This reconciliation is said to have been worth an additional fifty thousand pounds a year to the Prince, and Horace Walpole remarks on it.
“He will have money now to tune Glover and Thompson and Dodsley again, et spes et ratio studiorum in Cæsare tantum.”
The whole of the Royal Family went after this together to the Duchess of Norfolk’s—the old house by the river, no doubt—the streets being “illuminated and bonfired.” There were pageants and reviews to celebrate the reconciliation, and the Prince and Princess made a sort of triumphal progress through the city to show themselves to their good friends the Corporation; then entering their barges at the Tower steps they finished up the day in a very sensible manner by dining at Greenwich, where they no doubt partook of whitebait and turtle.
Those processions of gilded barges on the Thames, accompanied as they generally were by music, must have been stately sights for the citizens to view, and much missed when the river became too crowded and dirty to be used as a royal highway.
In 1743 died Schulemberg, the mistress of George the First, whom he created Duchess of Kendal. The Emperor of Germany had also for some unstated reason conferred on her the dignity of Princess of Eberstein.
She died at the age of eighty-five, possessed of great wealth, which she bequeathed to Lady Walsingham, generally supposed to be her daughter by George the First.
Lady Walsingham had previously married Lord Chesterfield.
“But, I believe,” remarks Horace Walpole, “that he will get nothing by the Duchess’s death but his wife. She lived in the house with the Duchess”—next door in Grosvenor Square, “where he had played away all his credit.”
But at this time war clouds were hanging over Europe, and King George had espoused the cause of Queen Maria Theresa of Hungary. Very soon his attention was drawn from his eldest son to be centred in this cause, in which his favourite son William took a part.