Chapter 6

FAMILY JARS.

[Sidenote: 1737--Unpopularity of George the Second]

"How is the wind now for the King?" "Like the nation--against him." Such was the question put, and such the answer promptly given, by two persons meeting in a London street during certain stormy days of December, 1736. The King had been on a visit to his loved Hanover. When the royal yachts were returning, some fierce tempests sprang up and raged along both coasts; and the King's vessel was forced to return to Helvoetsluis, in Holland, from which she had sailed. She had parted company with some of the other vessels. The storms continued to rage, and the King, who had been most reluctant to leave Hanover, was wild with impatience to get away from Helvoetsluis. Having had to take leave of Madame Walmoden, he was now anxious to get back to the Queen. He sailed for Helvoetsluis while the tempest was still not wholly allayed, and another tempest seemed likely to spring up. News travelled slowly in those times, and there were successive intervals of several days, during which the English Court and the English public did not know whether George was safe in a port, or was drifting on a wreck, or was lying at the bottom of the sea.

That was a trying time for the Queen and those who stood by her. George the Second was just then very unpopular in London, and indeed all over England. "The King's danger," Lord Hervey says, "did not in the least soften the minds of the people towards him; a thousand impertinent and treasonable reflections were thrown out against him every day publicly in the streets--such as wishing him at the bottom of the sea; that he had been {70} drowned instead of some of the poor sailors that had been washed off the decks--and many other affectionate _douceurs_ in the same style." A man went into an ale-house where several soldiers were drinking; he addressed them "as brave English boys," and called on them to drink "damnation to your master." The man went on to argue that there was no reason why the English people should not hate the King, and that the King had gone to Hanover only to spend the money of England there, and to bring back his Hanoverian mistress. There is not much in this of any particular importance; but there is significance in what followed. The man was arrested, and the sergeant who was with the soldiers when the invitation to drink was given went to Sir Robert Walpole to tell him what had happened. Sir Robert thanked the sergeant and rewarded him, but enjoined him to leave out of the affidavit he would have to make any allusion to the English money and the Hanoverian mistress. There was quite enough in the mere invitation to drink the disloyal toast, Sir Robert said, to secure the offender's punishment; but the Prime-minister was decidedly of opinion that the less said just then in public about the spending of English money and the endowment of Hanoverian women, the better for peace and quietness.

[Sidenote: 1737--The Prince of Wales]

The Queen and Sir Robert and Lord Hervey were in constant consultation. They would not show in public the fear which all alike entertained. The Queen went to chapel, and passed her evenings with her circle just as usual; but she was in the uttermost alarm and the deepest distress. Any hour might bring the news that the King was drowned; and who could tell what might not happen in England then? Of course in the natural order of things the Prince of Wales would succeed to the throne; and what would become of the Queen and Walpole and Hervey then? Hervey, indeed, tried to reassure the Queen, and to persuade her that her son would acknowledge her influence and be led by it; but Caroline could not be prevailed upon to indulge in such a hope even for {71} a moment. To add to her troubles, her daughter, the Princess of Orange, was lying in a most dangerous condition at the Hague--her confinement had taken place; she had suffered terribly; and, to save her life, it had been found necessary to sacrifice the unborn child, a daughter. Every hour that passed without bringing news of the King seemed to increase the chance of the news when it came proving the worst. Such was the moment when the Prince of Wales made himself conspicuous by several bids for popularity. He gave a dinner to the Lord Mayor and aldermen of the City of London on the occasion of their presenting him with the freedom of the city. The Queen, who, for all her philosophical scepticism and her emancipated mind, had many lingering superstitions in her, saw an evil omen in the fact that the only two Princes of Wales who before Frederick had been presented with the freedom of the city were Charles the First and James the Second. The prince was reported to the Queen to have made several speeches at the dinner which were certain to ingratiate him in popular favor. "My God!" she exclaimed, "popularity always makes me sick; but Fritz's popularity makes me vomit." People told her that the prince and those around him talked of the King's being cast away "with the same _sang-froid_ as you would talk of a coach being overturned." She said she had been told that Frederick strutted about as if he were already King. But she added, "He is such an ass that one cannot tell what he thinks; and yet he is not so great a fool as you take him for, neither." The Princess Caroline vowed that if the worst were to prove true, she would run out of the house _au grand galop_. Walpole described the prince to Hervey as "a poor, weak, irresolute, false, lying, dishonest, contemptible wretch," and asked, "What is to become of this divided family and this divided country?" It is something of a relief to find that there was in one mind at least a thought of what might happen to the country.

