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withdrawn.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 was requested 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 wall _are 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 persons
who have recently lost a dear one by death; the terrible fear that the
beloved _has 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
comment _to the Princesses_ on 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 was for 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 the King 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, pulled _his_ chair 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, on the 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 Prince as 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 “stuttering puppy,” 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, _Cato_ being 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 had
said 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 on _some 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 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.