CAROLINE, QUEEN OF GEORGE II, AND THE YOUNG DUKE OF CUMBERLAND
The King, however, as he passed her, reminded her that she had not spoken to the Duchess of Norfolk, and she went back and said a few words to her. This was the last person she ever spoke to in public. She retired, went at once to bed, and grew steadily worse.
The King, however, was not at all alarmed, indeed his courageous wife did all she could to reassure him, and he went off in the evening to play cards with Lady Deloraine. When, however, he returned late, the condition of the Queen so alarmed him that he sent off for another physician, Doctor Broxholme, Ranby, the King’s house surgeon, being already there, principally for bleeding purposes apparently.
These learned doctors, who all along regarded her symptoms as those of cholic, could think of nothing better to give her than usquebaugh, i.e., whiskey—which seemed to do her as much good as the many nostrums which were afterwards administered. Having tried such things as Daffy’s Elixir, mint water, usquebaugh, snake root, and “Sir Walter Raleigh’s Cordial”—which appears to have been some remedy of the great explorer’s which had survived to that time—the doctors, in the fashion of the day, decided to bleed the Queen, and the ever-ready Ranby was ordered to draw off twelve ounces of blood.
The King, now thoroughly alarmed, commenced to show great anxiety, and insisted on lying in his night-gown, i.e., dressing gown, outside the Queen’s bed all night, so that he greatly inconvenienced both her and himself, as he could not sleep, and the poor sufferer could not turn in bed.
The diary of the Queen’s illness may be summarised as follows:
Thursday, November 18th.
The Queen was bled again early in the morning, and lost twelve ounces, which abated her fever. As the King left her to go to his own side of the Palace, she grew very despondent, and told her daughter Caroline that no matter what they did she would die. “Poor Caroline,” she added to her daughter, who was ailing, “you are very ill, too; we shall soon meet again in another place.”
Growing better in the morning the King determined to hold a Levee, and was very particular about having his new lace cuffs sewn on his shirt, as the Foreign Ministers were coming. Sir Robert Walpole was at his country seat, Houghton, in Norfolk, and knew nothing of the Queen’s illness. This day there was some talk of sending for him, and the Duke of Newcastle and Lord Hervey both wrote.
This evening the Queen said to her daughter Caroline and Lord Hervey, who was with her—he seems to have hardly left her—“I have an ill which nobody knows of.” No particular significance was however attached to this remark.