We have to take all these pictures of Frederick on {72} trust--on the faith of the father who loathed him, of the mother who detested and despised him, of the brothers and sisters who shrank away from him, of the minister who could not find words enough to express his hatred and contempt for him. Of course the mere fact that father and mother, brothers and sisters, felt thus towards the prince is terrible testimony against him. But there does not seem much in his conduct, at least in his public conduct, during this crisis, which might not bear a favorable interpretation. He might have given his dinners, as the Queen held her public drawing-rooms, for the purpose of preventing the spread of an alarm. No doubt the entertainment to the Lord Mayor and aldermen had been long arranged; and the prince may have thought it would be unwise to put it off at such a moment. Every report was believed against him. A fire broke out at the Temple, and the prince went down and stayed all night, giving directions and taking the control of the work for the putting out of the flames. His exertions undoubtedly helped to save the Temple from destruction; and he became for the time a hero with the populace. It was reported to Caroline that either the prince himself or some of his friends were going about saying that the crowd on the night of the fire kept crying out, "Crown him! crown him!"

[Sidenote: 1737--Monarchy a prosaic institution]

So far as the alarm of the Queen and Walpole had to do with the state of the country, it does not seem that there was any solid ground. What would have happened if the bloated King had been tossed ashore a corpse on the coast of England or the coast of Holland? So far as the public affairs of England are concerned, nothing in particular would have happened, we think. George would have been buried in right royal fashion; there would have been an immense concourse of sight-seers to stare at the royal obsequies; and Frederick would have been proclaimed, and the people would have taken little notice of the fact. What could it have mattered to the English people whether George the Second or his eldest son was {73} on the throne? No doubt Frederick was generally distrusted and disliked wherever he was known; but, then, George the Second was ever so much more widely known, and therefore was ever so much more distrusted and disliked. The chances of a successful Jacobite rising would not have been affected in any way by the fact that it was this Hanoverian prince and not that who was sitting on the throne of England. It would be hardly possible to find a more utterly unkingly and ignoble sovereign than George the Second; it is hardly possible that his son could have turned out any worse; and there was, at all events, the possibility that he might turn out better. Outside London and Richmond very few people cared in the least which of the Hanoverians wore the crown. Those who were loyal to the reigning family were honestly loyal on the principle that it was better for the country to have a Hanoverian sovereign than a Stuart. Many of those who in their feelings were still devoted to the Stuart tradition did not think it would be worth while plunging the country into a civil war for the almost hopeless chance of a revolution. England was beginning to see that, with all the corruption of Parliament and the constituencies under Walpole's administration, there was yet a very much better presentation of constitutional government than they had ever seen before. The arbitrary power of the sovereign had practically ceased to affect anybody outside the circles of the Ministry and the Court. The law tribunals sat and judged men impartially according to their lights, and person and property were at least secure against the arbitrary intrusion of the sovereign power. The old-fashioned chivalric, picturesque loyalty was gone; not merely because royalty itself had ceased to be chivalric and picturesque, but because men had, after so many experiments and changes, come to regard the monarchy as a merely practical and prosaic institution, to be rated according to its working merits. The majority in England at the time when George was tossing about the North Sea, or waiting impatiently at Helvoetsluis, had come to the conclusion {74} that on the whole the monarchy worked better under the Hanoverians than it had done under the Stuarts, and was more satisfactory than the protectorate of Cromwell. Therefore, we do not believe there was the slightest probability that the loss of George the Second would have brought any political trouble on the State. One can imagine objections made even by very moderate and reasonable Englishmen to each and all of the Hanoverian kings; but we find it hard to imagine how any reasonable Englishman, who had quietly put up with George the Second, should be at any pains to resist the accession of George the Second's eldest son.

