Six Royal Ladies
of
The House of Hanover
CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK, WIFE OF GEORGE IV. (WHEN SHE CAME
TO ENGLAND AS A BRIDE).
Six Royal Ladies
of
The House of Hanover
By
SARAH TYTLER
Author of "The Tudor Queens," "Life of Marie Antoinette,
" Life of Queen Victoria," etc.
With Tortraits
London
Hutchinson & Co.
Paternoster Row
1898
PREFACE.
THE compiler of the life-stories of the "Six Royal
Ladies of the House of Hanover," apologises for
what may seem to the reader instances of repetition.
But in a series of lives which succeed and dove-tail into
each other, where the same incidents, the same figures,
under varying lights, appear and re-appear, a certain
amount of repetition is inevitable. To avoid it would
be to strip the different sketches of many of their
characteristic touches, and to furnish inadequate repre
sentations of the times and of the individuals with whom
the surroundings have to do.
20GG51O
CONTENTS.
i.
THE ELECTRESS SOPHIA.
PAGE
CHAP. I. THE PRINCESS SOPHIA 3
II. A VISIT AND A MARRIAGE . . . -15
III. THE DUCHESS . .-_.*''. . . '25
IV. COURT MATCH-MAKING . . . .40
V. THE ELECTRESS . . . . . . $7
II.
SOPHIA DOROTHEA OF ZELL, WIFE OF
GEORGE I.
I. SOPHIA DOROTHEA OF ZELL, WIFE OF
GEORGE I. . . . . . . .75
ii. KONIGSMARK'S DEATH . . . . .89
in.
CAROLINE OF ANSPACH, WIFE OF GEORGE II.,
AND HER DAUGHTERS.
I. THE ELECTORAL PRINCESS OF HANOVER
AND PRINCESS OF WALES . . . 1 09
II. AT LEICESTER HOUSE AND AT ST. JAMES'S 119
III. THE QUEEN . ; '- - ' . . . . I3O
vii
viii Contents
IV.
CHARLOTTE OF MECKLENBURG-STRELITZ,
WIFE OF GEORGE III.
PAGE
CHAP. I. A YOUNG QUEEN-CONSORT . . . .169
II. A ROYAL WIFE AND MOTHER . . .199
III. AN AGING AND AGED QUEEN . . .222
V.
CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK, WIFE OF
GEORGE IV.
I. A ROYAL BRIDE . . . ... .255
II. A CONTENTIOUS COUPLE .... 267
III. A WANDERING PRINCESS AND REPUDI-
ATED WIFE . . . . . . 290
VI.
ADELAIDE OF SAXE-MEININGEN, WIFE
OF WILLIAM IV.
I. THE DUCHESS . ':* 3 11
II. THE QUEEN . . .... . 320
I.
THE ELECTRESS SOVHIA.
AUTHORITIES :
Memoirs of the Electress Sophia (1630-1680), translated by H.
Forrester; Memorien der Herzogin Sophie nachmals kurfurstin von
Hannover, herausgegeben von Adolf Kocher ; Letters of Charlotte
Elisabeth, Duchess of Orleans ; Thackeray's Four Georges.
THE ELECTRESS SOPHIA (THE WORTHY LINK BETWEEN THE ROYAL
HOUSES OF STUART AND HANOVER).
CHAPTER I.
THE PRINCESS SOPHIA.
WHEN the Queen and the Prince Consort visited
Germany in 1858 they made a brief halt at Hanover
on their way to Potsdam, and drove out to Herren-
hausen, the country palace of the old Electors and
Dukes. The halt was not without its significance,
for Hanover was the cradle of her Majesty's race on
the German side, and Herrenhausen was long the
home of the Electress Sophia (the connecting link,
through her mother the Queen of Bohemia, between
the royal houses of Stewart and Hanover), by whom
the crown passed in the Protestant line to George I.
and his successors. Not only so ; the Electress was a
power in herself, a gifted woman of strong mind and
original character, who, though her immediate descen-
dants did not inherit many of her individual traits,
certainly left her impress on her successors. By her
spirit and sagacity, not less than by her ambition, the
great inheritance of the throne of England was secured
to her children's children ; and doubtless it was from
her that her son, George I., derived the prudence and
moderation which, in spite of many far from creditable
or lovable qualities, served to seat him firmly on that
throne.
But in course of time the wise and witty Electress
has merged into a vague figure in the popular mind.
Even when some sense of her capability and energy
has lingered in men's memories, the most erroneous
4 Sis ffiopal ladies
conception of the princess and woman have prevailed.
This is partly due to the fact that her picture has been
frequently drawn by foes as well as by friends, and
oftener by her enemies than by her allies, in con-
sequence of the number of Jacobite refugees in
Germany, Holland, and France in her day. These
ladies and gentlemen, from political bias and personal
partiality to the Stewarts, were more or less ready to
sketch their sovereign's rival unfavourably, and to
transmit in their home correspondence all the hostile
gossip and scandal regarding her and her Court.
Under the circumstances, it is a testimony to Sophia's
honest and upright life that the darker shades with
which the writers felt justified in loading the likenesses
of her son and grandson could not be applied to her.
The detractors were compelled to limit their censures
to representing the Electress as a harsh-tempered,
worldly-minded, scheming little woman, who showed
no feeling where feeling is most called for, whose sole
aim was the aggrandisement of herself and her family,
whose Protestant religion was a mere cloak for her
sceptical philosophy. Her own nimbleness of tongue
and readiness in sarcasm have also had something to do
with these wholesale charges, which even the supporters
of her dynasty, living in another country and not
coming into personal contact with her, inadvertently
adopted and handed down to the next generation.
Her graphic, most entertaining autobiography was
needed to correct the error. She wrote it in French ;
and while it is said that she was a law to herself as
regards grammar and spelling, so vigorous and lifelike
is her composition that her friend, the all-accomplished
Leibnitz, said of it, in his unqualified admiration, that
" by sheer force of creative originality she produced not
only her own style, but her own French also." The
Memoir was written to enliven the tedium of her
Electress Sopbfa s
husband's long absences from Herrenhausen, and to
supply an occupation for her lively faculties. It is
much to be regretted that the autobiography, which
shows what a caricature of the real woman survived in
England, was not continued to the end of her life.
The narrow-souled plotter, the stern, cruel mother-in-
law, the cynic and scoffer, which the Electress Sophia
has been represented, was not the woman of whom
Thackeray could write . that she was " one of the
handsomest, the most cheerful, sensible, the shrewdest,
the most accomplished, of women " ; not the woman
to whom her plain-spoken, warm-hearted niece,
Charlotte Elizabeth, Duchess of Orleans, could refer
with cordial respect and tender affection to the close
of her days ; not the woman who was the intimate
friend and " kind patroness " of the great Christian
philosopher 'Leibnitz, the " Serena " of his letters,
whom he held in the highest esteem.
The Electress Sophia was ambitious beyond question,
for her children still more than for herself. She was,
like her niece, Madame d'Orleans, what many people
would call " brutally " matter-of-fact in her opinions,
and unvarnished in her statements. She lived in a
coarse, licentious generation, when every Court in
Germany was deeply tinged with the vices still more
than with the splendours of the Court of the great
Louis. Her moral sense was not finer or keener than
that of her neighbours. Her religion was exhibited
more in her acts than in her professions. She was
somewhat of a moqueuse, tempted to laugh at most
things. Handsome and witty from youth to age ; not
only capable of winning and retaining affection, but
endowed with the power of compelling admiration, she
yet lacked the natural charm of her mother, the Queen
of Bohemia and the Queen of Hearts that facile
charm of the Stewarts which is more frequently found
6 Sf IRopal Xafcfes
in alliance with brilliant shallowness and reckless im-
pulsiveness than with solid sense and calm wisdom.
But withal, the Electress Sophia was a woman of
much worth and stability of nature, true to her obliga-
tions, a loyal wife, an attached mother, a faithful friend,
a good mistress, respected, loved, and mourned most
by those who knew and understood her best.
On October I4th, 1630, there was born at the
Hague a little girl, who, humanly speaking, seemed
little wanted in the world into which she had come.
She was all but the last of the troop of children born
to Elizabeth, daughter of James I. of England, and
Frederick, the Prince Palatine of the Rhenish provinces.
His acceptance, at the urgent instigation of his wife,
of the crown offered him by the Protestants of Bohemia
which the couple enjoyed for but one winter was
followed by the loss of the battle of Prague, fought
by the Catholic forces under his Emperor. It cost
Frederick not only his newly-made kingdom, but the
Palatinate also. From that date the landless pair were
wanderers from European Court to Court, urging their
claims on royal relatives, and beseeching help to win
back Bohemia and the Rhine lands. In vain Frederick
pressed on his neighbours his rights. In vain Elizabeth
pawned her jewels in order to obtain the sinews of
war, or employed all the fascinations of her beauty and
misfortunes to attract adherents to a vanquished cause.
Not till the Peace of Westphalia, after the death of
Frederick, .was the Palatinate restored to his eldest
surviving son. In the meantime, after useless pilgrim-
ages in search of money and soldiers, the couple, rich
only in children, made their headquarters in Holland,
where they strove to keep up in their poverty that
most piteous of shadowy pretensions a Court without
a kingdom.
Sophia was the youngest of five sisters Elizabeth,
Electress Sopbia 7
Louise, Charlotte, and Henri ette- Maria who were
kept in countenance by a still more formidable file of
brothers Henry, Charles Louis, Frederick, Edward,
Philip, Rupert, and Maurice conspicuous figures in
the Civil War in England ; and little Gustav, who was
a year younger than Sophia. He was born at the
time of their father's death, was a pretty, sickly boy,
and died at the age of six years ; sister Charlotte also
died in childhood, and brother Henry did not survive
his first youth ; but the remaining ten reached the full
estate of men and women.
So many of the family had come into the world
before Sophia, that there was some difficulty in furnish-
ing her with a name and providing her with the
necessary complement of god-parents. It was by
casting lots that her friends' choice fell on the Christian
name " Sophia," and her sponsors had of necessity to
be of lower rank than the magnates who had filled the
same office at the christening of her elder brothers and
sisters. Who could have guessed that, out of all the
strong phalanx of goodly sons and fair daughters, little
Sophia, too sharp and eager to have even any pre-
tensions to childish beauty, would live to be the chosen
representative of a great cause and creed, the member
of the family in whom the hopes of the English Pro-
testants and Whigs centred when the main branch of
the Stewart line failed, either by death without heirs,
or by the forfeiture of its responsibilities and privileges,
and when all Elizabeth Stewart's elder children had
either passed away and left no children in like manner,
or had in their turn sold their birthright for a mass ?
According to the vigorous, animated narrative with
which the Electress Sophia occupied her leisure hours
in middle age, she was removed when an infant, as
soon as it was safe for her to perform the journey,
from the Hague to Leyden, where she was brought
up, in company with the brothers and sisters near her
in age, under the care of an .exemplary old lady who
had reared the children's father. (The fact is mentioned
as an indication of her advanced years. However,
she was assisted in her duties by her two daughters,
who were, as their pupil remarks in her naive way,
"older than their mother.") The reason of this
banishment of the younger members of the household
the writer explains with the perfect frankness which
is occasionally somewhat startling to the reader. The
Queen their mother preferred the company of her
monkeys and dogs to that of her children. The poor
Queen of Hearts believed herself born to preside over
a Court, and much of her life was spent in endless
machinations to recover her position. Her social
charm has never been denied, but she does not seem
to have been distinguished by the possession of the
purely domestic virtues. Indeed, in her dealings with
her sons and daughters, " the Queen," as they always
termed her, in tenacious reference to her brief sover-
eignty, was more of a sovereign than of a mother. She
even suffered herself to indulge in partialities and
prejudices where her children were concerned, which
were hardly calculated to promote family harmony.
The ladies to whom the children were entrusted
were scrupulously conscientious in the fulfilment of
their task. The little Sophia of early days recalls
them in later years with gratitude and respect, though
by no means without amusement at their homely looks
and odd ways. She says they taught her u to love
God and fear the devil," and brought her up in the
good doctrines of Calvin.
There is an amusing account of one of those youth-
ful days which bears witness, among other things, to
the strictness of German discipline and the rigorous-
ness of German etiquette. The bright, small pupil
Ube JElectress Sopbfa 9
went at seven o'clock in deshabille to one of madame's
daughters, who read the Bible and prayed with the
child. Then Sophia learned by heart a portion of a
popular code of German precepts or proverbs while
her governess brushed her teeth, her grimaces in the
process making an indelible impression on the clear,
terribly observant eyes. Next the child was dressed
and prepared by half-past eight for regular lessons,
which continued till ten, when the dancing-master
always welcome arrived. He gave " the exercise " till
eleven the dinner-hour for a meal of ceremony. It
was served at a long table, before which the Princess's
brothers " were drawn up, with their governors and
gentlemen behind them." She made first a low curtsy
to the Princes, and a slighter one to the others ; another
low curtsy in placing herself opposite her brothers ;
another slight one to her governess, who on entering
the room with her daughters curtsied very low to the
little Princess. She curtsied again in handing her gloves
to her ladies ; yet again in drawing near the table ;
again when the gentlemen brought her a large basin
in which to wash her hands; again (as a form of
" Amen ") after grace was said ; and for the last and
ninth time, on seating herself at table. The food was
appointed by rule for each day in the week. On
Sundays and Wednesdays improving conversation was
provided for the royal young people by the presence of
a couple of divines or professors from the neighbouring
university. There was " rest " till two, when lessons
were resumed ; at six there was supper, and at half-past
eight bed, after reading in the Bible and prayers.
Princess Sophia led this diligent, monotonous life
till she was nine years of age. In her second year she
was left fatherless. Her brothers and sisters grew
up. The Princes finished their education by travelling,
or by entering the Emperor's army. The Princesses
io Sij TCosal Xafcies
went to the Hague, to appear at the Court of the
Princess of Orange, and at their mother's Court
(by courtesy), where they could push their fortunes
in the only way open to them. The little brother
Gustav was dead, and it was held undesirable to keep
up the establishment at Leyden for the Princess Sophia
alone. She was taken to the Hague, to her great joy ;
for discipline and lessons were considerably relaxed, and
the lively child was delighted with her share of the
stir and bustle of the great world. Her cleverness and
vivacity were acceptable in turn to the more formal
and duller grown-up members of the household. Even
the Queen allowed herself to be amused by the young
girl's merry sallies, and granted to them a considerable
amount of indulgence, to the pleased surprise, as it
reads, of the recipient of the favour.
The Princess describes minutely her elder sisters
who were thenceforth her instructresses the Princesses
Elizabeth, Louise, and Henriette. According to their
chronicler, they were all her superiors in personal
attractions, and, in the case of the two elder sisters,
in learning and accomplishments. Elizabeth was the
greatest scholar, and had a philosophic and scientific
bent. She corresponded with Descartes, then settled
in Holland, and this may be the origin of the assertion
which does not seem to rest on any other foundation
that Sophia herself was the pupil of the French
philosopher. Elizabeth had been partly brought up
by her German grandmother, the Prince Palatine's
mother, and was under the impression that the Queen,
her own mother, had little love for her. In fact,
Elizabeth was, to some extent, une femme incomprise
not in harmony with her surroundings. She desired
to lead a single life, and in order to secure her in-
dependence became eventually Abbess of Herford.
Louise also ended her life as an abbess the Abbess
Blectress Sopbfa n
of Maubisson ; but hers was a genuine perversion to
Roman Catholicism. She was better fitted for society,
was spirited and agreeable. She painted well, and
Sophia's youthful admiration for her sister's work
throws light on her subsequent interest in art. The
third Princess, Henriette, was very fair and blooming.
Her talents, we are told, lay in the direction of
embroidery and cookery, and it sounds natural that
she should be the first to marry. Her bridegroom
was reckoned beneath her in rank, since he was only
the lord of Siebenbiirgen. The poor bride did not
live long enough to question the wisdom of the step
she had taken, for she died the year of her marriage,
1651.
Before Princess Sophia was in her teens, the Court
at the Hague was excited by a visit from Henrietta-
Maria of England. She came ostensibly to bring
her little daughter, already married to the young Prince
William of Orange, that she might be brought up
in the States over which her husband was to rule.
The Queen of England's real errand was to raise
money, and procure weapons and recruits to assist her
husband Charles I., then engaged in the Civil War.
She was Sophia's aunt by marriage, and was then seen
by the Princess for the first time. She gives, with
her usual candour and animation, the impression pro-
duced upon her by Vandyck's beautiful Queen, the
heroine of the devotion of the extreme Royalist party.
Sophia was surprised to find her much-praised kins-
woman a little woman, with long, thin arms, shoulders
which did not match each other, and teeth projecting
from her mouth like " guns from a fort." However,
the unsparing critic acknowledges that the Queen had
" beautiful eyes, a well-shaped nose, and an admirable
complexion " ; so that our faith in Vandyck's veracity
as an artist is not altogether shaken.
OLafcies
Mary Stewart, Princess William of Orange, was
only ten years of age a little younger than her cousin
Sophia ; and it is half pathetic, half comical, to hear
of the two as " playfellows."
As time passed, and the Civil War in England
became more and more hopeless so far as the King's
success was concerned, many English, Scotch, and Irish
refugees thronged to the Hague, where the Prince of
Wales (Charles II.) had taken refuge. Inevitably the
titular Queen of Bohemia, herself an English princess
and the Prince of Wales's aunt, with her family,
occupied a prominent position in the strange scene.
Princess Sophia at seventeen evidently enjoyed it,
though, as she says in her expressive way, the family,
in their chronic poverty, " had often nothing to eat
save pearls and diamonds." She tells little of her
own looks, except that she had light brown curling
hair, gay, easy manners, a good though not a tall figure,
and "the air of a Princess." In Thackeray's Four
Georges there are two sketches of the Electress Sophia
from contemporary prints. The sketch which re-
presents her in youth is that of a pretty, slender girl,
with long curls falling on her neck.
Because of suitability in age, perhaps quite as much
as because of her beauty and bright wit, Sophia was re-
garded as eligible for the hand of her cousin, the Prince
of Wales, who was a year her senior. The other aspir-
ant was a daughter of the elder Princess of Orange.
Factions of the emigrants ranged themselves on the
different sides. That which advocated the claims
of Sophia was headed by the Marquis of Montrose,
while the Dukes of Hamilton and Lauderdale sup-
ported the pretensions of the other Princess. One
can hardly imagine a situation more trying, or more
likely to be injurious to a girl, than that which
Princess Sophia then occupied, with all the petty strife
Electress Sopbia 13
and mean artifices which it implied. But she seems
to have encountered it with her usual sound sense and
clear-headedness, and to have sustained no damage from
the encounter. She does not appear to have been par-
ticularly elated by any attentions which the Prince of
Wales paid her. She saw through, to some extent,
his extremely selfish and frivolous nature, which was
early developed. She distrusted his extravagant com-
pliments, attributing them, correctly on one occasion,
to an attempt to make use of her in procuring money
from Lord Craven for Charles and his friends. Lord
Craven, son of a Lord Mayor of London, is well
known for his chivalrous adherence to the Queen of
Bohemia's interests, to which he devoted his life.
Having attended her all through her chequered career,
when she at last withdrew to London, in the reign
of her nephew Charles II., and occupied, according
to tradition, a house in Kensington Square, he hired
the next house and dwelt in it, that he might still
be in her immediate vicinity and at her service.
Princess Sophia, in her Memoirs, merely mentions him
as "an old Englishman," who took an interest in
her and was in possession of money a rare commodity
among the English at the Hague in those days. He
was evidently a person of consequence and trust in her
mother's service ; but the daughter does not drop
a word which can give any colour to the common
report that he was privately married to the Queen
of Hearts, as it was said later that Harry Jermyn
was married to Henrietta-Maria. Like her niece, the
Duchess of Orleans, the Electress Sophia, in her frank-
ness and simplicity, strenuously maintained the dignity
of her birthright, and on that side was a rigid sup-
porter of etiquette, so that no admission which might
be regarded as impugning the family credit was to be
expected from her.
14 Sij IRosal XaMes
The Princess's mother was more bent on the English
alliance than was the daughter. Probably, in her
keen, youthful penetration, she saw plainly the in-
numerable obstacles to its fulfilment. She refers to
the Queen's having reproached her angrily for not
having joined the promenade at Vorhoeit, when the
Prince of Wales would have walked with her. The
excuse brought forward by Princess Sophia was, it
might be advisedly, of a ludicrously humdrum and
prosaic description. It would have sounded better
on the lips of a clumsy Dutch peasant than in the
mouth of an elegant Princess. The delinquent pro-
tested she was prevented from walking by a corn on
her foot. What would Horace Walpole have said
to a Princess with corns?
CHAPTER II.
A VISIT AND A MARRIAGE.
PRINCESS SOPHIA'S elder brother, Charles Louis, to
whom the Palatinate had been given back, was thirteen
years her senior, and was, as she said, more like a
father than a brother to her. On his marriage to a
Princess of Hesse-Cassel, he invited his youngest
sister to pay him and his Princess a visit an invita-
tion which, in those non-travelling times, meant a pro-
longed sojourn of the guest with her entertainers.
Sophia was nothing loth ; change and variety are
attractions in themselves at her age. She was glad
to escape from the cabals and intrigues of the Hague ;
while the Queen her mother was persuaded that the
transference of residence and guardianship was not
necessarily a barrier to the match with the Prince of
Wales. Sophia, whose every inclination for England
and the English was to be encouraged at this date,
was allowed to take with her a young English girl,
named Carey, to whom the Princess had taken a great
fancy, together with the girl's recently married sister
and her brother-in-law. They were escorted by Lord
Craven ; and as the journey from the Hague to
Heidelberg was a considerable undertaking for an
inexperienced traveller who had never gone from home
before, except for a day or two's sail in a canal-boat,
a pinnace was borrowed, in which the little party went
up the Rhine, with more state and much less expense
and fatigue than would have been incurred had the
journey been made by land.
15
1 6 Sij iRosal XaMes
On entering each principality belonging to her
brother's neighbours, the reigning Duke or Prince
hailed the distinguished traveller, and carried off her
and her companions to the different residences, where
the guests spent a night or a day, and were treated
with all the splendour and hospitality which could be
got up at a moment's notice. Not a word does
Princess Sophia say of the charmingly picturesque
scenery, which must have been a revelation to her
after the lowlands of Holland. There was little love
of primitive Nature in that generation, and no pretence
at the admiration which did not arise spontaneously.
But the traveller has piquant notices, very much to the
point, of the homely magnificence of the castles she
entered, where the tapestries were fine, but the less
said of the chairs and beds the better ; while the life
of royalty, viewed behind the scenes, displayed a
decidedly seamy side.
Even on beautiful Heidelberg, which had been her
father and mother's, and was now her brother's capital,
the wandering Princess makes no further remark than
that the castle was partly ruinous a result of the
Thirty Years' War so that the Elector Palatine and
the Electress were living in a house in the town, called
the Commissariat House.
Princess Sophia continued on excellent terms with
her brother ; but she could feel little regard for her
sister-in-law, a strange young woman, full of airs and
affectations, with a moody temper. She made not the
slightest disguise of the circumstance that she had
married the Elector Palatine who in the beginning
was enslaved by her beauty against her will, while
her heart was given to a Prince of Wiirtemberg. Her
tastes were card-playing, and especially hunting, and
for neither of these pursuits had Sophia much inclina-
tion. The family life was not improved by the arrival
Blectress Sopbia 17
of another of the Queen of Bohemia's daughters,
Princess Elizabeth, the femme incomprise, who made
common cause with the other misunderstood woman
the Electress, and formed a party against Princess
Sophia and the Elector Palatine. Sophia did not think
her elder sister had gained in wisdom as she had gained
in years. At the same time, in retrospect, she allows
honestly that she ought to have taken her sister's
advice and yielded to her authority. There is no
corroboration of what follows in the Princess's auto-
biography, but from information derived from another
source it appears that she had an official position in
her brother's household as governess to his children.
Doubtless it was as State governess, and the appoint-
ment, apart from its salary, was little more than
nominal ; but the commencement of the connection
between the aunt and her niece Charlotte Elizabeth,
afterwards Duchess of Orleans, was thus laid, though
it had a more solid superstructure when the little girl
joined her kinswoman, after her marriage in Hanover,
and was carefully brought up by her there till she had
reached the age of twelve years.
It is easy to guess how the unhappy menage at
Heidelberg must have sharpened Princess Sophia's
anxiety to attain for herself the only provision possible
for her an independent establishment by marriage.
In those plain-speaking days, ladies, even not royal,
made no secret of the strong obligation which rested
upon them to fulfil their destiny in this respect. They
must marry in order to retain their position, or even,
in extreme cases, to preserve for themselves the bare
necessaries of life. Accordingly, matrimonial prospects
were discussed by the ladies and their relatives with
the greatest openness and sang froid. Years were
passing for Princess Sophia. In 1652 she suffered
from the common scourge, small-pox, which in her
1 8 Si TRosal Xafcies
opinion impaired her good looks. Domestic affairs at
Heidelberg did not improve. Indeed, the Elector
Charles Louis now openly announced his intention of
divorcing the Princess of Hesse-Cassel on the ground
of her contumacious temper, and of marrying, after
the manner of Henry VIII. of England, one of her
maids-of-honour, Mademoiselle von Hagen. The
wretched Electress saw too late the result of her folly.
The Elector's passionate love, which his sister Sophia
had predicted was too violent to last, had changed to a
rooted aversion, and nothing the Electress could do
would propitiate him or turn him from his intention.
There was no lack of suitors for Princess Sophia's
hand ; but it became more and more an urgent duty to
make a wise selection from them. Her future husband
had already crossed her path more than once. She had
known Ernest Augustus of Brunswick when he was in
Holland as a lad. He appeared again at Heidelberg
on his way home from the gaieties of Venice, with
which he and his brother Duke George were entranced.
He figures in Thackeray's essays as one of the "jovial
Brunswick Princes " who had succeeded their pious
fathers, the supporters of Luther. Sophia says com-
placently he was much admired, but as a younger son
he was out of the question in the light of a parti for
a penniless Princess who, at the same time, never lost
sight of her illustrious descent and what was due to it.
However, the young couple played the guitar together,
which served the gentleman as an opportunity for the
display of what the lady, moved to enthusiasm, calls
" his exquisite hands." As she also records that he
excelled in dancing, no doubt the pair were partners at
the Court balls. After his departure he began a corre-
spondence in reference to guitar music ; which Sophia
states she stopped, lest it should be misinterpreted.
A likely suitor turned up in the person of a widowed
Electress Sopbta 19
Prince Adolf, brother to the King of Sweden. The
Princess notes that he had a fine figure, and then
qualifies the word of approval by one of those telling
quizzical touches which occur often in her animated
narrative. He had a long chin, "like a shoe-horn"
(who does not see the chin ?). A more serious objec-
tion than that of the long chin came to her ears in
the rumour that he had beaten his first wife ; therefore
the Princess would have nothing to say to him, and
without doubt was confirmed in her disinclination by
the conviction that her sister-in-law not yet set
aside was his vehement champion in order to get rid
of Princess Sophia.
Duke George William of Brunswick, the elder
brother of Ernest Augustus, was the next applicant
for the Princess's hand. Though he appreciated her
personal and mental qualities he was but a lukewarm
lover. He had at that date an utter distaste to
marriage. He was still more a man of pleasure and
of the world than his younger brother had shown
himself. Duke George was only consenting to marry
because of the pressure put upon him on this point
by his subjects. He had come to Heidelberg in
company with his favourite brother Ernest Augustus,
on the road to their beloved Venice. George went so
far as to ask Princess Sophia's hand in marriage a
proposal to which she immediately said " Yes," as
she frankly announces ; for she considered him de-
cidedly preferable as a suitor to Prince Adolf of Sweden.
The fact that Duke George was a jovial Prince did
not assume alarming proportions in eyes too early
enlightened and not over-fastidious. The marriage
contract was drawn up and signed, with the single
proviso that it was to be kept secret for a time. Sophia
does not hint at the slightest exception on Ernest
Augustus's part, save on the grounds that he disliked the
20 Sfj iRosal XaMes
idea of his elder brother's marriage, lest it should impair
the close friendship which had existed between the two.
The deed done, the bridegroom-elect, instead of
deciding to tarry at Heidelberg and cultivate the
society of his promised bride, as she possibly expected,
went on with Ernest Augustus to Italy, there to eat,
drink, and be merry ; while Princess Sophia remained
with her brother, experiencing the awkwardness of
an unacknowledged engagement. It left her to be
pestered by the advances of the persistent Prince Adolf,
who arrived with a sister, the Margravine of Baden,
to help him to plead his cause. As for the Elector
Palatine, he had to temporise in the matter, in order
to escape the danger of provoking the hostility of
the King of Sweden, who might be sensitive with
regard to the injury to his kinsman's feelings.
A third wooer, who wooed by proxy the proxy
being a Roman Catholic priest, fired with the hope
of converting Sophia to the Roman Catholic Church
was the Prince of Parma.
In the interval Duke George, plunged in dissipation
in Venice, was more and more unwilling to fulfil
his pledge. He hit upon the plan of getting his
easy-minded, compliant brother Ernest to be his
substitute. There were four Brunswick brothers
Christian, George William, John Frederick, and Ernest
Augustus among whom their father's possessions had
been divided at his death. Christian and John
Frederick (who went over to the Roman Catholic
Church) were then without heirs. Duke George
undertook to surrender the chief of his revenues to
Ernest Augustus and bound himself not to marry, so
that if Princess Sophia would consent to accept Ernest
in the room of George she would be the first lady in
Hanover, the mother of its future Dukes if God gave
her children, " the mother to the family and the country."
Electress Sopbta 21
With regard to this extraordinary suggestion, her
brother, the Elector Palatine, wrote to the Princess
that, for his part, he preferred Duke Ernest, as more
amiable and sensible than Duke George an opinion
in which she agreed ; while she volunteered the scath-
ing remark on her own account, that " a good
establishment was all she cared for, and that if this
was secured by the younger brother the change
was a matter of indifference." This cool speech of the
Princess's has been often used in evidence of her lack
of proper feeling and common delicacy; but before
condemning her many things must be thought of.
She was, as she owns, piqued by Duke George's
desertion. Her very language betrays that she was
smarting keenly under the mortification, so as to be
prompted to employ the most scornful, careless words
which came to her lips.
On the other hand, it is necessary to remember the
exceedingly mercenary light in which the marriages,
not of royal personages alone, but even of squires'
daughters, were viewed in the seventeenth century.
Lady Verney, in her delightful chronicle of the family
history of the Verneys, has pointed out the truth,
that while faithful, attached wives and devoted mothers
were to be found as readily then as now, there was
actually hardly a vestige of proof that love between
young men and maidens existed as an inducement to
marriage. Men and women married often in very
early youth at the instigation of relatives and friends,
to better the worldly position of bridegrooms and
brides, to establish themselves creditably in life, and
not to gratify personal affection. The letters of the
Verney girls amply bear out the conclusion. They
clamour to have their matrimonial chances, and weigh
the income and expectations of the gentlemen suggested
to them as husbands frequently on the slightest
Xatnes
acquaintance with all the acumen of the most worldly
of matrons. Lady Verney quotes another example of
this unblushing regard of the means to the end which
the candidates were not ashamed to proclaim. A
young lady writes to a suitor, who has given her the
liberty to inquire into his worldly estate, that she can
hear of no estate, and that without one she will not enter
on the question. There is no pretence at less material
sentiment, no blinking of the main point at issue.
Princess Sophia was not a rare example of mercenari-
ness, and it must be admitted that she was in
considerable straits. She was twenty-seven years of
age ; she would soon be -passes. Her position in her
brother's family was getting more and more untenable
in the light of his proposed divorce of the Electress
and marriage with her maid-of-honour. There seems
to have been no question of Sophia's return to her
mother's care, while a Princess of those days could not
dig, and to beg she was ashamed. The only apparent
solution of the difficulty was that she should marry
Ernest Augustus, or another Prince, perhaps less to
her mind. She accepted the situation composedly, as
was her nature a little sardonically, if you will and,
having accepted it, she determined to make the best
of it, and to do her duty according to her light in all
its relations.
In Duke George's thankfulness at his escape from
matrimony, he was willing to save the Elector Palatine
all the expense and trouble of the wedding, which the
Duke would have had celebrated with state and splendour
in Hanover. But Charles Louis exhibited some dignity
in declining to accept the proposal. He said that
Duke Ernest might come privately to Heidelberg if
he would, but Princess Sophia should be married there.
So it was settled. In the September of 1658 Ernest
Augustus arrived at Heidelberg with a small retinue.
Ube Electress Sopbta 23
In recording the event, the Princess announces cheer-
fully : "I, being resolved to love him, was delighted to
find how amiable " (in the French sense, " pleasing ")
" he was."
On her marriage-day the bride was dressed, German
fashion, in white silver brocade. Her flowing hair was
surmounted by " a large crown of family diamonds."
The little lady's train was of enormous length, and was
borne by four maids-of-honour. She was escorted to
church by her brothers, the Elector and Prince Edward.
Duke 'Ernest was supported by the little Electoral
Prince and the Due de Deux-Ponts. Twenty-four
gentlemen marched in front, bearing lighted torches,
decked with ribbons of the bride and bridegroom's
colours blue and white for the Princess, red and
yellow for the Duke. Cannon fired salutes while the
procession wended its way. After the ceremony the
bridal couple stood opposite each other while the
canopy was held over their heads during the singing
of the " Te Deum." The company returned to the
royal apartments, where Sophia formally renounced her
claim to the Palatinate.
When supper was served at an oval table, Duke
Ernest and his Duchess sat in the centre, with the
Elector on their right and his young son on their left.
Beyond them sat the Princesses, the small Charlotte
Elizabeth (Madame d' Orleans), and the Duchesse de
Deux-Ponts. After supper there was dancing, the
Princes bearing lighted torches and dancing before and
behind the bride.
In the course of a few days Ernest Augustus
returned to Hanover by post to prepare for his wife's
reception. " He went just as he came," she writes ;
and then she adds, with proud satisfaction, "except
that his feelings towards me had undergone a total and
unexpected change." From these words one is led to
24 Sij 1Ro$al XaMes
suppose that Duke Ernest, though he had politely
relieved his brother from an oppressive obligation, was
equally unwilling to marry ; and that, instead of
regarding the Princess with partiality, he had been
latterly prejudiced against her. A key to the alteration
in his feelings may be found in her succeeding de-
claration that her affection for him far exceeded her
former esteem, and that she now felt for him "all that
true love could inspire."
CHAPTER III.
THE DUCHESS.
DUKE ERNEST, in his new regard for his wife, hastened
to send a state coach in which she might journey to
Hanover. But she seems to have been still more
impressed by the fact of her brother the Elector's
escort as far as Weinheim. She records the circum-
stance that she shed some tears in parting from him
tears which were lessened by the hope of seeing
him again, and of being honoured with his letters.
The circumstantial mention of the tears leads to the
conclusion that they were a comparatively rare in-
dulgence with the warm-hearted but sensible Sophia.
Here was no whimpering, childish girl, no half-weak,
half-cunning woman, unable to restrain her feelings,
and prepared to give way to emotion on the slightest
provocation, as a natural and graceful resource her
ever present defence when she was found in fault,
whether the fault were trifling or heinous.
The progress to Hanover, like the earlier journey
from the Hague to Heidelberg, was through a succes-
sion of friendly states, the rulers of which were not
seldom family connections, either of the Princess or
of her husband. She was treated with even more
honour and ceremony than before, for was she not a
wedded wife and a Duchess, instead of a maiden
Princess ? Sophia had in the midst of her sagacity
and frankness, like her niece, Charlotte Elizabeth of
Orleans, perhaps as an element of her wisdom and
25
26 Sij fRosal Xa&fes
straight-forwardness, a true German's strong sense of
the propriety of etiquette. She would say and do
unconventional things ; she could even laugh at Court
forms ; but she was never inclined to abate one jot
of the homage due to her as a Princess. At Darmstadt
the fireworks which were given to celebrate the
occasion were the work of the young Landgrave. In
the Landgravine's room the visitor saw what was an
unaccustomed proof of luxury and refinement a side-
board laid out with glass and china. This lady danced
in a ballet with her children in the course of the
evening, in order to entertain her guest. Possibly
Sophia showed that she regarded this as unbending too
far, for she adds she was bidden not to be surprised,
since the Landgravine's mother had been accustomed
to practise the same condescension.
Near the town of Hanover the young Duchess was
met in state by the four ducal brothers Christian,
George William, John Frederick, and Ernest Augustus.
No arriere yensee which had to do with her brief
betrothal to the roving brother, Duke George, was
suffered to mar the harmony of the party when all the
four entered Duchess Ernest's carriage. She is
particular in telling that she entered the town to the
sound of cannon, and that when she alighted she
was received by four Duchesses of royal rank ; the
first being her mother-in-law, the Duchess-Dowager
of Hanover. Her husband, Duke Ernest, led her
to the handsome room which had been specially
prepared for her, while the rest of the fine company
followed the bride and bridegroom. On the third day
the newcomer took her place as the mistress of the
establishment, and surely no royal bride ever did the
honours with greater dignity and tact than did the pretty
high-spirited little woman who was to be at the head
of a Court. It was not a mock Court like that of
Electress Sopbta 27
her mother, the Queen of Bohemia ; not even a
Court in the future like that great Court of England,
which was eventually dangled before Sophia's longing
eyes. It was a solid, not unprosperous Court of the
present. It was somewhat dull and heavy, perhaps ;
ifor if its Ritter-saal was all its own, its terrace and
gardens, pinnacled pavilions and gorgeous theatre
and opera house, were second-hand importations to
the sandy plains of the north of the chefs-d'oeuvre of
French art and magnificence which studded the green
wooded belt round Paris. Such imitations are apt to
lose much of the spirit and grace of the originals, but
to those who know no better the borrowed lacquer
and tinsel are quite satisfactory. Certainly Ernest
Augustus spent in the course of his reign large sums
of money on extravagant display and lavish excess.
He raised the necessary funds partly by equipping and
selling the services of regiments of his subjects, trained
to be foreign mercenaries and destined to water the
battle-fields of Europe with their blood. But his
practice was the way of the Continental world then,
and was regarded as perfectly legitimate.
Sophia enjoyed heartily her first experience of com-
parative independence, state, and bounty. But it is
evident her chief gratification was derived from the
hold she had acquired over her husband's esteem
and affection. She owns she was proud even of
his jealousy of his elder brother Duke George, whose
privilege it was to " hand " the little lady every day
to her noontide dinner. She valued the jealousy,
inconvenient as it was in the light in which a less
wise woman might have been tempted to regard it.
It was a testimony to Duke Ernest's recently kindled
passion for her. She was guileless of unworthy
coquetry ; she was careful to give no ground for the
jealousy ; so much so, that she would hardly let her
28 5
eyes rest on Duke George when he was acting, for
months and years on end, the part of her appointed
cavalier. It was not her fault that he had the
inconceivable impertinence to express to her his re-
gret that he had relinquished her to his brother,
and occasionally to pester her with his unwelcome
attentions.
Without a crumb of food to nourish it, her
husband's unreasonable doubt of her regard died a
natural death. While it had pleased her in one sense,
in another it had drawn from her some of her seldom-
shed tears. With the jealousy, as might have been
expected in the shallow, showy, man, died all the
romance and fervour of his earlier love. There was
nothing left for her save the abiding friendship, which
was richly earned and could not well be withdrawn.
Sophia makes no statement to this effect, utters no
complaint of her husband, has scarcely a word to say
of him which is not full of praise of his princely
qualities and of her affection for him. There can
t)e no doubt that she was sincerely, even fondly,
attached to her Duke, little as he deserved it in some
lights ; while he gave her all that such a man had to
give in the respect and confidence, to which even he
could see she was amply entitled. He did not bestow
on her an undivided heart, an unwavering constancy.
He did not make her glad by his preference for her
and her society before that of other associates, even
if they had been creditable instead of discreditable.
He had no single-hearted, manly devotion in return
for 'her tenderness. In fact, he was light-minded and
faithless, steeped to the lips in the coarse vices of
the time in the midst of his lazy good-nature and
unthinking generosity. Sophia had known him to
be what he was from the beginning, and yet she could
learn to love him, and could love him really and
TEbe Blectress Sopbta 29
truly to the end. This was not merely for the sake
of appearances, or in the light of self-interest motives
which have been liberally attributed to her ; while
she has received many a taunt for her apparent lack
of feeling where Ernest Augustus's conspicuous fail-
ings were concerned. Neither was it because love
is blinding she was not the woman to be so blinded ;
it was rather because her standard of men and princes
was low. I have already written that the Electress
Sophia, with all her abilities and virtues, was not more
delicate-minded and higher-souled in reference to the
morality of her time than were the mass of her con-
temporaries. This is evident from her Memoirs and
letters. Hers was not one of those noble natures
which are laws to themselves in accordance with the
Divine law and testimony, which stand out like
beacons, dispensing purest rays of heavenly light to
generations otherwise corrupt and benighted ; still she
and the women who most resembled her Sophia's
beloved niece the Duchess of Orleans ; her grand-
daughter by marriage, Caroline of Anspach ; even the
great Maria Theresa had much in them and in their
relations to their husbands and children which can be
cordially commended. The virtue of the wives was
beyond question. They were loyal, forbearing, even
affectionate to husbands who were far from deserving
such allegiance. As mothers these Princesses were for
the most part excellent. They played the parts which
fell to their share according to their lights, honourably
and for the general good of the community. Each
country and Court with which the women had to do
was more or less the better for them.
It is a little difficult to understand how they did it,
and the only rational explanation which can be found
is, that hard experience had imparted to them early no
very exalted opinion of men and the marriage state.
30 Sij IRosal OLaMes
Duchess Sophia relates that Duke Christian was " given
to drinking " ; and adds, " it was well-nigh his only
fault" quite as if it was as minor an evil as it was a
common offence at the German Courts.
The Princesses in question accepted men and the
married condition as they found them, without any
great effort or hope to improve them. The wives, in
their high estate, were content and thankful for the
respect which did not fail them, and for the portion of
consideration and kindness which fell to their lot.
They never dreamt of themselves as injured victims ;
they simply saw themselves as undergoing the ordinary
fate of women and princesses. They succeeded in
being indulgent, even tender, to the foibles of the
husbands who tried them most severely. Madame
d'Orleans was possibly the hardest beset as she was
the most plain-spoken of the group, since she was
married to a man who, in addition to all the attributes
of a vicious fool, was a fantastic mountebank. He
appropriated and wore with exultation his first wife's
jewels without regard to the two daughters whom she
left behind. He not only rouged himself, he rouged,
against her will, the cheeks of his second wife, so
honest in her homeliness. Yet even Madame, while
candidly summing up her husband's little peculiarities,
not only bore with them patiently, but cared for him
in spite of them and of his peevish protest that she
bored him with her wifely duty and affection.
Duke Ernest's fleeting passion for his wife, and his
vexation that she should ever have been betrothed to
Duke George William, did not wean him from his
close alliance with his elder brother and his undesirable
resorts to Italy in Duke George's company. When
the two proposed to set out as usual very shortly after
Duke Ernest's marriage, Sophia intrepidly consented
to accompany them. But as the long journey was to
jEIectress Sopbfa 31
be made it might be not unadvisedly on the gentlemen's
part in an open carriage in the depth of winter, she
had to relinquish the attempt at the end of the first
stage. She confesses she cried again from loneliness and
want of congenial company after she returned alone to
the capital, while the two Dukes proceeded without her.
During all the years which had passed since Sophia
had quitted the Hague, she had kept with her, as
a proof of the strength of her friendship, the young
English girl named Carey, and her married and now
widowed sister. But after the Duchess's marriage, she
says, naively enough, that, as her heart was " given up
to the Duke," she cared only for what he liked ; she
therefore allowed the widow to return to the Hague,
and " consented " to the marriage to Baron de Bonstett
of Mistress Carey, who was no longer young and
feared the name of an old maid.
On her husband's next visit to Italy with his
brother, Duchess Sophia went to her mother at the
Hague and passed a pleasant time there. The Queen
welcomed the daughter who had done well for herself,
who brought with her the Queen's grand-daughter
the only grandchild she had seen Charlotte Elizabeth,
of the Rhenish lands, already in her young aunt the
Duchess's care. It must have been during this sojourn
at the Hague that the incident took place which
Madame d'Orleans afterwards described in the bright
fashion not far removed from her aunt's style.
The Queen and the little Princess Palatine went,
unaccompanied by the Duchess, for some unexplained
reason, to pay a visit of ceremony to the reigning Princess
of Orange the same Princess William of Orange who
had come as a bride of ten years, accompanied by her
mother, Henrietta-Maria, from England, when the
child-wife and the young Princess Sophia, her cousin,
were playfellows.
32 Si TRogal Xafctes
" Before starting," writes Madame d'Orleans, " my
aunt said to me, * Lisette, do not behave in your
usual flighty manner. Follow the Queen step by
step, so as not to cause her to wait for you.'
" I answered, ' Oh, my honoured aunt will hear
how well I have comported myself.'
" When we arrived at the Princess Royal's " (Princess
Royal of England, Princess of Orange of Holland),
" I found her son " (afterwards William III. of England,
by a second Orange marriage with a second Mary
Stewart), " with whom I had often played. After
gazing at his mother for a long time for I did not
know her in the least I turned round to the Prince
of Orange, and said, ' Tell me, I pray you, the name
of that woman with so strange a nose.'
" He burst out laughing, and replied, ' It is the
Princess Royal, my mother.'
" I was astonished, and remained stupefied. To
console me, Frau von Heyde took myself and the
Prince of Orange into the Princess Royal's bedchamber,
where we played at many games. I had asked to be
informed when the Queen" (her grandmother) "was
about to leave. We were rolling together on a
Turkey carpet when I was called. I jumped up and
ran into the hall, but the Queen was already in the
ante-chamber ; so, having always been a bold child,
I pulled the Princess Royal " (her father's cousin) " by
the gown, made her a pretty curtsy, and followed
the Queen step by step to the coach. Every one was
laughing I knew not why. When we arrived at
home the Queen went straight to my aunt and sat
down on her bed ; then, bursting out laughing, she
exclaimed, f Lisette has made a fine visit,' and told
her what had passed. Our dear Electress laughed even
more heartily than the Queen and said, * Well done,
Lisette ! You have revenged us on the haughty
Blectress Sopbia 33
Princess.' " A speech which implies that Charles I.'s
tragic end had not broken the spirit of his daughter.
We too laugh across the centuries as her own narrative
brings before us P enfant terrible making rude remarks
on a Princess Royal's nose to the Princess Royal's
son, and walking too late, in her mincing, prim, child's
fashion, " step by step " after the Queen, her grand-
mother.
In the month of June, 1660, Duchess Sophia's first
child was born. To the great joy of all it was a
son, who was named George Louis after two of his
uncles.
On the next visit of the ducal brothers to Italy, the
Duchess spent the time with her brother at Heidelberg.
When her husband and brother-in-law came to fetch
her home she sailed with them down the Rhine to
Rotterdam. There she found her mother on the
point of embarking for her native country. Elizabeth
Stewart found her last refuge in England during the
reign of her nephew Charles II. But the poor Queen
of Hearts was not destined to be long a pensioner
on the bounty of her royal kinsman. She ended her
storm-tossed life a year afterwards.
Sophia's second son was born, and then a change
took place in Duke Ernest's fortunes. On the death
of the Bishop of Osnabriick a prince-bishop and a
lay ruler the lay bishopric which belonged to the
House of Hanover fell to Duke Ernest, and he and
his wife went to stay in Osnabriick, the castle of Ibourg
being their residence.
" The bonds of holy matrimony had not changed
the Duke's gay nature," Sophia writes calmly of her
husband's love of dissipation and delight in Italy.
But he at last made up his mind to take her
there, or, rather, to let her follow him after he had
left her to winter again at Heidelberg. She had a
34 Six
great train, though she travelled incognito ; even a band
of musicians was not wanting. Her ladies (with whose
Northern fairness and beauty the Duke designed to
dazzle the Southerns) and women " occupied four
carriages, the gentlemen rode, and the servants went
in carts." With this cumbrous cavalcade she passed
through Southern Germany and the Tyrol, and crossed
the Alps no light undertaking in those days. The
overturning of a carriage was so common an occurrence
that the Duchess was carried in a litter, and two of her
ladies either walked or rode on horseback the whole
way.
At last the wandering Duke met the party and
escorted them by Verona and Vicenza to his beloved
Venice. The Duchess, who in 1665 was in her thirty-
fifth year, full of life and spirit, gives an animated
account of what struck her in the novelty of the
surroundings. She admired the gardens and corsos ;
she praised the wit of the Italian ladies and the
gallantry of their cavaliers ; she tried to accommodate
her reasonable soul to the gaudy show and giddy whirl
approaching riot of frivolous amusement in which the
Duke delighted ; she danced in the open air with him
and her ladies; she went with her companions, "dressed
out like actresses in gold and silver brocade and quan-
tities of feathers," to witness mock tilting on the
Lido. But nature would have its way ; she found
Venice " extremely melancholy." She herself grew sad
in an atmosphere of folly, while her health suffered.
" It may be imagined," she writes, " how strange a
German felt in a country where nothing is thought
of but love, and where a lady would consider herself
disgraced were she without admirers. I had always
learned to look on coquetry as a crime, but according
to Italian morality it was a virtue."
On the evening of the Duke and Duchess's arrival
TTbe BIcctress Sopbia 35
at Milan she was persuaded to attend a masked ball,
and when pressed to unmask on account of the heat,
did it philosophically, in spite of the unpleasantness
of exposing herself to the splendid throng in travelling
costume and morning cap ; for, as she explains,
" comfort always carried the day " with her.
When she accounts for not feeling the long carriage
journey to Rome tedious because a table was set in the
carriage, at which she played cards all the way with two
Venetian noblemen, we call to mind two things the
general, well-nigh universal, indifference in her genera-
tion to natural scenery, unless it was improved upon (?)
by art ; and the fact that the young girl who, when
she first came to Heidelberg, had no predilection for
cards or hunting, had changed to some extent with the
flight of time. In the monotony of Court life she had
accommodated herself to what, in the seventeenth
century, was, with few exceptions, the established rule,
of card-playing in all circles, royal, social, and domestic.
At Piacenza, where the travellers were entertained
by a deputy from the Duke of Parma, much merriment
was occasioned by the fact that, while they were
splendidly lodged, they were half starved. Duchess
Sophia remembered after an interval of years the supper
served to the hungry guests who had waited long for
the scanty meal " a very small salad dressed with
currants, six fresh eggs, at which everybody snatched,
and an eel pie."
At Parma the Duchess-Dowager, who had in former
days coveted Sophia for a daughter-in-law, desired to
make her acquaintance, and paid her many attentions.
At Rome the party were lodged in a palace by the
Duke of Tuscany, where Sophia passed but a dull time,
since she remained incognito, and ostensibly received
no visitors ; her husband in the meanwhile spent his
evenings playing basset with Madame Colonna, a niece
36 Sis IRogal
of Cardinal Mazarin's. Curiosity led the Duchess to
make use of the privilege of her rank in order to pay
an impromptu visit to the once famous beauty, and
join in a game of the perpetual basset. Madame
Colonna was discovered lying on a bed dressed in a
blue and silver silk dressing-gown tied with flame-
coloured ribbon ; on her head a point lace cap, which
was drawn over the forehead without touching the ears.
The Duchess failed to recognise the personal attractions
which had once bewitched the French Court. The
daughter of kings avoided giving the Cardinal's niece
the hand which she thought fit to claim at future
meetings. Even on Sophia's palace staircase she could
not resist taking precedence of her encroaching visitor.
Madame Colonna had a scheme for the perversion of
the staunch little Protestant Princess. If it had been
effectual, it would have changed the destinies of the
House of Hanover, of England, and of Europe.
The Pope, Alexander VII., would have received
Sophia incognito ; but she declined the concession
because of what she considered had been a slight to
the pretensions of her brother-in-law, Duke John
Frederick, in spite of his having professed Roman
Catholicism. To her regret she missed seeing the
clever, eccentric Christina of Sweden, who was then
in Rome.
Duchess Sophia's great pleasures were walking in
the exquisite gardens and paying daily visits to the
fine statues and pictures which served to recall the
art-loving Princess Louise, Abbess of Maubisson, whose
work at the Hague had been the admiration of her
little sister.
The Duchess was deeply impressed by St. Peter's,
and there she saw the Pope without being seen by
him, and was not edified by his behaviour.
At the Church of Maria della Vittoria she came
Ube Blectress Sopbfa 37
across a curious memento which had not an agreeable
significance for her. It was the crown and sceptre of
the Emperor Ferdinand, sent by him as an offering to
a little picture of the Virgin, which had, as he believed,
enabled him to defeat Sophia's father, the so-called
King of Bohemia, in the battle of Prague. When the
monk who exhibited the trophies suggested that so
great a Princess ought to add to them, she replied
dryly, with her ready wit, " Yes ; if the Virgin had
been on the other side."
Duchess Sophia was home-sick, and longing to be
with her two little sons. She was thankful when her
husband gave the word for their return, though, as was
his wont, he did not travel with her, but allowed her
to start in advance. The roads were so bad in
Tuscany that the carriage containing the Duchess's
maids-of-honour was upset nine times in one day,
while her waiting-women's mules broke down, and
they had to mount on post-horses and ride en croupe
with two gentlemen of the suite, a postilion sounding
his horn before them.
Florence charmed Duchess Sophia. She " greatly
admired " the Pitti Palace, its gardens and pictures.
At a convent in Bologna her strong sense of humour
was tickled by the spectacle of " the great beards of
the old nuns, which made them look like the husbands
of the young ones."
The travellers were in Venice again for the Carnival,
the freedom of which was to the Duchess's mind,
though the cold caused her to walk about " like a noble
Venetian," wrapped in a fur-trimmed robe. In the
midst of the merry-making she showed that in spite of
her respect for etiquette the love of frolic could get the
better of her. She agreed joyfully to travel post with
the Duke to Milan, while her ladies either preceded or
followed her. She was dressed for the expedition in
38 Si TCosal OLafcies
" a. long tight cloak and wig," and occupied a vetturino,
while Duke Ernest, an Italian count, and a valet rode
by her carriage. She was thankful, however, when her
identity escaped recognition, and she was not seen in
her disguise by the nobility, who had prepared a public
reception for the couple. The ladies of the town came
in state to see her, and she received them, as she
recounts comically, " with a fainting fit." They were
greatly distressed, undressed her, and put her to bed,
loading her with caressing epithets. Yet they kept her
dancing day and night for a fortnight !
The Duke and Duchess went back to Germany by
Switzerland and the St. Gothard Pass. It is one of the
signs of the change which has passed over the public
taste to find a woman at once so bright and thoughtful
as the Duchess Sophia having little to say of the land
of the mountain and the flood beyond dwelling on the
" frightful precipices " and the " nasty sledges " drawn
by bullocks. At Basle Sophia's native Rhine was
reached, anoT she and her husband sailed down the
river to the Palatinate. At Gemersheim, of which
Mistress Carey's husband, Baron de Bonstett, was high
bailiff, the old friends had the joy of meeting again.
But bad news awaited the Duke and Duchess farther
on. Their brother, Duke Christian of Zell (whose
only fault was that of being given to drink), had died
during their absence. Duke George William, who
ought by his father's will to have been Duke Christian's
successor in Zell, though sent for to his dying brother,
had not troubled himself to obey the summons,
while the Roman Catholic brother, John Frederick,
had made hay while the sun shone by taking possession
of the territory. After some difficulty he was induced
to make a compromise, and resign Zell to Duke
George. This Duke had long entertained a great
admiration for a French lady named Eleanore d'Olbrense,
ZTbe Electress Sopbia 39
who was in the suite of the Princess of Tarrente. He
now overcame his objection to matrimony so far as to
marry Eleanore d'Olbrense morganatically a contract
by which she became his wife but not his Duchess.
His family gave their consent to the contract, which
was signed both by Duke Ernest and Duchess Sophia,
with the express understanding that it did not invalidate
Duke George's earlier pledge to constitute his brother
Duke Ernest, with his children, his legal heirs.
To please her husband and brother-in-law, the
Duchess had treated Mademoiselle d'Olbrense with
consideration and attention, but she neither liked nor
trusted her. Sophia had been told that Mademoiselle
was gay and giddy, indulging in playfully beating and
pinching her friends as part of her charming artillery.
On the contrary, the Duchess found the lady grave and
dignified. The readiness with which she makes this
admission, and records the first favourable impression
made on her, goes far to contradict a common
impression that mere pique at encountering and being
compelled to acknowledge her successor in Duke
George's light affections had much to do with the
future relations which existed between Sophia and the
Zell family.
The agreeable impression was only temporary ; the
Duchess had soon good reason to suspect Mademoiselle
d'Olbrense or Madame de Harburg, by the title
which her husband gave her of scheming, craft, and
dissimulation.
CHAPTER IV.
COURT MATCH-MAKING.
OTHER children were born to Duchess Sophia. Like
the Queen of Hearts, she was the mother of many sons,
seven in number. One, a twin boy, died in early
infancy ; six grew up to man's estate, for her tribula-
tion rather than her rejoicing. She had one dearly-
loved daughter. It was of this girl when she was
thirteen that the Duchess is reputed to have said, in
reply to the question of an agent of the French King,
that she was of no religion as yet. Her friends were
waiting to ascertain who was to be her husband before
they decided in what Church she should be brought up.
Many severe animadversions have been passed on the
lack of principle and heart in this speech. Is it possible
that everybody does not recognise the mocking tongue
of the Duchess in an answer addressed to Gourville
himself a pervert from Protestantism who was seeking
to reconcile the Duke and Duchess to the Roman
Catholic creed? The jest was as transparent as the
frequently-repeated assertion which deceived the Duchess
of Orleans that she (Duchess Sophia) was very fond
of the Turks, and thought them very good people.
Those were still the palmy days of Turkish valour ;
but it is easy to read in the pointed praise the under-
current of sarcasm. The followers of the Crescent
were quite as good, even when they were guilty of
those practices for which they were most condemned,
as some of the so-called followers of the Cross whom
Blectress Sopbia 41
Sophia had known. No attempt seems to have been
made to find out whether the witty Duchess was in
jest or in earnest, whether her quick tongue ran away
with her, as on former occasions, while she sought to
administer a characteristic rebuke to the inquisitive
interloper a chameleon in his own person. Nobody
appears to have taken the trouble of ascertaining
whether the woman who built a church for French
Protestant refugees, who declined to allow the Church
of England service to supersede the Lutheran or the
Calvinistic services in her chapel, lest people should
say she had been of no religion before the Bill of
Succession appointed her heir to the English throne
the woman who was the confidential friend of the
Christian philosopher Leibnitz had a practice at all
in keeping with the scandalous worldliness of the
assertion attributed to her in sober earnest. So far as
can be gathered from the letters of Madame d'Orleans,
the Duchess's niece, brought up by her aunt till she
was twelve years of age, the reverse was the truth.
Charlotte Elizabeth notes after she was an elderly
woman the careful training she received, the Catechism
she was made to know by heart, containing those very
doctrines which she, in her maturer years, emphatically
styles " good." Madame d'Orleans put the utmost
value on a child's being trained in the way it should
go. She attributes the follies and misfortunes of the
wretched Sophia Dorothea of Zell to the absence of
proper instruction in her youth from the mother whom
Charlotte Elizabeth had known in her youth and in
the honesty of her heart had always heartily disliked.
Such criminal neglect of the first principles of religion
and morality in dealing with her children the Duchess
of Orleans was very far from ascribing to her beloved
Electress.
Another almost ludicrous misconception which is
42 Stj TRopal Xafcies
still current is that the Court of Hanover in the
Electress Sophia's day was dull and illiterate, so that
the French airs and graces and superficial accomplish-
ments of an Eleanore d'Olbrense and her wrong-headed,
ill-fated daughter afforded a brilliant contrast to the
general moroseness and stupidity. Why, the Duchess
Sophia, the kind, sympathetic patroness of scholars
and of all strangers of " parts " who came to Hanover,
the fluent speaker of five languages, the skilled em-
broidress, the brilliant hostess, was a tower of strength
in her own little person. Her daughter, Sophia Char-
lotte, was in her time beautiful, learned, and wise.
The grand-daughters by birth and by marriage, the
fourth Sophia and Caroline of Anspach, were equally
distinguished by the good fairies' gifts. Caroline had
been badly educated in her childhood, so that she
had to teach herself spelling, according to Madame
d'Orleans ; but her strength and originality of character,
together with the later training she had from the Queen
of Prussia, enabled her to overcome all difficulties.
The Court of Hanover in the circle of the Princesses
was second to no European Court of the time in fem-
inine intellect and culture.
In 1670 the Duchess tried her hand at a little
match-making. Duke Ernest's sister, the Queen of
Denmark, came with her husband and family to
Gliickstadt, where her relatives visited her. The
Duchess liked the Queen, her sister-in-law, and admired
her daughters, especially the youngest, Princess Wil-
helmine. The Duke and Duchess agreed that the
Princess his niece would be a very fit wife for Sophia's
nephew, her brother the Prince Palatine's eldest son.
The delicate negotiations were all successful ; even to
the bridegroom-elect's inspection of the proposed
bride's miniature, and his visit to Osnabruck to meet
her. The marriage did not take place till 1671, when
Ube Electress Sopbta 43
the Duchess Sophia was the chaperon selected to meet
the Queen of Denmark, who travelled as far as Altona
with her daughter and to conduct the Princess to
Heidelberg, where the marriage was to be celebrated.
Eleanore d'Olbrense, Madame de Harburg, was also
at Altona with her Duke, a brother of the Queen's
and an uncle of the bride-elect's. When the Queen of
Denmark declined to kiss Madame de Harburg, she
revenged herself by making invidious remarks on the
dishes at table ; on which Sophia utters the lofty
commentary that Madame's mind was " too base " to
understand that the great ones of this earth are
" sustained by higher things than ragouts."
Before the friendly Duchess had quite completed her
mission, while the shy, silent Princess Wilhelmine was
still detained at Weinheim till all was ready for her
state entrance into her husband's future capital, her
aunt was obliged to leave her. She went on in
advance to Heidelberg, supped with her brother the
Elector, and on the following morning her son, Prince
Christian, was born. The Elector, sending to ask
when she would go with him to meet the Princess,
received the answer that she was otherwise engaged ;
on which he hastened to offer his congratulations.
Sophia missed seeing the magnificence of the marriage
ceremony, which might have reminded her of her own
wedding in the same place.
Duke Ernest went off" as usual to Venice while his
wife paid the young couple a happy visit at Weinheim.
There she took part in the preparations for another
marriage that of her dear niece Charlotte Elizabeth
with Louis XIV.'s brother, " Monsieur " the Duke of
Orleans, whose first wife had been Princess Henrietta
Anne, youngest daughter of Charles I. The splendour
of the alliance dazzled all eyes save those of the
eminently sensible young Princess chiefly concerned.
