CHAPTER XII.A Child Bride.

Just about this time (1735), a very important event indeed occurred; the King took a new mistress!

He made his triennial visit to Hanover this year, and became smitten with the charms of a young German lady named Walmoden. This middle-aged Don Juan—he was getting on, he was fifty-two—induced this estimable lady to leave her husband for the trifling consideration of a thousand ducats.

Madame Walmoden was a great niece of the Countess von Platen who had been one of the mistresses of George the First, and consequently had a good strain of the courtesan in her blood before she disposed of herself for the aforesaid thousand ducats.

Little George at once wrote off to his wife in England and told her all about it, just as if he had bought a new horse; he did not scruple to describe the person of his new purchase to his wife, minutely. He even solicited his wife’s affection for her! A curious race these Hanoverian Kings!

Further, George did not scamp the details of his amour in his letters to his wife, which were immensely long and always written in French, whichhe apparently considered a language more fitted for descriptions of love affairs;hissort of love affairs at any rate. This is a sample of one of his letters written concerning the inviting to England by the Queen (which he besought her to contrive) of a certain Princess of Modena, a daughter of a late Regent of France, to whom he had the greatest possible inclination to pay his addresses, particularly because he understood she was not at all particular from whom she received such marks of favour. “Un plaisir,” he wrote, “que je suis sûr, ma chère Caroline, vous serez bien aise de me procurer, quand je vous dis combien je le souhaite!”

According to Lord Hervey, the Queen’s confidant, the general opinion was that Madame Walmoden, the King’s new mistress, would oust the Queen from her influence, but the diplomatic Caroline rose to the occasion. She, to retain her power, expressed the utmost interest in the King’s new mistress, and awaited further details with impatience. She got them.[30]Not in such a manner as a profligate husband would write in our days, even to a mistress debased enough to read such letters, but hot and strong in the terms of Shakespeare expressed in French.

So far from being offended, the Queen replied in the same strain, equalling in every respect her husband’s flights of fancy in the regions of Venus.

It is this correspondence between Caroline and the King, coupled with her very objectionable letters to the Duchess of Orleans, which have caused many writers to take exception to the remark of Lord Mahon, which described this Queen’s character as “without a blemish.” At any rate it gives us an insight into the private life of the mother of our Prince Frederick, and accounts perhaps for some of her unnatural conduct towards him, for where there is not purity of mind, how can there be purity of motherly affection?

Again, a mind which could take pleasure daily in the conversation of such a man as Lord Hervey—epigrammatic though that conversation might be—could not be expected to contain the natural solicitude which a loving parent would have for her first-born son.

The little King, however, was having a particularly effulgent time in Hanover with his new light o’ love, a time which he kept up, not exactly religiously, until the very night before he left for England, when standing glass in hand at a supper party on that eventful evening he pledged himself to Madame Walmoden and the other demireps forming the company to return without fail on the following 29th May.

Upon hearing of which promise some short time after, Sir Robert Walpole, his sturdy Prime Minister, remarked: “He wants to go to Hanover, does he”? he asked, when Lord Hervey told himof it, “and to be there by the 29th May? Well, he shan’t go for all that.”

So much did the King enjoy his revels in Hanover that he had paintings made of them, each containing portraits, sent them to England and had them hung up in his wife’s dressing room! She must have enjoyed the privilege!

So George returned to England and made himself exceedingly disagreeable to his wife when he got there, as a testy love-sick gentleman of fifty-two might be expected to do who had recently left a new and youngish lady-love hundreds of miles behind. For the time being Caroline and the English bored him; with regard to the latter he expressed himself as follows: “No English, or French cook could dress a dinner; no English confectioner set out a dessert; no English player could act; no English coachman could drive, no English jockey ride, nor were any English horses fit to be drove or fit to be ridden; no Englishman knew how to come into a room, nor any English woman how to dress herself.”[31]

How this particular strain of English King must have degenerated since James the First’s daughter made amésallianceand married the King of Bohemia!

But the little King had not wasted all his time in Hanover, he had seen a Princess—the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha—whom he thought woulddo for a daughter-in-law, and had straightway communicated this fact to his Queen, mixed up with accounts of his own prowess on the field of love, in a less innocent direction.

