“I hope in God,” piously repeated the Queen several times as she proceeded with her meal, “I shall never see him again.”
“Thank God!” responded the King in the same pious strain—no doubt with his mouth full and talking very quickly, “to-morrow night the Puppy will be out of my house!”
The Queen replied that she thought the Prince would rather like to be made a martyr of; but it was pointed out to her that the ignominy of being turned out of doors obscured any martyr-like attributes in the Prince’s opinion.
This beautiful scene appears to have been a lively one, for the King, getting excited, gave the company his opinion on the companions of his eldest son whom he referred to as “boobies, fools and madmen,” and their unlikelihood to represent anything to him in its proper light.
The King enumerated a few of the Prince’s household with what he considered appropriate remarks concerning each of them:
“There is my Lord Carnarvon,[50] a hot-headed, passionate, half-witted coxcomb, with no more sense than his master; there is Townshend,[51] a silent, proud, surly, wrong-headed booby; there is my Lord North,[52] a very good poor creature, but a very weak man; there is my Lord Baltimore, who thinks he understands everything and understands nothing, who wants to be well with both Courts and is well at neither, and entre nous is a little mad, and who else of his servants can you name that he listens to, unless it is the stuttering puppy, Johnny Lumley?”[53]
The ejection of the Prince and his family from St. James’s Palace had not been viewed without remonstrance; the Duke of Newcastle had begged the Princess Emily “for God’s sake”; that she would use her influence with her mother to prevent the last message going to the Prince.
But this request being conveyed to the Queen, by the Princess, did the Duke more harm with her than “all the stories his enemies could put together.”
So the message went, and the Prince and his family had to turn out on the 14th of September.
But even in this turning out, the little King, with his million a year[54] income, could not behave like a gentleman.