44 Sij 1Roal Xafcies
She demurred, though it was said to be at the bride-
groom's Roman Catholic creed, and not at the current
Siough unfounded rumour that he was privy to his
first wife's death by poison.
Charlotte Elizabeth's scruples were overcome ; she
was assured of freedom in her religion (three French
bishops tried in vain to bring her round to their
opinions). The marriage treaty was signed, and the
second bride started immediately, under the escort of
another aunt, for France. There, during the many
years of her exile, she wrote diligently, without pausing
to ascertain whether the missives always reached their
destination, and without waiting too exactingly for
replies, those sagacious, half-resigned, alas ! coarse
letters to her kindred in Germany, letters a portion
of which has been made public for the information (and
sometimes the disgust) of later generations. Madame
wrote for forty years, twice a week without fail, a long
confidential letter to her aunt. The single break in
the correspondence was when Sophia went to France,
and dwelt, a much-honoured guest, in the house of
Madame. The correspondence ceased only with the
lamented death of the aged Electress.
In 1674 the talk of a marriage between a Prince
of Wolfenbuttel and " the little Sophia of Zell," the
only child of Duke George and Madame de Harburg,
precipitated a step which had long been dreaded. The
child would succeed, partly by the instrumentality of
her uncle, Duke Ernest, to her father's large fortune ;
but she could not take royal rank unless the morganatic
marriage between the father and mother was converted
into a royal marriage. This was not done immediately,
nor till various compromises had been tried. In the
meantime the two Dukes, as if there was no bone of
contention between them, went to war against the
French, and defeated Marshal de Crequi. Sophia's
Electress Sopbia 45
eldest son, George Louis, was with his father, and
never quitted his side. She gives in her Memoirs
the letter which the Duke wrote to her to announce
the German victory. He winds up his praise of the
Prince by calling him " a son worthy of his mother."
Little wonder that the wife and mother's heart was
proud, and small credit to the manoeuvring Eleanore
d'Olbrense, who sought to make mischief out of the
letter (which was impulsively shown to her) by pointing
out that it contained no mention of Duke George,
and but slighting reference to the soldiers from Zell.
The estrangement between the brothers, once so
closely united, became confirmed, and the announce-
ment of a marriage between Duke George and Madame
de Harburg, which would raise her to his rank and
make her his Duchess, grew more and more imminent,
to the indignation and disappointment of Duke Ernest
and Duchess Sophia ; because, in the event of a son's
being born to Duke George, his former pledge would
go for nothing Zell would be lost to the younger
branch of the House of Hanover.
Friends of the family, in striving to reconcile the
brothers, suggested what was destined to be the dis-
astrous expedient of a marriage between the eldest
son of the one and the only daughter of the other,
thus uniting hostile claims. Duchess Sophia says
nothing of her own feelings, but records what she
believed to be her husband's reluctance to a conclusion
which he felt was a degradation to the family, and
his deliberate demand for a great dowry, while he
protracted the negotiations in the hope that they
might fall through without any fault of his. This
statement is in direct opposition to the assertion of
the Zell party, their mouthpiece being the newly-made
Duchess of Hanover, as quoted by Dr. Doran. The
version given by the very dubious lady, of whom
46 Si TCosal XaMes
Duchess Sophia notes incidentally that she never spoke
the truth, is as follows. The Duchess Sophia was
bent on the marriage in order to secure her niece's
large fortune for her (Sophia's) son. In order to
compass her ends she paid Duke George a private
visit, arriving so early in the morning that he was
still in his dressing-room, into which she insisted on
intruding, taking a seat there, and plying her specious
arguments for the marriage, unconscious and reckless
of the fact that they were perfectly audible to the
future bride's mother in the adjacent bedroom. Such
conduct is not at all in keeping with the ordinary
behaviour of the little woman, whose liveliness included
a strong sense of the ridiculous, and might balance,
but did not by any means overthrow, her respect for
the bienseances.
The next great event in Duchess Sophia's life was
her visit to France in 1679, when she was in her
fiftieth year. It was a matter of more moment to her,
and excited in her a keener interest, than her journey
to Italy had done. Its ostensible purpose was to visit
her sister, Princess Louise, Abbess of Maubisson, whom
the Duchess had not seen for thirty years, and her
niece, almost her adopted child, Madame d'Orleans,
who had now been married eight years and was the
mother of two children, while, like most royal brides
of these days, she did not return to her native coun-
try. But there were other less openly-expressed
motives at work, which the Duchess acknowledged in
her Memoirs. The Duke had been led to nourish an
ambitious dream in connection with the visit to which
he had been brought to consent. His only daughter,
Sophia Charlotte, who was to accompany her mother,
was fair to see, as well as gifted with wit and learning.
Toland, describing her at a later date, calls her <f the
most beautiful Princess of her time." He says she was
Blecttess Sopfofa 47
not very tall and rather too plump, with regular
features, fair complexion, blue eyes, and " cole black
hair." 1 He commends her philosophy and wit and
mentions, in connection with her passionate love of
music, that she "played to perfection on the harpsi-
chord, and sang finely." Why should not this paragon
take the fancy of the Dauphin, who was still unmarried,
win the approval of the great Louis, which was of
more consequence, and achieve the greatest match in
Europe ? The prospect was even more dazzling than
the overtures for the Duchess of Orleans' marriage had
been to her interested relatives. Would there be lib-
erty to follow the Protestant religion accorded in this case
also ? Or was the temptation so great that there was
danger of the stipulation being neglected or given up ?
The Duke did not go with his wife and daughter
he only escorted them as far as Holland. There the
Duchess had the satisfaction of meeting and greeting
warmly one of the English friends of her youth, the
elder Mistress Carey, long a widow. Sophia was
travelling incognito, as she had travelled formerly. She
was, as it were, introduced into the new region by the
Duchess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a lady of the great
French house of Montmorency. Her familiarity with
the manners and customs of her native country was a
benefit to the traveller ; but the benefit was counter-
balanced by her superciliousness, and by the amount of
care and attention which her beauty was supposed to
require. However, the caustic comment was qualified
by the cordial admission on the part of the critic
(always ready to see and reckon up redeeming qualities
where these existed) of the general worth and friend-
liness of the Franco-German Duchess.
1 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in referring to the beauty of the
Hanoverian women, remarks on their dark hair and eyes and fair
complexion.
48 Ste TCosal XaMes
With a pen as vigorous and graphic as ever Sophia
describes what strikes her in France the dirtiness of
the inns, the excellence of the cookery, the politeness
of the officials, her joy at seeing her sister (who
laughed with her aside over Court forms and
ceremonies), her delight when she found herself
embraced by her old charge, Madame, who was await-
ing the Duchess's arrival, and " ran " to meet her.
The Duchess Sophia's descriptions of the French
Court are inimitable ; one sees every strongly sugges-
tive and picturesque figure. Yonder is the magnificent
Louis, who is the soul of politeness, yet does not
forget that Duke Ernest and Duke George of
Brunswick have beaten the French soldiers under
Crequi. Here is the amiable nonentity the Queen,
who confines herself to "dressing and eating," the
vocations for which she is fit, and keeps saying how
well the King loves her, and that she is much obliged
to him. There is the silent and awkward Dauphin,
with whom Sophia seeks intrepidly, but in vain, to
make conversation, doubtless not without an ulterior
reference to her charming young Princess, on whose
beauty and wit the King compliments the mother
in courtly phrase, but with no sign of desiring an
alliance between France and Hanover. Here again
is fussy, fantastic Monsieur, the King's brother, who
is exceedingly courteous to the Duchess, as a host is
bound to be to the guest he desires to honour. He
is annoyed at being caught en famllle in his night-cap
tied with flame-coloured ribbons. He is constantly
exhibiting his beloved jewels. Honest, homely
Madame, his second wife, is an old acquaintance of
the reader's. Not so the victim ready to be sacrificed,
whom her kind-hearted stepmother loved dearly
poor Marie Louise, daughter of Henrietta of England,
whose untimely death resembled closely tha,t of her
Ube jeiectress Sopbta 49
mother. Duchess Sophia witnessed Marie Louise's
betrothal and marriage by proxy to the King of Spain.
She records the passionate grief of the Princess at
quitting France, and mentions how, in showing the
bridegroom's unattractive miniature unattractive
though set with brilliants the girl permitted herself
to remark, with what bitterness may be guessed, that
she believed he was thought to resemble " that ugly
baboon the Duke of Wolfenbiittel." State necessities
are great, for Sophia, excellent woman though she was,
and herself the mother of a young and fondly cherished
daughter, does not utter the ghost of a protest against
the sacrifice.
It is matter of regret that we cannot give more
of the Duchess's lively experiences, while we sympathise
with her independent spirit and German patriotism in
declining to kiss the gown of the Queen of France, or
to take a tabouret (the stool allotted to Duchesses of
inferior rank), after she had been thought worthy of
a chair in the presence of her own Empress. Questions
of etiquette were continually arising and were sufficiently
perplexing even to adepts in what was little short of a
science. Madame d'Orleans, by her marriage to the
King of France's brother, was raised a step in rank
above her aunt, Duchess Sophia, to whom, nevertheless,
she gave the precedence, on account, as she explains
of the affection she bore her kinswoman. This tribute
of regard was not accomplished without many elaborate
manoeuvres, feints of staying behind, eating meals in
private together, etc. The new Queen of Spain was
still farther in advance of both her stepmother and the
Duchess Sophia. As one result, she had to sup alone
with her father, Monsieur, who in France was second
only to the King and the Dauphin ; while the two
elder ladies, who would otherwise have had to yield
the pas to their junior, ate their meals apart.
so Ste
The gardens of Versailles and St. Cloud afforded
supreme delight to Sophia. Their artificial stateliness
and splendour, their terraces, groves, fountains, statues,
represented cultivated adorned nature, the beau-ideal
of such rural tastes as the generation possessed. But
from the superbness of Court gaieties, and the supposed
elegance of princely alleys and arbours, Sophia was
fain to retreat to what she called her " harbour of
refuge," the Convent of Maubisson, where the sisters,
who were congenial spirits, enjoyed their brief reunion.
The Duchess of Orleans had been eager to promote
a marriage between her cousin of Brunswick and the
Dauphin ; but before parting from her aunt she had
to announce that the preliminaries of his marriage with
a Bavarian Princess were settled, so that in one respect
the visit was fruitless. By the Moselle and the Rhine
the travellers made their way north, the Duchess
pushing on in her eagerness to rejoin her Duke.
" Words," she says, " fail to describe my joy at seeing
the Duke once more." He on his part was " well
pleased " (as he well might be) with all her proceedings,
and thought she had " come off with great honour and
credit."
But troubles on every side awaited Duchess Sophia.
The Duke was in haste to be off to Italy. The pro-
ject of a marriage between her son George and his
cousin of Zell was again broached. It is scarcely
possible to read the Duchess's few restrained words
on the subject without being of the opinion of the
editor and the translator of her fragment of auto-
biography, that the alliance, though she yielded at last
to it, was extremely repugnant to her. It is hard to
understand how impartial English writers can revive
the idle, slanderous gossip of her enemies, which re-
presents her as urgently advocating the union to secure
Sophia of Zell's fortune for George. Duke Ernest's
tTbe Jlectre$5 Sopbia 51
father's will had been a strange one in this respect,
that he left to his sons in succession, according to their
seniority, as they survived each other, and without
reference to their heirs, the territories of Zell and
Hanover, so that if Duke Ernest died before his
remaining brothers, Duke George William and Duke
John Frederick, his children would be deprived of their
patrimony.
Another cause of anxiety and sorrow was the fatal
illness of Sophia's eldest sister, Princess Elizabeth,
Abbess of Herford. In her last days affection revived,
and she craved earnestly for her sister's society. The
Duchess repaired to the convent and stayed with the
dying woman, striving to support and cheer her till
she was summoned home by the startling news of the
sudden death of Duke John Frederick at Augsburg.
He had been bound for Italy, like his brother, but died
on the road ; and Duke Ernest, who in the midst of
his joviality had a due regard for his material interests,
was recalled forthwith to take possession of his late
brother's inheritance of Hanover, irrespective of the
fact that Duke John was married and the father of
several daughters.
A visit to the Duke's sister and Sophia's friend, the
Queen of Denmark, at her palace of Nicoping, afforded
a consoling break in those multitudinous griefs and
worries ; but no sooner had the Duchess returned to
Hanover than the tidings reached her, during one of
the chronic absences of her husband, that death had
caused her another heavy loss in the person of her
favourite brother and constant friend and correspon-
dent, the half father of her girlish days the Elector
Palatine, Charles Louis. This last blow went far to
prostrate the woman, who was as strong and faithful
in her attachments as she was high-spirited and resolute
in her actions. For the first time her spirits flag.
52 Sis TCogal Xafctes
She allows herself to complain of that mysterious,
all-prevalent malady of the century, which seems to
have belonged more to the mind than the body
" the spleen." She anticipates following speedily her
brother and sister, yet with fresh-springing courage and
cheerfulness hopes that her Duke's return from his
inveterate roving will give her back health of body
and mind.
Here, alas ! ends the Duchess's vivid chronicle of
her history. We have to depend for the rest of her
life on public events, side-lights, and the notices of
her contemporaries. It was not till twenty years after
she laid aside her Memoirs that the prospect of her
succession to the throne of England assumed anything
like a definite shape, or could have appeared to so
shrewd an observer and reasoner more than the merest
shadow of a chance. In the meantime a suggestion of
marrying George of Hanover to Princess Anne of
England was mooted. He went to the English Court
on the strength of it ; but the proposal was dropped,
and he was recalled by his father that he might enter
into fresh negotiations in connection with the ill-
starred marriage between him and Sophia of Zell,
which took place in the following year, 1682. This
conclusion was accomplished in spite of what we
believe was Duchess Sophia's hearty dislike to the
arrangement, and rooted distrust of it. It appeared
to be a satisfactory family compromise, which would
unite Hanover and Zell without further trouble. In
the end the two Dukes, George William and Ernest
Augustus, had set their hearts upon it more or less.
Sophia gave way to necessity, as she had always known
how to give way with dignity when nothing else could
be done. The story of this miserable marriage, un-
welcome alike to bridegroom and bride, will find its
fitting place on another page of the domestic annals
jElectress Sopfoia 53
of the Royal House of Hanover. It is sufficient to
say here that the most vehement partisan of the erring
Sophia Dorothea of Zell has not ventured to accuse
her mother-in-law of any direct participation in the
tragedy. The offences charged against the elder
Sophia are limited to cold alienation after the younger
Sophia had shown herself, by her reckless folly and
misconduct, unworthy of all confidence and esteem,
and of unwomanly passiveness at a crisis when it
would have been in all probability as useless as it
was distasteful to the Duchess to interfere. It has
not been denied that on Sophia Dorothea's first arrival
in Hanover, during the brief period when she behaved
as if she felt disposed to acknowledge her responsi-
bilities and do credit to her position, she was kindly
received and treated with consideration by her husband's
kindred. 1 Her beauty and grace found favour in their
eyes, though her beauty was her mother's, and her
grace was a Frenchwoman's grace one of those
Frenchwomen who had so branded their countrywomen
that the emphatic answer of a contemporary German
Prince when a French Princess had been proposed to
him as a wife, and a hundred advantages from the
alliance urged upon him, was, " No Frenchwoman."
Without doubt there must have been, in addition to the
natural antipathy to the scheming and deceitful mother
who had reached the position of Duchess of Hanover by
scantily honourable means, an utter lack of harmony
and sympathy between the honest, upright, self-con-
trolled Duchess, and her unprincipled, passion-ridden
daughter-in-law, who counted virtue, reputation, her
husband's honour, and her children's affection all that
good women hold most dear well lost for the insolent,
1 Poellnitz describes the Electress as kind to and careful of her
daughter-in-law in illness, even after Sophia Dorothea's quarrels with
Prince George were notorious.
54 Sf IRogal OLafcfes
lawless love of a man of whom Thackeray could write,
" a greater scamp does not walk the history of the seven-
teenth century." It would offer small excuse in Duchess
Sophia's eyes that her niece Sophia Dorothea had come
an unwilling bride to Hanover, or that the culprit's
husband and cousin, after the shortest effort to do the
best for her and himself, had been guilty of the grossest
sins against her, and had further displayed a complete
want of courtesy and forbearance where she was con-
cerned. A faithless, even a brutal husband, did not, in
the Duchess Sophia's code, go far to justify a disloyal
and defiant wife. The woman and mother would only
see, in the wife's retaliation on her husband, the wreck
of any not very brilliant promise the young man had
ever displayed. George was brave and manly enough,
as he had early proved. He had served his Emperor
with credit, if not distinction, c< on the Danube, against
the Turks, at the siege of Vienna, in Italy, and on the
Rhine." He was not without sense and prudence,
after his surly, selfish fashion. He was not without a
heart for his country if for nothing else. Such a wife
as his mother had been to his father, such a wife as
Caroline of Anspach was to George's son, the second
George, might have done something to redeem his not
too shining or heroic qualities from waste and degrada-
tion. It must be said, however, that the silent, loutish
Prince, though he was a Prince, was destitute of his
father's easy geniality and lavish joviality, which dazzled
even Duchess Sophia's clear eyes and caused her to
view her pleasure-loving Duke as a splendid paladin.
But a mother's eye cannot be expected to spy out every
imperfection in her child. The Duchess stood by her
son, her first-born, the lad of whose youthful valour
she had been so proud throughout his career, always
zealous for his interest, always striving to see whatever
merit he could claim, while her niece Madame d'Orleans
iBlecttess Sopbia 55
was remarking indignantly on his lack of consideration
for the mother whose chief care was for him. 1
In 1684 Duchess Sophia had a great source of
congratulation, though it involved a separation from
her only daughter. Two years after Prince George's
unpromising marriage (for which the Duchess had one
consolation in the birth of a grandson, an heir to
Hanover and Zell, and to a still greater inheritance, as
yet only faintly foreshadowed), Sophia Charlotte of
Brunswick married the Elector of Brandenburg, who
became in time the first King of Prussia. He was
eleven years her senior, and already a widower, the
father of a son ; but these were trifles in the sum of
his recommendations. She was the first Queen of
Prussia, and the grandmother of Frederick the Great.
Her famous grandson said of her : " She had the
genius of a great, and the knowledge of a learned
man . . . she loved and sought truth as her husband
loved splendour." Toland writes that she was so
liberal in her ideas of Government she was called
throughout Germany t( the republican Queen."
None of the Duchess's six sons achieved much
honour save George through his English inheritance.
They were soldiers, like their elder brother, and led
the armies their father sent out to fight in the European
wars. The dangers they encountered and their adverse
fates must have sorely wrung the heart of the woman
who recorded, " I am a fool with my children." In
1690 Duchess Sophia fell ill; so ill that her niece,
Madame d'Orleans, was in anxious fear for the life
dear to her. Little wonder that the Duchess sickened,
for in that disastrous year two of her sons Prince
1 George I. was the Duchess of Orleans' bete noire, and there was no
love lost between them. Their feud began at a very early date, when
the future Duchess was a child at play. Hiding behind the door of her
aunt's room the day George was born, she rushed forward to see the
newly-born infant, and narrowly escaped a whipping for her pains.
$6 Sis 1Roal Xafcies
Augustus and Prince Charles l fell in Transylvania,
fighting against the Turks. Augustus was her second
son " the poor Gus " whose prodigal ways had got
him into trouble with his father, so that he was
"thrust out of the parent nest, and had no more
keep." " I laugh in the day and cry all night about
it," admits the poor, brave, distracted wife and mother.
Another son, Prince Maximilian, was a yet more
heinous offender. When his father decided that there
should be no division of his territories among his
children, that he would leave them intact to his
eldest son George, Maximilian broke out into open
rebellion. The Prince was put under arrest, and one
of the subordinates who aided and abetted him, a
Hanoverian count bearing the now historical name
of Molcke, or Moltke, suffered capital punishment for
the offence. On Maximilian's release and nominal
forgiveness he repaired to Rome, and adopted the
Roman Catholic religion, after the fashion of his
uncle, Duke John. He ended his career an officer
in the Emperor's service and a declared Jacobite, in
opposition to his mother's and brother's claims to the
succession to the throne of England, while his name
was a forbidden word, as may well be imagined, in
the old Hanover residency.
1 Poellnitz calls Prince Charles his mother's favourite son.
CHAPTER V.
THE ELECTRESS.
IN 1692 Duke Ernest received the coveted rank of
Elector, reserved for a select number of German
Princes ; and the titles Duke of Brunswick, or lay
Bishop of Osnabriick, and Duchess of Brunswick, are
henceforth merged in the higher titles of Elector and
Electress. It was said the promotion was the payment
of the transference of a section of Ernest Augustus's
troops from the service of France to that of the
Emperor. Be that as it may, Ernest's devoted wife
was certain to look on the step as no more than his
due. It did not pass without being contested in
Germany, and just when the dispute was settled in
Ernest Augustus's favour in 1698, his death was the
heaviest of Sophia's many bereavements. She had
attributed a host of shining qualities to her Duke and
Elector to atone for his deficiencies in the more solid
virtues. Whatever were his faults and they were
many and flagrant, both as a man and a husband he
had never failed in treating her with the respect and
deference which belonged to the Princess, to the faithful,
life-long ally, to the mother of his children. In her
widowed state, though she still presided over her son's
Court, her position was different from what it had
been in the lifetime of her husband. She was ready to
be the first to give her allegiance to the new Elector ;
but George was incapable of showing any graciousness
in the acceptance of the allegiance from the mother
57
ss Ste IRogal XaMes
always ready to make excuses for him. In some
respects her position was thenceforth one of sufferance ;
and though succeeding events lent it a fresh importance,
they bred also additional difficulties between the
Electress and her son. It was reported that she was
jealous of his interference in her English concerns. It
might be said, with more propriety, that he was jealous
both of her and of his son (George II.), and that the
idea that she or he might eclipse the Elector in the
eyes of their English partisans rendered him positively
hostile to their advances. This passed with superficial
observers for singular high-mindedness and disinter-
estedness on the part of the Elector; but he was not by
any means too high-minded and disinterested to take
the good things which were offered to him ; and had he
been actuated by motives of policy alone, he could not
have pursued a wiser course than that of the assumed
reluctance and indifference with which he met his great
destiny. Neither was the attitude altogether assumed ;
it was the result of his sluggishness, doggedness, and
ungraciousness to his family, quite as much as of his
cool craft.
A great resource and interest to the Electress, in
those days of loss and mourning, was the education
of her grandchildren, the son and daughter of the
Elector George, who, on the disgrace and imprison-
ment of their mother, passed into the Electress Sophia's
keeping. Unfortunately, the boy grew up very much
a repetition of his unprepossessing father, brave,
cautious, callous, selfish, indulging freely in the vice
around him, while the Electress did not bestow on
him the unrequited affection she had lavished on his
father. In the quarrels between father and son, which
rent the residency into two factions, she invariably
took the father's part. The Electress' s grand-daughter,
a fourth Sophia and a second Sophia Dorothea, better
Ube Electress Sopbta 59
repaid her training. Under the Electress's care she
grew up with a greater resemblance to her aunt, the
Queen of Prussia, than to her unhappy mother. Sophia
Dorothea the second was intellectual, upright, full of
sense and good humour. She was tall, with light-
brown hair and lively blue eyes, which redeemed the
irregularity of her features.
In 1701, while William of Orange still reigned in
England, the last of Princess Anne's sickly children,
the young Duke of Gloucester, died ; and a patriotic
English Parliament, dreading the return of Roman
Catholicism and despotism in England with the recall
of the exiled Stewarts, voted the Bill of Succession, by
which the inheritance of the English crown was settled
on the Electress Sophia and her children, as the nearest
Protestant heirs in the royal line. In doing so, the
Parliament passed over the son and daughter of
James II. at St. Germain ; the children of that rueful
young Queen of Spain (the grand-daughter of Charles I.),
at whose marriage the Electress Sophia had assisted
during her visit to France, and the Duchess of Savoy,
the Queen of Spain's sister, with her children, in
addition to the surviving descendants of Sophia's
brothers. All these persons had disqualified them-
selves from succeeding to the throne of England by
their profession of the Roman Catholic religion.
The Bill of Succession was great news for Hanover,
and was followed by grand doings there. Till then
the prospect of inheriting England had been very
dim and uncertain ; even yet it was insecure ; and
George I. is believed never to have regarded the
English crown as resting firmly on his head. But if
George was unfit to be more than an Elector, there
was a queenly spirit behind him which age could not
tame or sorrow break. The Electress Sophia was then
seventy years old, but it could be said of her, as of
60 Sij racial Xabtes
the great lawgiver, that her eye was not dim or her
natural strength abated. Her heart was fired by the
glorious vista opening out before her, the magnificent
prospect for her children's children ; and surely she
herself was fit to reign, not in a mock sovereignty
over a foreign country such as her mother had clung
to, but in the right of that mother over the three
kingdoms of her ancestors. " If I can but die Queen
of England, I will be content," she said ; and her
ambition was neither unworthy nor unnatural.
In 1701 the Earl of Macclesfield, accompanied by
Lord Say and Sele, Lord Tunbridge, and Lord Mohun,
went to Hanover in order to deliver the Act of
Succession to the Electress. Lord Macclesfield, it is
said vaguely, " bore a relation to the Queen of
Bohemia," so that Sophia might have had some pre-
vious acquaintance with him when he was in her
mother's service, a distinct recommendation to the office
with which he was entrusted. Luckily, in addition
to the noblemen who accompanied him, he had, in
the person of a private gentleman named Toland, a
lively chronicler of what passed. If his account is
stripped of its laudatory verbiage, it remains a graphic
commentary on scene and circumstances. Thrifty
Hanover in Elector George's day blossomed into
lavish expenditure for the occasion. There was feast-
ing everywhere at the Government's expense. No
Englishman present in the town was suffered to pay
for his entertainment. Balls, plays, and operas followed
each other in rapid succession. But the crowning
performances were the delivery to Sophia of the Act
of Succession, the great ball on the evening of the
day, to celebrate the event, and the investiture of
Elector George with the Order of the Garter. The
Electress presented Macclesfield with her picture
surmounted by a diamond crown. The Elector's
tlbe lElectress Sopbia 61
offering to the peer was a gold ewer. Dr. Sandys,
Lord Macclesfield's chaplain, preached and read the
Common Prayers of the Church of England before
the Electress, who had been brought up a Calvinist,
while her son was a Lutheran. She was ready to
listen to the service in her ante-chamber, and uttered
the responses " as punctually as if she had made them
all her life and was well acquainted with the
Liturgy " ; but she would not consent to have it set
up in her chapel. It was the English form of
Protestantism, she said, but it was only a form one
of many and she did not desire that in which she
had been reared to be eclipsed and thrust out of sight,
as though it were not Christianity. Here is Toland's
description of the Electress at the age of seventy-three ;
it is a fitting pendant to the piquant sketches she
furnishes of herself as the young Princess at the Hague
and at Heidelberg, and as the young Duchess of her
Italian adventures. She was of " a vigorous and
cheerful countenance." Her step was as firm and
her bearing as erect as that of any young lady. There
was not one wrinkle in her face, which was still very
agreeable (she was a handsome old woman, as she had
been a pretty girl). There was not one tooth out
of her head, and she read without spectacles, as Toland
often saw her do, letters of a small character, in the
dusk of the evening. She was as great a worker as
the late Queen Mary (Anne's sister) ; a visitor could
not turn himself in the palace without meeting
monuments of her industry. All the chairs in the
privy-chamber were wrought by her hand ; so were
the ornaments of the altar in the Electoral chapel.
She was the most constant and indefatigable walker
Toland had ever known ; never missing a day, if the
weather were fine, for one or two hours, and often
more, in the fine gardens of Herrenhausen (the country
62 Sij ffiosal Xafcfes
house of the Dukes and Electors, a mile and a half
from the town). She had read a prodigious quantity,
and spoke four or five different languages. 1 She was
adored for her goodness and affability. Toland was
the first to kiss her hand after the Bill of Succession
was read ; when she said to him that she was afraid the
nation had already repented of their choice of an old
woman, but she hoped none of her posterity would give
the English cause to weary of them. Doubtless it was
in reference to this admission of her age that Toland so
dwells on her native vigour, and the absence of any sign
in her of physical weakness and infirmity.
Sophia's intellect was far too acute to leave her un-
acquainted with the fact which her son George fully
recognised that, in spite of the Act of Succession, it
was still very doubtful whether Whig and Tory would
agree at last to place her on the throne, whether there
would not be a reaction in accordance with Queen
Anne's well-known leaning to the claims of her nearest
relations, which must end by restoring the exiled
Stewarts to their forfeited rights. She was not a woman
to be blinded by the most soaring ambition. It was in
her son and grandson's interests, as well as in her own,
that she watched as keenly as in the days of her youth
every sign of the times, and counselled wise counsels,
which helped to win the day.
It was a momentous period for all Europe when
Charles XII. of Sweden blazed like a meteor across
the political sky ; when Peter the Great donned his
carpenter's cap and converted old Muscovy into modern
Russia ; when the wars of the Spanish Succession raged
1 Sophia must have appeared a prodigy of learning to Toland,
contrasted with what he might have heard of the illiteracy of Queen
Anne, and of the late Queen Mary, who was a thoughtful and intelligent
woman; but even she could not write a letter in her mother-tongue
without lapsing into lamentable spelling. There had been a great
reaction from the classical culture of Elizabeth's reign where women
were concerned. Their education had sunk to a low ebb.
Electress Sopbia 63
in blood and fire far and near, and darkened the last
days of the great Louis ; when Marlborough's splendid
fruitless victories of Blenheim, Ramillies, Malplaquet,
etc., covered the English arms with glory. The
Electress had a special interest in Malborough and
his campaigns. Her youngest son, Prince Ernest, was
in his camp. In addition, Marlborough was the great
Whig leader, and sworn ally of the House of Brunswick,
while his termagant of a wife could twist Sophia's
second cousin, Anne, round her little finger. Still,
the position was perilous. The Tories were formidable
under Harley and St. John. Even Marlborough was
to be profoundly distrusted. He had a fair face and
a fair tongue, but his political creed could be manipulated
to any extent to suit his interests. He had the most
tempting means of making his peace at any time with
the Stewarts through his sister-in-law, Frances, Lady
Tyrconnel, and his nephew, the Duke of Berwick, and
there is abundant proof that he availed himself of the
means.
In 1703 Marlborough was employed by the Electress
to procure for her a portrait of her cousin Anne.
There was a resemblance between the cousins ; both
were stout, both were comely, with the same full face
and double chin. But Anne's heavily good-humoured
face was like a lamp without a kindling light with-
in when we see it by the face of the Electress Sophia.
Thackeray has supplied a sketch from a contemporary
print of the Electress. Instead of the flowing curls of
her youth, her head is crowned by a high structure of
silk or lace in the fashion of the day, and this again
surmounts the short locks of what may be a carefully
arranged wig. The face is that of a fine-looking old
lady, bright with intelligence and beaming with sense
and kindliness, while " the air of a Princess " is as
conspicuous as ever. Looking at Anne's stolid face,
6 4 Sij TRogal OLafcies
Sophia might be pardoned for thinking that if her
cousin's reign was called the Augustan Age of England,
her own would be more deserving of the name ; for
was she not infinitely better qualified than Anne, with
her dull wits and weak will, to enter with fullest sym-
pathy into communion with those master spirits which
were rendering the country and the period illustrious ?
The years which followed still brought the same
mingling of joy and sorrow that had been the burden of
the years which went before them. In 1 703 Sophia's son,
Prince Christian, was slain in a battle on the Danube
between the French and the Imperial troops. In 1704
his sister, the Queen of Prussia, died in the prime of
life. Madame d'Orleans, in recording the death, says,
" She was respected and liked by all who knew her."
Yet she, according to the same trustworthy authority,
failed a little, after the manner of her brothers, in what
was due to her mother : " All her children even the
Queen of Prussia, whom she loved so never treated
her as they ought to have done." Alas ! poor mother !
who was " a fool about her children." It would seem
as if Sophia's warm heart had not descended either to
son or daughter, though the daughter inherited the
mother's fine intellect.
The speech of the Queen of Prussia on her death-bed
is a marvel of philosophy, strongly tinged with sarcasm
rather than with reverent devotion or human tenderness.
" Do not pity me," she said ; "I go to satisfy my
curiosity on subjects that Leibnitz has never been able
to explain space, eternity, being, and nothing ; while
in my funeral the King my husband will find a -new
opportunity of displaying his magnificence."
In 1705 the joint marriages of the Electress's two
grandchildren, the Electoral Prince (George II.) and
his sister Sophia Dorothea, were celebrated with all the
splendour befitting the brilliant prospects of the House
Blecttess Sopbia 65
of Brunswick. The fourth Sophia married her cousin,
the Crown Prince of Prussia, and was in her turn
Queen of Prussia no unworthy successor to the first
Queen. " Three remarkable Englishmen," writes Dr.
Doran, " were present at the marriage. These were
Lord Halifax, Sir John Vanbrugh, and Joseph Addison."
The statesman came with a Bill of naturalisation for
the Electoral family, and with the Order of the Garter
for the second George ; the great architect and play-
writer appeared in his official capacity as Clarencieux
King-at-Arms ; the great essayist was in the company
by favour of Halifax.
Prince George married Caroline of Anspach, and
here Sophia had her reward. Her grand-daughter by
marriage was a congenial spirit, whose education,
neglected in her youth at the Court of Saxony, had
been so supplemented by the guidance and example of
the Electress's daughter, into whose care Caroline
passed, that she ended by being one of the best
instructed and most accomplished women of her day.
What is more to the purpose, she was wise and witty,
like Sophia's self. She was the most dutiful, devoted
of wives to a husband who was by no means respect-
inspiring. She was a grand-daughter after the Electress's
own heart. Nine years of Caroline's married life were
spent at the Court of Hanover ; and the elder members
of her numerous family were born there. In them
Sophia lived to see herself surrounded by her descendants
of the third generation.
But the succession to the Crown of England was
still hanging in the balance, and as time passed the
plots and cabals in connection with it thickened and
deepened. Neither was the Electoral family by any
means united on that or on any other subject, for the
quarrels of the two Georges were notorious. The
Elector George professed a chilling indifference to
66 Sij IRogal Xafcfes
the English succession. Sophia, to whom he was her
Elector, was placed in a difficult position. She was
bound to yield to him and to conciliate him. It was
no less her policy than her pleasure to defer to his
views, and veil her eager interest in the progress of
events. She had a hard part to play. If she was
induced, according to Marlborough's testimony, " re-
peatedly to disavow, both in public and private, her
wish to visit England ' ' a step already mooted in
Parliament the awkwardness of the situation is some
excuse for the dissimulation in a notably candid and
honest woman. Sophia had been a great traveller for
her day. She had visited Italy, Switzerland, many
parts of Germany, Holland the place of her birth
France. It would be strange if she was never to see
England, her mother's country, and still more the
country over which she might be called to reign. 1
Aged as she was, she was ready and willing to face
the undertaking, and if it had been accomplished she
could hardly have failed to win the golden opinions
which her son and grandson were so little calculated
to earn. But the opposition of the English Tories to
Sophia's appearance on the scene was naturally strong.
Anne was set against it ; many of the Whigs them-
selves were cool on the point, dreading to advocate a step
which would entirely compromise them, while it might
bring division into their ranks. The Electress had
the mortification, severe to a woman of her ardent
spirit, to find herself held at arm's length as it were
by a large proportion of those who should have been
her warmest supporters. Another question in dispute
was the propriety of the Electress's receiving from
the English Government a pension befitting the heir
1 In speaking to Lord Dartmouth during her husband's life, Sophia
said she could not leave the Elector and her family, otherwise she
would be glad to see her own country, as she called it, and would
willingly have her bones laid by her mother's in Westminster Abbey.
Ube jElectress Sopbia 6 7
to the throne. Never in the whole course of her
career had Sophia affected to despise money or money's
power. In her present ambiguous circumstances in
relation to her discourteous son, whose subject she
was, while she was likely soon to be his Queen, the
practical independence which such a pension would
give her rendered the suggestion doubly welcome.
This question of a pension was used as a bait by both
the great political factions, for the Tories dissembled,
and approached the Electress with specious overtures.
There were many English now in Hanover; several
were in the Electress's household ; and their presence
certainly did not tend to allay the ferment of expecta-
tion, and the undercurrent of scheming and manoeuvring
which was for ever at work. " Such humours, such
jealousies, such villainies in the Hanoverian Court,"
declared one of the baffled negotiators. The Electress
listened to both Whigs and Tories, and tried to make
friends with both, as the future sovereign who was to
rule the entire nation. The object of the Tories is said
to have been to secure from the Electoral family such
expressions of satisfaction with the Tory Govern-
ment as should help to keep them in office till the
death of Anne and the proclamation of the Pretender.
For this purpose they induced Anne, sorely against
her will, to renew her expressions of goodwill to the
Hanoverian House, while recognising them as her
heirs. The Electoral Prince and Caroline of Anspach's
eldest daughter was named Anne after the Queen of
England, who consented to be her god-mother.
In 1706, George, the Electoral Prince, had been
created by Queen Anne Duke of Cambridge, with the
right to sit in the English House of Peers, and to
take precedence of his fellow peers. But for eight
years the creation remained in abeyance, and any
proposal for the Prince to visit England or to take
68 Sis racial Xafcies
his seat in the Peers was strenuously opposed by the
Tories, and was regarded with extreme disapproval
by Anne, who dreaded a public demonstration in his
favour. At the same time Harley sent a kinsman and
namesake to Hanover to impose upon the EJectress
by renewed arrangements for her visiting England
and for her receiving a pension. Marlborough, on
his side, despatched his political agent, an Irish gentle-
man named Molyneux, to warn the Elector's secretary
of the treachery of the Tories, and their determination
to place the Pretender on the throne.
By a fresh ruse of the Tories, Baron Schutz arrived
in Hanover with a writ summoning the Duke of
Cambridge to take his seat in the House of Lords,
and with letters from the Queen and her ministers,
written in the friendliest terms, to the Electress and
her son. When these letters failed to produce the
effect they were intended to have, of drawing from the
heads of the House of Hanover such expressions of
confidence and regard as would help the Tories and
displease the Whigs, the Government began to show
their true colours, though the veil was not altogether
withdrawn. Anne was made to write that the writ
had been served without her authority ; that while
she was favourable to the Protestant settlement, she
would suffer no diminution of her royal prerogatives,
and that her intention was to oppose the Electoral
Prince's visit to England and his taking his seat in her
House of Peers, however fatal the consequences. At
the same time her minister, Harley, wrote to Sophia,
recommending her to rely implicitly on the friendship
of the Queen (he was quite cognisant of its lukewarm
nature) and dissuading her from identifying her interests
with those of the Whigs.
The Electress's answer was to direct copies of the
letters to be at once forwarded to Marlborough, as the
Ube Electress SopWa 69
Whigs' ostensible representative. It is from Marl-
borough's agent, Molyneux, that we hear the sad result
of the prolonged strife. His account is given with
genuine regret and kindly feeling.
" The last post I finished my letter about six in
the evening [June 9th, 1714], not an hour after
the post went. I went directly afterwards to Herren-
hausen, the country house of the Court, and there
the first thing I heard was that the good old Electress
was fast dying in one of the public walks. I ran up
there, and found her just expiring in the arms of the
poor Electoral Princess amidst the tears of a great
many of her servants, who endeavoured in vain to
help her. I can give you no account of her illness,
but that I believe the chagrin of those villainous letters
I sent you last has been in a great measure the cause
of it. The Rheingravine, 1 who has been with her
these fifteen years, has told me she never knew any-
thing make so deep an impression on her as the affair
of the Prince's journey, which I am sure she had to
the last degree at heart ; and she has done me the
honour to tell me so twenty times. In the midst of
this concern those letters arrived, and those, I verily
believe, have broken her heart and brought her with
sorrow to the grave. The letters were delivered on
Wednesday at noon. That evening when I came to
Court she was at cards, but so full of these letters that
she got up and ordered me to follow her into the
garden, where she gave them to me to read, and walked
and spoke a great deal in connection with them. I
believe she walked three hours that night. The next
morning, which was Thursday, I heard she was out
of order ; and on going immediately to Court, she
ordered me to be called into her bedchamber. She
gave me the letters I sent you to copy ; she bid me
1 A half-sister of Madame d'Orleans, and a niece of the Electress.
70 Si
send them (the copies) the next post, and bring them
(the originals) afterwards to her Court. That was on
Thursday. In the morning of Friday she told me she
was very well, but seemed very chagrined. She was
dressed, and dined with the Elector as usual. About four
she did me the honour to send me to town for some
other copies of the same letters, and then she was still
perfectly well. She worked and talked very heartily in
the Orangerie ; l after that, at about six, she went to
walk in the garden, and was still very well. A shower
of rain came on. As she was walking pretty fast to get
to shelter, they told her they believed she walked a
little too fast. She answered, * I believe I do,' and
dropped down in saying those words, which were her
last. They raised her up, chafed her with spirits,
tried to bleed her ; but it was all in vain, and when I
came up to her she was as dead as if she had been four
days so. No Princess ever died more regretted, and
I infinitely pity those servants that have known her a
long time, when I, that have had the honour to know
her but a month, can scarce refrain from tears in
relating this."
When Madame d'Orleans heard of the death of the
aunt for whom she had so great an affection, she
quoted from a letter of the Electress's in which she
had written that sudden death was best ; that it might
be painful to die in one's bed, having on one side the
minister or priest, and on the other the doctor, " who
can do nothing for you." Thus passed away in the
manner she desired a brave, true woman, who had
been early taught, what she had never forgotten, " to
love God and fear the devil." The Electress Sophia
had reached the age of eighty- four. Three out of
her eight children survived her, the Elector George,
1 Queen Anne's orangerie, a kind of magnified summer-house, is
to be seen in the grounds of Kensington Palace.
Ube Electress Sopbia 71
Prince Maximilian the renegade, and Prince Ernest,
the youngest born. The last was sufficiently trust-
worthy to be placed at the head of the Council, to
which George entrusted the management of the affairs
of Hanover when he left for England, taking with
him the son with whom he was not on speaking terms
for years at a time.
The Electress's wish was not granted, that " Sophia,
Queen of Great Britain," should be inscribed on her
tomb. Few Queens more deserving of the title ever
reigned. The prize she coveted had been all but
within her grasp. Sophia died in the month of June ;
two months afterwards, in the August of the same year,
her second cousin, Anne, who had been ailing and
failing for some time, died of dropsy. She was fifty
years of age, and more than thirty years Sophia's
junior.
II.
SOPHIA DOROTHEA OF ZELL, WIFE OF
GEORGE I.
73
AUTHORITIES:
Histoire Secrete de la Duchesse d' Hanover, Epouse de George
Premier, by the Baron von Poellnitz ; Memoirs of Sophia Dorothea,
from the secret archives of Hanover, Brunswick, Berlin, and Vienna ;
Dr. Doran's Lives of the Queens of the House of Hanover; Thackeray's
Four Gtorges.
74
SOPHIA DOROTHEA OF ZELL, WIFE OF GEORGE I. (THE PRISONER
OF AHLDEN).
CHAPTER I.
SOPHIA DOROTHEA OF ZELL, WIFE OF GEORGE I.
CELLE, or Zell, is described by Thackeray as " a little
town of 10,000 people, that lies on the railway between
Hamburg and Hanover, in the midst of great plains
of sand upon the river Celle." It was the seat of one
of the duchies into which the House of Brunswick and
Hanover was divided, and it was the birthplace of the
unhappy Sophia Dorothea. Her miserable fate has
raised up for her sometimes in quarters where one
would least expect such advocates zealous partisans,
unreasoning and unreasonable in their partisanship,
disposed, in order to clear their heroine, to sully
recklessly the reputation of all who stood in opposition
to her in her lifetime.
Sophia Dorothea, daughter of Duke George William
of Brunswick, by his morganatic marriage with Eleanore
d'Olbrense, was born at Zell in September, 1666. Her
birth was the signal for her father's bestowal on her
mother, to whom he had already accorded the style
of Madame de Harburg, the additional title of Countess
von Wilhelmsburg, endowing her with the island of
Wilhelmsburg, on the Elbe, near Hamburg. The
island was thickly stocked with game, which found a
ready sale in Hamburg, so that it was a perquisite
of some value. As time passed, and the other children
born to the couple did not survive their infancy, the
Duke, with the consent of his brother Duke Ernest,
added to his settlements on his wife, and especially on
75
76 Sij IRopal SLafcies
his child, till the little girl became a great enough
heiress to cause the fact that she was the child of
a morganatic marriage, and that her mother was not
of royal rank, to be in a measure 'overlooked. There
were suitors for her hand even then, not only among
the nobles, but among the minor Princes of Northern
Germany. It was quite possible that at any time, by
the Emperor's consent, Duke George's wife might be
promoted to the rank of his Duchess. Duke Ernest
and Duchess Sophia lived in dread of this contingency,
which would seriously affect their children's interests.
It was not likely to escape the attention, or to fail to
enter into the calculations of the neighbouring magnates.
All things considered, it was not probable that a hand-
some noble lad, in his early teens, who was at that
time a page in the royal suite maintained at Zell, and
a playfellow of the small seven-year-old Sophia, would
have much chance of winning her hand when he was
twenty-three and she was fourteen the age fixed for
her majority and her selection of a husband. It might
be the distinctive audacity of the Konigsmarks, the
lad's family destined to make Europe ring with
questionable exploits which originated the idea that was
in existence in those early days. This lad, fated to be
Sophia Dorothea's evil genius, was Philip Christopher
von Konigsmark. His family, one of note in Branden-
burg, had settled in Sweden, where it produced men of
more honourable renown than those descendants whose
splendid vices and daring crimes electrified the civilised
world.
A more promising bridegroom for the little beauty
and heiress of Duke George William's Court offered
himself, when she was still only nine years of age, in
the person of Frederic, eldest son of the reigning
Duke of Wolfenbiittel, her father's cousin. He was
willing to waive for the time, doubtless the question
Sopbfa 2>orotbea of Zell, Mffe of <3eor0e I. 77
of her not being of royal rank, and the young couple
were formally betrothed ; but the bridegroom-elect
was slain the following year at the siege of Phillipsburg.
Augustus of Wolfenbiittel, the Duke's second son,
took the place of his eftler brother ; but in the mean-
time the Emperor's consent had been obtained, the
Countess of Wilhelmsburg was recognised as the
Duchess of Hanover, and Sophia Dorothea was, by
Imperial decree, a Princess as well as her father's
heiress. Her hand in marriage was more in request
than ever, while her father was not favourable to the
pretensions of the Prince of Wolfenbiittel. The excuse
which Duke George gave was that he regarded the
death of the elder brother as a bad omen. Probably
the Duke was already hankering after a marriage for
his daughter with Duke Ernest's eldest son Prince
George, the marriage on which both brothers were
eventually determined. It would keep the Brunswick
possessions as much as possible united, and it would
combine the rights of the cousins, supposing there
should be an attempt to bring forward Prince George
as a rival to Sophia Dorothea, on the ground of the
pledge to Duke Ernest, before his marriage, that his
children should inherit the duchy of Hanover. If the
royal fathers desired the marriage of the cousins, the
mothers never on cordial terms were both averse
to it. We have already heard how long Duchess
Sophia resisted the match, and persuaded herself that
her Duke, whatever his policy in dealing with his
brother on the matter, was equally opposed to it.
Eleanore, Duchess of Hanover, had no reason to sup-
pose, on her side, that her sister-in-law would treat her
as an equal or a friend were the alliance completed. She
inclined strongly to the Wolfenbiittel connection, since
the reigning Duke had always supported her claims.
Duke George delayed the decision by putting off
78 Sf TRosal Xafcies
his daughter's majority for two years, till she was
sixteen instead of fourteen, while Prince George went
to England to make overtures for the hand of Princess
Anne. But always in the background there lurked
the advisability of the marriage of George and Sophia
Dorothea, with all its fatally specious recommendations.
Sophia Dorothea's admirers speak of her as at this
time a beautiful, graceful, amiable young girl, excelling
in many accomplishments. With regard to the beauty
and grace, they may be taken for granted. She was
the daughter of a beautiful mother, and one portrait
of her, which survives, represents her in a straw hat
and laced bodice a fair, buxom young woman, with
charms of a voluptuous type. Her eyes are half sleepy,
half languishing, her square chin is cleft by a dimple.
In reference to her accomplishments, these are always
judiciously generalised, and spoken of vaguely. The
exception, which is emphatically insisted upon, is " her
exquisite dancing, such as might have been expected
from the daughter of a French mother." We may give
entire credence to her exquisite dancing. Her garru-
lous, simple-minded champion, Baron von Poellnitz,
mentions it particularly, when on the occasion of a ball
given by Prince George the Princess " stood up " with
Count von Konigsmark, and the performance of the
pair won the admiration of the assembled company.
The amiability of a poor little girl of sixteen who
has never quitted her father's residency has not been
severely tested. In the course of a very few years
Sophia Dorothea's amiability developed into a violent
and stubborn temper, with all the headstrong passions
of an undisciplined nature.
The " careful education " given to the girl by her
mother the Duchess, so frequently dwelt upon by poor
Sophia Dorothea's adherents, sounds as apocryphal in
the sequel as do " the virtues " largely ascribed to
Sopbia Borotbea ot Zell, Mife of (Beorse L 79
Eleanore d'Olbrense, both before and after her marriage,
by the same disingenuous commentators. The virtues
appear to resolve themselves into the craft with which
an ambitious woman procured her promotion, and the
plausible propriety by which she took care to retain the
advantages she had secured. So far from bringing up
her only child with exceptional attention and devotion
to principle, a trustworthy contemporary, the Duchess
of Orleans, who, as a rule, is eminently truthful even
when she is most prejudiced, gives as her deliberate
opinion, which I have already had occasion to quote,
that the Princess's errors and misfortunes were due
in the first place to the wretchedly neglected education
for which her mother was responsible.
The birthday, when Sophia Dorothea would attain
the mature age of sixteen, was now at hand, and the
question whether she was to marry Augustus of
Wolfenbiittel or George of Hanover had to be settled
without further loss of time. Then is said to occur
the conversion of the Duchess Sophia to the two
Dukes' secret wishes, and the odd nocturnal visit to
Zell, in which one is not inclined to put much faith.
Poellnitz records it, but in a very modified form.
The Duchess arrived early, which seeing that she had
only twenty miles to travel was not very wonderful.
She had an interview with both her brother and sister-in-
law, and offered her congratulations on their daughter's
birthday. The only attempt if it was an attempt
at concealing the main object of the visit from Duchess
Eleanore was that Duchess Sophia spoke in German,
the native tongue of herself and the Duke, which the
accomplished lady who had been for seventeen years
the wife of a German Duke, dwelling in a German
duchy, was not supposed to understand. Granting that
French was largely the language of European Courts
at this date, this circumstance is in itself singular.
Xafcies
Poellnitz, unlike the other defenders of Sophia
Dorothea, does not find it necessary to traduce the
Electress Sophia in his attempt to make a cause for
her unhappy daughter-in-law. He is perfectly fair
to the elder lady, fully admitting her fine qualities
and her general goodness and kindness. His censure
is confined to the sharp sarcastic speeches which she
addressed to Sophia Dorothea, in which we can easily
believe, as in keeping with the speaker, and to her
non-interference at the last crisis. His most severe
reflection on the Electress is when he includes her
in the list of Sophia Dorothea's enemies who were
punished for their hostility to her, the Electress's
punishment being that her wish to be Queen of Great
Britain was not granted.
As an instance of the numerous inaccuracies and
inconsistencies which are to be found in the accounts
of the Duchess Sophia's alleged visit to Zell and its
consequences, it was certainly made, if made at all, before
Sophia Dorothea's birthday on September 1 5th, and
it is expressly said that the journey was taken on one
of the very hottest nights of the season ; while it is
added, without hesitation, that the inauspicious marriage
thus brought about was pressed on with indecent haste,
and was celebrated within a few days, at the most a
few weeks. As it happened, Sophia Dorothea was
not married till the following November (1682), fully
two months after her birthday.
Whether or not there is any truth in the tradition,
which still survives among the romance-loving maidens
of Zell, that Sophia Dorothea had already given her
heart to Prince Augustus of Wolfenbiittel (the son
of " the ugly baboon," to whom Marie Louise of
Orleans likened her unseen Spanish husband), it is
beyond question that the unwilling bride had no heart
for George of Hanover, though she wrote a formal
Sopbta Dorotbea of Zell, TOfe of George I. 81
letter of acquiescence in her parents' wishes to his
parents. She is said to have fainted when she heard
of his arrival in the character of an accepted bridegroom
at the gate of the castle.
On the gloomy November day of wind and rain
when the wedding took place she still clung to the
friends of her youth, and shrank unconquerably from
the twenty miles' journey which was to take her so far
away, as it seemed to her inexperience in those days
of bad roads and difficult locomotion. Above all,
the parting was to commit her to the care of an
unattractive, ungracious cousin and husband. Few
young men could have been more repellent to a self-
willed, frivolous girl than the ungainly, silent, gruff
lad of twenty-two, who deserved some pity on his
own account. Grievous as were his sins, he too was a
victim to political expediency, since he was as utterly
disinclined to the marriage as his young wife showed
herself.
In spite of it all, the first two years of the pair's
married life at Hanover seemed to give promise
of a bright ending to a bad beginning. Princess
George, as the Electoral Princess was familiarly called,
behaved as if she had some sense of the duties as well
as of the compensations of her lot, and had made up
her mind to live up to them. She was so young, and
personally so attractive, that good-natured people .
would have been ready to forgive a great deal to her
if she had but continued to give any sign of doing
her best. It is not denied on any hand that she was
received at the Court of Hanover with all the
cordiality and distinction to which the bride of the
heir-apparent was entitled. Even Prince George
thawed a little from the churlish and defiant attitude
natural to him in all circumstances. She was a mother
at seventeen, her son George Augustus (George II.)
6
82 Stj iRosal XaMes
being born in 1683, when there was the usual rejoicing
over an heir, and the usual increase of importance
and consideration for the young mother.
But very soon the horizon clouded over, never
again to reveal a serene domestic sky. The Court of
Hanover, then one of the most brilliant in Germany,
was, even with the Electress Sophia at its head, no
nursing-ground for the sanctity of home and the
growth of home virtues. Its moral standard was of the
lowest. Vice reigned triumphant in high places, as in
other European Courts of the time. The Elector and
his son were among the most flagrant offenders in
the gross self-indulgence and open profligacy which
prevailed. The Electress, according to the tenets of
the women like her, wisely or unwisely ignored what
she could not prevent, and pursued the even tenor of
her way ; honourable among the base, upright among
the depraved, gathering around her a circle of like-
minded men and women, and contenting herself with
their respect and regard. For this apparent indifference
to the conduct of her neighbours she has been loudly
and persistently reproached ; but it would be difficult
to say how she could have improved the aspect of
affairs by an undignified exhibition of furious resent-
ment and open rebellion against her husband and
sovereign. Sophia Dorothea writhed and raged under
similar domestic injuries ; she was ready to retaliate
by showing herself far from beyond suspicion, and
the result was not encouraging.
Hanover, on its dissolute side, was dominated by one
wicked woman. She is held up, without reserve, to the
detestation of her worthier contemporaries and of
posterity as the Jezebel of her country and generation.
She was one of two handsome unprincipled sisters named
Meissenbach, who came with their father, a political
adventurer, to the Hanoverian Court. These adven-
Sopbfa 2>orotbea of Zell, Wfe of George I* 83
turers were very often soldiers of fortune or members of
noble families, fallen into poverty, with their wives and
daughters. The whole were apt to be the parasitical
pests of the period. If the men were, as a rule, to be
deprecated, the women were in equal measure to be
detested.
The Fraulein von Meissenbach first appeared in
public as shepherdesses in a Court pastoral, which was
played to welcome back the two Princes George and
Maximilian, arriving with their governors, from their
foreign travels and campaigns. In proof of the success
of the sisters, they married the two governors, and
were from that time conspicuous figures at Court.
One of the governors, Platen, became in time the
Elector's Prime Minister, and was ennobled. His wife,
thus made a Countess, possessed great political and
social influence, still more from the Elector's favour
than from the Count's position. As the wife of her
husband's Prime Minister, and necessarily in this sense
one of the first of the Court ladies, the Electress
consented to treat the lady with all courtesy, while
steadily refusing to regard her in any other light.
Sophia Dorothea adopted different tactics. She
treated Madame von Platen and her sister with marked
rudeness and contempt. A furious war raged hence-
forth between the contending parties in a rivalry which
was as humiliating to Princess George as it was galling
to the haughty favourite. Princess George was not
without wit, though it was less silencing than that of
her mother-in-law. She did not fail in scornful retorts
and vindictive innuendoes.
Prince Maximilian's embroglio with his father occurred
about this time. The Prince headed a small plot for
the separation of Hanover and Zell, which the Elector
desired to unite and preserve as his eldest son's inheri-
tance. For this piece of insubordination Prince
8 4 Sij IRosal Xafcies
Maximilian found it necessary to fly from Hanover.
He took refuge, to begin with, at the Court of Wolfen-
biittel, but was reconciled for a time to his family before
he repaired to Italy and completed his treason by renoun-
cing the Protestant religion and denying his mother's
claim to the throne of England. His subordinate
fellow-conspirator Molcke, possibly also his tempter, was,
as has been already mentioned, arrested and suffered the
extreme penalty of the law, being beheaded at Hanover.
Sophia Dorothea was so far implicated in the matter.
Her partisans declare that an attempt was made to
induce Molcke to criminate her by offering him his
life in return for compromising evidence against the
Princess, and that he gallantly refused, preferring to
die. It must be remembered that such evidence
referred to the treasonable withdrawal of Sophia
Dorothea's native duchy of Zell from Hanover, and
not to her subsequent follies and indiscretions ; so that
even her connection with the conspiracy, if it could
have been proved, would not have subjected her to a
heavier penalty than was at first inflicted on her
brother-in-law. Poellnitz, in his rambling, gossiping
little narrative, details a violent altercation Sophia
Dorothea had with her husband on Prince Maximilian
and Molcke's affair, when she reproached him bitterly
for not exerting himself to vindicate her from the
charge of conspiracy. The quarrels between husband
and wife were now so inveterate that he, in his sullen
moods, would not speak to her for two months on end,
and only noticed her in public, while she revenged
herself by biting taunts and gibes in private.
An illness of Sophia Dorothea's followed on these
scenes, when Poellnitz asserts that the Electress Sophia
went to her, and watched over her, never leaving her
till the birth of the poor young creature's daughter
the second Sophia Dorothea in 1688, when the mother
Sopbia Dorotbea of Zell> Mife of <3eor0e I. 85
was still only twenty-one years of age. On her
recovery, while yet weak and low-spirited, the Electress
carried her daughter-in-law with her to Herrenhausen,
and there tried every means to cheer and entertain her.
Two years after the birth of the younger child of
George and Sophia Dorothea, the feud between husband
and wife having remained unhealed, an inopportune
visitor arrived at the Court of Hanover in the person
of the same Philip von Konigsmark who had been the
Princess's early acquaintance and playfellow at Zell.
If the beautiful aspiring page had been fascinating
to the thoughtless child, infinitely more attractive to
the vain, shallow, reckless nature of the discontented
woman and neglected wife was the man who, like her
husband, was six years her senior. Konigsmark was
still beautiful, with the beaute de diable of an insolent,
manly beauty. He was showily clever and brilliant,
a lively talker, an apt mimic, a splendid spendthrift, a
daring and dauntless soldier. He was considered so
great an acquisition to the Court circle that the Elector
immediately conferred on him the appointment of
Colonel of the Hanoverian Guards. Sophia Dorothea
was confirmed in her admiration of the newcomer by
the sensation which Konigsmark created at Court.
Even the Princess's declared enemy, Madame von
Platen, who united to the wiles of a skilful intriguante
the vilest of coquetry, was eager to attract his attention
-and win his friendship, and he did not decline her
overtures. Prince Charles, the Electress's best-loved
son, was dazzled, lad-like, by the graces and bons mots,
the adventures and escapades of the sorry-enough hero.
Prince Charles had a liking for his wayward young
sister-in-law and was in the habit of visiting her every
day, when he carried with him his last fancy in the
shape of a friend. The Prince even induced his mother
to give Konigsmark special invitations to Herrenhausen.
86 Sij IRogal Xafcies
But when every allowance is made for the force of
example, the general infatuation with which the magni-
ficent stranger was greeted at Hanover, and the early
associations which linked him with Sophia Dorothea's
childhood at Zell, and seemed to constitute him her
particular ally, it is impossible to overlook the deplorable
lack of sense, the culpable indiscretion, of such an
alliance between a Princess situated as Sophia Dorothea
was, on the terms on which she stood with her husband
and an avowed man of gallantry boasting of his con-
quests. In the interval since the two were parted
Count Philip had been mixed up in one of the most
ruffianly outrages which had scandalised a by no means
sensitive generation. This was the story of his brother
Carl Johann von Konigsmark, who had come to England
in his hunt for an heiress. Her fortune was to be won
by his handsome person and desperate character, and
was to serve as a substitute for the plunder no longer
to be had for the taking by the bold robber-knights of
the Middle Ages. He brought with him his boy-brother
Philip, and established him in a school preparatory to
sending him to Oxford.
Carl Johann decided that his prize should be the
heiress of the Percies, who at thirteen years of age
was the widow of Cavendish, Earl of Ogle, son of the
Duke of Newcastle. When Konigsmark made his suit
to the lady's relatives, it was dismissed with scant
ceremony, and she was prudently remarried to Thomas
Thynne of Longleat, a young man whose wealth had
procured for him the sobriquet of "Tom of Ten
Thousand." The second marriage was no serious
obstacle to his pursuit in the eyes of a Konigsmark.
He engaged and armed a group of foreign scoundrels
who, mounted on horseback, waylaid and beset Thynne
as he was driving in his coach in Pall Mall in the dusk
of the evening. A shot from the blunderbuss of one
Sopbfa 2>orotbea of %tll, Mffe ot (Beotge I. 87
of his assailants inflicted on the unfortunate man a
wound of which he died shortly afterwards. The deed
of violence was so wanton, apart from Konigsmark's
design, and so dastardly, it was committed in so public
a place, that no man could feel secure of his life if the
murder went unpunished. The perpetrators and the
instigator of the assassination were arrested and tried.
It would have gone hard with Konigsmark had he not
been helped by the favour shown to him by the King,
Charles II. The merry monarch could not bear that
so fine a gentleman should pay with the forfeit of his
life for what his royal sponsor was pleased to regard
as little more than a frolic. To his friends Konigsmark
insisted that his confederates had mistaken his inten-
tions. These were only to force Thynne to fight a duel
with him, which would have been a more legitimate
and gentlemanlike way of disposing of the barrier to the
Count's success. To the Court he lied without scruple,
and caused his young brother to lie in roundly asserting
that Carl Johann's sole business with his accomplices was
the purchase of horses. The wretched tools in the crime
were sacrificed without mercy, and received the full
penalty of the law, while their employer was acquitted.
