CHAPTER XXII.The Year of Mourning.
Caroline was buried with great pomp in a new vault in Henry the Seventh’s Chapel, in Westminster Abbey, on Saturday, the 17th of December, 1737. By her side when his time came was also laid George the Second. An interesting incident in this connection was related to the Right Honourable J. Wilson, compiler of “Hervey’s Memoirs,” by a Mr. Milman, Prebendary of Westminster.
“George the Second, as the last proof of his attachment,” he said, “gave directions that his remains and those of Queen Caroline should be mingled together. Accordingly the two coffins were placed in a large stone sarcophagus, and one side of each of the wooden coffins withdrawn. This was a tradition at Westminster Abbey, of which I myself have seen the confirmation, in my opinion conclusive; and as the Royal vault in Westminster Abbey may never be again opened, it may be curious to preserve the record.
“On the occasion of the removal, in 1837, of a stillborn child of the Duke of Cumberland (King of Hanover) to Windsor, a Secretary of State’s Warrant (which is necessary) arrived empowering the Dean and Chapter to open the vault. I wasrequested by the Dean to superintend the business, which took place by night.
“In the middle of the vault, towards the farther end, stands the large stone sarcophagus, and against the wallare still standing the two sides of the coffins which were withdrawn. I saw and examined them closely, and have no doubt of the fact. The vault contains only the family of George the Second.”H. H. Milman.
The King seems to have shown the utmost grief for his wife, and at first to a great extent to have secluded himself. A weird incident in connection with this period is related by Wentworth in a letter to Lord Strafford after the Queen’s funeral.
“Saturday night, between one and two o’clock, the King waked out of a dream, very uneasy, and ordered the vault, where the Queen is, to be broken open immediately, and have the coffin also opened; and went in a hackney chair through the Horse Guards to Westminster Abbey and back again to bed. I think it is the strangest thing that could be.”
He speaks of it again in another letter.
“The story about the King was true, for Mr. Wallop heard of one who saw him go through the Horse Guards on Saturday night, with ten footmen before the chair. They went afterwards to Westminster Abbey.”
There is no doubt whatever from the above account that the King was suffering from that awful visitation which comes so often to personswho have recently lost a dear one by death; the terrible fear that the belovedhas been buried alive. Only those who have been victims to this haunting fear—which is far more common than is imagined—can give an adequate description of its terrors.
Morbid as the thought is, the outcome no doubt of an exhausted nervous system, where deep grief has followed perhaps the wearing anxiety of watching a long illness, still it is not by any means restricted to those of an imaginative tendency, but comes to all temperaments alike. It would be perhaps quite safe to say that this was what made King George undertake his midnight journey, and give the order for the opening of the Queen’s tomb.
But deep as his sorrow was for his wife, it did not keep him from his old ways. In a very short time Walmoden was brought over, and pending her arrival Lady Deloraine acted the part of understudy. “People must wear old gloves until they can get new ones,” was Sir Robert Walpole’s commentto the Princesseson this arrangement, to which he had not only given his hearty approval, but as far as Madame Walmoden was concerned, strongly urged upon the King, as a duty he owed to his people to save his health breaking down under his grief, to bring her over.
To Lord Hervey Sir Robert expressed himself more fully on this subject. “I’ll bring Madame Walmoden over,” he said, “and I’ll have nothing to do with your girls,”i.e., the Princesses. “I wasfor the wife against the mistress, but I’ll be for the mistress against the daughters.”
It is needless to say that after this remark Lord Hervey and Sir Robert Walpole fell out.
Meanwhile the Prince of Wales appears to have remained in his position of ostracism, and apparently took no part in his mother’s funeral ceremonies. The Princess Amelia acted as chief mourner, and the King did not appear at all.
With the Princess, Frederick seems to have lived at Norfolk House very comfortably, coming over to Carlton House for any occasion of ceremony.
The popularity of the Prince seemed to grow, as he lost favour with his father, and it is not at all to be wondered at, as he possessed a natural geniality which endeared him to all. A story is related of him in connection with a Lord Mayor’s Show, which is very typical.
Waiting to see the pageant—which was the occasion probably which occurred during the year of mourning—the Prince of Wales went among the crowd in Cheapside to see the procession return to the Guildhall. Being recognised by some members of the Saddlers’ Company, he was invited into their stand hard by, and there made himself so agreeable that he was, there and then, elected their Master for the year; an honour which he accepted with much pleasure.
This period of mourning was, however, after a time relieved of much of its tristness as far as theKing was concerned, by the lively society of his mistresses, with whom the Princesses appeared to have associated in perfect harmony.
One night at Kensington Palace, just as Lady Deloraine was about to sit down to cards with the King, one of the Princesses pulled her chair away and she came down with a bump on the floor.
