The christening of this infant gave rise to an open rupture. The Prince, anxious to invest the occasion with every dignity, asked the King and his uncle the Duke of York to stand as godfathers. The King consented, but, at the eleventh hour, commanded the Duke of Newcastle to stand in the place of the Duke of York. The Duke of Newcastle was a mean-spirited and ill-favoured nobleman, whose eccentricities rendered him the laughing-stock of the Court, and he had made himself especially obnoxious to the Prince and Princess of Wales. All this the King knew full well, and to appoint him godfather to the Prince’s child was a studied insult. The Prince of Wales was furious, but his royal sire refused to give way, and the christening took place, as arranged, in the bedroom of the Princess of Wales at St. James’s. The Princess remained in bed, not so much because she was unable to get up, as because it was the custom. The Prince of Wales and the Princess’s ladies-in-waiting were grouped on one side of the bed, the King, the Duke of Newcastle and the godmother on the other. The Archbishop of Canterbury, standing at the foot of the bed, baptised the infant, and gave him the names of George William. There was an air of suppressed excitement in the royal bedchamber throughout the ceremony, the Prince with difficulty restraining his indignation. No sooner was the service over and the King retired from the room, which he did before the concluding prayers, than the Prince ran round the bed, and going up to the duke shook his fist in his face, and shouted in great rage: “You are von rascal, but I shall find you”. There was a great scene; the Archbishop, who had scarcely closed his book, remonstrated, the Princess half rose from her bed, the ladies huddled together in a fright and the pages tittered. The duke, who considered himself grossly insulted, went at once to report what had happened to the King; the Prince, meanwhile, regardless of his wife’s condition, stamped and strutted about the room, swearing that he would be revenged for the indignity put upon him.
The King too was greatly enraged, regarding the attack upon the duke as an insult offered to himself, and Schulemburg and Kielmansegge were greatly shocked by this filial disrespect. The duke believed, or pretended to believe, that the Prince had said: “I will fight you,” and so had practically challenged him to a duel. The long smouldering resentment of the King burst into a flame; he had more self-control than his son, he did not stamp about and make scenes, but his anger was more deadly. When he had relieved his feelings by a few round oaths, he gave orders that the Prince was to be put under arrest. The Princess declared that if her husband were arrested she would be arrested too, and so he remained the night in his wife’s chamber under guard. “What was my astonishment,” says Mrs. Howard, “when going to the Princess’s apartment next morning the yeomen in the guard chamber pointed their halberds at my breast, and told me I must not pass. I urged that it was my duty to attend the Princess, but they said, ‘No matter, I must not pass that way’.”
The news of the disturbance ran through the Court, and soon was noised abroad over the town. The frequenters of the coffee-houses and mug-houses talked of nothing else, and the Jacobites, who saw in this quarrel another proof of the unfitness of the House of Hanover to reign over them, were greatly elated. The Prime Minister went to the King and represented that something must be done, as the present situation was clearly impossible; the heir to the throne could not be kept shut up in his room as if he were a recalcitrant schoolboy, and the absurdity of the situation was increased by the fact that the Princess was locked up with him. The King was for sending them both to the Tower, but more moderate counsels prevailing, he ordered them to quit St. James’s Palace forthwith. No time was given them to pack up their effects, and so getting together what they most needed, the Prince and Princess left the palace before the day was over, and sought temporary shelter in Lord Grantham’s house in Albemarle Street. The Princess swooned on arriving at Lord Grantham’s, and continued for some days in a serious condition. It had been represented to the King that the Princess of Wales, being hardly yet over her confinement, was not in a fit state to be moved, and he sent her word that if she liked to separate herself from her husband, and hold no communication with him, she might remain with her children. But she sent back a defiant message, saying that whither he went she would go, and that “her children were not as a grain of sand compared to him”. The maids of honour were all in tears, and it must have been a melancholy procession that made its way up St. James’s Street between seven and eight o’clock that November evening. All the ladies of the Princess’s household were greatly depressed, except Mary Bellenden, whose high spirits were equal even to this sad flitting, if we may believe the Excellent New Ballad:—
But Bellenden we needs must praise,
Who, as down stairs she jumps,
Sings “O’er the hills and far away,”
Despising doleful dumps.
