Henry Curties

“ This further news was kept from the Queen altogether, and that evening a sad party sat down in the Palace of St. James’s to pretend to play cards, while every ear was strained to catch the least sound which might be the precursor of the news of the King’s death. In basset and cribbage was that Christmas night passed by the Queen, while Sir Robert Walpole, the Dukes of Grafton, Newcastle, Montagu, Devonshire and Richmond, with Lord Hervey, talked of everything they could think of, but the King’s danger, or walked moodily up and down in the shadows. ”

“ As for Prince Frederick himself, there is little doubt that although he had never seen her, yet he had in a romantic way fallen in love with his cousin Wilhelmina. This was quite a natural phase of his sanguine, artistic character. One can quite understand that his aunt, the Queen of Prussia, had not neglected any of those little manœuvres by which the hearts of young men are moved. She was simply a match-making mother, and was quite cognizant of the fact that Frederick would, if he lived, inherit the Crown of England. ”

“ Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, thus speaks of him at this time:—
“There is a great deal of very good company goes to Norfolk House, but if I were to advise, I would have more play, to make more people easy by sitting down, as it used to be in all the Courts, that ever I knew, either by a basset-table, or at other games, letting people of quality go halves. But they begin, to my thinking, with the same forms the late Queen did, only to leave room to entertain a few of the town ladies, and I think it don’t lessen one’s greatness, but the contrary, to make everybody, one can, easy.” ”

“ But other more stirring thoughts soon filled the young mother’s head than the frailties of her husband’s family, for when the sum of her nursery reached four and the little Prince Frederick was in his eighth year, the fruit of her hopes ripened, Queen Anne of England died, and a lucky turn of politics in favour of the Whigs, laid open to her the road to a throne. ”

“ James’s Palace, and then being told, in answer to an enquiry, that the Princess was very well, concluded that nothing had happened. However, the Queen, to whom this whole affair must have been a great trial—for she was in very bad health—ascended the stairs to the Prince’s apartments, and Lord Hervey considerately promised to get her a fire and some chocolate in his own room. As she parted from him she made this most extraordinary remark, which can be taken as a sample of the unreasonable fear and hatred towards their son which had obsessed the minds of the King and Queen. ”

“ The Duke of Grafton takes his nightly opiate of lottery and sleeps, as usual, between the Princesses Amelia and Caroline; Lord Grantham strolls from one room to another (as Dryden says) like some discontented ghost that oft appears, and is forbid to speak, and stirs himself about, as people stir a fire, not with any design, but in hopes to make it burn brisker, which his lordship constantly does to no purpose, and yet tries as constantly as if he had ever once succeeded. ”

“ The public conveyance seems to have been of much the same description as that which one recollects in one’s youth in the shape of the ancient growler, musty and full of damp straw to keep the feet warm, but represented then by a rumbling old disused coach, very mouldy, with straw as above, and in which it must have been a great treat to traverse the irregular cobbles of the metropolitan streets. But with all its drawbacks London of 1728 rose immeasurably superior to London of the twentieth century in one respect, and one respect only. ”

“ Thoroughly to appreciate the nest into which this unfortunate little Prince was born and christened, it is necessary to turn for a moment to the habits and customs of his father and grandfather.
Taking the latter first, the Elector and future King of England was in the habit of retaining without any concealment whatever a minimum of three mistresses. These ladies, this considerate old father-in-law expected his son’s wife to receive and treat with civility, and strange to say Caroline the Princess Electoral did it. Poor soul! ”

“ Lady Archibald was five-and-thirty, the mother of ten children, and is said not to have possessed any special good looks, but she must, however, have been possessed of a strong will and a subtle power of fascination—which many plain women have—for she in a very short time subjugated the Prince of Wales and tied him, in the public gaze, at any rate, to her chariot wheels. ”

“ Howard, Lady Deloraine, the Walmoden, were all exceedingly pretty, the little man, though coarse and vulgar, had a great eye for beauty, and if he could have got her—but he could not, she was a pure woman—he would have had one of the most beautiful girls in England, Mary Bellenden. ”

“ This was Horace Walpole’s opinion of Lady Deloraine: “A pretty idiot, with most of the vices of her own sex, and the additional one of ours—drinking.
“Yet this thing of convenience on the arrival of Lady Yarmouth, Madame Walmoden, put on all that dignity of passion, which even revolts real inclination.”
Lady Deloraine, however, went on her way rejoicing at this time, and as the summer wore on and the King showed no signs of returning to Hanover and Madame de Walmoden, openly boasted that she was keeping him in England. ”

“ The story, as may be imagined, was very soon in everybody’s mouth, and Madame Walmoden was thoroughly alarmed; she knew there were plenty to carry the story to the King. But she took her courage in both hands, and did what every woman has done in similar circumstances and will no doubt continue to do as long as women exist on this earth, beloved by natures weaker than their own. She ordered her coach soon after daylight, and by six o’clock was on the road to Herrenhausen to be the first to tell her version of the story to her elderly royal lover. ”

“ Poor child! It was a cheerless beginning to the [Pg 133] festivities of a marriage, coming alone without father or mother or relative of any sort to a strange land to wed with a man she had never seen, and who did not love her.
The etiquette of King George’s Court did not admit of a Prince of Wales going to woo a Princess of such an inferior state as Saxe-Gotha; on the contrary, she had to come to him, but it is said that the young Princess came joyfully, dazzled by the prospect of becoming Queen of England. ”