No sooner, however, had the King set foot in England, than the Prince of Wales, urged to this filial act of duty by Doddington, put in an appearance at one of his father’s first Levees, from which functions he had absented himself for a considerable time. His father, however, once more scented mischief in the air, and once more his olfactory nerves had not led him astray. Frederick at once renewed his demands, this time asking for his full allowance of £100,000 a year, a separate establishment, and—a wife. The Prince was insistent.

There can be little doubt from an incident which followed that in this demand for a wife, the Prince had in his mind his old love, his cousin Wilhelmina, still unmarried.

The King, his father, however, had no intention whatever of uniting his son with that Princess; he and the King of Prussia had been quarrelling for years, even going the length of challenging one another to single combat, an encounter which would have been exceedingly grotesque but for the redeeming point that though George the Second was very little, yet he was undoubtedly plucky for his size, and would have given a good account of himself in any case. But, “unfortunately,” as somehistorians put it, no mortal combat came off, and Europe had to put up with the two sovereigns for some years longer. The King, as usual, talked the matter of his son’s request over with his Queen, especially the part about the £100,000 a year, which her Majesty was dead against, she had all along resisted the demand of the Prince of Wales for a regular income, and this opposition being persevered in on her part had undoubtedly made matters worse between them.

The King and Queen’s talk resulted in the conclusion that it would be cheaper to marry him off and make him an allowance than to keep on paying some of his debts, therefore having put their heads together for the last time on the subject, they sent a message by five of the Privy Council, proposing to the Prince of Wales a marriage with the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, the young lady whom the King had seen when abroad. But this was evidently not what the Prince expected, for this is what happened.

In the first place more than a year after his coming to England, when there had been a spark of revival in the double marriage scheme, Frederick had written to Hotham, the Special Envoy in Berlin, on the subject of Wilhelmina:

“Please, dear Hotham, get my marriage settled, my impatience increases daily for I am quite foolishly in love!”[32]

There is something plaintive in this message, for whatever were his faults, and they were numerous, yet this constancy to the girl he wished to make his wife was honest and admirable, and had he been given her, he might have become a different man. But Wilhelmina was a strange girl, and in her diary, written long after, affects to think it was only his characteristic obstinacy which caused the Prince to evince such affection. Perhaps it was the old tale of the sourness of the fruit which had not come her way.

When therefore the deputation of the five Privy Councillors from the King waited upon the Prince of Wales and proposed to him a marriage with the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, they evidently threw him into a state of consternation. It was not Augusta he wanted, but Wilhelmina, his cousin.

He appears to have remonstrated with some heat[33]and then to have sent for Baron Borck, the Prussian Minister.

To him he complained that his father, the King, was forcing him to marry a lady he had never seen and to renounce all hopes of “a Prussian Princess”—there could not be much doubt about the identity of this Princess.

He requested him to lay this statement before the King of Prussia. He expressed his heartfelt grief at not being allowed to take a wife from a family which he loved more than his own, and to which,from infancy, all his desires had been directed. He begged for the King of Prussia’s favour and friendship notwithstanding, and deplored that he should be denied his support. He complained, too, that he should still be under the control of his father and mother, for it was a part of King George’s scheme that the young married couple should live with him, presumably to save expense.

All this and much more the excited young Prince appears to have said, and he seems to have deplored the fact of the King of England disdaining the friendship of such a great monarch as the King of Prussia, which could only lead to the ruin of his, Prince Frederick’s, house.

This impassioned appeal to his feelings affected even that astute old diplomatist, Baron Borck, who with Lord Townshend, had gained notoriety, by preventing the comic duel between the King of Prussia and King George.

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

Soon after, the Prince gave in, and accepted the marriage his father had arranged for him, apparentlyin sheer desperation, and no doubt in consequence of a little pressure being put upon him financially, for his father gave him no fixed allowance then as it has been said, but simply as much or as little as he chose.

The young man’s pleadings to Baron Borck, however, were not without effect; the Baron wrote off at once to his master the King of Prussia, and reported all the Prince of Wales’ messages, but as luck would have it the letter fell into the hands of Walpole, who was not at all above tampering with the Ambassador’s post bags, and the whole of the Prince’s love ravings were communicated to the King, his father, whose anger passed comprehension, especially about that part which referred to his “disdaining the support of such a great monarch as the King of Prussia” whom he hated, and his own ruin speedily following.