Sophia Dorothea could not have been ignorant of
this wicked business, and though one brother was not
answerable for the sin of another, it marked the stamp
of men and women like the Konigsmarks, who were
the scourges of the society in which they moved.
To the earlier enmity between the Countess von
Platen and Princess George was added the unseemly
contest for Philip von Konigsmark's favour, since he
combined paying court to the silly Princess with taking
care to stand high in the good graces of the wife of
the Prime Minister.
The Court rang with idle invidious gossip, evilly
flavoured slander and angry passages between the
88 Si Utosat XaMes
persons principally concerned. Now it was an em-
broidered glove of Sophia Dorothea's which her enemies
said she dropped by accident when walking tete-a-tete
with Konigsmark and her friends alleged the Countess
von Platen stole in order to leave it in Prince George's
path and arouse his wrath against the Princess.
Again it was a trick of the incorrigible Prince Maxi-
milian. He was for the moment back at Court, and
seems from internal evidence to have been like his
brother, Prince Charles, one of Sophia Dorothea's
thoughtless ill-advised adherents. In a public assembly
Prince Maximilian contrived to flirt a few drops of
the water in which peas had been boiled into Madame
von Platen's face, because peas-water was believed to
be an infallible test for the exposure of the rouge
with which she sought to repair the ravages of time
on her once brilliant complexion.
All these petty wrangles and ugly scandals in con-
nection with the wife of her eldest son must have
been gall and wormwood to the proud self-respect of
the Electress. Yet, according to Poellnitz, she stood
by her daughter-in-law for a time, and even sought
to show her confidence in her by permitting Prince
Charles to bring his friend into the royal circle.
Konigsmark accompanied Prince Charles and this
also may have been a well-meant arrangement of the
Electress Sophia's when the Prince went to fight the
Turks on the Danube, where he fell in battle as two
of his elder brothers had fallen before him. When
the melancholy news reached Herrenhausen, Sophia
Dorothea was with the Electress, and Madame von
Platen was also in attendance. The rumour was that
Konigsmark had also fallen, and the sacred sorrow
of the bereaved mother was broken in upon by the
noisy unrestrained lamentations of two of her com-
panions for their graceless cavalier.
CHAPTER II.
K&NIGSM ARK'S FLIGHT AND DEATH.
UNFORTUNATELY for all, as it reads, Count Philip was
not slain then. He returned to work further and still
more fatal mischief at the Court of Hanover. At
last the jovial Elector interfered so far as to suggest
to Konigsmark strongly, but not in an altogether un-
friendly spirit, the advisability of his quitting Hanover
for a time at least. The Count had just sufficient
prudence to see the judiciousness of the advice, and to
take it. He set out on a visit to Augustus, King of
Saxony, who was about the most licentious sovereign
presiding over the most riotous Court at a period in
history when such Courts were the rule rather than
the exception in Northern Europe.
Sophia Dorothea was induced to consent to the
separation from Konigsmark, and in consideration of
what was supposed to be the heart-broken misery of
the man, she agreed to put the crowning touch to her
inconceivable folly and wrong-doing by entering into
an intimate correspondence with a renowned and aban-
doned roue. This much is admitted by her most
zealous supporters, and attested with a certain amount
of reservation by her lady-in-waiting and confidential
friend, Fraulein von Knesebeck. Even without further
confirmation it would be hard to believe in the perfect
innocence of poor Sophia Dorothea after she had taken
this deplorably compromising step. Thackeray was
warranted in writing that he was " astonished " to find
89
9 o Sij TCosal Xafcfes
a writer like Dr. Doran acquit this most unfortunate
lady. The explanation is that the credulity and wilful
blindness of partisanship have no bounds. In order to
rehabilitate the smirched and tarnished character of
Sophia Dorothea, English writers continue, down to the
present day, to assail with covert sneers the spotless
reputation of the Electress Sophia, in whose side her
daughter-in-law must have been a sharp thorn, and with
whom Sophia Dorothea was not to be named in the
same breath. These unhesitating detractors dwell
with quite comical disgust on the Electress's learning
and love of philosopy, as if these acquirements and
tastes were so many reproaches in themselves, positive
proofs of her unwomanliness and coldness of heart.
Konigsmark, instead of pining in despair in his exile
from Hanover, was one of the gayest and most dissipated
revellers at the Court of Saxony. In a fit of drunken
bragging he proclaimed his double conquest of Princess
George and Madame von Platen, while he held up to
ridicule the antiquated airs and graces of the elder lady.
In all probability he corroborated his story by a display
of the letters he had received an insane act which
sealed his doom.
Away in Hanover the quarrels between Prince
George and his wife were progressing from words to
blows, if Sophia Dorothea is to be believed. The un-
seemly result is not unlikely, when the two persons
engaged in the perpetual disputes are considered, the
grim enraged man and the hysterically violent woman.
One day in answer to a privileged remonstrance, as her
friends would describe it Thackeray called it " her
intolerable tongue " George, according to Sophia
Dorothea, sprang at her throat, and she was only saved
from strangulation by the screams (which happily were
not stifled) that brought to her aid Knesebeck and her
other attendants. They bore her senseless to her room.
Sopbia 2>orotbea of Zell, Mife of George L 9 1
After this notable outbreak, Sophia Dorothea was
naturally able to obtain from the Elector permission to
pay a long-proposed visit to her parents at Zell. When
one thinks that Zell was only twenty miles distant,
even the rough roads and heavy coaches of the time
do not appear to present a difficulty which a self-willed
and rebellious wife and daughter-in-law could not have
surmounted long before, if she had so chosen. One of
the puzzling incongruities in Sophia Dorothea's history
is the exceedingly small space as we count space in
which all the events occurred. The two residencies
and the fortress of Ahlden were all within a day or a
day and a half's journey of each other even then, within
a couple of hours by modern railways. It is like a
grievous " storm in a teacup," in a different sense from
that in which the phrase is generally used.
Sophia Dorothea met with a different reception at
Zell from what she wished, though she might have
easily foreseen it. Her mother is said to have greeted
her affectionately, and to have been willing to grant a
ready hearing and unlimited sympathy to the fluently
told tale of her daughter's wrongs and sufferings. But
the formerly attached father had been made acquainted
beforehand, from more credible sources, with the
Princess's conduct. He was gravely displeased, and
absolutely refused to have anything to do with the
suggestion whether it proceeded from her mother or
herself that she should get a "separation" from Prince
George. He insisted that she should return to her
husband and children.
The explanation given by Sophia Dorothea's party of
her father's condemnation is far-fetched and improbable.
They say that the Duke's ears were poisoned, so that
he turned against his own child, and that the chief agent
in deceiving him and abusing his confidence was his
minister Bernsdorf, who was in the pay of Hanover,
92 Six IRosal Xafcfes
and was also a tool of the ubiquitous Madame von
Platen.
A man is rarely turned against his own flesh and
blood, sole daughter of his house and heart, especially
if her worst offences have been impulsiveness and im-
prudence. The statesman who is accused of having
defamed her was her countryman who had seen her
grow up from a child, if not into the paragon of
excellence she has been fondly represented, at least into
a light-hearted girl. It may well be supposed, without
giving him great credit, that he had some kindly
feeling for his master's daughter, some interest in his
Princess, until these feelings were changed into resent-
ment and mortification by the levity and perversity
with which she was doing her best to bring to nothing
the alliance between Zell and Hanover.
Princess George was compelled by her father to return
to her detested husband and home. In the act of doing
so she was guilty of a display of petulant defiance of her
husband's family, and of the rules of common courtesy,
not to say of Court etiquette, which, slight as it was,
marks the insubordinate regardless nature of the woman.
The road by which she travelled in her coach those twenty
miles to Hanover took her close to the country palace of
Herrenhausen, where the royal family were then staying.
Her simple duty was to stop long enough to pay her
respects to the Elector and Electress. The Elector had
always been willing to befriend her, and if the Electress's
forbearance had come to an end, it had stood Sophia
Dorothea in good stead before now, and it might have
been revived. Instead of alighting, Sophia Dorothea
drove past without a sign, treating the heads of the
house with marked rudeness, and indicating the position
of opposition to their authority and disregard for their
wishes which she intended to take up for the future.
The excuse made for the Princess is, that she saw
Sopbia 2>orotbea of Zell, Mife of (Beorge I. 93
Madame von Platen watching for her approach from
one of the windows ; but as Madame von Platen was
not the mistress of Herrenhausen we fail to see that her
presence, however exasperating, freed Sophia Dorothea
from her obligations to be civil and respectful to her
husband's parents, the sovereigns of the country.
Soon after Sophia Dorothea's return to Hanover,
Count Philip von Konigsmark reappeared there, it is
said, with the intention of completing the arrange-
ments by which he was to resign his colonelcy of the
Hanoverian Guards, and to enter the service of the
King of Saxony.
It was the summer of the year 1694. Sophia
Dorothea was no longer an inexperienced girl, she was
a woman of eight-and-twenty, the mother of a boy of
ten and a girl of seven. Her husband was absent on a
visit to his sister, the Queen of Prussia, at Berlin. When
in Prussia (by Poellnitz's account), he was induced on
the representations of his sister to write a conciliatory
letter to his wife, which came too late.
On the night of July ist Konigsmark, in compliance
with a note which had reached him, repaired to the
residency. The note was written in pencil, in the
name of the Princess George, and appointed him to
meet her in her apartments. This note is said to have
been a forgery of Madame von Platen's. It is certain
she was early acquainted with the interview.
When the Count requested admission to the Princess
he was received by the lady-in-waiting, Fraulein von
Knesebeck, who in her subsequent declaration asserted
she at once recognised that Konigsmark had been
imposed upon. But in spite of the recognition he
was admitted into the Princess's rooms, and remained
there for a couple of hours. It is not denied that he
was then arranging the details of the flight for which
her carriages and horses were in readiness. Konigsmark
94 Sf IRo^al OLaMes
was to be the Princess's escort either to Paris, 1 as he
proposed, or to the Court of Wolfenbiittel (only forty
miles distant), which Fraulein von Knesebeck main-
tained was the Princess's choice.
In the meantime Madame von Platen was informed
of the meeting. Maddened by Konigsmark's double
treachery to her in Saxony, she carried her information
to the Elector. He was incensed at the insolence of
the assignation under his roof, and gave an order for
the arrest of the Count, placing for the purpose several
soldiers of the guard at the disposal of his informant ;
she had thus the opportunity of revenging herself at
once on the Princess and on Konigsmark.
Madame von Platen did not stint herself in her
revenge this much is known, though the manner in
which the affair was hushed up has left it shrouded
in mystery. Konigsmark did not leave the residency
alive, though he was not missed for some time. So
far as can be gathered from the conflicting statements,
Madame von Platen had the soldiers given to her
placed in the shadow of the great stove in the Ritter-
saal through which the Count had to pass on his way
from Sophia Dorothea's apartments. Though it was
in the stillness of night, so silently and rapidly was the
deed done that scarcely a sound made itself heard,
unless it might be the barking of the Princess's little
dog, which warned her and her attendant that there
was some disturbance in the hall.
When Konigsmark came within the shadow of the
stove he was suddenly set upon by four armed men.
He strove to defend himself, and succeeded in wound-
ing more than one of the guards, but quickly fell
mortally wounded. In the various records of the
crime and in the vivid tradition which still preserves
1 Sophia Dorothea is said to have entertained for some time the
idea of escaping to Paris and becoming a Roman Catholic.
Sopbta IDorotbea of Ztll, Mife of Oeorge I. 95
its outlines, the Countess, who had been lurking in the
vicinity, is represented as coming forward to make
assurance doubly sure, and to taunt the vanquished
man on whom she had formerly lavished her ill-omened
regard. He is said to have cursed her where she
stood, and asserted the innocence of the Princess,
when the infuriated woman stamped with her high-
heeled shoe on the mouth from which the breath was
passing.
How Konigsmark's tell-tale body was disposed of
has never been clearly ascertained. The Elector is
reported to have been at his wit's end with alarm and
vexation at the undreamt of severity with which his
orders had been executed. He either caused the body
to be at once burnt, or he had it immediately cast into
a drain and covered with quicklime.
Another version of the story relates that many years
afterwards, when most of the persons concerned in the
tragedy were dead, on the second visit which George II.
paid to Hanover, in the course of alterations made
in the residency, Konigsmark's skeleton was found
beneath the flooring of Sophia Dorothea's dressing-room,
where he had been strangled. Some of the tellers of
the tale allege that the first tidings which Sophia
Dorothea had of the Count's death were received from
the Prime Minister, Count von Platen, who was sent to
examine her on her guilt or innocence after Konigsmark's
papers had been seized.
There can be no question that Prince George was
not implicated in Konigsmark's murder. The Prince
was still absent in Berlin. It is said that on his return
to Hanover he expressed his displeasure at the act of
violence which had been committed. He was annoyed
by the publicity which had been given to the charge
brought against the Princess, and only withdrew his
objections after reading one of her letters to Konigsmark.
96 Sis iRogal OLafcies
Unutterably sad as Sophia Dorothea's fate was
thenceforth, it is only her extreme partisans who will
venture to say that she was treated with excessive
harshness and deliberate cruelty. It ought to be borne
in mind that her father was from first to last fully
cognisant of the treatment complained of, and in entire
accordance with it. Those persons who prefer to
believe Duke George William an utterly unnatural
parent, Sophia Dorothea an injured victim, and all the
other actors in the drama her false accusers and per-
secutors, argue that the sole motive which actuated
these quite different individuals, apart from their enmity
to the Princess, with her piteously few allies, was the
desire to insure the union of Hanover and Zell. For
this purpose, it is alleged, and not from any humane and
merciful desire to spare the unhappy woman, not from
any honourable disinclination to expose a scandal which
would bring disgrace on the whole House of Hanover,
on the innocent children of the offender as well as on
her culpable husband, the authorities adopted the course
which has been found so open to censure.
For a time Sophia Dorothea remained in her own
apartments and was said to be suffering from illness.
She was visited and examined by statesmen, lawyers, and
Lutheran ministers, in a vain endeavour to elicit the
truth from her. A test was applied to her which
savours to us of profanity. It was a relic of the ordeals
of the Middle Ages, and was in keeping with the
lingering superstition of the seventeenth century. She
was required to take the sacrament in the presence of a
gathering of officials and clergymen, but before doing
so she was called upon to make a solemn statement of
her innocence of any offence against her husband. The
old belief was that the sacred symbols of bread and
wine would choke the lying eater. Even when this
conviction died out of the popular mind it was thought
Sopbia 2>orotbea of Zell, Wife ot (Beorge L 97
that the culprit would at least flinch and waver before
the test. Sophia Dorothea surmounted it unfalteringly
(with what mental reservations who can tell ?). It is
sufficient to show the spirit in which she played her
part. She immediately turned tauntingly to Count von
Platen, whom she believed to be listening incredulously,
and asked him if his excellent wife could do the same ?
One is led to suppose that this performance of Sophia
Dorothea's was one of " the prodigious falsehoods "
which Thackeray attributes to her.
Fraulein von Knesebeck was arrested and examined.
She gave her evidence in her mistress's favour ; she
declared that she had been present at every interview
between the Princess and Konigsmark, and that she was
guiltless of all save indiscretion and an intention to
flee from Hanover. But the Fraulein's single testimony,
especially as she had by her own confession connived at
the indiscretion and been a partner in the wrong-doing,
went for little or nothing. There was enough blame
attributed to her to cause her to be imprisoned in the
castle of Schwartzfeld, in the Hartz district.
Sophia Dorothea's latter-day friends will still have it
that her judges the Elector and his ministers, her
father and her husband continued anxious to " patch
up " a reconciliation between the ill-suited pair thus
wrenched asunder, and that to every overture she gave
only one reply " If I am guilty I am unworthy of
him : if I am innocent he is unworthy of me." The
speech sounds heroic, but it is an equivocation after all,
such an equivocation as a miserable woman standing at
bay might very well take refuge in. The Consistory
Court which finally dissolved the marriage, so far as
George was concerned, did so merely on the grounds
of incompatibility of temper and of the contuma-
ciousness of the wife, not on any accusation in which
Konigsmark's name was mentioned. There was not even
98 Sij TRosal Xafcies
an implication that Sophia Dorothea had sinned against
her marriage vow, in intent if not in deed.
The Princess had already been suffered to quit
Hanover and repair to Lavenau, since there was no home
for her at Zell. Her children, whom she had been
willing to abandon, were removed from her keeping,
and committed to the more trustworthy care of their
grandmother, the Electress. In all further proceedings
the Princess was treated with such punctilious respect
and consideration as were consistent with her safety as
a state prisoner. No doubt this was due in some degree
to the near relationship of her father to the Elector,
and to that father's acquiescence in the sentence of the
Court. It is worthy of notice that Sophia Dorothea
herself declined to impugn the sentence when it was
pointed out to her by her counsel that she had legal
grounds for protest. One of her biographers makes the
comment that she declined f ' disdainfully," on account
of the injustice with which she was treated. Yet a
candid reader is left with the impression that in all
likelihood the refusal to protest was the result of a
consciousness that she had been more gently dealt with
than she deserved, or had any reason to expect.
Sophia Dorothea had an ample income settled upon
her, and she was allowed to manage her own affairs ;
she had the retinue of a woman of her rank appointed
for her. She received the title of Duchess of Ahlden.
In the month of October, following the July in which
Konigsmark was slain (1694), Sophia Dorothea was
conducted to Ahlden, a strong castle on the verge of
one of the waste heaths of Northern Germany, and on
the banks of the Aller, which flowed past her native
Zell. Her captivity lasted, as no one could have fore-
seen, for the long period of thirty-two years, during
which her " silent husband " never once uttered her
name.
Sopbia 2>orotbea of Zell, Mffe of 0eor$e I, 99
Sophia Dorothea in her castle prison still presided
over a Court in miniature, held levees and was visited
by the neighbouring country gentry and clergy. She
occupied herself as time went on with the care of her
property and the control of her household, down to the
writing out of the daily menu ; she conducted through
her secretary a certain amount of correspondence under
necessary restrictions ; she also wrote a good deal
privately a practice which has caused a mass of ficti-
tious papers, including her own story and that of her
mother, told in high-flown dialogues, to be offered to
the public in her name ; she took an interest in the
peasantry around, and conferred substantial benefits upon
them. She made gifts to the parish church, though she
only heard service in one of the rooms in the castle.
She was not suffered to walk abroad, not even on the
ramparts, but she could take carriage exercise daily.
She was either driven in one of the ponderous coaches
of the time, or she drove herself in a cabriolet with
a coachman riding by her side. She was uniformly
attended by a detachment of cavalry with drawn swords.
For half a century after Sophia Dorothea's place was
vacant at Ahlden, the peasants in the locality would
talk with bated breath of the great lady who had
tenanted the castle. The old men and women remem-
bered for themselves, while the young men and women
had been told by their fathers and mothers that her
carriage would rumble or whirl past the labourers going
to and from their work, when the hot haze of summer
or the dark mists of winter lay on the heath. The
prancing horses and gleaming weapons of her escort of
soldiers would thunder and flash out of the obscurity
on the chance wayfarer.
As the years went on there was some relaxation of
the strictness of the imprisonment. The Princess's
mother, the Duchess of Hanover, and her ladies were
Xafcfes
permitted to pay occasional visits to Ahlden. Poellnitz,
in contradiction of the general theory, which represents
the Elector Ernest Augustus as the most lenient of
Sophia Dorothea's judges, gives the date of this conces-
sion as after Ernest's death, in which case the granting
of the grace was owing either to the silent husband or
to the Electress Sophia.
All the time Sophia Dorothea lived in tantalising
nearness, both to Zell and to Hanover, where her
children were growing up strangers to her. She had no
intercourse with her son after his early boyhood, unless
we accept the mythical story of the second George's
single attempt to visit his mother. When hunting
one day, not very far from Ahlden, so the tale runs,
he rode away from his suite with the intention of
fording the river Aller and seeking admittance to
the little fortress. If there is any truth in the
legend, he was overtaken and induced to relinquish his
intention. With her daughter, the second Sophia
Dorothea, the mother did have some correspondence
subsequent to the daughter's marriage, and her portrait
was suffered to reach Ahlden. The so-called treachery
of the elder woman's secretary put a stop to the com-
munications. The tide of events was flowing as briskly
as ever outside the grey castle walls and beyond the
dim monotony of the heath, while the solitary figure
left stranded by her own deed was as untouched by
them as if she had been already numbered with the
dead. The glorious succession to the throne of England
on which Sophia Dorothea would never sit as Queen-
Consort, was settled on the House of Hanover. Her
father, the pleasure-loving Duke George William, died
an old man of seventy in August, 1705, not without
some relenting and alterations of his will in favour of
the daughter who had then been a prisoner for eleven
years. He never saw her face, however, from the
Sopbia 2>orotbea of Zell, Mife of (Beorae I. 101
time when he cut short her visit to Zell and bade her
return to her husband and children. Sophia Dorothea
might almost have heard, with the wind in the proper
direction, the tolling of his knell. The last echo of
the ringing of the bells for the joint marriages of her
son and daughter, which were celebrated the same year
as that of the old Duke's death, might have come to
her were it only in the vigorous clang of the uncouth
bell of the parish church of Ahlden; but she had no
share in the pompous ceremonies and joyous festivals.
It might be that she had some hope from her daughter's
removal to the Court of Prussia that there would be
interference in that quarter on her behalf. If so, the
hope was doomed to disappointment, beyond a little
brief correspondence and the barest acknowledgment
of the relationship, which some allege was merely
accorded in order to secure to the daughter her share
in her mother and grandmother's very considerable
possessions. The most active step which the future
Queen of Prussia took for her mother's benefit was to
receive into her service Fraulein von Knesebeck, who
had escaped from Schwartzfeld. It is hardly necessary
to say that it is more than probable this act was a
politic measure to hush up the story of Sophia Dorothea's
disgrace rather than an expression of the daughter's
gratitude to her mother's confidante, who forthwith
drew up a fresh statement of Princess George's
innocence.
The unfortunate Fraulein had undergone a good
deal of hardship on her first mistress's account, ending
in the serio-comic adventure of the escape from
Schwartzfeld. This feat was accomplished by the
instrumentality of a " tiler," or a friend of the lady's
in the disguise of a tiler. Under the pretence of
repairing that part of the castle in which she was
detained, he made a hole in the roof through which she
102 Sis iRogal Xafcies
was drawn up under cloud of night. The governor
of the castle was roused in time to witness the flight,
which he did not prevent, because as he pled in his de-
fence he believed it was that of two demons of the Hartz
mountains engaged on an excursion through the air.
Nine more years and the good Electress had died,
with her death closely followed by that of Queen Anne.
George I. was called to reign in England, and departed
with seeming unwillingness to take to himself his great
inheritance, but without an apparent thought of the
skeleton he left behind in his well-beloved Hanover.
Two years afterwards George revisited his native
country, where he was received with every sign of
regard ; but there was no token of remembrance of
Sophia Dorothea, no amnesty where she was concerned.
Four years later, in 1720, George was again in Germany
for a season, his last visit there during the lifetime of
the wife who had ceased to exist for him.
In the following year, 1721, the changeful life of
Eleanore d'Olbrense, Duchess of Hanover, ended. She
might not have been a wise guardian to her daughter
in the days of her youth, but when the Duchess died a
woman far on in years, with her perished the last friend
who had a vital interest in Sophia Dorothea. We are
told the English royal family went into mourning for
the late Electress's old rival and enemy ; if so, it was
more than they did for Duchess Eleanore's unhappy
daughter. Sophia Dorothea did not outlive her mother
more than five years. In 1724, in the same dreary
month of November which had seen the Princess's
marriage more than forty years before, when the white
fogs and mist wreaths were scudding like legions of
sheeted ghosts across the desolate heath, the gradual
failure of the Princess's health culminated in a sudden
and violent illness which induced unconsciousness. She
died quietly, with her suite the sole watchers and
Sopbia Dorotbea of Zell, Wife of Oeorge I. 103
mourners by her death-bed. She was a rapidly aging
woman approaching her sixtieth year. She had en-
tered on that living death of imprisonment a young wife
and mother, still in her blooming prime. Her son
(George II.), the boy of ten she had left behind her, was
the Prince of Wales nearly forty years of age, the father
of a numerous family. Her daughter, the little girl of
seven, was the Queen of Prussia, and was enduring the
brutal treatment of a husband compared to whom the
Prince George of old, unloving, surly and dissipated,
was a paragon. Sophia Dorothea's grandson, Frederic
the Great, was already a boy of strange eccentric
promise.
Sophia Dorothea was not buried at Ahlden ; her
body was removed to Zell, where it rests with the dust
of her father's race. Not only was there no mourning
for her at her husband's Court, but he is said to have
resented the fact that the Court of Prussia paid the
small compliment to the memory of the dead woman.
This complacency on the part of Prussia was un-
questionably occasioned by the circumstance that the
Queen was to a large extent her mother's heir.
A tradition existed throughout Germany that an
unknown woman had uttered in the hearing of George I.
the sardonic prophecy that he had better take care of
the health of his wife since he would not survive her
a year. Another version of the same story was that
Sophia Dorothea, on her death-bed, cited her husband
to meet her before the judgment-seat of God within a
year and a day. The citation was reported to be con-
tained in a letter written by the dying woman to her
husband. It did not reach him till he was on his
next, and as it proved his last, visit to Hanover. His
excesses had left him an old and infirm man at sixty-
seven. Before embarking he had taken leave of his
son and daughter-in-law with quite unusual marks of
Xafcies
affection and regret, saying he knew he should never
see them again. Between Dolden (where he had eaten
heartily of a late supper, the materials for which in-
cluded part of a melon) and Lender, to which he was
travelling by night, he is reported to have received in
some mysterious manner Sophia Dorothea's letter. He
was much agitated on reading it, and complained of
illness, for which he was bled, according to the universal
panacea for disease in past centuries, while he still
journeyed to Hanover. He only got as far as
Osnabriick, where he was bled a second and a third
time, but died apparently of apoplexy during the
following night, that of June loth, 1723.
An equally ghastly legend deals with the last hours
of the infamous Countess von Platen, whom all sides in
the strife between husband and wife unite in reprobating.
She lived to be old and blind. In her darkness she
was haunted by the fancied presence of Philip von
Konigsmark with a blood-stain on his mouth. But of
all the curious traditions which have gathered round
the melancholy story of George I. and Sophia Dorothea
of Zell, the most extravagant and self-contradictory is
that which was gravely quoted in a recent article in the
Nineteenth Century. It is said that the elder George
caused the heart of Konigsmark, with whose murder
the Prince had nothing to do, to be taken from his
body and burnt. The ashes were collected and put
into a box, and the box was then inserted in a stool.
This stool the inhuman husband habitually carried
about with him and used as a footstool, so that he might
have the satisfaction of realising that he thus trampled
on the heart of Sophia Dorothea's lover ! The story
is fantastic enough to go unanswered, but it may be
said in connection with it that no anecdote could be
more foreign to the character of its hero or villain.
George I., like other members of his house, was, in his
Sopbta Dorotbea of Zell, Mife of <5eor0e L 105
cold and coarse stolidity and doggedness, singularly
free from vindictiveness. It was this, in common with
a rough-and-ready sense of justice, which rendered the
two earlier Georges, in spite of their glaring short-
comings, better sovereigns than their predecessors, the
more brilliant taking them as a whole, more personally
attractive Stewarts.
There is only one more word to say of Sophia Dorothea
of Zell, and that word bears reference to a discovery
supposed to have been made more than a century after
her death. A packet of letters written under assumed
names was found in Sweden, in the university library
at Upsala. These letters, unlike the papers alleged to
have been written by Sophia Dorothea in her imprison-
ment, are believed by many good judges to show both
by external and internal evidence that they are genuine.
They are love-letters written in two handwritings, and
are full of mad passion and desperate schemes for
clandestine meetings. The conviction is to a great
extent warranted that they are the original letters
written by Princess George and the Count von Konigs-
mark. They are understood to have been secured and
preserved by one of Konigsmark's sisters, Amelia von
Konigsmark, who wrote of them : " Here are the letters,
captured again at great peril, which cost a brother his
life and a King's mother her freedom." Amelia von
Konigsmark married a General von Lowenhaupt, and
her papers passed to her Swedish descendants. If these
letters are genuine they are conclusive proofs of Sophia
Dorothea's utter faithlessness.
III.
CAROLINE OF ANSPACH, WIFE OF
GEORGE //., AND HER DAUGHTERS.
107
AUTHORITIES :
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Horace Walpole, Mrs. Delany,
Dr. Doran, W. M. Thackeray, etc., etc.
108
CAROLINE OF ANSPACH, QU
EEN OF GEORGE II. (AS PRINCESS OF WALES).
CHAPTER I.
THE ELECTORAL PRINCESS OF HANOVER AND
PRINCESS OF WALES.
CAROLINE OF ANSPACH was the daughter of John
Frederick, Marquis of Brandenburg-Anspach, and of
Eleanor, his second wife, daughter of John George,
Duke of Saxe-Eisenach. She was born in 1683, the
same year in which her future husband, George II.,
was born. Her father died in her childhood, and her
mother took for her second husband the Elector George
of Saxony.
Happily for Caroline, she was not brought up in the
riotous Saxon Court. She was sent to Berlin, to the
Court of her guardian, the first King of Prussia.
There she was under the care of the wise and accom-
plished Sophia Charlotte, the much-loved daughter of
the Electress Sophia. From that time Caroline's educa-
tion, hitherto neglected, was sedulously attended to.
She made an ample return for the pains taken by her
teachers. She was both intelligent and studious, with
an excellent memory and a rare penetration, not only
where books, but also where men and women were in
question an invaluable gift to a Princess. The result
was that she was one of the cleverest, best-informed of
contemporary Princesses, and she was as witty as she
was learned. She had other qualities which she did not
owe entirely to her instructors ; these were her equable
temper, her great power of self-control, her extraordinary
tact. In addition, she was a beautiful young woman,
109
Sij iRopal XaMes
with a quantity of fine, fair hair, a blonde complexion,
and a stately bearing. In her early youth her admiration
for the Queen of Prussia led to a remarkable likeness
between the two in speech and movement.
Reasonable and dutiful as the girl Princess was, it did
not follow that she had not sufficient spirit and deter-
mination to resist successfully the pressure put upon
her by her Prussian friends to induce her to make an
ambitious choice, from her many suitors, of the best-
endowed with worldly goods, the Archduke of Austria,
who became afterwards the Emperor Charles VI. But
Caroline was a staunch Protestant, and refused absolutely
to be converted to the Roman Catholic religion in order
to fit her to receive a Roman Catholic bridegroom. It
is possible that, unattractive physically and mentally
as one is tempted to imagine the Electoral Prince of
Hanover (George II.) must have been to the brilliant
young Princess he had sufficient charm for her as
the Queen of Prussia's nephew, the Electress Sophia's
grandson, and the future King of England, to cancel
his defects. Her love for him was unquestionable,
and it never wavered, under the gravest provocation,
any more than the Electress Sophia's regard failed for
her Elector and Duke. On George's side the marriage
is said to have been one of inclination, and in his way
not a very noble or honourable way he showed the
highest value for his wife to the end.
The marriage was celebrated at Hanover in 1705,
when bride and bridegroom were twenty-two years of
age. The second splendid wedding that of George's
sister, Sophia Dorothea, and the Prince Royal of Prussia
followed, when Addison, at Hanover, in the suite of
Lord Halifax, had the first opportunity of seeing Caro-
line, whom, as his Queen, he celebrated in his verses
with much eulogy.
Caroline spent nine years of her married life in
Caroline of Hnspacb m
Hanover, where her elder children were born. It was the
early summer of her life, and though it was a summer
by no means without clouds and storms, it was, perhaps,
to a woman of Caroline's serene and happy temperament,
not deficient in the alternating sunshine which we are
tempted to claim as our right in youth. Caroline, like
the old Electress in her early days, took her husband as
she found him, made an amount of allowance for his
faults and foibles, which it is difficult, under different
circumstances, with altered standards and ideas, to com-
prehend, expected little from him or any man, and got
more than she expected, while she lavished on him the
treasures of her faithful devotion and tender affection.
He was a little, fair-haired, red-faced man, looking
more insignificant than he was by reason of his blonde
complexion and low stature. He was mean in mind
and body ; he had a narrow understanding and a hot,
inconsiderate temper. There was a certain grotesque-
ness about him, bestowed by the vanity which led him
to puff" and strut and to ape the vices, no less than the
virtues of abler men. His sullen, dogged, coarse-
minded father, with whom he was on the worst of
terms, was less ridiculous than the son. His redeem-
ing qualities, of which Caroline made the most, were
the little man's valour which he amply vindicated at
Oudenarde and Dettingen a certain amount of stolid
sense and prudence behind his folly, an equal allowance
of rough-and-ready justice inherited from his father,
and, what George senior was innocent of, some heart.
The Prince's quarrels with his father, which reached
the height of the couple's not being on speaking terms
for years, must have produced an atmosphere of jarring
discord and strife, in which it is difficult for good feel-
ing and good spirits to flourish. The air of the Court
was still further disturbed by the waywardness and
impertinence of the younger George's tone to the grand-
mother who had been a second mother to him. Deficient
as George I. was in proper respect for his mother, he
resented his son's attitude towards her. Caroline also
must have been hurt by it, since a cordial affection
subsisted between her and the old Electress. Besides,
the young wife was far too shrewd not to be aware of
the discredit which such conduct brought upon her
husband, and of its utter lack of policy supposing the
aged Sophia lived to occupy the throne of England.
But all these family differences and alienations only
served to throw the Prince to a greater extent on the
society of his wife and to increase her influence o.ver
him a consequence which a high-spirited, deeply-
attached woman like the Princess could not regard
altogether as a misfortune. She had no real fear of the
rages in which he was wont to spurn his wig and coat
from one corner of the room to the other. She only
knew that she was first to him, and that to her he
always turned for support and sympathy. For anything
further, Caroline was philosophic, politic, patient, rather
than sensitive. She was full of mental resources, and
as food for her heart she had her husband, her children,
her German and English friends. According to Toland,
she was the most carelessly indifferent of the whole
family to their splendid prospects in England. But the
indifference might have been assumed in order to meet
the conflicting humours of those principally concerned
in the great future opening out before them ; or Toland
might have made his observation in an hour of apathetic
languor, such as overtakes even the most energetic
natures. Certainly the Princess showed no lack of
appreciation, whether for herself or her husband, of
what was involved in the sovereignty of England after
she had her share in it.
The Court of Hanover, even with so gruff and glum
a sultan as George I. at its head, had many good
Caroline of Hnspacb 113
points to a German Princess of Caroline's faculties and
tastes. It had still the lingering aroma of such
borrowed splendour and mental superiority as the
Elector and the Electress, in her husband's lifetime and
in her prime, had been able to give it. Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu visited it two years after the royal
house had been transferred to England, and during
one of the occasions when George I. revisited his
native country. The far-travelled lady found it a very
tolerable place of residence. The town was small, but
the palace was capable of containing a large Court.
There were no houses of great nobles in the neighbour-
hood ; in fact, the wealth and magnificence of Germany
were confined to the Courts and the great burgher
towns. The King dined and supped in public, after
the Versailles mode introduced at an earlier date ; and
while he was still only Elector the members of his
family, including his mother and his daughter-in-law,
made part of the show, and learned to regard it as
a becoming and agreeable detail of their rank and
state. The King's opera-house was second to none in
Germany, and he had French comedians in his service,
who played twice a week for the delectation of the
upper classes. In winter the speed and costly beauty
of the Court sledges gliding over the snow were marked
features of the scene. In summer there were the fine
gardens of Herrenhausen, the delight of the Electress
Sophia, the last scene on which her aged eyes closed.
Lady Mary admired them even when she had the dis-
advantage of seeing the lime-tree avenue in winter. She
was particularly struck by the great size and profusion of
the orange-trees, which bore fruit throughout the year
by means of the perfection of stove-heat applied to them.
Many English Whigs repaired to Hanover and sought
to warm themselves in the beams of the Brunswick sun
some time before the death of Queen Anne. Among
8
them was a young couple, obscure enough though of
good family, belonging as they did to the Howard
house. These Howards were so poor that it was said
Mrs. Howard sold her beautiful hair on one occasion
in order to defray the expenses of a dinner which the
couple gave, as a matter of policy, to the Hanoverian
Prime Minister. The husband was dissipated and
worthless ; the wife l was a woman of singularly
pleasing expression and manner, rather than of beauty
of feature. She was above the middle height, with
what was then called " an elegant figure " ; she was
qyiet and ladylike. The notice she received was chiefly
from the Princess ; the Prince treated her with indiffer-
ence. Another English visitor, who was then of little
account, but who was destined to play a prominent part
in George I.'s government, was the lawyer Craggs,
eventually Secretary of State.
In the summer and early autumn of 17 14 the deaths of
the Electress Sophia among the shades of Herrenhausen
in the weeping Caroline's arms, and of Queen Anne in
England, made the Elector George King of Great
Britain and Ireland. The Act of Succession secured his
inheritance, and the plots of the Tory leaders Harley
and St. John in favour of the exiled Stewarts were crushed,
at what might have been the moment of fruition, by the
energetic action of the Dukes of Somerset and Argyle.
They were Whig ministers of the Privy Council, and
they brought to a summary conclusion the masked plots
of the Tory Cabinet by demanding the immediate pro-
clamation of George I.
The King, with a large German and English suite,
prominent in which were his son and daughter-in-law
(both then in the thirty-first year of their age), landed
at Greenwich in September 1714.
The King was in his fifty-fifth year, and could not
She was the great-granddaughter of John Hampden.
Caroline of Hnspacfo us
speak English. He had to transact his business with
his ministers in the Latin language. He announced
that he brought with him his son (who spoke English
but with a strong foreign accent and idiom) in order
that he might be trained in English politics and govern-
ment. But no trace of such training survives in the
fierce discord which presently broke out afresh between
the two. It ended in George II., as Prince of Wales,
representing the young England of the day and heading
a Court in opposition to that of his father. Caroline
had need of her tact, for though she came to England
in the dignified position of Princess of Wales, that
position had many humiliations for her. There was
no place for her any more than for her husband in
the Palace of St. James's. 1 The rooms there whose
occupant was supposed to be the first lady in England,
resident in the palace for the purpose of presiding over
the royal circle were given to Mdlle. Schulenberg, one
of the King's old friends, a tall, lean, dull woman of
his own age, whom the wits nicknamed the <c May-
pole." The King created her Duchess of Kendal, and
the rumour was freely circulated that he had married
her privately. He visited her daily, and when with
her pursued his favourite diversion of cutting out paper.
She "entertained" for the King at those evening assem-
blies attended by many Germans and a few English, the
deadly dulness of which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
has described. The Duchess of Kendal's rival in the
King's favour was not the Princess, his daughter-in-law,
but a very stout, comparatively lively German lady of
forty years, Madame von Kielmansegge, who was created
Countess of Darlington. Her huge size, combined with
the nation's contempt for these satellites, caused her to
1 The Prince and Princess of Wales repaired to St. James's on their
arrival in England, but were forced to leave the palace on the first
violent outburst of the smouldering quarrel between the father and son.
n6 Sij iRopal OLafcies
be termed the " Elephant." On one occasion the pair
driving together in one of George's glass and gilt coaches
were mobbed and hooted. " My goot people," called
out the more spirited Countess, lowering a window and
making a protest to her assailants, <e we have come for
your goots." " Yes, and for our chattels too," was the
derisive shout. The King would sit in the box of either
of these ladies at the theatre or opera ; but he went in
no greater state than was implied by a sedan chair
carried across the park, and he was attended not by two
lords-in-waiting but by two negroes, also part of his
old German entourage. These had been slaves acquired
from the Turks in the frontier wars. George was a
thrifty and unostentatious sovereign ; he was fond of
saving, and as he never felt the crown of England secure
on his head, he did not lose sight of the probability of a
successful rise of the Tory party, which would send him
back, with his gains, to the little German kingdom, which
he loved so much better than his English inheritance.
Caroline had little to do with her father-in-law and
his Court except when she had to appear there on public
occasions and at State ceremonials, and then, by taking
the initiative, she compelled him to acknowledge her
and speak to her with the respect which was her due.
He simply detested her as part of his son's belongings,
and as that son's most ardent and loyal adherent.
Besides, she had as witty a tongue as his mother had
possessed ; and, though Caroline was rather more careful
in speaking her mind, she was not altogether silent.
The King was in the habit of alluding to her as " Cette
diablesse, Madame la Princesse."
By a curious family arrangement, which has received
no explanation, but which may have had its origin in
the family quarrels already raging, and in a conviction
that the hostility between the father and son might be
renewed in another generation if the first-born son of
Caroline of Hnspacb 117
George II. and Caroline grew up amidst the factions
and intrigues of a strange Court, little Prince Fritz
did not come to England with the rest of the family.
He was left behind at the age of seven, and stayed
under the care of his governor in Hanover apart from
his near relations, seeing only his grandfather the King
during his visits to Germany, till the young Prince was
in his twenty-first year. If there was any such idea as
that of preventing courtiers' intrigues and the strain of
a contact which was liable to jar, the plan for preventing
further domestic misery was singularly unsuccessful.
Denied lodgings in St. James's, the Prince and Prin-
cess of Wales withdrew to Leicester House in Leicester
Fields, then on the verge of the country. There they
established themselves ; but the rupture between them
and the King did not reach its height till subsequent
to the anxious days of the '15 when Mar raised the
standard of rebellion in Scotland. In 1717 Caroline
gave birth to a second son, at whose baptism the
royal grandfather took such furious umbrage, on
grounds long since forgotten, that it became for a
time little better than war to the knife between the
two households. None of the courtiers of George I.
dared present themselves at Leicester House. None
of the frequenters of Leicester House were received at
St. James's. A far more savage blow was dealt by
the King at the Prince and Princess. George I., with
the approval of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Macclesfield,
declared it was the royal prerogative that the King
should superintend the education of the younger mem-
bers of his house. He therefore caused the three girl
Princesses, Anne, Emily (or Amily as the name was
then pronounced), and Caroline, with their little brother,
to be withdrawn from the care of their parents at
Leicester House and committed to the guardians whom
he appointed. The insult and the injury of this
us Si TRosal OLafcies
interference with their natural rights were keenly felt
and bitterly resented by the ill-used Prince and Princess.
Caroline especially is said to have been much attached
to her children, to whom she delighted to act in the
double capacity of teacher and playmate. Neither did
she decline the performance of less agreeable duties on
their behalf. Sarah, Duchess of Maryborough, once
found the Princess whipping one of " the roaring royal
children," when George II., who was present at the
performance, remarked complacently, f< You have no
good manners in England. You are not properly
brought up when you are young."
The wondering, weeping little girls made it up among
them, and succeeded in getting leave to send to the
bereaved pair a basket of cherries with the children's
respectful duty and love, and over the simple offering
the poor father and mother wept in their turn.
It was not till three years later, in 1720, on the birth
of Caroline's next child (Princess Mary ?) that the
breach between the King and the Prince and Princess
was partially healed by the instrumentality of the Prime
Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who was sagacious and
pacific in temper, if time-serving in his practice and
systematically low in his principles. The children were
restored to their proper protectors, from whom they
were not again removed. 1
1 According to Horace Walpole the three elder Princesses, Anne,
Emily, and Caroline, remained under their grandfather's eyes till his
death.
CHAPTER II.
AT LEICESTER HOUSE AND AT ST. JAMES'S.
AT Leicester House Caroline did much to popularise
her husband and to gloss over his defects. The
English nation, accustomed to the Stewart dynasty, the
representatives of which had been as a rule distinguished
by their gracious bearing and their mental graces and
gifts, and by their prestige as the native sovereigns of
a great country, were repelled and disgusted by the
surly uncouthness of George I., and by the unattrac-
tiveness together with the strong foreign element of the
Court at St. James's. Caroline was resolute in the deter-
mination that she and her husband should amend these
faults, and they were partly successful in the attempt. At
Leicester House the Princess held an informal drawing-
room every morning, which formed a precedent for
long lists of balls, masquerades, and water parties. One
refining taste the first three Georges had in common,
and that was a love for music, and for Handel's music.
George I. resented Handel's quitting Hanover for
England in the reign of Anne ; but the King forgave
the great composer his temporary desertion, and required
from him " the water music " played in the King's barge
on the Thames. For once the King and the Prince
were agreed in their admiration of Handel's stately
operas and oratorios. George III. used to tell how he
was taken, when a boy, by his grandfather, George II.,
then an old man, to listen to Handel, and was thus
inoculated with the family taste.
119
120 Sij TCosal XaOies 1
At Leicester House there were distinguished gather-
ings not of old Hanover, but of young England, in
her choice spirits : Chesterfield, Stanhope, the brothers
Hervey, Pope, Swift, at times were included in the
circle, the presiding genius of which was a brilliantly
clever woman, who laughed over Gulliver, and appreci-
ated Robinson Crusoe, though she had to pursue her
reading in private, since the Prince detested books.
In proportion as George I.'s Court was ridiculed for
such unornamental, unbecoming fixtures as the " May-
pole " and the " Elephant," the Princess of Wales
herself a dignified and charming woman was highly
approved of for surrounding herself with a group of
English ladies, well-looking, well-informed, well-bred,
according to the standard of the day, and with a bevy
of as pretty and lively girls as England could produce
for maids-of-honour.
Among the ladies was the bedchamber woman, Mrs.
Howard, Caroline's old acquaintance in Hanover. Mrs.
Howard was now living apart from her ne'er-do-well of a
husband in fact, was in such dread of him that the Prin-
cess's protection was regarded as necessary for her safety.
In England George professed a gallant admiration for
Mrs. Howard, visiting her rooms every afternoon and
spending several hours with her, condescending to be
soothed and entertained by her agreeable conversation.
Even Caroline could not eradicate her husband's follies,
but she could render them more respectable and less
absurd. She could consign him to the company of her
" good Howard," who took nearly as much care of him
as Caroline herself did. Convinced as the Princess was
of her superiority to all other women in her husband's
eyes, and of her unbounded influence over him, she
could suffer his idle homage to Mrs. Howard as the
safest and least pernicious of such platonic gallantries.
But politic Princess as Caroline was, she was a woman
Caroline of Hnspacb 121
still, and not always a generous woman in her dealings
with her woman of the bedchamber. She is said in later
years to have relished her husband's rude disparage-
ment of Mrs. Howard's lean arms and scraggy neck
in comparison with the beautiful arms and neck of her
royal mistress, to whose toilette the bedchamber woman
was putting the finishing touches while George was
lounging in the background. Caroline is also reported
to have taken a malicious satisfaction in blandly requir-
ing, as Queen, services which the lady at first indignantly
refused to render, such as kneeling and thus presenting
the silver basin and ewer with water that her mistress
might wash her hands.
Mrs. Howard was agreeable and cool-headed, never
losing her temper or making a scene. To men her
society was gently soothing and mildly stimulating ; she
was emphatically " a man's woman." Pope and Gay
celebrated her attractions long after she was laid in the
dust. 1 Her laudatory biographers were won by the
simple tastes, the unaffectedness and kindliness which her
letters revealed ; neither was she without cordial friends
among women. But Caroline's special friend among
her ladies was another woman of the bedchamber, Mrs.
Clayton. She was of comparatively humble birth, though
the wife of Sir Robert Clayton, Clerk to the Treasury,
and afterwards created Lord Sundon. She was appointed
to her post on the recommendation of the Duchess of
Maryborough. Very conflicting opinions of Mrs. Clayton
are expressed in the biographies and letters of the day.
John Lord Hervey praised her as of good understand-
ing and excellent heart. Horace Walpole, who had a
bitter feud with Hervey, described her as " pompous
and pretentious." His gossiping version of the origin
of her intimacy with Caroline was, that Mrs. Clayton,
1 They even praised her infirmity of deafness, which was slight to
begin with.
122 Stj IRosal Xaoies
apart from George II. and an old German nurse, was
the only person acquainted with the existence of the
internal complaint against which the Princess struggled
secretly for many years.
In most respects Mrs. Clayton was very unlike Mrs.
Howard, and between the two women of the bedchamber
there was a chronic quarrel. Mrs. Clayton was ardent
and impulsive and got into many difficulties through
her hot temper. She had solid intellectual tastes in
common with the Princess ; doubtless this is all the
reason required for their mutual regard. Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, with her sharp tongue and her sharp
pen, refers 'to the pair of friends as " playing " at study-
ing philosophy and metaphysics under the learned divine
Dr. Samuel Clarke. He dedicated to Caroline the
publication containing his discussions on natural philo-
sophy and religion with the German philosopher Leibnitz.
What associations Leibnitz's name must have recalled
to Caroline of Hanover and Herrenhausen the long
lime-tree avenue, where the bees hummed in summer,
the fragrant orange-trees, the philosopher's royal
patroness, his " Serena," who was also the wise and
kindly kinswoman of the Princess's early life !
The most renowned of Caroline's fair and gay maids-
of-honour with whom and with their merry doings
Leicester House, Richmond Lodge, and Kensington
Palace were closely connected were Mary Bellenden and
Mary or Molly Lepell. They were as vivacious as they
were lovely ; for in those days sprightliness was con-
sidered an excellent thing in woman, especially in her
youth. On one occasion little Mr. Pope was taken
possession of by the lively pair. They gave him a
dinner after one of the royal hunting parties, and Molly
Lepell spent several pleasant hours strolling with him
in the moonlight according to the free-and-easy customs
of the time. The two beauties sobered down as they
Caroline of Hnspacb 123
grew older, and merged into exemplary wives and
mothers. One of them, this Molly Lepell, left behind
her a series of letters written in her declining years to a
friendly clergyman, breathing much earnest religious
feeling and devoutness of spirit. "Sweet Molly Lepell,"
as she was called in the vers de societe of the period,
married the engagement having been conducted with
all " the mystery and secrecy " which is said to attend
even Court trifles one of the most conspicuous fig-
ures of the reign, John Lord Hervey. The poetaster
sang in his tuneful jingle how great was the sensation
when " Hervey the clever " wedded in orthodox style
" sweet Molly Lepell." Thackeray writes of Hervey's
ghastly beauty, his "ghastly painted beauty," and of
the impossibility of putting trust in him. Indeed, any
truthful representation of his finely-chiselled supercilious
face bears out to this day all that is known of a
singularly heartless man of wit and fashion, till one is
tempted to cry, " Poor Molly Lepell ! "
Caroline bestowed on Lord Hervey or <f Lord
Fanny," the nickname which his effeminate airs brought
on him all the affection and confidence that with
happier domestic relations she might have lavished on
her elder son. In return he betrayed her confidence,
exposed and made game of her foibles. Even her death-
bed was not sacred to him. With regard to its
" grotesque horror " and Hervey's share in recounting
the scene, Thackeray made the emphatic comment :
" The man who wrote the story had something diabolical
about him."
Mary Bellenden l married Colonel John Campbell,
1 A doggerel verse in her honour refers to the dismissal of the Prince
and Princess of Wales from St. James's :
" But Bellenden we needs must praise
Who, as down the stairs she jumps,
Sings, ' Over the Hills and Far Away, 1
Despising doleful dumps."
and survived to an advanced age, when she was burned
to death in an accidental fire at a county-house near
London, where she happened to be staying.
The levity of a third maid-of-honour, Sophy Howe,
ended in scandal and disgrace. There was much coarse
licence of manners and morals in the England of the
day. To mark the great changes in public opinion
Thackeray has given various quotations from old news
prints. Here are two : " Mary Lynn was burned to
ashes at the stake for being concerned in the murder of
her mistress." " At night (Twelfth Night) their
Majesties played at hazard with the nobility, for the
benefit of the groomporters, and 'twas said the King
won six hundred guineas, the Queen three hundred and
sixty, Princess Amelia twenty, Princess Caroline ten, the
Duke of Grafton and the Earl of Portmore several
thousands."
There was yet another maid-of-honour of Caroline's
while she was still Princess of Wales, who was neither
fair nor wise, who was only passing honest. This was
Jenny Warburton, the daughter of a Cheshire squire.
She had been one of the maids-of- honour to Queen
Anne, and on Caroline's arrival in England Jenny
Warburton was appointed to the same post in the
Princess's household. Her extreme rusticity and ignor-
ance, together with her personal plainness, caused her
to be the butt of her better-endowed companions.
Nevertheless, when John, Duke of Argyle, bravest of
soldiers and most patriotic of statesmen, a handsome
man and a brilliant talker, returned from the wars, he
conceived a sincere friendship for Jenny, whose sterling
simplicity and integrity rendered her fair and worthy
in his eyes ; so open and honourable was the friendship,
that not even the most unscrupulous tongue put a bad
construction on it, though the Duke had been entangled
when a boy in a loveless marriage, and had been long
Caroline of Hnspacb 125
separated from his wife. Suddenly the wife died, and
the Court was occupied with keen conjectures of what
the result would be where the two sworn friends were
concerned. Certainly the Duke would marry again,
making a great marriage, such as many a fine lady of
his society would willingly figure in, and his friendship
with poor Jenny would be dropped.
It is in connection with the supposition, that a little
story, very creditable to the Princess's good nature and
kindliness, has been preserved. When she heard of
the death of the Duchess of Argyle Caroline said to
Mrs. Howard, " How I pity that poor Warburton !
Her agitation must be cruel ; and she must dread
appearing in public, where everybody will be whisper-
ing, and every eye watching her looks. Go and tell
her I excuse her from attendance ; she need not wait
to-day, nor, indeed, till all the tattle has subsided."
Mrs. Howard found Jenny busily sewing, as if
nothing was the matter, and had some difficulty in
making her message understood.
"Not wait to-day! Why not? Why mustn't I wait?
What's the matter ? Is the Princess angry with me ?
Have I done anything ? "
" Done ! Bless us, no, my dear Mrs. 1 Warburton ;
it is her Royal Highness's kind consideration for you.
She concludes you cannot like to wait. She is afraid of
your being distressed."
" Dear ! I always liked waiting, and I ain't in dis-
tress," replied the sensible, matter-of-fact Jenny.
But there was no need for undesired sympathy, since
the great Duke immediately laid his strawberry-leaves
at Jenny's feet. It was entirely as a concession to her
sense of propriety that the ardent wooer was induced to
1 Young and unmarried women in a respectable position were
addressed as " Mrs.," not as " Miss," in the last century. Mrs. Hannah
Moore was the last single woman who was so styled.
126 Six IRosal OLaMes
allow the marriage to be deferred till six months had
elapsed. We have it on the testimony of a descendant
of the couple that his faithful love for her never waned.
On entering her room he would clasp her in his arms in
the presence of their daughters, when she would appeal
to them, "Do you see, you young folks ? On such a day
we shall have been married so many years. Will your
husbands' love last as long, think ye ? "
Unfortunately, Jenny had a voice both loud and
shrill, which she transmitted to her daughters. The
Duke used to say he knew if his ladies were at any
party the moment he crossed the doorstep of the
house where it was held. The family attribute pro-
cured for the members the nickname of "the bawling
Campbells."
Caroline's intimacy with Mrs. Clayton was well known,
and was much exaggerated in the popular mind. It was
said that she ruled the Princess and Queen, as Mrs.
Howard ruled George. In neither case was there more
than a few grains of truth in the assertion. The
Princess, not Henrietta Howard, ruled the Prince ; as
for Caroline herself she was cast in a stronger mould
than to be readily ruled by anybody, least of all by one
of her bedchamber women. But the impression was
that Mrs. Clayton could command much preferment
through her influence over the future Queen, and that
the woman of the bedchamber accepted bribes given for
the purpose of securing her advocacy on the side of the
petitioner. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was
nothing if she was not brilliantly scurrilous, coolly
observed, in relation to the jewels Mrs. Clayton wore,
which were believed to have been given to her as an
acknowledgment of her support in applications to her
mistress, " You would not know where wine was sold if
the seller did not hang out a bush"; in allusion to the
old custom still practised in some foreign towns of
Caroline of Hnspacb 127
distinguishing a vintner's by a green branch suspended
over the door or window.
Lady Mary's verdict on Caroline was that in her
youth " she was judged a German beauty," and that
she had " the genius which qualified her for the govern-
ment of a fool a genius unknown to witty Lady Mary
in her capacity as a wife. The foundation for the
charges against Mrs. Clayton was probably the fact that
the Princess granted her the privilege of introducing
aspirants for the royal notice. In this light she pro-
bably presented Sir Isaac Newton and Halley to Caroline,
as George in his aversion to intellectual pursuits was
little likely to bestow any grace upon them. The
Princess, on the contrary, was eager to mark her respect
for their attainments. She would fain have secured
Halley as governor or tutor for her second son William,
Duke of Cumberland, still hardly beyond his infancy ;
but Halley declined the dubious honour.
It does not seem to have propitiated Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu in Caroline's favour that the Prin-
cess lent her ready countenance to the scheme for
mitigating the ravages of small-pox by the process of
inoculation as it was practised in Turkey. Lady Mary
had caused her infant son to be inoculated. The
Princess followed suit with two of her elder daughters
after the experiment had been tested on a group of
condemned criminals, who had their lives granted to
them in consideration of their services on this occasion.
The eldest Princess, Anne, was exempted from the trial
because she had already suffered from small-pox, by
which her face was pitted ; otherwise she was a buxom,
rosy-cheeked girl. 1
In 1727 George I. paid his parting visit to Hanover.
He had a foreboding that it would be his last and that
1 Caroline herself had small-pox soon after her marriage, but was
only slightly marked.
128 Sij IRosal Xafcies
he would not return to England. Accordingly, before
he set sail, he took a friendly farewell of those members
of his family whom he had persistently treated as
enemies. Presently the news of his death reached
London. The tidings were brought by Sir Robert
Walpole in person to Richmond Lodge, where the
Court was in its country quarters. The bluff, heavily-
built Prime Minister rode post-haste at midday through
the June heat and dust, and sought an immediate
private interview with George. In vain the Princess
and her ladies represented the impossibility of granting
his request, since the Prince was at that moment enjoy-
ing his after-dinner nap. Sir Robert, knowing the
importance of his errand, was not to be denied. He
took it upon him to enter the royal bedroom, and
knelt down stiffly in his jack-boots by the bed. The
Prince started up, shouting furiously who dared to dis-
turb him.
" I am Sir Robert Walpole," said the panting but
undaunted intruder. " I have the honour to announce
to your Majesty that your royal father George I. died
at Osnabriick on Saturday last the 4th instant."
" Dat's one big lie ! " was the first exclamation of
the son and heir.
The coronation took place on the following October
nth. George and Caroline were then each forty-
three years of age and had been resident in England
for thirteen years. Mrs. Delany gives a pretty de-
scription of the coronation. The Queen was carried in
a sedan chair through the park to Westminster Hall,
by which she and the King went to and came from the
Abbey. Both walked under canopies : the King was
not well seen, the Queen was distinguished by everybody.
She was never so " well liked " (so much admired),
for already her personal appearance was spoilt by the
embonpoint which had increased with years. Her dress
Caroline of Hnspacb 129
was " extravagantly fine," but she walked gracefully
and smiled on all as she passed by. Mrs. Delany might
well comment on Caroline's fine clothes, for she is said
to have worn " twenty-four hundred thousand pounds
worth of diamonds on her petticoat, in addition to the
diamonds and pearls on her head, neck, and bodice."
Horace Walpole and Hervey do not hesitate to state
that the diamonds were borrowed from the Jews, and
Hervey adds that she got from her ladies the use of
their necklaces for the coronation. Yet the Queen
had many fine jewels of her own, though those of
Queen Anne had been so made away with that a
single pearl necklace was the sole relic. After the
gorgeousness of the Queen the three elder Princesses
Anne was then twenty who held up the tip of the
mother's train were in comparatively modest array.
" They were dressed in stiff-bodied gowns of silver
tissue, embroidered or quite covered with silver
trimming, with diadems on their heads, purple mantles
edged with ermine, and vast long trains. They were
very prettily dressed and looked very well." But
Mrs. Delany's enthusiasm is for the bedchamber women,
among whom was Mrs. Howard in scarlet and silver,
her head with long locks, puffs, and silver ribbons, " so
rich, so genteel, so perfectly well-dressed."
Almost as brave a show as that in the Abbey was
the dining in public in the Hall, and there the zeal of
the privileged spectators, who had been at their posts
since four o'clock in the morning, was rewarded by
the humane consideration of the diners in the light of
c< the eighteen hundred candles besides those which
were on the table." The mindful feasters in the Hall
filled baskets with cold meat, bread, sweetmeats, and
wine, and sent them, " drawn up by a string," to solace
the needs of their friends among the company in the
galleries.
CHAPTER III.
THE QUEEN.
CAROLINE was destined to reign as Queen-Consort for
ten years. During this time her influence over her
King was paramount. It was first exerted, as Queen,
in inducing the King to keep in office his father's Prime
Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, whom George, when
Prince of Wales, had heartily detested. She is said to
have been perfectly aware of the abominable rudeness
and coarseness characteristic of the period with which
Walpole had spoken of her as " that fat beast the
Prince's wife." On the other hand, she was sensible of
the absolute necessity there was for retaining his services
at the head of the Government, and she appreciated his
shrewdness and good judgment as a statesman. His
ignoble creed that u every man has his price " (by which
his support may be bought) is well known. As an
illustration of this cynical conviction, on George I.'s
death Walpole made it be spread abroad that, if he con-
tinued in office, he would raise the Queen's allowance
to a hundred thousand pounds per annum. But the
inference adopted by Dr. Doran that Caroline was thus
bribed to espouse Walpole's cause is gratuitous. Her
devotion to her husband's interests is beyond question.
She needed no bribe to uphold the claims of the only
man who had afforded any promise of ruling England
peacefully and successfully. She understood and felt to
the full the value of money, but she was awake to
higher obligations. She was far above the ordinary
grasping harpy to whom money is everything.
130
Caroline of Hnspacb 131
The Queen sought to recommend herself, and by
doing so to recommend her husband, to all around her.
Her manner to English ladies who flocked to her Court
and appeared at her drawing-rooms was frank and
agreeable. Her personal attractions might be on the
wane, but a great charm was lent to her address by her
captivating voice, while her graceful hands were still
" beautifully small " in their plumpness. Here is an
instance of the Queen's graciousness and tact, given by
a fine lady of the day, whose opinions are to be depended
upon because they are remarkable, in general, for
their fairness and forbearance : " On Saturday, the first
day of March, it being Queen Caroline's birthday, I
dressed myself in all my best array, borrowed my Lady
Sunder land's jewels, and made a tearing show. I went
with my Lady Carteret and her two daughters. There
was a vast crowd, and my Lady Carteret got with some
difficulty to the circle, and after she had made her
curtsy made me stand before her. The Queen came
up to her, and thanked her for bringing me forward, and
told me she was obliged to me for my pretty clothes." l
Frederick, Prince of Wales, who had received various
titles those of "Duke of Gloucester," "Duke of Edin-
burgh," etc., etc. while he was still in Hanover during
the life of his grandfather, George I., was now sum-
moned to England. His continued absence from his
family, acting on an utterly undisciplined and peculiarly
wayward nature, had entirely alienated him from them.
