A new reign had begun. Suddenly, without a moment of warning, the Prince of Wales found himself king. He emerged in an instant from the shadow of paternal disfavour to the full blaze of regal power.
Strange, dramatic even, that death of the old King, lying stark and cold in that very chamber in which he was born—strange to awfulness that wild drive through the summer dust and glare, the stricken King refusing to let his chariot be stopped for succour or rest; dozing in the arms of his faithful chamberlain, murmuring faintly in a brief moment of consciousness, "All is over with me;" gasping out with his last struggling breath, "Osnabrück, Osnabrück," to slavish courtiers and attendants who dared not question that kingly command: although his omnipotent majesty the King of Terrors rode shoulder to shoulder with their royal master. And thus in the deep of night that death-chariot arrived at Osnabrück, and the old bishop, Ernst August, clasped the cold hand of his royal brother.
The King died on Sunday, the 11th, old style, and the news reached Sir Robert Walpole at his dinner-table in Chelsea on Wednesday, the 14th. Quick work for the express who brought the tidings, in those days of villanous roads and sailing vessels. Sir Robert was said to have killed two horses between Chelsea and Richmond in his ride to the princely palace, doubtless a harmless exaggeration of good Gossip History. He received but scant civility from the new King—aroused from his customary after-dinner nap by the pleasing intelligence of his father's fatal apoplexy—and was sent straight off to Chiswick, to take his directions from that dull, precise, and plodding politician, Sir Spencer Compton. The statesman thus curtly dismissed, the new King and new Queen scampered post-haste to their house in Leicester Fields, where no sooner was the news public than the square was filled with a seething mob, huzzaing for King George II., whilst the long suite of reception-rooms was thronged with courtiers and sycophants, male and female, all bowing down to the new Panjandrum, and all turning their backs upon poor Sir Robert, whose fall seemed a foregone conclusion to the meanest apprehension; for had not everybody about the Prince's person heard him talk of his father's prime minister as a rogue and a rascal for whom the Tower would be only too comfortable a prison-house? But while the giddy, light-thinking crowd rushed to Leicester Fields, to slaver King George and Queen Caroline, some of the deeper calculators paid their court to a lady who was deemed a better mark for service and flattery than either; and that was Mrs. Howard, the new Queen's very submissive waiting-woman, and the new King's titular mistress, who was naturally supposed to rule him and to be as able to turn on the fountain of royal favour as ever Barbara Palmer or Louise de Querouailles had been in the easy-going days of good old Rowley.
"Strange how thoroughly beside the mark these simple souls all were," said Tom Philter, who by a kind of fox-like slyness always contrived to be on the right side. "They fancied that because that deaf and stupid middle-aged lady was the King's mistress she must needs be more powerful than his wife, although Queen Caroline is indisputably the finer woman by almost as wide a superiority as she is the cleverer. They concluded that the illicit tie must be the stronger, inasmuch as vice is generally pleasanter than virtue; and they did not take into consideration that our old sins are often as wearisome as respectability itself. I happened to know that in his Majesty's estimation Caroline's little finger is worth Mrs. Howard's whole body, and it was to her I dedicated my volume of odes and epigrams, 'Horace in a Periwig,' while she was Princess of Wales."
"It was a worse mistake to suppose that the new King could afford to dispense with the services of the greatest financier of modern times," said Durnford, who supplied occasional papers to the journal for which Mr. Philter was scrub, hack, and paragraph-writer, and who dined now and then at the Roebuck in Cheapside, a well-known Whig tavern where Philter spent much of his leisure, and where he heard most of the news which he was wont to attribute to far loftier sources. After all, it matters little whether a journalist gets his news at first, second, third, or fourth hand, so long as the facts he records can amuse and interest his readers. The more various the relaters of a story the more embellished the narrative.
"Ay, that was indeed a mistake. Yet if Sir Spencer had but had a little more gumption, he might have formed a new Cabinet with Townshend and Chesterfield, and sent Robin to the Tower. He let his opportunity slip; Sir Robert got the Queen's ear, and now his usefulness in the adjustment of the Civil List, by which both King and Queen get a larger income than any of their predecessors, has made George and Caroline his obliged and humble servants for ever."
"What, sir, you would insinuate that Sir Robert Walpole has bought his King at the expense of his country?"
"O, he was always good at buying the votes and consciences of common folks; but it is not often a minister has so good an opportunity of giving a fancy price for his King. It was pleasant to hear Sir Robert plead his Majesty's increasing family and the high price of provisions as a reason why the Commons should be liberal."
"And the only opposition was from Mr. Shippen—Downright Shippen, as Pope called him—the Jacobite who ventured to describe the late King as a stranger to our language and constitution, and was sent to the Tower for his insolence," said Durnford.
"Well, there is one to whom his late Majesty's fatal apoplexy—caused, Dean Swift tells me, by a melon—has dealt a death-blow, one whom I could almost pity, unprincipled and shifty as he has ever been."