[149] Soon after his first arrival in England, Mrs. ****, one of the bedchamber women, with whom he was in love, seeing him count his money over very often, said to him, “Sir, I can bear it no longer; if you count your money once more, I will leave the room.”
[150] He was nicknamed by the Jacobites, the Captain.
[151] Henrietta, daughter of Sir Henry Hobart, and sister of John, the first Earl of Buckinghamshire, of that family.—([Vide Appendix.])
[152] A relation of Cheselden the surgeon was condemned to be hanged; Cheselden proposed, if the King would pardon him, to take out the drum of his ear, in order to try what effect it would have; and if it succeeded, the experiment was to be repeated on my Lady Suffolk. The man was pardoned—the operation never tried!
[153] Amelia Sophia, wife of the Baron of Walmoden, created Countess of Yarmouth. She had a son by the King, who went by the name of Monsieur Louis, but he was not owned. The day Lord Chesterfield kissed hands on his being appointed Secretary of State, after so long an absence from Court, he met Sir William Russel, one of the Pages, in the antechamber of St. James’s, and began to make him a thousand compliments and excuses for not having been yet to wait on him and his mamma; the boy heard him with great tranquillity. When the speech was at an end, he said, “My Lord, I believe you scarce designed all these honours for me. I suppose you took me for Monsieur Louis!”
[154] Sir Spencer Compton, son of the Earl of Northampton, was Speaker of the House of Commons and Knight of the Bath in the reign of King George the First. On the accession of the present King, when Sir Robert Walpole went to receive his orders, he bad him go for them to Sir Spencer Compton. This was a plain declaration! The first business was to prepare the new King’s speech to his Privy Council, which the new Minister was so little able to draw, that he was forced to apply for it to the old one, who drew it—willingly, it may be believed; and the Queen knew how to make the request and condescension have their effects. He was then created Baron, and afterwards Earl of Wilmington and Knight of the Garter, and made President of the Council. On the resignation of Sir Robert Walpole, he succeeded him as First Lord of the Treasury, with the new Commissioners, but had so little influence even at that Board, that Sandys, Rushout, and Gybbon, used to put the disposal of places to the vote, and carry them against him and his nephew Compton. He died in about a year and a half after he had been raised to this uneasy situation. He was the most formal solemn man in the world, but a great lover of private debauchery: after missing the first Ministership, he entered into a secret league with Mr. Pulteney, which Sir R. Walpole discovered by the means of Mr. Pulteney’s gentleman, who betrayed to him the letter he was carrying from his master to Lord Wilmington. As this was soon after a treaty between them, Lord Wilmington was much shocked when Sir Robert reproached him with it, and continued so steady for the future, that when the famous motion was made against that Minister, he went to vote in the House of Lords with a blister on his head, after having been confined to his bed for some days with a fever.
[155] She always affected, if anybody was present, to act (and he liked she should) the humble ignorant wife, that never meddled with politics. Even if Sir Robert Walpole came in to talk of business, which she had previously settled with him, she would rise up, curtsey, and offer to retire; the King generally bad her stay, sometimes not. She and Sir Robert played him into one another’s hands. He would refuse to take the advice of the one, and then when the other talked to him again upon the same point, he would give the reasons for it which had been suggested to him: nay, he would sometimes produce as his own, at another conversation to the same person, the reasons which he had refused to listen to when given him. He has said to Sir Robert, on the curtseys of the Queen, “There, you see how much I am governed by my wife, as they say I am! Hoh! hoh! it is a fine thing indeed to be governed by one’s wife!” “Oh! sir,” replied the Queen, “I must be vain indeed to pretend to govern your Majesty!”
[156] Charles Fitzroy, the second Duke of Grafton, Lord Chamberlain and Knight of the Garter, grandson to Charles the Second. He died May 6, 1757, aged 78.
[157] All his three sons died before him.
[158] It was the Duke of Saxe Gotha, father of the Princess of Wales.