Apparently, he did not entertain a particle of respect or
regard for father or mother, brother or sister. For his
mother, indeed, he had a particular aversion. He was
looked upon by all his kindred with the utmost distrust
and dislike, though it is admitted that the Queen tried
1 At Caroline's last drawing-room on the King's reminding her that
she had passed the old Duchess of Norfolk, the Queen turned back,
though ready to sink with fatigue and pain, and spoke a few courteous
words to the venerable Duchess.
132 St IRosal Xafcies
at first to find excuses for her son ; and to the last
whether from policy, whether from some lingering
regret in the mother's heart where her first-born was con-
cerned sought to reconcile him to the King his father.
But George I.'s feud with his son was as a trifle com-
pared to the bitter strife which raged between George II.
and Frederick, Prince of Wales. The animosity on
both sides was expressed with the scurrilous violence
of the times, in which Caroline was not behind her
neighbours. 1 French, which she habitually spoke, though
the most polite language in Europe, did little to soften
the sound of her rancour. " My dear lord," said
Caroline, speaking to Lord Hervey of her son, " I
will give it you under my hand, if you have any fear
of my relapsing, that my dear first-born is the greatest
ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille^ and
the greatest beast in the whole world, and that I most
heartily wish him out of it." The furious resentment
in which everybody concerned indulged, and the exceed-
ing plain language in which all expressed their wrath and
disgust, is inconceivable unless to readers of the diaries
and letters of the period. When the gentlest member
of the royal household, Princess Caroline, spoke of her
brother, the mere circumstance of her devotion to her
mother caused her speech to be that of a reckless virago.
And when Princess Emily made a few attempts to be
on terms with him she was freely accused of double-
dealing, of a desire to stand well alike with the present
and with the future King.
In person the Prince was a tall, rather handsome
young man, with long fair hair (his mother's hair),
curiously curled above the forehead and at the sides of
the face, then tied back in a bag-wig or a queue. In
mind and character he was less illiterate than his father,
1 Caroline's wit was often of a coarse description, but those were
days when delicacy of sentiment and expression was rarely to be found.
Caroline of Hnspacb 133
though his tastes were not more refined, and he had
drunk, gambled, and been a profligate from his early
youth. But what turned Caroline utterly against him
was not so much his vice, and his rudeness and lack of
all natural affection towards herself, as his attitude to-
wards his father, the object of her life-long solicitude
and tender fidelity. " Prince Fritz " was disobedient,
defiant, and insubordinate, till the very jealous bravado
and senseless perversity of the young man lent to some
of his unwarrantable proceedings a tinge of the morbid,
unreasoning hate which is akin to madness.
In his extravagant conceit and treachery of disposition
the Prince of Wales made bids for popularity in every
quarter. He attended an evening party at the Countess
of Huntingdon's in order to hear Whitfield preach
when Methodism, in high places, was dividing public
attention with the Mississippi and South Sea schemes.
He praised the sermon, and rebuked the levity of some
of the fine ladies present, to the great gratification of
his good hostess. He was equally ready to show him-
self at St. Bartholomew's or " Bartlemy's Fair, and
join in the gross revelry certain to degenerate into
excess and riot. Like his father, Frederick made a
parade of the tone of a man of gallantry and licence.
He professed to cultivate the Muses, and wrote detest-
able verses in his own person. In the midst of this
chameleon-like versatility there was one aspect of the
Prince which never changed, and that was his envenomed
hostility to every member of his family. He was as
unscrupulous in his private talk of them as they were
in their talk of him. When his mother lay dying, at
the very time when he was making, before the public,
solemnly sympathetic inquiries after her health, and
petitions to be permitted to see her, he congratulated
his cronies on their being likely to hear " good news "
soon, the news being that of Caroline's death. There
is no page of family history so hideous in some lights,
so painful in all, as that which records the relations
which existed between Frederick, Prince of Wales, and
his nearest blood relations.
The Queen was not only present at the King's inter-
views with his minister, but while apparently passive she
was really prompting or modifying his consent to the
various measures which Sir Robert Walpole laid before
him. During George's frequent absences in Germany
Caroline was appointed Regent, to the hot indignation of
her elder son, and, aided by the Cabinet Minister, she
ruled the country constitutionally and with much discre-
tion. Twenty-four months after his accession, George
was absent for two whole years, and it was no easy matter
for those left in power to preserve its balance and main-
tain the peace and honour of the country. It was during
the interval between the rebellions of '15 and '45, and
the entire kingdom was restless and unsettled. Much
smuggling and many other disorders prevailed, and
called for a strong hand to restrain them. The excise-
duties were a vexed question, so were the opinions and
prospects of those of the Established clergy who did not
hold High Church views, and of the Nonconformists,
who naturally looked to the House of Brunswick, as the
champions of Protestantism, to support the Dissenters'
claims. Thus the repeal of various Test Acts was
urgently demanded, and the Queen, in her difficult
position, was reduced to temporising. It was said of her,
as it was said of the Electress Sophia by the opponents
of what, for lack of a better name, may be styled the
Low Church party, that the Queen was unorthodox in
her favour for liberal Churchmen, and that this bent in
her was due to the influence of Lady Sundon (Mrs.
Clayton). Caroline resembled her husband's grand-
mother in having been always fond of theological dis-
cussion. She was much more likely to lead than to be
Caroline of Hnspacb 135
led by her bedchamber woman in this respect. When
the Queen's preferences are known to have included
Dr. Samuel Clarke, Bishop Berkeley, and Bishop Butler,
whose Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the
Constitution and Course of Nature she was accustomed
to keep on her breakfast-table, it does not seem as if her
lack of orthodoxy was of a very formidable description.
It must, however, be said that the irreverence of the
speech and manners of the day was on a par with
their frequent brutality. In the accounts of the
scenes which prove this fact the reader is forced to
come to the conclusion that the claims of an earthly
sovereign were allowed to figure in a controversy the
repulsive unseemliness of which did more than savour
of profanity with the prerogatives of the King of kings.
In Anne's reign the indecorous practice had been estab-
lished of the chaplain's reading prayers in the ante-room,
while the Queen dressed in the room within. She was
in the habit of causing the door of communication to be
shut occasionally. On one occasion when this happened
the chaplain stopped the service, and the Queen sent
to ask the reason why, on which the high-spirited and
indignant prelate replied that he declined to "whistle
the word of God through a keyhole." Prayers were
read in the same disorderly fashion to Caroline. The
chaplain's reading-desk was placed under a huge picture
of the heathen goddess Venus. The Queen's toilette
went on in regular stages, the last including the
presence of Lord Hervey, her Vice-Chamberlain, as well
as of her ladies and women of the bedchamber in attend-
ance, and Hervey was there to discuss with his mistress
the morning's highly-spiced gossip.
Amidst this autocratic and disrespectful careless-
ness, the Queen, in her affability and candour, was
open to both remonstrance and rebuke when there was
any one bold enough, under the seal of his commission,
136 Sij IRoval Xafcfes
to administer them to her. Dr. Whiston had the courage
to tell her frankly of the scandal created by the royal
conduct in the square pew in the little chapel in the
palace at Kensington. The King demanded that the
shortest l of "good sermons " should be preached ; yet,
in spite of their shortness and goodness, he either fell
asleep, or conversed with the Queen in German so loudly
as nearly to drown the voice of the preacher, who, on
one occasion, was so hurt and distressed that in place of
challenging the offenders, as his predecessors challenged
the " lion's cub " Elizabeth, the unfortunate man burst
into tears. Caroline acknowledged the reasonableness
of the protest, but pled in self-defence that the King
would speak to her and she had to answer him.
Whatever the fate of England might have been had
Caroline lost the influence over her husband which she
was persuaded was only to be secured by the appearance
of unqualified deference to his wishes, she would have
been infinitely more respected, and more worthy of re-
spect, had she cherished and given voice to a mind of
her own, on questions of right and wrong, in her inter-
course with her husband. It would almost seem as if a
blunted sense of decent propriety, when joining in re-
ligious worship, was hereditary, in addition to the fact
that the growth of bad example had done its work,
since we read that, in the next generation, Princess
Emily received a public rebuke for carrying a little dog
in her mufF to church.
Gay had just brought out his popular Beggar's Opera,
which, under its rollicking fun, contained a smart satire
on the Government embodied in Sir Robert Walpole.
For this indiscretion the poet (he is said to have been the
first man to bring the news of Anne's death to Hanover,
1 There is the excuse for George, that he a stupid unintellectual old
man was required to listen to a sermon in what was practically a
foreign language to him.
Caroline of Hnspacb 137
he had been certainly in such favour with Caroline that
she had asked him to write a book of fables for the use
of her little son William, and offered him a small place in
the household) fell into disgrace at Court. As a con-
sequence the performance of the play, which had " run "
for many nights, was interdicted. Gay's part was imme-
diately taken by " Kitty," Duchess of Queensberry, one
of the most headstrong and whimsical of the fine ladies
of the reign. She had such confidence in her own beauty
that she went to the coronation of George II. and Caro-
line without either ribbon or feather. " This," writes
well-mannered Mrs. Delany, in the dainty fault-finding
which offers so marked a contrast to the robust vitupera-
tion of her contemporaries, " was not to her " (the
Duchess's) "advantage." With a like conviction that
her charms were beyond embellishment, the same wilful,
egotistical " Kitty " no longer young, but an aged
woman walked at the coronation of George III. in her
" milk-white locks," unsheltered and unadorned. The
Duchess was an ardent patroness of Gay. She chose to
resent the disgrace into which he had fallen, and to go
about making subscriptions for him at one of the
Queen's drawing-rooms of all places. When she was
called to order for her conduct, she wrote so saucily im-
pertinent a reply that she too was forbidden the Court ;
she indemnified herself by espousing Gay's cause more
vehemently than ever. She repaired to Bath, like the
rest of the world then, and got up private theatricals,
which the Prince of Wales went to admire, in order to
display, in the eyes of the world, his disagreement with
his family.
In 1733 tne ^ rst arrangements were made for the
marriage of Princess Anne, Caroline's eldest daughter,
who was in her twenty-fifth year, with the deformed
Prince of Orange. The match was not greatly approved
of by the King and Queen. Holland was not in the
138 Sis TCosal Xafcies
first rank among European countries, though its rulers
had wedded with English Princesses more than once
since the States became independent. The bridegroom's
income was not much above ten or twelve thousand
pounds a year, while his person was ill-suited to
the buxom youth and comeliness of the bride. A far
greater alliance that with Louis XV. of France
had been talked of for her, but the proposal had been
dropped on account of the Roman Catholic creed of
the suitor. The decision with regard to the Prince of
Orange was left to the person most concerned the
Princess, a young woman of much character and some
estimable qualities, though she was of too haughty and
imperious a disposition to be generally liked. She
immediately pronounced for the Prince of Orange,
declaring, in scorn of the ridicule of his deformity, that
though he were a monkey she would marry him.
Nobody was more astonished, or well-nigh affronted,
by her daughter's choice than was Queen Caroline.
During the whole of the preparations, and even during
the celebration of the marriage, she never ceased to
dwell on the Prince's defects, and to bemoan with
showers of tears the hard fate of the Princess. With
outrageous exaggeration Caroline was in the habit
of styling her future son-in-law " that animal, that
monster " ; yet surely dapper, red-faced, conceited, and
irate George was neither an Adonis nor a Solomon
that his partner in life should have commented, with
overwhelming severity, on the shortcomings in person
and manners of a man who is said to have had a fine
and good face to counterbalance his crooked body.
As for his share of the silence and phlegm which
distinguished his race it was more than compensated
by his quiet, magnanimous dignity under the unmerited
rudeness and neglect with which he was treated on his
arrival in England. He was so ill in health that many
Caroline of Bnspacb 139
weeks had to elapse before he could resort to Bath to
drink the famous waters for the purpose of hastening
his convalescence. It was not till March, 1734, that
the ceremony of marriage, of which so many gossiping
details have been given, could take place. In the
meantime William received no visit of formal polite-
ness, no mark of friendly sympathy from Kensington
or St. James's. The Prince and his retinue were
treated with marked slights by all save London city
and the people at large, to whom the stranger's con-
spicuous Protestantism recommended him. One is
tempted to ask oneself whether there was not a seamy
side of clownish selfishness and rudeness to the Sir
Charles Grandison era of exquisite bowing and curt-
seying, just as, in the Middle Ages, the fantastic courage
and generosity of chivalry had its reverse aspect of
savage cruelty. The very bride, who had elected of
her free will to accept the offer of William's hand,
showed herself strangely indifferent to his feelings and
sufferings. She did not display the slightest impatience
to see him ; she did not give utterance to the smallest
regret that he should be seriously ill under trying cir-
cumstances. Like her family, she took little or no
notice of him till the moment which was to make them
husband and wife. However, her subsequent behaviour
indicated that her apathy was due, partly to her position
with its difficulties, partly to the pride which led her
to guard jealously her own prerogatives, and would not
allow her to concede anything till she had granted all.
The foremost in contempt for his brother-in-law, and
in animosity to Princess Anne in the light of a bride,
was, as might have been expected, her brother Frederick,
Prince of Wales. He is represented as ludicrously angry
because his sister was to be married while there was still
no mention of his marriage. One of his modes of annoy-
ing his sister was to get up an opposition opera to that
140 Stj IRosal Xafcies
of Handel, her old master, for whom she had a high
regard, so that for a time the great composer, whom
the rest of the royal family delighted to honour, was
thrown into the shade by an unworthy rival.
The Court life, in spite of courtiers' intrigues and
fierce family squabbles, was formal and monotonous.
The King, with his aspirations to be gay and gallant, was
heavily dull and methodical in his habits and amusements.
A round of residences at St. James's, Kensington, Rich-
mond, and Hampton Court, formed the rule ; a sojourn
at Bath or Tunbridge Wells, then in their glory, was the
exception. Caroline had a passion for landscape garden-
ing, which she indulged with least hindrance during the
King's absences in Hanover. Among her improvements
were the removal of the labyrinths of ornamental hedges
from Kensington Gardens a and the substitution of the
Round Pond in their place ; she also projected the
formation of the Serpentine. Her taste in art was at
least superior to that of George, and to her alert intelli-
gence is due the discovery and preservation of one of the
art treasures of the country. The reference is to a price-
less set of chalk drawings by Holbein, able sketches of the
notabilities of the Court of Henry VIII., with the names
supplied by Sir John Cheke. The drawings, which are
now in the possession of the Queen at Windsor, were
found by Queen Caroline, long after they had been lost
sight of, stowed away in the drawers of an old cabinet.
There was royal hunting for three days a week in
Richmond Park and similar localities, when the Queen
always hunted in a chaise, and appointed her vice-
chamberlain Hervey, who cared no more for the sport
than she did, to ride by her coach and entertain her with
his lively conversation. It has been already mentioned
1 There is still a pastry-cook's, in the main street of Kensington,
where Caroline's recipe for German gingerbread is preserved. The
Queen gave it to the pastry-cook's predecessor of her day, who had a
shop on the same site.
Caroline of Hnspacb 141
that Lord Hervey, along with his heartless cynicism, was
an effeminate fop, affording warrant for the nickname
" Lord Fanny " which Pope first applied to him. He used
rouge, was sickly for which he was less to blame and is
said to have been subject to epileptic fits. He went con-
stantly to London, on the plea of hearing what the world
was saying and doing, and retailed what he had learnt
to the Queen and the Princesses, with whom he walked
<c every other day." He was always at the Queen's break-
fast-table. His society was so necessary and agreeable to
Caroline that, when she was confined to her room with
gout, she made the excuse of her mature years and high
character in order to admit him to sit by her and enliven
her with his sallies. He was so secure of his position, and
so convinced of her regard, that in one of thejeux cT esprit
which he was in the habit of perpetrating he not only
described himself as waylaid by highwaymen on the
country (!) road between London and the courtly little
town of Kensington, but he went on to picture, in the
freest manner, the news of his misadventure with the
report of his death reaching the palace and the different
amusing ways in which, according to their idiosyn-
crasies, the various members of the royal family and
the Court circle would receive the information. In these
details the author did not hesitate to comment slyly on
the peculiarities of the individuals dealt with. This
paper Hervey read aloud to the Queen, the Princesses,
and the ladies-in-waiting, to the accompaniment of their
appreciative laughter. In another paper, supposed to
be his diary written after death, he painted his spirit as
constantly occupied in serving his royal mistress. He
was driving a bat out of her bedroom ; he was shading
her from the sun ; he was taking the chill off the
strawberry-water she was about to drink when she was
hot ; he was sitting on the shaft of her Majesty's
carriage, so as to brush away the dews and worms from
M2 Ste racial Xatrtes
her path ; he was hovering over the chaplain in chapel,
and tearing six leaves out of his sermon in order to
shorten it, etc., etc. Caroline said, laughingly, she
endured the impertinence of which the creature was
guilty because she could not live without him. The
return for all this indulgent affection was the cold-hearted
analysis of her life and character, the elaborate narrative,
as if given con amore, of every sorry circumstance, every
grim and ghastly feature of her last days and hours.
Why did Caroline, with her well-known penetration,
lavish so much confidence and regard on so frivolous
and false a servant ? Even her son Frederick, of whom
she was accustomed to think and speak as " a poor
fool," formed a more correct estimate than his mother
did of Hervey, whom Frederick detested with all his
heart. The explanation is to be found in the matter-
of-fact, philosophic, pessimistic side of the Queen's
disposition. She had been early accustomed to put up
with a great deal which was mentally and morally
inferior. Hervey could not be called mentally inferior.
He was a man " of parts " as people said in his day, of
keen wit and lively talent, while she was a witty woman,
with her perceptions of what was pure, honest, lovely,
and of good report, long blunted, alas ! by disuse and
abuse. She was oppressed as only such a woman
could be oppressed by the extremity of dulness and
levity on the part of the King, in whose society she
spent seven or eight hours each day, listening to him,
humouring him, guiding him by apparently endorsing
his views and opinions, with a constant restraint put
on herself. During these long hours she is said by
Hervey himself to have " looked, spoke, and breathed "
but for her husband. It must have been an immense
relief to her, faithfully as she loved and served
George, to exchange his vapid boasting and tiresome
garrulity, his causeless frets and unreasoning furies for
Caroline of Hnspacb 143
the society of a companion as quick in perception
and apt in tongue as herself, who could divert her
thoughts and entertain her and her daughters by his
racy version of what was passing in and out of
London. She fancied here was a gossip with whom
she could be at ease, whom she could trust, to whom
she could speak her mind without fear of ulterior con-
sequences. It should be remembered that Caroline's
eldest son, who might have been her friend, had utterly
failed her. Her communications with him were only
less forced than those which he held with his father.
Unless when it was necessary to notice the Prince in
public, which the King was induced to do with diffi-
culty, George passed Frederick by in dogged silence,
as George's father had passed his son by in his youth,
and habitually acted as if no Prince were visible.
Caroline's younger son, William, Duke of Cumber-
land, to whom she was sincerely attached, who returned
her attachment, was not more than seventeen years of
age at the date of his mother's death. His education
and the offices, military and civil, to which he was early
appointed, as if for the purpose of mortifying his elder
brother, kept mother and son apart.
Queen Caroline, like the Electress Sophia, got into
trouble by her tongue. Her speech was always pointed
and vigorous. That her strong language was frequently
an offence to proper feeling and good taste is attri-
butable, in part, to the licence then permitted and
encouraged in conversation. The fact that the Queen
spoke mostly in French, as has been stated, ought
also to be borne in mind, since that language lent
a certain airy piquancy and drollery to her talk.
It served to modify the pungent phrases and broad
illustrations of her meaning, which her biographers
have rendered in the plainest of plain-spoken English.
Her " sprightliness," as it was called, tempted her to
144 Si IRo^al Xafcies
tease her listeners, and to "play off" or show up their
peculiarities, though it was never done ill-naturedly.
She was dining in company with Sir Paul Methuen at
Lady Walpole's, and kept attacking him on his
notorious love of romance-reading, pressing him with
the question, " Well, Sir Paul, what romance are you
reading now? " At last he was provoked into answer-
ing, " I have got into a very foolish study, madam,
that of the Kings and Queens of England " ; a smart
repartee which she deserved and probably enjoyed.
At Richmond Caroline walked for more than an hour
every morning with the King. The amount of exercise
was often exceedingly difficult for her, on account of
her great stoutness, her gout, and the fatal complaint
which was gradually developing itself. But rather than
disappoint the King, who would have been annoyed by
any failure to attend him on her part, she would plunge
her foot and leg up to the knee in cold water, and trust
to the dangerous shock to the system, and the violent
perspiration thus induced, to enable her to do what she
conceived to be alike her privilege and her duty. The
Queen's devotion to her husband has been freely ascribed
to ambition and self-interest. Thackeray judges it
more justly, though he does not profess to account for
it : " One inscrutable attachment that inscrutable
woman has. To that she is faithful through all trial,
neglect, pain, and time. Save her husband, she really
cares for no created being. She is good enough to her
children, and even fond enough of them, but she would
chop them all up into little pieces to please him. In
her intercourse with all around her she was perfectly
kind, gracious, and natural ; but friends may die,
daughters may depart, she will be as perfectly kind and
gracious to the next set. If the King wants her, she
will smile upon him be she ever so sad, and walk with
him be she ever so weary, and laugh at his brutal jokes
Caroline of Hnspacb 145
be she in ever so much pain of body or heart. Caroline's
devotion to her husband is a prodigy to read of. What
charm had the little man ? What was there in those
wonderful letters of thirty pages long which he wrote
to her when he was absent ? . . . Why did Caroline,
the most lovely and accomplished Princess of Germany,
take a little red-faced, staring princeling for a husband
and refuse an emperor ? Why, to her last hour, did
she love him so ? ... With the film of death over her
eyes, writhing in intolerable pain, she yet had a livid
smile and a gentle word for her master."
Card-parties for basset, quadrille, loo (spelt c 'lu"), etc,
etc., etc., with occasional heavy gains and losses, were
formed every evening in English as in other European
palaces.
Before going to bed, the King and Queen spent
an hour or two each night when they were in the
country, and three nights a week when their Majesties
were in town, with a respectable pair, who were
under the royal protection and were members of the
household. These were French Huguenots of high
birth. The King created the brother Earl of Lifford ;
the sister, Lady Charlotte de Roncy, was governess to
the younger Princesses Mary and Louisa. According
to Lord Hervey, the two were more worthy than
amusing ; according to Horace Walpole, they were
poor, and received more of the honour of the King and
Queen's countenance than of substantial remuneration
for genuine services. In the company of Lord Lifford
and Lady Charlotte the King walked up and down and
talked of armies and genealogies ; the Queen knotted l
and yawned, and occasionally " went from yawning to
1 Knotting was a favourite occupation of ladies in the eighteenth
century. Like tatting (which it resembled), netting, and knitting, it
was better calculated to send the workers to sleep than to keep them
awake. Knotting resulted in the production of a strong kind of lace or
IO
146 Stj IRosal Xafcies
nodding, and from nodding to snoring." When Lady
Charlotte was summoned to help to make up a game at
one of the royal card- tables, her mistakes are said to
have been treated with scant ceremony. The Queen
tweaked her by the turban, the Princess Royal rapped
her on the knuckles. These details are supplied by
Lord Hervey and Horace Walpole, " Lord Fanny " and
" Horry," as kindred spirits termed them. In these
gentlemen's readiness to believe the worst of all save of
their special cronies, in their incapacity for ascribing to
the people around them higher motives than those
which sufficed for themselves, they are not witnesses
who can be taken without a pinch of salt. Their pens,
like the brilliant pen of Lady Mary Montagu, were
dipped in gall. Unfortunately, the authors referred to
are not only the most graphic writers, they are the
chief contemporary authorities on the manners and
customs of the Court and on the social life of the reign.
Mrs. Delany, who is a mildly vivacious, quaintly
pleasing substitute for the men, while she is much more
truth-loving and amiable, was in Ireland and in the
country for part of the time ; besides, she deals more
with an occasional ceremonial, such as a coronation,
with the fashions, and with delightful records of her
personal friends and her personal pursuits, than with
any form of history. Lady Louisa Stuart with her
Scotch shrewdness and old-world liveliness supplements
by her reminiscences her family narratives ; but she
is necessarily brief. There is no lack of material in
Lady Mary Coke's voluminous diary and letters, but
they are the literary remains of a woman styled charac-
teristically, from the dead whiteness of her skin and
from her fierce eyes, " the White Cat." She was nearly
as crazy as Kitty of Queensberry, while her extravagant
egotism was still more dominant ; neither was she more
generous and gentle than the two distinguished men
Caroline of Hnspacb 14?
one of whom, Horace Walpole, used to welcome her
to Strawberry Hill.
Caroline has been laughed at for her mistaken patron-
age of Stephen Duck, a Wiltshire labourer, who wrote
poetry of little merit. The Queen procured for him an
appointment as Yeoman of the Guard, and named him
Keeper of her Grotto grottoes and wildernesses were
among the " fads " of the time in Richmond Park.
She even caused him to enter the Church and made him
Vicar of Kew, a promotion of which he was not worthy
in any light. The burden so weighed upon him that the
unhappy man drowned himself. In the sad story there
is only one pleasing element, and that is Caroline's genuine
desire to reward intellectual effort under difficulties.
The Queen was very fond of English comedy, had
the famous Anne Oldfield to " read " at Windsor, and
on the actress's death, writes Dr. Doran, " bought her
collection of plays for a hundred and twenty guineas."
An event of moment in 1734 was the withdrawal of
Lady Suffolk (Mrs. Howard) from her Court posts. She
held, first, that of bedchamber woman, and second, on
her husband's accession to the Earldom of Suffolk, that
of Mistress of the Robes, which was her office for twenty
years years during which she had not been absent from
Court for six weeks in succession. The etiquette of the
royal service required a bedchamber woman to come
into waiting before the Queen's prayers were made,
which was before she dressed. The bedchamber woman
gave the Queen's underlinen to a lady of the bed-
chamber, who had also to be present ; the lady of the
bedchamber put the " shift " on the Queen. In the
same manner the bedchamber woman presented the fan
to the lady of the bedchamber, who handed it to the
Queen. The page of the back-stairs brought the basin
and ewer, and placed them on a side table. The bed-
chamber woman knelt and offered them to the Queen,
i 4 8 Ste IRosal OLafcies
the lady of the bedchamber looking on ; the bedchamber
woman poured the water from the ewer on the Queen's
hands ; later, she pulled on the Queen's gloves, if she
did not choose to do it herself. The page of the back-
stairs put on the Queen's shoes. When the Queen
dined in public her glass was handed to her by a woman
of the bedchamber, who also brought the Queen's
chocolate.
Lady Suffolk's infirmity of deafness had increased to
an extent which wearied the King in his daily visits to
her. She, whose conversation had formerly been so
soothing, had learnt a habit of contradicting Majesty it-
self a liberty in which Queen Caroline rarely indulged.
Horace Walpole mentions that Lady Suffolk was a
strict lover of truth, and was very apt to be circumstan-
tial about trifles. These peculiarities may have had
something to do with her contradiction of the King
which was not agreeable to him. She persisted in her
friendship with Gay, who was in perennial disgrace at
Court, and with Pope, who had openly satirised the King
and the royal family. Puffing, strutting little George
protested ungallantly that he was weary of a deaf old
woman, and ceased his daily visits to her. Lady Suffolk
declared that the rooms assigned to her in Kensington
Palace were three feet underground, and were injurious
to her health. Another reason for the resignation of
her office was that the worthless life of the husband from
whom she had long lived apart was ended, and although
she was upwards of fifty years of age she was about to
marry, for the second time, the Honourable George
Berkeley, a younger son of Earl Berkeley, Master of
St. Catharine's in the Tower, and Member of Parliament
for Dover. Her retirement from Court was more re-
gretted by her mistress than by any other member of
the royal family and household. In spite of the cordial
regard entertained for Lady Suffolk by her intimate
Caroline of Hnspacb 149
friends, her early contemporaries in office, and by the
sardonic editor of her letters, together with the warm
tribute paid to her memory by Thackeray, her departure
from the circle was welcomed, rather than regretted, by
all save the Queen, who was " both glad and sorry,"
with whom, and with whom only, Lady Suffolk had a
long and friendly parting interview, in which Caroline
even sought to induce her servant to reconsider her
resignation. George had been bored by his old friend
and confidante. The elder Princesses had resented her
influence with their father, and were pleased to see her
go ; only Anne, in her blunt, disrespectful fashion,
pitied her mother for having the King for ever on her
hands. A quarter of a century afterwards Lady Suffolk
happened to pay a visit to Kensington. There was a
review of the household troops, of which she had not
heard, and her coach got wedged in among other coaches,
so that it could not move. As the old woman sat there,
the King, whom she had not seen for many years,
passed, and did not recognise her. Two days afterwards
she heard of his death. She survived the Queen thirty
years, and the King seven ; she outlived her second, as
she had outlived her first husband, and died, compara-
tively poor, in 1767, in the eightieth year of her age.
Apart from her deafness, she was well-nigh as pleasing
as ever to the last.
Lady Sundon (Mrs. Clayton) succeeded her former
rival as Mistress of the Robes and remained with Caroline
to the end. Lady Sundon's death, which occurred five
years after that of the Queen, is said to have been caused
by grief for the loss of her friend and mistress, or, as
sceptical spirits understood it, by the mortification of the
check to her ambition. She was said to suffer from
attacks of madness after Caroline's death.
In the years 1735 and 1736 the King revisited
Hanover, while the Queen again acted as Regent in
iso Sij IRosal Xafcies
her husband's absence. When in Germany, George
experienced one of his violent attacks of gallantry and
extravagant admiration for a German lady, Madame
Walmoden. She was a descendant of the family of dis-
reputable adventurers, of whom the Countess von Platen,
George's mother Sophia Dorothea's deadly enemy, was
the most conspicuous. George's letters from forty to
sixty pages Jong in which he gave the minutest account
of his proceedings abroad for his wife's benefit, were full
of ecstatic praises of the lady. Caroline must have read
them with a rueful smile at her King's ineradicable
follies and absurdities. She replied to them with the
time-serving dissimulation and subserviency which spoilt
an otherwise fine character. She professed to sympathise
with him fully in his enthusiasm for this new paragon.
Madame Walmoden came to England at a later period
and was created, by George, Countess of Yarmouth.
Lady Louisa Stuart remembered her, and describes her
as a dull, orderly, harmless woman, not possessed of any
particular personal or mental attraction, ?- ' not disposed
to meddle with anybody.
On the King's return to Kensington in October, 1735,
Dr. Doran describes the Queen, with her ladies and
gentlemen, hurrying to the gate to meet him as he
alighted from his coach. She took his hand and kissed
it in her office as Regent, then hastened to kiss him on
the lips, with a very unceremonious, hearty, brusque kiss,
as his loving wife. But George, who chanced to be in
one of his cross, ungracious humours, led her upstairs
" in a very formal, stately manner." If the King was
in this frame of mind he spared nobody. Lord Hervey
describes two similar scenes at this time. One was when
Caroline and her daughters were drinking their morning
chocolate in the gallery, with the Queen's second son
William, Duke of Cumberland, standing by. " George
snubbed the Queen. . . for being always stuffing ;
Caroline of Hnspacb 151
the Princess Amelia for not hearing him ; the Princess
Caroline for being grown fat ; the Duke of Cumberland
for standing awkwardly ; and then he carried the Queen
out to walk and be re-snubbed in the garden."
On the other occasion, when there was an argument
on the obligation of giving " vails " or gratuities to the
servants in any house which the King or the Queen
visited, the Vice-Chamberlain took it upon him to hint
that such liberality was expected from the Queen.
" Then let her stay at home as I do," said the King
rudely. " You do not see me running into every
puppy's house to see his new chairs and stools." Turn-
ing to the Queen he added, " Nor is it for you to be
running your nose everywhere, and to be trotting about
the town to every fellow who will give you some bread
and butter, like an old girl who loves to go abroad, no
matter where, or whether it be proper or no."
The Queen coloured, and knotted a great deal faster,
during this speech, than she had done before, while the
tears came into her eyes ; but she said not one word.
Lord Hervey still ventured to defend his royal mistress,
the result being that George burst into a torrent of
German which sounded like abuse. The Queen made
no reply, but knotted on till she tangled her thread,
then snuffed the candles which stood on the table before
her, and put one of them out ; " upon which the
King, in English, began a new dissertation upon her
Majesty, and took her awkwardness for his text."
The King had several pictures painted of the balls
and entertainments which he had most enjoyed in his
visit to Hanover. These pictures, containing portraits
of his Majesty's guests, were hung up in the Queen's
dressing-room. " Occasionally, of an evening, the King
would take a candle from the Queen's table and go from
picture to picture with Lord Hervey, telling its history,
explaining the joyous incidents, naming the persons
152 Sf
represented, and detailing all that had been said and done
on the particular occasion before them. " During which
lecture," says the Vice-Chamberlain himself, " Lord
Hervey, while peeping over his Majesty's shoulder at
those pictures, was shrugging up his own, and now and
then stealing a look to make faces at the Queen, who,
a little angry, a little peevish, a little tired at her
husband's absurdity, and a little entertained with his
lordship's grimaces, used to sit and knot in a corner of
the room, sometimes yawning and sometimes smiling,
and equally afraid of betraying those signs either of her
lassitude or her mirth." Alas ! for the coarse-minded
insincerity, disloyalty, and mockery, in which, if we are
to believe Hervey, Caroline played a part.
In spite of these domestic fracas, no one, either then
or since, ever doubted George's warm attachment, after
his uncouth fashion, to his Queen, and her unalterable
supreme regard for her King.
In April, 1735, Frederick Prince of Wales, was married
to Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. It was more than
time that he should be settled in life ; he was in his
thirtieth year. Already a bold scheme, with which his
family had nothing to do, had been planned to marry
him to one of his father's subjects a scheme which
was baffled by Sir Robert Walpole. The schemer was
Queen Anne's former favourite, the haughty termagant
Sarah, Duchess of Marl borough, freely styled " Old
Sarah " by her later contemporaries. She had secretly
arranged an alliance between " Prince Fritz " and her
favourite grand-daughter Lady Di. Spencer. The
Duchess was to give the bride a portion of a hundred thou-
sand pounds, a sum which would have been particularly
acceptable to the needy bridegroom, over whose pro-
posed income of fifty thousand pounds a year, paid in
monthly instalments at the King's pleasure, George or
rather Frederick's friends and the Parliament were
Caroline of Bnspacb 153
wrangling. But it was the question of a separate estab-
lishment, which would give the undutiful, wayward
son still greater opportunities for mischief, in heading
cabals against the King's authority, that delayed any
suggestion of a fitting allowance for the future King.
It is just possible also, if there is any truth in the
assertion, of Caroline, as well as of George, having long
cherished a hope that England and Hanover might be
separated, the Queen had trusted Hanover might pass to
the Prince of Wales, and England to the son of her love,
William, Duke of Cumberland ; or, vice versa, England
to Frederick and Hanover to William. Such divisions of
territory were not unknown to the House of Brunswick.
But if Frederick married and had heirs, the subsequent
distribution of the royal possessions would be rendered
doubly difficult.
If Caroline ever entertained the idea attributed to
her, she must have relinquished it before the date of
Frederick's marriage, which she was certainly anxious
to promote. The King first looked to Prussia, and
to the daughter and son of his sister the second Sophia
Dorothea, for marriage-contracts where two of his
children were concerned. He had planned a double
marriage the Prince of Wales to the daughter, and
one of his own daughters to the son (afterwards
Frederick the Great) of the King of Prussia. But
Prussia, influenced by Court intrigues, and by reasons
best known to her brutal tyrant, broke off the treaty.
George then selected for his daughter-in-law a Princess
of Gotha, a blooming girl of seventeen, eager to avail
herself of the promotion offered to her. She landed
at Greenwich on St. George's Day, 1736. Her fresh,
happy face made her awkward, ungainly figure be for-
gotten, and recommended her to the people, who
crowded to see her as she sat in the balcony of the
Queen's house overlooking the park. The people's
iS4 Ste IRosal Xabfes
hearty greetings were the only welcome she had, for
the bridegroom came late, and he was unaccompanied
by any member of the family, with whom he was at
chronic strife.
The marriage took place in the Chapel Royal, St.
James's, on May 8th, 1736, in spite of the old super-
stition against celebrating weddings in the month which
had been dedicated to the Virgin. The King and Queen
were pleased with the Princess on first acquaintance, but
in the troubles which followed she always seemed to
them a mere tool of her husband's. Caroline looked
upon Augusta as a poor, dull, stupid girl, against whom
the clever woman of mature years could not condescend
to bear malice.
George went again to Germany in the course of the
summer, leaving behind him orders that the Prince and
Princess of Wales should occupy rooms in whatever
palace the Queen-Regent chose to reside. Prince Fritz,
with the petty but galling spirit of contradiction which
uniformly possessed him, thought fit to evade the order
by inventing a succession of excuses. He pleaded an
illness of his wife's on one occasion as his reason for not
attending his mother when she was removing to fresh
quarters.
Caroline was sufficiently provoked to take a journey in
person urged, as she professed, by her anxiety to ascer-
tain the state of her daughter-in-law's health in order to
discover whether the Princess had measles or not. But
in a darkened room, with the compliant Princess laid up
in bed, and instructed in the evasive answers to give to
every searching question put to her, it was difficult to
discover whether the patient had so much as a slight
cold.
The Queen had enough weighty business on her
hands to occupy her otherwise. First, there was rioting
everywhere, so that the guards had to be doubled at
Caroline of Hnspacb 155
the entrances to the palaces where she was in residence.
These disorders culminated in the Porteous mob in
the Scotch capital, when the execution of the smuggler
Wilson was avenged by the murder of the captain of
the city guard, who had directed his men to fire on the
ringleaders of the excited crowd engaged in attempting
to cut down Wilson's body. The breaking open of
the Tolbooth where Captain Porteous lay, the manner
in which he was seized, half dragged, half carried
through the streets of Edinburgh, and hanged on the
very spot where Wilson had suffered the extreme
penalty of the law, was so daring a usurpation of
justice, while the affair was conducted so deliberately
and systematically that it was exceedingly like the
beginning of a general insurrection.
Next, Caroline was vexed by the prolonged injudi-
cious absence of her King, extending even beyond the
anniversary of his birthday. She was piqued and morti-
fied into abridging her usual letters to him, which were
as prolix as his were to her. But entreated by Walpole,
who believed that his position as Prime Minister de-
depended on Caroline's influence over the King, she
sought to make amends for her brief rebellion by invit-
ing Madame Walmoden to England, even by offering
to take her into the Queen's service ; an invitation
and offer which were not, however, acted upon at the
time.
The last straw which threatened to break the poor
burdened camel's back was the bad passage which
George had, in crossing from Hanover to England, in
the month of December. He was so tossed by the
storm, delayed, and turned back, that the liveliest
apprehensions for his safety were current in England.
The Prince of Wales began openly to brag that when
he appeared in public the mob shouted " Crown him !
crown him ! " in anticipation of his speedy succession
OLaMes
to the throne, when his mother and sisters were likely
to fare badly at his hands.
But the Queen kept up her spirit and courage, and
read Rollin's Ancient History to pass away the time.
She spent Christmas Day without breaking down. It
was only when Sir Robert Walpole thought it right to
tell her that the ships which had been the escort of
the King's vessel had struggled back in a disabled con-
dition to England, bringing news of the tremendous
hurricane they had encountered, but unable to say a
word with regard to what had become of the King's
yacht, that she broke down at last and wept bitterly.
Nevertheless she went to service in the Chapel Royal
as she was accustomed to do, because her absence would
have been like sealing the King's death-warrant in the
eyes of the Court and the people ; besides, what better
place could be found for an afflicted wife, over whose
head the dreaded sentence of bereavement seemed im-
pending, than the House of Prayer ? In the middle of
the service a letter from the King was brought to the
Queen. His vessel had been able to put back to the
port from which it had sailed, and was waiting there for
more favourable weather. In the month of January,
1737, George arrived in safety; he had the grace on
this occasion to express his gratitute for the Queen's
concern on his account, and his fervent regard for her.
When the Prince and Princess of Wales's first child
was born the Prince gave another illustration of his
hare-brained recklessness, and of the miserable terms
on which the royal family were living together still
together though the King refused to speak to his son,
and while the Prince led the Queen by the hand to
dinner, with terrible enmity reigning in the hearts of
mother and son. The King and Queen, the Prince and
Princess of Wales, the Princesses Emily and Caroline,
with their younger sisters, Mary and Louisa, were all
Caroline of Hnspacb 157
at Hampton Court towards the end of the month of
July. "On the evening of the 3ist the King and
Princess Amelia were playing * commerce ' below stairs ;
the Queen, in another apartment, was at * quadrille ' ;
and the Princess Caroline and Lord Hervey were
soberly playing cribbage." The party separated at ten
o'clock under the impression that the Prince and
Princess of Wales were also retiring to rest in their suite
of apartments. At two o'clock in the morning the
Queen was aroused by the bedchamber woman, Mrs.
Tichborne, with the startling intelligence that the Prince
had taken away the Princess to St. James's in order that
their child might be born there.
" My good Tichborne," cried the Queen, using a
form of address which was common with her, " are
you mad, or are you asleep ? " When satisfied of the
truth of the information thus conveyed to her, the
Queen announced her determination to follow the runa-
way couple as soon as it was daylight. She entertained,
or professed to entertain, a fear that her son and his
submissive Princess would attempt to palm off a sup-
posititious child on the King and the nation. Caroline
declared she would be at the bottom of the business ;
accordingly she started in one of the royal carriages
with her two elder daughters, and reached St. James's
by eight o'clock in the morning. There the indignant
Queen found that her daughter-in-law had given birth
to a daughter an hour after her arrival from Hampton
Court. The Prince met his mother with many fluent
explanations and apologies, such as that the Princess
wished the child to be born at St. James's ; that she
was under the impression she would get better medical
aid in London, etc., etc., from which the Queen turned
away in scorn, viewing the excuses as " a pack of lies."
She was, however, satisfied that there was no imposition.
When she heard the poor young mother, who was
158 Sij TCosal XaMes
putting a brave face on the situation, declaring she was
very well and had not suffered from the Prince's action,
Caroline was softened, and spoke kindly and encoura-
gingly to her. The Queen took the infant in her
arms, and said, half in pity, half in sarcasm, " May
the good God bless you, poor little creature ! Here
you are arrived in a most disagreeable world."
Within a fortnight the Queen and the Princesses
paid another visit to the Prince and Princess of Wales.
On this second visit the Prince did not address a word
to his mother during the hour she remained in the
palace, though he went through the form not only of
conducting her to her coach, but of kneeling in the
muddy street and kissing her hand in presence of the
gaping crowd collected at the sight of the royal liveries.
This was the last time that the unhappy mother and
son met. The Queen was not present at the christening
of her grand-daughter. The incessant quarrelling
thinly veiled which went on between the King and
Queen with their household on the one side, and the
Prince and Princess of Wales with their household on
the other, reached a climax. The Prince and Princess
were requested to quit St. James's, as Caroline and
George had been told to leave the same palace at an
earlier date. The royal outcasts were bidden establish
themselves elsewhere, and they settled for the time
at Kew.
Caroline's health had long been manifestly failing,
undermined as it was by the internal injury which she
had sustained and had imprudently concealed to the
last. The fatal termination of her complaint was also
hastened by her compliance with the King's inconsiderate
and exacting demands for her company at all times, so
that she would walk with him when she was totally
unfit for the exercise, and drag herself out of bed in
order to undergo the fatigue of standing by his side in
Caroline of Hnspacb 159
public assemblies, till outraged nature compelled her to
withdraw. Sir Robert Walpole, with his keen, if
sardonic, insight into characters and motives, was one
of the first who suspected the truth. He founded his
suspicions on Caroline's persistent and particular inquiries
with regard to the course of Lady Walpole's illness,
which had been a case of rupture. He guessed that
Caroline's malady arose from a similar cause. In the
month of August, 1737, the Queen was so ill that her
death was reported in London. She rallied presently,
but in the following November grew so much worse
that her dangerous condition could no longer be hidden,
to the grief and consternation of the King, her daughters,
her second son, Sir Robert Walpole, and of every candid
and intelligent person in the country who esteemed her
virtues and was aware of the active part she had taken
in the government.
Caroline's last and fatal seizure occurred on Wed-
nesday, November 9th, but the indomitable woman
struggled gallantly against mortal pain and weakness.
To please her King, she made her final public appearance
at one of the drawing-rooms, which he was in the habit
of saying were destitute alike of grace, gaiety, and
dignity without her presence ; she was much worse for
the effort. Her loving daughter Caroline watched over
her the next night, while poor George obtuse and selfish
in his very affection lay, in his morning-gown, outside
the bed, rendering the tortured woman, tossing in her
restlessness, unable to turn.
Then began the " grotesque horror " and " dreadful
humour " of a death-bed scene, from which Thackeray
shrinks, which John, Lord Hervey, the Queen's friend,
dissects and exposes. First, there was the troop of
doctors, striving in their perplexity to find remedies for
the unknown ailment ; and when one of them succeeded
in arriving at the truth, and spoke of it in a low voice
160 Sij TRogal Xafcies
to the King, who had been in the secret from the
beginning, the Queen, guessing what he was about,
called him "a blockhead" for his pains. When forced
to own the nature of her illness, however, she was
patient, courageous, even cheerful, with her old ready
wit. She was willing to submit to any treatment, be it
ever so painful, even to undergo an operation, if the
doctors thought it would do her good.
Next the Prince of Wales sent hypocritical inquiries,
at which his father stormed, to which his mother, alas !
had no further answer than that she begged he might
be kept out of her sight. She had no faith in his pre-
tended sympathy ; she knew he would " blubber like
a calf" at her condition, and laugh at her outright as
soon as he was out of sight and hearing. Yet this was
the woman of whom we are told, on George's authority,
that she was the last to believe her son a fool and knave !
The wholesome heart had indeed been turned to gall.
On Sunday, November 1 3th, the doctors believed the
Queen's end to be near an opinion which she heard
with great calmness. She took a loving farewell of the
children who were with her, being especially tender to
the Duke of Cumberland a lad approaching manhood
and to the Princess Caroline, the most upright, un-
selfish, and gentle of the family, to whose special care
the Queen committed her younger daughters, Mary and
Louisa, girls in their earlier teens. She spoke in their
hearing to no purpose, as it proved of the womanish
sensitiveness and silliness which had induced her to con-
ceal a bodily hurt which, if attended to in time, might
have been of little moment, instead of shortening her
days as it was then doing. 1 She sought to console the
sobbing King, telling him that what of happiness and
greatness she had enjoyed in her life she owed to him,
1 Louisa, when Queen of Denmark, sustained a similar injury, which
she also concealed with like fatal consequences.
Caroline of Bnspacb 161
drawing a ring from her finger and putting it on his
hand, and appointing him her heir. She counselled
him to marry again a recommendation to which he
returned a vehement refusal, coupled with a character-
istic and unseemly qualification, on which she made an
equally characteristic and unseemly comment.
The Queen had a superstitious belief that she would
live till the following Wednesday, because, as she said,
all the great events of her life had happened to her on
Wednesdays. She had been born on a Wednesday,
married on a Wednesday, had given birth to her first
child on a Wednesday, and been crowned on a Wed-
nesday. Even this last violent illness had seized her
on a Wednesday, and she believed she would die on
a Wednesday. As it was, she only survived till the
following Sunday, the 2oth of the month. During
that week of extreme distress the doctors had sometimes
a faint hope that the Queen might yet recover. She
did not share the hope ; she might have pulled through
at twenty-five, she said, not at fifty-five.
The King kissed the sleeping woman again and again,
enlarging endlessly on her unrivalled excellences, and,
when she was awake and conscious, scolded her for not
lying still, and for staring into vacancy "like a calf
with its throat cut."
Princess Emily, who among various good qualities was
affected with a strong sense of the ridiculous, while she
had also her full share of the propensity of the family
and the generation to dispense with natural reverence
and modest ' self-control, and to speak her mind with-
out restraint, lost all patience with the noisy chief
mourner. She feigned to be asleep, so weary was she
of affecting to listen and respond to her father's exces-
sive garrulous eulogiums on her dying mother ; and
when he was absent from the room, in the tension of
her feelings, ,she forgot all filial regard and womanly
II
1 62 Sis TRo^al Xafcfes
compassion to rage at the stupid egotistical man, calling
him " old fool, liar, coward, and driveller," of whose
stories she was heartily sick.
The courtiers gossiped and speculated. Messengers
from the Prince of Wales crept into the ante-room, in
order to hear the doctor's last report and carry their
master the assurance that the Queen was certainly
sinking an assurance which he received with un-
dissembled satisfaction.
The public and the Prime Minister not George or
even his daughters apparently were solicitous that the
Queen should make a last formal recognition of the
truth of the Christian religion, and should receive its
consolations from the hands of an ordained priest. Ac-
cordingly, Potter, Archbishop of Canterbury, waited
on her, and read the prayers for the sick by her bed
morning and night. But those who made the matter
one of personal interest, and who besieged the prelate
every time he quitted the sick-room with the pressing
question, " Has the Queen received ? " could not learn
that she had taken the Holy Communion. The reason
usually assigned for this omission was that she was not
at peace with her elder son. It is known, nevertheless,
that she sent him her forgiveness and blessing, and that
she earnestly recommended his younger brother the Duke
of Cumberland, if he lived to see Frederick King of
England, to submit and defer to him, and only to seek
to surpass him in virtue. It is not impossible that
Caroline's absolute devotion to King George was at the
root of her refusal to have a personal interview with her
son. She knew that his presence in the palace would be
a torment to his father in his sorrow, and that, if the
Prince were ever readmitted to the royal circle, there
would be fresh difficulty and scandal in dislodging him
for the second time. Hervey and Walpole agree in
attributing these motives to the Queen.
Caroline of Hnspacb 163
On the final Sunday Queen Caroline asked one of her
physicians, " How long can this last ? "
" It will not be long," was the guarded reply, " before
your Majesty will be relieved from this suffering."
fc The sooner the better," said Caroline ; and then she
began to pray aloud ; and her prayer was not a formal
one, fixed in her memory by repeating it from the Book
of Common Prayer, but a spontaneous and extemporary
effusion, so eloquent, so appropriate and so touching,
that all the listeners were struck with admiration at this
last effort of a mind always remarkable for its vigour and
ability. She herself manifested great anxiety to depart
in a manner becoming to a Queen, and as her last
moments approached her anxiety in this respect appeared
to increase. She requested to be raised in bed, and
asked all present to kneel and offer up a prayer on her
behalf. While this was going on she grew gradually
fainter, but, at her desire, water was sprinkled upon
her, so that she might revive, listen to, and join in the
petition which her family (all but her eldest son, who
was not present) 1 put up to Heaven on her behalf.
" Louder," she murmured more than once, as some one
read or prayed ; " louder, that I may hear." " Pray !
pray ! " was the Queen's cry, as others had it. Her re-
quest was complied with, and then one of her children
repeated the Lord's Prayer. In this Caroline joined,
repeating the words as distinctly as failing nature would
allow her to do. The prayer was just concluded, when
she looked fixedly at those who stood weeping around
her, and uttered a long-drawn (German) So ! (the familiar
expression of assent in her mother- tongue). This was
" her last word ; but she was still able to wave her hand
in farewell to her friends and to the world. She com-
posed herself on her bed, breathed a sigh, and expired."
Thus died Caroline of Anspach, in her fifty-fifth year,
1 Her eldest daughter Anne, Princess of Orange, was also absent.
1 64 Sij %oal Xafctes
on Sunday, November 2oth, 1737. She was, without
doubt, the ablest of our Queen-Consorts. Her coarse-
ness and callousness belonged to her generation, her fine
qualities were her own. She helped to steer England
wisely and successfully through a transitional period of
great peril. She was the most devoted of wives, and,
apart from her relations with the wretched Frederick,
Prince of Wales, a good and kind mother. She was a
faithful friend and patroness of good men in the Church,
and of men of letters, so far as was in her power. She
deserved, in many lights, to be called, as she was, " the
good Queen Caroline." Ambition, together with her
temperament half philosophic, half mocking blinded
her, and rendered her, as they rendered several of her
predecessors, strangely indifferent to affectations and
offences which would have half-maddened a more deli-
cately sensitive and impulsively passionate woman.
Ambition, too, taught her the time-serving dissimulation
foreign to her naturally frank, outspoken disposition
which caused Walpole, while always regarding her as
his most valuable ally, to talk and write not only of
her, but to her, with little respect and less reticence ; x
if, indeed, bluff, brutal Sir Robert was capable of much
respect and propriety where either man or woman was
concerned.
The death of Queen Caroline was widely and justly
lamented by all save the Jacobite faction in the country.
Eulogiums in prose and verse, some of them of the
most extravagant character, were poured forth in her
honour. Her loss was still more deeply and abidingly
felt in the Court circle. George, with all his grievous
vices and follies, never forgot her ; he would look at her
picture for an hour at a time, bedewing it with tears,
1 Sir Robert was in the habit of complaining that the Queen " daubed,"
that is, over-did the graciously flattering manner under which she con-
cealed some of her personal and party dislikes.
Caroline of Hnspacb 165
and asserting that he had never seen a woman fit to
buckJe his wife's shoes. He did what he could to retain
in the royal service her much prized Vice-Chamberlain
and gossip Lord Hervey. Political exigencies deprived
Hervey of his post at last, and he did not survive the
Queen more than six years. Princess Caroline, her
mother's favourite daughter and namesake, ceased to
appear in public, and led the life of a confirmed invalid
and recluse from the date of Queen Caroline's death.
The Queen was buried with the splendour due to her
rank, though with Jess picturesque pomp than distin-
guished the funerals of the earlier Queens of England.
Her coffin was deposited in a vault beneath Henry VII. 's
Chapel, Westminster Abbey. Instead of the King or
either of his sons filling the office, Princess Emily, the
eldest Princess in England, acted as chief mourner,
according to old custom.
Handel's recently composed anthem, " When the ear
heard her, then it blessed her" was first sung on this
occasion.
In the preparations for the funeral of George II., who
survived his wife twenty-three years, dying in 1760,
one side of his coffin and one side of that of Queen
Caroline were removed, according to the directions
which the King had left behind him, in order that, as
the coffins rested together in the royal vault, the dust
of husband and wife might meet and mingle.
Caroline was the mother of nine children four sons,
two of whom died in infancy, and five daughters.
IV.
CHARLOWE OF MECKLENBURG-STRELIfZ,
WIFE OF GEORGE III.
167
AUTHORITIES :
Horace Walpole, Dr. Watkins, Mrs. Delany, Fanny Burney, Dr.
Doran, W. M. Thackeray, etc.
:KLENBURG-STRELITZ, QUEEN OF GEORGE in.
(THE GIRL-QUEEN).
CHAPTER I.
A YOUNG QUEEN-CONSORT.
THERE was a young King in England in 1761.
George III., who succeeded to his grandfather
George II. a year before, was just twenty-three. He
was then a handsome but rather delicate-looking lad,
on whom the hopes of the nation were centred, for
was he not the first English-born Prince of his line,
and had he not from his youth upwards borne, in
contrast to his predecessors, the highest character for
manly modesty and virtue? His father was the un-
lucky and undeserving " Prince Fritz," whom nobody
except his wife not his father, still less his mother
or his brother and sisters held in the slightest regard ;
with reason, for a more contradictory, heartless,
insubordinate Prince never existed. George III.'s
mother was a Princess of the House of Coburg. She
came to England a simple-minded, well-disposed girl
enough, neither pretty nor witty. Though with her
starched ways she was never popular in England, she
was a dutiful wife to the most trying of husbands
one of whose few redeeming qualities, however, was a
certain sense of her worth and of respect for her character.
She was a good mother in a hard, intolerant way.
Unfortunately, she was also a woman of no liberality
of mind, no tact, no grace. She was accused of
intermeddling with public affairs in an underhand,
unwarrantable manner. Certainly so long as she lived,
which was for eleven years after her son's accession
169
170 Si ttogal Xabies
to the throne, he was, in spite of the lesson she had
given him to "be a King, George, be a King," and
in spite of his firmness in all matters of conscience and
his naturally obstinate temper, a good deal like clay
in her hands and in those of Lord Bute, who by
George's favour succeeded the elder Pitt as Prime
Minister for a time. Bute was entirely in the Princess
of Wales' counsels, and for that reason, among others,
was detested by the nation at large.
The great question of the day was whom should
the young King marry. His grandfather had desired
an alliance with the royal family of Prussia, but that
project, thwarted by the Princess of Wales and Lord
Bute, fell to the ground.
There was many a noble English maiden who had
aspirations to the crown matrimonial, and there was the
fair Quaker Hannah Lightfoot, to whom, wild rumour
would have it, the royal lad had made honourable
proposals of marriage, nay, would have married had
not George II.'s death intervened in time. Yet
it was long centuries since a King of England had
wedded with a subject not since Edward IV. had
married Elizabeth Woodville. But there seemed some
danger of it in the present case because of George's
innocent admiration for the beautiful Lady Sarah
Lennox, daughter to the Duke of Richmond and cousin
to Charles James Fox. Her kith and kin are said to
have done their best to bring about the unequal match.
There still exists round Holland House a remnant of
the park in which Lady Sarah was wont to make hay
when the young King rode past on his way from
Kensington to St. James's. The whole scene was then
sufficiently quiet for such a performance. Holland
House was a country mansion, and Kensington, apart
from its palace and its stately square many of the
picturesque old houses in which had served as residences
Cbarlotte of /lfoecfclenbur0*Strelit3 171
for the foreign ambassadors in the reigns of William
and Mary and Anne was but a country village with
a country road, having a bad reputation for foot-pads,
between it and London.
The Princess of Wales and her adviser would on no
account countenance a misalliance, and as George would
not disobey his mother, and was too sensible, with all
his simplicity, of what was due to his rank and office,
not to appreciate the weight of the arguments against
his stooping to place Lady Sarah by his side, she smiled
her sweetest smile and tossed her fragrant hay in vain.
It was well, for Lady Sarah's future life did not afford
proof of a capacity to discharge with credit to herself
and profit to others the duties of a Queen.
It was believed that the widowed Princess and Lord
.Bute dispatched a trusty messenger to visit the Pro-
testant Courts of Europe and discover a suitable Princess
to match with the royal George. He found one in
a remote corner in the little duchy of Mecklenburg-
Strelitz. It was a poor little kingdom, over which the
young lady's brother presided with his widowed mother
and a couple of sisters to bear him company. Charlotte
Sophia the younger of the sisters had been brought
up in wholesome economy and quietness, still with
every attention to ducal dignity. For six days in the
week she had been content to appear in a robe-de-chambre ;
on the seventh she had worn full dress in which she
had attended church in state and afterwards driven out
in a coach and six, escorted by guards. Notwithstanding
this distinction she had not so much as dined at the
ducal table ; for she was only a girl of sixteen, very
much occupied with her studies in which she had been
carefully instructed. Indeed, she was an accomplished
girl for her age and for the remote duchy to which she
belonged. She could play on the spinet better than
any lady in England, she could speak a little English,
172 Sf tRosal XaMes
French, and Italian, she could draw fairly and embroider
with skill and taste. She was not pretty, though she
had a fresh complexion in keeping with her chestnut
brown hair, good eyes, and what was then called " a
fine countenance " that is, a face agreeably brightened
by quick intelligence and cheerful good humour. Her
mouth was large so large that as she was, whether as
a girl or a woman, thin, people said she was " all
mouth," but her teeth were white and regular. In
spite of her smallness and thinness her figure was good,
and she held herself so well that the public who came
in contact with her never failed to praise it in a variety
of terms. She was f * very genteel " in the original
meaning of the much abused old French word gentille
(petite, svelte, charming), or she was "elegance and
dignity itself." " How she held her fan ! " an enthu-
siastic painter recalled her attitude in one of her sittings
for his picture. Her arms and hands were beautiful
almost to the end of her life.
But it was not for mere accomplishments or for such
a share of personal attractions as she possessed that
Charlotte was chosen for her high destiny. The King
of Prussia in one of his smaller warlike expeditions had
devastated Mecklenburg-Strelitz, on which the girl
Princess ventured to write a letter to him in which she
dwelt on the scourge of war and the blessing of peace
and pled that her country might be spared further
suffering. Naturally the letter contained a few self-
evident truths clothed in stereotyped language, such
as might find its way into any school-room essay.
But the epistle, written as it was with perfect correct-
ness and great neatness, was regarded in those days as
a wonderful production for a girl of sixteen. It was
so managed that it should fall into the hands of honest
young George the royal Coelebs in search of a wife.
He was filled with respect and admiration. He declared
Cbatlotte of fl&ecfclen&urg*Strelit3 173
that the writer of that letter with its noble, just senti-
ments so eloquently expressed, was the wife for him,
and acted accordingly.
Thackeray has a pretty story of the Princess strolling
with her girl-companions in the ducal gardens and
crying out as the chatter turned on marriage, " Who
will take such a poor little Princess as me ? "
"And at that very moment the postman's horn
sounded, when Charlotte's chief girl friend said, much
to the purpose, ' Princess, there is the sweetheart.' "
Sure enough that postman brought the formal pro-
posals of the King of England.
Young as Charlotte was, it is hardly possible that
she was so entirely ignorant of the coming event of
tremendous importance to her as she is represented to
have been, though it might very well be true that the
Empress of Russia knew of the projected marriage
before it had reached the ears of the bride presumptive.
A widely received account has it that one morning,
without previous intimation, Charlotte's brother, the
Duke, entered, accompanied by the Duchess-mother,
the ante-room free to the Princess and communicated
to her what was in store for her. " In a few minutes
the folding doors flew open to the saloon, which she
saw splendidly illuminated, and there appeared a table,
two cushions, and everything prepared for a wedding.
Moreover, the proxy for King George was standing
ready. Her brother then gave her his hand and, leading
her in, said in French, ' Come, do not be a child. You
are going to be Queen of England,' and a service was
performed, after which all present embraced her, calling
her ' the Queen.' "
Two English ladies, the Duchesses of Hamilton and
Ancaster, were sent to Mecklenburg-Strelitz to represent
the Princess's suite and to help to escort her to her
future kingdom. They were what was called " fine
174 Sir IRosal Xafcfes
women," the Duchess of Hamilton, though she had been
twice married, being still strikingly handsome. " Are
all English women as beautiful as you are ? " asked
Princess Charlotte naively and wistfully, though pro-
bably not without a perception of the acceptability of
the graceful, gracious compliment.
Lord Hardwicke was the envoy who bore the King's
credentials and was empowered to bring the Princess to
England. A cloud came over the rejoicings and
delayed the conclusion of the treaty, in consequence of
the unexpected death of the Duchess-mother.
