The person of Her Majesty at this period is described as having been easy and graceful, rather than striking or majestic. They who could not call her handsome, which she never was, compromised the matter by describing the contour of her face as delicate and pleasing. Her well-shaped forehead and her beautiful teeth, no inconsiderable items in a face, were her chief beauties. Her bright chestnut-coloured hair would have been an additional beauty to have been reckoned, but that it was generally hidden under thick layers of powder—so long, at least, as powder was in fashion. Of her hands and arms the royal lady was proud to a very late period of her life; and amateurs, in the early term of her reign, eulogised the beauties of a neck, which soon very well bore the discreet veil with which it was wisely and modestly covered. Her countenance was naturally benignant, except when flushed, as it could sometimes be, by an offended feeling; and it was naturally pallid, ‘except,’ says an anonymous writer ‘(which happened not unfrequently), when a blush of diffidence suffused her modest cheek.’
The succeeding year to that last named brought mourning with it, for the death of the mother of George III. On the death of her husband she was appointed the chief guardian of her eldest son, in case of the demise, before that son’s majority, of the king, his grandfather. In the meantime she was really his guardian during that king’s lifetime. This office, however, she shared with Lord Bute, who, according to the scandal-mongers, was less attached to the pupil than to the pupil’s mother. Of this attachment the Prince of Wales himself is said to have had full knowledge, and did not object to Lord Bute taking solitary walks with the Princess, while he could do the same with Lady Middlesex. However this may be, the Princess and Lord Bute kept the Prince George in very strict seclusion after his father’s death. The future husband of Charlotte had, however, abundance of teachers, but a paucity of instruction. One taught him ‘deportment,’ another imbued him with Jacobitism. Dr. Thomas did honestly his little ineffective best. Lord Bute superintended Dr. Thomas, and the Princess said the boy was slow, and the masters indifferent.
The boy would probably have been an accomplished scholar had his preceptors been more careful in their training. There was the stuff and also the taste in him; but he was neglected, and the lost ground was never recovered. His affection for his mother was strong, and she deserved it. She was not a favourite with the people, and she did not deserve her unpopularity. George III. and Queen Charlotte visited her regularly every evening at eight o’clock. After one of these filial visits, in February 1772, when her health had been long declining, she expressed a hope that she might pass a good night. The hope was fulfilled, but death came in the morning. Never was woman more praised or censured than she. Her merit lay, perhaps, between both. Her son adored her, Queen Charlotte respected her, and a commercial country should reverence the memory of a woman who, out of her own jointure, paid off all the debts which her husband left at his decease. During the illness of the Dowager-Princess of Wales, her daughter, the Princess of Brunswick, arrived in England, on her mother’s invitation. The Princess was coolly treated by her brother, George III., and by Queen Charlotte. She was ill lodged in a furnished house in Pall Mall, while the Prince of Mecklenburg had apartments in the royal palace. Charlotte was jealous of Augusta, her sister-in-law, and could not help showing it unbecomingly. At the Court held on the Queen’s birthday Augusta was attended by Lady Gower, an old friend, and one of her former ladies-in-waiting. Lady Gower followed the Princess into the ball-room, and sat next to her—Lady Gower’s friend, the Duchess of Argyle, courteously making way for her. The Queen was excessively angry. A few days later, all her ladies being present, Her Majesty said, crossly, to the Duchess of Argyle, ‘Duchess, I must reprimand you for letting Lady Gower take place of you as lady to the Princess of Brunswick. I had a mind to speak to you on the spot, but would not, for fear of saying anything I should repent of, though I should have thought it. The Princess of Brunswick has nothing to do here, and I insist on your recovering the precedence you gave up. One day or other my son will be married, and then I shall have his wife’s ladies pretending to take place in my palace, which they shall not do.’ The Princess of Brunswick left England in a naturally angry mood. The King, reluctantly and tardily, paid both her journeys, and gave her 1,000l. besides. Her mother left her nothing.
The death of a woman of less note caused some conversation in Queen Charlotte’s circle, soon after the demise of the Princess-dowager of Wales, and it may be fittingly noticed here.
Petronilla Melusina was the illegitimate daughter of George I. and Mdlle. von der Schulenburg (Duchess of Kendal). It was the discovery of her birth (in 1693) that stirred Sophia Dorothea to the resolution to leave Hanover. Petronilla came to England, passed as her mother’s niece, and was created Countess of Walsingham. She became acquainted in this country with Lady Huntingdon, and that good, active, eccentric, but earnest apostle of the Gospel, Whitfield. With the latter Petronilla maintained a long correspondence, and she is spoken of as being a gem in the crown which metaphor placed upon the preacher’s brow.
