Though the nation as a whole cared little about the disputes of the Royal Family, this unnatural strife between father and son was well known, and formed a common subject of conversation. As time went on and the quarrel showed no signs of healing, it began to tell seriously against the dynasty. In Parliament the subject was never touched upon, but there was always a dread that it might crop up during debate. On one occasion, when the Prince of Wales was present in the House of Lords, Lord North rose to take notice, he said, “of the great ferment that is in the nation”—and then paused. The Prince looked very uncomfortable, and the whole House was in a flutter, but Lord North went on to add, “on account of the great scarcity of silver,” a matter to which Sir Isaac Newton, as Master of the Mint, was giving serious attention.
Caroline was sensible of the harm this disunion was doing the dynasty, and tried to keep up appearances as far as she could. When the first soreness was over, she attended occasionally the King’s drawing-rooms (the Prince, of course, never went), and by addressing him in public forced him to make some sort of answer to her remarks. At first it was thought that the Princess’s appearance at the King’s drawing-rooms foreshadowed a reconciliation. The subsidised organs in the press hailed it as imminent. One scribe wrote: “It is with extreme joy that I must now congratulate my country upon the near prospect there is of a reconciliation between his Majesty and his Royal Highness. The Princess of Wales’s appearance at court can forebode no less. A woman of her consummate conduct and goodness, and so interested in the issue, is such a mediator as one could wish in such a cause. And when it is known that she has been in long conference with the King, there can be no doubt but she has first won upon the Prince to make that submission without which ’tis absurd to think of healing the breach.”[101] A petition was also drawn up praying the Princess to act as mediator, which ran as follows:—
“To her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales.
“The petition of several loyal subjects, Englishmen and Protestants,
“Humbly sheweth,
“Whereas the difference between his Majesty and the Prince is of such a nature, as not easily to be decided by any subjects; neither can a Ministry presume to intercede with all the freedom requisite to the determination of it: That by this means it still continues to the unspeakable detriment of the public, the deep sorrow of the well affected to your Royal Highness’s family; and the fresh hope and merriment of the disloyal, who were otherwise reduced to the saddest despair. That in such a dismal conjecture we can apply to none so proper as your Royal Highness to assuage these jealousies and reduce both parties to a reunion. Your petitioners therefore beg and entreat your Royal Highness to put in practice that persuasive eloquence by which you are distinguished, and to employ all your interest for this purpose; before the breach be made too wide to admit of a cure, and we involved in irretrievable confusion.
“And your Royal Highness’s petitioners
will ever pray, etc.”
The Princess was both unable and unwilling to mediate in the way suggested, for her sympathies were wholly with her husband. The situation was still exceedingly strained; the King only received the Princess formally and under protest. Caroline probably went to the King’s Court in the hope of softening his heart, and of being allowed to have her children. She was also anxious that her son Prince Frederick, Duke of Gloucester, should be brought over from Hanover, for he was growing up a stranger to her, and the accounts which reached her of his manners and morals were far from reassuring. The malcontent Whigs also considered this a grievance, on the ground that the young Prince should early become acquainted with the country over which he would one day reign. But the King was obdurate. He held that his prerogative gave him absolute power over all the royal children without reference to their parents, and quoted as a precedent Charles the Second’s authority over the daughters of the Duke of York.
Caroline was deeply wounded by this refusal, and shed many bitter tears. But it made no difference to her policy of keeping up appearances at all cost. Outside her immediate circle she ignored the fact that there was a difference in the Royal Family, and was careful always to speak of the King in public with great respect. She paid several visits to seats of the principal nobility and gentry near London—we read of her supping with General Harvey at Mitcham, dining with Lord Uxbridge at Drayton, and so forth—and tried in all ways to maintain the credit of the dynasty with the people. When, therefore, a low fellow insulted her and spat in her face one day as she was crossing Leicester Fields in her chair, he was nearly torn to pieces by the crowd, who resented this gross insult upon a woman, and the only popular member of the Royal Family. The man was handed over to the authorities for punishment, who certainly did not spare the rod if we may judge from the following account:—
“On Thursday morning last, Moore the chairman, who insulted the Princess, was whipped, pursuant to his sentence, from Somerset House to the end of the Hay market. ’Twas observed that during the performance of this corporal exercise (in which the executioner followed his work pretty close), he wore about his neck, tied to a piece of red string, a small red cross; though he needed not to have hung out that infallible sign of his being one of the Pope’s children, since none but an inveterate Papist would have affronted so excellent a Protestant Princess, whom her very worst enemies cannot charge with a fault. The respect her Royal Highness has among all parties was remarkable in the general cry there was all the way he pass’d of ‘Whip him,’ ‘Whip him’; and by the great numbers of people that caressed and applauded the executioner after his work was over, who made him cry, ‘God bless King George’ before he had done with him.”[102]