[Sidenote: 1736—Following the ways of his ancestors]
The fight, however, did not come off, and George had still to find a wife for his eldest son. She was found in the person of the Princess Augusta, sister of the Duke of Saxe-Gotha. The duke gave his consent; the princess offered no opposition, and indeed would not have been {47} much listened to if she had had any opposition to offer. King George wished his son to get married to anybody rather than remain longer unmarried; and the prince, who had tried to make a runaway match with a young English lady before this time, appeared to be absolutely indifferent on the subject. So the Princess Augusta was brought over to Greenwich, and thence to London, and on April 28, 1736, the marriage took place. The princess seems to have been a very amiable, accomplished, and far from unattractive young woman. The Prince of Wales grew to be very fond of her, and to be happy in the home she made him. He continued, of course, to follow the ways of his father and his grandfather, and had his mistresses as well as his wife. The Prince of Wales would probably have thought he was not acting properly the part of royalty if he had been contented with the companionship of one woman, and that woman his wife. His wife had to put up with the palace manners of the period. Frederick had at one time been noted for his dutiful ways to his mother; but more lately the mother and son had become hopelessly estranged. George hated Frederick, and the hatred of the mother for the son seemed quite as strong as that of the father.
A courtly chronicler and genealogist, writing at a period a little later, describes George the Second as in the height of glory, a just and merciful prince, but dryly adds, "He resembles his father in his too great attachment to the electoral dominions." So indeed he did. The whole policy of his reign was affected or controlled by his love for Hanover, or, at least, his love for his own interest in Hanover. He had no patriotic or unselfish attachment to the land of his ancestry and his birth; he was incapable of feeling any such exalted emotion. But the electoral dominions, which were his property, he clung to with ardor, and Hanover was the garden of the pleasures he enjoyed most highly. He never could understand English ways. He once scolded an English nobleman, the Duke of Grafton, for his delight in the hunting field. It was a {48} pretty occupation, the King said, for a man of the duke's years, and of his rank, to spend so much of his time in tormenting a poor fox, that was generally a much better beast than any of those that pursued him; for the fox hurts no other animal but for his subsistence, while the brutes who hurt the fox did it only for the pleasure they took in hurting. One might admire such a declaration if it could be thought to come from a too refined and sensitive humanity. An eccentric, but undoubtedly benevolent, member of the House of Commons declared, in a speech made in that House some years ago, that he only once joined in a hunt, and then it was only in the interest of the fox. George had no such feeling; he simply could not understand the tastes or the sports of English country life.
[Sidenote: 1736—To Hanover at all hazards]
George came back from an expedition to Hanover in a very bad humor. He hated everything in England; he loved everything in Hanover. It was with the uttermost reluctance that he dragged himself back from the place of his amusements and his most cherished amours. He had lately found in Hanover a new object of adoration. This was a Madame Walmoden, a fashionable young married woman, with whom George had fallen headlong into love. He wrote home to his wife, telling her of his admiration for Madame Walmoden, and describing with some minuteness the lady's various charms of person. He induced Madame Walmoden—probably no great persuasion was needed—to leave her husband and become the mistress of a king. George, it is said, paid down the not very extravagant sum of a thousand dollars to make things pleasant all round. During his stay in Hanover he and his new companion behaved quite like a high-Dutch Antony and Cleopatra. They had revels and orgies of all kinds in the midst of a crowd of companions as refined and intellectual as themselves. George had paintings made of some of these scenes, with portrait likenesses of those who took a leading part in them, and these paintings he brought home to England, and was accustomed {49} to exhibit and explain to the Queen, or to anybody else who happened to be in the way. But he did not as yet venture to bring Madame Walmoden to England; and his having to part with her threw him into a very bad temper. The curious reader will find an amusing, but at the same time very painful, account of the manner in which George vented his temper by snubbing his children and insulting his wife. The Queen bore it all with her wonted patience. George had made a promise to get back to Hanover very soon to see his beloved Madame Walmoden. Walpole restrained him for a long time, which made the King more and more angry. Once, when the Queen was urging him to be a little more considerate in his dealings with some of the bishops, the King of England, Defender of the Faith, told her he was sick of all that foolish stuff, and added, "I wish with all my heart that the devil may take all your bishops, and the devil take your minister, and the devil take the Parliament, and the devil take the whole island, provided I can get out of it and go to Hanover." Caroline herself could be sharp enough in her tone with the bishops sometimes, but the manners of the King seemed to her to go beyond the bounds of reason.