But a bridegroom so great as the King of England
could not be kept waiting, and a fortune so august as
that of his consort could not be received with a doleful
face by a silent Court. There must be festivity follow-
ing quickly on mourning, illuminations, balls, fireworks,
and volleys of artillery in rapid succession. The little
bride had to swallow down her tears for her mother
and show herself properly grateful and glad because of
the new honours heaped upon her and the new life
stretching out before her. And this may be said for
the coming Queen that noblesse oblige was a strong
principle with her. From first to last she set an in-
trepid example of conquering herself and sacrificing her
inclinations to do what was right and becoming in her
station and what would satisfy the natural and lawful
requirements of the nation. If she exacted much from
others it was because she had been always prepared to
grant them all they could claim, though she had to
trample down her own heart in the process.
On August lyth, 1761, the girl-bride left Strelitz
never to return ; for then it was emphatically de-
manded of a bride in a high place that she must forget
her people and her father's house. Her brother
accompanied her to Stade, and she had with her a life-
long friend who figured for many years at the English
Cbarlotte of fl&ecfelenlwr^StreUts 175
Court as Madame Schwellenberg. George, like his
successors, suffered his bride to come to him. Charles I.
when Prince of Wales stole incognito to Spain to be
introduced to the Infanta who was not to become his
Queen. His father James when crowned King of
Scotland dared the voyage to Denmark to bring Anne
to Holyrood ; but such gallantry was not to be found
in modern Princes.
From Cuxhaven Charlotte embarked on the Royal
Yacht convoyed by an English fleet under the naval
hero, Lord Anson. She had a stormy passage of a
week's duration. She bore the discomfort with
courage, cheerfully declining to be ill for more than
the first half hour. She played a great deal on the
harpsichord which had been provided for her, and sang
to her own accompaniment, doubtless anxiously practis-
ing the talent for which she was distinguished. She
arrived on Sunday afternoon at Harwich. Not even
as far as Harwich did the King go to welcome her.
When the news reached London next morning there
was great excitement about how and when the Queen
was to arrive, but there was no effort on the part of
George, willing bridegroom as he was, to anticipate
the moment of the meeting. Neither did the bride
show any indecorous haste to complete her journey.
She did not land till Monday afternoon, when,
after being received by the Mayor, she took coach.
She only proceeded in a leisurely way as far as
Colchester, where she was entertained at the house
of a local magnate with tea and coffee, and received
graciously the presentation of a specimen of a local
production called "candied Eringo root." She then
proceeded, on the August evening, as far as Witham,
where she halted for supper and a bed at the mansion
of Lord Abercorn. Her host happened to be in
London, so that she arrived unexpectedly, but she was
1 76 Sf IRosal XaMes
immediately received with all hospitality and honour.
She supped in public with open doors where the people
might gather to look at her, while Lord Hardwicke and
Lord Anson stood one on either side of her chair. It
was a severe ordeal for a youthful foreigner, but if ever
a girl of sixteen could surmount it bravely, with dignity
and grace, it was this little Charlotte of Mecklenburg-
Strelitz. Whether she slept the sweet, sound sleep of
youth after her fatigue and her first supper in public,
or whether she lay awake in the summer dusk thinking
how strange it was and looking forward with a beating
heart to the next day's meeting with the handsome
lad whose miniature she had eagerly studied, on whom
so much of her future well-being and happiness
depended, who can tell ?
The next morning Charlotte journeyed to Romford
where she was to stop at the house of a wine-merchant
named Dalton and await the royal servants and carriages
sent for her entrance into London. She had dressed
carefully for the occasion according to what was con-
sidered " English taste "in " a fly cap with rich lace
lappets " (think of the little girlish face in this matronly
guise !), a stomacher ornamented with diamonds, and a
gold brocade suit of clothes with a white ground.
Apparently she changed her mind in the course of the
day and put on garments which were less approved of.
She is described by a critical observer as " hideously
dressed in a blue satin quilted Jesuit" (Joseph or
Spencer ?) " which came up to her chin and down to
her waist, her hair twisted up in knots called a fete de
mouton, and the strangest little blue coif at the top."
She wore jewels including ear-rings with many drops,
the gift of the Empress of Russia.
One of Charlotte's ladies seems to have taken it upon
her to hint that an improvement might be made on her
toilette by curling her toupee ; but the Princess at once
Cbarlotte of /lfoecfelenbttr0*Strelit3 177
showed that, juvenile as she was, she would not allow
a liberty to be taken with her or submit to be dictated
to by a member of her suite. She answered with
spirit and good sense that she thought it (her toupee)
looked as well as that of any of the ladies sent to fetch
her : if the King bid her she would wear a periwig,
otherwise she would remain as she was.
Charlotte and her suite, her German ladies and her
English lords, occupied three carriages. She entered
London by the wretched suburbs of Mile End and
Whitechapel (so that it must have needed the rejoicing
crowds assembled in the streets to gaze and shout a wel-
come, whose numbers and bearing surprised and amazed
her, to turn aside her attention from the poverty-stricken
aspect of this approach to the capital).
By a long detour the cavalcade reached Oxford Street
and Hyde Park. As it entered on Constitution Hill,
one of the ladies, probably with intention, made the dis-
quieting remark, " We shall hardly have time to dress
for the wedding."
" Wedding ! " cried the young girl, who had not
realised that her fate was to be sealed so soon.
" Yes, madam, it is to be at twelve o'clock " (that
night). 1
Courageous as Charlotte was the shock of the infor-
mation after the long strain of excitement was too much
for her, and she grew white and faint. Lady Effingham
threw the contents of a bottle of lavender water on
the Princess's face. Struggling back to consciousness
Charlotte saw the Duchess of Hamilton smiling to
reassure her, when she was herself again on the instant,
and made the animated protest, " My dear Duchess,
you may laugh ; you have been married twice, but it is
no joke to me."
1 The old-established usage was for royal weddings and funerals to
be celebrated at night.
12
178 Si IRosal Xafcfes
In truth a royal marriage with all its authorised
credentials must have seemed a simple matter to
Elizabeth, double Duchess of Hamilton and Argyll.
She was none other than one of the beautiful Irish
adventuresses, the Gunnings. According to contem-
porary gossip, she had been induced by her friends (in
order to acquire for the first time the coronet graced
by the strawberry-leaves) to take the Duke of Hamilton
at his word at the close of a debauch when the time
and the place were alike so unpropitious that only a
curtain ring could be found to serve as the token of
the union of two hearts and lives.
These picturesque days had their dark shadows as
well as their high lights.
At the garden gate of St. James's Palace the bride's
lips trembled and she looked paler than ever, but her
self-possession did not desert her. She alighted, assisted
by her chamberlain, the Duke of Devonshire, and found
herself face to face with the King, his mother the
Princess of Wales, his brothers and sisters and the
Court. She would have knelt on the crimson cushion
put down for her, but the King took her kindly in his
arms and "all but carried her upstairs." Sharp-eyed,
sharp-tongued courtiers would have it that with his
fancy filled with the images of the loveliest women of
the time, when George's glance first rested on his little
bride, with no more than an April charm, he winced
and his face fell. If so, all that was best in his nature
responded also to her youth, her sex, her absolute
dependence on his generosity and tenderness. He was
prepared from that moment to be a kind and faithful
husband to her, as she was, in a manner in which wilful
and light-minded Lady Sarah Lennox could never have
been, to be a faithful and loving wife to him.
Charlotte was presented to the Princess of Wales, who
welcomed her as the wife she had chosen for her son, and
Cbarlotte of /IDecfelenbur3*Strelft3 179
to those of his brothers and sisters who were of an age
to appear in company ; among them were Edward Duke
of York, next brother to the King, and his elder sister
the " Lady Augusta," as her father had chosen to call
her. The King's uncle " Bluff Bill," the soldier Duke
of Cumberland, was also present, a conspicuous figure in
the scene. A drawing-room was held (drawing-rooms
were evening functions then), when the various Court
functionaries and the ten bridesmaids were presented to
the bride. " There are so many of them, so many of
them," she said dizzily in French. She might also have
exclaimed anew on the personal beauty of Englishwomen,
for among the ' maids " were three famous beauties,
Lady Sarah Lennox, of whom the Princess was the
unconscious rival. Lady Caroline Russell, and Lady
Elizabeth Keppel. The tenth was to afford one of the
strong contrasts of the period. She was Lady Susan
Strangways, a daughter of the Earl of Ilchester. She
figures along with her cousin Lady Sarah Lennox and
the boy Charles James Fox in Sir Joshua Reynold's
renowned picture. Under the plea of giving "a sitting "
for this picture she left her father's house in order to
elope with a well-known actor whose fortunes she fol-
lowed to America, where she died. Such a misalliance
on the lady's side was unheard of in the great world
of a century ago. Lady Susan was the original of
Thackeray's "Lady Maria" in his novel The Virginians.
In the course of these drawing-room presentations
Charlotte forgot to hold out her hand to be kissed, so
that her new sister, the Lady Augusta, never loth to
come forward, had to capture the dainty hand and hold
it out to those who were to do its mistress homage.
At nine (not twelve) o'clock at night the crowning
event of the agitating day took place. The mar-
riage ceremony was performed in the Chapel Royal,
St. James's. The bride was given away by the Duke
of Cumberland. Her dress was white velvet, while her
slight girlish figure was half shrouded by a violet velvet
mantle lined with crimson. It was fastened on her
shoulder by a bunch of large pearls, but the weight of
the mantle dragged it half off her shoulders. When it
is taken into consideration that the season was early
September and the evening hot for the month, the
costume must have been oppressive. But the wearied
little heroine of the spectacle bore up gallantly under
the infliction, till the guns from the Tower and the Park
thundered out their salutation, prompting Charlotte to
ask first herself and then her newly-wedded husband
with ingenuous wonder was it all for her ? Was she
worthy of such honours ?
There was still the great dinner or supper before and
after which she exerted herself to converse with those
nearest to her in the various tongues, with which she
had a creditable speaking acquaintance. If she knew
herself eclipsed in good looks she would show wherein
she did excel. She fell back on her beloved spinet. She
played with taste and feeling some of the lessons which
such masters as Handel and Haydn wrote for their
pupils, and she sang to her own accompaniment.
Here she had young George at her feet. He dearly
loved music, and he had learned from his grandfather
George II. to appreciate Handel. She thus exhibited
her different accomplishments modestly and with an
innocent dauntless determination that she would do
herself, her friends, and her training all justice. One is
reminded of the Tudor bridegrooms and their brides
and how even dignified Catherine of Arragon danced
with one of her ladies before Prince Arthur in order to
show that her education had not been neglected.
After dinner Charlotte appeared in the gallery and at
various windows in order to be seen by the populace.
The day after the marriage there was the wedding
Cbarlotte of /Ifoecfclenbur0*5trelft3 181
drawing-room, to which the ten bridesmaids came in
their white lutestrings trimmed with silver. The Queen
did not speak because in a sense she knew nobody and
the company were only in the act of being presented to
her. But the dulness and formality were brightened to
her by the King's standing at her side and speaking much
to her in the kindest manner. Even such a worldling
and cynic as Horace Walpole augured well for the future
happiness of the royal pair by their attitude towards
each other in their early days of acquaintance and wed-
lock. There was a Court ball the same night. It was
opened by the Lady Augusta, who danced with her
brother Edward, Duke of York.
The King and Queen went in state, amidst throngs of
applauding on-lookers, to Church, where George had
forbidden the Court preacher to disgrace his sacred
office and offend his sovereign's ears by personal, ful-
some eulogy. They went also in state to witness a
play at Drury Lane.
The coronation came next, for George had deferred
it for himself till his Queen should be crowned along
with him. - Then was the opportunity for masses of the
people to see and greet her in the procession to West-
minster Abbey. Unfortunately, they were not near
enough to judge of the redeeming traits in her personal
appearance, and for the play of countenance which made
up for the absence of positive beauty. The public was
disappointed, and did not hesitate to express its
disappointment plainly. This was the only mortifying
incident in the grand pageant more splendid and more
picturesque, in the retention of old usages, than those
which had gone before it since the accession of the
House of Hanover, or in subsequent coronations.
The sermon was preached by Drummond, Bishop of
Salisbury; the act of crowning the pair in their robes
of state was performed by Seeker, Archbishop of
1 82 Sf
Canterbury. George insisted, with manly reverence, on
laying aside the crown when he took the Communion.
Queen Charlotte was forced to retain her crown because
it was so small it had to be steadied on her rolled-up
hair and could not be withdrawn without the disarrange-
ment of the entire chevelure. When the procession
repaired to Westminster Hall for the banquet the
King wore his crown, while he bore in his hands the
orb and sceptre ; the Queen, wearing her crown and
carrying her sceptre and rod, followed him. The old
custom was still observed of the courses of the banquet,
which was served on gold plate, being ushered in by
three peers Earl Talbot, the Earl of Effingham, and the
Duke of Bedford on horseback prancing and curvetting
up the hall as far as the dais where the King and Queen
sat. A comical incident marred the perfect gravity of
the actors in this ceremony the admired conclusion
of which was the three noblemen causing their horses
to walk backwards the length of the hall and so to
pass out of the presence of royalty. Earl Talbot had
carefully trained his horse in this the most difficult feat
of the whole performance, and the animal had learned
its lesson only too well. When the three gentlemen
rode into the hall and proceeded to advance towards
the high table, the conscientious brute insisted on turn-
ing its own back and its master's to the King and
Queen and thus riding up to the dais, so covering its
unfortunate owner with discomfiture and awaking half-
smothered laughter all over the august assemblage.
The ancient challenge by the King's hereditary cham-
pion was also delivered. He rode up the hall and
flung down his gauntlet while he recited the claims of
George III. to be King of Great Britain and Ireland
and summoned any man who denied them to mortal
combat. No partisan of the House of Stewart made
his way to the front, caught up and carried off the
Cbatlotte of /lDecfclenlmr0*5trettt3 183
gauntlet as Sir Walter Scott made Redgauntlet do in
support of a Jacobite tradition. A third curious
practice was maintained at the Coronation Ball on the
night after the coronation, when the Duke of Ancaster,
whose Duchess had escorted Charlotte from Germany
and was installed as her Mistress of the Robes, pre-
sented himself in the complete dress which the King
had worn the day before and had afterwards bestowed
as a high compliment on the Duke.
When these inevitably grave ceremonies and gay re-
joicings were ended the Court settled down into what
was to be its every-day life. This was marked by
a well-ordered simplicity and a virtuous, affectionate
domesticity, rare in royal annals at any time, and espe-
cially rare a century ago. Dissipated men about town,
women of fashion craving for excitement and finding
it in a constant racket of routs, ridottos, auctions, etc.,
might complain of the dulness of the Court, but the
nation at large, above all the better part of it, sick of
the mingled coarseness, waste, and profligacy which had
distinguished the last years of the Court of George II.,
welcomed gladly a new regime, a reverent, honest, sound
and sweet reign which did much to reform social vices
and abuses throughout the country. Whatever might
have been the intellectual rather than the moral short-
comings of the young King and Queen this inestimable
credit is due to them. They raised the standard of
belief and behaviour throughout Great Britain. High
and low, who had any worth themselves, were proud
of their good young King and Queen and thought twice
before indulging in senseless profusion, not to say in
riot and debauchery, when they recalled that wisely
temperate and modestly economical household in the
highest place in the kingdom. If the quiet decorum
and strict frugality were carried too far and provoked
future rebounds into foolish and shameless excess, the
i8 4 Sfj IRosal Xa&fes
error proceeded from defects in temperament and judg-
ment which were perhaps inevitable. Neither King
George nor Queen Charlotte had the smallest taste for
display and extravagance, for late hours in the company
of the great idle world which cared nothing for its
sovereigns, and only desired to use them as tools to
countenance its own frivolity and folly. The King and
Queen could be splendid and sumptuous on occasions
in dispensing or accepting hospitality, but they did not
care for splendour or sumptuousness in themselves.
A visit to the opera once a week, an occasional appear-
ance at the theatre formed enough public gaiety for the
couple. Their private relaxations were unceremonious
visits to the City for the purpose of becoming acquainted
with its industries and manufactures or of inspecting its
lions ; such was the witnessing the Lord Mayor's Show
from the private house of Barclay, the great Quaker silk
mercer, opposite Bow Church.
But the rural pleasures of Richmond and Kew far
outweighed in the royal eyes the diversions offered by
the town. At old Richmond Lodge, which was George
and Charlotte's country house till the old palace at
Kew, with the gardens adjoining those of Richmond
Lodge, was left vacant by the death of the Princess of
Wales, the Queen gave such simple little parties as a
well-to-do citizen might have given, in which ten or
twelve young couples were refreshed with tea and
danced to their hearts' content for three or four hours.
In the morning the King had his kingly business and
his hunting, while the Queen had her reading, her
music, her needlework, with her daily walk or drive.
In the last reign nightly gambling had been the
evening routine, in which not only the King but his
daughters, the Princesses notably Princess Emily and
the ladies and gentlemen of the suites won and lost
large sums. This was replaced, under King George
Cbatlotte of /lfcecfclenburcj*StreUt3 185
and Queen Charlotte, when the family were alone, by a
game of chess, of which the King was fond, or a game
of backgammon played by the King and one of his
gentlemen, or a game of cribbage in which the Queen
took part. If card-playing had a place it was in the
shape of some innocent sociable game which did not
drain the lightest purse. But mostly the evening was
occupied with music, which the King loved, in which
the Queen excelled, or the Queen worked at her em-
broidery and the King read aloud what were reckoned
standard books.
With remarkable good sense for so young a girl the
Queen devoted much of the first year of her married
life to her education, not to gadding here and there
pursuing pleasure in any form, or to the eager exhibition
of all the fine dress and jewels to which the homely but
well-bred little German Princess had succeeded, which
she might now wear every day in the week. The reso-
lution which she carried out was to accomplish a serious
study of the English language under a competent tutor.
A like course in French had been prescribed for
poor Marie Antoinette ; but the youthful Dauphiness,
though she had the fairy gift of beauty, with an
ineffable charm which Queen Charlotte lacked, was
giddy where Charlotte was sedate, and idle where
Charlotte was diligent. For practice in her attainments,
Queen Charlotte had those evening readings of the
King to which she listened dutifully and attentively for
his sake as well as for her own, that his mind not less
than hers should be cultivated as became his rank and
dignity. When the two were in their happy country
retirement the Queen not only rode and drove with the
King in the hours when he was at liberty to enjoy her
company, but a favourite resort in their afternoons for
a period of years was a garden pavilion (these were
the days of pavilions and summer-houses), where the
1 86 Sf IRosal Xafcies
Queen's fingers were busy with her needlework and the
King's readings were resumed with greater leisure.
Unfortunately, George, who was dull as a boy, remained
a stupid man ; but that was neither his fault nor his
Queen's she made the best of him and of herself.
The result where she was concerned was that, while
she had not the brilliance any more than she had the
coarseness and unscrupulousness (as far as a virtuous
woman could be unscrupulous) of her predecessor on
the throne, George's grandmother, Queen Caroline,
and though Charlotte could hardly be called a woman
of talent and was without a spark of genius, she was an
intelligent, well-informed, and by dint of her energy
and perseverance a fairly well-read English lady. She
might prefer Beattie as a poet just as George preferred
West as a painter to their more gifted compeers, but
that was a defect in perception which no amount of
culture could have prevented.
The young Queen in her seclusion was not insensible
to the benefit to trade of such seasonable fetes as she
inaugurated at Buckingham House and attended in the
houses of the nobility with becoming magnificence.
Her presence along with that of the King at the
weddings or the christenings of the golden youth of
the kingdom ; the royal progresses to this subject's
country seat, to grace the great universities, to honour
a favourite admiral on board his man-of-war, were
all as they should have been, models of stately sim-
plicity, of frank, well-nigh boyish cordiality on the
honest King's part, and on the Queen's unaffected,
gracious interest in all around her. As a bride Char-
lotte had no objection to deck herself with her ornaments ;
indeed, she had a woman's love of jewels, and she had
not only the Queen-Consort's jewels for her lifetime,
but George showed his affection for his young wife by
magnificent presents of jewels to her in her own person.
Cbatlotte of /l&ecfelenbui'0*StreUt3 187
Still she judged that jewels should be worn in season, not
out of season. Walpole tells a story illustrative of the
subjection in which the Princess of Wales, who was not
a favourite either with the Court or the people, tried to
hold her daughter-in-law. Charlotte and George were
going to take the Communion, a solemn duty which was
then discharged in semi-state. Charlotte's dead mother
had made her promise not to wear jewels on so
sacred an occasion, and she was prepared to keep her
pledge. Her intention was discovered by the officious
tattling Princess Augusta, who conveyed it to her mother.
The Princess of Wales then, in spite of the Queen's
promise and of her tears of remonstrance at being com-
pelled to break it, so insisted, and so employed the
authority which she had been accustomed to exercise
over her son, that Charlotte had to kneel before the
altar and confess her sins in glittering array. Long
afterwards, when no doubt jewels, except for their mar-
ketable value, had palled upon the Queen, she told
Fanny Burney that after the first few times of wearing
the crown diamonds, when she had been entranced like
a child with their splendour, they grew rapidly a care and
burden to her ; the trouble of having them selected and
put upon her, the dread of losing them, the obligation
to restore them with her own hands to the firm of
bankers with whom they were habitually deposited, did
more than qualify the passing intoxication of girlish
pride and vanity.
The King and Queen rose at six o'clock and went to
bed early to ensure health of body and mind. When
in town the pair were carried in their sedan chairs every
evening at eight from St. James's and Buckingham
House to Carlton House to pay their respects to the
Princess of Wales. There was a large household of
young people under her roof lads who were already,
or were about to be Dukes of York, Cumberland, and
1 88 Ste IRosal XaMes
Gloucester ; girls who were soon promoted to matron-
hood, as the Duchess of Brunswick and the Queen-
Consort of Denmark.
The sickly little Princess Elizabeth, whose precocious
ability and child-wisdom had impressed even a moqueur
like Horace Walpole, was followed to the grave by
Prince Frederick William, a promising boy of fifteen,
and Princess Louisa, a bright amiable girl, who fell a
victim to consumption in her twentieth year. None of
the survivors, unless the young King, was distinguished
by even ordinary discretion. Thick-headed and obsti-
nate as George has been considered, he had the sense
and stability in which his younger brothers failed. His
elder sister, Augusta, who styled herself his " favourite
sister," was a chatterbox, and was to merge into a vulgar
gossip and mischief-maker. Caroline Matilda, a fair-
haired, handsome girl, was indeed quick-witted and
high-spirited, but she was rash, impulsive, and destitute
of the self-restraint, reasonableness, and prudence which
were Charlotte's safeguards. In looking back on the
family one can understand why their clever aunt,
Princess Emily, called her troop of nephews and nieces
" the best-natured young asses in England."
For good nature in youth is frequently only another
name for youth's light-heartedness and buoyancy. These
are elements welcome to kindred youth; they must have
lent somewhat of a gay and breezy atmosphere in
which there was room for skirmishes and jars without
question, while it was still the natural environment of
life in its early vigour to Carlton House. It was the
home of a staid and severe Princess, who had been a
strict disciplinarian to her little boys and girls, but who
was no more able to command her young men and
women than similar mothers frequently find themselves.
Charlotte was not forgotten by her own family, neither
did she forget them; though in those non-travelling
Cbarlotte of /lfoecfclenbura*Streltt3 189
days she could not hope to revisit Germany, nor could
she trust that her sister or her girl-friends would brave
the perils and discomforts of a journey of many weeks
to visit her. She had to content herself with sending
them letters and gifts, but she had the gratification of
receiving each of her three brothers. She had the still
further satisfaction of finding the appointment of Gover-
nor of Zell conferred by George on her second brother.
From the first Charlotte adopted the sagacious policy
of non-interference in State affairs. It may be thought
that a girl of sixteen had small temptation to such inter-
ference, but one must recall the kind of girl she was,
serious, shrewd, capable of a keen interest in all which
concerned the welfare of the King and country, in order
to give her credit for her modesty and moderation in
remembering her foreign origin and her proper sphere
as a Queen-Consort. She refrained from every attempt
to put her finger in the Government pie. She did not
seek to wield any undue influence. She did not dictate
or take the first place in any relation of life, a fatal fault
not uncommon in Queen-Consorts, and not rare in
women of all ranks who have decided views and resolute
wills. Charlotte could hardly be called an ambitious
woman. She usurped no province, was no interloper,
no arrogant intruder into domains beyond her know-
ledge and scope. She had her reward in many years of
domestic happiness, and in her early popularity with her
husband's subjects of all grades of intelligence and all
shades of political opinion. In this respect she stood
in strong contrast to the Princess of Wales, who, rightly
or wrongly, was accused of trying to rule the King, her
son, in his public capacity. For this reason as well as
for the absence in her of all winning grace and gracious-
ness she was heartily detested by the nation. As for
Queen Charlotte, she lived to realise in full the fickle-
ness of the mob ; but those dark days were still far ahead.
IQO Sf IRogal Xafcfes
The Queen pursued the same upright friendly course
in reference to her husband's family. She abstained
from questioning their rights. She was on good terms,
in the main, with her mother-in-law, to whom Charlotte
always behaved with fitting respect. So long as George's
sisters remained in England, and his maiden aunt,
Princess Emily, survived, the Queen treated them with
kindness and consideration. To have gone further,
to have allowed them the privilege of more intimate
friendship, would have been in all probability to un-
dermine her position, and to render it difficult, if not
intolerable, for her as Queen.
Augusta was a foolish Mrs. Malaprop, a creature
without natural reverence or truthfulness, whose tongue
was as disrespectful as it was glib. Dr. Doran, who
was severe enough to Augusta's foibles in the end, seems
to have adopted the spiteful gossip of the time on the
King and Queen's behaviour to her at the date of her
marriage with the brave, rough soldier, the Duke of
Brunswick. Doran dwells on the shabbiness, the positive
penuriousness of the marriage doings. Another autho-
rity, who must have had warrant for his statement,
tells a different tale. He enlarges on the supper at
Leicester House on the evening of the marriage day, at
which the King and Queen, the Princess of Wales, and
the younger members of her family, together with the
bride and bridegroom, were present ; on the ball after-
wards, which was opened by the Duke and Duchess of
Brunswick ; on the special drawing-room given in the
couple's honour, with the farewell concert, supper, and
ball which followed. He mentions among the gifts to
the fairly dowered Princess the King's diamond neck-
lace, valued at ^30,000, the Princess of Wales's diamond
stomacher, and the Queen's exquisite gold watch set
with jewels.
When the King was greatly displeased, with much
Cbatlotte of /lfoecfelenburcj*Strelit3 191
reason, by his brother's idleness and dissipation, and in
the case of the Dukes of Gloucester and Cumberland
by their misalliances with two widows the Duke of
Gloucester marrying the beautiful Lady Waldegrave, a
kinswoman of Horace Walpole's ; the Duke of Cum-
berland Mrs. Horton, one of a wild, racketing county
family of the name of Luttrell the royal sister-in-law
of the culprits, however offended in her own sense of
what was due to the King and to herself, did not seek
to increase her husband's resentment. It resulted in
the passing of the Royal Marriage Act, precluding the
marriages of members of the royal family without the
consent of the sovereign and the Houses of Parliament.
Edward, Duke of York, who was nearest the King in
age, was as unprofitable a representative of the race as
were his younger brothers. He did not marry, though
he kept the upper circles of society ringing with rumours
of some more or less imprudent match on his part.
However, he was not to blame for the persistent claim
on his regard, and the mysterious hints of a secret
marriage circulated by a third widow, one of the most in-
corrigibly wilful and perverse of the fine ladies of the day.
Lady Mary Coke, born Lady Mary Campbell ("the
White Cat "), had more than the albino fairness of her
skin, the light colour of her hair and eyebrows and
the alternate sleepy blink and angry blaze of her eyes
to ally her with the feline tribe. She was largely
endowed with a certain tricksiness and mischievousness
of conduct. To such an extent did she carry her
unwarranted pretensions to the hand of the Duke of
York, that though her assertions were unsupported
by any attentions on his part, and were flatly con-
tradicted by his family, she assumed the airs of an
ardently wooed, privately wedded wife. She went
abroad on an ostentatious visit to his aunt Mary,
Princess of Hesse. When the news arrived of his
192 Ste IRo^al Xabies
death from fever at Monaco (he was the only one of
the brothers who had developed a taste for travelling,
and had repaired to Italy, possibly in flight from the
craze of Lady Mary), she shut herself up as if in the
extremity of grief, and reappeared in public presently
in what was the nearest approach to widow's weeds,
till the dead man's aunt, Princess Emily, took the
audacious pretender to task for her mingled deceit and
impertinence. The final froward act of this extra-
ordinary being, after she had reached old age, was to
refuse to change her dress, or to lie down in her last
illness, so that she actually died with a steeple-crowned
felt hat, adorned by a plume of feathers, on her head.
But the real tragedy among George III.'s brothers
and sisters was the melancholy fate of his sister, Princess
Caroline Matilda. With this Queen Charlotte had
nothing to do either in advocating or in reprobating
the disastrous marriage which led to the catastrophe.
Indeed, no alliance could have appeared more suitable
and promising beforehand. Princess Caroline Matilda
was troth-plighted to Christian VII., the young King
of Denmark, who was her cousin through his mother
Princess Louisa, one of the younger daughters of
George II. and Queen Caroline, a sister to Fritz, Prince
of Wales, father of the present bride. She had shown
no reluctance to the marriage with her kinsman, an
idea with which she had been familiar for years, since
at the time of the betrothal both bride and bridegroom
were considerably under age. It was in the usual order
of such alliances that the couple had not met, and were
personally unacquainted with each other, and that even
when the marriage took place at Carlton House,
Edward, Duke of York, was proxy for the bridegroom.
The only person who seems to have foreboded evil
was the stiff and sombre Princess of Wales. Caroline's
tears at parting from her mother and family were a
Cbarlotte of flDecftlenlwr0*StreUt3 193
simple tribute to the fact that she was not likely to see
them again, that when a Princess married a foreign
Prince she, of all women, was destined, in the quaint
language of an old song, to " drink the brewst " she
had brewed to the dregs, unsupported and unrelieved.
Bitter indeed was the " brewst " which poor Caroline had
to drink ; but so little did she foresee it that she arrived
in her adopted country in the fearless spirit which dic-
tated the proud, cheerful message which she sent back
by the captain of the frigate in which she had sailed
to the King, her brother, that his sister had borne the
discomforts of the voyage as an Englishwoman should.
She might have been her predecessor Princess Louisa,
whose memory the Danes long cherished, who, when
she came to Denmark, consented to the return of all her
English ladies and attendants, saying that she herself
was thenceforth to be a Dane. But, as it happened, the
circumstances and the sequel were wholly different.
The King whom Caroline Matilda went bravely and
light-heartedly to marry was so tiny in person as to be
likened to a fairy Prince when he came to England
a year or two after his marriage, unaccompanied by his
wife, in the course of travel he was pursuing.
At the same time a resemblance was traced between
him and his portly cousin, King George, and, what was
felt to be a little ominous, between him and his wrong-
headed uncle, Fritz, Prince of Wales. Still, though
small and pale, King Christian was neither misshapen
nor ugly in ". the sense in which his uncle by marriage,
the Prince of Orange, who came to wed Princess
Anne, eldest daughter of George II., had horrified his
worthy mother-in-law on the occasion of his visit.
King Christian was credited with a fair amount of brains,
though the faithful chronicler goes on to state that he
"strutted about like a cock-sparrow." In truth, he
was weak, both in body and mind, and was completely
13
194 Sfe IRosal OLaMes
in the power of the Queen-Dowager, Julia Maria, who
rivalled in wickedness the most black-hearted step-
mother of fiction. Her scheme was to get rid of the
incapable King, either by his early death or by shutting
him up as insane, and to place on the throne in his stead
his younger brother, her own son, Prince Frederick.
Caroline and the children she bore to King Christian
were formidable obstacles in the Queen-Dowager's path,
and she hated and plotted against them accordingly.
Caroline behaved, in the miserable situation, as a
very young, dauntless, passionate girl might have been
expected to behave. Finding that her husband was an
utterly untrustworthy stay, she went her own way in
reckless defiance of the sharp eyes and cruel tongue of the
Queen-Dowager and the malicious gossip of a divided
Court. Not content with amusing herself by riding and
hunting in a fashion not practised in Denmark, she
played such pranks as disguising herself in a young
man's suit of clothes and seeking foolish adventures
under false colours. There was a picture of her, which
may still be extant, in a page's dress, with her long
fair curls (a reversion of her father's and her grand-
mother's beautiful hair) escaping from their confinement
and betraying her sex, while she held the horse of Count
Struensee, of all people. Alienated from her half-
imbecile husband by the wiles and misrepresentations
of Queen Julia Maria, Queen Caroline seemed to wake
up to her danger ; but alas ! the steps she took only
accelerated her ruin. King Christian had come across
the clever young doctor Struensee and had taken a great
fancy to him, ennobling him, and gradually entrusting
a large share of the government to him in gratitude for
the improvement in the King's health effected by his
following Struensee's advice.
Caroline had recourse to Struensee to reconcile her
to her husband and to counsel her in turn, There is
Cbarlotte of /l&ecftlen&ur0*5treUt3 195
no proof that Struensee abused the confidence of either
husband or wife. Where his country was concerned,
he strove to serve it as an enlightened reformer of
many existing errors in the constitution. If personal
ambition had something to do with his zeal it was the
only fault that could be fairly and plainly laid to his
charge.
For a time the King stood by his minister, and
Caroline, eager in everything she did, courted his
friendship, and entered warmly into his reforms. But
a reformer is sure to create enemies, and there was one
deadly enemy already in the field, who caught at the
association of Struensee and Queen Caroline as a means
of accomplishing their ruin and furthering her cherished
project by one decisive blow. Julia Maria again secured
the ear of the King and poisoned his weak mind
beyond recovery. Struensee was arrested and executed
on a charge of high treason. Caroline was also arrested
in her palace on the accusation of complicity with
Struensee and infidelity to her husband. She was
hurried to Cronberg, where her life might have been
taken also, had it not been for the spirited intervention
of Sir Robert Keith, who was lying with his fleet in the
Baltic. He obtained her liberation on condition that
she should be taken to Zell, to remain a prisoner in the
Castle of Zell. -There, separated from her husband
and her children, in disgrace and confinement, to the
last solemnly asserting her innocence, she died after
three years at the age of twenty-four. The Princess of
Wales did not long survive her younger daughter's
downfall; she died at iCarlton House, dutifully waited
upon by the King and Queen, and was buried in
Westminster Abbey.
Quite early in Queen Charlotte's happy married life,
a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, and yet sadly
indicative of what might happen, appeared on the
196 Sf racial OLafcies
horizon, and though it passed away as quickly as it
came, could never have been altogether absent from the
Queen's mind in time to come, and must have left on
it a shadow of doubt and dread haunting her even in
her brightest moments.
When George was a mere lad, before his grandfather's
death, it is said there had been occasional symptoms in
the heir to the throne of threatening brain disease,
hanging over his doomed head such an honest, manly
head in its very limitations and in its dogged blunders !
He was not a strong lad, and the consumption which
carried off his youngest brother and sister was feared
for him. He escaped that danger, and by temperate
dieting he was enabled to check the corpulence which
was a tendency of his family. It culminated in "Bluff
Bill," the " Butcher " of Culloden, William, Duke of
Cumberland, George's uncle, who was enormously stout.
But while the King and Queen's marriage was yet
young, and every prospect was bright, George had one
of his premonitory attacks, when it was necessary to
seclude him from company and to avoid all excitement.
The particulars were kept closely hidden from the
public, but think of the shock to the young wife, the
bolt from the blue which ever afterwards hung over
her, even when the sky was most serene ! And she
had to mask her feelings, go in state to the royal
chapel every day, and hold drawing-rooms in order not
to alarm the country. Happily a few days' retirement
dissipated the fever of body and mind, and for a long
time the terrible malady was in abeyance. Charlotte
celebrated her King's recovery by a birthday surprise for
him in the shape of what was called the " transparency "
of a temple, at the gate of which the King appeared,
dispensing peace to all the world.
These transparencies were simple " make-believes," in
great request at the time. They appear to have been
Cbarlotte of /IDecfelenbur3*Strelit3 197
composed of oiled silk cut and fastened together in the
figures to be represented and illuminated from within.
On one of the Queen's birthdays a famous exhibition of
transparencies, in which the whole royal family were sym-
bolised, 1 was part of an entertainment got up in Char-
lotte's honour by no less a person than Miss Chudleigh
who, strange to say, was one of the good girl-Queen's
maids-of-honour. Where will not folly and wickedness
enter in ? For Lady Mary Coke's performances were
nothing to Miss Chudleigh's. She married privately a
son of the Earl of Bristol, who was a sailor and for the
most part of his time at sea. In his absence, his wife,
still passing to the world as Miss Chudleigh, received an
offer of marriage from the Duke of Kingston. Loth to
lose the opportunity of becoming a Duchess, the lady
drove down in her coach to the village church in which
she had been married, asked for the register, and there in
the light of day, before the astounded eyes of the clergy-
man, boldly tore out and demolished the page on which
the marriage had been recorded. She was under the
credulous conviction that by withdrawing this important
piece of evidence she annulled the marriage ; so she
went back and without any further sign married the
Duke of Kingston. But the sailor husband, who was by
this time Earl of Bristol, returned and took his revenge
by claiming his wife, and a trial for the crime of bigamy
on the part of the Countess or Duchess ensued. She
demanded the privilege of being tried before the House
of Peers, as she herself was a peeress, whether as Countess
of Bristol or Duchess of Kingston. Part of the sentence
pronounced upon her the part which was commuted
was that she should be branded on the hand by the
common hangman in punishment of her misdeed. The
lights and shadows of those bygone days were strong
1 The emblems were somewhat far-fetched and consisted of birds of
Paradise, orange-trees, etc.
198 Sij IRopal OLafcies
indeed ; the good were very good, the sinners sinned
" as with a cart rope."
Great events were stirring and shaking the world at
home and abroad : the rise of Methodism, when the
Wesleys and Whitfield had the glory of re-christianising
the dark places of England, and made converts among
the noble women as St. Paul did of old notable among
them being Lady Huntingdon, Lady Chesterfield and in
Scotland Lady Glenorchy ; the American war ran its
course, and to George's mortification he saw his greatest
colony wrested from him ; the " No Popery " riots
convulsed London, which was for days at the mercy of
the mob, while the King and Queen remained intrepidly
at their posts, he at St. James', she at Buckingham
House, or, as it was more commonly called, the Queen's
House ; Clive and Warren Hastings were annexing
territories in India, Clive laying a portion of the spoils
in a cluster of magnificent diamonds at the feet of the
Queen, and still George continued sound in body and
sane in mind.
CHAPTER II.
A ROYAL WIFE AND MOTHER.
QUEEN CHARLOTTE from the day when she arrived a
girl-bride in England had a generous desire to be a
Queen-mother to her husband's people.
It has been customary in later times to dwell on the
homely but honourable thrift practised in the royal
household as not only humdrum, but parsimonious, and
to allege that Queen Charlotte, brought up at a small
niggardly German Court, was the author of the parsi-
mony ; yet no more munificent Queen to the poor and
destitute ever reigned in England, in spite of the fact
that she had no privy purse and only received twenty
thousand a year to keep up her house (Buckingham
House) and discharge her personal debts. No doubt
the economy enabled her to be munificent. One of the
earliest institutions which she established and maintained
during her whole long married life was a home for
orphan girls of gentle birth a little on the model of
Madame Maintenon's school of St. Cyr. In the Queen's
home the girls were instructed in the old womanly art
of embroidery so as to earn a livelihood by it. The
first specimens of their matured skill and taste were
always offered to the Queen, who was pleased to accept
them for bed and window curtains, and covers to chairs
and settees in the palace, where they could be seen and
recommended to the patronage of the royal tradesmen
and to such mistresses of great households as loved to
199
200 Si IRosal XaMes
be in the royal fashion. For the support of this school
Charlotte annually set apart five hundred pounds. l
Another benevolent establishment instituted by her
was the great Lying-in Hospital (for the wives of re-
spectable working men) which still bears her name.
These were her public acts of beneficence ; her private
charities were as liberal as they were judicious.
To her own numerous children Charlotte was an
assiduously careful and kind mother. If she was strict
it was in what she believed was their best interest.
She loved to have her family with her ; she taught the
eldest of them their first lessons, she overlooked their
studies and shared their pleasures. While they were
still young when they were sick she shut herself
up with them and nursed them as far as was in her
power ; she braved public opinion and a mother's
nervous fears in having the eldest children inoculated
as a defence against smallpox.
A year after her marriage, when Charlotte was not
more than seventeen, her Prince of Wales was born.
Great was the delight of the King, 2 and the nation
rejoiced with the pair. Cake and caudle were free to
all who came to the palace (St. James's) to inquire for
the Queen and the heir. The festivities threatened to
become riotous.
But who can estimate the proud yet humble gladness
of the mother of seventeen ? She was devoted to the
child a singularly fine baby. It was her loving hand
which placed in his lap the patent of his creation as
Prince of Wales. His cradle was draped with crim-
son velvet and lined with white satin ; the sheet was
1 She supported entirely or partly a variety of schools ; she took under
her protection a number of widows in three classes, twelve in each class ;
to these she gave grants of money paid half yearly in advance, the
lowest grant amounting to twenty pounds.
2 He gave the messenger who brought him the tidings five hundred
pounds.
Cbarlotte of flfcecfelenbur^Strelfts 20 i
covered with broad Brussels lace, turned over on a
quilt of crimson velvet. A nurse sat in state with a
crimson velvet cushion on her knee, on which the child
was laid ; a maid was on each side of the cradle to rock
it when necessary. Thackeray refers to a charming
picture of Charlotte, in which the beautiful infant
lies asleep across one arm, while the other is free to
raise a finger as if bespeaking silent respect for the
baby Prince's slumbers. The Queen arranged, and she
carried out the arrangement afterwards, to teach her
boy an apt pupil in childhood and youth his letters
and to hear him say his first prayers. Who would
have dared to predict that he was to live to plant cruel
thorns in his mother's breast ?
A troop of boys and girls to the number of fourteen
followed in the wake of George Augustus Frederick,
Prince of Wales. They were brought up in the main
wisely and simply. The King hearing from the Duke
of Buccleuch that his nursery was flourishing on oat-
meal porridge caused an order for oatmeal to be sent at
stated intervals to Mr. Mutter of Middle Mills, Lass-
wade, that the royal children might breakfast on the
same wholesome food ; and great was the exultation
north of the Tweed on this sign of the King's approval
of the national dish.
When the Court was at Kew the Princes had a tiny
farm which they were taught to cultivate. They
sowed it and reaped it. They beat out the corn
with their chubby hands; they ground it and baked
it into bread which their parents and sisters helped
them to eat.
One instance of a mother's fond folly can be brought
against Queen Charlotte. She caused a miniature
drawing-room to be held for the children of the
nobility by the Prince of Wales, aged eight, and the
Princess Royal, aged five. It was a pretty mockery of
202 Si iflosal Xafcies
the real ceremony, and the small pair who presided in state
and splendour for the occasion are said to have behaved
with much dignity and decorum ; but the affair was
questionable as an interlude in their education. A
more unmistakably false step was the separate house-
hold provided immediately afterwards for the Prince of
Wales and the Duke of York, then styled Bishop of
Osnabriick in consequence of his holding the lay
bishopric of Osnabriick, which entitled him to draw the
revenues without any obligation to assume the priestly
office. The step was warranted by precedent, but it was
unnatural and artificial, and it was grievously prejudicial
in spite of the high characters of the Princes' governors
and governess (Lady Charlotte Finch) and the watchful
superintendence of the Queen.
The Prince of Wales was a lovely child, a handsome
lad, a fine-looking young man. He was more highly
gifted intellectually than either father or mother.
Indeed, he gave promise of being an able scholar and
accomplished gentleman, as his mother had set her
heart on his being. But the promise remained unful-
filled. He was destitute of his father's good principles
and his mother's conscientiousness ; though he could
learn quickly, serious application was detestable to him.
He was entirely ignorant of the honest, honourable
satisfaction of self-denial, of doing his duty in the teeth
of opposing inclination. He frittered away his talents
in the pursuit of trivialities and the coarsest pleasures.
He grew always more effeminate, more insubordinate
and overbearing in temper in proportion as he yielded
to self-indulgence. The moment the restraints of his
minority were withdrawn and he was his own master,
his follies, excesses, and rapidly accumulating debts scan-
dalised the King and the country. To be considered
" the first gentleman in Europe " in superficial grace
and manners, to be reckoned a man of supreme taste
Cbarlotte of flfoecfelenbur3*Streiit3 203
and fashion and copied by the other fine gentlemen of
the day, were his chief ambitions. It was from no
political consideration, but out of sheer desire to thwart
and get the better of the father who sought in vain
to show him his failure in all which could be claimed
from him, that, surrounded as the Prince was by
the gay and thoughtless, by unscrupulous sycophants,
aspirants for the favour of the future King, he imme-
diately headed the party opposed to that of the King
in the House of Parliament and in the nation. The
position of the father and son recalled the quarrels
between George II. and Frederick, Prince of Wales, and
between George II. and George I. when he was
Prince of Wales, in the younger man's perverse dis-
obedience and insolent defiance of authority. George
Augustus Frederick was the despair of prime ministers,
who from William Pitt to the Duke of Wellington
were constantly counselling him and remonstrating
with him, while they were compelled to endure his
capricious arrogance and insincerity. Even his sup-
porter and friend from political motives, Charles James
Fox, and his witty playfellow, Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
were bitterly ashamed of the Prince's falseness and
complete disregard of his word.
Poor Queen Charlotte struggled hard not to realise
that the idol of her young motherhood was of basest
clay. She hoped against hope for him, excused him,
strove to make his peace with the King and, almost to
the last, forgave the stabs he inflicted on her dignity
as a Queen, wife, and mother, and her tenderness as a
woman. She would embroider with her royal hands
a dainty vest to be worn on his birthday, and contrive
family reunions, innocent dances, and diversions to make
the Court livelier for him ; only to have the vest re-
ceived with perfect politeness and tossed aside after
one trial, and the family gatherings rendered an affront
204 Sij IRosal Xafcies
and disappointment by his coolly and deliberately
absenting himself from them.
The Duke of York was much less gifted than his
brother. He was a big, burly, hectoring carpet soldier.
He followed in his elder brother's footsteps except that
his dissipation was of a grosser kind and his tastes
lower. But he was bluffly good-natured and he had
some fitful filial feeling and family affection.
The third son, the Duke of Clarence, the sailor
Prince, had the merits of a sailor-like frankness and
simplicity as a qualification to the circumstance that he
lacked the good manners of his brothers. He had a
rough and rowdy geniality about him when he dis-
pensed lavishly the hospitalities of the Admiralty. He
was better liked than his elder brothers, though he did
not dream of mastering himself or attempting to walk
in the paths of sobriety and moderation.
It was fixed he should come to Windsor for one
of the Queen's birthday balls in order that he might
dance the first minuet with his pretty lovable sister
Princess Mary on her coming out. Unfortunately
there was a dinner before the ball, and as no man
could sit down before the Queen (unless when etiquette
was relaxed in the rural life at Kew), only ladies
were admitted to her Majesty's table. The Duke of
Clarence, then Prince William, was consigned to the
care of the equerries, at whose table he insisted on
drinking bumper upon bumper of champagne till,
after performing a variety of antics, it was clear that
he could neither dance a minuet nor enter a ball-room.
On another occasion when he was fit to be his sister's
partner, Maria Josepha, daughter of Lord Sheffield and
future wife of Lord Stanley of Alderney, was present.
She recounts that every time Prince William turned his
back to the King he put out his tongue, to the great
alarm and distress of Princess Mary. Withal, in later
Cbatlotte of flDecfclenbur^Strelfts 205
years, when he fell into good hands which he had the
grace to appreciate, he proved the genuine kindness of
heart which underlay his errors and follies, those of the
day still more than of the man. He ended his life very
differently from the manner in which his elder brothers
ended theirs.
The younger Princes, who grew up and were in
succession the Dukes of Kent, Cumberland, Sussex, and
Cambridge, did not, to their benefit, inherit the same
amount of worldly influence and prosperity which had
been the ruin of the firstborn in the family. In fact,
during the period of the Regency their just claims were
neglected and set aside, and they were condemned to
something like obscurity and hardship in their station.
With one exception, adversity helped to make better
men of them. They were more or less unoffending
citizens, 1 good husbands and fathers. The exception
was Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, a man of singularly
surly uncertain temper. He was, however, less of a
carpet knight than the Duke of York. He saw active
service, lost an eye and received a slight wound in the
battles of the Peninsular War. He married so wilfully
and unadvisedly, though his wife was a Princess, that
no allowance was voted to him by Parliament, and his
Duchess was not received at the Court of Queen
Charlotte. He was comparatively little in England in
his earlier years, and a story was long current against
him to account for his absence. It was said that in a
fit of passion he struck one of his servants a violent
blow with a cane, which, happening to enter the unfor-
tunate man's eye, caused his death. The story went on
to say that on account of the rank of the culprit the
affair was hushed up, but that the dread of being called
1 The Duke of Sussex was accomplished for his generation, spoke
well and figured as the president of various learned societies and the
chairman at many banquets.
206 i TRosal Xafcies
to account for the untoward accident kept the Prince
out of England. He succeeded to his brother, King
William IV., as King of Hanover, in which character he
was, in spite of his despotism, borne with by his'subjects,
and even enjoyed a certain amount of popularity among
them.
When William reigned at Windsor and a remark,
attributed to the Duke of Cumberland, was repeated to
him, he said wrathfully in the hearing of his Court,
" The Duke of Cumberland knows nothing about it ;
but if the Duke of Cumberland can do mischief or say
an ill-natured thing he will be sure to do it."
There were two baby Princes, Octavius and
Alfred, who brought the royal ranks to a close and
soon left their places vacant, dying in infancy.
In her six daughters Queen Charlotte was happy.
They were good women, examples to their class and
sex. They were the Queen's right hands in her acts of
benevolence. For many a day she shared their pur-
suits, reading and working with them, and studying
whatever they studied. In a woman with her strict
sense of the obedience and submission due from children
to parents and with her German notions of etiquette
the association grew somewhat of a yoke which pressed
and galled a little when the children themselves were
no longer young, and yearned for independence of
thought and action ; but that was the other side of the
shield which only became visible towards the close of
the family life. The Princesses had every reason to
respect the King and Queen ; and while an element of
pitying tenderness and anxious apprehension mingled
betimes with their reverence for him, they clung in
trouble to the strength of mind, authority and experience
of the Queen. They were affectionate and attentive to
her wishes and tastes. The daughters loved in brighter
hours to surprise the mother on her own and on family
Cbarlotte of flfcecfclenlwr^Strelits 207
birthdays with unexpected achievements in ability and
industry in decorating Frogmore, which she had bought
for her and their special delectation (during the King's
life and her own), and as a residence for her unmarried
daughters in the future. At Frogmore they could be
a private family party holding their gatherings and
celebrating their festivals in comparative retirement and
peace. We hear most of the Princesses and their doings
from Fanny Burney when she chronicled them in her
diary during her stay at Court as one of the dressers to
the Queen. Her favourite and special Princess was
Princess Augusta, who was always affable and engaging
to the little authoress whose literary career had been full
of brilliance, while there was something of a cloud be-
tween Miss Burney and the Princess Royal, of whom we
hear from other sources as an amiable and sensible woman.
The origin of the cloud was to be found in the stout
person and blunt German manners of Mrs. Schwellenberg,
the chief dresser, whom the Queen had brought with
her in the old days from Germany. Queen Charlotte
remained faithfully attached to her old friend and
countrywoman, and the Princes and Princesses had
been taught to hold one whom they had known from
infancy in kindly regard.
But Mrs. Schwellenberg's homely ways were by no
means viewed with the same complacency by the King's
equerries, over whose tea-table she was, oddly enough,
chosen to preside. They were either stiffly distant to
her, or they made game of her ; but they could carry off
the situation better than it could be endured by Fanny
Burney, who shared the table. Accustomed to the
most intellectual society in London, lionised and petted
by its select circles, she could not bear to be con-
demned to the society of an illiterate old woman who
did not hesitate to call her to order and find fault
with her with what the younger woman held to be
Xafcies
unexampled rudeness. The lively protegee of Dr. Johnson
and Mrs. Thrale found these to be hard lines, and in
spite of her own solid sense and worth showed little
forbearance and magnanimity in the detestation which
she entertained for Mrs. Schwellenberg ; a detestation
which the offended dogged elder woman naturally
returned with interest.
In the chronic feud the Princess Royal adopted the
side of Mrs. Schwellenberg with pardonable warmth,
hence the " dryness " which existed between the Princess
and the diarist. The Princess Royal married the Crown
Prince of Wurtemberg and was an excellent wife to him
and a good step-mother to his children. The wittiest
and most accomplished of the sisters was Princess
Elizabeth. In her earlier years a marriage was projected
between her and the exiled Duke of Orleans, afterwards
King Louis Philippe of France. At his house at
Twickenham he was in the neighbourhood of Kew and
he was intimate with the Princess's brothers. It was
supposed he was inclined to Protestantism. Eventually
he gave up Elizabeth for Amelia, the richly endowed
daughter of the King of Naples. Elizabeth, though a
Princess, was jilted ! She became late in life the wife
of the Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg, and like her elder
sister was loved and respected in her new relations.
The prettiest and sweetest of the Princesses was Princess
Mary, who after long delay was wedded to her cousin
and first love, William, Duke of Gloucester.
Princess Amelia, the youngest, was the pet and play-
thing of the others and the cherished darling of the
King and Queen. She faded away ere her girlhood was
well past, dying as King George's young brother and
sister had died, of consumption. Her death was the last
blow which overthrew the King's tottering reason.
Thackeray in his Four Georges quotes some simple
pathetic verses which Princess Amelia is said to have
Cbarlotte of /IDecfelenburcj*Strelit3 209
written on the contrast between her opening bloom and
the swift blight which fell upon it.
Many customs of the time some of them admirable,
some quaintly picturesque, some singularly inconvenient
and burdensome have passed away. Among them was
the procession to chapel for morning prayer at eight
o'clock through the long corridors. The procession
was headed by the King and Queen walking arm-in-
arm. The Princesses followed in pairs, and after them
the suite. The attendance was not obligatory on the
members of the suite, but it was understood the Queen
remarked and disapproved of absentees. On the after-
noons of Sundays and royal birthdays when the Court
was at Windsor and the weather was fine, the King and
Queen with their family promenaded on the terrace,
which was generally crowded with people of rank and
fashion. They came down from London to look at the
promenaders, by whom the spectators were graciously
noticed as occasion served, the King and Queen stopping
for the purpose, with their whole train arrested behind
them. Admittance to the terrace was obtained by the
public of suitable position who could command the
necessary influence. One of the excursions craved by
country cousins, come up to town to behold the wonders
of the great Metropolis, was that to Windsor with the
spectacle of the royal promenade, which enabled the
admiring strangers to claim a knowledge by sight of
their sovereign and his fine family. When we think
of the grey tower of St. George's, the green slopes and
glades of Windsor Park, and the splendid company
walking on the noble terrace under the summer sun-
shine we are inclined to commend the taste of the
country cousin of last century.
As years rolled on, when the King was blind and in-
firm, he could be seen walking on the terrace between
two of his daughters, his devoted guardians.
210 Sf IRosal Xa&ies
The Queen's toilette, which, when she could have her
will in a country Paradise, was simple enough in its
details, had at other times to be conducted with much
state and ceremony. In her dressing-closet she was
attended by her dressers, who handed to each other in
succession, and finally to Charlotte, the various articles
of dress. At the later stages of the process, when she
sat in her peignoir and had her hair dressed l she would
receive visitors in the French fashion, or Fanny Burney
would vindicate her appointment by reading aloud ; but
when the powdering crisis came Charlotte was enveloped
from head to foot in another dressing-gown and left alone
with the performer, who raised dense clouds of powder
round himself and the lady whose head he was " drench-
ing " in the approved style. When the Queen retired
for the night the King handed her to her dressing-room,
to which the grown-up Princesses followed her, kissing
her hand as they wished her good-night. Then the
requisite garments were handed to her as before, and
the ceremony ended; but not without the Queen acknow-
ledging by a punctilious curtsey every act of service
rendered to her.
Queen Charlotte took snuff 2 and was a connoisseur
with regard to the merits of the best rappee and an
adept at having it properly mixed. The mal practice
was well-nigh universal in contemporary European
Courts. All that strikes us as offensive in the custom
was condoned by the supposed elegance with which a
fine lady tapped her gold, brilliant-set snuff-box and
took a perfumed pinch between her delicate thumb and
fore finger. If Queen Charlotte held her fan in one of
those beautiful hands of hers, like a Queen, one may be
sure that there was also royal dignity in her objection-
able snuff-taking.
1 This operation generally took two hours.
- The King's aunt Princess Emily was also a great snuff-taker.
Cbarlotte of /Ifoecfclenbttr0*strelit3 21 1
Most biographers of Queen Charlotte quote from
Mrs. Delany's letters a visit from the royal family to
the Duchess of Portland at Bulstrode. It is a graphic
picture of the large young family, headed by the King
and Queen, of the lumbering elaboration of their trans-
port and of the mingled state and simplicity which
characterised the whole episode. " The King drove
the Queen in an open chaise, with a pair of white
horses " (to the late breakfast to which they had
invited themselves and a large instalment of their
offspring). " The Prince of Wales " (whose birthday,
August 1 2th, it was) "and Prince Frederick" (Duke
of York) " rode on horseback all with proper
attendants, but no guards Princess Royal and Lady
Weymouth in a post-chaise. Princess Augusta, Princess
Elizabeth, Prince Adolphus about seven years old"
(afterwards Duke of Cambridge) " and Lady Charlotte
Finch" (the royal children's governess) u in a coach.
Prince William " (afterwards Duke of Clarence and
King William IV.), "Prince Edward" (afterwards
Duke of Kent), " the Duke of Montagu, and the
Bishop of Lichfield in a coach. Another coach full
of attendant gentlemen, etc., etc."
Well might Mrs. Delany add that the cavalcade
made a splendid figure "as on a brilliant day it drove
through the park round the court and up to the house."
Of the Queen, the amiable aristocratic letter-writer tells
us : " She was in a hat, and in an Italian night-gown "
(an anticipation of the modern tea-gown) " of purple
lutestring trimmed with silver gauze. She is graceful
and genteel. . . . The three Princesses were all in
frocks. The King and all the men in uniform, blue
and gold." Part of the entertainment was walking
through the suite of eight rooms and examining the
pictures and curiosities. The rallying point was the
great drawing-room in which there were only two
Xafcies
chairs placed in the centre for the King and Queen.
" The King, whose conversation " (incessant) "and good
humour took off all awe but what one must have
for so respectable a character, immediately placed the
Duchess of Portland in his chair. Breakfast was offered
all prepared in a long gallery that runs the length of
the great apartments. . . . The King and all his royal
children and the rest of the train chose to go to the
gallery where the well-furnished tables were set, one
with tea, coffee, and chocolate, another with their proper
accompaniment of eatables, rolls, cakes, and another
table with fruits and ices. . . . No servants waited but
those out of livery. When the Queen chose to have
only a dish of tea and a plate of biscuits in the drawing-
room, the Duchess brought them on a waiter and served
her Majesty." Mrs. Delany stood at the back of the
Queen's chair, which happened to be one of Mrs.
Delany's working, " and gave the Queen an opportunity
to say many obliging things." Her Majesty would
not return her empty cup to the Duchess, but " got up
and would carry it to the gallery herself. . . . The
King desired me to show the Queen one of my books
of plants. 1 She seated herself in the gallery, a table
and a book laid before her, and I kept my distance till
she called me to ask some questions about the mosaic
paper-work. As I stood before her Majesty the King
set a chair behind me. I turned with some confusion
and hesitation on receiving so great an honour, when
the Queen said, * Mrs. Delany, sit down, sit down ; it is
not every lady who has a chair brought her by a
King.' So I obeyed." When Mrs. Delany expressed
to her Majesty the pleasure it had given her to pay
her duty to the King and Queen and to so many of
1 Mrs. Delany was an accomplished and exquisite worker from her
own designs. She was also famous for her copies of plants which she
outlined and cut out of paper tinted by herself, pasting the flowers on
a black ground.
Cbarlotte of flDecfelen&ur0*5trelft3 213
the royal family, " Oh ! but," was the proud mother's
answer, " you have not seen all my children yet " ; and
the King remarked : " You may put Mrs. Delany in
the way of doing that by naming a day for her to drink
tea at Windsor Castle." Accordingly the next day
was fixed upon.
The royal visit to Bulstrode was the introduction of
the charming old lady, Mrs. Delany, to the King and
Queen. The acquaintance thus begun ripened into a
close and sincere friendship highly creditable to the
friends on both sides.
As " Mary Granville " Mrs. Delany had been forced
in early girlhood into an unsuitable marriage with an
old Cornish squire, a boorish sot named Pendarvis.
He did not live long, but on his death left her with a
bare allowance. The beautiful young widow, born in
the reign of Queen Anne, was an acknowledged belle
both at the Court of St. James's and in St. Stephen's
Green, Dublin. In Ireland she married Dean Delany,
a friend of Dean Swift's. A widow for the second
time, old and in poor circumstances, she was obliged
to her dear friend the Duchess of Portland for a home.
When the Duchess's death deprived Mrs. Delany of
that refuge the King and Queen assigned her a house
in Windsor, close to the gate of the Castle, settled an
annuity on her and doubled their kindness by treating
her as a cherished personal friend. Hardly a day
passed when the King or the Queen did not look in
upon her for a dish of tea or a cheerful talk. The
Princes and Princesses were constantly invading her
little territory, and making much of her. To them
she was the most delightful of grandames, full of old
stories, endless in her indulgence of their youthful fancies
and freaks a refined, gifted Mrs. Schwellenberg.
An awful interruption came to these artless gaieties
and genial charities. It was not the attempt to
214 Ste 1Roal OLafcies
assassinate the King made by the mad woman, Margaret
Nicholson, though that was bad enough. She got so
near him that the knife which was intended to pierce
his heart cut his waistcoat. He would suffer no one
save himself to tell the Queen of the danger he had
encountered with courage and composure. She was
distressed and alarmed, but the knowledge that the
attack had proceeded from a crazy woman, whose
purpose had been frustrated, who would no longer be
a source of apprehension, soon quieted her fears. But
a darker shadow was about to fall on the pair. In
the course of the year 1788 the King caught a chill
and was seized with a feverish attack which speedily
went to his brain. Always a great talker, in the habit
of putting endless questions which he himself answered,
he now spoke continuously and incoherently in a hoarse
voice, the very kindness and good nature of which it
was piteous to hear. He kept telling everybody that
he was not ill, merely a little nervous, and that if he
could get to sleep he would be perfectly well. The
ghastly dread which must have hovered in the back-
ground of the Queen's happiest hours for more than
twenty years was a ghastlier reality.
