The King did not behave generously to his daughter-in-law; all his gold and jewels went to his mistresses, but when he came back from one of his last visits to Hanover, he brought with him a curious specimen of humanity, called the “wild boy,” whom he gave to the Princess. Great curiosity was excited in Court circles by this strange present. We read: “The wild boy, whom the King hath presented to the Princess of Wales, taken last winter in the forest by Hamelin, walking on all fours, running up trees like a squirrel, feeding on twigs and moss, was last night carried into the drawing-room at St. James’s into the presence of the King, the Royal Family and many of the nobility. He is supposed to be about twelve or thirteen, some think fifteen, years old, and appears to have but little idea of things. ’Twas observed that he took most notice of his Majesty, whom he had seen before, and the Princess giving him her glove, he tried to put it on his own hand, and seemed much pleased with a watch which was held to strike at his ear. They have put on him blue clothes lined with red, and red stockings, but the wearing of them seems extremely uneasy to him. He cannot be got to lie on a bed, but sits and sleeps in a corner of the room. The hair of his head grows lower on the forehead than is common. He is committed to the care of Dr. Arbuthnot, in order to try whether he can be brought to the use of speech and made a sociable creature. He hath begun to sit for his picture.”[124]
Caroline may possibly have had some influence with the King in delaying the Queen of Prussia’s cherished scheme of the double marriage. An incident also contributed to delay it. There had always been jealousy between the Hanoverian Government and the Court of Berlin, and a very trifling matter served to stir up bad blood. The King of Prussia had formed a regiment of giants in which he took great pleasure and pride. In order to get men of the necessary height and size, he had to seek for recruits all over Europe, and his recruiting sergeants often took them by force. King George had sent his son-in-law some tall Hanoverians, and would have sent him some more, but when the King was absent in England the Hanoverian Government threw difficulties in the way. Frederick William’s recruiting sergeants, chancing to light upon some sons of Anak in Hanoverian territory, carried them off by force. This made a great turmoil at Hanover; the men were demanded back, the King of Prussia refused, and the relations between Berlin and Hanover became strained. When King George came to Hanover again, in 1726, the King and Queen of Prussia paid him a visit, the King to smooth matters with his father-in-law, and the Queen to settle the details of the proposed alliance. King George, however, wished to postpone the marriage on the ground that the parties were too young; Wilhelmina was then only fifteen years of age, and the Duke of Gloucester seventeen. But the Queen of Prussia pointed out that the precocious youth had already set up a mistress of his own, and therefore the plea of youth was unavailing. George then excused himself on the ground that the English Parliament had not yet been consulted about the marriage, but he gave the Queen a definite promise that, when he came to Hanover again, the marriage should be celebrated. He never came again—alive.
The Queen of Prussia had to be content with this promise, and she probably felt that she could afford to wait, as she had won over to her side the Duchess of Kendal, whose influence was all-powerful with the King. The Duchess, who had now been created Princess of Eberstein, enjoyed in her old age a powerful position, and she was paid court to, not only by the Queen of Prussia, but directly or indirectly by the most powerful monarchs of Europe. She was in correspondence with the Emperor at Vienna, and no doubt receiving money from him on the plea of furthering his interests, and she was in indirect communication with the King of France. The curious correspondence between Louis the Fifteenth and his Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s, Count de Broglie, reveals how much importance was attached to gaining her influence. In one of his despatches the envoy says:—
“As the Duchess of Kendal seemed to express a desire to see me often, I have been very attentive to her; being convinced that it is highly essential to the advantage of your Majesty’s service to be on good terms with her, for she is closely united to the three Ministers[125] who now govern.”[126] And again: “The King visits her every afternoon from five till eight, and it is there that she endeavours to penetrate the sentiments of his Britannic Majesty, for the purpose of consulting the three Ministers, and pursuing the measures which may be thought necessary for accomplishing their designs. She sent me word that she was desirous of my friendship, and that I should place confidence in her. I assured her that I would do everything in my power to merit her esteem and friendship. I am convinced that she may be advantageously employed in promoting your Majesty’s service, and that it will be necessary to employ her, though I will not trust her further than is absolutely necessary.”[127] The King of France was quite convinced that it was necessary to gain her friendship, for he writes: “There is no room to doubt that the Duchess of Kendal, having a great ascendency over the King of Great Britain and maintaining a strict union with his Ministers, must materially influence their principal resolutions. You will neglect nothing to acquire a share of her confidence, from a conviction that nothing can be more conducive to my interests. There is, however, a manner of giving additional value to the marks of confidence you bestow on her in private, by avoiding in public all appearances which might seem too pointed; by which you will avoid falling into the inconvenience of being suspected by those who are not friendly to the duchess; at the same time a kind of mysteriousness in public on the subject of your confidence, will give rise to a firm belief of your having formed a friendship mutually sincere.”[128]
These backstair intrigues of France with the Duchess of Kendal probably helped forward the defensive alliance which England concluded at Hanover with France and Russia, commonly known as the Treaty of Hanover, a treaty in which English interests were sacrificed for the benefit of Hanover. “Thus Hanover rode triumphant on the shoulders of England,” wrote Chesterfield of it. Yet bad as it was from the English point of view, its provisions did not altogether satisfy the grasping Hanoverians, and Walpole was blamed by them for not having done more for them. Walpole had long realised that the duchess was a force to be reckoned with. “She is in effect as much Queen of England as ever any was,” he said of her once, and he declared the King “did everything by her.” He soon had occasion to feel her power.