The King was determined to get back to Hanover by a certain date. Walpole swore to some of his friends that the King should not go. The King did go, however, and left the Queen to act as regent of the kingdom during his absence. This time George was to be absent from his wife on his birthday, and the poor Queen took this bitterly to heart. She consulted Walpole, and Walpole was frank, although on this particular occasion he does not seem to have been coarse. He reminded the Queen that she was ceasing to be young and attractive, and, as it was necessary that she must keep a hold over the King's regard, he strongly urged her to write to George and ask him to bring Madame Walmoden over to England with him. Even this the Queen, after some moments of agonized mental struggle, consented to do. She wrote to the {50} King, and she began to make preparations for the suitable reception of the new sultana. She carried her complacency so far as even to say that she would be willing to take Madame Walmoden into her own service. Even Walpole thought this was carrying humbleness too far. "Why not?" poor Caroline asked; was not Lady Suffolk, a former mistress of the King, in the Queen's employment? Walpole pointed out, with the worldly good-sense which belonged to him, that public opinion would draw a great distinction between the scandal of the King's making one of the Queen's servants his mistress and the Queen's taking one of the King's mistresses into her service.
[Sidenote: 1736—Handelists and anti-Handelists]
The quarrels between the Prince of Wales and the other members of the royal family kept on increasing in virulence. The prince surrounded himself with the Patriots, and indeed openly put himself at their head. The King and Queen would look at no one who was seen in the companionship of the prince. The Queen is believed to have at one time cherished some schemes for separating the Electorate of Hanover from the English Crown, in order that Hanover might be given to her second son. With the outer public the Prince of Wales seems to have been popular in a certain sense, perhaps for no other reason than because he was the Prince of Wales and not the King. When he went to one of the theatres he was loudly cheered, and he took the applause with the gratified complacency of one who knows he is receiving nothing that he has not well deserved. He would appear to have been continually posturing and attitudinizing as the young favorite of the people. The truth is that the people in general knew very little about the prince, and knew a good deal about the King, and naturally leaned to the side of the man who might at least turn out to be better than his father.
Even the seraphic realms of music were invaded by the dispute between the adherents of the King and the adherents of the prince. The King and Queen were supporters {51} of Handel, the prince was against the great composer. The prince in the first instance declared against Handel because his sister Anne, the Princess of Orange, was one of Handel's worshippers, therefore a great number of the nobility who sided with the prince set up, or at least supported, a rival opera-house to that in which Handel's music was the great attraction. The King and Queen, Lord Hervey tells, were as much in earnest on this subject as their son and daughter, though they had the prudence to disguise it, or to endeavor to disguise it, a little more. They were both Handelists, "and sat freezing constantly at his empty Haymarket opera, whilst the prince, with all the chief of the nobility, went as constantly to that of Lincoln's Inn Fields." "The affair," Hervey adds, "grew as serious as that of the Greens and the Blues under Justinian at Constantinople; an anti-Handelist was looked upon as an anti-courtier, and voting against the Court in Parliament was hardly a less remissible or more venial sin than speaking against Handel or going to the Lincoln's Inn Fields Opera." Hervey was a man of some culture and some taste; it is curious to observe how little he thought of the greatest musician of his time, one of the very greatest musicians of all time. The London public evidently could not have been gifted with very high musical perception just then. Indeed, later on, when Handel brought out his "Messiah," it was met with so cold and blank a reception in London that the composer began to despair of the English public ever appreciating his greatest efforts. He made up his mind to try his "Messiah" in Ireland. He went to Dublin, and there found a splendid reception for his masterpiece, and he remained there until the echo of his great success had made itself heard in England, and he then came back and found his welcome in London. This, however, is anticipating. At present we are only concerned with the fact, as illustrating the existing condition of things in London, that to be an admirer of Handel was to be an enemy of the Prince of Wales, and not to be an {52} admirer of Handel was to be an enemy of the King. The feud ran so high that the Princess Royal said she expected in a little while to see half the House of Lords playing in the orchestra in their robes and coronets. She herself quarrelled with the Lord Chamberlain for preserving his usual neutrality on this occasion, and she spoke of Lord Delaware, who was one of the chief managers against Handel, "with as much spleen as if he had been at the head of the Dutch faction who opposed the making her husband Stadtholder." It seems needless to say that George himself had no artistic appreciation of Handel. He subscribed one thousand a year to enable Handel to fight his battle, but he talked over the matter with unenthusiastic prosaic common-sense. He said he "did not think setting one's self at the head of a faction of fiddlers a very honorable occupation for people of quality, or the ruin of one poor fellow so generous or so good-natured a scheme as to do much honor to the undertakers, whether they succeeded in it or not; but, the better they succeeded in it, the more he thought they would have reason to be ashamed of it." There were some gleams of manhood shining through George still, and he could appreciate fair play although he could not quite appreciate Handel. For the ruin of one poor fellow! The poor fellow was Handel. The faction of fiddlers that could ruin that poor fellow had not been found in the world, even if we were to include Nero himself among the number. One poor fellow! We wonder how many sovereigns living in George's time the world could have spared without a pang of regret if by the sacrifice it could secure for men's ennobling delight the immortal music of Handel.
[Sidenote: 1736—William Pitt]