For a little time the Queen was suffered to remain
by the King's side ; and so wistfully did he cling to her
that when she was still allowed to occupy a bedroom
next the King's he would get up during the night,
light a candle, and come into her room to convince
himself that she was still near him. He needed no
physician, he said pathetically, the Queen was the best
physician he could have. " She is my best friend ;
where could I find a better ? " When the doctors,
urging the necessity of absolute quiet for their patient,
induced him to remove to a distant room, the Queen
was in despair. She had further cause for pain. She
had now to experience the serpent tooth of the ingrati-
Cbatlotte of fl&ecfclenl>urs*StreUt3 215
tude of a much loved child. The Prince of Wales
hurried with indecent haste to supersede his father
and mother in their palaces. Assured by his friends
that in case of the King's incapacity the eldest son was
the natural Regent in the father's stead, he did not
wait till Parliament conferred on him the office, he went
down to Windsor, gave every direction in the Queen's
as well as in the King's rooms, dismissed attendants and
altered arrangements. When Charlotte was induced to
remove to Kew in order to supply the attraction of
his wife and daughters' being there waiting for him
to tempt the King into going to the country, the
Prince preceded his mother, had part of the palace
shut up, and even caused to be chalked on the doors of
the remaining rooms the names of the members of the
family and suite whom he chose to locate in them.
He was accustomed to come over with his brother
the Duke of York and to remain in the rooms adjoining
the King's in order to be personal witnesses to his
ravings. Then the sons reported to the Queen the
doctors' opinion of the King's state. This the brothers
did with such brutal plain speaking and indifference to
the feelings of the miserable wife and mother of her
who had been so proud and happy in the attachment of
her husband and of his fine children as to shock the
hearers. The poor Queen shut herself up, stricken
and humiliated, with her sorrowing daughters and ladies.
Fainting fit after fainting fit prostrated her strength,
till fear for her life mingled with the grief for the
King's loss of his reason.
In the meantime the Prince of Wales and the Duke
of York, jubilant in the prospect of unrestricted power
as Prince Regent and as Commander-in-Chief, repaired
to town and plunged into every orgy which drink,
gambling-tables, and attendance at the least reput-
able public and private places of amusement could
216 Sf racial
accomplish. The country looked on scandalised and
appalled. Were these the lawless hands into which
the guidance of the afflicted King and the nation was
to be committed?
But the Queen's high spirits did not fail altogether,
particularly where her duty to her helpless husband
and her younger children came into play. The great
statesman William Pitt, at the head of the Tory
Government, supported her and looked after her in-
terests and those of the people in the dire strait. He
swayed Parliament by securing large majorities for his
measures. He compelled the Prince of Wales to the
sullen acceptance of a conditional regency, among
whose provisions were the stipulations that the King's
person was to be entrusted to the Queen's care, and
that her Majesty was to be also invested with the
control of the royal household.
Almost as suddenly as the dark cloud had descended
on Queen Charlotte's fortunes it rose again by God's
mercy, and the whole complexion of the case was
changed. In November the King had been pronounced
still delirious ; the fever had left him but the delirium
did not subside. The change to Kew from which
something had been hoped had brought no improve-
ment. The doctors were baffled and at their wits' end.
Happily some of them were not above calling in
further counsel. They summoned from Lincolnshire
(to the Queen's great comfort) a certain Dr. Willis,
famous for his treatment of lunacy. He arrived bring-
ing with him two grown-up sons accustomed to act
with him in the management of his lunatic asylum.
The three are described as sensible, humane, kindly
gentlemen. From the time the King was committed to
their charge every reasonable indulgence was granted
to him and his health of body and mind improved
rapidly.
Gbarlotte of /l&ecfelenbur^Streltts 217
On January ist, 1789, he was heard praying aloud
fervently for his recovery. On January i8th he re-
membered it was the Queen's birthday and asked to see
her, which he had not been allowed to do for several
months. The gardens were reserved for his use, and
the Queen would watch him from her window. Not
knowing the reservation, Fanny Burney ventured on
a stroll, when a serio-comic incident occurred. To her
horror, on coming round a corner, she saw the King at
a little distance. Believing that he was forbidden all
intercourse with the world, she turned and ran. But
the King, who pined for the sight of his friends and
acquaintances, had already seen her and came running
after her, bidding her stop and calling her by name. 1 It
was a command she could not obey. Presently the three
Willises, who had been in the background, joined in the
pursuit, when the extraordinary spectacle was presented
of " Little Burney " running through the royal grounds
with her revered King at her heels and his three doctors
bringing up the rear. Happily, Dr. Willis was able
to arrest the fugitive and to impress upon her that she
would do the King harm if she contradicted him further.
She did her best to behave as if nothing had happened,
halted, and even turned and advanced respectfully to-
wards his Majesty, acting on the supposition that she
had only, during that instant, seen and heard him.
To Fanny Burney's confusion the worthy old King,
in his delight at meeting one he knew and liked, with
whom he could discuss Court news, opened his arms
and folded her in an affectionate embrace, kissing her
on each cheek. She accepted the salute, satisfied that
it was given in the benevolence of his heart, and that
it was such a one as he had been wont from the
1 The relations of Fanny Burney with the King and Queen were
intimate and friendly. They had great faith in her judgment and sent
her to be one of the audience at the trial of Warren Hastings, that she
might bring back to them a full report of the proceedings.
beginning of his reign to bestow with a mixture of
fatherliness and gallant homage on all the young women
who were presented to him. He talked eagerly in
his accustomed monologue, speaking quickly, hoarsely,
but only occasionally incoherently. He discussed his
family affairs, those of Miss Burney, politics, and his
beloved music. He commenced singing from Handel,
but so hoarsely and out of tune as almost to scare his
auditor. Still he would not consent to shorten the in-
terview. He showed that he was aware of his condition
and dropped hints that he was sensible it had been
taken advantage of. He ended by threatening with a
half-jesting energy that when " he was King again he
would rule with a rod of iron."
Miss Burney's account of the interview filled the
Queen with happy hopes, and by February i2th the
reunited pair were walking together in Kew Gardens
with thankful hearts.
A few days afterwards Lord-Chancellor Thurlow
communicated to the House the welcome intelligence
that the King's medical attendants had announced his
recovery. The elder sons, who had striven hard to
turn their father's illness to their own profit, affected
not to believe in his restoration to reason. After it
was placed beyond doubt they scarcely concealed their
disappointment. When in the gladness of the nation a
large ball was given by White's Club to celebrate the
joyful event, the two Princes sold the cards sent for
them and their friends, and absented themselves from
the ball. At the solemn and affecting thanksgiving in
St. Paul's, the King, seated by the Queen's side, humbly
confessed his sins and gratefully acknowledged God's
goodness. He was calm, but she could hardly restrain
her emotion, while the Princesses wept in sympathy ;
but as for the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, and
their cousin the Duke of Gloucester, they outraged the
Cbatlotte of flDecfelenbttr0*StreUt3 219
vast congregation by the loud and irreverent conversa-
tion they maintained during the service. London was
illuminated in honour of the day. The Queen and
the Princesses witnessed the spectacle. It was thought
too exciting for the King, who only saw it from a
distance in the company of Princess Amelia, the prattling
child to whom he was tenderly attached.
At the first drawing-room and on the Queen's first
visit to the theatre after the King's recovery there were
renewed gala displays. " The Queen sat on a chair of
state under a canopy, surrounded by the great officers
of her household. Her dress was magnificence itself.
She was in a blaze of diamonds ; around her neck was a
double row of gold chain supporting a medallion.
Across her shoulders was another chain of pearls in
three rows ; but the portrait of the King was suspended
from five rows of diamonds fastened loose upon the
dress behind and streaming over the person with the
most gorgeous effect. The tippet was of fine lace
fastened with the letter " G " in brilliants of immense
value. In front of her Majesty's hair, in letters formed
of diamonds, were the words * God save the King,'
easily legible. . . . The female nobility wore em-
blematical designs beautifully painted on the satin of
their caps." One is tempted to think that because the
King had regained his wits the Queen and the female
nobility had lost theirs. On the King's birthday the
Queen was in royal purple covered with rich Brussels lace
and carried a superb bouquet of brilliants a present
sent to the King by the Nizam of the Deccan. tf Queen
Charlotte is as fond of diamonds as the Queen of France,
and as fond of snuff as the King of Prussia," was the
report of a foreigner. The first taste was a misfortune
to both Queens. It led to the story of the diamond
necklace and De Rohan, which helped to ruin Marie
Antoinette. It brought upon Queen Charlotte the
220 5f TCosal OLafcies
accusation of having accepted bribes from Lord Clive
and Warren Hastings to cover their abuse of govern-
ment in India. It gave point to the false charge of
selfish rapacity brought against an upright and generous
woman.
The foreign ambassadors vied with each other in the
taste and luxury of their commemoration banquets.
The Princess Royal gave a ball to the young nobility,
the invitations being issued in her name, while the
married people were asked in the Queen's name. The
gentlemen were in Windsor uniform, the ladies in
garter blue covered with white tiffany. Each wore a
large plume of feathers, white, and sometimes tipped
with orange, in her head-dress, and each displayed a
bandeau bearing the inscription, " God save the King."
The fashion of wearing feathers, though the Queen had
at one time forbidden them to her maids-of-honour,
was at its height. It had not waned since the Duchess
of Devonshire had to stoop on entering a room when
she sported a feather given to her by Lord Stormont,
which was an ell and three inches in length. The
fashion of wearing ostrich feathers still survives in the
costume for Queen Victoria's drawing-rooms so far as
even the youngest debutante is concerned.
The etiquette at these bygone balls was of the most
stringent description, and the Prince of Wales, though
he could trample upon more serious obligations, and
could cast this one aside where it affected himself, when
the fancy took him was a stern stickler for its main-
tenance by less exalted persons. The rule was that no
person should stand up in a country dance who had
not previously danced in a minuet. At one of these
balls Colonel Lennox and Lady Catherine Barnard, who
had not danced a minuet, thought fit to range them-
selves in a country dance. The Prince of Wales, who
was dancing with the Princess Royal, was in high
Cbatlotte of /lBecfelenbur0*Strelit3 221
dudgeon at the liberty taken. When he and his
partner reached the offending couple he refused to
dance with them by at once walking with the Princess
to the bottom of the set. The Duke of York coming
next with Princess Augusta danced regardlessly right
down the row. The Duke of Clarence with Princess
Elizabeth condemned the couple by breaking off and
going to the bottom like the Prince of Wales and the
Princess Royal. The culprits, abashed or unabashed,
danced down the set, till they came to the Prince of
Wales and his eldest sister, when he immediately took
her by the hand, led her out of the dance, and con-
ducted her to the Queen with haughty words to the
effect, u Madam, I will not see you or any of your
family insulted." Then Charlotte wisely brought the
ball to a close.
Fantastic as were many of the demonstrations of
loyalty on the King's recovery, they were at least
genuine tokens of the high regard in which he and the
Queen were then held by all honest unprejudiced hearts.
The unspeakable blessing of reason was spared to the
good King for a further period of over twenty years
an interval during which his friends and subjects
were delivered from the incubus of the threatened
regency.
CHAPTER III.
AN AGING AND AGED QUEEN.
THE old routine of the Court was resumed, with per-
haps longer and longer stays, on account of the benefit of
the sea air to the King's health, at Weymouth, which
he had selected as his seaside resort, and adhered to
so faithfully that part of the town on its beautiful bay
adopted the high-sounding name of " Melcombe Regis."
In the days when travelling was limited to excursions
here and there in England, now to visit a subject of
sufficient rank and substance, now to make acquaintance
with one of the great University towns, now to inspect
a portion of the navy, and again to go over a public
work or centre of industry as in the early years of the
King's reign, many such expeditions were undertaken
both before and after the King's illness, and were highly
popular throughout the country. The King, Queen, and
several of the Princesses paid a couple of visits to Oxford
with Nuneham and Blenheim as their headquarters.
The King sat in the Sheldonian theatre in the Vice-
Chancellor's chair, his head covered, and received an
address from his " most loyal University." Afterwards
the heads of the houses and principal professors
were presented to him ; when a quick, merry observer
like Fanny Burney had an opportunity of remarking
on their unfamiliarity with Court procedure how they
knelt on both knees instead of on one, pulled them-
selves up by the King's hand after kissing it, tottered
and stumbled in walking backwards, etc., etc. The
Cbarlotte of /ifoecfelenlwr^Strelits 223
colleges were visited in solemn rotation and a collation
was taken in one of them by the royal party, while the
ladies and gentlemen in attendance formed a semi-
circle and looked on in hungry appreciation of the
banquet they were not to taste. The lively chronicler
records a feat performed by Lady Charlotte Bertie
when the King stopped engrossed in conversation in
the middle of one of the halls. It was necessary for
Lady Charlotte to leave the room in order to follow
the Queen, but she could not turn her back on the
King. She had a sprained ankle ; but those to the
manner born can do wonders. "She faced the King
and began to march backwards . . . she went perfectly
upright, but without one stumble, without once looking
behind to see what she might encounter ; and with
as graceful a motion as I ever saw anybody enter a
room, she retreated, I am sure, full twenty yards."
The woman of fashion in her own role defeated the
men of learning.
The royal explorers, on another occasion, examined
Mr. Whitbread's great porter brewery in Chiswell
Street, the Queen and the Princesses entering the main
vat, and they and the King being served at luncheon
with old porter from a bottle of extraordinary size.
The King and his family had a desire to see Divine
Service performed on board ship, and one Sunday at
Weymouth they went on board the Magnificent L , sit-
ting together under the quarter-deck awning, on the
starboard side, while those of the nobility in the
neighbourhood who followed their Majesties' example
were on the larboard side. The ship's officers were in
the centre, behind them the ship's company and the
marines in the form of a crescent, while the chaplain
was at his post and preached a sermon to an attentive
congregation met under unusual circumstances.
A more imposing incident was the visit of the King
224 Sij TRosal Xafcfes
Queen, and Princesses to the Royal Charlotte lying off
Portsmouth, when the King carried a diamond-hiked
sword which he presented to the Commander, Lord
Howe. And a still more interesting event even than
the Handel Festival in Westminster Abbey which had
preceded it, was the naval thanksgiving in St. Paul's,
when a procession headed by the Admirals Howe,
St. Vincent, and Duncan, conveyed the enemies' colours
which the sea-captains had won in their glorious
victories to the steps of the altar, where they were
received by the Bishop of London and ranged on each
side. The King was in naval uniform, the Queen
and the Princesses in mazarine blue.
When the Queen accompanied the King to military
reviews or to camps, while he was in scarlet regimentals
faced with blue, gold lace and epaulettes, she, to do
honour to the army, wore in her turn a scarlet riding
habit faced with blue richly embroidered, a black hat,
feather, and large cockade.
Though the calamity of the King's madness was
arrested for a number of years and Queen Charlotte
was again royal mistress in her own domains, she had
many heavy trials besieging her in the present and
looming in still darker battalions in the future. Her
two elder sons remained as unruly and as miserably
unsatisfactory as before. The Whig party, which
supported them effusively in order to oppose the King
and the Tories, fell into the injustice of systematically
and vehemently aspersing the Queen, who stood between
two hostile factions and was attacked by both. She
was supposed to confirm the King in his Toryism and
so she was maligned by the Whigs. She was believed
after all to favour the Prince of Wales and to side with
him in his contest with his father, and so the extreme
Tories and the mob, for once holding a cause in
common, vilified her. Clever caricaturists, with Gilray
Cbatlotte of /l&ecfelenburc^Strelits 22 5
and Peter Pindar at their head, began to mock at her
continually.
Something was hoped where the Duke of York was
concerned from his marriage with Princess Frederica
of Prussia, the only child by his first marriage of the
late King of Prussia. The match was very agreeable
to the nation not only on account of the rank and dowry
of the bride but also because of her Protestant nurture.
The Duke's income was raised to thirty-five thousand
pounds a year and an annuity of thirty thousand a year
was settled on the Duchess should she survive her hus-
band. The ages of the couple were suitable : she was
twenty-three and he was twenty-seven. She was a
gentle little woman, handsome in her modest way,
well educated, upright, and kind-hearted. She was a
world too good for him, while she was innocently
attached to him. If he had only seen it, his temporal
salvation lay in her. He went to Berlin, where the
couple were married. France was in a state of open
revolution, which, as was evident, was infecting England.
It was not without considerable danger in traversing the
South of France that the Duke and Duchess at last
reached London, where they were re-married by the
Archbishop of Canterbury at the Queen's House
(Buckingham Palace) in the presence of the King,
Queen, and the rest of the royal family, on Nov-
ember 22nd, 1791.
When the King and Queen with the Princes and
Princesses paid the young couple a formal visit, the
entertainment on the occasion took the form for which
the King and Queen had a predilection, of a tea-party,
sufficiently stately in its simplicity. The King's tea
was solemnly handed to him by the Prince of Wales,
while the Duchess of York, receiving a cup from the
Duke, presented it with much reverence to the Queen.
Only the King's good-natured loquacity and the Queen's
'5
226 Sf IRo^al Xafcies
gracious fine manners were equal to such situations and
could render them easy and cordial.
Unfortunately, in the Duke and Duchess of York's
marriage the virtue was all on the Duchess's side. After
six years of insulting neglect and shameless inconstancy
the dutiful affection of the poor Princess was worn to
the last thread. The Court of Prussia was not in those
days an example of domestic loyalty and tenderness, but
its Princes were less outrageous in their evil behaviour
than this English Prince, who had brought his bride to
a foreign country only to behave to her with insolent
falseness. But she was too modest and too dignified to
indulge in useless upbraidings. She kept her worries
and her sorrows to herself. The pair separated by
mutual and amicable consent. The Duchess, whose
health was delicate, retired to the country house of
Oatlands, where she led a quiet, blameless life, dis-
tinguished chiefly by its charities. On any special
occasion she showed her respect for the King and
Queen by coming out of her retirement to appear at
the royal drawing-rooms, etc., etc. 1 In return she
received every mark of respect from her husband's
family and from the nation. Even the graceless
Duke condescended to treat her with outward pro-
priety in the circumstances. He paid flying visits to
Oatlands at intervals in order to settle business matters
and make polite inquiries after the Duchess's health and
well-being. The Duke and Duchess of York had no
children.
One of the younger Princes, Augustus, afterwards
Duke of Sussex but then only Prince Augustus, a lad
of twenty, who had at least been so far free from the
1 When the Duke of York was under a cloud because of the reported
sale of commissions in the army by the worthless Mrs. Marianne
Clarke, the Duchess came up to town, stayed in the same house with
him, and appeared in public in his company, in a generous effort to
shield him from disgrace.
Cbarlotte of fl&ecfclenburg*Strelit3 227
wild excesses of his three elder brothers, distressed the
King and Queen by committing a breach of the recently
enacted Royal Marriage Act. In Italy he met and fell
in love with Lady Augusta Murray, daughter of the
Earl of Dunmore. The Prince induced an English
clergyman in Rome to marry the couple without seeking
the consent of the Sovereign and the Parliament.
The lady's relations supported the pair, so that on
their return to England they were publicly re- married
in St. George's, Hanover Square, in open defiance of
the statute which had been enacted to prevent a repe-
tition of the misalliances of George III.'s younger
brothers. The marriage was pronounced invalid by
the Ecclesiastical Court in August, 1794, and Lady
Augusta immediately withdrew from her husband, who
had only attained his majority a few months before.
Apparently he did not make any attempt to procure a
reversal of the decree, or an exception in his favour to
the Royal Marriage Act, neither was there any mention
of a morganatic marriage, 1 to which possibly Lady
Augusta would not have stooped. The separation was
permanent. She was permitted to take by royal licence
the matronly title of Lady D'Ameland. The two
children a son and daughter bore the name of D'Este,
and were acknowledged as connections of the royal
family.
The following year, 1795, saw the ill-omened marriage
of George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, now a
man of three-and-thirty years of age and old in dissipa-
tion. His continued misconduct could no longer be
excused on the plea of youthful folly which he might
renounce presently. His debts were enormous, and it
1 A marriage between a Prince or Princess and a private lady or
gentleman in which the couple are recognised as man and wife, but the
lady or gentleman does not take the rank of her husband or his wife,
and the children are not necessarily Princes and Princesses, and have
no claim to a throne.
228 Sir
was understood that they would only be discharged by
the King and the Government on his marrying and
settling down to a more honourable course of conduct
than he had hitherto pursued. He had obstinately
declined to marry for a very good reason. It had long
been an open secret that eleven years before, in 1784,
he was married in her own drawing-room to the only
woman for whom he ever showed a particle of real
affection, the beautiful Mrs. Fitzherbert. The lady was
of respectable but by no means very distinguished ante-
cedents. Her father was a country gentleman of the
name of Smith, and while still in the bloom of her youth
she was for the second time a widow her second
husband having been a Colonel Fitzherbert. There
had been nothing of Prince Augustus's boyish candour
in his marriage with Lady Augusta Murray in the cir-
cumstances of the Prince of Wales's marriage with Mrs.
Fitzherbert. It was conducted with extreme secrecy ;
the Prince denying the fact in the most absolute man-
ner both in public and private. In fact, the marriage
was doubly forbidden by the conditions of the Royal
Marriage Act and by the light of a still older Act, that
of the Hanoverian succession to the throne of England.
Mrs. Fitzherbert was a Roman Catholic, and no Roman
Catholic could be Queen-Consort of England.
There is a somewhat apocryphal story that the
Prince of Wales confessed his marriage to the Queen,
his mother, to whom, in spite of his conduct towards
her on the occasion of George III.'s first attack of
madness, he still came to ask her to intercede for him
with his justly incensed father ; not that the prodigal
was repentant, but that he would fain have his
mortgaged income increased and his pressing creditors
staved off. If the Prince of Wales ever made such a
confession to the Queen, she must have regarded his
marriage as totally irregular and illegal ; but she had
Cbarlotte of /iDecfelenbur^Strelits 229
certainly more pity than condemnation for the woman
who had entered on the untenable contract. Charlotte
held a rigid moral standard with regard to the
character of her Court, even where the members ot
her family were concerned, but she always displayed
forbearance and clemency to Mrs. Fitzherbert ; she
received her publicly at her drawing-rooms, and
consented to be visited by her when the royal family
were in semi-retirement at Brighton.
In 1794 the Prince of Wales's finances were in a
desperate state and he suddenly announced his willing-
ness to marry, the King only stipulating that the bride
should be a Princess and a Protestant. The Queen was
anxious that the choice should be a wise one, but
eventually it fell on the King's niece, Princess Caroline
of Brunswick, daughter of the old talkative mischief-
maker, Princess Augusta, the King's sister who had
married the soldier Duke of Brunswick and presided
for thirty years in an undignified, indiscreet fashion
over a small German Court whose morals and manners
were the reverse of what was desirable. It is sufficient
to say here that the poor Queen was aware, even before
she saw Caroline, that the daughter-in-law proposed for
her was utterly antipathetic to her. No two women
could be more unlike ; no two would so jar on each
other. Caroline was the very reverse of what a wise
mother might have sought for in the wife of her son.
For such a son as the Prince of Wales the prospect of
his wedded life with Caroline was dark indeed. The
Queen saw her last hope for her firstborn, the darling
of her young motherhood, extinguished, and she was
powerless to prevent the catastrophe. Personally there
was little to object to in Caroline. At twenty-six she
had a pretty face, with delicate features, fair hair and
complexion, and expressive eyes. Her figure, though
already showing a tendency to stoutness, was not yet
230 Sij iRosal XaMes
overgrown. But mentally she was " a bold, dashing,
careless girl whose tongue was ever in advance of
reflection " (in this respect going far beyond her
mother's, who called the coarsest things by the coarsest
names), " and was as complacently vain as she was
reckless of the consequences of her words and actions."
The Earl of Malmesbury was sent to conduct
Caroline of Brunswick to England, and the marriage
was celebrated on April 8th, 1795, in the Chapel Royal,
St. James's, in the presence of the King and Queen
and the rest of the royal family. Queen Charlotte,
whatever her feelings might have been, gave an enter-
tainment at Frogmore in honour of the wedding, and
"was civil if stiff," while the bride is said to have
been "superbly dressed," and to have "looked as
black as midnight."
Already the quarrels of the ill-suited couple had
begun, and soon were notorious. The Queen's distaste
to the Princess of Wales (the natures of the two women
were absolutely irreconcilable) is said to have been con-
firmed and intensified by certain impertinently sarcastic
remarks on the Queen contained in some letters of the
Princess to her friends in Germany, which came to
the Queen's knowledge.
The only child of the Prince and Princess of Wales,
Princess Charlotte of Wales, was born in London in
1796, and shortly afterwards the father and mother
separated. The Princess settled at Blackheath, where
she was occasionally visited by her uncle the King, but
not by the Queen. The baby Princess was left at
Carlton House under a succession of governesses
appointed by her father, and even when she was
removed to Blackheath she had an establishment of
her own, in a different house from her mother, whom
she was only allowed to see once a week. This practical
separation of the child from the mother, who was fond
Cbarlotte of /lDecfeIenlwrg*Streltt3 231
of her baby, was, to begin with, an act of heartless
tyranny. Afterwards, when the child was older, and
the foolish mother living in a racket of company of
all kinds had so conducted herself as to cause many
scandals, there was something to be said on both sides
of the question.
Princess Charlotte of Wales was the only grandchild
whom the old King and Queen lived to see, and in that
light as well as from the circumstance that she stood,
after her father, next in succession to the throne, the
little creature was an object of much interest to them.
The Queen had many plans for her grand-daughter's
education. She wished to enlist in the service no less
a person than Mrs. Hannah Moore.
A diversion in the trouble brooding over the divided
house was effected by the marriage of Charlotte, the
Princess Royal, to the Crown Prince of Wurtemberg.
But even this satisfaction was considerably alloyed. At
this date it sounds strange, all things considered, to be
told that the bridegroom had wedded for his first wife
the elder sister of the little esteemed Princess of Wales.
This Charlotte of Brunswick, first cousin to the English
Charlotte, to whose hand the Prince now aspired, had
undergone a miserable mysterious fate. The story
went that the Prince, then in the service of Russia, had
taken his wife and three children to St. Petersburg,
where the Princess, under the influence of the Empress
Catherine, was led into much that was evil. Her
husband endeavoured to return to Germany with his
wife and children ; but the formidable Empress,
while giving him leave to go with his children, declined
to consent to the departure of her friend, his wife.
After he was gone the Empress removed all her German
attendants from the unhappy lady, and then, whether
in one of the violent caprices to which the able but
depraved woman was subject, whether in the wish to
232 5f iRopal Xafcies
silence the Princess on incidents with which she was
familiar in the Empress's life, the Princess of Wiir-
temberg was sent to a castle at some distance from
St. Petersburg and confined there. Two years afterwards
Catherine caused letters to be conveyed to the Duke
of Brunswick and the Prince of Wiirtemberg simply
intimating the death of the Princess. Of the truth of
the announcement the Duke of Brunswick and the
Prince of Wiirtemberg convinced themselves, but the
Duchess of Brunswick, whose opinion, after all, was
not worth much, never believed the tale of her daughter's
death. There were other people who held that she
was still dragging out her existence in a Russian prison
or in the wilds of Siberia. This was a ghastly tale with
which a bridegroom went wooing to the near relative
of his last wife. Rumour increased its ghastliness ;
never satiated with horrors, it added to them in this
case by roundly asserting that the Prince was an ac-
complice in his wife's tragic end, that his treatment had
led to it, and that he knew full well how she had fared
if dead, and where she was if still alive. But Charlotte,
Princess Royal, was too sensible and friendly to be
scared by rumour, and she was fain to make up to an
injured man, as she believed, for what he had suffered
in the past. She was in her thirty-second year ; she
was old enough to judge for herself ; she was not averse
to the husband who had made proposals for her hand,
or unwilling to resign her state as the lady of the
second degree of importance in England to be the lady
of the first rank in Wiirtemberg.
Naturally the King and Queen did not smile on so
doubtful a match. They were both opposed to it at
first, and the King did not yield till he was satisfied
(with reason) of the baselessness of the charges against
the Prince. Then the Queen too gave way and allowed
herself to trust that her daughter knew what was for
Cbarlotte of /l&ecfelenburo*Strelft3 233
her welfare and happiness. When the marriage was
finally agreed upon there was all the pleasant bustle
and interest of the first daughter's marriage in a group
of grown-up daughters, the first Princess in a cluster
of Princesses. The Queen took a mother's proud and
tender share in the preparations, embroidering with her
own hand the white-and-gold wedding dress.
In 1798 the anxiety of the Irish rebellion following
on the French revolution but ending in the quelling of
the rebels was a heavy burden on the King's mind.
Two years later there was still sufficient anarchical and
revolutionary feeling in the country to cause the King
to be fired at from the pit of Drury Lane Theatre,
when the Queen and the Princesses were seating them-
selves in the royal box previous to witnessing a play.
The King behaved with great courage and equanimity,
remaining himself in the front of the box, but preventing
his wife and daughters from coming forward till he
was assured there would not be another shot. The
whole family then sat down and stayed out the perform-
ance, thus quieting the audience in the midst of their
own heart-throbbings. On another occasion when the
King and Queen were driving in the City the carriage
was surrounded by a riotous mob and a stone was thrown
in through one of the windows which struck the Queen
on the cheek. She who in the early years of her life
as Queen-Consort had been followed with praise and
admiration wherever she went, who had done nothing
to deserve the withdrawal of the popular affection, but
had been in all respects virtuous, discreet, and beneficent,
saw herself superseded in the people's esteem by their
sorry idol the Princess of Wales, and was not infrequently
assailed with taunts reflecting on her son's treatment
of his wife, and accusations of being at the bottom
of the mischief.
The first book stereotyped in England was a religious
234 Si IRosal SLafcies
treatise translated from the German by the Queen for
the use of her daughters, and suggested by her to Bishop
Porteous as an antidote to the infidel publications which
were being widely circulated throughout the country.
She was greatly interested in the rise of Sunday-schools
under Raikes, and had his worthy ally, Mrs. Freeman,
presented to her.
When Lady Huntingdon ventured to remonstrate
with Archbishop Cornwallis on the indecorum of the
gay and giddy routs over which his wife presided at
his palace, she had the cordial support of the King and
Queen. The King even wrote to the Archbishop
endorsing Lady Huntingdon's opinion.
In 1 80 1 the King's health fluctuated alarmingly.
The proposal of a Bill for Catholic emancipation preyed
on his conscience, as the loss of the American colonies
had filled him with mortification in the earlier years
of his reign. He considered that his consent . to the
Bill would be a violation of his coronation oaths. The
Prince of Wales openly rejoiced in the hope of a
regency ; but the Duke of York, though not un-
willing to profit in his purse by his father's threatened
incapacity, for the first time withdrew to some extent
from his elder brother's influence and showed a little
filial feeling.
The Queen was persuaded that it was the affairs of the
Prince and Princess of Wales which were distressing
the King. She dreaded further alienation between him
and the Prince, while she thoroughly distrusted the
appeals of the Princess, who in the midst of much
company and outrageous folly was constantly crying
out for justice and for the possession of her child.
The physicians, the Willises, were now in attendance
on the King, who was suffering from a bad feverish attack,
during which he was talking continually, now praying
piteously for his recovery, now commanding the Queen
Cbarlotte of /lDecfelen&uttj*Strelit3 235
not to reveal what he said to her private, now eagerly
discussing the retirement from office of his minister
Pitt. The Queen appealed through one of the
Princesses to the Willises to calm the King, and though
she would not see the Princess of Wales, she had
the prattling four-year-old Princess Charlotte to pay
frequent visits to Buckingham House and Windsor in
order to gladden the old man with her pretty baby
ways. He had proposed that the future Queen of
England should reside under his care and the Queen's
at Windsor, and should be educated there ; but he was
thwarted by the wilful opposition for opposition's
sake of the little Princess's father, the Prince of Wales.
The King rallied from this fresh threatening of his
malady, but the Queen was kept in a constant strain
of anxiety lest he should over-exert himself, lest his
loquacity should suddenly pass into incoherent nonsense.
He was unable to appear much in public, and she
returned willingly to the quiet domesticity of the happy
early days of her marriage. But her mind was never
at rest : she would appear at a drawing-room which the
King could not attend, and where the Prince of Wales
was rude to her, pale and careworn, while the Princesses'
eyes were red and swollen as if they had been weeping.
But noblesse oblige \ They had to play their parts as
if nothing were amiss.
It was observed that the Queen never took her eyes
off the King while she went through the form of making
one at an evening card-table. She did not possess the
comfort of having the Doctors Willis to rely upon for
judicious treatment and to consult confidentially. The
King had conceived an unreasonable antipathy to
his former physicians and was now under the care of
Dr. Symonds, who appears to have lacked the neces-
sary knowledge and experience, and was much less
successful in his treatment of his royal patient.
236 Sf TCosal Xafcfes
Even Charlotte's strong nerves began to give way.
The King, naturally kind and indulgent to his family,
had in the waywardness of his disease grown rough and
well-nigh violent. He declined doggedly to resume his
former habits, his country walks, his attendance at
chapel, his promenades on the terrace at Windsor,
where his daughters were always in readiness to obviate
the difficulties caused by his growing blindness. With
regard to the last infirmity, he was more like his old
self, he was patient and resigned, consenting to wear a
flapping hat and a shade when the protection was judged
necessary. Still, seeing the change in his temper, what
wonder that the poor Queen grew reluctant to be alone
with the King, and craved the presence of one or more
of the Princesses in her interviews with him ? Nay, in
sudden panic would lock herself into the white room
(her boudoir), where he was wont to be the most
welcome of visitors.
The blow, however, was broken by the descent being
very gradual. The King, who now dwelt habitually at
Windsor, would be tolerably well for months. He
would breakfast with the Queen and the Princesses, go
to chapel as of old, would even ride out with the
younger Princesses and his equerries. He dined by
himself at two o'clock, but after the dinner of the
Queen and the Princesses at four o'clock he would
join them for a short time before he retired with
his secretary to transact his share of the business of the
nation. In the evening all the family, with the variety
of company from the neighbourhood, met in the great
drawing-room in social intercourse till ten o'clock.
In 1805 the Queen consented to receive Caroline,
Princess of Wales, and young Princess Charlotte at
Windsor. She behaved to her daughter-in-law with
courtesy, though she could not affect to feel the King's
hearty forgiving kindness.
Cbarlotte of flDecfelenbura*StreIft3 237
In the Jubilee year of 1 809 the King was evidently
failing in health. He was unable even to attend the
fete given on the occasion by the Queen at Frogmore.
His horse was led when he rode out. He used a stick
in making his way along the terrace. Handel's " Fatal
Eclipse," of which he was fond, affected both King and
Queen to tears. Once she surprised him repeating
aloud Milton's lines :
"Oh dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day !
Oh first-created beam, and Thou great Word,
Let there be light, and light was over all :
Why am I thus deprived Thy prime decree?"
But the double climax which overthrew entirely the
King's tottering reason was the defeat of the bungled
Walcheren Expedition and the consequent odium in-
curred by the Duke of York (who was the King's
favourite son, as the Prince of Wales had been the
Queen's favourite among her seven stout sons), and the
death from consumption at Weymouth in the springtime
of her life of the darling of his old age, Princess Amelia.
It is said the poor girl, knowing her end was near, had
a ring made containing a lock of her hair, wore it for a
little time, then gave it to her father, saying, "Take
this and remember me." The King broke down, left
the room, and was unable to see her again during the
few days she survived.
Poor Queen ! her heart also must have been lacerated
as she realised in 1810 that her darkest forebodings
were accomplished, and that the King, upwards of three
score and ten, was hopelessly, incurably insane !
The Conditional Regency, proposed twenty years
before, was appointed with the Prince of Wales as
Regent, while the Queen was entrusted with the person
of the King an office which left her still mistress of
238 Sf iRosal XaMes
the palaces. The increased expense to her personally
was provided for by an addition of ten thousand pounds
to her annual income.
The Queen behaved with the dignity, patience, and
good sense which might have been expected from her.
In time she grew reverently resigned to the terrible
calamity which had befallen her and the husband to
whom she had been from her girlhood warmly and
loyally attached. She ceased to entertain any delusive
dream of his recovery. She did not wish the King to
be buoyed up by false expectations, the disappointment
of which only distressed and irritated him. Sometimes
in her visits to him her feelings were sorely tried, as
when she found him singing a hymn to his own accom-
paniment on the organ and afterwards kneeling down
and praying for his family, the nation, and that God
would restore to him the reason which he felt he had lost.
Touched to the quick as she was, his simple, unfaltering
faith and goodness must have been under Heaven her
best consolation. That was a lucid interval differing
from the frenzy which made him call for death and
fancy himself dead, when he " asked for a suit of black
that he might go into mourning for the old King."
Though the long disastrous wars with France had been
brought to a close, their consequences, as it seemed, in
ruined trade, much suffering and disaffection among the
lower classes, were still strongly felt. The visit of the
allied sovereigns in 1814 inaugurated a series of
festivities in which Charlotte had to play her part
whether her heart were heavy or light. She was now
upwards of seventy, and is described as a little spare
woman still remarkable for her gracious, graceful
manners. Her health was giving way under an insidious
disease. She was in a worse plight as the wife of a lunatic
husband than as a widow. She was tortured by the
ingratitude and misconduct of more than one of her
Cbarlotte of /lDecftlenburg*Sttelit3 239
children, by the disorder in their households and the evil
example of their lives over which she had no control.
Her early popularity with all classes was gone as far as
the impulsive, unreasoning mob was concerned. She had
been satirised and caricatured in higher circles. She was
accused of parsimony and avarice, of using her influence
with the King to stifle liberal measures, and of making
a party with her eldest son the Prince Regent against
his injured wife, Caroline of Brunswick. Caroline's
name, in spite of her grievous offences against good
sense and good taste, was fast becoming the rallying cry
not only of the extreme Whigs and the Radicals, but
of the great body of Nonconformists. As the Queen
was carried in her chair from Buckingham House to
St. James's to hold one of her last drawing-rooms she was
surrounded and stopped for a moment by the scum of
the streets. She was hissed and hooted at and demanded
what she had done with the Princess Charlotte ? For
the populace's last craze was that the Queen was keeping
the heiress to the throne out of sight, and had shut her
up in durance vile. For aught the girl's champions
knew, the cruel, relentless old woman might beat and
starve her grand-daughter to death.
As an answer to the taunts and insults addressed to
her the Queen drew down the glass in front of her
chair and faced and addressed her assailants. " I am
above seventy years of age," she said. " I have been
more than half a century Queen of England, and I
never was hissed by a mob before."
The boldest of her foes recoiled before the undaunted
rebuke given by the queenly old woman. They fell
back and let the chair pass. The Prince Regent, hearing
of the disturbance, sent some of his aides-de-camp to
escort his mother back to Buckingham House. She
dismissed them. They remonstrated, urging that they
had the Regent's order to accompany her home and
240 Ste IRosal Xafcies
that they were bound to obey him. " You have left
Carl ton House by his Royal Highness's orders," replied
the Queen ; " return there by mine, or I will leave my
chair and go home on foot." She had her way, and
her courage converted the base attack into something
like respectful homage.
Various events, some vexatious, some cheerful, some
deeply sad, crowded themselves into the last years or
Charlotte's life. In 1815 there was the alarm of
Napoleon's escape from Elba and the triumph of the
final victory at Waterloo. In the same year the Queen
was scandalised by the marriage made in defiance of all
propriety and of her prohibition by her fifth son, Ernest,
Duke of Cumberland. Unsatisfactory in all his re-
lations and actions, his marriage was not an excep-
tion to the general tenor of his life. His bride was a
Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a near relative of the
Queen's in fact, her niece, as Caroline of Brunswick
was the King's niece ; but nieces were not destined to be
matrimonial successes in the royal family of England.
The original disability of Caroline of Brunswick to
occupy worthily the position she was destined to fill was
nothing compared to that of Frederica of Mecklenburg-
Strelitz. But closely related as the Queen was to her,
Charlotte seems, in those days of rare communication
and scanty intelligence, to have been unacquainted with
the worst features of the case. She must have known
that Frederica's first marriage with Prince Frederick
of Prussia had been dissolved (a circumstance which on
account of the presence in the country of a Prussian
Princess, the highly respected Duchess of York, was
in itself a difficulty), while Frederica's second husband,
the Prince of Salms-Braunfels, had left her a widow.
The Queen, however, did not consider the objection as
insurmountable. When Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge,
the Queen's youngest son, was disposed to make pro-
Cbarlotte of flfoecfelenlwrg*5trelft3 241
posals for his cousin's'hand, the Queen interposed no in-
terdict. As it happened, the lady preferred Cambridge's
morose elder brother either from a peculiarity of taste
or because he stood nearer the English throne. Still,
Queen Charlotte regarded the second projected match
complacently. There is a letter of hers extant (and
quoted by Dr. Watkins), which was written to her
brother the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, discussing
the coming marriage pleasantly and giving some good
advice to the bride. 1 All at once it came to the Queen's
knowledge that the marriage of her niece to Prince
Frederick of Prussia had been no mere formal contract
broken off for political reasons, it had been a marriage
in which the wife's misconduct had caused her to be
divorced by her husband. The particulars of the affair
had been known to King George while he was sane,
and he had kept them back from the Queen out of
consideration for her family feelings ; but he had ex-
pressed in the strongest terms his condemnation of the
erring Princess. She would have been the last person
whom he would have consented to admit into his family.
The Queen immediately withdrew her consent and
urged upon the Prince Regent to add his veto to the
unseemly connection ; nevertheless the marriage was
solemnised in Mecklenburg with unusual splendour
for the little duchy, in spite of the Queen's opposition.
Presently the couple arrived in London, accompanied
by the Queen's brother, to make peace if possible with
the Queen. But she was inflexible ; she would never
consent to accord her approval to a person of whom the
King had entirely disapproved, and she would not agree
to a step which he would have been the first to prohibit.
She owed a duty to herself, to her good daughters, to her
1 This letter contains also an intimation of the homely gifts of six
pounds of tea and two cheeses which the Queen was sending to the
Duke her brother.
16
242 Sfj IRosal Xa&ies
husband's subjects. She had striven for more than half a
century to preserve a pure Court, she declined to have it
sullied by the admission within its precincts of a daughter-
in-law whose reputation was worse than spotted. 1 The
rebellious couple were re-married, according to custom,
at Carlton House in the presence of the Regent ; but
neither the Queen nor the Princesses countenanced the
ceremony, nor did the Queen ever see or acknowledge
her niece and daughter-in-law. The Duchess of Cum-
berland was a pariah in the royal family and in the
society from which she was virtually excluded. The
result introduced further strife and division into an
already divided house. The Queen's grey hairs were
being brought down in sorrow to the grave.
On May 2nd, 1816, Princess Charlotte of Wales
was married to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg.
"The old Queen played the part of mother to the
bride on the occasion " ; for Caroline, Princess of Wales,
had been persuaded to go abroad, where she was spend-
ing her exile and illustrating her quasi-disgrace by the
medley of unsuitable company, rowdy gaiety, and well-
nigh crazy impropriety which she had begun to practise
during her stay at Blackheath.
Queen Charlotte drove with the bride in semi-state
on an afternoon of early summer across Hyde Park to
the Prince Regent's residence, Carlton House, where
the marriage was solemnised. This was a wedding
which the Queen and everybody else approved. At
the splendid drawing-room held afterwards in honour
of the occasion the Queen's spirits were so unusually
high that critics set them down as " affected." In
like manner the pale bride's smile was declared to be
" forced," and she was pictured as thinking indignantly
1 There was another reason. Charlotte knew that it was believed
she had been hard, from the first, on the King's niece, Caroline of
Brunswick. She would not have it said in addition that she was more
lenient to her own niece Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
Cbarlotte of flDecfclenbur0*Streltt3 243
and sorrowfully of her banished mother, who had acted,
as her daughter was well aware, more like an enfant
terrible than a responsible human being. Be that as it
may, the marriage was one of mutual affection and un-
clouded happiness during its brief duration. The
Queen-grandmother might well be glad at the solution
of a troublesome problem by the removal of the young
Princess from the harsh thraldom in which her father
had held her without the further exposure of domestic
misery.
Within three months another marriage in which
the Queen may be supposed to have taken a deeper
interest was quietly accomplished at Buckingham House
without form or parade. It was the welcome end of
a pathetically protracted love story. More than twenty
years before there had been certain innocent little love
passages between pretty Princess Mary and her cousin,
William, Duke of Gloucester, son of her father's
brother and the Countess of Waldegrave, whom he
had raised to the rank of a royal Duchess. The exi-
gencies of the state soon put a barrier between Princess
Mary and her lover. If little Princess Charlotte was
to grow up heir to the throne, where, in the midst
of European wars and rumours of war, was there to
be found a fit husband for her ? Surely she would
be safer and the nation would be best pleased if she
married the one English Prince who was not within
the forbidden degrees of kindred. Even if a greater
alliance could be found for her, it would be well
while she remained unwedded that Gloucester should
continue a bachelor as a respectable pis alter in case
nothing better turned up. The years rolled on till
Princess Mary's young bloom faded and her girlish
spirits grew meek and subdued, while Duke William
waxed stout and heavy in body and mind, till at last,
after a Prince of Orange had been rejected, Prince
244 Sf IRo^al Xafcies
Leopold was found fit for the vacant post and proved
signally acceptable to the bride and the nation ; so on
a July evening there was a quiet wedding at the
Queen's House, and Princess Mary, a bride of forty
instead of twenty, was promoted to the goal of her
early aspirations as Duchess of Gloucester. What
though the Duke was the " silly Billy " of the graceless
clubs, and was more distinguished by stupidity than by
brilliance, he was " a proper man " to her, her first love
glorious in her faithful eyes. One is glad to know that
here was an instance in which royal cousins married and
did not disagree, and that the Duke of Gloucester an
honourable contrast to other Princes whom Princess
Mary had known was a true and affectionate husband
to his Duchess throughout their married life.
In 1817, when the Queen was trying the Bath
mineral waters as a check to her increasing illness,
the news reached her of the death in childbed at
Claremont of Princess Charlotte "dead mother and
dead child" The hopes of the nation were quenched
in addition to the pang of separation between husband
and wife after one short year. The Queen was deeply
grieved and shocked and the chances of any improve-
ment in her health were seriously impaired by the
melancholy tidings. Yet the prejudices against her
had grown so envenomed and furious that a wild whisper
actually went abroad that she had compassed the death of
her grand-daughter out of hatred to Princess Charlotte's
mother, and that an accoucheur and a nurse present at
Claremont were the Queen's tools in perpetrating the
crime by causing the death of the child and by ad-
ministering poison to the Princess during the night
following the birth of her son. It was further alleged
that in remorse for their wickedness the doctor and
nurse had afterwards committed suicide. Here the single
grain of truth is to be found. The doctor, an eminent
Cbarlotte of flDecfclenbur0*Strelit3 245
man of sensitive temperament, keenly pained and dis-
appointed by the disaster which had not only deprived
him of the honour of successfully performing his functions
in the highest quarter, but had also cost two precious
lives and plunged the country into mourning, himself
succumbed to the blow, his reason was completely
unhinged, and he took his life.
In dismay at what was the failure of an heir to the
crown in Princess Charlotte's generation Parliament
issued a recommendation to the Dukes of Clarence,
Kent, and Cambridge 1 to marry, while proportionate
additions to their incomes were voted to provide for
the increased expenses of their households. Before any
of these marriages were celebrated another of Queen
Charlotte's daughter's was married in 1818. Princess
Elizabeth, a distinguished looking in spite of her great
size and a really highly endowed woman, at the mature
age of forty-eight, married the Landgrave of Hesse-
Homburg. In the society gossip of the day many
absurd stories were told of the German bridegroom's
uncouthness how unaccustomed he was to the use of
a bath, and that he walked stockingless in his long
cavalry boots. Neither did the elderly bride escape
reproaches for her marriage while the Queen was so ill
that there was hardly a hope of her recovery. To
account for the act on Princess Elizabeth's part it was
said that there were differences of opinion and contests
of will between her and the Queen. The real explana-
tion seems to lie in the dread which not only the Queen
but the Princesses entertained of their being left un-
married, scantily provided for in accordance with their
rank, and in a measure dependent on the good offices
1 The Duke of Sussex, to his credit, declined to marry '(and so
forfeited the increase of income voted to his brothers) while Lady
DAmeland was alive. She had separated from him when their
marriage was declared illegal, and he had consented to the separation,
but he refused to treat the marriage as if it had never been.
246 Si TRosal XaMes
of their brother the Regent. Princess Elizabeth, one of
the eldest and the most high-spirited of the Princesses,
doubtless felt the position most acutely and was most
desirous of escaping from it. If any misunderstanding
and alienation had arisen between the mother and
daughter, it is known that it passed away with the
marriage and that the two so long and loyally united
parted good friends. Dr. Watkins mentions that the
couple delayed setting out for Germany and lingered
for a little time at Brighton to be at hand if any imme-
diate change took place in the Queen's condition. But
Charlotte, who, as a girl, left Mecklenburg-Strelitz
before her own mother's grave was green because of the
duties and obligations which awaited her in England,
was the last person to permit a daughter to disregard
similar obligations, or to accept from her and her
husband a sacrifice which might cause them serious in-
convenience and loss.
One more visit the old Queen paid to the City, when
she made a request to the Lord Mayor that she might
be received without ceremony. Her wish was complied
with. Her carriage was surrounded, as her chair had
been on a previous occasion, by a yelling mob. She
was scoffed at and menaced. The old question con-
taining a new and more horrible meaning was shouted
What had she done with Princess Charlotte ? Men
thrust their heads into the carriage and endeavoured to
disarm her footmen. On her return to Buckingham
House, while dining in company with the Duke of
York, she was seized with the first of the spasms
an ominous symptom in her exquisitely painful disease,
which was of a bilious nature.
Perhaps the last signal gratification Queen Charlotte
received was derived from the suitable and promising
marriages of her three sons the . Dukes of Clarence,
Kent, and Cambridge and their arrival in England with
dbarlotte of /l&ecfelenburg*treUt3 2 47
their respective brides, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen,
Victoria of Saxe-Coburg and Leiningen, and Augusta
of Hesse-Cassel. The couples had been married in
Germany and were re-married in England. The first
of the brothers to marry and come back with his wife
was the youngest, Adolphus of Cambridge, forty-five
years of age. His bride, Augusta of Hesse-Cassel, was
more than twenty years his junior. They arrived in
England at the close of May, 1 8 1 8, and were re-married
at Buckingham House in the presence of the Queen
and her family on June ist. Of the two remaining
couples, the Duke of Clarence, a bridegroom of fifty-
three, 1 did not go to Germany to fetch his wife. She
came, a Princess of twenty-six years of age, accom-
panied by her mother, to London to meet her fate.
The Duke of Kent, fifty-one, brought home his bride,
whom he had married according to the Lutheran form
at Coburg. She was the young widow of the Prince
of Leiningen and the sister of Prince Leopold of Saxe-
Coburg, the widowed husband of Princess Charlotte.
The Princess of Leiningen was in her thirty-third
year and was the mother of a son and daughter, the
children of her first husband.
The Dukes of Clarence and Kent, with the two
Princesses escorted by the Prince Regent, for once in
his life considerate and gracious, came out on a July
afternoon to the old palace of Kew, where the Queen
had gone to stay, in order that the joint ceremonies of
marriage and re-marriage might be performed in her
presence if she were fit for the fatigue. She was not fit,
but she received the couples in her sick-room, and her
old keen, shrewd eyes must have been pleased to
recognise for themselves, as they had already seen in
the case of the third bride, the young Duchess of
Cambridge, that the somewhat plain and homely
1 All the Queen's sons were big, stout men.
248 Sfe IRosal Xafcfes
Duchess of Clarence and the pretty, accomplished
Duchess of Kent were alike in this, that they were
modest and reasonable young women who would try
their best to make good wives to the Princes.
Queen Charlotte, well as she had loved simple tea-
parties, could not preside over this one on the palace
lawn, which followed the great ceremony of the evening.
But she could hear where she lay the volley of cheers,
led by the Prince Regent, which followed the last of the
two couples on their way back to town.
The Queen's health declined rapidly, dropsy and
difficulty of breathing supervening on her other ailments.
She had a passionate longing to be taken to Windsor to
spend her last days under the same roof with the
King ; but the step had been delayed too long. In vain
different easy carriages were constructed and small essays
made at driving her out ; the journey on which she had
set her heart was of necessity abandoned. When the
physicians regarded her case as hopeless and fast drawing
to an end, a communication was made to her on the
authority of the Prince Regent " that if her Majesty
had any affairs to settle it would be advisable to do so
while she had health and spirits to bear the fatigue."
It is said that till the Queen got the grave hint she had
still a faint faith in her ultimate recovery ; but from
that moment she turned her attention to setting her
house in order and preparing for the great change
which was near at hand. The most of her family her
four younger sons with their wives, the Duke of Sussex,
and two of her daughters were abroad. Those sons
and daughters in this country gathered round her ;
Princess Augusta and the Duchess of Gloucester 1
watched and waited upon their mother devotedly, day
1 The youngest surviving daughter, Princess Sophia, whether from
physical weakness or mental depression, appears toTfave latterly lived
her life apart. She is not even buried at Windsor, she lies at Kensal
Green near her brother the Duke of Sussex.
Cbarlotte of dDecfclenbur^Strelits 249
and night. They had been accustomed to read to her
and share her devotions for many a year. The gradual
decay of the Queen's bodily powers, her suffering and
approaching death, had not only touched the Duke of
York, they had awakened some sparks of tenderness in
the Prince Regent. Towards the close of his mother's
life he behaved to her with deference and affection.
He was a constant attendant on her death-bed. At the
very last, when she roused herself from the unconscious-
ness stealing over her, it is said that with a faint smile
she made a motion with her hand towards him. He
had been her firstborn, her " might and the beginning
of her strength." He had wandered far from the path
she had destined for him, the path in which she herself
had walked faithfully from youth to age ; he had failed
her and tried her desperately, but in a mother's heart
full forgiveness and love inexhaustible abide. It was
on November i6th, 1818. She was in her seventy-fifth
year and had been for fifty-seven years Queen- Consort
of England. Mrs. Inchbald, then residing at Ken-
sington, records how she had watched the royal
carriages passing all day between St. James's, Carlton
House, and Kew, where the old Queen lay dying. Her
King, in confinement at Windsor, was ignorant of his loss.
The Queen's funeral took place at Windsor on
December 2nd. It was conducted without any great
display, but with the military pomp thought requisite
for a royal funeral. By her will she only left four
thousand pounds in money ; a sufficient answer to those
who had accused her savagely of greed and rapacity,
of robbing the country to fill her private purse.
A hundred and thirty-six thousand pounds' worth
of personal property, including Frogmore, its plate,
furniture, etc., was bequeathed to Princess Augusta, and
the estate in New Windsor, with the house known as
New Lodge, was left to Princess Sophia. The Queen
250 Si
owed nine thousand pounds, incurred by her allowing
her charities to exceed the ready money at her disposal.
The debt was to be paid out of her personal estate.
The main provision for her daughters was her jewels. 1
These were to be sold, with the proceeds divided equally
between four of the Princesses. The Princess excluded
was not Elizabeth, Landgravine of Hesse-Homburg,
but Charlotte, Princess Royal, Queen-Dowager of
Wiirtemberg, and the reason given for the exclusion
was that Queen Charlotte considered her eldest daughter
already well provided for. To her the Queen left as
a mark of her affection her set of fine garnets, which
could be worn with a widow's mourning.
Unpropitious as the Wiirtemberg alliance had
appeared at first sight, the marriage had turned out a
happy one. When death dissolved it, the widow,
known in her adopted country as the " Good Queen-
Dowager," declined to lay aside her widow's mourning
while life lasted.
Queen Charlotte's stores of priceless lace descended
eventually to the Duchess of Gloucester, and from her,
according to report, they passed to her god-daughter,
Princess Mary of Cambridge, Duchess of Teck. The
Queen's wardrobe was to be given to her chief dresser, 2
Madame Beckendorff.
There was no mention of the Queen's sons in her
will. They had their incomes settled upon them by
Government, together with their official incomes, and it
was not in her power to do anything more for them.
1 There were two exceptions in the disposal of her jewels. Those
which the King had presented to her, to the value of ,50,000, upon her
marriage, were to go back to him if he recovered his reason. If not,
they were to become part of the Crown jewels ol Hanover. The
jewels which Queen Charlotte brought with her from Mecklen-
burg-Strelitz were to be returned to the head of the reigning family
there.
2 The Queen's old friend, Mrs. Schwellenberg, who was in her service
for fifty years, had died suddenly while playing at cards, iu March, 1797.
Cbarlotte of /l&ecfelenbur^Strelits 251
The personal custody of the old King was transferred,
on Queen Charlotte's death, to the Duke of York, on
whom an additional ten thousand a year was settled
not that he might reside for the better part of the year
at Windsor and bear the consequently increased ex-
penditure, but that he might inquire periodically after
the invalid's condition. At the same time the state
which the Queen had seen maintained round this wreck
of " the Royal George " was put an end to by the
orders of the Prince Regent. The King's former
household was to a large extent dismissed as a need-
less cost to the country. George III. survived his Queen
two years ; the Duke of Kent died a week before his
father ; the Duchess of York died eight months after
the King, and the ill-fated Caroline of Brunswick ended
her unhappy career in the following year.
Queen Charlotte was a woman, reverent, upright, and
dutiful to the core. She had never blenched from her
first honest cenception of a sovereign's obligations.
Narrow in her notions she might be, and rigid in her
standards, but England owes her to this day a great
debt for her unshaken godliness and unfaltering virtue
at a godless and dissolute period of the nation's history.
The Court of Caroline, wife of George II. (in spite
of her many good qualities), which came before, and
that of the regency which followed after Charlotte's
Court, ought to serve as warnings of what English Courts
could be. They should help us to judge what the
influence of George III. and Queen Charlotte was, and
how it "made for righteousness."
CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK, WIFE OF
GEORGE IV.
253
AUTHORITIES :
Lord Malmesbury, Lady Charlotte Bury, The Jerningham Letters,
Dr. Doran, Thackeray, etc.
CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK, WIFE OF GEORGE IV. (ABOUT THE TIME
OF HER TRIAL).
CHAPTER I.
A ROYAL BRIDE.
CAROLINE OF BRUNSWICK, wife of George IV., was
born at Brunswick in May, 1768. She was the second
daughter of the reigning Duke of Brunswick and
Princess Augusta, or, as her father would have had her
called, f< the Lady Augusta," whose birth occurred under
such peculiar circumstances in the reign of George II.
and his Queen Caroline. We hear more of Augusta
as the Princess Augusta, elder sister of George III., who
sought to patronise young Queen Charlotte. Princess
Augusta's voluble heedless tongue and meddling pro-
pensity got her into mischief from her girlhood and
were in evidence throughout her long life. She had
not learnt wisdom with years, and her innate coarseness
of grain had increased with her surroundings, until an
elderly English gentleman, accustomed to the free-and-
easy speech of his generation, could have blushed at the
language which the Duchess of Brunswick used before
her grown-up daughter. Duchess Augusta never had
possessed the romantic attributes of Caroline Matilda
of Denmark in the midst of her imprudence and
recklessness. Neither had it been Augusta's fate to
meet the terrible retribution which befell her unfor-
tunate younger sister. The Duchess had her trials,
numerous and sore enough to have crushed a less
c< easy-going," thick-skinned woman, but they were of
a more prosaic nature than those which are linked with
the name of Caroline Matilda of Denmark.
255
25 6 Sfi TRosal Xafcfes
The Duchess of Brunswick was good-natured and
affectionate on the surface, but was destitute of truthful-
ness, high principle, and the very elements of common
sense and right judgment. Her daughter Caroline
resembled her mother in many respects, with a quicker
wit, a still more unscrupulous tongue, a double allow-
ance of self-will, and an utterly uncontrolled stock of
sensibility and sentimentality perilous endowments for
a future Queen. She was one of a family of six : four
sons, brave like their bluff, gruff father, and an elder
daughter Charlotte, four years the senior of Caroline,
whose disastrous fate coming to a climax after Caroline
was old enough to understand its significance was with-
out power to warn and subdue her.
The Court of Brunswick with such a woman as
Augusta at its head was full of coarseness and licence,
and had a reputation for scandal and impropriety be-
yond that of any other German Court of the day. In
this Court Princess Caroline, irresponsible by nature,
grew up. She had ruled her mother from her child-
hood. She stood in fear of her father, while she
passionately admired and loved him. She was now
applauded for her wit, now blamed for her folly, now
carelessly indulged and now rudely checked by her
father, who did not afford her the example of a
virtuous life. She received a scanty education, which
managed to include proficiency on the harpsichord
while it left out all real culture and refinement. Even
in her girlhood poor spoilt, undisciplined Caroline was
guilty of spurts of froward defiance of law and authority
for which she was punished in a primitive fashion, by
confinement to her rooms or by refusal to let her
appear in the ducal circle, without the slightest effect on
her in the shape of amendment.
George III. had set his heart on his eldest son's
marrying as the sole means left for steadying him.
Caroline of ffirunswicfe 257
The King had another inducement: the marriage of the
heir to the throne was the only chance of the country's
coming forward finally to pay his enormous debts.
Caroline was the King's niece, the daughter of the
sister of whom, according to herself, George had been
fond in the old days, whose faults he might not have
had the shrewdness to detect. Caroline's father was a
reasonably honest man as well as a gallant soldier,
though he was far from a model in other respects.
According to one report the Duke of York, George's
favourite son, had visited Brunswick and reported
favourably of the personal and mental attractions of the
Princess.
Queen Charlotte, like most sensible women, knew
better than to advocate the match for her firstborn,
who, in spite of his heartless disrespect towards her
when he was temporarily in possession of power, kept
a place in a mother's long-suffering heart. She was
aware of her son's distaste to the marriage; she re-
membered " the Lady Augusta " who was never tired
of retailing mischievous or spiteful gossip where her
loyal forbearing sister-in-law was concerned. It seems
the Queen must have heard of the misbehaviour and
miserable end of her namesake Charlotte of Brunswick,
together with hints that Princess Caroline was likely to
be as unmanageable and unsatisfactory. To crown her
objections, Queen Charlotte had other views for her
prodigal son. She had destined a beautiful and, as she
believed, a well-brought-up Princess of her own house
of Mecklenburg-Strelitz to be offered up for the
reformation of the Prince of Wales. If this Princess
was the " Frederica " who was admired by her cousin
Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, and married by his elder
brother Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, it is possible that
Charlotte might have witnessed the wreck of her
scheme ; but she could not foresee its destruction.
258 Sij IRosal XaMes
The King's wish and the plausible expediency of
the union carried the day. The Earl of Malmesbury
was despatched to Brunswick with the necessary creden-
tials and to make formal proposals on behalf of the
King and the Prince of Wales for the hand of Princess
Caroline.
The envoy was received with all the flutter of excite-
ment and of gratified vanity and ambition which might
have been expected.
The Duchess, while senselessly abusing Queen
Charlotte and England in the hearing of her daughter,
was openly delighted with the splendour of the match.
