LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES, AND HIS SISTERS | [Frontispiece] |
| LEINE PALACE, HANOVER | Facing page [10] |
| MARY BELLENDEN | [28] |
| GEORGE II. | [40] |
| LORD HERVEY | [96] |
| MARY LEPEL | [108] |
| PRINCESS AUGUSTA | [136] |
| MARY BELLENDEN, DUCHESS OF ARGYLL | [146] |
| THE PALACE OF HERRENHAUSEN, HANOVER | [156] |
| SIR ROBERT WALPOLE | [192] |
| SARAH, DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH | [240] |
| QUEEN CAROLINE, AND THE YOUNG DUKE OF CUMBERLAND | [262] |
| PRINCE GEORGE AND PRINCE EDWARD | [346] |
| BUBB DODDINGTON | [368] |
A FORGOTTEN PRINCE OF WALES.
CHAPTER I.
Which Seizes upon the Prince as he comes into the World.
On the fourth day of cold February in that cold town of Hanover, in the year 1707, of a brilliant and beautiful young mother, in the great palace on the little river Leine, was born—perhaps it would be more correct to say crept into the world, for there was so little noise about it—a Prince of whom in after years his father remarked: “My dear first-born is the greatest ass and the greatest liar and the greatest canaille and the greatest beast in the whole world, and I heartily wish he was out of it.”[1] If this worthy parent—who by-the-bye was no less a personage than King George the Second of England at the time of speaking—had any reason or truth in this most fatherly comment with its charitable tail-piece by way of benediction, then must this little German potentate—by accident King of England—have been gifted in addition to his other fine and gentlemanly qualities of perception, with the power of divining the future, for his dislike, nay, his inveterate hatred, of this little vaunted first-born son commenced at his earliest years. Why, the good God alone knows, for certainly none of His creatures have ever up to the present time succeeded in discovering the cause.
The beautiful young mother then, Caroline, a Princess of Brandenburg-Ansbach, commonly called “Caroline of Ansbach,” married but a year to her George Augustus—only the Electoral Prince[2] at that time—lay happy in her bed in the palace, with her baby beside her, whilst the cold river ran without and the winter winds blew among the dear orange trees in the gardens she was so fond of two miles away at Herrenhausen, and very few people in Hanover and still fewer in England knew that a possible future Prince of Wales had been born into the world, for perhaps after all, very few people very much cared. Anne of England was still on the throne.
So quiet had this matter been kept and so great a surprise was the event that Howe, the English Envoy, wrote home in the following strain:—
“This Court having for some time past almost despaired of the Princess Electoral being brought to bed, and most people apprehensive that her bigness, which has continued for so long, was rather an effect of a distemper than that she was with child, her Highness was taken ill last Friday at dinner, and last night, about seven o’clock, the Countess d’Eke, her lady of the bedchamber, sent me word that the Princess was delivered of a son.”[3]
On the 25th February Howe writes again complaining bitterly like a wicked fairy in a children’s tale, that he has not been invited to the christening which had taken place a few days after the birth in the young mother’s bedroom, when the child had received the names of Frederick Louis. Furthermore, he had not been allowed to see the baby—and presumably to kiss it—until ten days later! This visit, however, appears to have mollified him, for he bursts forth into description: “I found the women,” he says, “all admiring the largeness and strength of the child.”