In controversial works, however, Caroline always delighted. She had no greater joy in this way than setting Clarke and Leibnitz at intellectual struggle, watching the turns of the contest with interest, suggesting, amending, adding, or diminishing, and advising every well-laid blow, by whichever antagonist it was delivered. It may be asked, Was there not in all this rather more love of intellectual than of religious pursuits? The reader must judge.
Caroline loved the broad English comedy of her time, and saw no harm in the very broadest. She was especially fond of the ‘Queen of Comedy,’ Mrs. Oldfield, but affected to be a little shocked at the way in which she was living with General Churchill. One day, when Mrs. Oldfield had been reading at Windsor, and was walking on the terrace with the court, the Queen said to her, ‘I hear, Mrs. Oldfield, that you and the General are married.’ ‘Madam,’ answered the actress, playing her very best, ‘the General keeps his own secrets.’ After Mrs. Oldfield’s death, the Queen bought her collection of plays for a hundred and twenty guineas.
Lord Chesterfield says of Caroline, in his lively way, that ‘she was a woman of lively, pretty parts.’ She merits, however, a better epitaph and a more sagacious chronicler. ‘Her death,’ adds the noble roué, ‘was regretted by none but the King. She died meditating projects which must have ended either in her own ruin or that of the country.’ Dismissing, for the present, the last part of this paragraph, we will say that Caroline was mourned by more than by the King; but by none so deeply, so deservedly, so naturally as by him. He had not, out of affection for her, been less selfish or less vicious than his inclinations induced him to be. He was faithless to her, but he never ceased to respect her; and in those days a husband of whom nothing worse could be said was rather exemplary of conduct than otherwise. It was a sort of decorum by no means common. One could have almost thought him uxorious; for he not only allowed himself to be directed in all important matters requiring judgment and discretion by the guidance of her more enlightened mind, but he never drew a picture of beauty and propriety in woman but all the hearers felt that the original of the picture was the Queen herself. It is strange, setting aside more grave considerations for the rule of conduct, that, with such a wife, he should have hampered himself with ‘favourites.’ These he neither loved nor respected. A transitory liking and the evil fashion of the day had something to do with it; and besides, he had a certain feeling of attachment for women who were obsequious and serviceable. These he could rule, but his wife ruled him. Nor could the women be compared. Sir Robert Walpole, an unexceptionable witness in this case, asserts that the King loved his wife’s little finger better than he did Lady Suffolk’s whole body. For that reason it was that Walpole himself so respectfully kissed the small, plump, and graceful hand of the Queen rather than propitiate the good-will of the favourite.
Caroline shared the vices in which her husband indulged, by favouring the indulgence. She was not the more excusable for this because Archdeacon Blackburn and other churchmen praised her for encouraging the King in his wickedness. Her ground of action was not founded on virtuous principle. She sanctioned, nay promoted, the vicious way of life followed by her consort merely that she might exercise more power politically and personally. She depreciated her own worth and attractions in order to heighten those of the favourites whom the King most affected, and by way of apologising for his being attracted from her to them. Actually, she had as little regard for married faith as the King himself. The Queen regarded his doings with such complacency as to give rise to a belief that she had never cared for the King, and was therefore jealouslessly indifferent as to the disgraceful tenor of his life. An allusion was once made in her presence, when the Duke of Grafton was by, to her having in former times not been unaffected by the suit of a German prince. ‘G—d, madam,’ said the duke, in the fashionable blasphemous style of the period, ‘I should like to see the man you could love!’ ‘See him?’ said the Queen, laughingly; ‘do you not then think that I love the King?’ ‘G—d, madam,’ exclaimed the ostentatious blasphemer, ‘I only wish I were King of France, and I would soon be sure whether you did or did not.’
Caroline has been laughed at for her patronage of such a poet as Duck. She had wit enough to see the merit of Gay. On her accession she offered him the honourable post of gentleman-usher to the Princess Louisa—a sinecure worth 200l. a-year, and a stepping-stone to other preferment; Gay peremptorily and scornfully declined the offer. Accordingly, Cibber was preferred to Gay for the post of laureate. Caroline had always been kind to this ‘tetchy’ poet. In 1724, when Gay’s play, ‘The Captives,’ had failed on the stage, she invited him to read it at Leicester House. On being ushered into the august company, Gay, nervous from long waiting, tragedy in hand, bashful and blundering, fell over a stool, thereby threw down a screen, and set his illustrious audience in a comical sort of confusion, amid which the kind-hearted princess did her best to put Gay at ease in his perplexities.
