But the cruellest blow was depriving the Prince and Princess of their children. The three young Princesses, Anne, Amelia and Caroline, were kept at St. James’s Palace. Even the infant prince, to whom the Princess had just given birth, was taken, literally, from his mother’s arms. The King was very bitter against the Princess, whom he denounced as “Cette diablesse Madame la Princesse,” and at first refused her permission to see her children. In the case of the unfortunate infant, who had unwittingly been the cause of all this trouble, the restriction was fatal, for, deprived of his mother’s breast, he pined away. When the doctors found that the child was in a precarious condition, they informed the King, and recommended that his mother should be sent for, but as the King was obdurate, they applied to the Ministers, who, moved by the tears and anguish of the Princess, and conscious of the effect it would have on public opinion if the child died without its mother’s care, insisted that she should be admitted, and the King had to give way. The Princess was allowed to come to St. James’s Palace to see her child, but the King found her presence under the same roof as himself so unpleasant that he sent the infant to Kensington, notwithstanding its dangerous condition. This move was fatal. The child immediately became worse, and when on the morrow it was seen that he was dying, the Prince and Princess both set off to Kensington Palace, and remained with the young prince until he died that same evening about eight o’clock. “His illness,” says the Gazette, “began with an oppression upon his breast, accompanied with a cough, which increasing, a fever succeeded with convulsions, which put an end to this precious life.” The child was buried privately by night in Henry the Seventh’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, and public sympathy went out greatly to the bereaved mother, not only in England, but in all the courts of Europe, where the scandal excited curiosity and derision. The Duchess of Orleans writes: “The King of England is really cruel to the Princess of Wales. Although she has done nothing, he has taken her children away from her. Where could they be so well and carefully brought up as with a virtuous mother?”[84] And again: “The Princess assures me that her husband did everything in his power to conciliate the King’s good graces; he even begged his pardon, and owned that he had been to blame as humbly as if he had been addressing himself to God Almighty”.[85] And again: “The poor Princess is greatly to be pitied. There must be something else at the bottom of all this, when everything is given a double meaning. They say that the King is himself in love with the Princess. I do not believe this, for I consider that the King has in no ways a lover-like nature; he only loves himself. He is a bad man, he never had any consideration for the mother who loved him so tenderly, yet without her he would never have become King of England.”[86]
CAROLINE, PRINCESS OF WALES, AND HER INFANT SON, PRINCE GEORGE WILLIAM.
From an old Print.
The excitement created by this quarrel did not abate for many months. The Jacobites exultingly quoted the well-known text about a house divided against itself. Any number of skits and pasquinades, some of them exceedingly scurrilous, were circulated in connection with it. The most popular was that called An Excellent New Ballad, from which we have already quoted one verse, and may give a few more, omitting the coarsest:—
God prosper long our noble King,
His Turks and Germans all;
A woeful christ’ning late there did
In James’s house befal.
To name a child with might and mane