If there was something strange in this scene, what followed was stranger still. Mentor and maiden retired to a box on the Balcon, and there they discussed anew the chances of domestic happiness, and the rules by which it might be accomplished. As minuets were being statelily walked below, the envoy categorically laid down the regulations observation of which might purchase connubial felicity. He gave expression to an urgent wish that she would never miss going to church on Sundays, as the King and Queen never failed being present—although it must be added that, severe as Queen Charlotte was in strictly and formally attending divine worship on the Sabbath, the service itself was no sooner over than (at that period of her life) she proceeded to hold a drawing-room. It was one generally more brilliantly attended than that held on the Thursdays.
The prospect of being compelled to attend church every Sunday was but a gloomy view, it would seem, thus presented at the very gayest portion of the masquerade. The Princess probably thought she saw a way of escape, for she inquired if the Prince was thus strict in his weekly attendance. Lord Malmesbury dexterously replied that if he were not she would bring him to it; and if he would not go with her, she would do well to set a good example and go without him. ‘You must, in such case,’ added the bride-trainer, ‘tell him that the fulfilling regularly and exactly this duty can alone enable you to perform exactly and regularly those you owe him. This cannot but please him, and will in the end induce him also to go to church.’
The Princess evidently liked this part of her prospect less and less. We may fairly judge so by her observation, that my Lord had ‘made a very serious remark for a masquerade.’
The envoy defended himself from the attack made under cover of this insinuation, and he defended himself with gaiety and success. The Princess herself acknowledged as much, and Lord Malmesbury rather naïvely observes that, after descanting to the bride upon the necessity of regular church-going when she got to England, he was glad he had set her thinking on the drawbacks as well as of the agrémens of her situation. The attendance at church was, in his eyes, a rather severe discipline; but, as he so forcibly impressed on the mind of his charge, ‘in the order of society, those of a very high rank have a price to pay for it. The life of a Princess of Wales is not to be one of pleasure, dissipation, and enjoyment. The great and conspicuous advantages belonging to it must necessarily be purchased by considerable sacrifices, and can only be preserved and kept up by a continual repetition of those sacrifices.’ The Princess probably sighed as she weighed the pomp of her position against the piety by which she was to formally illustrate it.
Lord Malmesbury could not play the mentor without the godless wits of the court treating him to a little raillery. On the evening when he had been expatiating on the uses of attendance at church, during the noise and revelry of a masquerade, he encountered Madame de Waggenheim She was the lady who ‘drank,’ and whom the noble diarist sets down upon his tablets as ‘absurd, ridiculous, ill-mannered, and méchante.’ ‘How did you find the little one?’ said she, alluding thereby to the Princess. ‘Rather old as she is, her education is not yet finished.’ Lord Malmesbury felt the taunt, but parried it with the remark that ‘at an age far beyond that of her Royal Highness persons might be found in whom the education of which she spoke had not even begun.’
CHAPTER II.
THE NEW HOME.
The Princess desires to have Lord Malmesbury for her lord chamberlain—The Duchess a coarse-minded woman—The Duke of Clarence her bitter enemy—The Duke and Duchess’s caution to Lord Malmesbury, and his dignified reply—The Abbess of Gandersheim’s opinion of mankind—Difficult question proposed by the Princess, and Lord Malmesbury’s gallant reply—The Abbess without human sympathy—A state dinner, and a mischievous anonymous letter—The Princess’s departure for England—Her indifference to money—Instances—Ignorance of the Duchess—Difficulties of the journey—The Princess’s design to reform the Prince of Wales—Indefatigable care of Lord Malmesbury—Story of the Princess at Hanover—Care as to her toilette recommended—Presents given by the Princess—Her arrival in England—Ridiculed by Lady Jersey—Reproof administered to her ladyship by Lord Malmesbury—The first interview of the Prince and Princess—Cold reception of the bride—Flippant conduct of the Princess—Lord Malmesbury reproached by the Prince of Wales.
It is to the credit of the Princess Caroline that she took in such good part all that Lord Malmesbury told her, and that she was desirous of having him appointed her lord chamberlain; a prematurely expressed desire which did her honour, gratified the object of it, and was never realised. She, no doubt, respected him, for the advice he gave her was not only parental, but much of it might have come from a tender and affectionate mother. But her mother was a coarse-minded, weak-hearted woman, who had little regard for propriety, was not affected by the disregard of it in her husband, and who told stories at table, in her daughter’s presence, that would have called up a blush of shame, if not of indignation, on the cheek of a dragoon.
It was after such stories that Lord Malmesbury particularly enjoined the Princess, if she cared to please, to commune much with herself, and to think deeply before she spoke. Her family was a strange one, but not stranger, in many respects, than that into which she was going. Her admission there, indeed, at all, was perhaps a consequence of hate rather than love. Prince William, Duke of Clarence, had been among the first to speak of the Princess Caroline of Brunswick as a wife for the Prince of Wales. He had been led to do this because he hated the Duchess of York, knew that the Princess and Duchess hated each other, and felt sure that the marriage of the former with the heir to the throne would be wormwood to the Duchess. The Duke of Clarence was, ultimately, one of the bitterest and the most unreasonable of the enemies of this very Princess whom he had helped to drag up to greatness.
With regard to the feelings of the Princess against the excellent Duchess of York, the envoy endeavoured to turn them into a sentiment of respect for one who was worthy of such homage. Indeed, he was so indefatigable with his counsel that the ducal parents became fearful lest there might be even too much of it for his own profit, if not for their daughter’s good. It was suggested to him that the Princess, in a moment of fondness, might communicate to the Prince all he had said to her, and so he ‘would run the risk of getting into a scrape’ with his Royal Highness on his return. Lord Malmesbury, who was the envoy of the King and not of the Prince, replied with readiness, dignity, and effect. ‘I replied,’ he said, ‘that luckily I was in a situation not to want the Prince’s favour; that it was of infinitely more consequence to the public, and even to me (in the rank I filled in its service), that the Princess of Wales should honour and become her high situation, recover the dignity and respect due to our princes and royal family, which had, of late, been so much and so dangerously let down by their mixing so indiscriminately with their inferiors, than that I should have the emoluments and advantages of a favourite at Carlton House; and that idea was so impressed on my mind that I should certainly say to the Prince everything I had said to the Princess Caroline.’ He had a difficult pupil in the latter lady. After a whole page of record touching how important it was that she should practise reserve and dignity, we remark the condemnatory entry: ‘Concert in the evening; the Princess Caroline talks very much—quite at her ease—too much so.’