The servants of the King and Queen were not even permitted to put on their new attire, either for the wedding ceremony or the drawing-room next day. They were ordered to keep their new suits for the Queen’s birthday. The ceremony performed, the bridal pair betook themselves to Leicester House, where they presided at a right royal supper; and this was the last time that Kings, Queens, Princes, Princesses, and half the peerage met together in Leicester Square to hold high festival.
Political party spirit ran very high in the early years of King George’s reign; and such especial care was taken to keep the Prince from encountering any of the Opposition that, as Walpole remarks, he did nothing but take notice of them. He wrote to fidgety Newcastle, and called on fiery Pitt, and dined twice with ‘the Duke’—of Cumberland. On the evening of the second dinner he was engaged to attend a concert given in honour of himself and wife by the Queen. As he did not appear inclined to leave the table when the hour was growing late, Fironce, his secretary, pulled out his watch. The ducal host took the hint, and expressed a fear, which sounded like a hope, that the hour had come when his guest must leave him. ‘N’importe!’ said the Prince; and he sat on, sipped his coffee, and did not get to the Queen’s concert until after eight o’clock, at which hour, in those days, concerts were half concluded.
Fironce, the Duke’s secretary, who sought to influence his master thus early, long continued to aim at exercising the same power. In 1794 Fironce was the Duke of Brunswick’s prime minister, when the command of the Austrian army against France was offered to the Duke. The latter was inclined to accept, and Fironce had nothing to say against it; but Fironce’s wife (who was a democrat) had, and she forbade her husband furthering the object of Austria.
During the short sojourn between the bridal and the departure, the whole of the royal family went to Covent Garden Theatre to see Murphy’s decidedly dull and deservedly damned comedy, ‘No One’s Enemy but his Own’—a comedy which even Woodward could not make endurable. The feature of the night, however, was the difference which the public made between their reception of the King and Queen and that given to the newly-married pair. For the latter there was an ebullition of enthusiasm; for the former, who were suspected of being more cold to the bridegroom than his deserts warranted, little fervour was shown; and the then young Queen Charlotte was not a woman to love either bride or bridegroom the better for that.
On the following night the same august party appeared at the Opera House. The multitude which endeavoured to gain access to the interior would have filled three such houses as that in the Haymarket. Ladies, hopeless of reaching the doors in their carriages, left them in Piccadilly, and, gathering up their hoops, attempted to make their way on foot or in sedans. So great were the concourse and confusion in the Haymarket that the gentlemen, to force a passage for these adventurous ladies and themselves, drew their swords and threatened direful things to all who stood between them and their boxes!
In the meantime the house was overflowing; and Horace Walpole, who has faithfully painted the scene—except, perhaps, where he presumes to construe the politeness of the Prince into contempt for his royal brother and sister-in-law—tells us: ‘The crowd could not be described. The Duchess of Leeds, Lady Denbigh, Lady Scarborough, and others, sat in chairs between the scenes; the doors of the front boxes were thrown open, and the passages were all filled to the back of the stoves. Nay, women of fashion stood in the very stairs till eight at night. In the middle of the second act, the hereditary Prince, who sat with his wife and her brothers in their box, got up, turned his back to King and Queen, pretending to offer his place to Lady Tankerville, and then to Lady Susan. You know enough of Germans and their stiffness to etiquette to be sure this could not be done inadvertently, especially as he repeated this, only without standing up, with one of his own gentlemen in the third act.’
After a brief sojourn, the slender young Prince, who looked older than his years (twenty-nine), left town with his bride for Harwich. Bride and bridegroom travelled in different coaches, with three or four silent and solemn attendants in each. Never did newly-married couple travel so sillily unsociable. The farewell speech, too, of the bridegroom, before he went on board, rang more of war than of love. He had already, he said, bled in the cause of England, and would again. In this he kept his word, for he was the Duke of Brunswick who fell gloriously at Jena, at the age of threescore years and eleven, subsidised by Great Britain, and unthanked by ever-ungrateful Prussia, so deservedly punished for her habitual double-dealing on that terrible day.
As bride and bridegroom travelled from the court to the coast in two coaches, so now did they traverse the seas in two separate yachts. No wonder they were storm-tost. Their passage from Holland, where they landed, to their home in Brunswick was quite an ovation. The little courts in their route did them ample honour; there were splendid receptions, and showy reviews, and monster battues at which ten thousand hares, and winged game in proportion, were slaughtered in one morning; after which, in the evening, the slayers all appeared at the opera in their hunting-dresses! Finally, the ‘happy couple’ arrived at Brunswick, where the various members of the ducal family greeted their arrival, and—no less a person than the Countess of Yarmouth, the Walmoden of George II., the mistress of the bride’s grandfather, bade them welcome!
Of this marriage were born two most unhappy women; Charlotte, in December 1764, and Caroline, in May 1768. There were also four sons: Charles, born in 1767; George in 1769; William in 1771; and Leopold in the following year. Of these, two died gloriously; the first fell in battle at the head of the Black Brunswickers, on the bloody field of Quatre Bras; the last perished not less gloriously in an attempt to save the lives of several persons, when the river Oder burst its banks, in 1785. Of this family we have only especially to do with the second daughter, Caroline Amelia Elizabeth, ultimately Queen-consort of our George IV.
‘In what country is the lion to be found?’ asked her governess, after a lesson in natural history. ‘Well,’ answered the little Princess Caroline, ‘I should say, you may find him in the heart of a Brunswicker!’ In these sort of dashing replies the girl delighted. She was as much charmed with dashing games. In the sport of the ‘ring,’ in which the aimers at that small object are mounted on wooden horses fixed on a circular frame, she was remarkably expert. On one occasion, when she was flying round with something more than common rapidity, one of her attendants expressed fear of the possible consequences. ‘A Brunswicker dares do anything,’ exclaimed the undaunted Caroline; adding, ‘A Brunswicker does not know that thing fear.’