afford out of the civil list. He represented the dangerous impropriety of interposing between father and son, and making a lasting breach between them; he met Pulteney's historical references with other references of the same kind; he denied that any precedent for such parliamentary interposition could be found except in the reign of the weak and imbecile Henry VI.; he declared that the prince had no claim either in equity or good policy, and still less in law, or precedent; and he affirmed that the civil list had been granted unconditionally to the king, without stipulations, without restrictions, without a hint of 100,000l. per annum for the prince. Pulteney said in reply, that in reality the prince had only 52,000l. a-year; that the whole expense of his household amounted to 63,000l., “without allowing his royal highness one shilling for the indulgence of that generous and charitable disposition with which he was known to be endued in a very eminent degree;"that the prince was being reduced to real want, even with respect to his absolute necessities, "and consequently to an unavoidable dependence, and a vile pecuniary dependence too, upon his father's ministers and servants.' Between twelve and one o'clock in the morning the House divided, when the numbers for the king were 234, for the prince 204. According to Bubb Doddington, forty-five Tories were absent, but thirty-five members of the class who had never voted against government before voted for the prince. If the Tory opponents of Walpole had all remained and voted, he and the king would have been left in a minority; but the hottest of the Tories as Jacobites were disposed neither to give any vote in favour of the heir of the House of Hanover nor against the prerogative and authority of the crown." The prince, or the party acting with him and driving him on, was determined

go through." On Friday, the 25th, precisely the same motion was made in the House of Lords by Carteret, who, since his return from his Irish government, seems to have been more inimical to Walpole than ever. Lord Carteret was seconded by Lord Gower, and the debate lasted till half-past eight at night, when the motion was rejected by a majority of 103 to 40. The prince set no bounds. to his rage, and studied how he might best insult❘ his father. His wife had been for some time enceinte, but he did not deign to announce this fact either to the king or to the queen until the beginning of July, when her time approached. All the royal family were then at Hampton Court, where the usual stately preparations were made for the birth. But, upon the 31st of July, when the

Forty-five was near about the number of determined Jacobites in the House of Commons at that moment. But, with all his enemies arrayed against him, Walpole could never have dropped to the small majority of thirty if it had not been for the pretty general belief that George II. was dying, and that his son would in the course of a very few months or weeks, or perhaps days, be king. Hence arose the votes of the thirty members who had never voted against Walpole before. The courtly instinct of others both in parliament and out of parliament went, no doubt, in the same way.

prince, at the hazard of her life and the life of her offspring, hurried her off in the middle of the night to London, to the unaired palace and beds of St. James's, without giving the slightest intimation to the king and queen, or to any of the great officers of state who were required to be present to certify the birth of an infant that might inherit the crown. George, angry and alarmed, sent off Sir Robert Walpole and Lord Harrington to attend the birth; but though they used speed they did not arrive till after the accouchement. The princess was safely delivered of a daughter in St. James's, but had run a near risk of being delivered at a road-side inn. According to Horace Walpole, Queen Caroline hastened up to town, and was with the princess by an early hour on the following morning. "The gracious prince, so far from attempting an apology, spoke not a word to his mother; but, on her retreat gave her his hand, led her into the street to her coach-still dumb; but, a crowd being assembled at the gate, he kneeled down in the dirt, and humbly kissed her majesty's hand! Her indignation must have shrunk into contempt." The edifying quarrel, the exemplary hatred, between father and son was now pushed to extremities, even as it had been in the preceding reign when George II., as prince, had exercised that filial undutifulness of which he was now the victim. Frederick, however, for the sake of public opinion, proffered submissions and apologies to his parents, and, to account for his strange conduct in removing his wife, told stories which no one believed; and the father was at the very least as harsh and obstinate as the son was rash and undutiful. Walpole, at the same time, apprehending that his removal from office might be made the condition of a reconciliation, opposed all the prince's overtures, and endeavoured, it is said, to keep alive the unnatural enmity. Yet, for ourselves, we are disposed to believe that there was small necessity for any such exertion on the part of the minister; and that the feelings of the king might be safely left to their own deep resentment and unforgiveness. Lord Hardwicke, the new chancellor, exerted himself to the utmost to effect a reconciliation, and failed; and even so, we apprehend, would Walpole have failed if he had made the attempt. Possibly, too, such an attempt might have shaken the king's confidence in his premier, as much as any reconciliation could have done. When Frederick intimated his design of visiting the king, the queen strongly advised him to delay his visit for a few days. In the mean while the king dictated the draft of a message to Sir Robert, who submitted it to the consideration of the Lords Hardwicke, Wilmington, and Harrington. Hardwicke suggested gentler terms; Wilmington, who seldom spoke

