Dr. Doran

“ Her parting with her favourite son, the young Duke of Cumberland, was touching, and showed the depth of her love for him. Considering her avowed partiality, there was some show of justice in her concluding counsel to him that, should his brother Frederick ever be King, he should never seek to mortify him, but simply try to manifest a superiority over him only by good actions and merit. She spoke kindly to her daughter Amelia, but much more than kindly to the gentle Caroline, to whose care she consigned her two youngest daughters, Louisa and Mary. ”

“ Every auditor knew how to make special application of the complainings and sorrowings of a royal sire over a somewhat profligate son; or of the unfilial speeches and hypocritical assurance of a princely heir, flung at his Sovereign and impatient sire. The house in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields had the reputation of being the Tory house; and the Prince of Wales there was probably represented as a proper gentleman; not out of love to him, but rather out of contempt to the father. It was not a house which received the favour of either Caroline or her consort. ”

“ Lord Hervey said, ‘he could wish that if the prince was to sit down in her lap, that she would only say she hoped he found it easy.’
For the princess the Queen had nothing but a feeling which partook mostly of a compassionate regard. She knew her to be really harmless, and thought her very dull company; which, for a woman of Caroline’s intellect and power of conversation, she undoubtedly was. The woman of cultivated mind yawned wearily at the truisms of the common-place young lady, and made an assertion with respect to her which bespoke a mind more coarse than cultivated. ”

“ Her consent to live again in Hanover and let by-gones be by-gones was indignantly refused by her. She would never, she protested, live again among people who had murdered the only man in the world who loved her well enough to be a friend to her who was otherwise friendless. Her passionate tears flowed abundantly; Fräulein von Knesebeck states that whenever the mysterious fate of Königsmark was referred to, the princess’s grief was so violent that it might almost lead those who witnessed it to suspect that she took too great an interest in the man made away with almost at her chamber-door. ”

“ Meanwhile, the two courts of the Bishop of Osnaburgh and the Duke of Zell continued to present a striking contrast. The bishop was one of those men who think themselves nothing unless they are imitating some greater man, not in his virtues but his vices. There was one man in Europe whom Ernest Augustus described as a ‘paragon,’ and that distinguished personage was Louis XIV. The vices, extravagance, the pomposity of the great king, were the dear delights of the little prince. ”

“ The King, overcome, or seemingly overcome, at the idea of being a widower, burst into a flood of tears. The Queen renewed her injunctions that after her decease he should take a second wife. He sobbed aloud; but amid his sobbing he suggested an opinion that he thought that, rather than take another wife, he would maintain a mistress or two. ‘Eh, mon Dieu!’ exclaimed Caroline, ‘the one does not prevent the other! Cela n’empêche pas!’
A dying wife might have shown more decency, but she could hardly have been more complaisant. ”

“ Quiet people were struck by the change which had come over court circles since the days of ‘Queen Anne, who had always been decent, chaste, and formal.’ The change indeed was great, but diverse of aspect. Thus the court of pleasure at which Caroline reigned supreme was a court where decency was respected; respected, at least, as much as it well could be at a time when no superabundance of respect for decency was exhibited in any quarter. Still, there was not the intolerable grossness in the house of the prince which was to be met with in the very presence of his sire. ”

“ The Scottish lord was sadly beaten down, and confessed his disgraceful defeat by requesting her Majesty to be good enough to keep what had passed at the interview as a secret. He added, in French, ‘Madame, le Roi est trompé et vous êtes trahie’—‘The King is deceived and you are betrayed.’ He had previously alluded to Lords Bolingbroke and Carteret, as men worthy indeed to be trusted, and who had the honour and glory of the kingdom at heart. These names, with such testimonial attached to them, especially excited the royal indignation. ‘Bolingbroke and Carteret!’ exclaimed Caroline. ”