The King—to return to that royal widower—indubitably mourned over his loss, and regarded with some rag, as it were, of the dignity of affection her memory, and that with a tearful respect. He was for ever talking of her, even to his mistress; and Lady Yarmouth (as Madame Walmoden was called), as well as others, had to listen to the well-conned roll of her queenly virtues, and to the royal conjectures as to what the advice of Caroline would have been in certain supervening contingencies. There was something noble in his remark, on ordering the payment to be continued of all salaries to her officers and servants, and all her benefactions to benevolent institutions, that, if possible, nobody should suffer by her death but himself. We almost pity the wretched but imbecile old man too, when we see him bursting into tears at the sight of Walpole, and confessing to him, with a helpless shaking of the hands, that he had lost the rock of his support, his warmest friend, his wisest counsellor, and that henceforth he must be dreary, disconsolate, and succourless, utterly ignorant whither to turn for succour or for sympathy.
This feeling never entirely deserted him; albeit, he continued to find much consolation where he had done better not to have sought it. Still, the old memory would not entirely fade, the old fire would not entirely be quenched. ‘I hear,’ said he, once to Baron Brinkman, as he lay sleepless, at early morn, on his couch, ‘I hear you have a portrait of my wife, which was a present from her to you, and that it is a better likeness than any I have got. Let me look at it.’ The portrait was brought, and so placed before the King that he could contemplate it leisurely at his ease. ‘It is like her,’ he murmured. ‘Place it nearer me and leave me till I ring.’ For two whole hours the baron remained in attendance in an adjoining room, before he was again summoned to his master’s presence. At the end of that time, he entered the King’s bedroom, on being called. George looked up at him, with eyes full of tears, and muttered, pointing to the portrait: ‘Take it away; take it away! I never yet saw the woman worthy to buckle her shoe.’ And then he arose, and went and breakfasted with Lady Yarmouth.
A score of years after Caroline’s death, he continued to speak of her only with emotion. His vanity, however, disposed him to be considered gallant to the last. In 1755, being at Hanover, he was waited upon by the Duchess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and all her unmarried daughters. The provident and maternal duchess had an object, and she was not very far from accomplishing it. The King considered all these young ladies with the speculative look both of a connoisseur and an amateur. He was especially struck by the beauty of the eldest, and he lost no time in proposing her as a match to his grandson and heir-apparent, George, Prince of Wales, then in his minority. The prince, at the prompting of his mother, very peremptorily declined the honour which had been submitted for his acceptance, and the young princess, her mother, and King George were all alike profoundly indignant. ‘Oh!’ exclaimed the latter with ardent eagerness, to Lord Waldegrave, ‘oh, that I were but a score of years younger, this young lady should not then have been exposed to the indignity of being refused by the Prince of Wales, for I would then myself have made her Queen of England!’ That is to say, that if the young Princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel could only have been introduced to him while he was sitting under the shadow of the great sorrow which had fallen upon him by the death of Caroline, he would have found solace for his grief by offering her his hand. However, it was now too late, and the gay old monarch, taking his amber-headed cane, feebly picked his way to Lady Yarmouth and a game at ombre.
Lord Chesterfield allowed Caroline some degree of female knowledge. If by this he would infer that she had only a portion of the knowledge which was commonly possessed by the ladies her contemporaries, his lordship does her great injustice. Few women of her time were so well instructed; and she was not the less well-taught for being in a great degree self-taught. She may have been but superficially endowed in matters of theology and in ancient history; but, what compensated at least for the latter, she was well acquainted with what more immediately concerned her, the history of her own times. Lord Chesterfield further remarks, that Caroline would have been an agreeable woman in social life if she had not aimed at being a great one in public life. This would imply that she had doubly failed, where, in truth, she had doubly succeeded. She was agreeable in the circle of social, and she not merely aimed at, but achieved, greatness in public life. She was as great a queen as queen could become in England under the circumstances in which she was placed. Without any constitutional right, she ruled the country with such wisdom that her right always seemed to rest on a constitutional basis. There was that in her, that, had her destiny taken her to Russia instead of England, she would have been as Catherine was in all but her uncleanness; not that, in purity of mind, she was very superior to Catherine the Unclean.
The following paragraph in Lord Chesterfield’s character of Caroline is less to be contested than others in which the noble author has essayed to pourtray the Queen. ‘She professed wit, instead of concealing it; and valued herself on her skill in simulation and dissimulation, by which she made herself many enemies, and not one friend, even among the women the nearest to her person.’ It may very well be doubted, however, whether any sovereign ever had a ‘friend’ in the true acceptation of that term. It is much if they acquire an associate whose interest or inclination it is to be faithful; but such a person is not a friend.