Reminiscences. Horace repeats the same story in his Memoirs; and in many letters of the time, written by less caustic pens, the cir cumstances are alluded to. Horace says-"A baby that wounds itself to vex its nurse is not more void of reflection. The scene which commenced by unfeeling idiotism closed with paltry hypocrisy." Yet such was Frederick Prince of Wales, and, such as he was, he was made, for selfish ends no doubt, the idol of a party.

ordered an official circular to be sent to all the foreign ambassadors at London with his account of the affair; and this paper was afterwards published, together with the correspondence which had taken place between the king and the prince. Lord Hardwicke has hinted that there was more in this quarrel than met the public eye. "Sir Robert Walpole," says his lordship, "informed me of certain passages between the king and himself and between the queen and the prince, of too high and secret a nature even to be trusted to this narrative; but from thence I found great reason to think that this unhappy difference between the king and queen and his royal highness turned upon some points of a more interesting and important nature than have hitherto appeared.'

A few weeks after the departure of the prince from St. James's, Queen Caroline, who appears indisputably to have been the best person of the family, departed this life. From an excess of delicacy her majesty had carefully concealed, even from her personal attendants and physicians, a bad rupture under which she had suffered for many years. "The queen's great secret," says Horace Walpole, was her own rupture, which till her last illness nobody knew but the king, her German nurse, Mrs. Mailborne, and one other person (her confidante, lady Sundon,† who had exercised an extraordinary degree of influence over the queen, and who was accused of swaying her majesty's countenance towards the heterodox or less believing part of the clergy). To prevent all suspicion, her majesty would frequently stand some minutes in her shift talking to her ladies; and, though labouring with so dangerous a complaint, she made it so invariably a rule never to refuse a desire of the king, that every morning at Richmond she walked several miles with him; and more than once, when she had the gout in her foot, she dipped her whole leg in cold water to be ready to attend him. The pain, her bulk, and the exercise, threw her into such fits of perspiration as vented the gout; but those exertions hastened the crisis of her distemper." Ignorant to the last of her real malady, the physicians treated her majesty as if she had gout in the stomach, and thereby hastened her death. When the secret was disclosed it was too late, though one of the surgeons is said to have declared that if he had known it only two days sooner he could have set her upcn her legs within four-and-twenty hours; but such professional declarations, not very rare were common then. The high-minded, stronglynerved woman bore her agonies with wonderful fortitude. Her friendship to Walpole, or her con

Lord Hardwicke's Narrative.

even now,

"It was great shrewdness in Sir Robert Walpole," says that minister's son, "who, before her distemper broke out, discovered her secret. On my mother's death, who was of the queen's age, her majesty asked Sir Robert many physical questions; but he remarked that she oftenest reverted to a rupture, which had not been the illness of his wife. When he came home he said to me, Now, Horace, I know by possession of what secret Lady Sundon has preserved such an ascendant over the queen.'. He was in the right."-Reminiscences.

viction that he was the most likely minister to carry her husband honourably through the increasing difficulties of government, remained unshaken to the last. It is said that the day before her death, as the king and the premier were standing by her bedside, she pathetically recommended, not the minister to the sovereign, but the master to the servant, saying to Walpole, "I hope you will never desert the king, but continue to serve him with your usual fidelity; I recommend his majesty to you." But it appears that, even in dying, her orthodoxy to the church of England was questioned,* and it has been asserted that she could not make up her mind to the natural and truly Christian duty of forgiving the Prince of Wales, who had not merely wronged her by recent insult, but who, ever since his arrival in England, had treated her with marked aversion, arising, probably, in good part, from her great political influence and his own nothingness in the cabinet, and from the king's constantly leaving her regent during his absences on the continent, without deputing the least share of authority to her son. The story of the queen's implacable resentment even on her dying bed is, however, open to some doubt. Horace Walpole, who certainly had the fullest means of information, though not in all cases the most perfect veracity-as he would twist a tale to make it tell the better, and turn circumstances so as to favour the character of his own father or his father's great patroness -affirmed positively that Caroline sent both her forgiveness and her blessing to her unaffectionate son, and said she would have seen him with pleasure had she not feared to embarrass and irritate the king her husband. The generally amiable character of Caroline facilitates our belief; and, if Horace Walpole was prejudiced on one side, the authorities which state her unforgiveness were at least as much prejudiced on the other. Pope was Caroline's enemy and a friend of Swift, and, as a poet, quite as much given to turning truth to make a point as was the anecdote-telling Horace Walpole; Lord Chesterfield was her enemy upon many