But the truth is that although in her many consultations with Walpole and with Hervey the Queen did sometimes let drop a word or two about the condition of the country and the danger to the State, she was not thinking much about the state of the country. She was thinking honestly about herself and those who were around her, and whom she loved and wished to see maintained in comfort and in dignity. Her conviction was that if her son Frederick came to the throne she and her other children would be forced to go into an obscure life in Somerset House, the old palace which had been assigned to her in her jointure, and that they would even in that obscurity have to depend very much on the charity of the new King. This was the view Walpole took of the prospect. He thought those most in peril, those most to be pitied, were the Queen and the duke, her son, and the princesses. "I do not know," said Walpole to Hervey, "any people in the world so much to be pitied as that gay young company with which you and I stand every day in the drawing-room, at that door from which we this moment came, bred up in state, in affluence, caressed and courted, and to go at once from that into dependence on a brother who loves them not, and whose extravagance and covetousness will make him grudge every guinea they spend, as it must come from out of a purse not sufficient to defray the expenses of his own vices."

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Walpole, to do him justice, did think of the country. For all his rough, coarse, selfish ways, Walpole was an English patriot. He thought of the country, but he saw no danger to national interests in the change from George to Frederick. He saw, indeed, a great prospect of miserable mismanagement, blundering, and confusion in the Government. He foresaw the reliance of the coming King on the most worthless favorites. He foresaw more corruption and of a worse kind, and more maladministration, than there had been before at any time since the accession of George the First. He feared that it might not be possible for him to remain at the head of affairs when Frederick should have come to reign. But he does not appear to have had any dread of any immediate cataclysm or even disturbance. The troubles Walpole looked for were troubles which might indeed make government difficult, disturb the House of Commons, and bring discomfort of the bitterest kind into Court circles, but which would be hardly heard of in the great provincial towns, and not heard of at all in the country--at least not heard of outside the park railings of the great country-houses.

[Sidenote: 1737--A Royal love-letter]

Whatever the alarm, it was destined suddenly to pass away. While Caroline was already secretly putting her heart into mourning for her husband the news was suddenly brought that George was safe and sound in Helvoetsluis. He had been compelled to return, and there he had to remain weather-bound. He wrote to the Queen a long, tender, and impassioned love-letter--like the letter of a youthful lover in whose heart the first feeling on an unexpected escape from death is the glad thought that he is to look once again on the fair face of his sweetheart. George really had a gift for love-letter writing, the only literary gift which he seems to have possessed. It is impossible to read the letters from Helvoetsluis without believing that they were written under the inspiration of genuine emotion. Their style might well raise over again that interesting subject of speculation--whether it is in the power of man to be in love with two or more women {76} the same time. King George was unquestionably in love with Madame Walmoden: while he was near her he could think of nothing else. He was in Hanover, feasting and dancing, always in Madame Walmoden's company, while his daughter was lying on what seemed at one time like to be her death-bed at the Hague. It is not a very far cry from Hanover to the Hague, but it never occurred to George to entertain the idea of leaving Madame Walmoden to go and pay a visit to his daughter. Out of Madame Walmoden's presence his thoughts appear to have flown at once back to his wife. To her he wrote, not in the mere language of conjugal affection and sympathy, but with the passionate raptures of young love itself. The Queen was immensely proud of this letter, although she took care to say that she believed she was not unreasonably proud of it. She showed it to Walpole and to Hervey, who both agreed that they had a most incomprehensible master. Walpole was a very shrewd and keen-sighted man, but he did not understand Queen Caroline or her feeling towards her husband. He had told Hervey more than once that he did not know whether the Queen hated more her son or her husband; and, indeed, he said there was good reason why she should hate the husband the more of the two, seeing that he had treated her so badly while she had been all devotion to him. The love of a woman is not always governed by a sense of gratefulness. There are women whose hearts are like the grape, and give out their best juices to him who tramples on them. If anything is certain in all the coarse and dreary story of that Court, it is that Queen Caroline adored her husband--that she was too fond of her most filthy bargain.

