[39] Letter of Leibniz to the Electoral Princess Caroline, Vienna, 24th May, 1714.
[40] The Electoral Princess Caroline to Leibniz, Hanover, 7/17th June, 1714.
[41] D’Alais’s Despatch (translation), Hanover, 12th June, 1714. This has not before been published.
[42] The Queen’s Answer to the Memorial of their Electoral Highnesses the late Electress Dowager and the Elector of Hanover, June, 1714.
[43] Clarendon’s Despatch, Hanover, 7th August, 1714. The Elector’s words are translated from the French.
[44] Clarendon’s Despatch, Hanover, 10th August, 1714.
[45] Clarendon’s Despatch, 10/17th August, 1714.
BOOK II.
PRINCESS OF WALES.
CHAPTER I.
THE COMING OF THE KING. 1714.
George the First landed at Greenwich on Saturday, September 18th, 1714, at six o’clock in the evening. The arrival of the royal yacht was celebrated by the booming of guns, the ringing of bells, the flying of flags, and the cheers of a vast crowd of people, who had assembled along the riverside. A great number of privy councillors and lords, spiritual and temporal, hurried down to Greenwich, eager to kneel in the mud, if need be, and kiss the hand of the new sovereign. This was not the first visit of George to England; he had come here thirty-four years before, as a suitor for the hand of Queen Anne, then Princess Anne of York, whose throne he was now to fill. On that occasion his barque was left stranded all night at Greenwich, and no one was sent from Charles the Second’s court to meet him or bid him welcome. If he had any sense of the irony of events, he must have been struck by the contrast between then and now, when he landed on the same spot, and gazed at the servile crowd of place-hunters who elbowed and jostled their way into the royal presence. Tories and Whigs were there, and Jacobites too, all fervent in their expressions of loyalty, which George knew how to value for what they were worth. He wished them and their lip service far away, for he was both tired and cross; he had had a rough voyage, and the yacht had been detained some hours off Gravesend by a thick fog. He dismissed them all with scant ceremony and went to bed.