Horace Walpole, who was not very orthodox himself, says that the queen declined taking the sacrament, which was offered to her by Archbishop Potter, very few persons being in the room at the time. He adds- When the prelate retired, the courtiers in the anteroom crowded round him, crying, My lord, has the queen received?' His grace artfully eluded the question, only saying, most devoutly, Her majesty was in a heavenly disposition;' and the truth escaped the public."

+ Lord Chesterfield, who occasionally rhymed, though he had no genius for poetry, circulated a copy of verses, in which was the line,

'And, unforgiving, unforgiven, dies."

Pope, who took another occasion of saying, in the coarsest manner, that Caroline had no bowels, put the following sarcasm in the Epilogue to his Satires:

And, hail her passage to the realms of rest,

All parts perform'd, and all her children bless'd."

Coxe, Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole. The archdeacon says that he had some circumstances from Lord Orford, i. e. Horace Walpole, in his old age. In his Reminiscences Horace says, in his most caustic manner-" She suffered more unjustly by declining to see her son, the Prince of Wales, to whom she sent her blessing and forgiveness; but, conceiving the extreme distress it would lay on the king, should he thus be forced to forgive so impenitent a son, or to banish him again if once recalled, she heroically preferred a meritorious husband to a worthless child."

grounds; and Mr. Charles Ford, who gives the most distinct account on this side, could not have been her friend, as he was the correspondent and friend of the black-biled dean of St. Patrick's. In fact, this particular account is given by Ford, in a letter to Swift. Ford says-" She absolutely refused to see the Prince of Wales, nor could the Archbishop of Canterbury, when he gave her the sacrament,† prevail on her, though she said she heartily forgave the prince." But was Ford at all likely to deck out Caroline as a saint to the malicious revengeful man who had been cursing her for years for not making him a bishop, for adhering to Walpole, and frustrating all the schemes and intrigues of his close allies, Atterbury, Bolingbroke, and the rest? But, again, Ford's prose account disagrees with the poetical points of Pope and Chesterfield for it admits that the dying queen heartily forgave her son. Although written in a different spirit, indeed, it is, in what relates to the prince, substantially the same with that given by Walpole.

Whatever was her conduct on her death-bed, Queen Caroline died on the 20th of November, and her loss was deeply felt both by the king and the nation, and probably by Walpole more than all. That minister knew that she had been the better genius that guided the king-that she had been the only person in the world that could properly understand and manage her husband that her good sense had carried him through all his official difficulties, and that without her he could have no sure reliance on George. He vented some of his feelings in a letter to his brother, relating the queen's death. "I must have done," said he;

our grief and distraction want no relation; I am oppressed with sorrow and dread." The king, however, repeatedly assured him of his intention still to follow his advice in all things, and reminded him how the queen on her death-bed had recommended her husband to the minister, which his majesty emphatically said was a just and wise recommendation. These royal sentiments lasted as long as grief for the deceased, which was at first

According to Horace Walpole, Chesterfield had been put in the Queen's Index Expurgatorius some years before, on account of a suspicion that his lordship was intriguing (politically) with Mrs. Howard, afterwards Lady Suffolk. The queen," says Horace. "had an obscure window, at St. James's, that looked into a dark passage, lighted only by a single lamp at night, which looked upon Mrs. Howard's apartment. Lord Chesterfield, one Twelfth-night, at court, had won so large a sum of money that he thought it imprudent to carry it home in the dark, and deposited it with the mistress. Thence the queen inferred great intimacy; and thenceforward Lord Chesterfield could obtain no favour from court; and, finding himself desperate, went into opposition. My father himself long afterwards told me the story, and had become the principal object of the poet's satiric wit, though he had not been the mover of his disgrace. The weight of that anger fell more disgracefully on the king." The noble lord's revenge on George II. was instituting proceedings at law about the suppressed will of George I.-[See ante.] Chesterfield, moreover, had made a close league with the old Duchess of Marlborough, who lost no occasion of venting her spite against the present government. Her grace hated St. James's, but she could never long agree with Norfolk House. For some time Chesterfield was her mouthpiece in the House of Lords. The opposition, on the whole, seem to have been rather troubled than served by the self-willed imperious old woman-only, now and then, she obliged some of them with loans of money out of her enormous wealth.-Marchmont Papers.