“ Lord Effingham vowed the earl-marshal’s office had been strangely neglected, but he had taken such care for the future that the next coronation would be regulated in the most exact manner imaginable. The number of peers and peeresses present was not very great; some of the latter, with no excuse in the world, appeared in Lord Lincoln’s gallery, and even walked about the hall indecently in the intervals of the procession. My Lady Harrington, covered with all the diamonds she could borrow, hire, or seize, and with the air of Roxana, was the finest figure at a distance. ”

“ His studied disrespect towards the Queen was, however, too strongly marked to allow of this conclusion to the quarrel. He invariably omitted to speak of her as ‘your Majesty;’ Madam, and you, were the simple and familiar terms employed by him. Indeed, he more than once told her that he considered that the Prince of Wales took precedence of the Queen-consort; at which Caroline would contemptuously laugh, and assure her ‘dear Fritz’ that he need not press the point, for even if she were to die, the King could not marry him! ”

“ The Bishop of Osnaburgh was merrier than ever at what he styled the mock marriage, and more unmanly than ever in the coarse jokes he flung at the Lady of Harburg. But even this marriage was not concluded without fresh concessions made by the duke to the bishop, in order to secure to the latter an undivided inheritance of Brunswick, Hanover, and Zell. His mirth was founded on the idea that he had provided for himself and his heirs, and left the children of his brother, should any be born, and these survive him, to nourish their left-handed dignity on the smallest possible means. ”

“ These were times when Hanoverians, who stood in fear of Prussia, never lay down in bed but with arms at their side; times when young peasants who, influenced by soft attractions, stole by night from one village to another to pay their devoirs to bright eyes waking to receive them, walked through perils, love in their hearts, and a musket on their shoulders. The enrollers of Frederick, and indeed those of his great son after him, cast a chill shadow of fear over every age, sex, and station of life. ”

“ No comedy has such a scene as that enacted at Hampton Court on this night. While the prince was carrying off the princess, despite all her agonising entreaties, the rest of the royal family were quietly amusing themselves in another part of the palace, unconscious of what was passing. The King and the Princess Amelia were at commerce below-stairs; the Queen, in another apartment, was at quadrille; and the Princess Caroline and Lord Hervey were soberly playing at cribbage. ”

“ When we came to the chapel of Henry VII. all solemnity and decorum ceased; no order was observed, people sat or stood where they could or would; the yeomen of the guard were crying out for help, oppressed by the immense weight of the coffin; the bishop read sadly, and blundered in the prayers. The fine chapter, Man that is born of a woman, was chanted, not read; and the anthem, besides being immeasurably tedious, would have served as well for a nuptial. The real serious part was the figure of the Duke of Cumberland, heightened by a thousand melancholy circumstances. ”

“ The graces of the young Sovereign were sung by pseudo-poets, and Walpole, in graceful prose, told of his surprise at seeing how completely the whole levée-room had lost its air of a lion’s den. ‘The Sovereign don’t stand in one spot, with his eyes fixed royally on the ground, and dropping bits of German news: he walks about and speaks to everybody. I saw him afterwards on the throne, where he is graceful and genteel; sits with dignity, and reads his answers to addresses well. ”

“ When Caroline informed her vice-chamberlain, Lord Hervey, of the report of this marriage, his alleged disbelief of the report made her peevish with him, and induced her to call him an ‘obstinate devil,’ who would not believe merely improbable facts to be truths. Caroline then railed at Lady Suffolk in good set terms as a sayer and doer of silly things, entirely unworthy of the reputation she had with some people of being the sayer and doer of wise ones. ”

“ On Sunday, the 26th of October, the Queen and her court had just left the little chapel in the palace of Kensington, when intimation was given to her Majesty that the King, who had left Hanover on the previous Wednesday, was approaching the gate. Caroline, at the head of her ladies and the gentlemen of her suite, hastened down to receive him; and, as he alighted from his ponderous coach, she took his hand and kissed it. This ceremony performed by the regent, a very unceremonious, hearty, and honest kiss was impressed on his lips by the wife. ”