The Duchess of Kendal resented Walpole’s influence with his master. It was a peculiarity of this strange creature that she was jealous of any one who enjoyed the confidence of the King, were he man or woman; she had been largely responsible for the fall of Townshend in the early days of the reign, she had been a thorn in the side of Stanhope, and she now directed her energies to undermining the power of Walpole. At first she did not make any impression, for the King was fond of “le gros homme,” as he called his Prime Minister. He made him a Knight of the Bath, an order which he revived, and afterwards gave him the Garter, the highest honour in the power of the Sovereign. He openly declared that he would never part with him. In his favour he even broke his rule of not admitting Englishmen to his private intercourse, and spent many an evening with Walpole at Richmond, where he had built a hunting lodge. He would drive down there to supper, and he and the Prime Minister would discuss politics over a pipe, and imbibe large bowls of punch, for they both habitually drank more than was good for them. The Duchess of Kendal became jealous of these convivial evenings, and bribed some of the King’s Hanoverian attendants to repeat to her what passed, and to watch that the King did not take too much punch. But the effort was not very successful, for the servants could not understand what was said. Walpole could speak no German and little French, and so he and George conversed mainly in Latin, the only language they had in common. Walpole used afterwards to say that he governed the kingdom by means of bad Latin.
The Duchess of Kendal gained an able ally in Bolingbroke, who had now returned again to England, and through the influence of the duchess had gained the restoration of his title and estates, though not his seat in the House of Lords. “Here I am then,” he wrote to Swift, “two-thirds restored, my person safe, and my estate, with all the other property I have acquired or may acquire, secured to me; but the attainder is kept carefully and prudently in force, lest so corrupt a member should come again into the House of Lords, and his bad leaven should sour that sweet untainted mass.” Bolingbroke now entered into an alliance with the opposition in the House of Commons, and intrigued with the Duchess of Kendal to oust Walpole from the King’s favour. Had they been given time, they might have succeeded. The Duchess of Kendal presented to the King a memorial, drawn up by Bolingbroke, on the state of political affairs, and she persuaded him to grant the fallen statesman a private audience. Walpole declared years later that the King showed him the memorial, and it was at his suggestion that George the First consented to receive Bolingbroke. During the whole time Bolingbroke was closeted with the King, Walpole stated that he was waiting in the ante-chamber, and when the audience was over, he asked the King what Bolingbroke had said. The King replied indifferently: “Bagatelles, bagatelles”. But the fact that the King, who had dismissed Bolingbroke from office, and refused to receive him in 1714, when he first came to England, (though that was before his attainder), now consented to give him a special audience looked ominous for his great rival. Bolingbroke boasted that the King was favourably inclined to him, and only deferred making him Prime Minister until his return from Hanover, where he was soon setting out. But he could have had no grounds for the latter statement, though what he and the Duchess of Kendal might have achieved in time it is impossible to say.
Since the King’s visit to Hanover the previous summer, his divorced wife, Sophie Dorothea, had died at Ahlden (November 13th, 1726), after thirty-three years’ captivity in her lonely castle, where she had never ceased from the first hour of her imprisonment to demand release. Prince Waldeck arrived in England with secret despatches giving an account of the ill-fated princess’s last moments, and the Courts of Hanover and Berlin assumed mourning, for the deceased Princess was the mother of the Queen of Prussia, and by birth Princess of Celle. It would have suited the King better to ignore the death of his hated consort altogether, but he was unable to do so after the public notice that had been taken of it by the Court of Berlin. So he had a notice inserted in the London Gazette to the effect that the “Duchess of Ahlden” had died at Ahlden on the date specified. He countermanded the court mourning at Hanover, and he would not allow the Prince and Princess of Wales to assume mourning for their mother, or make any allusion to her death. He himself, the very day he received the news, went ostentatiously to the theatre, attended by his mistresses. But he was superstitious, and therefore a good deal worried by remembering a prophecy that he would not survive his wife a year.
It was rumoured that the King morganatically married the Duchess of Kendal soon after Sophie Dorothea’s death, and that the Archbishop of York performed the ceremony privately. But there was nothing to prove the rumour, and the duchess was never acknowledged as the King’s wife, either morganatically or otherwise. She always assumed airs of virtue and respectability, and was regular in her attendance of the services at the Lutheran Chapel Royal, though one of the pastors in years gone by had refused to administer the sacrament to her, on the ground that she was living with the King in unrepentant adultery. He was soon replaced by another more complaisant. It is exceedingly unlikely that a morganatic marriage took place, for the King, shortly after the death of his ill-treated consort, took to himself another mistress, who in time might have proved a formidable rival to the old-established favourites. On this occasion he selected an Englishwoman, Anne Brett, a bold and handsome brunette, who was the daughter of the divorced Countess of Macclesfield by her second husband, Colonel Brett. Anne demanded a coronet as the price of her complaisance and the old King was so enamoured that he promised her everything she wished. He lodged her in St. James’s Palace, gave her a handsome pension, and promised the title and coronet on his return from Hanover. He set out thither on June 3rd, 1727, accompanied by the Duchess of Kendal, and Lord Townshend as Minister in attendance.
Mistress Brett was left in possession of the field, for Lady Darlington had ceased to count, and she soon gave the court a taste of her quality. Her apartments adjoined those of the King’s granddaughters, Anne, Amelia and Caroline, and Mistress Brett ordered a door leading from her rooms to the garden to be broken down. The Princess Anne ordered the door to be blocked up again, whereat Mistress Brett flew into a rage, and told the workmen to pull down the barriers. But she had met her match in the Princess Anne, who, haughty and determined beyond her years, immediately sent other men to enforce her orders. When the dispute was at its height, news came from Hanover that the King was dead. Anne Brett was turned out of St. James’s Palace, her coronet vanished into air, and she was more than content, some years later, to marry Sir William Leman, and retire into obscurity. The King’s death foiled more than Anne Brett’s expectations; it shattered Bolingbroke’s hopes to the dust, and postponed indefinitely the double marriage scheme so dear to the heart of the Queen of Prussia.