The Duke had more self-restraint, more foresight, and
a greater sense of honour. These caused him to drop
various hints of the unfitness of Caroline for the position
offered to her and to enjoin on Lord Malmesbury the
thankless task far too long delayed of warning her
of the pitfalls in her path, and of strongly advising
her to curb her inclinations and to bring under control
her free-and-easy manners, which were far removed
from the decorum of a Court.
The bride, to whom the bridegroom had not written
a word of greeting, was more offended than hurt by
the omission, and was not much daunted in her elation
at the brilliance of her prospects. Caroline was twenty-
six years of age and had refused various suitors, among
them a Mecklenburg Prince, who had received the
support of the Duke and Duchess of Brunswick, a
Prince of Orange, etc., etc. She was nice-looking at that
stage of her life, with delicate features, good complexion,
and teeth only beginning to decay. Her figure was not
graceful ; she was short with a tendency to stoutness,
her head was too large for the lack of length in her
neck, while of her shoulders Lord Malmesbury, in
describing her, quotes the expressive French phrase,
" des epaules impertinent es"
Caroline of Brunswick 259
The bridegroom, who had been reckoned handsome
as an Apollo in his youth, was still regarded, even after
more than a decade of fierce dissipation had left sure
traces upon him, " as a man of fine presence," whose
air and deportment were those of " the first gentleman
in Europe." He began, however, to display an inclina-
tion to the corpulence which prevailed in his family and
was a great mortification to his vanity. He was in his
thirty-fifth year, nearly seven years Caroline's senior,
and, what was infinitely more fatal to any chance of
happiness for the couple, he had been married privately
ten years before to Mrs. Fitzherbert. 1 He was also
a mere tool in the hands of a wicked woman, Lady
Jersey, whom he was about to appoint to one of the
principal posts in the unfortunate Princess's household.
Lord Malmesbury fulfilled his mission with dignity,
tact, and kindness. He thought well on the whole of
Princess Caroline. He certainly knew her to be too
good for the Prince to whom she was to be given.
Prompted by his desire to serve her, and by his duty to
his King and country, Lord Malmesbury acted on the
Duke of Brunswick's suggestion. He administered to
the Princess much excellent advice on behaving with
discretion, being agreeable to her husband and respect-
ful to the King and Queen, on keeping her own place,
avoiding all undue familiarity with the members of her
suite, asking no questions, having no confidant, etc., etc.
To all the wise exhortations Caroline listened with
wonderful docility for her.
Just before the marriage by proxy which took place
on December 8th, 1794, the miniature of the bride-
groom arrived. What impression it produced on the
1 Mrs. Fitzherbert lived to be upwards of eighty years of age. Apart
from her so-called marriage with the Prince of Wales, she had an
unblemished reputation. A considerable annuity was granted to her,
she was even allowed to use the royal liveries. She was treated
with much forbearance and was generally liked.
2 6o Sij IRosal OLafctes
impulsive bride we are not told. A less gracious act
than sending the miniature was his forbidding a
German lady to accompany Caroline as a reader
nominally, though according to the Duke of Brunswick
the office was not likely to be a sinecure. The reason
the Duke gave for the cancelled appointment was that
his daughter wrote badly and spelt badly.
The marriage contract was signed and sealed, the
heavy burdensome festivities were nearly over, the day
before the bride's departure had arrived, when an ill-
omened incident occurred. The Duchess received a
packet of letters. One was from her brother King
George, strongly recommending that the Princess of
Wales on coming to England should lead a quiet, re-
tired life. Another was a malicious anonymous letter
warning Caroline's family of the character of the bride-
groom, and of the troubles which were in store for
his wife.
It was consistent with the Duchess's character that
she should at once communicate the contents of the
letters to her daughter. It was equally consistent with
Caroline's disposition that the letters excited in her
more of roused inquisitiveness and cool speculation
than of either alarm or indignation.
The travellers including the Duchess, who accom-
panied her daughter part of the way started on a
December afternoon, the cannon on the ramparts of the
city sending after them a parting salute. The journey
was then an arduous undertaking in the depth of a severe
winter, with war raging between England and France.
Lord Malmesbury had time to notice one respect in
which the characters of mother and daughter differed
materially. The Duchess was careful to penuriousness
where money was concerned, the Princess was liberal in
a lavish, prodigal way ; both were alike in their want
of self-restraint, in laughing with hardly an attempt at
Caroline of Brunswick 261
concealment at anything which struck them as odd in
the appearance and manners of the ladies and gentlemen
presented to them at the different halting stations.
The party took a well-earned rest at Hanover, which
they reached nearly a month after starting on their
journey from Brunswick, and where they remained three
weeks.
Of Hanover as of England Caroline would be the
future Queen. While the Hanoverians entertained her
with all honour, she was bound to make the best impres-
sion she could upon them, were it only in preparation
for the more severe ordeal of her presentation to the
English people. She seems to have acted with more
propriety than could have been hoped for at this early
stage of her introduction to Court ceremonial. Indeed,
her volatile mind had been latterly full of the idea of
reforming her husband (the man she had never seen),
of making up to him and to the nation for his alienation
from the King and Queen. She would stand between the
divided factions, linking them together, herself a model
of all that a Princess and a wife should be. She would
earn the gratitude of the country by her good offices.
Lord Malmesbury, while gravely applauding her
excellent intentions, must have had a depressing con-
sciousness of the egregious vanity and presumption of
the notion on the part of the young woman whom he
had still to instruct in the A B C of self-respect and
good feeling ; for she would rattle on in conversation,
in any company she happened to be in, on the most
foolish incidents of her past life, and on the grandeur
of her future, whose difficulties she was prepared to defy
and surmount in the most marvellous manner ; and she
would laugh without scruple at the absurdities of her
silly mother.
Lord Malmesbury had a still more delicate task to
accomplish. He was scandalised at the coarseness of
262 Sij iRosal Xafctes
the Princess's under-clothing and the slovenliness of
her toilettes. He had to impress on a German lady at
the Hanoverian Court that something very different
was called for. He had even himself to hint broadly
to her Royal Highness that the quick dressing on which
she prided herself was worse than undesirable, when it
left such results o. dirt and disorder as were patent to
his enlightened eyes.
Poor benighted Caroline ! to have what she had re-
garded as a cardinal virtue, the mark of a superior
mind, thus classed as an offence, and to be humiliated
by the information of how she, who had done what she
liked and had received her meed of admiration from a
Court circle no more dainty than herself, would be
viewed by her fastidious, abandoned husband!
At Hanover the Princess parted from her mother,
with profuse tears on the Duchess's part and some
show of becoming regard on the daughter's. On
March 26th, almost three months from the date of
their leaving Brunswick, Lord Malmesbury embarked
with his troublesome charge on board the fifty-gun
frigate Jupiter, which at once discharged a broadside to
welcome the Princess of Wales. A midshipman named
Doyle was the proud lad who was permitted to hand
her a rope to help her in ascending from the cutter
to the ship. The Princess won golden opinions among
the sailors for her affability and cheerfulness, and for
her fearlessness of any such casualty as being captured
by the French.
On April jrd the Jupiter anchored at the Nore, and
on the following day Easter Sunday surely a day
of good omen, the Princess proceeded in a barge to
Greenwich, her progress watched by shouting thousands.
But at Greenwich her reception was very much like
that accorded to her grandmother, Augusta of Saxe-
Coburg, when she came to England to marry Fritz,
Caroline ot Brunswfcfc 263
Prince of Wales. There was nobody to greet the
stranger, and though she arrived at noon she had to
wait an hour for the royal carriages. When they did
come they brought no princely bridegroom. George
Augustus Frederick did not choose to come in person
to welcome his cousin and bride, but he sent in his
place the ladies of her suite ; conspicuous among them
the detestable Countess of Jersey (Childe the banker's
great heiress). She immediately began to take insolent
liberties with the foreigner, laughing at her dress and
attempting to put herself on an equality with her by
seeking to drive in the same coach, even to sit by the
Princess's side, on her entrance into the capital. It
was all the worthy Malmesbury could do to rebuff the
brazen-faced usurper. How fruitless his efforts had
been may be guessed from the fact that short as was
the time the Princess and Lady Jersey were left
together, yet Caroline, though forewarned, and though
acquainted with the character of her lady-in-waiting, 1
was so infatuated as to attempt to pit her shallow wits
against the craft of the other. The consequence was
that the Princess fell immediately into Lady Jersey's
snare by taking refuge in mad bravado, in the course
of which she gave the eager listener the gratuitous
assurance that her heart was not hers to give, it was
already bestowed on an enamoured and inconsolable
German.
A tradition lingers of Lady Jersey in connection
with Caroline's English, which she spoke badly and
wrote and spelt execrably. It is said that Lady Jersey
suggested to the Princess words Caroline did not under-
stand, words which used in conversation before the
Prince would inevitably repel and disgust him.
1 Caroline eventually appealed to the King on the insult inflicted
upon her by having Lady Jersey in the suite, and the lady was made
to resign her office.
264 Ste TRopal Xafcies
The Princess was taken first to the Duke of Cumber-
land's rooms in Cleveland Row, St. James's. There at
last the Prince joined her. The account of the pitiable
interview is preserved in Lord Malmesbury's diary.
He introduced Princess Caroline. She attempted to
kneel as she had been told. The Prince raised her, went
through the form of embracing her, said " barely one
word, turned round, retired to a distant part of the
room, and called, c Harris, I am not well ; pray get me
a glass of brandy.' ' Sir, had you not better have a
glass of water ? ' was the amendment of the disinterested
envoy. Upon which he, much out of humour, said
with an oath, ' No, I will go directly to the Queen,'
and away he went."
And what of the Princess? The poor girl was
amazed and well-nigh scared. The first sight of the man
whom she had meant to reform was not encouraging.
" Is the Prince always like that ? " she asked her friend
in French. " I find him stout and not by any means so
handsome as in his portrait."
If she had known it and he had known it, the word
" stout " would have cut into the Prince's sensibility
far more than many a harsher word. He lived in
horror of his increasing stoutness. Leigh Hunt's
" fat Adonis of fifty," Beau Brummel's " fat friend,"
maliciously applied to the Prince in years to come,
stung the over-grown, used-up exquisite in the most
sensitive quarter.
The Sunday drawing-room was over, but the Prin-
cess was present at the dinner afterwards. It is not
wonderful, perhaps, that her father's strict injunctions
and all Malmesbury's elaborate instructions were cast
to the winds. Caroline thought fit to appear to the
new relations who had received her coolly in her very
worst colours. She was noisy, flippant, and under-
bred, making allusions which no modest woman ought
Caroline of 3Brunswtcfc 265
to have made, and using the coarse expressions of
which Lord Malmesbury had tried hard to break her.
If Europe had been sought from end to end no
Princess, innocent of absolute wrong-doing, could have
been found more repugnant to Queen Charlotte in her
dignity, good sense, and in that scrupulous regard for
the conventionalities of life which was born and bred
in her very goodness, than was the forward, indelicate,
vulgar hoyden 1 who was about to become the wife of
the Queen's son.
If the first meeting of the troth-plighted, ill-suited
couple was pitiable, the circumstances of their marriage
were positively ghastly. The ceremony, which was
performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, took
place on April 8th, 1795. All the royal family
dined together at the Queen's House and dressed at
St. James's Palace, assembling at the Queen's rooms
there before walking in procession to the Chapel Royal.
The only cordiality shown on the occasion was by the
King, who kissed his niece affectionately and shook by
both hands the graceless son, who had fortified himself
with a stock of Dutch courage for the trial he was to
undergo. If magnificent dress could have concealed
the tragedy which was being enacted, the dress was not
wanting. Hoops swayed, lace fluttered, ostrich plumes
waved. Caroline was in white satin embroidered with
pearls, she wore a mantle of crimson velvet lined with
ermine and had a small crown on her fair hair. At
that date, so adorned, she was a come.ly bride but for
the flurry of ostentatious indifference amounting to
defiance which was in her bearing.
The bridegroom was in a Court costume a blue
velvet coat, knee-breeches, buckles, and pointed shoes
while he held in his hand a three-cornered hat with
1 Yet Caroline was not without brains and kindness of heart, and
everybody agreed that she could be dignified when she liked.
266 5f
a rich diamond buckle and loop. He had still the
remains of a goodly physique, but according to Lord
Holland the Prince was so intoxicated that he could
not have kept his feet had he not been supported by
two of the royal Dukes, his brothers ; as it was, in the
middle of a prayer he staggered up from his knees, and
the ceremony would have been interrupted had not the
King crossed quickly to his son, whispered to him, and
induced him to kneel down again.
There was a supper afterwards at Buckingham House
previous to the unhappy couple's departing at midnight
for his residence, Carlton House. According to rumour
they were heard wrangling the whole way. The quarrel-
ling did not cease next day, when he found fault with
her shoes and she flung down in a heap before him
the letters of congratulation she had received from the
heads of different European Courts, saying these were
to show that she was not an impostor.
The income voted to the Prince was ,12,000 a year
apart from the revenue of the duchy of Cornwall ;
that to the Princess was 50,000 annually, with
45,000 in addition to provide her with jewels and
to defray the expense of refurnishing Carlton House.
The Prince's income did not satisfy him because a
yearly deduction was to be made from it for the pay-
ment of his debts in the course of nine years. He
complained bitterly of this arrangement as a breach of
the pledge in reliance on which he had been induced
to marry Princess Caroline of Brunswick.
CHAPTER II.
A CONTENTIOUS COUPLE.
THE estrangement of the couple was complete from the
first, and neither made the slightest attempt to bridge
over the gulf; though they went through the form of
the usual appearance together at the theatre and went in
company to an entertainment given in their honour by
the Queen at Frogmore.
Queen Charlotte tried to do her duty, but according
to Lord Malmesbury she was stiff in her civility, while
the unruly daughter-in-law, superbly dressed, looked
" black as thunder." The Princess had some excuse
for her wrath. Ordinarily she was like her mother,
good-natured with the easy good nature of a person of
no principle, no earnestness or real depth of feeling.
But a packet of letters written to her family and friends,
in which she had descanted freely on her position, and
had made sundry smart criticisms of the Queen's person,
etc., etc., had miscarried, been opened, and the contents
had, as Caroline suspected, come to Queen Charlotte's
knowledge.
For about a year, till a little after^the birth of Princess
Charlotte of Wales, Caroline remained at Carlton House,
but practically she and the Prince of Wales " lived in
different houses and were never alone together." At
the end of the year a formal permanent separation was
agreed upon, and the Princess, accompanied by a small
suite of ladies, removed with alacrity first to the village
267
268 Sij racial Xafcfes
of Charlton and afterwards to Blackheath, in connec-
tion with which she held an appointment that of
Ranger of Greenwich Park. Her income was much
what it had been previously. The one point on which
George IV. showed some consideration for his wife was
in not robbing her of the means of living according to
her station. He expressed himself more than once as
desirous that the Princess should be free from pecuniary
difficulties. 1
The King, her uncle, countenanced Caroline by
occasionally paying her a visit, a kindly attention the
Prince of Wales bitterly resented. The Queen never
came : she disapproved as strongly of the separation as
she had disapproved of the ill-starred marriage. The
greatest injustice done to Caroline then was the with-
drawal from her of her child. She was extravagantly
fond of all babies, and she was naturally fond of her own.
The child was consigned to the care of her father, who
had little affection for his daughter. He showed how
little by the repeated capricious changes he made in
her household throughout her youth, without paying
the slightest heed to her feelings in the matter. The
poor girl had no sooner grown attached to her gov-
ernesses than she found them removed and herself
committed afresh to the care of strangers, from no
apparent motive, unless that she was not to be suffered
to know and be happy with her guardians.
However, there were limits to the Prince's harshness
to his wife, or, what is more probable, he entertained a
certain fear of public opinion. He sent the child, in
the charge of Lady Elgin, to stay in a house of her own
at Blackheath, and once a week the little Princess was
permitted to go to her mother.
Caroline began her life at Blackheath with unusual
credit to herself. She seemed to aim at living quietly,
1 She never was exempt from them.
Caroline of JBrunswicfe 269
was content with her income, took pleasure in her
garden, inquired into the wants of the neighbouring
poor and sought to relieve them. She was generous
to excess, though mostly injudicious in her generosity.
She put out several poor children to nurse l and taught
others, personally instructing them in English reading,
writing, etc., etc. Her qualifications as a teacher were
on a par with her attributes as a husband-reformer.
The Princess was not without society. From sym-
pathy or from curiosity many distinguished and many
more simply agreeable men and women sought her
company. She was undeniably hospitable, she gave
pleasant dinners and suppers, in which the chief fault
was that everybody was too much at his or her ease and
unbounded hilarity was the order of the day, until no
room was left for a wise and respectful recollection of
the Princess's rank, not to say of her peculiar position.
Blind-man's buff was one of the games played at these
unceremonious parties, which were often prolonged to
midnight.
The Princess's spirits when high (they were either
high or low) got the better of her. She delighted in
astonishing and scandalising people a weak and dan-
gerous form of vanity. When the poet Campbell was
presented to her she insisted on dancing a reel with him.
In writing of her afterwards he described her as " a fine
body." A story is told of her that an artist appointed
to paint her picture and shown into her morning-room
for the purpose found her sitting on the floor, without
shoes or stockings, eating a potato. He would have
retreated in dismay until she had assumed a more suit-
able dress and attitude, but she refused to let him go,
treating his scruples with gay ridicule and bidding him
1 Caroline told Lady Charlotte Bury that she had nine children,
and in answer to Lady Charlotte's incredulous amazement explained
that the eight boys and one girl referred to were adopted children
whom she supported.
270 Ste IRo^al .Xaofes
paint her as she was. A Princess so unsophisticated, or
rather so regardless of the laws which govern society,
is in a perilous way. What made it worse for Caroline,
Princess of Wales, was that she had ceased to be in her
first youth. A girl's impulsive thoughtlessness and
giddiness could no longer be pled in extenuation of a
woman's madcap pranks.
At last a very demon of mischief took possession of
Caroline. Instead of avoiding the appearance of evil
she sedulously cultivated it. She took what was little
short of an insane satisfaction in outraging the prejudices
of her neighbours, in mystifying and misleading them,
so that they might believe her guilty of shameful vice
of which, in spite of her glaring follies, the general
evidence shows she was incapable. It is hardly necessary
to say that no woman with any strong sense of duty
and any delicate purity of mind could have fallen over
such an ugly precipice.
In a miserable hour for Caroline she made the ac-
quaintance of an officer named Sir John Douglas and
his wife Lady Douglas. The couple had lately returned
from Egypt and were settled for a time at Blackheath.
Caroline introduced herself to them in the erratic, in-
considerate manner she was fond of adopting. She had
heard they had a beautiful child whom she wished to
see. In order to gratify the whim, she set out, on a
winter morning, to cross the heath, which happened to
be covered with snow, in a lilac satin pelisse, primrose-
coloured half-boots, and a small lilac travelling cap
trimmed with sable. Unannounced and uninvited
she let it be seen that she intended to make a call on
the Douglases. She was politely received by the pair,
who could hardly decline the honour of her acquaintance,
which, thus unceremoniously begun, rapidly ripened
into a violent friendship between the two women and
into the appointment of Lady Douglas as one of her
Caroline of Brunswfcfe 271
Royal Highness's suite. The ladies were in some
respects kindred spirits. Lady Douglas, a matron of
doubtful reputation, was much the craftier and more
evilly disposed of the two ; Sir John, as far as can be
discovered, was a mere tool of his wife's.
A coolness arose on the Princess's side towards her
quondam friend, and she broke off the connection, re-
fusing to give any explanation of the breach. It is
said to have arisen from her having acted, rather late
in the day, with a little more prudence than she was
wont to display in taking to heart a friend's revelation
of some of Lady Douglas's antecedents, with the advice
to Caroline to be on her guard where Lady Douglas
was concerned.
Lady Douglas was furious at the stop put to the
friendship, and so pestered the Princess for an explana-
tion that she had recourse for counsel and assistance to
her brother-in-law the Duke of Kent. He succeeded
with some difficulty in inducing Sir John Douglas, in
whose eyes the matter was complicated by an anonymous
letter and an offensive drawing which he ascribed, with-
out proof, to the Princess of Wales, to submit to the
Princess's decision.
But the malice of a slighted, vindictive woman who
sticks at nothing to accomplish her revenge is not
easily defeated. It was contrived that her story should
reach the ears of the Duke of Sussex, who believed
himself called upon to lay it before the Prince of Wales,
and he was only too willing, in his unmanly hatred of
his wife and his persecution of her when he dared, to
receive every bad report against her. Had the King
been in his usual health, he might have afforded his
niece more effectual protection; but he was then hover-
ing on the brink of madness, and nobody dared to
appeal to him on a subject certain to distress him. As
for the Queen, good woman as she was, she showed
272
herself fatally biassed against her daughter-in-law. She
had washed her hands of her from the first. Caroline's
every word and act ran counter to Charlotte's keen
sense of what was right, and she was now beyond the
age when people's opinions and convictions are easily
modified. Her position with regard to Caroline was
very much that of the Electress Sophia towards the
wife of George L, but, to begin with at least, the
Electress was less rigidly hostile to the younger Sophia.
The elder woman did her best to restrain and quiet the
younger until the faithless wife broke all bounds. A
woman with far rougher surroundings, in less happy
circumstances than Charlotte, wedded to her loyal,
dutiful George, the Electress was in some respects,
because of her individual traits, perhaps, a larger
minded, less intolerant woman than was the Queen.
But there are other items to be taken into consider-
ation. Both women had sons whom the mothers, as
mothers will, regarded in the light of the victims of
their erring wives. Charlotte especially, who had been
so fondly attached to the Prince of Wales of whose
beauty, grace, and wit as a lad she had been extremely
proud clung to the one excuse for the Prince's
debauchery, heartlessness, and falseness, that if he had
married a better woman he might have been a better
man; she might, in a homely English phrase, have
" kept him straight," as, indeed, poor Caroline had
proposed to herself to do. It would have been a wise
woman who would have brought George Augustus
Frederick to a sense of the obligations of a fairly
honest, temperate, reverent man.
Queen Charlotte, besides getting and taking the
greatest credit for the virtuous character of her Court,
had also unmarried daughters, excellent young women,
whom she had reared with the greatest care. She had
their honour and interests to guard, and it was not to
Caroline of JBrunswfcfc 273
be supposed that their minds and morals would be
improved by coming into contact with such a daughter
of Heth as the Princess of Wales was proving herself.
The Prince of Wales called upon Lady Douglas to
substantiate the accusations she was spreading abroad.
The result was a deposition by Lady Douglas in which
she made the basest and most odious charges against
the Princess, taking advantage of their former intimacy
to allege familiarity with the details and to bring
forward many small incidents which had really occurred
in order to corroborate the hideous story. The names
of various gentlemen, including the gallant naval officer
Sir Sydney Smith, and the eminent portrait-painter Sir
Thomas Lawrence, together with others of less note,
were coupled with that of the Princess. The main
point on which the slander turned was that the Princess
had adopted a baby (as she had busied herself with
various babies before). The infant, a boy of poor
parents named Austin, had been brought into her
house and was kept constantly with her. This child,
Lady Douglas declared, was Caroline's child by her
own cool, careless admission.
The matter could not rest there. A commission was
appointed and witnesses, chiefly the Princess's servants,
were examined against and for her. These servants
had not been appointed by Caroline, they were nom-
inated to their posts by the Prince of Wales and his
agents, and they regarded him their future King as
their master, from whom their promotion was to come.
Nevertheless, though some of them professed to con-
firm and even to render worse Lady Douglas's gross
assertions, there were others who emphatically denied
them. The different gentlemen concerned contradicted
positively and indignantly on oath their share in Lady
Douglas's accusation. It was demonstrated beyond
question that the child Austin (whom his adopted
18
274 Sfe TCosal Xafcies
mother called " Willikin," continuing defiantly to keep
him in her house and to pet and play with him im-
moderately) was as had been said the son of poor
parents in fact, was none other than one of those
nurslings whom Caroline had taken out of charity and
to whom she had played the part of Lady Bountiful.
She had a greater liking for him than for the others, and
the fancy had seized her to have him constantly with her.
For some time the Princess was kept largely in the
dark about the steps taken against her, and for nine
weeks she remained in suspense as to the decision of
the King, before whom and his ministers the unpleasant
affair had at last to be laid. Naturally, but illogically,
Caroline, like many other foolish women who have
done everything in their power to provoke groundless
aspersions of their characters, was highly indignant at
the turn events had taken, and from that date posed as
a cruelly wronged woman, with a shrill cry for justice,
and a wild clamour against her enemies added to the
other elements of flighty insubordination which were
always to be found in her nature.
Fortunately for the Princess she consented at this
season to be controlled by friends wiser than herself.
One of them, the Cabinet Minister Perceval, wrote
respectful but urgent appeals to the King to remove
the stigma which had been cast upon her. Perceval
let it be understood that if the appeals were passed by
the version of the infamous charjge held by Caroline
and her supporters should be laid before the public.
The threat was effectual, both the original commission
and the King's ministers pronounced the Princess
innocent of crime ; though by the mouth of the King,
who announced to his daughter-in-law that she was
exculpated, they considered, with reason, her conduct as
unbecoming in a woman of her rank and position, and
enjoined on her to behave with greater circumspection
Caroline of 3Brunswicfc 275
in the future an injunction which Caroline, tingling
with resentment at the light in which her conduct had
been viewed, treated with scornful indifference.
If Caroline of Brunswick had been capable of serious
thought there were other events then happening in her
family which were calculated to sober and steady her.
Her father, the old man whom she loved, fell fighting,
bravely but in vain, with his Brunswickers against
Napoleon at the battle of Jena. Her mother, an aging
woman, was forced to return as a fugitive to that
England she had assailed with abuse, which she had
left as a bride forty years before. Unhappily, the old
Duchess was not the style of woman to be of much
benefit to her daughter. Neither adversity, nor the
kindness which King George and Queen Charlotte
showed her in her tribulation, had taught her wisdom
any more than time had inculcated discretion. She
still " babbled every thought which came into her
head." She found her dinner-table, to which she had
invited Lady Jerningham l among other guests, a proper
place for the discussion of the state of the Duchess's
soul, about which she delivered sundry pious common-
place reflections.
The Duchess lived partly in a house in Spring
Gardens, shabby enough in relation to her rank, partly
at Blackheath, where, though she occupied a separate
house, she was near her daughter. In the course of
years of separation an oddly shown affection had de-
veloped between them. It was greatest on the mother's
side, while it had some place in the daughter's heart,
though Caroline, Princess of Wales, was still less dis-
posed than Caroline, Princess of Brunswick, had been,
to brook contradiction or to give honour where honour
to age and maternity was due.
The old Duchess replied with much spirit to the
1 The Jerningham Letters,
276 Si IRosal Xafctes
insulting observation made by the Prince of Wales when
he offered to come and pay his respects to his aunt,
provided, he stipulated, that he was ensured from
meeting the Princess of Wales.
The mother replied that she should be happy to see
her nephew, but that as her daughter came to see
her at all hours she could not engage that his Royal
Highness might not encounter his wife.
After all, not only the King and Queen visited the
pathetic wreck of " the Lady Augusta," the Prince of
Wales condescended to call in Spring Gardens at the
risk of encountering Caroline there. The Duchess
received at last an invitation to Carlton House. Here
was a temptation difficult for her to resist ; she would
see again her old home where she had spent her child-
hood and youth, she would be able to criticise the
changes and improvements made on it first for the
reception of Caroline, whose stay in it had been brief,
and second to illustrate the splendid tastes of its master.
Besides, the simple, garrulous old woman was easily
propitiated, and she was fond of such society as she
would obtain, mostly made up of stranded old people
like herself who remembered the boyhood of her
brother George III., the heartless vagaries of their
father, Prince Fritz, and the Court of George II. in
its licence and coarseness. (Caroline nicknamed her
mother's circle " Dullification " and openly yawned
when she was detained in it.) The Duchess went so
far as to hesitate whether to accept or reject her son-
in-law's invitation, but her better and more motherly
feelings conquered ; for had she consented to appear
at Carlton House she would have been considered as
ranging herself on the side of the Prince of Wales
and condemning her daughter.
Little Princess Charlotte had now a grandmother as
well as a mother to fondle her when she was suffered to
Caroline of Brunswick 277
see them. (Caroline, in her Philistine spelling, termed
her child a "dear Angle/') Princess Charlotte was treated
more rationally and with more discipline by her relatives
at Windsor, with whom at the same time she was a
favourite. She was a pretty fair-haired child, the chief
defect of her face being the lightness of her eyebrows
and eyelashes. As she grew older she showed slight
traces of an attack of smallpox. She was naturally
lively, and her childish sallies amused her grandfather,
whose sight was waning more and more, while over
him hung the melancholy of his realisation of the
mental cloud which was descending upon him.
As a seal to the justification of Caroline she was
again free to attend the Queen's drawing-rooms ; she
went to two in 1807. Dr. Doran quotes the account
given of her by Sir Jonah Barrington, who chanced to
be present. It tallies to a remarkable extent with the
mercurial temper of the Princess. She advanced down
the room leaning on the arm of her brother-in-law the
Duke of Cumberland, who was sure to espouse the cause
of any man or woman of whom the rest of his family
disapproved. She was in deep mourning because of the
recent death of her father, and some emotion over-
came her so that she " tottered " as she approached the
Queen. Sir Jonah thought she feared a repulse ; but
his unprejudiced testimony was that her Majesty was
" kind," while other onlookers commented on " the cold
civility " which was all that was accorded to the culprit.
Caroline's spirits, however, rose in a rebound at the
concession. She talked much and loudly as was her
wont, and " was bold." She did not hesitate to gather
around her a cluster of sympathising members of the
nobility, and with a total absence of tact she consented
to have many presentations made to her, as if she were
anticipating the day when she should be Queen and
was holding a Court of her own.
278 Sij IRopal SLaMes
At the second drawing-room that painfully dramatic
incident of the last meeting and parting of the Prince
and Princess of Wales took place. They came face
to face in the centre of the crowded room among the
throng of gay company when every eye was upon the
two. Caroline had left off her mourning for her father :
she was dressed in much splendour, even gaiety. Her
love of striking effects came out in the border of her
silver tissue train and of the petticoat to her silver and
lilac bodice. The border was embroidered to represent
vine-leaves and grapes by means of emerald, topaz, and
amethyst stones, with which the dress was literally sown.
Silver laurel looped up the drapery and edged the
pocket-hole. Her head-dress was the usual ostrich
feathers and diamonds.
The Prince was, of course, in a Court suit, with
its lace ruffles, star and ribbon, knee breeches, silk
stockings, and buckled shoes.
The magnificent miserable couple bowed, stood oppo-
site each other for a moment, " exchanged a few words
which no one heard, and then passed on, he stately as
an iceberg and as cold, she with a smile, half mirthful,
half melancholy, as though she rejoiced that she was
there in spite of him, and yet regretted that her visit
was not made under happier auspices."
Alas ! poor Caroline, no man on earth would have
made her a wise or a refined woman, but with a husband
kind and humane she might have been respectable and
happy.
Princess Charlotte of Wales, a girl of eleven, in a
Brussels lace frock with a pink and silver sash, was
present on this memorable occasion. What could she
have thought, precocious as she was with a sad precocity,
of this meeting and greeting between her father and
mother ?
The next trouble was the Princess of Wales's debts.
Caroline of UBrunswicfc 279
In spite of her large income and her simple enough
personal habits, she was so incapable of managing
money and so much at the mercy of her servants that
she owed as much as fifty thousand pounds. The
difficulty was surmounted by the execution of a regular
deed of separation between the Prince and Princess of
Wales, in consideration of which and of his ceasing
to be liable for her further expenses he consented
to pay her standing debts. Her income was settled
at yf 2 2,000 a year and was put under the care of
a treasurer, who was in a manner responsible for
its proper disposal. The Princess in contending for
her rights had asked for rooms in one of the royal
palaces, and apartments were granted to her in
Kensington Palace.
In 1820 George III. became hopelessly insane, and
the Prince of Wales was appointed Prince Regent.
Until then Caroline had kept up around her something
like a Court, and her balls and dinners were freely
attended by the Dukes and Duchesses of Portland and
Beaufort and other prominent members of the nobility ;
but from the time that George was Regent the great
world came no more, or only very sparingly, to the
dingy red brick palace associated closely with the
memories of Dutch William and his Mary, of Anne,
of George II., his Queen Caroline, and their numerous
family. Still Caroline, Princess of Wales, maintained
her shadow of a Court, in opposition to that of the
Prince Regent, neither of the Courts being by any
means models of what they ought to have been. The
Princess was as careless as ever of courtly etiquette.
On her birthday, when she might expect a crowd of
such visitors as were left to her, Lady Charlotte Bury
found her in a pink flannel dressing-gown, encouraging
her young daughter to disparage laughingly, with her
"loud musical laugh," a valuable jewelled aigrette
280 Sis
which the Queen, seeking to keep the peace, had sent
as a birthday gift to her daughter-in-law. She was not
more discreet in other respects. She affected frankness
and sincerity to the extent of assuming an indecent
heartlessness which was foreign to her character. She
declared that she was only afraid Princess Amelia would
die because then she could not go out and amuse her-
self. She was fond of the play, but would sometimes
attend it more for the gratification of others than for her
own pleasure. On the birthday of the boy " Willikin,"
whom she kept with her in a very doggedness of fidelity,
she insisted, though ill and suffering, on taking him to
the theatre. She heard that the Prince Regent was
dangerously ill, and she wrote to one of her cronies that
she could not " flatter herself that the period to all her
troubles" was yet come. She was in the frequent
habit after dinner, when she was not restrained by the
presence of strangers, of moulding little wax figures,
which she supplied with horns, and into which she
stuck three pins taken from her dress, previous to
roasting them before a fire. She did it half in bravado,
half with the superstition that by destroying this curious
series of effigies of her husband she would in turn
destroy him. She would have no servants wait at
dinner, and had dumb waiters instead. With regard
to the dinners themselves, at which Princess Charlotte
was allowed to present herself every Saturday, " the
food was bad and the wine worse." She was never
happy unless when talking of her grievances, and then
she would constantly repeat the strong expression, of
which she was fond, " to tell you God's truth."
Her sole attempts at intellectual pursuits were reading
aloud and keeping a kind of diary, in which she made
in her bad English daringly sarcastic sketches of the
people she had known in England. She had her noisy
free-and-easy dinner parties and concerts on Sundays in
Caroline of Brunswicfe 281
defiance of English habits. 1 She would go out sometimes
in the evening and in dinner dress accompanied only by
one of her ladies, to whose dismay Caroline would pass
out of Kensington Gardens and stroll beyond Bayswater
into the adjacent fields at the risk of being accosted and
insulted. She would seat herself beside strangers on
the garden benches, talk to them and entertain herself
by leading them to speak of the Princess of Wales and
to give their opinon of her disposition and of the treat-
ment she had received. Caroline's brother, the Duke
of Brunswick, was a refugee in England. His two boys,
Duke William and Duke Charles, also came over and
were lodged at the top of a house in Vauxhall. Caro-
line went to visit her nephews occasionally. In driving
out one of her queer unconventional proceedings was
not to send out directions to the coachman or even to
deliver the directions to him personally, she preferred
simply to point to him, at short intervals, where she
wished him to go.
She was by no means so fond of these youthful Dukes
her kindred in adversity as she was of the promiscu-
ous collection of babies she adopted and reared. She never
saw her nephews without apostrophising their ugliness.
The Princess of Wales removed in 1814 from her
apartments in Kensington Palace to a house in Connaught
Place, where she was still more her own mistress. The
best of her supporters began to shrink from her friend-
ship ; she sank lower and lower in the company she kept,
especially in relation to a cottage in the neighbourhood,
to which she went incognito^ where she saw people quite
out of her sphere. There is no name for these expe-
ditions except the slang term "larks." Caroline was
partial to " larks " and to the incongruous company,
the members of which felt no scruple in making her an
1 The King and Queen had also given dinners on Sundays, but their
dinners were of a different order.
282 Sf 1Roal Xatries
object of ridicule and laughing to her face at her broken
English and odd ways. She enjoyed every form of
mystification and was fond of the silly tricks and vulgar
practical jokes which would have been distasteful to any
person of intelligence and honour and were far beneath
her dignity.
Yet Caroline could act the Princess when she chose
and so could her young daughter, who with many fine
qualities was not without alarming indications of having
inherited her mother's impulsive rashness and obstinacy,
just as she had inherited her fair complexion and her
full, somewhat voluptuous figure, early tending to
embonpoint. Perhaps a perception of this likeness was
one reason for the Prince of Wales's coldness and
harshness to his daughter. The apprehension of what
might be the result of frequent unrestrained intercourse
with her mother, in intensifying the traits which mother
and child had in common, might be in part the reason
why Caroline and her daughter were so systematically and
persistently separated, and why every vexatious obstacle
which could be interposed was put between them. It
is more rational to suppose that these considerations
had some weight with the Prince Regent than to
imagine, as the Princess of Wales and her more violent
partisans took pleasure in believing, that he was solely
actuated by a vindictive desire to thwart and affront
his wife.
The poor young girl, Princess Charlotte, stood up
with pathetic loyalty for the mother whose natural
affection for her child won a return in kind, but who
was incapable of inspiring respect. Charlotte had
arrived at the age of being formally presented to the
Queen her grandmother, and it was arranged that the
girl's aunt, the Duchess of York, should make the pre-
sentation. Against this arrangement with its marked
slight to the Princess of Wales young Charlotte
Caroline of Brunswick 283
struggled with all her might. She declared that she
would be presented by her mother or not at all. But
as the Prince of Wales, now invested with the additional
power of Prince Regent, had intimated to the Queen
that he objected to the appearance of the Princess of
Wales at any function in which he might take part, her
attendance at the drawing-rooms was thenceforth per-
force dispensed with. The substitution of the Duchess
of York for the Princess of Wales in the performance
of a duty which was specially a mother's contained the
additional sting that even before her marriage Caroline
appears to have cherished an unexplained dislike to the
good little Duchess. After her marriage it is easy to
understand how a hot-headed, feather-brained woman
would entertain an aversion for the far wiser, better
woman who was always held up to her as an example,
with whose conduct her own was perpetually compared
unfavourably. The sequel of the contest was that the
young Princess was forced to yield.
Under the exasperation of the circumstances Caroline
allowed her defenders to publish a letter in her name
which the Prince had refused to open. It contained a
protest against the unmerited injuries and indignities
she was suffering, chief among them being her practical
separation from her daughter. The result of this
letter and of the altercations to which it gave rise in
the Privy Council and in Parliament was that the
mother and daughter were forbidden to have any
intercourse for the time a prohibition which did not
prevent the Princess of Wales from causing her coach-
man, on one occasion at least, to drive after the carriage
of Princess Charlotte, who was then living at Warwick
House under the guardianship of the Duchess of Leeds.
When the open carriages were drawn up side by side
Caroline and the young Princess leant over and kissed
each other affectionately, and conversed for a few
284 Sfj TCosal Xafcfes
moments, to the edification of a cheering crowd which
speedily collected.
The Duchess of Brunswick, after her many vicissi-
tudes, died in her house in Spring Gardens somewhat
unexpectedly towards the close of March, 1813. She
had been ill for a little time and her daughter had
been with her the previous evening. The Duchess had
been of little service to Caroline whether as child or
woman, but she was an old familiar figure never
wanting in a certain fondness for her children among
them her wayward daughter and her brave son the
exiled Duke, who was destined in the course of the
next two years to fall in the preliminary skirmish at
Quatre Bras. The Duchess of Brunswick was buried
without any display in Westminster Abbey. She had
been six years resident in her native England, to which ^
she had returned under such disastrous circumstances.
The great event of 1814 was the visit of the Allied
Sovereigns to London ; but though they were old war
comrades of her father's and he had been slain in their
cause Caroline had little to do with the festivities with
which all London was ablaze. She was not permitted
to attend the drawing-rooms, and the greatest notice the
visitors took of her was when one of them sent his
chamberlain to make formal inquiries for her in his
master's name. She was deeply wounded, for she had
sat, day after day, in feverish expectation of the arrival
of the Emperor of Russia, or the King of Prussia, or
at the very least of her nephew, her unhappy sister's
son, Prince Paul of Wiirtemberg, whom Lady Charlotte
Bury described as " a squinting bird, dancing and
scolding the ladies " ; but not one paid her the small
mark of respect which the briefest visit would have
implied. It is well understood that this utter neglect
was in compliance with the urgent solicitation of the
Prince Regent. The time was not well chosen for
Caroline of Brunswick 285
such harsh treatment. The Princess had been acting
with unusual submission to authority, and when there
was a proposal in Parliament to restore her income to
the original 50,000 per annum, she voluntarily gave
up 15,000 of the sum. It was these careless examples
of free-handed generosity in which justice was not
always a conspicuous element which endeared her to
the unthinking, easily dazzled populace.
Caroline did see, as she had a great desire to do, the
Emperor Alexander of Russia at the Opera House. It
was a strange scene, for in the royal box between him
and the King of Prussia sat the Prince Regent. When
the air, which was being sung as the Princess entered,
was finished, the great audience in the pit turned to her
with hearty applause. She refused to acknowledge the
compliment, saying with a flash of the scathing wit,
which was one of her attractions and at the same time
one of her snares, " Punch's wife is nobody when Punch
is present." After the Prince Regent and the Allies
were gone the mass of the audience called for the
Princess of Wales, when she came forward, " made three
curtsies," and then withdrew modestly enough. In
the street her coach was surrounded by a vociferous
mob, saluting her, asking to shake hands with her, and
offering if she liked to burn down Carlton House,
opposite which the carriage was passing. The character
of the Prince Regent was well known to the masses,
and was detested by them with an exaggeration of
detestation. The tide of popular sympathy turning to
the Princess was equally exaggerated and unreasoning,
and had already a strongly political colouring.
The Princess was pleased and touched by the
clamorous demonstrations. She was at her best when
she answered : " No, my good people, be quiet. Let me
pass, and go home to your beds."
When the Prince went in dignified procession with
286 Sis TRo^al Xafcies
his distinguished guests to a banquet in the City, he
was followed from Temple Bar to the Mansion House
by hoots and hisses and jeering cries, " Where's your
wife ? "
In the meantime, Caroline, who was now in her forty-
fifth year, had been attending a masquerade, to which
she went at twelve o'clock at night with her amazed
ladies by a back-staircase and a back-door, at which
they met the gentlemen of the suite who escorted them
on foot through the streets to the Albany, where the
intending masquers changed their dresses. One is re-
minded of poor Marie Antoinette in the thoughtless
frolics in which she indulged in company with her
brother-in-law, the Comte d'Artois, when both were in
the grace and the gracelessness of their first youth, and
of all the woful consequences which resulted from the
idle pranks of a boy and girl. But this was no girl,
this over-grown, giggling, senseless woman with a
daughter on the threshold of womanhood nay, Princess
Charlotte of Wales's marriage was already on the tapis ;
and here again her loyalty to her foolish mother stepped
in and broke off" the contract.
The Prince of Orange was the suitor, who was ac-
ceptable to the Prince Regent and the country. The
Prince Regent indeed wished to be quit of his daughter
in an honourable way, to get her settled out of the
country where her disturbing presence would no longer
interfere with his comfort and complicate his relations
with her mother.
The Prince of Orange did not attract the Princess
particularly, but she was not so happily situated as to
be obdurate to friendly representations. The barrier
arose when she clearly understood not only that she,
the heiress to the crown of England, would be expected
to live in Holland, but that her mother would not be a
welcome guest there. It is said that matters had gone
Caroline of Brunswick 287
so far that the Prince of Orange submitted to the
Princess a programme of the celebration of the marriage
together with a list of the guests he wished to be invited
on the occasion, and that when she saw that her mother's
name was absent she promptly returned the list with
the name of the bridegroom struck out.
The next proceeding on' the part of the Prince Regent
was to order that his daughter should remove at once
to Cranbourne Lodge near Windsor and thenceforth
reside there with a fresh household of ladies appointed
by him. This new instance of tyranny, with the appar-
ent purpose of separating her more entirely from her
mother, drove the high-spirited girl to violent revolt.
The plan which occurred to her was first to ask a
short respite that she might take leave of her dismissed
ladies and prepare for the journey, and then when the
Prince was gone to Carlton House to steal out in the
dusk of the summer evening (it was in the month of
July and the weather was fine) and make her way to
her mother. Princess Charlotte had never been out
alone before, she had hardly put her dainty foot on the
common pavement. Her mother's escapades had all
been executed apart from her daughter.
It is like a fairy-tale to realise a young Princess
threading the throng of ordinary wayfarers, clerks,
porters, message-boys, and working-women, returning
from their day's tasks, etc., etc. But Charlotte did not
lose her head, she knew what she wanted. She walked
straight to the coach-stand at the bottom of the Hay-
market, hired a hackney coach, and bade the driver take
her to Connaught Place. He had no idea of the rank
of the young lady who had hired him until the page
who opened the door of the house in Connaught Place
and answered her question addressed her as "Your
Royal Highness," and until she gave him three sov-
ereigns for his fare.
288 St IRo^al Xafcies
Caroline was at Blackheath, and there her daughter
sent a messenger begging her mother to return without
delay. Reckless as the Princess of Wales was on her
own account, she was terrified by the crisis in her
daughter's affairs, and exercised on Princess Charlotte's
behalf a foresight and prudence the mother had never
exhibited on her own. Caroline was utterly opposed
to Princess Charlotte's defiance of the Prince Regent's
authority, and the first thing she did before returning
home was to drive to both Houses of Parliament in a
vain pursuit of her own principal supporters, Mr.
Whitbread and Earl Grey. The next aid she sought
was that of her eloquent counsel, Mr. Brougham him
she summoned imperatively.
No effort was to be left untried to soothe and calm
the excited run-away. Even her girl-friend, Miss
Mercer Elphinstone, was brought post haste to use her
influence with Princess Charlotte.
That was a wonderful summer night in Connaught
Place. Little did the other inhabitants of the square
dream of the magnates who, to avoid publicity and the
gossip of servants which would attend on the spectacle
of their private coaches and liveries, drove up in a
succession of hackney coaches l to overcome and turn
from her determination one solitary, sobbing girl.
There was the Lord Chancellor Eldon, sent by the
Prince Regent. There was the Duke of York, who had
been dining with the Prince when he heard, in the
course of the dinner, of his daughter's attempt at escape,
upon which the Duke deserted both host and dinner and
came to the rescue. There was the Duke of Sussex.
There was the Archbishop of Canterbury, who remained
in his hackney coach, sitting well back, till he should be
1 The neighbours would only see in them evidence of one of the
Princess of Wales's "jumble " parties gathered together at a later hour
than usual.
Caroline of 3Brunswicfe 289
summoned to add his spiritual weight to the mundane
arguments of the others.
For a considerable length of time Princess Charlotte,
in a fever of indignation and wounded feeling, would not
submit. She would not return to the guardians
appointed by her father, who had shown little regard for
her, she would live with her mother whether that
mother would or not. The young Princess would
work for her bread (little she knew of working for her
bread ! ) and subsist on five shillings a week, sooner than
continue to endure what she had borne.
Brougham, her mother's able advocate, had to
tell the girl that by the law of the land she was, while
still under age, subject to the control of her father
not to say of the Prince Regent, who represented the
high mightiness of the King. As for the Lord Chan-
cellor Eldon, he roundly asserted that he would not go
back without Princess Charlotte. (It;was many a long
day since the briefless barrister, Jack Scott, who had
lived to become Lord Chancellor Eldon, had himself
set parental authority at nought, when he eloped with
pretty Bessie Surtees, the future Lady Eldon.)
At last, worn out and broken down, possibly morti-
fied by her mother's secession from her side of the
question, Princess Charlotte gave way and returned to
Warwick House in the middle of the night. She was
" seen home," in the royal carriage in which her former
governess had been sent to fetch her, by her uncle the
Duke of York, bluff and good-natured whatever his
lack of probity.
CHAPTER III.
A WANDERING PRINCESS AND REPUDIATED
WIFE.
IT was, without doubt, this painful scene which con-
firmed Caroline in the intention she announced shortly
afterwards of going abroad for a time. Her enemies
were only too glad to get rid of her. Her friends were of
two minds. Some of them thought it was the best thing
she could do for her dignity and peace ; others, with a
truer knowledge of the woman, had a foreboding, which
was fully warranted, that the greater liberty she would
thus acquire might be her destruction. She offered
to resign the Rangership of Greenwich Park and her
house at Blackheath l in favour of her daughter. The
last half of her proposal was met by the harsh reply
from the Prince Regent that his daughter " could never
be permitted by him to reside in a house which had
been the dwelling-place of the Princess of Wales."
Early in August, 1814, nineteen years after she had
come as a bride to England, Caroline left the country,
apparently not without some serious thoughts and pen-
sive regrets. She sailed with her suite from the vicinity
of Worthing, followed to the beach by a silent crowd,
in which the ladies waved their handkerchiefs and the
gentlemen uncovered in token of sympathy. She was
forty-five years of age. Her travelling-dress was a
quiet enough version of the fashions of the day. She
wore a dark cloth pelisse with large gold clasps, and a
Lady Charlotte Bury describes it as " full of trickery and trumpery."
290
Caroline of Brunswicfc 291
cap of velvet and green satin (of the Prussian Hussar
costume) with a green feather.
The Princess's sobriety did not last long. On the
Prince Regent's birthday the ship fired a salute by her
orders, and at dinner she proposed her husband's health
in a speech full of mocking pleasantry.
The foreign Courts which the Princess of Wales
visited received her, at first, very courteously, while
she was cordially welcomed by her own people in
Brunswick, to which she went back for a short sojourn.
But soon her wonted indiscreet and unbecoming be-
haviour awoke disappointment and ultimately contempt.
In Switzerland she encountered and became intimate
with two other Princesses separated from their husbands
Marie Louise of Austria, the wife of Napoleon, and
Juliana of Saxe-Coburg, the divorced wife of the Grand
Duke Constantine of Russia. Princess Juliana had a
special attraction for Caroline because she was the sister
of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, whose marriage with
Princess Charlotte was being arranged. Her mother
had no acknowledged voice in the arrangement in which
she had so great an interest, but she liked the match
and the handsome bridegroom largely gifted with the
tact in which his future mother-in-law was lamentably
deficient. She showed the fact in the very intimacy
she immediately struck up with the black sheep of the
house of Coburg.
The great historic and political changes which were
transforming Europe were lost on Caroline, engrossed
with her own attitude of protest and defiance to fate
and her husband. Napoleon returned from Elba,
Waterloo was fought and won, and she paid little heed
to the fall of an Emperor or to the defeat of " La
Grande Armee."
In Italy the Princess of Wales, who appeared at mas-
querades, now as an elderly Venus, now as the Muse of
292 Sis IRosal XaMes
History, was the noisiest and danced the longest of the
pleasure-makers. Her English suite, the members of
which were unable to keep their mistress from grievously
compromising herself, declined to be compromised in
her company, and resigned their offices one by one. She
engaged an Italian courier named Bergami, a big fine-
looking man who had lost caste in the world. He was
really descended from an old family, was entitled to be
called "II Signor Baron," and was respectably connected,
though he could find no higher office to fill than
that of a courier. For this man, who had previously
borne a good character, Caroline conceived one of
her ardent friendships; she had him constantly with
her, promoting him to the rank of chamberlain, re-
ceiving him at her table, creating him a Knight of
Malta (which she had not the slightest right to do),
inaugurating an order of knighthood on her own
account, naming it the order of St. Caroline, 1 and invest-
ing Bergami with the dignity of Grand Master. She
wound up her absurdity with the old folly of adopting
a little child of Bergami's and carrying it about with
her everywhere. She did this in spite of the fact that
she knew and said she knew spies were set upon her,
and that there was actually a commission instituted to
procure proofs of her misconduct. She gloried in de-
ceiving the members!; she did her best to make them
think her guilty, not of egregious error alone, but of
brazen-faced crime.
Before the Princess set out on what she regarded as
an extended Eastern tour (it was certainly extensive for
her day), which was conducted on the most careless,
senseless principles, her whole English suite had with-
drawn and she was surrounded entirely by Italians.
1 The insignia of this order was a cross and heart tied together with
a true lover's knot. The motto was that of the Garter, " Honi soit qui
maly pense."
Caroline of JSrunswicfc 293
Thus unchecked she pursued her wild career on sea or
on land, in storm-tossed old ships, in rickety open
boats, on mules and donkeys ; she was absolutely fear-
less, and her health, which a sedentary life did not suit,
stood any amount of hardship in travelling. She went
to Tunis and cultivated the Bey, procuring from him
the release of a batch of Christian captives. She went
to Athens and Constantinople. She went as far as
Jericho and Jerusalem. Her progress, Dr. Doran says
with truth, was no longer that of a wandering Princess,
it was the rollicking, helter-skelter journeying of one
of a troop of strolling players.
She bought a villa on Lake Como and settled down
after a fashion, giving fetes champetres to her neigh-
bours ; but the management of the establishment was
conducted on the most unceremonious lines the
Princess and a sister of Bergami's, an Italian Countess,
occasionally acting as cook in order to show their skill
in the science of gastronomy.
Caroline had ceased to receive the smallest attention
from foreign Courts. Her reputation for impropriety
had spread far and wide among the English abroad.
The untimely death of poor Princess Charlotte with her
child had failed to subdue her mother. It had filled
Caroline with genuine sorrow, though the letters she
wrote expressing that sorrow were as grotesque as
everything else about her. " I have her not lossit," the
bereaved mother explained to Lady Charlotte Bury.
But the very sorrow from which she fled goaded her
on to further extravagances of behaviour.
The event which really arrested the Princess was one
long expected, that came to pass at last the death of her
uncle George III., the old King, blind and mad for ten
years. George, Prince Regent, was about to be crowned
King, and Caroline would return after her six years'
absence to be crowned Queen, to have a Court of her
294 Sfe iRosal XaMes
own, to be prayed for by name in the liturgy, and to
enjoy all the advantages in honour and revenue which
a Queen can claim.
Her proposal to repair to England was met on the
part of the Government by a counter proposal, unwise
and damaging to their side of the question. The
Princess's income of fifty thousand pounds a year would
be secured to her provided she would remain away from
England and expect no support from the English
ambassadors at foreign Courts. In short, if she was
innocent she was to be bribed to keep out of sight ; if
she was guilty she was to be equally bribed to renounce
her claim to royal rights.
Caroline, who might have entertained, indeed, had
entertained such overtures from the Prince Regent,
regarded them with scorn when they came from the
King ; she dismissed her Italian suite in spite of the
protests of Bergami, and, accompanied only by Alderman
Wood, her enthusiastic friend who had come to fetch
her, and by Lady Anne Hamilton, she embarked in an
ordinary sailing packet, arriving at Dover and driving
to London, which she reached on June 7th, 1 820. Her
request for a house in England had been ignored ; she
had no home provided for her and was glad to accept
the hospitality of Alderman Wood. He conducted her,
followed by a huge applauding crowd, to his house in
South Audley Street, where she had to appear on the
balcony several times a day in order to show herself to
her riotous friends. She was a melancholy sight in
those days an unwieldy woman whose once pretty face
was swollen, lined, and weather-beaten. 1
Caroline's party could be ranged in three divisions :
1 Lady Brownlow, who saw Queen Caroline often in the Park, thus
describes her : " She had exchanged her fair hair for a black wig with
a mass of long curls hanging on each side of her face, her eyebrows
were painted black, her cheeks plastered with rouge, and the expression
of her face most disagreeably bold and stern."
Caroline of Brunswtcfc 295
the mob which is not particular about the quality of its
idol for the hour, while it greatly prefers when it can
rave over the wrong inflicted, and treat as a victim its
hero or heroine ; the Whig opposition to the Tory
Government, which, whether its members believed
Caroline innocent or guilty, caught at the watch-word
" injured Queen " as a convenient rallying cry and made
use of her cause as a vulnerable spot from which to assail
their opponents ; the third section consisted of the large
body of Nonconformists and Methodists who stood
stoutly by Caroline. At a casual glance it is surprising
to find the Bohemian Caroline with a host of Puritans
condoning her faults, exalting what virtues could be
found in her, and pleading passionately for her as a
grossly ill-used woman. The lack of all kindliness and
forbearance in her opponents, the crying injustice of the
verdicts which society and the King pronounced on her,
while the notorious offender sat in his high place un-
challenged, and the foolish woman to whom he had
shown little mercy was trampled in the mire, roused
the more manly righteous spirits to fierce wrath.
A house was taken for Caroline in Portland Place
from which she went shortly afterwards to Hammer-
smith to tenant Brandenburg House the house once
occupied by the Margravine of Anspach. She drove
about freely ; to Blackheath, to visit her friends in the
City, etc., etc. Once, in the neighbourhood of Kensington,
her carriage encountered that of her cousin and sis-
ter-in-law, Princess Sophia, the two passing without
exchanging a greeting.
Luckily for Caroline her case was conducted from
the first by able and eloquent men, who, while keeping
within the bounds which separate loyalty from treason,
spoke and wrote in her name as, it is hardly necessary
to say, she never could have done for herself. In one
of their protests mention was made of the most cruel
296 Sf IRosal Xafctes
stab which her enemies could give her in the omission
of her name, the name of the mother, from the styles
and titles of descent of Princess Charlotte engraved on
her coffin. Brougham, in referring to the insult of the
further omission of Caroline's name from the liturgy,
said that she was certainly present in the clause which
has to do with " the desolate and oppressed."
The fear felt by Caroline and her friends after they
knew that the evidence of the commission which had
sat at Milan with the intention of obtaining proof of
her guilt would be brought forward, was that her case
would be privately disposed of before a Government
commission, when her condemnation was a foregone
conclusion. She demanded an open trial by the Jaw
of the land, and eventually it was granted to her. She
was cited to appear before the House of Lords, Lord
Liverpool having succeeded in introducing his Bill of
" Pains and Penalties," which was tantamount to re-
quiring a sentence of degradation and divorce to be
pronounced on the Princess of Wales. Witnesses for
the prosecution were brought over from Italy, and her
counsel Denman and Brougham, who earned name and
fame by their splendid services, won permission to
cross-examine the prosecution's witnesses, to produce
their own, and to speak in Caroline's defence. She
announced her intention of being present in the House
of Lords on each day of the trial, and to enable her
to do so she came from Hammersmith and accepted
the loan of a house in St. James's Square.
Queen Charlotte had died two years before. She
had borne her share of the unpopularity caused by the
grievous dissensions in the royal family and by the
frantic zeal with which the masses had espoused the cause
of the Princess of Wales ; but at least the old Queen
was spared the shame of this criminal investigation.
Just before the trial began Caroline's old rival, the
Caroline of Brunswick 297
Duchess of York, whose life had been as honourable as
Caroline's was humiliating, peacefully breathed her last
at her house of Oatlands.
The trial began on August i yth, and was continued
till the beginning of September, to be renewed in
October. On the first day Caroline went early. She
was dressed quietly and in good taste, in black satin
with a white veil over a lace cap. Her former chamber-
lain, Sir W. Cell, and Mr. Keppel Craven, who had also
been in her suite, had returned to their posts. Her
sole gentlewoman was Lady Anne Hamilton. Alderman
Wood was in attendance. Caroline was led into the
House by Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt and one of her counsel,
Mr. Brougham ; she was conducted to the chair of
state placed for her, the peers rising to receive her.
The evidence was the old story of incredible folly l
accompanied by a total absence of refinement and
delicacy. But although the witnesses nearly all of
the lowest classes put the grossest construction on
Caroline's actions, every inference was founded on con-
jecture. There was not a definite proof of guilt
brought home to her. Indeed, her incorrigible indis-
cretions had been committed quite openly, without the
smallest attempt at disguise. They courted rather than
avoided publicity, and that alone was a strong indication
of her comparative innocence. To have believed
otherwise would have been to reckon her and her Italian
chamberlain Bergami, who had borne a good character
up to the time of entering her service, the most de-
praved wretches in existence.
The witnesses of good position who came forward
1 On one occasion the Princess is said to have presented herself at
a review in Germany with a half-pumpkin on her head. When the
Grand Duke, who was presiding, and whom she was scandalising,
ventured to remonstrate and to suggest a more decorous head-dress, she
answered that the weather was hot and that nothing kept her head so
cool and comfortable as a pumpkin.
298 Si IRosal XaMes
for Caroline did much to explain away or to invalidate
the base suspicions of the witnesses on the other side.
The comparative licence and gallantry of foreign
manners, which allowed a man in Bergami's position to
kiss his mistress's hand, etc., etc., was made plain to a
strictly English tribunal, the members of which even
in 1820 had little familiarity with the habits of other
nations. It was distinctly proved that some of the
assertions of the hostile witnesses were not merely
incredible, they were impossible. The House, how-
ever, when put to the vote sustained the Bill of Pains
and Penalties by an inconsiderable majority which at
the next stage of the proceedings was so much less
that the Government not daring to face the people,
all but up in arms for Caroline withdrew the Bill.
This step, though hailed as a triumph by the populace,
was of all measures the most disappointing and disarm-
ing to the Princess. As long as a battle was to be
fought she could fight it inch by inch, she could hope
for an overthrow of some part of the charges, she
might even plead for a new trial ; but this surrender of
the Bill by its promoters was a fatal compromise. It
left matters no better but rather worse than they had
been. It declared her neither innocent nor guilty, her
rights were still denied to her, her reputation instead
of being cleared was worse sullied than before. Lady
Charlotte Bury had a glimpse of Caroline leaving the
House after she had been made acquainted with the
withdrawal of the Bill, and could not forget the " dazed
look " with which, clutching the banister, she descended
the stair, seeing nothing.
After the first blow the Princess rallied ; she con-
tinued to sign herself " Caroline Regina" ; she claimed
the grant of a house in accordance with her rank ;
she insisted on her coronation taking place at the same
time as that of the King. She refused to touch the
Caroline of Brunswicfe 299
30,000 income settled upon her unless her name was
inserted in the liturgy ; but her poverty soon forced
her to yield on this point. She gave intimation that
she intended to go in state to St. Paul's to return
thanks for her deliverance from the machinations of
her enemies. She did go on November 29th in a white
velvet pelisse, in such state as her means would permit,
in a procession of the friendly Members of Parliament,
the Corporation, and many of the citizens of London,
the representatives of the trades and a large assortment
of the rabble. Personally she was attended by some of
the gentlemen of her former suite and by Lady Anne
Hamilton.
The clergy of St. Paul's, ranged between two fires
the will of the King and the will of the people admitted
her, but only promiscuously as it were, with the rest of
the heterogeneous throng. They held no special service
for her ; they even omitted the clause in the service
which may state the name of the man or the woman
who requests the thanks of the congregation for special
mercies.
Caroline held large receptions at Hammersmith, to
which a concourse of extraordinary guests resorted.
