A note conjectures, that the Princess Royal might have had some expectation of ascending the throne of England, neither of her brothers being then married; a circumstance, which may account for the Princess’s anxiety to have her child born in this country.
The next scene is laid among the bishops. The bishopric of Winchester had been promised to Hoadly. Willis, the Bishop of Winchester, was seized with an apoplectic fit, and Lord Hervey instantly wrote to Hoadly, who was then Bishop of Salisbury, to come up to town and enforce his claim. The bishop wrote to the Queen and Sir Robert letters, which were to be delivered as soon as Willis was dead. The Queen, on presenting those letters, asked Lord Hervey if he did not blush for the conduct of his friend in this early and pressing application for a thing not yet vacant. While he was speaking, the King came in, and both King and Queen talked of Hoadly, in such a manner as plainly showed that they neither esteemed nor loved him. Potter, Bishop of Oxford, a great favourite of the Queen, strongly solicited Winchester, and would have obtained it, but for Walpole’s suggestion, that the engagements to Hoadly could not be broken without scandal. Hoadly at last obtained Winchester; and, as the Memoir observes, one of the best preferments in the church was conferred upon a man hated by the King, disliked by the Queen, and long estranged from the friendship of Walpole. Then all followed in the way which might have been anticipated; the King not speaking a word to the new bishop, either when he kissed his hand or did homage; the Queen, when she found it could not be helped, making the most of promoting him,—and Sir Robert taking the whole merit of the promotion to himself.
Another source of contention now arose. The Chancellor Talbot had recommended Rundle, a chaplain of his father, the late Bishop of Durham, for the see of Gloucester, which had been vacant a twelvemonth. Gibson, Bishop of London, objected to him, that fourteen or fifteen years before he had been heard to speak disrespectfully of some portions of Scripture, and Rundle was suspected of Arianism. This reason was certainly sufficient to justify inquiry.
Sir Robert, in his usual style, tried to mediate; begged of the Chancellor to give up his support of Rundle, offering him at the same time a deanery, or to give him the Bishopric of Derry in Ireland, then possessed by Henry Downes; of whom the Memoir speaks as a crazy old fellow with three thousand a-year. This affair ended in Benson’s being made Bishop of Gloucester, and Secker Bishop of Bristol, both formerly chaplains to the Chancellor’s father. Rundle was subsequently made Bishop of Derry, where he died, nine years after, in his sixtieth year, much regretted.
Walpole was now visibly approaching decline. He had become negligent of the claims of his friends, and solicitous only to conciliate his enemies. Of course, where he bought over one opponent, there were fifty others ready to fill up his place. This policy failed, and ought always to fail. At the close of the session, say the Memoirs, “the harvest of court favour was small, though the labourers were many.” The only things to give away were the Privy Seal, by the retirement of Lord Lonsdale, and the Secretaryship at War, by the dismissal of Sir William Strickland, “who was become so weak in mind and body, that his head was as much in its second infancy as his limbs.”
A new source of ministerial vexation was added to the mêlée, by the King’s sudden determination to run over to Hanover, in spite of all remonstrance—the royal answer being always “Pooh, stuff! You think to get the better of me, but you shall not.”
Walpole, who dreaded that the King, once in Hanover, would plunge the country into a war, tried to set the Queen against this untoward journey; but her Majesty, though she gave the minister fair words, was in favour of the freak. The reasons assigned by the Memoir for her conduct being those rather irreverent ones, on the part of his lordship—pride in the éclat of the regency; the ease of being mistress of her hours, which was not the case for two hours together, when the King was in England; and, “besides these agrémens, she had the certainty of being, for six months at least, not only free from the fatigue of being obliged to entertain him for twenty hours in the twenty-four, but also from the more irksome office of being set up to receive the quotidian sallies of a temper that, let it be charged by what hand it would, used always to discharge its hottest fire, on some pretence or other, upon her.”
But “one trouble arose from the King’s going to Hanover, which her Majesty did not at all foresee;” and which was his becoming, soon after his arrival, so much attached to a Madame Walmoden, “a married woman of the first fashion in Hanover,” that nobody in England talked of any thing but the declining power of the Queen.
They might justly have talked much more of the insult of this conduct to public morals; but we shall not go further into those details. They absolutely repel the common-sense of propriety, to a degree which, we hope, will never be endurable in England. The King, however, gave her Majesty, in the long succession of his correspondence, the complete history of his passion, its progress, and his final purchase of the lady for 1000 ducats! A proof, as Lord Hervey says, more of his economy than his passion.
The life of courts is stripped of its glitter a good deal by the indefatigable courtier who has here left us his reminiscences; but it requires strong evidence, to believe that the persons who constitute the officials of royal households can submit to the humiliations described in these volumes.