“ She knew full well, in common with most continental Princesses, that the heir to the throne of England was by no means a favourite with his parents and that he was only brought over from Hanover because the English people demanded it. He was not wanted by the Royal Family, they wanted the crown of England for the handsome second son, William Duke of Cumberland, afterwards adorned with the additional title of “The Butcher of Culloden.”
Frederick was not handsome though he had a charm of manner, chiefly owing to his amiability and kind-heartedness which endeared him to the people. ”

“ It is more than probable that Baron Borck gave the distressed young Prince some fatherly advice and impressed upon him the hopelessness of thinking any more of his cousin Wilhelmina. None knew better than the Baron that such a marriage could never take place. In addition the Queen informed her son—they still had some confidence in each other left—that the King of Prussia had definitely refused to give him the hand of his daughter. ”

“ But now the King at last decided to tear himself away from Hanover, and at the same time to accept the Queen’s very kindly offer that he should bring his lady love, Madame de Walmoden, to England with him. What an offer from a wife! What a married state for any unfortunate woman to have lived in! King George was in deadly earnest about bringing over his paramour with him, and ordered the apartments lately occupied by Lady Suffolk to be prepared for her, and this it appears, under the Queen’s directions, was done. ”

“ Sir Robert Walpole, however, summed up the matter in the following directions to Princess Amelia:—
“Pray, Madam, let this farce be played: the Archbishop will act it very well. You may bid him be as short as you will. It will do the Queen no hurt, no more than any good; and it will satisfy all the wise and good fools, who will call us all atheists if we don’t pretend to be as great fools as they are.” ”

“ The condition of the irate little King and his Queen can best be imagined.
“The Prince is firm, he is a rock,” sneered Sir Robert, “the Prince can never be more firm in maintaining Carteret than I am in my resolution never to have anything to do with him. I am a rock,” he raved, “I am determined in no shape will I ever act with that man.”
But there appeared to be a considerable mystery about the printing of the King’s letter of expulsion, as Lord Hervey states that Sir Robert Walpole had told him fully a week before that he intended to let this message “slip into print.” ”

“ Wagers were freely laid in London against the King ever setting foot in his kingdom of England again. The possibilities of the future began to be very freely discussed, even in the Royal Family, and the Queen’s confidant showed decided signs of trimming. The Queen was greatly alarmed, and even imagined that she saw in Frederick signs of satisfaction; she now roundly abused her son to Hervey, saying: “Mon Dieu! Popularity always makes me feel sick, but Fritz’s popularity makes me vomit.” ”

“ Morbid as the thought is, the outcome no doubt of an exhausted nervous system, where deep grief has followed perhaps the wearing anxiety of watching a long illness, still it is not by any means restricted to those of an imaginative tendency, but comes to all temperaments alike. It would be perhaps quite safe to say that this was what made King George undertake his midnight journey, and give the order for the opening of the Queen’s tomb. ”

“ As regards the increase in his household, the expenses were at once doubled, as the Princess had practically a new household of her own, with ladies-in-waiting, gentlemen-in-waiting, women of the bedchamber, gentlemen ushers, and a host of others required by the Court etiquette of the time. What would have been a large income for a nobleman was totally inadequate for the Prince of Wales, and as a result he commenced at once to fall deeper and deeper into debt. ”

“ A good strong man this Bourguait; one not to be moved from his duty by even a Queen, for she no doubt left no stone unturned to divert him from a purpose which would render abortive her years of scheming.
The effects of the message to England were startling.
King George the Second and his Queen Caroline, who had kept their eldest son away from England for fourteen years, and had resisted every persuasion of their Ministers to bring him over, hesitated no longer; a Colonel Lorne was despatched at once to Herrenhausen to bring the Prince to London. ”

“ To a girl of her keen perception, for it was shown by her conduct on her arrival that she was exceedingly intelligent, it cannot be for a moment doubted that as those anxious moments of imminent motherhood drew near she painfully realized too, that her baby was not wanted either, to be another stumbling block in the way of the favourite son.
It is not at all an uncommon thing for young married people to have this overstrung sense of anxiety for their coming little one, and to conjure up in their minds fears for which, perhaps, there is no reason. ”

“ He appears to have worked among the crowd, and to have excited its admiration to a remarkable degree. Some unwise persons raised a cry of “Crown him! Crown him!!” and this being duly reported to his mother, the Queen, caused her the gravest anxiety, and the most unreasonable anger.
Hervey, as usual, poured oil, not upon the troubled waters, but upon the fire of her wrath; he suggested that owing to the King being so much hated and the Prince so popular, the latter believed that his favour with the people helped to keep his father on the throne. ”

“ It is not surprising to find that during the reign of George the First his mistresses Schulemburg and Kielmansegge were much in evidence. They were particularly hated by the populace, also the Turks Mustapha and Mahomet, possibly on account of their association with them; but these latter infidels also appear to have had the honour of dressing and undressing their master the King.
The Court of George the First had not by any means been a refined one; the old King greatly loved the society of ladies who were not over particular in their conversation. ”

“ The world is very much the same at all times, except that now and then we take on a little extra enamel, which we call civilization, to hide our natural barbarism for a time, as the Greeks and the Romans and the Egyptians before them did—these latter even to having their hollow teeth gold-crowned as we do—until some upheaval from within, or a crushing blow from without, breaks the thin crust, and leaves us just the natural savages we were at first. ”