The Prince, who soon became aware that he had made a false step, called a council of his chief supporters, including Carteret, Chesterfield and Pulteney, who frankly told him that he had put himself in the wrong, and the best thing he could do would be to patch up a reconciliation with the King and Queen. In view of this the Prince, a few days later, thought he would go to Hampton Court to pay his respects to the King and Queen, but the King, having got ear that he was coming, sent him a message saying he would not see him. Thereupon ensued a lengthy correspondence, in which the Prince would not own himself in the wrong. He expressed himself deeply grieved at having aroused the King’s anger, but insinuated that the Queen was really responsible for the strained relations between himself and his father. He thus struck a note which was taken up by the Prince’s court, and afterwards by the great body of his supporters. Afraid to strike at the King directly, they threw all the blame upon the Queen, who they declared had first artfully inflamed the King’s anger against his son, and now tried to keep him inflexible. It was a cowardly thing to do, as well as unjust, for the Queen had always been on the side of peace; but the Prince hated his mother because the King had appointed her Regent instead of him, and the Opposition hated the Queen because she had shown herself, through storm and shine, the firm supporter of Walpole. In pursuance of this policy, when the Queen, nine days after her daughter-in-law’s confinement, paid her another visit at St. James’s, the Prince treated his mother with marked discourtesy; he avoided meeting her at the main entrance, and only received her at the door of the Princess’s bedchamber; he refused to speak a word to her during the whole visit, though the Queen was in the room with him and her daughter-in-law more than an hour. He could not help escorting her to her coach when she left, but did it all in dumb show; yet when they reached the coach door, and he saw that a considerable crowd had assembled, he knelt down in the muddy street and kissed her hand with every demonstration of respect. At this hyprocrisy, as Horace Walpole says, “her indignation must have shrunk into contempt.”[120] The Queen was deeply wounded by her son’s treatment, and after that she paid no more visits to St. James’s.
These acts irritated the King beyond endurance, and even the Queen was stung out of her usual calm by the attacks made upon her. But anger and strong language availed nothing. The Prince was heir to the throne, and an heir to a throne is never without friends. In Frederick’s case his friends were all the Patriots; even Carteret, finding his overtures to the Queen led to nothing, had gone back to him. The triumph of the Prince would mean the triumph of the Opposition too, the defeat of the King and Queen, the defeat of the Government. Walpole knew this, and realised that if any reconciliation were brought about he would probably have to go. It was obviously to the advantage of the Royal Family that these quarrels should end, and Lord Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor, earnestly strove to bring about a reconciliation. But Walpole advised the King against it, an easy task, for the King’s inclination was all for revenge. Another message, an ultimatum, was therefore composed and sent by the King, denouncing the Prince’s conduct in the strongest terms, and ending, “It is my pleasure that you leave St. James’s with all your family”.[121] This was equivalent to a total separation.
The Prince received the King’s message without comment, and, as the orders were peremptory, two days later he and the Princess removed from St. James’s Palace to Kew. All communications between the two courts were now broken off, and shortly afterwards the Prince took up his residence at Norfolk House, St. James’s Square, which immediately became a rival court and the centre of the Opposition, much as Leicester House had been in the reign of George the First.[122] The court of Norfolk House, though small in numbers, was not without brilliancy. The Prince had wit and pleasing manners and was ably seconded by his young and beautiful consort. His love of letters attracted many of the ablest writers, and his political views drew around him the rising men among the Tories. The Prince of Wales’s court became a focus of all the talents and a rallying place of the younger Tories, and as time went on, it influenced considerably the course of English politics. A generation was growing up in the Tory party which knew not the Stuarts, and saw a way of overthrowing the Whig ascendency, not by the forcible restoration of James, but in the peaceable accession of Frederick. They were doomed to wander many years in the wilderness of opposition before their dreams came true; and the Whig domination was at last beaten down, not by Frederick, but by his son. But at this time Frederick’s accession to the throne seemed comparatively near at hand. It was in view of his future reign, and as a satire on his father’s, that Bolingbroke composed his magnificent essay, The Ideal of a Patriot King, a sublime conception of government, but impossible to be acted upon, because it presupposed the existence of a monarch of almost superhuman wisdom and virtues. Such an ideal could not be realised in Frederick, nor was it realised in his son, George the Third.
FOOTNOTES TO BOOK III, CHAPTER XIV:
[119] The Princess thus born was afterwards Duchess of Brunswick, and died in London, March, 1813.
[120] Walpole’s Reminiscences, vol. iv. He repeats the same story in his Memoirs, vol. i. Horace Walpole confuses the Queen’s second visit with her first, otherwise his account tallies with that of Lord Hervey—Memoirs, vol. ii.
[121] Message of the King to the Prince of Wales, 10th September, 1737.
[122] The parallel became closer when Frederick Prince of Wales removed to Leicester House.
CHAPTER XV.
THE QUEEN’S ILLNESS AND DEATH. 1737.
The Queen’s health had been breaking for some time past, and nothing but her strength of will and determination not to yield kept her up. She had never really enjoyed good health since she became Queen. The last ten years had been a continual struggle against physical weakness; in the news-sheets of the day mention is frequently made of the Queen’s indisposition, and nearly always from a different cause. The list of her ailments and the barbarous and violent remedies resorted to makes one wonder how she survived so long—gout, ague, rash, pleurisy, chills, colic—everything, in short, but her secret, and most dangerous, malady was recorded. But the Queen seldom retired for more than a day or two, she would never admit that she was really ill, and was extremely angry if any one said that she was so. The King disliked to have sick people about him, and resented the Queen’s ailments as though they were invented for his special annoyance. Caroline was aware of this peculiarity on the part of her spouse, and would endure agonies rather than let him suspect that anything was wrong with her. She was a great sufferer from gout, which sometimes crippled her so much that she could not move without pain, but so absolute was her devotion to the King, that she would plunge her swollen legs into ice-cold water, in order that she might not fail to accompany him on his daily walks. These desperate remedies no doubt did her infinite harm. But she had another malady too, which “false delicacy,” as some described it, though it would be more correct to say “wifely devotion,” made her conceal. At the birth of her youngest child, Princess Louisa, in 1724, Caroline suffered a slight internal rupture. Her husband noticed it at the time, but she said it was nothing, and would pass. Later he taxed her with it again, and advised her to consult a doctor, but she again denied it, this time with so much vexation, declaring that he sought a pretext for neglecting her, that the King promised never to mention it again. For a time the malady seemed to grow better, or, at any rate, to remain dormant, but of late it had been troubling her again, and neglect and concealment made it go from bad to worse.