In addition to the wives of City magnates favourable to
her cause there were hosts of the humbler tradesmen's
wives totally unaccustomed to the circumstances in
which the women found themselves. According to
Lady Brownlow they flaunted in silks and satins pro-
cured for them by the leaders of the Princess's party, who
desired that her adherents in passing through the streets
should make as fine a show as possible ; but the bearing
of the wearers was not in keeping with their finery :
they lolled against the cushions, stared about them, and
thrust " their red elbows " out of the windows of the
hackney coaches. Lady Brownlow quotes a rumour
that Caroline was sometimes too intoxicated to receive
her company otherwise than stretched upon a sofa.
But it is necessary to remember that Lady Brownlow
was an ardent Tory, one to whom the King was the
King, who could do no wrong at least, who was not
answerable to any fellow-creature for his actions while
his wife was a foolish, disreputable woman of whom the
worst might easily be believed. Though Caroline was
notoriously self-indulgent in her recklessness, a prey to
every foible of the moment, from no other source do
we learn that she was degradingly intemperate. On the
other hand, the unfortunate woman's strong peculiar-
ities and wild eccentricities were exactly the foundation
on which a charge of drunkenness would be built.
On every side, apart from the flattery of the mob,
Caroline was met with obstacles, slights, and indignities.
The King refused to set aside a palace for her. He
would not consent to her coronation either when his
own for which the most elaborate preparations were
in train was being celebrated, or afterwards ; and as
a Queen-Consort of England can only be crowned when
the reigning sovereign chooses she was legally without
any power to enforce her demand. She established
herself in Cambridge House, Hammersmith, in tolerable
quietness till May, 1821.
In the meantime a new family connection in the
person of the Duchess of Kent, sister of Caroline's
son-in-law Prince Leopold and of her ally in Switzer-
land, Juliana, wife of the Grand Duke Constantine of
Russia, had taken up her residence in Kensington
Palace. She was a second time a widow, the mother
of a fatherless baby girl in whose interest the Duchess
must walk warily. She could not but regard with
fear and trembling the proximity of Caroline. To a
sensible, punctilious woman, the Princess of Wales, or
as she was now generally called whether crowned or
uncrowned " Queen Caroline," was, if nothing worse, a
Caroline of JBrunswtcft 301
royal randy unapproachable in rowdiness, outraging
propriety the one moment and clamouring for her dues
the next.
Caroline and her councillors agitated in vain for the
concession of permission for her to be present at the
coronation of George IV. The rite was to be performed
with much splendour and all the old picturesque customs
the procession from the Abbey to the Hall, the throw-
ing down of the gauntlet by the King's champion, the
royal banquet, etc., etc. Certainly there was a reasonable
apprehension of a violent interruption to the proceedings
and a public scandal, and the King had to be dosed
with sal volatile to steady his nerves before setting out.
Caroline would not relinquish her purpose of going
to Westminster for the occasion, though her health
was beginning to suffer from the life of unceasing
strife and contest which she had led for many months.
As early as six o'clock in the morning she drove
through the already crowded streets ; according to one
account she was loudly cheered, according to another
she was hooted and bidden go home as a disturber of
the public peace. She was in a carriage and six accom-
panied by Lord and Lady Hood and Lady Anne
Hamilton. Arrived at the Abbey amid a circle of ex-
cited spectators, she tried door after door, seeking to
procure admittance. There were those in the interior
of the building who declared they heard the ominous
knocking which shifted from one quarter to another.
Nemesis was very near George at that moment. The
skeleton in his house in the shape of his wife was
threatening to illustrate the " Mene, mene, tekel, up-
harsin " on his palace walls.
The uniform answer to Caroline's application was
that the officials had their orders ; nobody could enter
the Abbey without presenting such a ticket as Caroline
did not possess. " This is your Queen," said Lord
302 Sis racial XaMes
Hood. <f Yes, I am your Queen," repeated the poor
soul piteously ; " will you not admit me ? " But the
door-keepers knew too well the injunctions laid upon
them and were inflexible.
Caroline was in hysterical tears and laughter. Lord
Hood had a ticket which he offered to her, but it would
only admit one, and even she shrank from encountering
alone the ordeal which awaited her.
At last the poor Queen turned away and re-entered
her carriage. That repulse which convinced her of the
futility of the struggle was her death-blow. " She
seems to have lost her head," wrote Lady Brownlow.
" When going through the Horse Guards the officer on
guard ordered the men to present arms ; she jumped
up in her carriage and called out, * I am the Queen !
you dare not stop me ! ' Later in the day she was
seen at a back window of Curzon House talking with
two gentlemen and gesticulating like a fury."
The King was crowned with great magnificence,
presided at the coronation banquet and immediately
afterwards set out on a state visit to Ireland, where
he was the centre of fresh honours and rejoicings. The
Queen returned sick and sorry to her house at Hammer-
smith. One more effort she made to cast off the pall
which was closing in round her. She appeared again at
Drury Lane Theatre, and then she was seen no more
abroad in the surging maelstrom of friends and enemies
which had fought for and against her. The bone of
contention over which the nation had so long wrangled
was removed at once and for ever. On August 2nd
Caroline's medical attendants issued a bulletin to the
effect that she was suffering from internal inflam-
mation. The disease lasted only five more days and
was accompanied with great suffering, which she bore
courageously and patiently. Indeed, the dignity which
she could exercise on occasions stood her in good stead
Caroline of JSrunswicft 303
on her death-bed. If she had only lived as she died
posterity would have had a different record of her
history. She cherished no hope of her recovery and
expressed herself as not only resigned but willing to
leave a world in which her misfortunes had been many.
She arranged her affairs as far as her illness permitted
her, directing that the free-spoken diary which she had
kept in her earlier years at Kensington and Blackheath
should be burnt ; she signed her will and turned her
face to the wall. After two hours of unconsciousness
she died, on the morning of August yth, 1821, at the
age of fifty-three years. Lord and Lady Hood and
Lady Anne Hamilton were with her to the end.
The previous night had been one of wild tempest,
thunder and lightning, wind and rain. The news had
reached London that Queen Caroline lay dying. A
party of Methodists who had been among her followers
hired a boat and, rowing up the Thames as near as they
could reach to the house she occupied, sang hymns in
the fitful darkness and raging tempest, fondly trusting
that the sound might reach the fast dulling ears and carry
with it a sense of the rowers' sympathy and of the divine
mercy. It was such a gale as that which blew on the
night when Oliver Cromwell died, and it burst open
doors and windows in the dying woman's house.
The King was still at sea when he learnt the news
of the death of his wife. He had the decency to
leave the deck and remain in private for the next few
hours. l
A galling encumbrance was lifted from his path, and
he and his ministers for him were in haste to get rid
of Caroline's lifeless remains. Caroline herself had left
a request that her body should not be embalmed and
that it should be conveyed without delay to Brunswick.
1 There was no public mourning for the Queen, though the royal
family made the concession of wearing black.
304 Sf TRosal Xafctes
But the speed of the Government in complying with the
direction was so unprecedented and unseemly that the
dead Princess's executors protested over her coffin at
the insult thus gratuitously inflicted on her. The en-
venomed dispute was fated to be continued throughout
the ceremony of her funeral, till the lifeless body had
for ever quitted the shores of that England where
Caroline had met no welcome, found no peace, and out
of which her cold clay was hustled at last with as little
respect as if she had been proved to be the criminal she
was accused of being.
The Government's wary determination was that
there should be no public demonstration at the funeral,
and for that reason that the small cortege, guarded by
soldiers, should pass along by-ways and through suburbs
not by the main thoroughfares of London until it
should arrive at Romford, where the coffin would rest
for the night before going on to Harwich, from which
it was to be embarked for Brunswick.
But the populace were neither to be balked of a
spectacle nor to have their heroine shorn of any dis-
tinction which they could procure for her. It was as
if Caroline's stormy career was to be stormy to the
last ; even her breathless body was to give ground for
disorder and riot. Amidst torrents of rain the melan-
choly procession started from Hammersmith and got as
far as Church Street, Kensington. There the cavalcade
was stopped in an attempt to go up Bayswater Road by
a furious crowd collected in thousands, who, in spite of
the Life Guards, called out for the occasion, tore up the
road and rendered it impassable, so that the leaders of
the funeral party had no resource save to take the high
road to London, amidst shouts of triumph from their
opponents. Another encounter between the mob and
the military escort took place at the Kensington Gate of
Hyde Park, where amidst hoarse cries of " The City,
Caroline of Bmnswicfc 305
the City," the funeral was again turned back from travers-
ing the Edgware Road. A third obstruction was raised
farther along the route, when the Guards fired, two
persons were killed and several wounded. The people
were quelled for the moment, but at Tottenham Court
Road the struggle was renewed so successfully that the
funeral was forced down Drury Lane and into the
Strand. When the hearse passed under Temple Bar
its rude escort raised " a wild hurrah ! " in token that
they had carried their point and won the day.
Out in the open country it is said another funeral
train crossed Caroline's ; it was that of her ancient
enemy the banker Childe's heiress, Sarah, Countess of
Jersey.
At Harwich a frigate, two sloops of war, three brigs,
and a schooner were awaiting their consignment. The
coffin was taken by a barge to the schooner and by the
schooner to the frigate, the captain of which (Captain
Doyle) was the midshipman who had handed Caroline a
rope to help her to gain the deck of the Jupiter , on
which she had stood an ill-fated bride.
The little company of mourners consisted of Lord
and Lady Hood, Lady Anne Hamilton, Mr. Austin
(" Willikin " the adopted child, grown to manhood, to
whom Caroline had left the bulk of such worldly goods
as she possessed), 1 Dr. Lushington (one of her legal
advisers), his wife, and Count Vassali. The progress of
the funeral up the Elbe and the Schwinde to Stade was
very much the course Caroline had followed when she
came to England twenty-seven years before. Arrived
in Brunswick her poor remains were treated with affec-
tion and respect by her country people, many of whom
must have remembered the comely, open-hearted, open-
handed girl who had gone about freely among them.
One of the resting-places had been at Zell, where
He died soon afterwards.
20
s6 Ste IRopal OLaMes
Caroline's coffin had lain for a night on the tomb of
a Princess as wilful and unfortunate as Caroline her
aunt, her mother's sister Caroline Matilda of England,
Queen of Christian VII. of Denmark.
The last resting-place of all that was mortal of
Caroline was in the vault beneath the Church of St.
Blaize, Brunswick, between the coffins of her father who
fell at Jena and her brother who fell at Quatre Bras.
Dr. Doran vouched for the fact that there is still to be
seen on Caroline's coffin the marks of the nails which
had fastened on the plate that was removed in the
course of the journey between London and Brunswick.
The inscription on the plate had been according to
Caroline's injunctions : "Here lies Caroline of Brunswick,
the injured Queen of England." The second plate
substituted for the first bore only the style and titles
of the deceased.
There is no match to be found for Caroline among
the royal ladies of Hanover, with the single exception
of Sophia, the wife of George I. Even Sophia, if she
was more criminal than Caroline, was not so out-
rageously deficient in all dignity, delicacy, and common
sense. Without being wicked Caroline, in her boister-
ous self-assertion, reckless bravado, and utter disregard
of appearances and consequences, was a scandal to the
right-judging public, even when a portion of it recog-
nising her wrongs figured as her partisans. She was a
sore trial to all connected with her who were capable of
measuring and condemning her senseless outrages of pro-
priety, her grievous sins against good taste, her egregious
vanity, bounce, and bluster, together with her senseless,
hopeless struggle with the overwhelming power and
authority of her foes (chief among whom was her un-
worthy husband).
The Electress Sophia was wise and virtuous. Caroline,
the beautiful, witty wife of George II., though a coarse-
Caroline of Brunswfcft so 7
spoken representative of a coarse generation and
curiously callous on many points which are to us of
the first importance, which we still view as sacred, even
when their sweetness is turned to bitterness, was in the
main a good and dutiful woman a devoted, all-indul-
gent wife, an affectionate mother of those children who
were not, like her son Fritz, her unnatural enemies.
Augusta of Saxe-Coburg, her daughter-in-law, if narrow-
minded and harsh-tempered, was a good submissive
wife to the most trying of princely mates and a good
mother to a family of unruly children. Charlotte of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz was good throughout, an example
of solid worth, generous dignity, and active benevolence
to her subjects, of whom only the lawless and dissolute
held her in small esteem. The younger Caroline's
sisters-in-law (save only the Duchess of Cumberland),
the Duchesses of York, Clarence, Kent, and Cambridge,
were honourable women. The mouth-pieces of the
nation described them satirically to begin with as
" amiable ladies who spoke very little English," but ere
long treated them with cordial respect, and finally with
loyal affection. They might have served as examples
to their feather-brained, coarse-grained sister-in-law who
was their senior, who looked forward to being their
Queen. But Caroline was incorrigible and fulfilled her
sorry destiny. The pity of it was, when we come to
regard the evidence calmly and dispassionately, that
Caroline, with all her faults and extravagances, was
good-natured, kind-hearted, and generous, guilty only
of supreme imprudence and wanton indiscretion, and of
the additional offence, for which she was not altogether
to blame, of receiving the rampant idolatry of the mob,
which provoked cooler-headed, more reasonable lookers-
on to recoil from the idol and her cause. Never was
the force of the command which bids men and women
avoid the very appearance of evil more strikingly
so8 Sij TCosal Xafcfes
illustrated than in the life of Caroline of Brunswick,
who in her audacity and wrong-headedness positively
courted calumny, and laid herself out with the malicious
short-sighted glee of a perverse child to be misjudged
and defamed.
VI.
ADELAIDE OF SAXE-MEININGEN, WIFE
OF WILLIAM IV.
309
AUTHORITIES
Dr. Doran, Lady Brownlow, Lady Bedingfield, Mrs. Crawford, etc.
ADELAIDE OF SAXE-MEININGEN, QUEEN OF WILLIAM IV. (SOON AFTER
HER HUSBAND'S DEATH).
CHAPTER I.
THE DUCHESS.
ADELAIDE OF SAXE-MEININGEN was the eldest child,
born in 1792, after ten years of marriage, of Duke
George of Saxe-Meiningen and his Duchess (Princess
Louise of Hohenlohe-Langenburg). Duke George
was an honest patriotic German of somewhat cultivated
tastes. He showed his patriotism by gallantly holding
his little duchy against French invasion, and his culture,
such as it was, by seeking the friendship of Schiller,
Jean Paul Richter, etc. His genial German affinities
came out in his friendly relations with his burgher
subjects and with the country people around his little
capital.
He had his mother buried in the town churchyard,
saying she was worthy to lie among her subjects. He
died after a short illness in 1803, leaving the widow
guardian to his only son Bernard, a child of three, and
to his two daughters, the Princesses Adelaide and Ida,
of whom Adelaide was then a young girl of eleven
years of age. " Altenstein, the simple and unpretending
home of Queen Adelaide's childhood," was visited in
later days by Lady Brownlow in the suite of the Queen.
Lady Brownlow remarks on the extraordinary plainness
and simplicity of the furniture and appointments of
that summer palace of a German Prince, at which an
English eye, accustomed to any ordinary squire's house,
would have been astonished ; and on the bedroom with
its uncarpeted floor, and two small beds with white
312 Sf TCoEal Xa&ies
dimity curtains, which had been shared by the Queen
and the Duchess Ida her sister till they married. A fine
English maid would have turned up her nose at them. 1
The widowed Duchess of Saxe-Meiningen was an able
and sensible woman who was qualified in conjunction
with her councillors to maintain the courageous and
prudent policy of her husband which saved his duchy
ifrom French devastation. Such a woman was likely
to rear her daughters with good judgment. It is said
that it was Queen Charlotte who selected Princess
Adelaide, a womanly Princess of twenty-six years of
age, as a fitting wife for the Duke of Clarence at the
time when the death of Princess Charlotte and the
absence of heirs to the throne in the third generation
caused the nearly simultaneous marriages of three of
Charlotte's younger sons, the Dukes of Clarence, Kent,
and Cambridge. Of these three, the Duke of Clarence
stood nearest to the throne, coming next in age to the
now childless Prince Regent and the equally childless
Duke of York. No doubt Charlotte, like the wise
woman she was, gave due weight to the Duke of
Clarence's comparative nearness to the throne. After
the terrible fiasco of the marriage of George, Prince of
Wales, and Princess Caroline of Brunswick it was
doubly necessary that the future Queen should be an
upright, reasonable, well-disposed young woman. It
was these qualities in Princess Adelaide which decided
Queen Charlotte, for the selected bride was not beauti-
ful, not even pretty. Neither was she accomplished.
She was not a fine musician like the Duchess of Kent,
and her attempts at art were of the flimsiest description,
even in that generation when what were classed as
" feminine accomplishments " were superficial to the
last degree. Princess Adelaide had ordinary features,
1 Article in Temple Bar on " Slight Reminiscences of a Septuagen-
arian," by Lady Brownlow.
Hoelaifce of Saje*/lDeintn^en 313
a bad skin and complexion which some of her de-
tractors called " scorbuticness " and others a " ginger-
bread complexion," weak eyes, and hair of that trying
shade of yellow which is more akin to lemon than to
gold colour ; yet the whole was redeemed by the
pleasant, friendly expression of the face. She was very
fond of what was then called " carpet work," in which
she was a model of industry. She was an adept in the
construction of the needle-cases, card-racks, watch-
pockets, etc., which figured at bazaars and were the
usual stock of " the repositories " for the work of
poor ladies. 1
What was of much more consequence than beauty or
trifling accomplishments, Adelaide was thoroughly well-
principled, affectionate, sweet-tempered, not difficult to
please, not exacting in her requirements, brought up as
she had been, in the land of sauer-kraut and lager-
beer, among bluff German Princes and officials whose
morals and manners alike left a good deal to be desired.
She was willing to make the best of things and to con-
done and ignore much that a more fastidious woman,
perhaps a woman of higher standards and ideals and
more delicate, sensitive instincts, could hardly have
endured.
The bridegroom was over fifty, a weather-beaten
sailor, not destitute of kindness of heart, but the least
well-mannered of the family, priding himself as he did
on what was then considered the bluntness and rough-
ness characteristic of a sailor. His previous life had
1 She was mistress of " scumbling," Padua work, Berlin wool tapes-
try, etching, flower-painting (such as it was in amateur hands), and
knitted window-curtains, etc. "There was at the house of a rich
Quaker lady where I was often taken as a child quite a collection of
artistic knick-knacks made by Queen Adelaide and her sister Ida,
Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, for fancy fairs." Adelaide decorated a pair
of letter-racks with likenesses in water-colours of some beautiful
children. "The royal womanly hands were never idle with their
owner's will." Emily Crawford in the " Contemporary"
314 Sij IRopat Xaoies
been lax in virtue and dissipated after the fashion of his
elder brothers' lives. It must have revolted an innocent
young Princess if she had not in accordance with the
precepts of her education and her generation resolutely
shut her eyes and turned her back to it.
The Duke of Clarence is supposed to have simply
acquiesced in his mother's choice for him. He made
no attempt to see and make the acquaintance of his
bride, as the Dukes of Kent and Cambridge did in refer-
ence to their brides, and when Parliament refused to
grant him the ,10,000 annual addition to his income
which was asked for him and insisted that he should be
satisfied with the supplementary thousands bestowed on
his younger brothers on their marriages, he flatly re-
fused for a time to go on with the contract. The
bride may not have realised the uncomplimentary in-
difference and resistance of her bridegroom ; anyhow
she arrived in London with her mother on a July even-
ing in 1818. The two ladies took up their quarters
at Grillon's Hotel, Albemarle Street, for Adelaide
also had to face the discouraging reception accorded
repeatedly to foreign brides entering the House of
Hanover. Nobody awaited her, nobody received her.
The Duke of Clarence was out of town, the Prince
Regent was at dinner at Carlton House, the old
Queen was in one of the last stages of her illness, the
Princesses waiting on her were not expected to come
forward on the occasion. The two Princes, the Regent
and the Duke of Clarence, were sent for, and both these
stout, elderly gentlemen had the grace to obey the call,
and to hurry to welcome the stranded Duchess and her
daughter. No offence was taken and no bad impression
made. The Duke of Clarence was nothing if he was
not hearty and hilarious, in the style of the stage Jack
Tar, and he was pleased by the unaffected gentleness and
good humour of his future wife. The Prince Regent
Hoelatoe of Saje*/lDefntngen 315
could, when he chose, be the most gracious and agreeable
of hosts. The little party fraternised admirably, and sat
talking and laughing, advancing in common liking, till
far into the night.
The marriage, as has been said, was a double
marriage, the Duke of Kent who had gone to Germany
for his Duchess, marrying her there according to the
Lutheran form was to be married by the Archbishop
of Canterbury from the service of the Church of
England at the same time and place that the knot was
tied between the Duke of Clarence and Princess
Adelaide. The two marriages were celebrated at the
old country palace of Kew under the roof with Queen
Charlotte, but not in her presence, since she was too
ill for the effort and could but have a brief glimpse of
her daughter-in-law before the Duke and Duchess of
Kent returned to Kensington Palace and the Duke and
Duchess of Clarence, after waiting to drink tea on
the lawn, started for St. James's Palace, followed by the
company's cheers led by no less a person than the
Prince Regent, the sound of the rejoicing rising to
the old Queen's sick-room.
The Duke and Duchess of Clarence repaired soon
afterwards to Hanover, where the Duke acted as the
Prince Regent's representative.
The details of the last parting between the young
Duchess and Queen Charlotte were told with simple
good feeling by Queen Adelaide to her friend and lady
of the bedchamber, Lady Bedingfield, in whose diary
(included in The Jerningham Letters) we have a
good picture of the Court of King William and his
Queen. The old Queen had always been good to the
unassuming, amiable young Duchess, who on going to
bid her mother-in-law good-bye would fain have
thanked her for her goodness, only the Duchess knew
the Queen did not like to speak of her health or to
3 i6 Sis TCosal Xabies
take leave of anybody. After the Duchess had gone
she stole back, fearing that she would never see the
eueen again, and opened the door softly that she might
ok on her once more. The Queen heard (and
doubtless understood) ; she recalled the Duchess, but
merely spoke on indifferent subjects, pretending not to
notice the younger woman's sorrow. The Queen did
not survive the parting many weeks.
In the meantime the Court and fashionable gossip was
all about the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth, the
mature bride of forty-eight summers, a clever, high-
spirited woman. She had latterly felt galled by the
somewhat rigid yoke under which Queen Charlotte
kept her daughters to the last ; and without question the
Princess dreaded beforehand, as her mother also feared
it, the fate likely to be that of the unmarried Princesses
left in a manner dependent on their elder brother,
the Prince Regent. Therefore Princess Elizabeth, who
had been one of the handsomest as she was the most
gifted of the sisters in the days when Louis Philippe
of Orleans was faithless to her, who was now as big
for a woman as her brothers were for men, was resolute
in marrying late in life. Report had it that she even
entertained a romantic attachment for her rather uncouth
elderly bridegroom, the Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg,
" blushing rosy red " when he entered the room. The
English public exaggerated his uncouthness and made
game of it. They were not then in a particularly
suave humour with regard to the predominance of the
German element at Court. As for the poor Homburg
Prince there was no end to the amusing, palpably in-
vented or distorted stories told of him. It was said
meaningly of the man who walked stockingless in
his military boots that the servants had to immerse
him several times in a warm bath. Not smoking
but snuff-taking was then the accepted practice of the
Hfcelatfce of Sa?:e*/lDeininaen 317
majority of the gentlemen of England, and the gossip
that the German Prince smoked " four pipes a day "
was listened to with hearty disapprobation, followed by
proportionate approval when it was alleged that the
English courtiers among whom he was established for
the time, had kept him for the three days previous to
his marriage without suffering him to smoke. When he
and the Princess drove out to spend their honeymoon at
Frogmore, where Princess Elizabeth and Mary Moser l
had painted a room with garlands of roses and lilies in the
old happy days when the King was sane, and the Queen,
unburdened with years, cares, and sorrows, was less
stringent in her demands on the absolute submission
of her daughters, the unlucky foreigner, unable to bear
the motion of an English carriage, was forced to leave
his new-made wife within, and to take a seat without
on the box beside the coachman. In spite of the
sarcasms Princess Elizabeth did not tire of her bargain ;
she was as loyal to him as her mother was to King
George. She was happy, loved, and honoured in his
beautiful castle of Homburg, from which she re-visited
England when her brother William was King, and
where her younger sister Princess Augusta an adven-
turous maiden Princess for those days visited the
Landgrave and Landgravine on her way to see the
Princess Royal, the Dowager-Queen of Wurtemberg.
The two sisters returned together to Homburg, and
three English Princesses sojurned for several happy
months in 1823 in the old castle.
Five years before, at Hanover in 1819, three months
previous to the birth of Princess Victoria at Kensington
Palace, another baby Princess was born, the child of the
Duke and Duchess of Clarence. She only survived a few
hours. In the end of 1 8 20 a second Clarence Princess was
born. She was christened " Elizabeth," and her parents
1 A contemporary of Angelica Kauffman's famous for flower painting.
318 Sl IRosal
fondly hoped she would live to be another " Good Queen
Bess " with a difference. But she died at the age of
three months. At the request of the sorrowing Duke
and Duchess the sculptor Chantrey reproduced in
marble the sleeping figure of the little child.
When the Duke and Duchess of Clarence returned to
England they had apartments in St. James's Palace,
while their country-house, where they stayed principally,
was Bushey Park. There probably Adelaide's happiest
years were spent. She helped the Duke to keep their
household expenses within the limits of his income, and
at the same time she induced him to go hand-in-hand
with her in generosity to their poorer neighbours. She
was content to live quietly with her elderly husband.
She showed much friendship and sympathy for her
sister-in-law the widowed Duchess of Kent, who was
staying with her baby at Kensington Palace. When
the Clarences were at St. James's the Duchess went
almost every day to Kensington to console and
encourage her friend and country-woman and to fondle
the child which was to take the place of her own dead
children. Adelaide, like the Duchess of Kent, seems
to have kept aloof (and who need wonder at the attitude
even in a simple-minded, kind-hearted woman !) from
the miserable Queen Caroline, then fighting desperately
for her rights, and on the eve of passing before a higher
tribunal.
At Bushey the Duchess of Clarence was able to re-
ceive long visits from her sister, Princess Ida, Duchess
of Saxe- Weimar. (Lady Brownlow thus describes their
brother Duke Bernard of Saxe- Weimar : " The Duke
was a prodigious man, six feet four at least in height,
and large in proportion ; all was round about him, round
body, legs and arms, a round face, a small button of
a nose and a small mouth ; he appeared to me the beau
ideal of a Brobdignag Cupid.")
ot Sase^flDeinfngen 319
One of the Duchess of Saxe-Weimar's children,
Prince Edward of Saxe- Weimar, was born at Bushey,
and became as a son to the childless Duchess of
Clarence He grew up in England, was naturalised,
and has long served in the English Army.
CHAPTER II.
THE QUEEN.
ON June 24th, 1830, nearly twelve years after her
marriage, when Adelaide was thirty-eight years of age,
she became Queen-Consort by the death of George IV.
and the succession to the throne of his next surviving
brother the Duke of Clarence as William IV. It is
said she burst into tears when the news was announced
to her and gave the prayer-book she held in her hand
as a remembrance of the day to the messenger who
brought the tidings. Certainly, the duties and obliga-
tions laid upon her by King William's accession were
heavy and irksome to a woman of quiet habits, simple
tastes, and somewhat delicate health. Though she dis-
charged the obligations with cheerful conscientiousness
she aged manifestly under the burden. Happily for
her, William, whose earlier years had hardly promised
such a consummation, was, to his lasting credit, a faith-
ful and kind husband to her. Apparently he never
ceased to marvel, with respect and admiration, at his
wife's virtues, and to praise them whenever he had the
opportunity. Parliament settled on her a hundred
thousand a year, with Marlborough House and Bushey
Park for residences if she survived her husband. The
King himself was the happy bearer of the information,
which he gladly confirmed by promptly appointing her
perpetual Ranger of the Park. Many stories (highly
welcome to those of the nation who had loved to hear
of the honest attachment between King George and
320
Hfcelaffce of Sae*/lDefnin0en 32 i
Queen Charlotte and of the peaceful domesticity of
their lives) were in circulation of the somewhat similar
frank heartiness and unaffected simplicity of the old
sailor King and his Queen and their menage.
The joint coronation took place on September 8th,
1831. There was much excitement in connection with
the bringing forward of the Reform Bill, and consider-
able distress from the ravages of cholera throughout the
country, and the King and Queen were anxious that
the ceremonial in which they were to play their part
should be as unpretending and inexpensive as possible
a great contrast to the coronation of George IV. We
have a graphic description of the scene from Lady
Brownlow, who was already appointed a lady-in-waiting.
Before her marriage, when as Lady Emma Mount
Edgcumbe she had resided with her father at Twicken-
ham, a friendship had sprung up between her and the
Duchess of Clarence at Bushey. Lady Brownlow
writes : " Whether the irritable state of the public
feeling, or a desire for economy actuated the King and
his ministers, I know not, but the coronation was very
different from the last. No assembling in Westminster
Hall of King, Lords, and Commons, to form a pro-
cession to the Abbey ; no banquet, no great officers
of state riding up the Hall to see the dishes placed on
the King's table ; no champion of England on horse-
back armed cap-a-pie, throwing his gauntlet and defying
any who denied the right of the King to the throne ;
all these interesting old customs were omitted, the
religious ceremony in the Abbey being the only one
performed as on former occasions. In this there was,
indeed, an improvement in the general effect, for as a
Queen also was to be crowned all the peeresses wore
their robes and put on their coronets when the Queen's
crown was placed on her head by the Archbishop.
Then my duties as Lady-in-waiting were to be
21
322 Si iRosal Xafcfes
performed. With my coronet tottering unfastened on
my head, I had to wipe her Majesty's forehead after
the anointing, first with a piece of cotton wool, then
with a piece of cambric ; after which I fastened the
crown by inserting four long diamond-headed pins into
holes made for them. The cotton wool and cambric
I carried in a little white velvet and gold purse-like
bag hanging to my girdle; and the pins were stuck
in my dress ; so I had all ready and there was no
bustle ; yet I never felt so nervous in my life, for I
knew that thousands of eyes were observing me."
Dr. Doran gives the Queen's dress " a gold gauze
over a white satin petticoat, with a diamond stomacher,
a purple velvet train lined with white satin having a
rich border of gold and ermine."
The crown was made up at Adelaide's own expense
of the jewels already in her possession. It was a small
coronet composed of diamonds and pearls. Dr. Doran
states it was too small, and had it not been for the
presence of mind of two of the ladies-in-waiting (who
resolve themselves into one, Lady Brownlow, prepared
for the emergency) it would have fallen from the head
on which the Archbishop of Canterbury had merely
rested it. The knob of hair worn on the top of the
head was there in order that the crown might be drawn
firmly over it.
Lady Brownlow proceeds to describe the homage of
the Lords " a very impressive part of the ceremony.
When the Duke of Wellington in his turn ascended the
steps and knelt before the King to do his homage, there
arose a simultaneous cheer from all parts of the Abbey.
It was perhaps wrong, but the effect was electric and
thrilling at this irrepressible outburst of feeling as the
hero of a hundred fights, the true patriot, the loyal and
devoted subject, took the oath of allegiance to his
Sovereign." The Duke of Wellington was a personal
of Saje*/lDeinin^en 323
friend of the great Tory lady, and she held him in the
highest esteem. She did not extend her favour to Lord
Brougham, for whom she had an aversion equal to that
she had entertained for Queen Caroline. When fresh
cheers were raised for various Whig leaders among the
peers, she did not hesitate to attribute the ovation to
Brougham ; she declared he acted as fugle-man to the
applauders. She called his appearance ludicrous in the
extreme. " His ugly features, his twitching nose, his
chancellor's wig hanging on each side of his face, sur-
mounted by his coronet, made him resemble the old lion
in the royal arms, and it was impossible to look at
him without laughing. Even my good Queen, whose
feelings of devotion were very strong, confessed to me
afterwards that she was so struck with the glimpse she
had of his absurd ugliness that she could scarcely refrain
from laughing and therefore never ventured to look in
his direction again. The ceremony being ended, their
Majesties returned to the palace in the same order in
which they came, the King and Queen in the state coach
attended by the Duchess of Gordon, acting Mistress of
the Robes, and myself as lady-in-waiting. The proces-
sion was, I believe, a grand one ; but I saw nothing of it,
and it was considered a poor substitute for that to and
from Westminster Hall and the Abbey, with the revival
of old feudal customs. In short, John Bull was dis-
contented, though grudging expense and calling for
economy, and called this 'a half-crownztion.' In^the
evening there was a great dinner at St James's Palace,
and my lot was to be handed in by Prince Talleyrand the
French Ambassador ! J Princess Victoria was not present
at the coronation, the delicacy of her health being-given
as the excuse for her absence."
1 At the first great drawing-room after the coronation the Queen
told Lady Bedingfield she had to put something round her knees to
lessen the fatigue of bending them so often.
324 Sij 1Roal Xafcies
The ferment in the country continued. William had
been reckoned on the Whig side, and when he hesitated
in the promotion of Liberal measures in the reform of
election to Parliament above all, it was supposed that
the Queen, born and brought up in a country which had
suffered severely from the consequences of the French
Revolution, was influencing her husband against what
she might consider revolutionary politics. This was
loudly said and largely believed of the modest, retiring
woman, who had a difficulty in asserting herself and did
not know where to stop when the question was of being
kind and obliging, instead of standing firm in opposition
to the pressure brought to bear on her, the woman who
spent so much of her time plying her needle. A tide
of unpopularity set in against the gentle, friendly Queen. 1
Occasionally the Princesses, those daughters of George III.,
the Duchess of Gloucester and the Princesses Augusta
and Sophia, who remained in the country were associated
with Adelaide in the popular dislike, because they too
were supposed to influence their brother, the King. At
other times poor Adelaide was singled out in party
speeches by the press as forming the most undesirable
contrast, in her interference in public affairs, to Queen
Charlotte, who had never meddled in politics which
were altogether beyond her v sphere. Queen Adelaide
was written and spoken of as " the foreign woman
whom the nation may have too easily adopted." There
was an open comparison made between her position and
that of Marie Antoinette, and threats uttered of a like
destruction which would befall Adelaide if she persisted
in her supposed opposition to a great and necessary
reform. So fierce was the tempest that leaders on both
sides, able and experienced men, dreaded a revolution.
" A hooting, yelling mob followed the most obnoxious
1 The Tories did something to provoke it by loudly calling her their
Queen.
Boelaffce of Saje*/IDefntngen 325
member of the royal family the Duke of Cumberland
when he drove down Constitution Hill one morning.
There were nightly disturbances with volleys of stones,
brought into the streets in carts for the purpose, flung at
the windows of the principal Tories. The windows of
the Duke of Wellington at Apsley House were shattered,
and he caused iron shutters to be fixed to the windows."
On George III.'s birthday, June 4th, the Reform
Bill passed and London was illuminated in spite of the
authorities, the populace smashing the windows of all
the houses which did not " light up." Lady Brownlow
describes the progress of the Queen from the " ancient
Concert Rooms " to which she had gone that evening.
Lady Brownlow had previously dined with her Majesty
at Clarence House. "The King had a dinner for
gentlemen only at St. James's, at which my father and
Lord Brownlow had the honour of being present. As
I attended the Queen downstairs to her carriage, Sir
Herbert Taylor came out of the King's room, and I
said to him, * So there are to be illuminations to-night.'
c Oh no,' he replied ; the King has spoken to Lord
Melbourne, who has promised to check on the part of
the Government anything of the sort.' ' That is all
very fine,' was my answer, ( but depend upon it there
will be illuminations, for I have seen preparations at
the Lord Chancellor's [Brougham's] and other houses.'
Sir Herbert shook his head and I wagged mine, being
perfectly convinced that I was right ; and so events
proved that I was. Well, we proceeded to Hanover
Square, the Landgravine of Hesse-Homburg (Princess
Elizabeth) in the carriage with the Queen, and myself
in attendance, the rest of the suite following in another
carriage. On these occasions the Queen had no escort ;
but a guard of honour was stationed at the Rooms.
All went harmoniously inside, and we supposed the
same was the case outside, till the officer on guard
326 5i racial Xafcies
came into the royal box to inform her Majesty that
the mob were breaking the windows of the houses not
lighted up ; and the names of two or three of the
King's guests were mentioned whose windows had
already been broken. This was not a pleasant hearing ;
but still less pleasant was what awaited us as her Majesty
drove down Regent Street on her return to the palace.
Both sides of the street were blazing with illuminations
and transparencies, the intervening space filled with
a frenzied mob shouting Reform for ever ! ' and
waving their greasy hats into the Queen's carriage,
which was forced to go at a foot's pace. The Land-
gravine, opposite to whom I sat, was grinding her teeth
and stamping on my feet with rage ; and I confess I
was equally angry, and also alarmed for the Queen, who
was not then popular, and I felt that a few disloyal and
exciting words might change the mood of the frantic
people around, to whose tender mercies she was left,
for not a policeman was to be seen. Most thankful
was I when we reached St. James's in safety. There
we found the King much disturbed and displeased ; and
with reason, for not only had the ministers broken faith
with him in not trying to check the illuminations, but
the Admiralty was lighted up behind its gates, and
Lansdowne House in its garden. The unaccountable
absence of the police was explained by the fact that
they had all been confined to their stations, to be ready
when wanted."
1833 was not better than its predecessor so far as
the relations of the King and Queen to the country
were concerned. On the grand stand at Ascot the
King was struck on the forehead with a stone thrown
by a man in the crowd. A week later Queen Adelaide
was treated with marked rudeness at a review in Hyde
Park. " The King looked old and infirm, the Queen
depressed and apprehensive."
Boelafoe of SaEC^flDefnincjen 327
During the same season an ominous visitor passed
through London. The Duchesse d'Angouleme, "the
daughter of sorrows," whose father, mother, and aunt
had been guillotined, was a second time a fugitive from
France, which had finally cast out the main line of the
Bourbons. Queen Adelaide went to greet her and was
not cheered by her story.
On the night of the Queen's birthday there was
such a dense fog in London that the usual illumination
was " blotted out."
At a small card-party at the Pavilion, Brighton, the
Queen was playing whist with Mr. Greenwood, the
army agent, against the King and Sir Herbert Taylor,
when Mr. Greenwood, seized with illness, was carried
into the next room and died in a quarter of an hour,
the company receiving a painful shock.
In 1834 the storm had blown past and matters began
to mend. The Queen visited her relations in Germany,
and on her return met a hearty welcome from the
people, who began to see how foolishly and cruelly she
had been calumniated. Adelaide and the King resumed
the even tenor of their way which had been practised
at Bushey Park, as Duke and Duchess of Clarence,
before the business of the State troubled them. They
fed thousands of the poor in Windsor Park and looked
on at the feasting. They shopped together like ordin-
ary mortals. When the Queen attended a Brighton
fancy fair and saw an infirm old lady drop her reticule,
her Majesty, before she could be stopped, stooped
and picked it up. The couple went visiting freely
among their subjects especially at Brighton among
the families of the old admirals who had been
William's shipmates. The King and Queen were
fond of Brighton and the sea. They were the last
sovereigns to reside for any length of time at the
monstrosity of a Pavilion which George IV. erected for
328 Sij IRosal
a marine palace. William and Adelaide still gave balls
and dinners there.
It is difficult to abide by the juste milieu. Kindly,
not over- particular, good-natured Queen Adelaide erred
in receiving at her Court on the most familiar terms the
numerous handsome, but with the exception of Lord
Adolphus, rowdy sons and daughters of William and
the popular actress in comedy, Mrs. Jordan. These
ladies and gentlemen had by the King's decree been
ennobled ; the eldest son was created Earl of Munster,
the younger brothers and sisters took the name of Fitz-
Clarence and were promoted to the rank of the sons and
daughters of Dukes. Relying on their father's affection
and on the Queen's indulgence, they swarmed about
Windsor and the Pavilion, out-talked everybody, and
helped to lend to the royal household a loud, free-and-
easy character which was far from a desirable attribute
for such a circle. It was with reason that the Duchess
of Kent kept her young daughter, Princess Victoria, as
much as possible away from Court. The King and
Queen, remembering the old friendly relations, were
hurt and offended. On one of the few occasions when
the Duchess and her daughter were present at a royal
banquet the King, in making a speech, gave way to his
temper and so far forgot himself as to publicly reproach
the Duchess of Kent for withdrawing the heir to the
throne from his control and notice. The poor Duchess,
thus assailed, gave way and wept, the girl Princess join-
ing in her mother's tears, while Queen Adelaide was
greatly distressed, and the rest of the company were
covered with confusion.
Nowhere have we so lifelike a picture of Windsor in
its lights and shades in King William and Queen
Adelaide's days as in the diary of Lady Bedingfield, one
of Queen Adelaide's bedchamber women and eventually
a lady-in-waiting till the Queen's death. The diary
Hfcelatfce of Sase^/lfceiningen 329
or rather what survives of it has been preserved among
the Jerningham Letters, Lady Bedingfield being by birth
a Jerningham. The intimacy between the Queen
and Lady Bedingfield began earlier and was even
closer than that between the Queen and Lady Brownlow.
It affords one of the many proofs of the amiable and
constant nature of the Queen. Lady Bedingfield with
her husband and family had gone abroad to retrench,
and, as they were Roman Catholics of an old Norfolk
family, to educate and establish in foreign service some
sons of the house. The Bedingfields spent several years
in Ghent, where they became well acquainted with the
Duchess Ida of Saxe- Weimar and through her with her
elder sister the Duchess of Clarence. By the time the
Duchess became Queen Lady Bedingfield had returned
to England and was a widow with her family scattered
and her income small. Adelaide immediately appointed
her former friend one of the women of her bedchamber.
The appointment was not calculated to be popular on
account of the lady's religion in fact, she passed the
time when she was not in waiting on the Queen as
parlour-boarder in a convent at Hammersmith.
Between court and convent was a unique division
of life in England for centuries past ; but it did
not hinder the appointment or bring it to a close,
neither did it spoil the wits or the affections of such
an excellent and brightly intelligent woman as Lady
Bedingfield.
The Queen sent for Lady Bedingfield as the appro-
priate person to go and meet the Duchess of Saxe-
Weimar, who was coming on a visit with six of her
children and was expected that morning at Tower
Stairs. Before giving Lady Bedingfield her instructions
the Queen kissed her and seated her on the ottoman
beside herself. By a mistake Lady Bedingfield was kept
waiting for an hour at Buckingham Palace and then
330 Sf$ IRopal XaMes
found that Lord Howe and Lady Mayo had set out
without her ; but she was determined to obey the
Queen's orders. A footman brought her a crust of
bread at her request and a coach-and-four arrived for
her to follow the others. She rushed out calling to
some one who spoke to her from behind, " I can't
stay," and then found, to her dismay, it was the Queen
following her, laughing. Preceded by a man on
horseback the royal carriage-and-four trotted rapidly
along Pall Mall, all eyes curiously inspecting the
occupant, people standing on tip-toe to see the amused
Lady Bedingfield. Surrounded by Beef-eaters and
Guards she entered the gate of the Tower with its
historical and tragic memories, to discover that Captain
Fitz-Clarence's yacht with the Duchess and family had
arrived and that Lord Howe and Lady Mayo had gone
on board. Lady Bedingfield resolved to do likewise,
and was not to be prevented, she confesses, by Lord
Howe, who had returned and told her the Duchess
was coming on shore and it was not worth while for
her to be rowed to the ship. When he saw she
would do it he good-naturedly escorted her in a boat ;
midway he cried out in distress that he saw the barge
coming and that he ought to be at the Tower Stairs to
receive the Duchess. Nimbly the boat was turned, and
rowed back so rapidly that the Tower Stairs were
reached in time. The Duchess's only anxiety was to
see her lame daughter land. The Princess was raised
in a chair on the bargemen's shoulders and put into a
chariot with her mother ; a procession of eight royal
carriages came next, making a grand show as they
turned the corners of the streets.
At the Court ball on the birthday of the Duchess
of Gloucester the Queen wore a magnificent coronet
of diamonds and carried a nosegay of diamonds (in
the style of Queen Charlotte). Lady Bedingfield
Hfcelatfce of Sae*flDeinfn(jen 331
had to put off her widow's weeds and wear white
according to etiquette on royal birthdays.
At the Queen's request Lady Bedingfield went to the
Pavilion, Brighton, to preside for a time over the
establishment of the young invalid Princess of Saxe-
Weimar, on whom sea baths were tried in order in
restore to her the power of walking. On the last
birthday she had sat down, which the uninitiated
viewed as a great liberty ; but in reality all that the poor
Princess, who was wasting away, could do, was to walk
one or two steps, and that only occasionally. Lady
Bedingfield had to write every night to report progress
to the Queen ; but instead of recovering Princess
Louisa took chicken-pox ! Then Lady Bedingfield
had the opportunity of remarking how the fear of
infection for their children kept away the King's
daughter Lady Sophia Sidney and another lady, and
how that fear vanished on the arrival of the King,
Queen, and Court at the Pavilion. The royal party
consisted of the King and Queen, the Princess Augusta,
the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, Prince George
of Cambridge, Princess Louisa of Saxe- Weimar, four
of the King's daughters (Lady Erroll, Lady Sophia
Sidney, Lady Augusta Erskine, and Lady Mary Fox
all well married), Mademoiselle D'Este (daughter of
the Duke of Sussex and Lady Augusta Murray and
afterwards Lady Truro), with the ladies and gentlemen
in attendance.
The King was like a bluff old admiral who looked up
other admirals and summoned them and their woman-
kind unceremoniously to dine or to spend a social
evening at the Pavilion. On such occasions the Queen
and the ladies worked (by invitation) at her table.
Princess Augusta often played on the piano all the
evening. l>ne could play any old or new air that might
be asked for. The gentlemen walked about the room
332 Sfj IRopal Xa&fes
and conversed. There was not more than one card-
table. The King would get Lord Mayo, who had
neither voice nor ear, to sing Irish songs. It was one
of his Majesty's practical jokes.
When the guests were at table the signal for their
rising and retiring was the King's saying the word
" Doors " audibly.
s Princess Augusta always came from Frogmore to
Windsor to dinner when the Court was there. Princess
Sophia never appeared in public and looked melan-
choly. The Queen was very attentive to her when
itv~/T she came to Windsor and sought to entertain her.
Ci/JuL Perhaps the boisterousness of the Fitz-Clarences was
too much for the Princess, as in the instance when
Lady Bedingfield remarks that " Lady Sophia Sidney
sat by the King and talked a great deal, as she generally
does." The talk was apt to be neither instructive nor
decorous. It was gossip of the most careless descrip-
tion, out of which small scandals affecting even the
blameless Queen arose. Lord and Lady Bingham and
Lord and Lady Falkland were members of the house-
hold. Lord Bingham was supposed to admire Lady
Falkland and Lord Falkland to admire Lady Bingham,
and if Lady Falkland and Lord Bingham tarried be-
hind the others at the card-table, or Lady Bingham and
Lord Falkland lingered in the music-room the incidents
awoke titters and mischievous comments. The King
was so fond of a bad joke and had so little sense of
propriety as to observe aloud at table that Lady Bingham
had changed her seat in order to be with Lord Falk-
land. Queen Adelaide herself was infected by the
prevailing levity and indiscretion when she kept telling
Prince George of Cambridge, in the hearing of the
Court, that the little Queen of Portugal had fixed upon
him for her husband and was come to fetch him.
They were but boy and girl of fourteen, and in their
of Sae*/lfeefnin0en 333
case the jest was innocent enough, except for the position
of the lady who uttered the jest, and the example she
set to the frivolous and coarse jesters around her, who
were capable of taking the most extraordinary liberties
in her company. The Queen told Lady Bedingfield
when driving with her one day in her pony phaeton to
the Chinese Lodge near Virginia Water, and when
talking of Lady Bingham's beauty and folly, various
anecdotes of the "odd ways" of Lady Bingham's sister
Lady Howe.
The King and Queen, and Lord and Lady Howe had
made a journey in the same carriage, when Lady Howe,
feeling tired, had put up her feet on Lord Howe's
knee, to his great embarrassment. Not content with
this freedom she put her feet out of one of the carriage
windows, and at Lord Howe's signs of distress asked
calmly, " What do you mean by shaking your head ? "
At another time, when placing tickets with prices on
articles to be sent to a bazaar, in the company of the
Queen and Lord Howe, Lady Howe fancied a pair of
slippers. Her husband said he would buy them for
her if they fitted her ; on which she not only tried on
the slippers on the spot, she put her foot on the table
to show how well the slippers fitted. After these per-
formances the gaucherie of a maid-of-honour who was
in the custom of coolly appropriating her neighbours'
seats, without asking their permission, sounds light
by comparison.
We cannot be astonished at the Duchess of Kent's
reluctance to take Princess Victoria to Court, except at
rare intervals and for short visits. The King and
Queen were wounded, and the regret was reciprocal,
for the Duchess of Kent was warm-hearted and the
Princess was fond of her indulgent aunt and cordial
uncle ; but the circumstances of the case rendered it
very unadvisable that Princess Victoria should be
334 Si IRogal Xafcies
brought into close and prolonged contact with the some-
what rollicking Court circle. It is reported that the
Duchess of Kent had a special distrust of the ten Fitz-
Clarences, who were the moving powers in their father's
palaces, and to whose predominance the Queen made no
objection, having the daughters constantly about her.
She embroidered frocks for their children, painted their
likenesses, and supplied them with pocket-money as if
they had been her own grandchildren.
At the juvenile ball at St. James's when Prince Albert
and his brother were visiting their aunt at Kensington
and were present at the ball with their cousin Princess
Victoria, the Duchess would not bring them up to the
Queen (on such occasions the royal family sat on an
elevated row of chairs under a canopy), retired at an
early hour with her daughter and nephews from the
ball, and would not consent to their visiting Windsor.
Queen Adelaide was so intent on her needlework that
she carried it even to the tent at Epsom on the race-
days. One would have thought that her " drawing-
book," in which she was in the habit of drawing with
those diligent fingers such likenesses as struck her
and as she could take, would have been a more natural
accompaniment at Epsom.
On the anniversary of the coronation in 1833 a great
dinner for ninety guests was served at St. George's
Hall. When the King returned thanks for the terms in
which the Queen's health was drunk he delivered an
affectionate eulogium on her character. There were
one hundred and thirty-five lamps in the dining-room
and one hundred and twenty-four wax lights on the
table at the banquet. After it the King gave every
lady present a little Chinese bottle, the Queen distri-
buting the bottles in the corridor before luncheon next
day.
Lady Bedingfield gives an amusing account of that
Hfcelaioe of Sae*/lfcetnin0en 335
visit of the young Queen of Portugal to Windsor which
has been mentioned by so many chroniclers. Four
carriages and a guard of honour were sent to meet the
Queen and her party. Guards were stationed in the
Park. The household was assembled in the corridor,
getting cold and tired with the long delay ; a regiment
of Foot Guards with their band was drawn up in the
court. Prince George of Cambridge came running, out
of breath, to say he had seen carriages coming. The
ladies hurried to the bottom of the stairs, the Queen
stood at the top, with her lady-in-waiting, Lady Mayo,
behind her. The band struck up " God save the
King," and King William and all his gentlemen went
down to the entrance hall to receive the visitors. He
gave an arm to each princess (the Queen and her
mother) and brought them upstairs to the Queen.
She embraced them and put Dona Maria's arm within
her own, while the King with the elder Princess led the
procession to the great drawing-room. The Queen
then presented the visitors to the ladies of her house-
hold. The two Portuguese ladies and the three
Portuguese gentlemen were presented also. The last
appeared old, bent, and ugly. The guests were then
conducted to their apartments. The dinner hour was
seven, and the Queen sent Lord Denbigh beforehand
from her private drawing-room to see if the royal
ladies were ready, as she meant to come and fetch
them. In spite of the message there was an un-
accountable delay, till at last the Queen went to Dona
Maria's room and found that the luggage had only just
then arrived. Her Majesty, who was accompanied by
Princess Augusta, the six ladies of the household, and
the Lord Chamberlain, lingered in the corridor, remark-
ing on the busts and pictures, for the purpose of giving
the strangers more time. At last Dona Maria's door
was thrown open, and there, facing the Queen, stood
336 Sf tRosal Xa&ies
the young girl bolt upright, with her lady-in-waiting,
" equally tall, stout, straight and grave behind her."
Dona Maria's step-mother, who was with her, had
French blood in her veins, as she was the grand-
daughter of the Empress Josephine. She was graceful
and mistress of the situation, with beautiful blue eyes,
black eyelashes, and marked black brows.
The young Queen was as tall as her step-mother
and much stouter. Her features were ' c small and
childish, with fat cheeks squeezing up her mouth ; "
she had no colour, and was not a blonde though with
light eyes and hair. According to Lady Bedingfield
Dona Maria " had no expression whatever." Other
observers thought the shy, reserved girl haughty and
inclined to be sulky when anything put her out. The
dinner, at which the young Queen sat between the King
and Queen, was in St. George's Hall. The dinner-
service was splendid, " all vermeil." The health of
Dona Maria was drunk standing. In the evening
the Queen and her ladies worked as usual.
The visitors breakfasted in their own rooms, the
King and Queen with the household, as was their wont,
where the conversation seemed to flow unchecked,
and any lady who liked discussed the unfortunate for-
eigners with the greatest freedom. The King said he
had never seen so uninteresting a girl as Dona Maria.
The boy Prince George compared her to " an immense
doll." The good-natured Queen considered her features
regular, and thought she might improve. Lady Sophia
Sidney, with her fine lady airs and her flippant sarcasms,
was tolerably certain to have her " say."
In the course of the morning the company set out
in five carriages-and-four, and many gentlemen on
horseback, to see the park and Virginia Water. Rain
began to fall, and the carriages had to be closed, with
the air so overcoming Lady Mayo that she could not
Hfcelaffce of Sase^/l&dnfngen 337
shake off the sleep which had beset her from the time that
she was in one of the boats on the water. The spectacle
of the nodding lady broke down the gravity of the
young Queen who had been so sharply criticised at
breakfast. But her gaiety was not more agreeable than
her gravity ; her manner was uncouth, her voice un-
pleasant, and she seems to have been seized with an
inclination to romp ; while the person she chose to
" pull about " was the elderly Princess Augusta, of all
people.
On the Queen of Portugal's departure Queen Ade-
laide conducted her to the door at the foot of the
stairs. The visitors went to Lalham, a house at which
the Queen of Portugal had stayed when in England
before, and there Dona Maria showed girlish delight
at finding the place unaltered, and that the tree which
she had planted had grown. She graciously sent back
sprigs of it to all the ladies (of whose censure-she was
unconscious).
Lady Bedingfield went in the suite with the King
and Queen to Kew to a farewell dinner given to the
Duke and Duchess of Cumberland before they left for
Germany.
The Duchess of Cumberland came out to meet the
Queen, holding the arm of her " beautiful blind boy,"
when the party were shown into a square room, plainly
furnished, hung round with pictures. Prince George
of Cumberland was not yet fifteen. He was tall and
thin, with a round fresh face in which the eyes were
partly closed. He wore the dress of the period dark
coloured pantaloons, a waistcoat buttoned to the chin, a
black silk neckerchief with a cambric frill appearing above
it, boots, and military spurs. He was " a fine-looking,
spirited lad, unsubdued by his infirmity." He said he
could not do without his tutor Mr. Jelf, and " Do you
know he is so kind as to say he cannot do without
22
338 Sf IRosal XaMes
me ? " Prince George of Cambridge was with the
King and Queen, and his blind cousin recognising him
by his voice pretended to kneel down and kiss his hand.
The Queen showed Lady Bedingfield the little old
palace of which all the royal family were fond, because
so much of their youth had been spent there. Adelaide
took her friend to the room in which the Queen was
married, and pointed out where the royal family had
stood on the occasion that July afternoon sixteen years
before. Another room visited was that in which Queen
Charlotte breathed her last, with the chair on which
was pinned the paper containing the information,
" Queen Charlotte died in this chair."
The company dined at Cumberland Lodge, which
was modern and fashionably fitted up. The King gave
the health of the Duke and Duchess in such terms that
even the Duke was moved. Poor Duke ! Nobody
liked him, with his odd, abrupt manners and fierce
countenance. He was " teasing and disagreeable."
When he was at Windsor he professed a great fancy
for Lady Bedingfield, which he illustrated by sitting
next her and cracking the strangest jokes, which she
could not comprehend. Somewhere, however, he had
a heart which was bound up in his unfortunate son.
The Queen also showed Lady Bedingfield over the
charming old home of Bushey, in which her Majesty
delighted, she herself acting the part of cicerone in the
shrubbery and grounds. Kew and Bushey were home-
like ; " Golden Windsor " was too magnificent. When
there were only sixteen people at dinner the Queen
was pleased, for then the couple and their household
were like a private family, and the King himself led
Adelaide to the table. 1
In 1 837 the King's favourite daughter, Lady de L'Isle,
1 The Queen presided over the building and decorating of a small
house called " Adelaide Lodge " in Windsor Park, a memorial of her.
Hoelai&e of Saje*/IDeinfngen 339
whom he had recently appointed to the sinecure involved
in being nominally housekeeper of Kensington Palace,
died. Grief for her loss hastened the break-up of her
father's constitution. Without any more special malady
than an attack of hay fever, he gradually sank, lovingly
waited upon by his faithful Queen. When she burst
into tears on the eve of his death, he strove to speak
cheerfully to her, " begging her to be of good heart "
and to " bear up, bear up." He died at last in a
peaceful sleep with his hand resting, where it had lain
for hours, on Adelaide's shoulder.
The King was seventy-two and Queen Adelaide forty-
five years of age.
On July 8th she was present at his funeral, occupy-
ing the royal closet during the service. Dr. Doran
states that she was the only English Queen who paid
this mark of respect to her dead King.
Most people are familiar with the anecdote indicative
of Queen Victoria's good feeling and good taste which
belongs to this time. Queen Victoria in writing a
letter of affectionate condolence to her aunt addressed
it to the f ' Queen of Englaiid." Her Majesty was
reminded that she was now Queen of England. " Yes,"
answered the Queen, " but I am not going to be the first
person to recall that fact to her Majesty's recollection."
In August, 1837, Adelaide left Windsor and repaired
to her own house of Bushey Park. Her health, never
very robust, soon began to fail. Her chest was weak
and she sank into the condition of a chronic invalid
who pursued in vain a sad search for a climate
which might be of permanent benefit to her physically.
She lived, however, for twelve years longer, spending a
winter at St. Leonard's, another in Malta, where she
caused an English church to be built at her expense.
She rented Canford Hall, Witley Court, and Cassiobury,
in turn.
340 Sf$ iRopal
Ten years after King William's death the Queen-
Dowager was able to pay a last visit to her friends in
Germany. On her return to England she sailed as a
forlorn hope to Madeira. In spite of her weak and
suffering condition her genuine sympathy for those
around her whether in sorrow or in joy did not fail.
A sailor on board the Howe, the vessel in which
she sailed, over-balanced himself in trying to catch a
bird which had alighted on the rigging, and fell over-
board. The Queen's interest survived the details of the
rescue and busied itself with the man's future welfare.
On nearing the coast of Portugal an impromptu ball
took place on board, and there was merry dancing both
on the main and quarter decks. The sick Queen lay
below, unable to be present ; but she would not throw
cold water on the festivity, to whose echoes she listened
with patient indulgence. She landed at Lisbon, where she
was met by the King-Consort of Portugal. She returned,
as probably she had not dreamed she would do, the
long past visit to Windsor, when Adelaide was its royal
mistress, in the days of comparative health and happiness,
of the shy girl Queen, Dona Maria, who had been twice
married since then and was the mother of many children.
Madeira was of little service in staying the progress
of the Queen's fatal disease. She returned to England,
tarried for a time at her beloved Bushey, and then went
for the last change to Bentley Priory near Stanmore.
There her complaint reached its final stage. Her niece
Queen Victoria, hearing how grievously ill Queen
Adelaide was, went with Prince Albert, on November
22nd, 1849, to
1 At Queen Victoria's marriage, after the ceremony, when, according
to etiquette, the Queen-Dowager, who was present, ought to have come
forward with her congratulations, the younger woman anticipated the
movement by passing quickly to the elder and claiming her embrace.
On the birth of the Princess Royal one of the first messages announcing
the joyful event was sent to the Queen-Dowager.
H&elaifce of Saye*/lDeinfngen 341
Eight days afterwards death released the kindly spirit
from the worn-out body. Queen Adelaide's attached
ladies and some of her nearest kindred had been much
with her during those last sad years. In addition to
her nephew Prince Edward, a niece, Princess Ida of
Saxe- Weimar, resided frequently in England towards
the end, which came when Queen Adelaide was in her
fifty-eighth year. It was thirty-one years since the
arrival in England of the bride of William, Duke
of Clarence.
In her will the good Queen declared that she died
in all humility, " knowing well that we are all alike
before the throne of God." She requested that she
might be conveyed to her grave " without pomp or
state." She desired that she might not be dissected
or embalmed, that her body might not lie in state,
but that it might be buried by daylight as privately
and quietly as possible. She, the widow of the sailor
King, wished that her coffin might be carried by sailors
to its resting-place in St. George's Chapel. Her rela-
tions and friends, the ladies and gentlemen of her
household, her dressers, etc., etc., might if they chose
follow her to the grave. She died in peace and wished
" to be carried to the tomb in peace and far from the
vanities and pomp of this world." She desired " to
give as little trouble as possible."
In a sense this was her aim throughout her life an
aim which was full of simple dignity and genuine
modesty. Probably one of the last of her acts was done
still with the view of saving trouble, and under the
idea that it might be wrong in her (where others were
concerned) to dictate even the circumstances of her
funeral, and that exception might be taken to the terms
of her bequests of her worldly goods to members of her
kindred. For very shortly before her death she sought
in a few lines to cancel this will, and to substitute for
342 Ste IRopal OLafcfes
it the brief direction to divide the means she died
possessed of between her brother Duke Bernard of
Saxe-Meiningen and her sister the Duchess of Saxe-
Weimar. But as the memorandum was without attesta-
tion it did not hold good in point of law, and the
original will was carried out.
The funeral was conducted according to the request
of the dead Queen. An ordinary hearse, with nothing
distinctive save the Queen's arms on the pall, conveyed
the body. Three mourning coaches followed, and a
small escort of cavalry completed the cavalcade, on
which the Harrow boys and the country people all
along the route gazed with awed interest. At the
entrance to St. George's Chapel ten sailors stood ready
to propel the platform on which the coffin rested to
the mouth of the vault into which it was in due time
lowered, with all honour, but without ostentation.
A good wife, sister, daughter, and friend, a con-
scientious and faithful benefactress of the poor, a
reverent and devout Christian ; in the integrity,
sweetness and kindliness of a most womanly nature
Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen has rarely been surpassed
among the Queen-Consorts of England. Slander
assailed her, as whom will slander not assail when
goodness provokes its poisoned sting ? But false and
base insinuations quickly die a natural death when
neither arrogance nor folly exists to afford the evil weeds
nourishment.
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