[Sidenote: 1737--A fickle, inconsiderate Prince]

The danger in which George had been, and out of which he had escaped, did not in any way soften the hearts of King and prince, of father and son, towards each other. The prince still occupied a suite of rooms in St. James's Palace, and the King and he met on public occasions, but they never spoke. The Queen was even more constant in her hatred to the prince than the King himself. It does {77} not seem possible to find out how this detestation of the son by the mother ever began to fill the Queen's heart. She was not an unloving mother; indeed, where her affection to the King did not stand in the way, she was fond and tender to nearly all her children. But towards her eldest son she seems to have felt something like a physical aversion. Then, again, the King was a dull, stupid, loutish man, over whose clouded faculties any absurd prejudice or dislike might have settled unquestioned; but Caroline was a bright, clever, keen-witted woman, who asked herself and others why this or that should be. She must have many times questioned her own heart and reasoned with herself before she allowed it to be filled forever with hatred to her son. Lord Hervey, who had a true regard for her, and in whom she trusted as much as she trusted any human being, does not appear to have ever fully understood the cause of the Queen's feelings towards the prince; nor does he appear to have shared her utter distrust and dislike of him. As far as one can judge, the prince appears to have been fickle, inconsiderate, and flighty rather than deliberately bad. He sometimes did things which made him seem like a madman. Such a person would not be charmed into a healthier condition of mind and temper by the knowledge daily thrust upon him that his own father and mother, and his own sister, were the three persons who hated him most in the world. Of course, in this as in other cases of a palace quarrel between a king and an eldest son, there was a bitter wrangle about money. The prince demanded an allowance of one hundred thousand a year to be secured to him independently of his father's power to recall or reduce it. The King had hitherto only given him what Frederick called a beggarly allowance of fifty thousand a year, and even that had not been made over to the prince unconditionally and forever. The prince argued that his father's civil list was now much larger than that of George the First at the time when the Prince of Wales of that day, George the Second now, was allowed an income of one {78} hundred thousand a year. The Princess of Wales had as yet received no jointure, and she and the prince were thus kept, as Frederick's friends insisted, in the condition of mere pensioners and dependants upon the royal bounty. The prince's friends were, for the most part, eager to stir him up to some open measure of hostility; especially the younger men of the party were doing their best to drive the prince on. Pulteney, it must be said, was not for any such course of action, indeed, was against it, and had given the prince good advice; and Carteret was not for it. But Lord Chesterfield and several other peers, and Lyttelton and William Pitt in the House of Commons, were eager for the fray, and their counsels prevailed. To use an expression which became famous at a much later day, "the young man's head was on fire," and it soon became known to the King and Queen that the prince had resolved to act upon a suggestion made by Bolingbroke two years before, and submit his claim to the decision of Parliament. More than that, when Walpole was consulted Walpole felt himself obliged to declare his belief, or at least his fear, that if the prince should persist in making his claim he would find himself supported by a majority in the House of Commons. The story had reached the Queen in the first instance through Lord Hervey, and the manner of its reaching Lord Hervey is worth mentioning, because it brings in for the first time a name destined to be famous during two succeeding generations. The prince, having been persuaded to appeal to Parliament, at once began touting for support and for votes after the fashion of a candidate for a Parliamentary constituency. He sent the Duke of Marlborough to speak to Mr. Henry Fox, a young member of Parliament, and to ask Mr. Fox for his vote. Henry Fox was the younger of two brothers, both of whom were intimate friends of Lord Hervey. He had not been long in the House of Commons, having obtained a seat in 1735, as member for Hendon, in Wiltshire. He had come into Parliament in the same year with William Pitt, whose foremost political rival he was soon destined {79} to be. He was also destined to be the father of the greatest rival of his opponent's son. English public life was to see a Pitt and a Fox opposed to each other at the head of rival parties in one generation, and a far greater Fox and a not inferior Pitt standing in just the same attitude of rivalry in the generation that succeeded.

