The fact has already been referred to, that George the Second and his Queen are credited with the intention of endeavouring to make their second son, the Duke of Cumberland—the idol of his mother—heir to the English throne, without giving any consideration to the fact that the throne was not theirs to give.
Such a determination which could not but have become known to the brothers was not likely to foster much fraternal love. As regards the Prince of Wales’s sisters, the two elder Princesses Anne and Amelia, cannot be said to have ever been his friends. Amelia exhibited some signs of affection at first, but when the Prince discovered that she was betraying his confidences to his father, he very naturally would have no more to do with her, as a result of which perfidy she became despised both by her brother and the King.
Anne, the elder Princess, had apparently never exhibited anything but dislike for her elder brother, whom neither she nor her sister could have had any distinct recollection of in their infancy when they left Hanover, and whom they both regarded as a stranger and interloper.
This state of unfortunate enmity which existed between the Prince and his sisters took an active form in a peculiar way. Anne, the Princess Royal, was devoted to music, and had had the advantage of the great Handel as her instructor, to whom she was much attached.
Handel at one time became the manager of the Opera House at the Haymarket,—one can imagine it with its hundreds of wax candles, its powder, patches, and orange girls—this undertaking the Princess Royal aided by every means in her power, inducing the King and Queen to not only subscribe to a box, but to frequently visit the theatre. This must have been an infliction upon King George, whose dislike for “bainting and boetry,” together with the other arts is proverbial.
It cannot be denied that Frederick, Prince of Wales, had the attribute of combativeness, and a natural power of enraging others by his mode of opposition. No sooner had his sister’s protégé established his opera at the Haymarket theatre than he forthwith started an opposition opera at the theatre in Lincolns Inn Fields, possibly not very far from the present Gaiety.
Then commenced a state of affairs which can only be regarded as extremely comical. All the adherents of the Prince—and he was very popular among the nobility as well as the people—ceased their patronage of Handel’s theatre, and transferred it to the Prince’s undertaking in Lincolns Inn Fields. Excitement between the two parties was high at the time, and the Prince’s theatre was crowded.
Lord Chesterfield, who by this time was becoming a strong partisan of Frederick’s, wittily commented on the state of affairs one evening at the Lincolns Inn Fields establishment. He had, he informed the Prince, just looked in at the Haymarket theatre on his way down, and found nobody there but the King and Queen, “and as I thought they might be talking business,” he concluded, airily, “I came away.”
Much as this joke pleased the Prince it cannot be expected that its repetition gave much satisfaction to the King and Queen, and the Princess Royal, the latter of whom spoke bitterly of the whole affair. She commented with a sneer that “she expected in a little while to see half the House of Lords playing in the orchestra at the Prince’s Theatre in their robes and coronets,” which was a remark truly worthy of a spiteful young lady, and the anger of the King, her father, can be understood when it is considered that he had been dragged to witness a performance he did not care a bit about, to be snubbed by his nobility and made a public spectacle of.
The King’s appreciation of a theatrical performance was not of a very high order; of an opera it was probably much worse. The following anecdote is related of one of his visits to a theatre when the play was Richard the Third, and Garrick sustained the title rôle.