The King would take no further advice from his Ministers, and determined to do exactly what he pleased. On the evening of the next day he commanded the Dukes of Roxburgh, Kent and Kingston to go to the Prince and demand an explanation of his conduct. The Prince was not at all in a mood to make an explanation, and was quite as obstinate, and much more excited than his royal sire. He stated that he had not said he would fight the Duke of Newcastle, but he declared, “I said I would find him and I vill find him, for he has often failed in his respect to me, particularly on the late occasion, by insisting on standing godfather to my son when he knew it was against my vill”. The Duke of Roxburgh reminded the Prince that Newcastle had not thrust himself forward, but merely acted as godfather because the King commanded him, whereupon the choleric little George Augustus said roundly: “Dat is von lie,” and assumed the patriotic rôle, declaring that he was an English Prince, and all Englishmen had a right to choose the godfathers for their children, and he should insist on his rights as an Englishman, and allow no one to abuse him or ill-treat him, not even the King himself, and much more to the same effect. So the three dukes went back empty-handed. Roxburgh, who considered himself insulted by being given the lie by the Prince, refused to have anything more to do with the matter.
The Prince’s fits of anger, however, were apt to be shortlived, and the Princess pointed out that it would be both unwise and impolitic for him to put himself in the wrong by taking up an unyielding position. Acting on her advice, therefore, within the next day or two he wrote a letter to the King, in which he said he hoped that: “Your Majesty will have the goodness not to look upon what I said, to the duke in particular, as a want of respect to your Majesty. However, if I have been so unhappy as to offend your Majesty contrary to my intention, I ask your pardon, and beg your Majesty will be persuaded that I am, with the greatest respect, your Majesty’s most humble and most dutiful son and servant.” But the King took no account of this letter. He said that professions were one thing and performance was another, and he had had enough of the Prince and Princess’s professions in the past “to make him vomit”. If the Prince were sincere in his desire for pardon, he must show his sincerity by signing a paper which he had drawn up. This paper ordained, among other conditions, that the Prince should give up to the King the guardianship of his children, and that he should cease to hold any communication “with, or have in his service, any person or persons distasteful to the King”. This the Prince, and the Princess with him, absolutely refused to sign, and made up their minds for the worst. On the Sunday following, a notice having been sent them that they would not be admitted to the Chapel Royal, they with all their suite attended divine service in St. James’s parish church and received the Holy Communion.
The King, enraged at their disobedience, now resolved to make his son feel the full weight of his royal displeasure. He could not take away without the consent of Parliament, the Prince’s allowance of £100,000 a year (though he endeavoured to do so), and he could not prevent him from succeeding to the throne; but he did everything that he could to humiliate his son, and to wound the Princess. They were deprived of their guard of honour and all official marks of distinction. A formal notification was made by the King’s order to the foreign ambassadors and envoys that if they visited the Prince they would not be received at St. James’s. All peers and peeresses, privy councillors and their wives, and official persons received similar notices. Orders were sent to all persons who had employment both under the King and the Prince to quit the service of one or the other, and the ladies whose husbands were in the King’s service were likewise to quit the Princess’s.[82] This applied to Mrs. Howard, whose husband had a little appointment under the King, but she refused to leave her mistress, and so separated from her husband. But all were not so decided as Mrs. Howard, and this order gave great alarm to the time-servers, who had now to make up their minds whether to be well with the father or the son. “Our courtiers,” writes a scribe, “are reduced to so hard a dilemma that we may apply to them what the Spanish historian says of those in his day, when the quarrel happened between Philip II. of Spain and his son, Don Carlos. ‘Our courtiers,’ says he, ‘looked so amazed, so thunderstruck, and knew so little how to behave themselves, that they betrayed the mercenary principles upon which they acted by the confusion they were in. Those who were for the Prince durst not speak their minds because the father was King. Those who were for the King were equally backward because the son would be King; these because the King might resent; those because the Prince might remember.’”[83]