It was when the royal pair were at Weymouth that, on one occasion, the mayor of the borough, after presenting an address, and receiving the stereotyped answer, boldly walked up to the Queen to kiss her hand. ‘You must kneel,’ whispered the master of the ceremonies. Mr. Mayor, not heeding the court guide, continued standing, and in that position kissed the royal hand. As he retired, the highly offended master of the ceremonies remarked, angrily, ‘Sir, you ought to have knelt.’ ‘Sir,’ said the Mayor, ‘I can’t; don’t you see I have got a wooden leg?’
It is upon record that the Queen once attempted to write some verses; and having got to the third line gave the matter up in despair—leaving her ‘reader’ to finish and perfect the rhymes. The occasion was on presenting a pair of old-fashioned gloves to Lord Harcourt, who had an affection for ancient gear, and cared more for old gloves than new verses. Miss Burney acquitted herself, however, very well with her impromptu; indeed, she may be said to have been the Queen’s laureate during the five years she served that Sovereign. Her royal mistress employed her to compose some congratulatory verses on the King’s recovery from his serious indisposition; and of these it may be said that if Warton, over whom paralysis was then pending, might have written better, Henry James Pye, the succeeding laureate, could hardly have written worse.
The taste of the Queen was itself not unimpeachable. With regard to the drama, she would rather have seen little Quick in Tony Lumpkin, than Mrs. Siddons in Lady Macbeth. So her ‘reader’ was not called upon to exert her powers upon any great works. The first book she was required to read aloud was Colman’s broad farce of ‘Polly Honeycomb.’ The young lady must have had a difficult task with the novel-reading Polly, whose heart beat for Mr. Scribble, and into whose head her sire could not beat a favourable opinion for ‘the rich Jew’s wife’s nephew,’ Mr. Ledger. The young Princesses were listeners, and it could hardly have been edifying for them to hear the rollicking Polly say of her father, ‘Lord, lord! my stupid papa has no taste; he has no notion of humour and character and the sensibility of delicate feeling.’ ‘A novel,’ says Miss Honeycomb, ‘is the only thing to teach a girl life;’ and she adds, ‘Every girl elopes when her parents are obstinate and ill-natured about marrying her.’ Her ridicule of the long-lived affection of her parents is expressed in the coarsest manner; and she thinks it a good joke that her father recommends her to read the ‘Practice of Piety;’ she runs away with a scamp, and her honest lover, rightly disenamoured, declares of her that ‘he would not underwrite her for ninety per cent.’ What Miss Pope made of Polly and King of Scribble, when this farce was first produced, in 1760, it is not worth inquiring. Miss Pope was considered great in it; but it is worth noticing that when Miss Burney was reading the piece to the Queen and her daughters, an actress whose name can never be separated from that of the Queen’s third son was then turning half the heads in town with her Polly. Mrs. Jordan was well supported by Palmer in Scribble, and the piece seems to have found its way to court, as the ‘Dragon of Wantley’ did in the preceding reign, on the strength of its popularity.
The reader to the royal audience performed her vocation under great disadvantages. She read on in mortal silence on the part of those who listened; neither comment, applause, nor feeling of any sort was ever exhibited; and when Miss Burney had to read other of the elder Colman’s plays, and once ventured to relieve the voice, long fatigued by reading, by making some remark on the construction of the piece, the innovation was submitted to without being commended.
This scene of a Queen whose high moral character and purity of taste have been long matters of eulogy, seated amid her daughters, listening to a farce which would hardly now be tolerated, is not pleasant. But society had not yet freed itself from the uncleanness with which it had been overwhelmed during the two preceding reigns. The unspeakable degradation into which the first two Georges dragged the country must not be forgotten, though it may not be detailed. While detesting the restrictions with which monarchy had been loaded in the great revolution, they indulged unrestrainedly in the worst coarseness of vice. Kept back from pressing despotically upon the people, they yielded unbridled sway to their own passions, and their infamous example corrupted three-fourths of society. Caroline herself would listen to stories told her by Sir Robert Walpole, upon which the eye of the student of history cannot rest without a blush of indignation mantling in his cheek. If the Stuarts were vicious, they were, in a certain degree, gentlemanlike in their vices. The first two Georges were as vicious, but they had none of the refinement of the Stuarts, and would have been to the full as tyrannical had the men of England left them the power. Their conduct was enough to render monarchy detested, and the name of Brunswick execrable. The domestic virtues of George III. and Queen Charlotte insured respect for the first, and surrounded the latter name with something like a halo of love. If there be any yet among us who sing ‘Hail, Star of Brunswick!’ with any mental reservation, the reason may probably be traced to impressions received from the records of the first Georges. The tone of society had not yet recovered itself fully when Queen Charlotte caused ‘Polly Honeycomb’ to be read aloud to herself and daughters. It is true that her Majesty also listened in like company to the teaching of Mrs. Hannah More; but even that high moralist hardly as yet understood how the work of morality might best be sped. Even ten years later than the time when Colman’s farces were deemed not unfitting to be read to an audience of mother and children, Mrs. More, in ‘Cœlebs,’ was recommending the observance of modesty on the part of ladies on very selfish grounds. In allusion to the ‘naked style’ of dress which was then the fashion with women, Mrs. More admonitorily and significantly exclaims: ‘Oh, if women in general knew what was their real interest; if they could guess with what a charm even the appearance of modesty invests its possessor, they would dress decorously from mere self-love, if not from principle. The designing would assume modesty as an artifice; the coquet would adopt it as an allurement; the pure as her appropriate attraction; and the voluptuous as the most infallible art of seduction.’ When the Reverend Sydney Smith read this passage, he remarked that if there were any truth in it, ‘nudity becomes a virtue, and no decent woman for the future can be seen in garments.’ This is, perhaps, more smartly than truly said. Queen Charlotte certainly abhorred the style of dress which is censured in ‘Cœlebs.’ When the Lady Charlotte Campbell, famous for her beauty and for her subsequent connection with Queen Caroline, first went to court, she was attired in the scant costume of the period. She was, in fact, in the very highest of the fashion, and as she was passing before Queen Charlotte, the latter recommended her to ‘let out a tuck in her petticoat!’
