So far from being offended, the Queen replied in the same strain, equalling in every respect her husband’s flights of fancy in the regions of Venus.
It is this correspondence between Caroline and the King, coupled with her very objectionable letters to the Duchess of Orleans, which have caused many writers to take exception to the remark of Lord Mahon, which described this Queen’s character as “without a blemish.” At any rate it gives us an insight into the private life of the mother of our Prince Frederick, and accounts perhaps for some of her unnatural conduct towards him, for where there is not purity of mind, how can there be purity of motherly affection?
Again, a mind which could take pleasure daily in the conversation of such a man as Lord Hervey—epigrammatic though that conversation might be—could not be expected to contain the natural solicitude which a loving parent would have for her first-born son.
The little King, however, was having a particularly effulgent time in Hanover with his new light o’ love, a time which he kept up, not exactly religiously, until the very night before he left for England, when standing glass in hand at a supper party on that eventful evening he pledged himself to Madame Walmoden and the other demireps forming the company to return without fail on the following 29th May.
Upon hearing of which promise some short time after, Sir Robert Walpole, his sturdy Prime Minister, remarked: “He wants to go to Hanover, does he”? he asked, when Lord Hervey told him of it, “and to be there by the 29th May? Well, he shan’t go for all that.”
So much did the King enjoy his revels in Hanover that he had paintings made of them, each containing portraits, sent them to England and had them hung up in his wife’s dressing room! She must have enjoyed the privilege!
So George returned to England and made himself exceedingly disagreeable to his wife when he got there, as a testy love-sick gentleman of fifty-two might be expected to do who had recently left a new and youngish lady-love hundreds of miles behind. For the time being Caroline and the English bored him; with regard to the latter he expressed himself as follows: “No English, or French cook could dress a dinner; no English confectioner set out a dessert; no English player could act; no English coachman could drive, no English jockey ride, nor were any English horses fit to be drove or fit to be ridden; no Englishman knew how to come into a room, nor any English woman how to dress herself.”[31]
How this particular strain of English King must have degenerated since James the First’s daughter made a mésalliance and married the King of Bohemia!
But the little King had not wasted all his time in Hanover, he had seen a Princess—the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha—whom he thought would do for a daughter-in-law, and had straightway communicated this fact to his Queen, mixed up with accounts of his own prowess on the field of love, in a less innocent direction.
No sooner, however, had the King set foot in England, than the Prince of Wales, urged to this filial act of duty by Doddington, put in an appearance at one of his father’s first Levees, from which functions he had absented himself for a considerable time. His father, however, once more scented mischief in the air, and once more his olfactory nerves had not led him astray. Frederick at once renewed his demands, this time asking for his full allowance of £100,000 a year, a separate establishment, and—a wife. The Prince was insistent.