The Princess-Dowager was unmoved by the popular clamour, and her influence over the young King remained unshaken; indeed it was rather strengthened, for his sense of chivalry was roused by the coarse insults heaped upon his mother. Lord Bute continued to pay his visits to Carlton House as before, the only difference made was that, to avoid the insults of the mob, his visits were paid less openly. The chair of one of the Princess’s maids of honour was often sent of an evening to Bute’s house in South Audley Street, and he was conveyed in it, with the curtains close drawn, to Carlton House, and admitted by a side entrance to the Princess’s presence. These precautions, though natural enough under the circumstances, were unwise, for before long the stealthy visits leaked out, and the worst construction was placed upon them.
In the first year of the King’s reign the supremacy of the Princess-Dowager was threatened by an attachment the monarch had formed for the beautiful Lady Sarah Lennox, daughter of the second Duke of Richmond. But the house of Lennox was a great Whig house, and its members were ambitious and aspiring, therefore the Princess-Dowager and Bute determined to prevent the marriage. That they succeeded is a matter of history. Lady Sarah’s hopes came to an end with the announcement of the King’s betrothal to Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. The announcement was not popular, for the nation was weary of royal alliances with the petty courts of Germany. But the Princess-Dowager had made confidential inquiries. She was told that Charlotte, who was very young, was dutiful and obedient, and no doubt thought that she would prove a cipher in her hands. In this the Princess-Dowager was sadly mistaken. Lady Sarah Lennox, or an earlier candidate for the honour, a Princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, would have been pliable in comparison with Charlotte of Mecklenburg, who, on her arrival, showed herself to be a shrewd, self-possessed young woman, with a tart tongue, and a full sense of the importance of her position. Charlotte soon became jealous of her mother-in-law’s influence over the King. Her relations with her sisters-in-law also were never cordial, and with the Princess Augusta she was soon at open feud.
George III. and Charlotte were married at the Chapel Royal, St. James’s Palace, on September 8, 1761, and a fortnight later were crowned in Westminster Abbey. The Princess Matilda, then ten years of age, witnessed her brother’s wedding, but unofficially, from a private pew. Her first public appearance was made at the coronation, when we find her following the Princess-Dowager in a procession from the House of Lords to Westminster Abbey. A platform, carpeted with blue baize and covered by an awning, had been erected across Palace Yard to the south door of the Abbey, and over this platform the Princess-Dowager and all her children passed, except the King, who was to be crowned, and Prince Edward and Princess Augusta, who were in their Majesties’ procession.
“The Princess-Dowager of Wales,” it is written, “was led by the hand by Prince William Henry, dressed in white and silver. Her train, which was of silk, was cut short, and therefore not borne by any person, and her hair flowed down her shoulders in hanging curls. She had no cap, but only a circlet of diamonds. The rest of the princes and princesses, her Highness’s children, followed in order of their age: Prince Henry Frederick, also in white and silver, handing his sister Princess Louisa Anne, dressed in a slip with hanging sleeves. Prince Frederick William, likewise in white and silver, handing his youngest sister, the Princess Matilda, dressed also in a slip with hanging sleeves. Both the young princesses had their hair combed upwards, which was contrived to lie flat at the back of their heads in an elegant taste.”[16]
[16] The Annual Register, September 22, 1761.
For some time after George III.’s marriage the Princess-Dowager and Bute continued to be all-powerful with the King. The aged Prime Minister, the Duke of Newcastle, clung to office as long as he could, but at last was forced to resign, and in 1762 Lord Bute became Prime Minister. The Princess-Dowager’s hand was very visible throughout Bute’s brief administration; her enemy the Duke of Devonshire, “the Prince of the Whigs,” as she styled him, was ignominiously dismissed from office, and his name struck off the list of privy councillors. Other great Whig Lords, who had slighted or opposed her, were treated in a similar manner. Peace was made with France on lines the Princess-Dowager had indicated before her son came to the throne, and a still greater triumph, the peace was approved by a large majority in Parliament, despite the opposition of the Whig Lords. “Now,” cried the Princess exultingly, “now, my son is King of England!” It was her hour of triumph.