All this was no doubt stored up by the Royal couple against their troublesome son, who seemed to be in ill-luck’s way. His parents were determined. They had married off their daughter Anne, the Princess Royal, in 1733 to the Prince of Orange, an amiable but deformed gentleman who apparently married his royal wife—he was only Serene himself—on the traditions of another Prince William of Orange who had preceded him. A marriage the English King and Queen would have now. Frederick was to marry the Princess Augusta, or go short, and it is not at all surprising, considering all things, that he gave in.

With regard to the above-mentioned marriage of Frederick’s eldest sister with the Prince of Orange, the way in which this unfortunate man was treated could not have been a better testimony to the bad breeding of King George and his wife. The poor Dutchman fell ill when he landed in England, and lay in that state for months, during which time the whole of the Royal Family were forbidden to go near him, lest they should make him proud by having such an attention from a “Royal” House as a sick visit. He was to be taught by little George to understand that if he ever should receive any dignity at all, it was not to be his own but a reflection from his marriage with a Royal Princess of England. In addition, to make things more pleasant all round—especially for the bride—he was given the name of “the Baboon” by the King in the family circle, and the Queen generally graciously referred to him as “that Animal.” All this was calculated to establish the future happiness of the young couple on a firm and sound basis.

But to return to Frederick, it is very evident that he hesitated long before he accepted the marriage his father proposed for him, until in fact it was demonstrated to him that the desire of his heart was unattainable; then he agreed in the following words: “whoever His Majesty thought a proper match for his son would be agreeable to him,” and the negotiations went forward forthwith.

The King, after an unusual struggle, hadintimated—undoubtedly on the initiative of the Queen, for she suggested everything, or at any rate sanctioned everything before it passed through her hands—that he intended to allow the Prince £50,000 per annum, which seems a large sum to us considering the fact that the young couple were to live with “his people,” but when the sum is dissected, and the huge taxes deducted, the amount, as will be seen later, was not by any means too great an income for a Prince of Wales at that time. The sum that the young princess was to receive from her father’s grateful subjects of Saxe-Gotha by way of income, did not transpire.

The Prince having given his reluctant consent to the marriage—and there was something pitiable about it—little time was lost. Walpole was most anxious to get the Prince married, perhaps he was glad to put a final stop on the double marriage scheme which had worried him at intervals for years. Lord Delaware was selected, principally on account of his ugliness, to demand the hand of the Princess of Saxe-Gotha. King George had recollections, perhaps, of a certain handsome Count Königsmarck, who had played havoc in his father’s family, and was taking no risks in that respect in the present instance. This long, lank, unpolished nobleman shambled off to fetch the Princess Augusta, leaving no jealous feeling in anybody’s heart, that he would play the part of Paolo to the Princess’s Francesca.

There is no doubt whatever that the PrincessAugusta was handsome; certainly she was only seventeen, but gave promise of great beauty, she was tall, slender, but naturally unformed and fresh from the schoolroom.

Now commenced a somewhat humorous episode. The little King George was due to meet his dear Walmoden in Hanover on the 29th of the following May according to promise—how he had endured the intervening months in his state of middle-aged infatuation it is difficult to conceive—and the staid, leisurely formalities of the marriage contract over which the ungainly Delaware presided on behalf of the Prince in Saxe-Gotha, were one long drawn out agony to the amorous little King of England, whose deep-drawn sighs of love for his far-away German courtesan must have been exceedingly gratifying to his wife, the Queen, to listen to, she being perfectly informed from his own lips how matters stood. At last King George sent word to Lord Delaware that if the Princess could not arrive in England by the end of April, the marriage would either have to be put off till the winter or take place without his presence.

This had the desired effect of hurrying the Princess, who was at the time saying good-bye to her numerous girl friends, and of course having her trousseau made. She forthwith set out alone, under the care of that plain-featured nobleman who had been sent for her.

Poor child! It was a cheerless beginning to thefestivities of a marriage, coming alone without father or mother or relative of any sort to a strange land to wed with a man she had never seen, and who did not love her.

The etiquette of King George’s Court did not admit of a Prince of Wales going to woo a Princess of such an inferior state as Saxe-Gotha; on the contrary, she had to come to him, but it is said that the young Princess came joyfully, dazzled by the prospect of becoming Queen of England.

She arrived at Greenwich in the royal yacht, “William and Mary,” on Sunday, April 25th, 1736, and was duly handed ashore by Lord Delaware, who not being a lady’s man was no doubt glad to be rid of his charge.

