The old lady issuing from the Palace, where possibly she had dined more amply than was judicious—for she was a great eater—leant on the arm of her beloved Catherine and harped as ladies of her age will do on the string of her treatment by her kinswoman Anne. It is said that she became greatly excited and walked very fast, as she spoke of her imagined wrongs. They bent their steps towards the celebrated orangery, where the Princess and the attendants with them noticed the Electress turn very white; then the next moment she fell forward in a swoon.
The cries of the attendants quickly brought to her aid her son the Elector who was not far off, and he placed some poudre d’or—evidently a restorative—in her mouth. But she was beyond the power of earthly restoratives; she was carried into the Palace and in the barbarous custom of the time bled, but very little blood came[7]; she was dead! as the doctors said, from apoplexy.
Thus did this great Princess, to whom our own late Queen, Victoria, her descendant, has been so often likened, miss by a little over six weeks the great goal of all her long years of ambition, the throne of England, for Queen Anne died on the 1st of August following.
It is extraordinary that after the lapse of six generations a descendant so like her should fill that throne after which she had striven so long and so wisely for her family.
Her son George was now the “Heir of Britain” in her place; an heirship which was to very soon resolve itself into possession, for within a few weeks began that celebrated crisis in England between Oxford and Bolingbroke which from the virulence of the discussions at the Councils absolutely broke down Queen Anne’s health and killed her.
She departed this life on the 1st of August, 1714, almost her last intelligible words being of her brother, the Pretender: “My brother! Oh! my poor brother. What will become of you?”
On July 31st, Craggs, a creature of the Whig Government, had been despatched to Hanover to convey the news that the Queen of England was dying.
Craggs reached Hanover on August 5th—a journey then apparently of six days—but his performance, though accomplished, one can imagine, with all haste, was entirely eclipsed by that of one Godike, secretary to Bothmar, the Hanoverian Envoy to England, who, despatched by his master on August 1st, the day of the Queen’s death, arrived at Hanover on the 5th, the same day as Craggs, and proceeding direct to the Palace of Herrenhausen, conveyed the news to the Elector before any of the other messengers from England arrived.
It was this enterprising Bothmar who really decided George in accepting the British Crown, for had not his reports from London been satisfactory as to the feeling of the people, or at any rate as to the absence of hostility to the Elector on their part, it is very unlikely that George would have left his beloved Herrenhausen at all, and England might to-day have been ruled by a Stuart King.
“The late King,” wrote Dean Lockier after the death of George the First, “would never have stirred a step if there had been any strong opposition.”[8]