“ The young nobility, who had formed great expectations of the splendour and gaiety that were to result, as they thought, from the establishment of a new court, with a young couple at the head of it, were miserably disappointed that pleasure alone was not the deity enshrined in the royal dwelling. To the Queen’s palace they gave the name of Holyrood House, intending to denote thereby that it was the mere abode of chill, gloom, and meanness. ”

“ Desnoyers; you know the way of that Caroline. That is just like her. She is always like that!”’ ‘Well, M. Desnoyers,’ remarked the princess, ‘when next you see him again, tell him that I think his observation is as foolish as his conduct.’
The exception made by the Princess Caroline of the Princess of Wales, in the censure distributed by the former, was not undeserved. She was the mere tool of her husband, who made no confidante of her, had not yet appreciated her, but kept her in the most complete ignorance of all that was happening around her, and much of which immediately concerned her. ”

“ Königsmark hesitates; his fortune is not secure, his position uncertain, and he must first seek glory and riches in war: but her prayers detain him in Hanover.’
These two persons could have said this and more to one another in complete or comparative safety. To write such things down, and to preserve what was written, was madness, fatal to life and honour if discovered. But if these, and much worse, were not written down by some one, how could Sophia Dorothea be made infamous for ever in the eyes of posterity? ”

“ Sophia Dorothea had now a considerable amount of funds placed to her credit in the bank of Amsterdam. Of the incidents of her captivity nothing whatever is known, save that it was most rigidly maintained. She was forgotten by the world, because unseen, and they who kept her in prison were as silent about her as the keepers of the Man in the Iron Mask were about that mysterious object of their solicitude. Where little is known there is little to be told. The captive bore her restraint with a patience which even her daughter must have admired ”

“ Here was matter in which the Hanoverian suitor was doubly interested both as man and as lover. Nor was there anything unnatural or unbecoming in such concern. The possible inheritance of such a throne as that of England was not to be contemplated without emotion. An exclusive Protestant succession made such a heritage possible to the House of Brunswick, and if ever the heads of that house, before the object of their hopes was realised, ceased to be active for its realisation, it was when assurance was made doubly sure, and action was unnecessary. ”

“ The household was a happy one; and when an heir to its honours appeared in the person of Guelph d’Este the Robust, the court-poet who foretold brilliant fortunes for his house failed to see the culminating brilliancy which awaited it in Britain.
This same Prince ‘Robust,’ when he had come to man’s estate, wooed no maiden heiress as his father had done, but won the widowed sister-in-law of our great Harold, Judith, daughter of Baldwin de Lisle, Count of Flanders, and widow of Tostic, Earl of Kent. ”

“ When Caroline, however, was told that Sir Robert was not in sorrow because of the difficulties of government, but simply because his mistress, Miss Skerret, was dangerously ill of a pleuritic fever, the ‘unblemished Queen’ was glad! She rejoiced that politics had nothing to do with his grief, and she was extremely well pleased to find that the prime-minister was as immoral as men of greater and less dignity. And then she took to satirising both the prime-minister and the lady of his homage. ”

“ Bernhard was subsequently sent by the princess to spy out what they would do with Königsmark.
‘When the count was in the vault, he came a little to himself, and spoke:—“You take a guiltless man’s life. On that I’ll die, but do not let me perish like a dog, in my blood and my sins. Grant me a priest, for my soul’s sake.” Then the Electoral Prince went out, and the fourier remained alone with him. Then was a strange parson fetched, and a strange executioner, and the fourier fetched a great chair. ”

“ Out of the field of battle George Louis was an extremely ordinary personage, except in his vices. He was coarsely minded and coarsely spoken, and his profligacy was so extreme of character—it bore about it so little of what Lord Chesterfield recommended when he said a man might be gentlemanlike even in his vices—that the bishop, easy as he was both as parent and prelate, and rich as he was himself in evil example to a son who needed no such warrant to plunge headlong into sin—even the bishop felt uncomfortable for awhile. ”