There was, however, nobody there to meet her. King George did not believe in, as the Irish say, “cocking up” these small “Serenities” with too much attention, so she spent the night at Greenwich Palace alone.

One is confused at this time with the number of royal palaces; St. James’s, Richmond, Kew, Hampton Court, Leicester House, Kensington, Greenwich, and Windsor Castle, which latter seemed to be very little used.

The young Princess created a very favourable impression on the people on landing; she was exceedingly amiable and engaging, and possessed all the charm of youth. She showed herself to the people on the balcony of the Palace and was very warmly received.

The poets were ready with plenty of verses for the young couple, of the description following:

That pair in Eden ne’er reposedWhere groves more lovely grew;Those groves in Eden ne’er enclosedA lovelier pair than you.

That pair in Eden ne’er reposed

Where groves more lovely grew;

Those groves in Eden ne’er enclosed

A lovelier pair than you.

Which somehow reminds one of the verses of Mr. Feeder, B.A., in “Dombey and Son.”

Walpole made the following amusing remark upon it:—“I believe the Princess will have more beauties bestowed upon her by the occasional poets than even a painter would afford her. They will cook up a new Pandora, and in the bottom of the box enclose Hope—that all they have said is true. A great many, out of excess of good breeding, who have heard that it was rude to talk Latin before women, proposed complimenting her in English; which she will be much the better for.[34]I doubt most of them instead of fearing their compositions should not be understood, should fear they should; they wish they don’t know what, to be read by they don’t know who.”

The next day after the landing of the Princess Augusta came the Prince, and the meeting must have been an exceedingly interesting one to those about them, especially to the populace who loved them both for their amiability, and who cheered themselves hoarse in consequence whenever they caught sight of the pair.

It is said that the Prince was very pleased with her, as indeed he might well have been, for there is no doubt that she was a very charming young girl, and what man—especially one of the Prince’s temperament—would not have been pleased under the circumstances?

But after his impassioned appeal to Baron Borck, which occurred only a few days before, it is impossible to believe that this child from abroad—who by the bye brought a doll with her, poor dear—could have effaced from Frederick’s heart the passion for his cousin Wilhelmina, which had burned there for so many years, almost from his childhood.

And now the hour had come when she was to lose him for ever; perhaps there were some tears shed in the private chamber of Wilhelmina in far-away Berlin, for what girl likes to lose a devoted lover?

Meanwhile, the young Princess waited patiently at Greenwich Palace for something to occur; she remained there it is said for forty-eight hours without anyone coming near her, except the Prince, this being a result, without doubt, of the King’s orders.

His Majesty, however, came down so far from his great altitude as to send the poor little Princess a message from himself and his family:

“Their compliments, and they hoped she was well.”

This was being taken to the warm bosom of a loving family with a vengeance! And yet the littlePrincess seemed to put up with it without a murmur. Perhaps she confided all her disappointments to her doll, and wept over them in secret with it, or what was still more probable, they did things differently in Germany and it was no surprise to her. Certainly the Royal Family could not have sent a barer message if the Prince had been going to marry Cinderella.

The Prince, however, was a gentleman and certainly did his best to make up for the coldness of his relatives whose excuse was that they were so bound up with etiquette that until Augusta became Princess of Wales they did not know upon what footing to treat her.

Frederick came down to Greenwich the next day after his first visit in his state barge and dined with his bride elect; then he did the exact thing to please a girl. He took her out for a row in his flag-bedecked barge on the Thames, with a band playing sweet music before them, guns firing from the river craft, and the people cheering them on the bank; these seeing their bright young faces, thought how happy the Prince of Wales must be, not knowing of course anything about his cousin Wilhelmina over in Berlin.

It is not a far-fetched idea to imagine that the Prince thought of his lost-love on that journey on the river—they went as far as the Tower and back again—and wondered how she would have looked in the same place beside him. It is just what alover under such circumstances could not well help doing.

RINCESS AUGUSTA

From “Caroline the Illustrious,” by permission of Messrs, Longmans, Green & Co.PRINCESS AUGUSTA.Wife of Frederick, Prince of Wales.

The account in theGentleman’s Magazinefor April, 1736, concludes by saying that the happy couple returned to Greenwich together, and “supped in public,” which meant that the young people took their meal near an open window for the people to see them.

Certainly this must have been an enjoyable day for the young Princess, during which probably she did not miss the presence of the King and Queen, whose personality was pretty well known on the Continent.

