But Miss Bellenden was in love, which is the greatest safeguard against such persons as the little German Prince of Wales. She loved a certain groom of the bedchamber to the Prince, Colonel John Campbell, some years later Duke of Argyle. But here George showed a little of the noblesse which one expects from a descendant of Edward the Third.
Finding that Mary Bellenden was in love, though he did not know the object of her affections, he showed no ill-feeling, but asked a pledge from her that she would not marry without informing him, and in return he would give her and her future husband his favour. But Mary had lived much at Court, and mistrusted princes.
A year or two later she secretly married Colonel Campbell, and was no doubt very happy, but certainly impecunious in that long interval before she became a Duchess. In 1720 she writes to her friend Mrs. Howard, from Bath, and good and pure woman and loving wife though she was, her letter is a fair sample of the free and easy, not to say broad, style of even virtuous ladies of the period.
“Oh! God,” she writes, “I am so sick of bills; for my part I believe I shall never be able to hear them mentioned without casting up my accounts—bills are accounts you know. I do not know how your bills go in London, but I am sure mine are not dropped, for I paid one this morning as long as my arm and as broad as my....
“I intend to send you a letter of attorney, to enable you to dispose of my goods before I may leave this place—such is my condition.”
But there were other maids-of-honour only a little less charming. There was Margaret Bellenden, of whom Gay wrote.[14] Mary’s sister or cousin, almost as beautiful, and Mary Lepel who was raved about by such excellent critics as Gay, Pope and Voltaire, not to mention the courtiers Chesterfield and Bath.
She appears to have been of a more stately style of beauty than Mary Bellenden, and of a more staid disposition.
Then there was Bridget Carteret, niece of Lord Carteret, who was fair and petite. The oldest of them all was “prim, pale Margaret Meadows,” who seems to have done her best to keep them all in order, but had terrible difficulty with giddy Sophia Howe, who was the daughter of John Howe by Ruperta, a natural daughter of Prince Rupert, brother of the old Electress Sophia, which fact was probably the reason of her appointment as maid-of-honour to the Princess of Wales. She was up to all sorts of mischief, and among other enormities was given to laughing in church, which is not to be wondered at when we consider that the King and the other Royalties were accustomed to talk all the time.
Sophia Howe was, however, reproached for her laughing by the Duchess of St. Albans, who told her “she could not do a worse thing.” To this she pertly answered—and one can almost hear her saying it—“I beg your Grace’s pardon, I can do a great many worse things.”
This conduct of the maids-of-honour—accompanied by much ogling and smiling at gallants, however, at last aroused the ire of Bishop Burnet, who complained to the Princess of Wales, and requested that their pew should be boarded up so that they could not see over. This from the Bishops importunity being at last done, provoked the following verses in retaliation from one of the young ladies’ admirers, supposed to be Lord Peterborough: