CHAPTER XXIV.The Reconciliation.
In 1741 the antagonism between the Prince and his father had not subsided and party spirit was strong, the followers of the King, such as Hervey and others, did not scruple, as they had never scrupled, to malign the Prince. There were, in theory, two Courts, the King’s and the Prince’s, the followers of both using the term “going to Court” in speaking of their visits to their respective masters. Walpole tells a story which bears upon the point.
“Somebody who belonged to the Prince of Wales said he was going to Court. It was objected, that he ought to say ‘going to Carlton House’: that the only Court is where the King resides. Lady Pomfret, with her paltry air of learning and absurdity, said: ‘Oh, Lord! is there no Court in England but the King’s? sure there are many more! There is the Court of Chancery, the Court of Exchequer, the Court of King’s Bench, etc.’ ‘Don’t you love her? Lord Lincoln does her daughter.’”
He refers to Lord Lincoln, one of the King’s party, and a nephew of the Duke of Newcastle, one of the Ministers.
“Not only his uncle-duke,” continues Horace Walpole, speaking of Lord Lincoln, “but even his Majesty is fallen in love with him. He talked to the King at hislevéewithout being spoken to. That was always thought high treason, but I don’t know how the gruff gentleman liked it.”
The “gruff” gentleman was of course the King.
The faction fever between the King’s party and that of his son reached its height, however, in the year 1742, when the Prince’s party combined with other opponents of the Government and overthrew the great Sir Robert Walpole after his many years of office. So Queen Caroline’s trusted minister and adviser fell at last.
He was succeeded by Lord Wilmington, who practically carried on the same policy as his predecessor.
In this year died Lady Sundon, who had been Mistress of the Robes to Queen Caroline and one of her confidantes.
“Lord Sundon is in great grief,” writes Horace Walpole. “I am surprised, for she has had fits of madness ever since her ambition met such a check by the death of the Queen. She had great power with her, though the Queen affected to despise her, but had unluckily told her, or fallen into her power, by some secret. I was saying to Lady Pomfret ‘to be sure she is dead very rich,’ she replied with some warmth, ‘She never took money.’ When I came home I mentioned this to Sir Robert. ‘No,’ saidhe, ‘but she took jewels. Lord Pomfret’s place of Master of the Horse to the Queen was bought of her for a pair of diamond earrings, of fourteen hundred pounds value.’
“One day she wore them at a visit at old Marlboro’s; as soon as she was gone, the duchess said to Lady Mary Wortley, ‘How can that woman have the impudence to go about in that bribe?’
“‘Madam,’ said Lady Mary, ‘how would you have people know where wine is to be sold unless there is a sign hung out?’
“Sir Robert told me that in the enthusiasm of her vanity, Lady Sundon had proposed to him to unite with her and govern the kingdom together; he bowed, begged her patronage, but, he said, he thought nobody fit to govern the kingdom but the King and Queen.”
About the period of 1742 rumours of a fresh Stuart rebellion began to permeate the country, and it was probably this fact, together with the Prince of Wales’s popularity with the public, which decided the King to come to a reconciliation with him. There was, however, now no Sir Robert to apply his wonderful statesmanship in bringing about the matter with the finesse and forethought he always displayed in cases of this sort, though it must be admitted that his arts had always been directed against the Prince.
However, the matter was done, though clumsily. It was commenced by a gentle hint given to thePrince that a letter from him to his father would be acceptable.
This proposition does not appear to have met at first with the Prince’s favour, he, possibly, thinking that the King owed him some reparation, and that the first step should come from him. But he eventually put his feelings in his pocket and wrote his father the desired letter.
This letter reached the King late at night, and he lost no time in responding to it; he expressed his wish to receive the Prince on the following day.
Frederick repaired to St. James’s as desired, attended by five of his suite. He was received by his father in one of the drawing-rooms, and the interview must have been an exceedingly interesting one for the onlookers from its importance, but its duration was bound within the limits of the strictest formality.
“How does the Princess do? I hope she is well,” was the sole scrap of conversation which passed King George’s lips, if chroniclers of the time can be credited. The Prince kissed his father’s hand, answered the question concerning his wife’s health, and—withdrew.
There appears, however, to have been a little burying of the hatchet on both sides. The King spoke to one or two of the Prince’s followers. The Prince unbent, and addressed a few courtesies to his father’s attending Ministers, and the thing was over.
The reconciliation, however, appears to have been universally regarded as an accomplished fact, and theGentleman’s Magazine, in its next issue, thus records it:—
Wednesday, February 17th, 1742.
“Several messages having passed yesterday between his Majesty and the Prince of Wales, his Royal Highness waited on his Majesty at St. James’s about one o’clock this day, and met with a most gracious reception. Great joy was shown in all parts of the kingdom upon this happy reconciliation.”
This reconciliation is said to have been worth an additional fifty thousand pounds a year to the Prince, and Horace Walpole remarks on it.
“He will have money now to tune Glover and Thompson and Dodsley again,et spes et ratio studiorum in Cæsare tantum.”
The whole of the Royal Family went after this together to the Duchess of Norfolk’s—the old house by the river, no doubt—the streets being “illuminated and bonfired.” There were pageants and reviews to celebrate the reconciliation, and the Prince and Princess made a sort of triumphal progress through the city to show themselves to their good friends the Corporation; then entering their barges at the Tower steps they finished up the day in a very sensible manner by dining at Greenwich, where they no doubt partook of whitebait and turtle.
Those processions of gilded barges on the Thames, accompanied as they generally were by music, musthave been stately sights for the citizens to view, and much missed when the river became too crowded and dirty to be used as a royal highway.
In 1743 died Schulemberg, the mistress of George the First, whom he created Duchess of Kendal. The Emperor of Germany had also for some unstated reason conferred on her the dignity of Princess of Eberstein.
She died at the age of eighty-five, possessed of great wealth, which she bequeathed to Lady Walsingham, generally supposed to be her daughter by George the First.
Lady Walsingham had previously married Lord Chesterfield.
“But, I believe,” remarks Horace Walpole, “that he will get nothing by the Duchess’s death but his wife. She lived in the house with the Duchess”—next door in Grosvenor Square, “where he had played away all his credit.”
But at this time war clouds were hanging over Europe, and King George had espoused the cause of Queen Maria Theresa of Hungary. Very soon his attention was drawn from his eldest son to be centred in this cause, in which his favourite son William took a part.