The next day after this excursion, one of the Royal coaches was sent down to Greenwich to bring the Princess up to Lambeth, where she embarked in a royal barge and was rowed across the river to Whitehall. Thence she was carried in one of Queen Caroline’s sedan chairs to the garden entrance of St. James’s Palace, by a couple of stout carriers, to the great content no doubt of the inhabitants of Westminster, who were assembled there to see her.

Her reception at the palace is said to have been magnificent and tasteful. Certainly the meeting itself of Frederick and Augusta was very pretty and likely to impress the public and increase the young people’s popularity with them.

On the arrival of the bride, Frederick was there to meet her and gallantly assisted her from her chair. Then when she attempted to kneel and kisshis hand, he prevented her, but instead drew her to him and kissed her twice upon the lips before everybody, a proceeding no doubt which gave satisfaction to all, including the Princess.

The picture of confusion and happiness, it is said the young couple ascended the broad staircase of the Palace together hand in hand. Thus they proceeded into the Presence Chamber crowded with courtiers of both sexes.

Here, according to Lord Hervey, the Princess “threw herself all along the floor, first at the King’s, then at the Queen’s feet,” and by so doing greatly pleased little George, whose kingly brow had been disfigured by wrinkles when she arrived, for she was a little late.

This act was considered by the Court as being so exceedingly tactful that she was given the credit at once of being a girl of “propriety and sense.”

But the King graciously raised her up and kissed her on both cheeks with his royal arm round her. The Queen embraced her too, and the remainder of the family did their best to make up for their neglect of her at Greenwich.

This must have been a trying ordeal for the young Princess considering that her wedding was to take place that very night at nine o’clock!

To avoid the question of precedence before Augusta became Princess of Wales, the King and Queen decided that she should dine with the younger members of the family, and this incidentgave rise to a scene which can only be regarded as exceedingly comic, and which gave the bride an idea of what sort of a family she was marrying into.

Of course it must be remembered that the actors in this absurd scene were all young, though the Prince was the eldest and certainly twenty-nine.

For some reason, possibly by way of a joke, for he was extremely fond of joking,videthe Bubb Doddington incident, the Prince decreed that at this meal, his brother and all his sisters should sit on stools without any backs, whilst he and his bride luxuriated in arm-chairs at the head of the table. Upon this the Duke of Cumberland, who was fifteen, and the Princesses, refused to go into the Dining Chamber until the stools were all removed—there ought to have been one for the Princess Augusta’s doll—and chairs substituted in their place.

This formality being complied with, exception was taken by these young royalties to the fact that the Prince of Wales and the bride were being served on bended knee and they were not. This difficulty was got over by their being allowed to be waited on by their own servants, who it is presumed served them also on bended knee or in any other position in which it pleased them to have their food handed to them.

But these young sticklers remained firm on one point, they wouldnotreceive coffee from the Prince’s servants for fear they should “pass some indignity upon them with the cups.” Altogether itwas a scene which was well fitted for a nursery, and no doubt heartily enjoyed by Augusta who had just come away from one.

It is notable that the King, perhaps having an idea what this dinner party of his children was likely to be, commanded that they were to dine “undressed,” that is in their ordinary clothes, and not in the grand paraphernalia of the wedding. This was probably a wise precaution.

The dinner and the various objections and counter-objections concerning the etiquette to be observed at the meal occupied nearly all the afternoon, so that when the time came for uprising, Augusta had barely time to withdraw to her rooms, and commence that most important dressing of a girl’s life, whether she be a princess or a ’prentice, her wedding toilette.

FOOTNOTES:[30]“Old Blackbourn, the Archbishop of York, told her,”i.e., the Queen, “one day, that he had been talking to her Minister, Walpole, about the new mistress, and was glad to find that Her Majesty was so sensible a woman as to like her husband should divert himself.” Walpole’s Memoirs, App., p. 446.[31]Hervey’s Memoirs.[32]End of 1729.[33]Coxe’s Walpole.[34]She could not understand a word of English.

[30]“Old Blackbourn, the Archbishop of York, told her,”i.e., the Queen, “one day, that he had been talking to her Minister, Walpole, about the new mistress, and was glad to find that Her Majesty was so sensible a woman as to like her husband should divert himself.” Walpole’s Memoirs, App., p. 446.

[31]Hervey’s Memoirs.

[32]End of 1729.

[33]Coxe’s Walpole.

[34]She could not understand a word of English.

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