Thus writes Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, of events at this time, 1737:
“They have printed all the letters and messages that have passed between the King, Queen, Prince and Princess. This shows that the Minister thinks he has been in the right; but I don’t find any reasonable body of that opinion. And I observe that they have left out in this printed paper a message from his Majesty to the Prince, which was brought in writing by my Lord Dunmore; in which they judged very well, for it was certainly a very odd one, as I think it is, my Lord Harrington’s and Sir Robert Walpole’s evidence concerning the Prince, some part of which is certainly untrue.
“But upon the whole matter nobody can think that the Prince designed to hurt the Princess or the child, which was of much more consequence to him than it can be to her Majesty, who has so many children of her own. If the Prince had not had good success in what he ventured to do; and if it had been a real crime, the submissions the Prince has made, one would think ought to have been accepted, for the omission of a ceremony that was not natural for the Prince to think of at the time; and especially as he was treated at Court. But I suppose that Sir Robert did not think it a proper thing to say that the true cause of the quarrel was the Prince’s seeming to have a desire to have the whole of the allowance which the public pays for his support; and, indeed, I do think it would not have been becoming to have given that reason for what has been done. But if I may presume to give my opinion against Sir Robert’s, I should rather in his place have chose to have sent the message to the Prince, that he must leave St. James’s, because the King was dissatisfied with his behaviour in general; and not have given such strange reasons for the quarrel, and then publish a printed account with so many reflections upon the Prince, which no man that has any notion of honour can ever forgive.”
With regard to the publication of these letters, which was a kind of set-off against the Prince’s address to the Lord Mayor, Lord Hervey was employed to translate the Prince’s, and in the midst of his task went off to London. On his return he was greeted by the Queen, who was most anxious about the letters, in the following terms:—
“Where the devil are you, and what have you been doing? You are a pretty man to have the justification of your friends committed to your hands! There are the letters which you have had this week to translate, and they are not yet ready to be dispersed, and only that you must go to London to divert yourself with some of your nasty guenipes[55] instead of doing what you have undertaken.”
Hervey made her a quotation from Shakespeare in reply:—
“Go tell your slaves how choleric you are, and make your bondmen tremble. Your anger passes by me like the idle wind which I regard not.”
FOOTNOTES:
[49] George the Second was himself kicked out of St. James’s Palace by his father, George the First, with all his family in 1717.
[50] Lord of the Prince’s Bedchamber.