In 1733, this lady married the Earl of Chesterfield, and in her name her husband is said to have compelled George II. to pay him a very large sum, which also, according to report, was bequeathed her by George I. in the will which was destroyed. She led as gay and careless a life as her lord, but not for so long a period as he. She was in the very height of her enjoyment of the splendour of the great world, when, attracted by curiosity to the obscurely lighted drawing-room of Lady Huntingdon, where Whitfield was preaching, she learned, for the first time, to heed as well as hear the story of the brighter splendour of a greater, and the night and anguish of a more terrible, world than the one in which she was the chief lady of the revels, and the fascinator, not to be resisted, of every man in it except her husband. It was here she first felt that all was not so well with her heart, nor so safe for her soul, as should be. She was a woman of strong mind, and she at once braved all the storm with which fools and fine gentlemen pelted her, by boldly declaring the difference which had come over her views, and that which should in future mark her practice. She would fain have retired altogether from the world, but in obedience to her husband, who exacted from her a service which he never repaid, she went occasionally to court. At each visit it was remarked that her costume diminished in finery, but increased in taste. At her last visit among the gay and panting throng she appeared in a plain but elegant dress of sober brown brocade, ‘powdered with silver flowers.’ A smile may mock this humility of a court lady, but the costly and continental simplicity was encountered by her half-brother the King (for it was in George II.’s time that this occurred) with a frown. He had not yet learned to honour pious men or women of any creed, and he had little respect for Lady Huntingdon or Whitfield. He accordingly made two or three steps in advance to the shrinking lady, and rather rudely remarked, ‘I know who selected that gown for you; it must have been Mr. Whitfield. I hear you have been a follower of his for this year and a half.’ Lady Chesterfield mildly replied, ‘I have, and very well do I like him,’ and withdrew; but she afterwards used to regret that she had not said more when she had so excellent an opportunity for uttering a word in season with effect.
Lady Huntingdon hoped, for some time, that a sense of religion might soon touch the heart of the Earl, who continued to be polite and impious to the last. He laughingly called death a leap in the dark, and he obstinately refused the light which would have saved him from leaping to his destruction. The nearest approach he ever made to being converted by Lady Huntingdon was when he once sent her a subscription towards building a chapel, and earnestly implored her not to expose him to ridicule by revealing the fact!
His noble wife—for she was a wife—true woman, rising above the shame of her birth, and resolute to save even him who was resolute and resigned to perish, was most assiduous at the death-bed of a husband who was as anxious as Charles II. to be courteous and civil, even in death. His last day on earth was the 24th of March, 1773; and his courtesy had well-nigh failed him when he heard that his wife had sent for Mr. Rowland Hill to attend him. ‘Dear Lady Chesterfield,’ says Lady Huntingdon, in one of her letters detailing ‘the blackness of darkness’ which had thickened round his dying moments, ‘Dear Lady Chesterfield could not be persuaded to leave his room for an instant. What unmitigated anguish has she endured! But her confidential communications I am not at liberty to disclose. The curtain has fallen; his immortal part has passed to another state of existence. Oh, my soul, come not thou unto his end!’
This wife, the illegitimate daughter of George I., was not even mentioned incidentally in a will which recognised the services of menials, and rewarded them with ostentation. But after Chesterfield’s death the mansion in May Fair, and its great room, and its dark, mysterious boudoirs, curtained with blue and silver tissue, and slightly echoing the rustle of silks that were not worn by the wife of the lord of the house—over all these there came a change. The stage remained, but the actors and audiences were different, and now we see that once little girl who usurped in Hanover a love to which she was not legitimately entitled, a sober woman grown, throwing open her saloons to Rowland Hill and the eager multitude who thronged to hear that hearty, honest, and uncompromising man. In March 1777, Horace Walpole wrote: ‘Lady Chesterfield has had a stroke of palsy, but may linger some time longer.’ In September of the following year, the record is: ‘Lady Chesterfield is dead, at above fourscore. She was not a girl when she came over with George I.’ ‘She was very like him,’ Walpole writes, in the following month to Cole, ‘as her brother, General Schulenburg, is, in black, to the late King.’
Such was the end of that lady whose birth in 1693 had so severely wounded the pride and self-dignity of Sophia Dorothea. ‘I was with her to the last,’ says Lady Huntingdon, ‘and never saw a soul more humbled in the dust before God, on account of her own vileness and nothingness, but having a sure and steadfast hope of the love and mercy of God in Christ, constantly affirming that his blood cleanseth from all sin. The last audible expressions which fell from her a few moments before her final struggle were, “Oh, my friend, I have hope, a strong hope—through grace.” Then, taking my hand, and clasping it earnestly between hers, she exclaimed with much energy, “God be merciful to me, a sinner!”’