But though the Whigs were defeated in Parliament, they took their revenge outside. The ignorant mob was told that the peace was the first step towards despotism, the despotism of the Princess-Dowager and her led-captain Bute, and the torrent of abuse swelled in volume. One evening when the Princess was present at the play, at a performance of Cibber’s comedy, The Careless Husband, the whole house rose when one of the actresses spoke the following lines: “Have a care, Madam, an undeserving favourite has been the ruin of many a prince’s empire”. The hoots and insults from the gallery were so great that the Princess drew the curtains of her box and quitted the house. Nor was this all. In Wilkes’s periodical, The North Briton, appeared an essay in which, under the suggestive names of Queen Isabella and her paramour “the gentle Mortimer,” the writer attacked the Princess-Dowager and the Prime Minister. Again, in a caricature entitled “The Royal Dupe,” the young King was depicted as sleeping in his mother’s lap, while Bute was stealing his sceptre, and Fox picking his pocket. In Almon’s Political Register there appeared a gross frontispiece, in which the Earl of Bute figured as secretly entering the bedchamber of the Princess-Dowager; a widow’s lozenge with the royal arms hung over the bed, to enforce the identity. Worst of all, one night, when the popular fury had been inflamed to its height, a noisy mob paraded under the windows of Carlton House, carrying a gallows from which hung a jack-boot and a petticoat which they afterwards burned (the first a miserable pun on the name of John Earl of Bute, and the second to signify the King’s mother). The Princess-Dowager heard the uproar from within and learned the cause from her frightened household. She alone remained calm. “Poor deluded people, how I pity them,” she said, “they will know better some day.”
What her children thought of all this is not precisely recorded, but it would seem that the King stood alone among them in the sympathy and support he gave to his mother. Prince Edward, Duke of York, and the Princess Augusta were openly hostile to Lord Bute. Prince Edward declared that he suffered “a thousand mortifications” because of him. Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was sullenly resentful, and even Prince Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, made sarcastic remarks. What Matilda thought there is no means of knowing; she was too young to understand, but children are quick-witted, and since her favourite brother, Edward, and her favourite sister, Augusta, felt so strongly on the subject, she probably shared their prejudices. There is little doubt that the mysterious intimacy between the Princess-Dowager and Lord Bute was the cause of much ill-feeling between her and her children, and had the effect of weakening her authority over them and of losing their respect. Years after, when she had occasion to remonstrate with Matilda, her daughter retorted with a bitter allusion to Lord Bute.
The Princess Augusta had inherited her mother’s love of dabbling in politics, and as her views were strongly opposed to those of the Princess-Dowager the result did not conduce to the domestic harmony of Carlton House. The Princess Augusta, of all the royal children, had suffered most from the intimacy between her mother and Lord Bute. Horace Walpole wrote of her some time before: “Lady Augusta, now a woman grown, was, to facilitate some privacy for the Princess, dismissed from supping with her mother, and sent back to cheese-cakes with her little sister Elizabeth, on the pretence that meat at night would fatten her too much”.[17] Augusta secretly resented the cheese-cakes, but she was then too young to show open mutiny. Now that she had grown older she became bolder. She was the King’s eldest sister, and felt that she was entitled to a mind of her own. Therefore, with her brother, the Duke of York, she openly denounced Lord Bute and all his works, and lavished admiration on his great rival, Pitt. This was a little too much for the Princess-Dowager, who feared that Augusta would contaminate the minds of her younger brothers and sisters. She resolved therefore to marry her to some foreign husband, and thus remove her from the sphere of her present political activities. Moreover, it was quite time that Augusta was married. She had completed her twenty-sixth year and her youthful beauty was on the wane. “Lady Augusta,” writes Horace Walpole, “is not handsome, but tall enough and not ill-made, with the German whiteness of hair and complexion so remarkable in the royal family, and with their precipitate yet thick Westphalian accent.”[18]
[17] Memoirs of the Reign of George III., vol. iii.