At this time, too, the great William Pitt—“Cornet Pitt,” and afterwards Earl of Chatham—made his first speech in the House of Commons, in seconding the Address of Congratulation to the King on the marriage of his son, which address was moved by Lyttleton. So laudatory was Pitt of the virtues of the son that he mortally offended the father, who never forgave him, and as an instalment of future spite deprived him of his commissions of Cornet.
But little George the King had other fish to fry; he was due at Hanover on the 29th May, and whether Sir Robert Walpole approved or not he intended to go, and keep his tryst with Madame Walmoden and the other members of her select circle. From the King’s point of view it was high time he went to look after his interests in this direction, as there was a certain Captain von der Schulemburg about in connexion with whom a rope ladder was discovered dangling from Madame Walmoden’s bedroom window during the King’s visit. But George had made up his mind to go, and go he would, and did.
Sir Robert Walpole, however, by way of asserting his authority in some shape or form, got him to take his brother Horace with him as Minister in Attendance.
But before departing the King appointed the Queen as his Regent, as usual ignoring his eldest son; at the same time he sent a message to Frederick intimating that wherever the Queen was, there would be provided apartments for him and the Princess. The Prince of Wales very naturally resented this order, which practically constituted him and his wife prisoners in whichever of the Royal palaces the Queen happened to be living. The fact of the Queen being appointed Regent was also a subject of bitter discord between the mother and son, creating a gap which widened day by day.
CHAPTER XV.
A Rope Ladder and Some Storms.
It has been already stated that there was at Hanover a certain Captain von der Schulemberg, whose name became very much coupled with that of the King’s mistress, Madame Walmoden, and it came about in this wise.
Madame Walmoden inhabited certain grand apartments in the old Leine Schloss in the town of Hanover—in which palace it will be remembered that Prince Frederick was born.
The King lived at Herrenhausen Schloss two miles away, and thither the Walmoden was accustomed to drive every morning and spend the day with the King. The King, too, would sometimes return with her to the Leine Palace.
Another important fact must also be mentioned and that is that Madame Walmoden had presented the King with a fine boy, which she, of course, declared to be his. The King was fifty-three, fatuous and ready to believe anything she told him; the birth of this child attached him more to the Walmoden than ever, a consummation she had no doubt calculated upon. Now it came about that one night, when the King was away at Herrenhausen, a muddle-headed gardener with no knowledge of the courtly world and its pretty little ways, stumbled over a ladder in the small hours placed immediately under Madame Walmoden’s window, which looked upon the gardens of the old Leine Schloss, those gardens through which it is said Sophie Dorothea, the mother of George the Second, stole disguised to meet her lover Königsmarck at his lodgings hard by.
The obtuse gardener, instead of leaving the ladder where it was and going his way, officiously thrust his nose into other people’s business, and having carefully examined the ladder—some say it was a rope ladder and fixed to the Walmoden’s window-sill—proceeded to search the gardens, believing as subsequently stated that a robber was planning the removal of the mistress’s jewels. As might have been expected by one less dense he presently discovered a man hiding in some bushes near. This man he seized, and at the same time alarmed the palace guard. This man being placed in the guard room and examined proved as it is stated in one account, “to everyone’s astonishment,” to be a certain officer in the Austrian service named Schulemberg; Captain von der Schulemberg, and certainly not a robber in the ordinary sense of the word. In addition, he was a relative of the Duchess of Kendal—old Melusine von der Schulemberg—the mistress of George the First. How these Hanoverian courtesans and their belongings got mixed up!