It was bad enough to be laughed at by the Princesses, but far worse to have little George guffawing at her with the knowledge in her mind that she was only playing second fiddle to the Walmoden.
Lady Deloraine waited her opportunity, and later, when the King was about to sit down, pulledhischair away, with the view of getting her own back again. The result, however, was not at all what she expected; the sacred person of his Majesty is said to have been much bruised, and so far from regarding the performance as a joke, he excluded Lady Deloraine from his Court from that time forth, and the Walmoden, now created Countess of Yarmouth, reigned henceforth supreme till the King’s death many years after. Many will recollect a similar anecdote in similar circumstances in our own day.
The next event, however, in the life of the Prince of Wales, following quickly on the death of his mother, was the birth of his eldest son, afterwards to fill the throne of England as George the Third. This took place at Norfolk House, St. James’s, onthe 4th of June (new style), 1738, while Carlton House was still under repair.
The birth was premature, and the child very frail, so much so that he was baptized on the day of his birth.
The Poet Laureate seized this opportunity of the birth of a Prince in the direct line of succession to the throne to become drivelling. He congratulated Nature that she had first amused herself by sketching a girl—Princess Augusta—by which bit of practice she had enabled herself to produce the wonderful baby George!
Truly this Laureate was a person of some imagination!
The Corporation of London appear to have gone to the King direct and in a talented address pointed out to him the fact—which perhaps otherwise might have been overlooked—that this joyful occasion was the result of the alliance of the baby’s parents!
The Bath Municipality seem to have also done something in this way to distinguish themselves, by congratulating the Prince of Wales on his own birth, to which they owed the sight of the royal presence in which they stood.
It may be mentioned here that on his first birthday little Prince George was the object of a curious attention.
Sixty of the children of the aristocracy, dressed as little soldiers with drums beating and colours flying, entered the Palace and “elected their little Princeas their Colonel.” This important event concluded, they kissed the baby’s hand and departed.
The Prince and his wife—to whom he was devoted—seem to have had a variety of residences. Norfolk House, Leicester House—formerly the residence of his father when Prince of Wales—situated in Leicester Square on a site very near where the Empire Theatre now stands; Carlton House in Pall Mall, a house at Kew, and a Palace at Cliefden, built by Villiers, situated on a terrace overlooking the River Thames.
Here at this latter house the Prince seems to have lived the life of a country squire, and a lover of the river. He distributed prizes at rowing matches, and mixed freely with the people of the part. His dignity did not prevent him stopping to chat with a labourer at his cottage door, or even to enter in, and do what few Princes would condescend to do, sit down and share the cottager’s plain meal with him.
He would play cricket on the lawn at Cliefden with his children, when they were old enough, or stroll along the banks of the river of which he was very fond, and his companions were not always of the exalted order one would expect.
He was devoted to art, and loved talent wherever he found it.
“Lord Sir,” exclaimed a simple country servant to his master one day at Maidenhead, “I have seen the Prince of Wales accompanied by his nobles.”
The “nobles” in question were two Scottish authors, Thompson and Mallett, neither of them distinguished by the neatness of their attire.
It was alas! on the lawn at Cliefden, that Frederick received a blow, some say from a cricket ball, others while at a game of tennis, which was the indirect cause of his death some years after.
Here at Cliefden, and at his other residences, were to be seen his boon companions; the Earl of Chesterfield, courtier, politician, satirist and mimic. Lady Huntingdon, who left his world for Whitfield’s, and whose name may be seen in almost every town in England on Dissenting Chapels to the present day; Bathurst, Queensberry, the clever Pulteney, Cobham, Pitt, the Granvilles, Lyttleton, the prig Bubb Doddington, whose one aim in life was to be a lord. There were the two Hedges—(Charles, who wrote epigrams)—erratic Lord Baltimore and peevish Lord Carnarvon, Townshend, whom George the Second much objected to, and his wife as well—the Townshends seem to have been very staunch to the Prince—chatty Lord North, the Earl of Middlesex, who allowed his wife’s name to be coupled with the Prince’s, although the lady’s descriptions “short and dark, like a winter’s day,” and “as yellow as a November’s morning,” were hardly those to fascinate an artistic nature such as Frederick’s. Yet she certainly took part in the “Judgment of Paris” in 1745 as one of the Graces. Last of all to be mentioned, there was that “stutteringpuppy,” as George the Second called him, Johnny Lumley, brother of the Earl of Scarborough.
The maids of honour in attendance on the Princess of Wales, however, must have been very different to that charming trio, “the Swiss,” “Belladine,” and the “Schatz,” who waited upon Queen Caroline when Princess of Wales.
They do not appear to have been popular in the Prince’s household at any rate, for his head coachman made a most curious will concerning them, in which he left his considerable savings to his son, on condition that he never married a maid of honour! A compliment to those ladies which they no doubt appreciated.
