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."
{75}
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.
{82}