[40] Commander-in-Chief, husband of Mary Bellenden, who had died the previous autumn.
[41] He was well aware the Prince was hard pressed for money, and he was away from England eight months.
[42] This was denied afterwards, but it was probably the Household of George the Second when Prince of Wales.
CHAPTER XVII.
A New Favourite and a Settlement.
The King and Queen in the jubilation of their victory over the Prince of Wales had a mind to celebrate it by turning him and his young wife out of St. James’s Palace, but they were dissuaded from this benevolent intention by the judicious Sir Robert Walpole. Instead the Prince retained his position—though no doubt he would have much preferred a house of his own—but the state of affairs under these circumstances must have reached the limit of painfulness to the young Princess and her husband.
Each night “he led the Queen by the hand to dinner,” says Doran, “and she could have stabbed him on the way; for her wrath was more bitter than ever against him, for the reason that he had introduced her name, through his friends, in the Parliamentary debate.”
This referred presumably to his mention of the fact that he had told his mother of his embarrassments.
The Prince still attended his father’s levees occasionally, but the King never acknowledged his presence in any way whatever. Very soon, however, at the conclusion of the session of Parliament, the Court moved to Richmond, and there the little King, now quite restored to health, distinguished this year 1737 by another gracious act; he took still another mistress. This time the object of his Royal selection was the children’s governess, Lady Deloraine.
The lady in question was Mary Howard—the King seemed to favour the name of Howard in his amours—of the Suffolk family, who had married Henry Scott, first Earl of Deloraine; but at this period he was dead and she had remarried William Wyndham, Esq., of Cassham.
She was an extremely pretty woman, but celebrated for the looseness of her talk in that age of looseness. She was not a woman of much brain power, and a fair estimate of her character may be formed from the following incident.