Among the many amusements with which the Prince and Princess delighted their friends, private theatricals had their place,Catobeing played on one occasion at Leicester House, when the young Prince George Frederick had grown sufficiently into boyhood to take the part of Portius, in which he was coached by Quin, who boasted he “had taught the boy to speak”; the boy who was afterwards to be George the Third.
For the little theatre at Cliefden, Thompson, a pensioner of Frederick’s—and he had many—wrote his play “Alfred.”
The Prince’s children came quickly, and Frederick showed himself to be a tender father. There had been that sad episode years before, when he had grieved so deeply—so deeply that his mother and sisters hadsaid they had not believed him capable of such sorrow—over the death of that little child who had no right to have been there at all, Anne Vane’s and his son.
That sad note had struck the one most tender chord in the despised Prince’s nature, the depths of which his mother and sisters could not sound; the love of little children. When his own grew up around him, that great fount of love welled up and covered many of his sins, as we know that love will do.
This is what is said of him at that time:
“Notwithstanding this, he played the father and husband well. He loved to have his children with him, always appeared most happy when in the bosom of his family, left them with regret, and met them again with smiles, kisses and tears.”
And this was the nature which Queen Caroline could not understand; was it not one full of love to shower onsome one? Had he but had the chance of a mother’s full love in those cold years of his childhood spent in Hanover, is it not reasonable to think that his whole nature would have been altered, and that he might have so wound himself around Caroline’s heart that even her handsome younger son could never have loosened those tendrils of affection.
But alas! there were those fourteen years of separation, when the boy was left practically to his own resources to grow up without the tenderness of a mother’s love to guide him.
How different was his conduct as a father to that of his own father, who candidly admitted that he could not bear to have his children playing about in the same room with him.
But in this happy time of a young father’s life, there were black clouds gathering over the Prince’s household and this is how the old Duchess of Marlborough speaks of them in her matter of fact way:
“They have found a way in the City to borrow thirty thousand pounds for the Prince at ten per cent. interest to pay his crying debts to trades-people. But I doubt that sum won’t go very far. But they have got it though great pains was taken to hinder it.
“The salaries in the Prince’s family are twenty-five thousand pounds a year, besides a good deal of expense at Cliefden in building and furniture. And the Prince and Princess’s allowance for their clothes is six thousand pounds a year each. I wish his Royal Highness so well that I am sorry there is such an increase of expense more than in former times, where there was more money a great deal, and really I think it would have been more for the Prince’s interest, if his counsellers had thought it proper to have advised him to live only like a great man, and to give the reasons for it; and in doing so he would have made a better figure, and have been safer; for nobody that does not get by it themselves can possibly think the contrary method a right one.”The Duchess of Marlborough to Lord Stair, 1738.
But though the pall of debt hung heavy over the Prince, yet there was hope ahead, for even as far back as 1737—it must have been the very end of the year—Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, writes to Lord Stair:—
“The courtiers talk much of a reconciliation. If there is any design to compass that, surely it was as ill-judged as everything else to publish such a character of the King’s son all over England.”[58]
From a wall of an alcove in the Prince of Wales’s garden at Cliefden, Bucks.
“Say, Frederick, fixed in a retreat like this,Can ought be wanting to complete thy bliss?Here, where the charms of Art with Nature joinEach social, each domestic bliss is thine.Despising here the borrowed blaze of stateThou shin’st in thy own virtues truly great,By them exalted, with contempt look downOn all earth’s pomps, except Britannia’s crown.”
“Say, Frederick, fixed in a retreat like this,Can ought be wanting to complete thy bliss?Here, where the charms of Art with Nature joinEach social, each domestic bliss is thine.Despising here the borrowed blaze of stateThou shin’st in thy own virtues truly great,By them exalted, with contempt look downOn all earth’s pomps, except Britannia’s crown.”
“Say, Frederick, fixed in a retreat like this,Can ought be wanting to complete thy bliss?Here, where the charms of Art with Nature joinEach social, each domestic bliss is thine.Despising here the borrowed blaze of stateThou shin’st in thy own virtues truly great,By them exalted, with contempt look downOn all earth’s pomps, except Britannia’s crown.”
“Say, Frederick, fixed in a retreat like this,
Can ought be wanting to complete thy bliss?
Here, where the charms of Art with Nature join
Each social, each domestic bliss is thine.
Despising here the borrowed blaze of state
Thou shin’st in thy own virtues truly great,
By them exalted, with contempt look down
On all earth’s pomps, except Britannia’s crown.”
M.L.Nov. 2nd, 1749.
FOOTNOTES:[58]She alludes to the correspondence printed and published by Walpole, after the Prince’s expulsion from England.
[58]She alludes to the correspondence printed and published by Walpole, after the Prince’s expulsion from England.
[58]She alludes to the correspondence printed and published by Walpole, after the Prince’s expulsion from England.