While on the subject of fashion, it may here be noticed that when the marriage of the Princess Royal with the head of the House of Wurtemburg had been determined on, her Majesty made the bridal dress, and helped to deck her daughter with it. As a King’s eldest daughter, she had a right to be attired in a dress of white and silver. The Princess, however, was about to marry a widower, and it appears that custom, consequently, required the bride to wear white and gold. And so the robe was fashioned accordingly, and the preference of the Princess was made to yield to etiquette. This marriage, however, did not take place till 1797.
In 1792, the Prince’s pecuniary affairs were in a worse condition than ever. Several executions had been in his house, from one of which he had been saved by the benevolence of Lord Rawdon. His debts now amounted to 400,000l. The Queen advised him to press the King, through the lord chancellor, to apply for an increase of income. What the Prince required was 100,000l. yearly, and if that were granted he proposed to set aside 35,000l. per annum for the liquidation of his debts. He had now abandoned racing, a silly pursuit which had cost him yearly not less than 30,000l.; and having done that, he feigned to be shocked at his equally embarrassed brother, York, remaining on the turf. He added, that if his request were not acceded to, he should shut up Carlton House, go abroad, and live upon 10,000l. a year. It was very properly suggested to him that he would do much better, if the Queen’s wishes and his own could not be carried out, by staying in England and showing the people that he could adapt his circumstances to his revenue. This was a course, however, which he had never seriously determined to follow. He was made up of contradictions; and although he was at this period more than ever attached to Mrs. Fitzherbert, it did not prevent him from maintaining the well-known actress, Mrs. Crouch, in the post of ‘favourite.’ Mrs. Fitzherbert met this course by ridiculing it, and by coquetting on her side. This hurt the Prince’s vanity, and brought him again under her influence. What his homage was worth may be judged of by the fact that it was paid to many deities, and while he was maintaining Mrs. Crouch, forgetting poor Perdita Robinson, making love to the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire (who was separated from her husband, but did not on that account in the slightest degree regard the Prince), he had also opened an intercourse with Lady Jersey, who was not half such a prude as the Duchess, and who was the most shameless of those to whom the heartless Prince had pretended to surrender his heart. With many loves, or what were called such, Mrs. Fitzherbert continued the married sultana. He built for her a residence at Brighton, where she kept up the establishment of a queen—really looked like one, for she was a superb woman—had as brilliant diamonds as Queen Charlotte herself, and was greeted by all the bathing women with the respectful appellation of ‘Mrs. Prince.’
But the Queen had soon to deplore another mésalliance. Her son Prince Augustus (Sussex), when travelling in Italy, had become attached to the Lady Augusta Murray, daughter of the Earl of Dunmore; and, after a courtship during which the Prince wrote love-letters to the lady that, with respect to style were neither sublime nor beautiful, and with regard to grammar were calculated to make Lindley Murray die of despair, the parties were married privately by an English clergyman, and were re-married, at St. George’s, Hanover Square, on their return to England. Of this union two children were born, of whom the daughter (once known as Mademoiselle d’Este) became the wife of Lord Truro, who, when Mr. Serjeant Wilde, endeavoured to establish the validity of her father’s marriage, and acquired the lady’s hand by way of honorarium. The moment the marriage of the Duke with Lady Augusta Murray was first declared invalid by the ecclesiastical court, Lady Augusta separated from her husband. The latter appears to have borne the separation very philosophically, but he did not marry again during Lady Augusta’s life. In his later days, when his brother, William IV., was King, he married the lady who long survived him under the title of Duchess of Inverness. But a marriage of more importance remains to be noticed.
CHAPTER X.
LENGTHENING SHADOWS.
The Prince of Wales’s marriage to the Princess Caroline of Brunswick—Her character—The Prince’s behaviour at the marriage ceremony—Lord Holland’s two accounts of the Princess irreconcileable—The Prince’s hatred of the Princess—Propriety of the Queen’s Court—Unpopularity of the King—Pelted by the mob—Birth of the Princess Charlotte—Strict observance of Court etiquette—Marriage of the Princess Royal to the Prince of Wurtemburg—First book stereotyped in England—The volunteer mania—Attempted assassination of the King—Archbishop Cornwallis’s drums, and Lady Huntingdon’s efforts to induce him to discontinue—Her hot reception by Mrs. Cornwallis—Lady Huntingdon induces the King to aid her—The King’s letter to the archbishop—Conduct of the clergy—Incident of the Drawing-room—The Prince a Radical—The King’s illness—His excitement—Feeling exhibited by the Duke of York—The Prince of Wales incredulous of the recovery of the King—Conversation between the King and Dr. Willis—The Queen’s anxiety—Particulars of the King’s illness—Recovery of the King—Home scene at Windsor Castle.