[Sidenote: 1737--A Royal liar]

Henry Fox went at once to Lord Hervey and told him how he had been asked to support the prince, and how he had answered that he should do as his brother did, whatever that might be. Lord Hervey at first was not inclined to attach much importance to the story. He said he had heard so often that the prince was going to take up such a course of action and nothing had come of it so far, and he did not suppose anything would come of it this time. Fox, however, assured him that the attempt would now most certainly be made, and was surprised to find that the ministers appeared to know nothing about it. He declared that he did not believe there was a man on the side of the Opposition who had not already been asked for his vote. Lord Hervey hurried to the Queen and told her the unpleasant news. Caroline sent for Walpole; and at last the story was told to the King himself. The Queen was urged by Lord Hervey to speak to her son privately, and endeavor to induce him not to declare open war upon his father. The Queen would not do anything of the kind. She declared that her speaking to her son would only make him more obstinate than ever, and that he was such a liar that it would not be safe for her to enter into any private conference with him. Other intercessors were found, but the prince was unyielding; and George himself, as obstinate as his son, could not be induced at first by Walpole, or by any one else, to make any show of concession or compromise. The Princess Caroline kept saying ever so many times a day that she prayed her brother might drop down dead; that he was a nauseous beast, and she grudged him every hour he continued to exist. These sisterly expressions did not contribute much to any manner of settlement, and the prince held on his course. {80} The calculations of Frederick's friends gave him in advance a majority of forty in the House of Commons; and even the most experienced calculators of votes on the King's side allowed to the prince a majority of ten. Walpole began to think the crisis one of profound danger. He felt it only too likely that the fate of his administration would depend on the division in the House of Commons.

[Sidenote: 1737--Frederick's "dutiful expressions"]

Something must be done; something at least must be attempted. Walpole saw nothing for it but to endeavor to arrange a compromise. Parliament had opened on February 1st, and the day appointed for the debate on this important question of the prince's allowance was to be Tuesday, the 22d of the month. On the Monday previous, Walpole made up his mind that if the King did not offer some fair show of compromise his party would be beaten when the question came to be put to the vote. His plan of arrangement was that the King should spontaneously send to the prince an intimation that he was willing to settle a jointure at once on the princess, with the added remark that this had already been under consideration--which indeed was true--not a very common occurrence in Royal messages of that day; and that he was also prepared to settle fifty thousand a year on the prince himself forever and without condition. Walpole did not believe that the prince would accept this offer of compromise. He knew very well that Frederick, full of arrogant confidence and obstinacy, and backed up by the zeal and passion of his friends, would be certain to refuse it. But Walpole was not thinking much about the impression which the offer would make on the prince. The thought uppermost in his mind was of the impression it would make on the House of Commons. Unless some new impression could be made upon the House, the triumph of the prince was absolutely certain; and Walpole felt sure that if any step could now alter the condition of things in the House of Commons it would be the publication of the fact that the King had spontaneously held out the olive-branch; that {81} he had offered a fair compromise, and that the prince had refused it.

Walpole had much trouble to prevail upon the King to make any offer of compromise. Even Lord Hervey was strongly of opinion that the attempt would be a failure, that the proffered concession would be wholly thrown away; such a movement, he said, would neither put off the battle nor gain the King one single desertion from the ranks of the enemy, while to the King's own party it would seem something like a lowering of the flag. Walpole, however, persevered, and he carried his point. A deputation, headed by the new Lord Chancellor, Lord Hardwicke, who had succeeded to the Great Seal on the death of his famous rival, Lord Chancellor Talbot, was sent to wait on the prince and submit to him the proposition of his father. The prince answered rather ungraciously that the matter was entirely out of his hands now, and that therefore he could give no answer to the Royal message. It must be gratifying to every patriotic soul to know that his Royal Highness accompanied this declaration with "many dutiful expressions" towards his father, and that he even went so far as to say he was sorry it was not in his power to do otherwise than as he had done. The dutiful expressions did not by any means charm away the wrath either of the King or the Queen. The two stormed and raged against Frederick, and called him by many very hard names. Both were much disposed to storm against Walpole too, for the advice he had given, and for his pertinacity in forcing them on to a step which had brought nothing but humiliation. Walpole bore his position with a kind of patience which might be called either proud or stolid, according as one is pleased to look at it. With all his courage, Walpole must have felt some qualms of uneasiness now and then, but if he did feel he certainly did not show them.

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