+ Horace Walpole, as we have seen, says that the queen did not take the sacrament at all. He was more likely to know the fact than was Ford,

me."

passionate; for, as we have already observed, though George kept mistresses, he never loved any woman as he did his wife. Some time after the queen's death, he called Baron Brinkman, one of his German attendants, to his bedside, and said, "I hear you have a picture of my wife-a better likeness than any in my possession-bring it to When the picture was brought, the king was deeply affected, and after a short pause he said, "It is very like; put it upon the chair at the foot of my bed, and leave it till I ring the bell." The bell was not rung till two hours had elapsed, and when the baron entered the bed-chamber, George said, "Take the picture away; I never yet saw the woman worthy to buckle her shoe."*

And yet Goorge had at Hanover-and had had for some time-a successor to Lady Suffolk, in the person of the Countess of Walmoden; and not very long after the queen's death he brought her over to England, and on the 24th of March, 1740, created her Baroness and Countess of Yarmouth.† Fortunately, the Walmoden was almost as inoffensive as her predecessor Lady Suffolk, albeit somewhat fonder of money. She looked to the main chance, and tried to enrich her family and friends, leaving politics to take their own course, and shunning any dangerous connexion either with rabid Tories or discontented Whigs. A more dangerous woman was the princess royal, Anne, whom George had married to the Prince of Orange. Anne, who is described as being of a most imperious and ambitious nature, came over from Holland soon after the queen's death, in the hope of succeeding to her mother's influence: but the king, aware of her plan, was so offended that he sent her to Bath as soon as she arrived, and then, in as peremptory a manner, back to Holland. The Princess Amelia and the Princess Caroline remained in England, unmarried, but they took little or no part in cabinet intrigues, and their brother, the Duke of Cumberland, whose passion it would have been to command the army, rarely interfered in politics.

A.D. 1738. The opposition, or all that part of it linked at Norfolk House, took alarm at a curious attempt to reconcile the Prince of Wales to the king. At a masquerade, Madame Hoppe, wife of the Dutch minister in London, went up to the prince, and, asking him if he were afraid to talk to a lady, presented to him Madame Walmoden, "who proposed some things to him, and talked of being reconciled to his father, and they agreed to

This anecdote was communicated at the end of the last century to Archdeacon Coxe by Theodore Henry Broadhead, Esquire, grandson of Baron Brinkman, who possessed the portrait alluded to.

"After the death of the queen," says Horace Walpole," Lady Yarmouth came over, who had been the king's mistress at Hanover during his latter journies-and with the queen's privity, for he always made her the confidante of his amours. . . . . . In his letters to the queen from Hanover, he said, 'You must love the Walmoden, for she loves me.' She was created a countess, and had much weight with him, but never employed her credit but to assist his ministers, or to convert some honours and favours to her own advantage. She had two sons, who both bore her husband's name; but the younger, though never acknowledged, was supposed the king's, and conse. quently did not miss additional homage from the courtiers."Reminiscences.

meet at another masquerade, better disguised."* But the secret got wind, and the Earl of Marchmont warned the prince that a reconciliation, or the talk of a reconciliation, would spoil everything; "that the talk of his going to court on his birthday had done harm, the bad consequences of which must inevitably follow, for he would be at mercy, and lose the interest he had gained, which was a great security to the Hanoverian establishment, to himself, and to the whole family." The Scottish Whig lord farther assured the prince that since the quarrel he had been gaining ground in the hearts of the people; that he was surrounded now by those most loved and respected by the people, by men of unblemished characters, that is to say the Pulteneys, the Carterets, the Chesterfields, and the Marchmonts. In reply, the prince assured Lord Marchmont that he would never make any dishonourable terms, and would never speak to Sir Robert Walpole. He said, that, if ordered to go to court, he must go; but he wished that might not happen. In this manner did a faction labour to prolong the unnatural discord. The assurances of the prince were satisfactory, but the opposition was split into sections, each jealous of the other; and, a day or two after this interview, the Earl of Marchmont and his more particular allies were alarmed at a project revealed to them by Lord Cobham, as having been formed by Lord Carteret and Pulteney,

to get the Prince of Wales into their hands, by which they might have made a property of him." It appears, however, that as soon as the Earl of Chesterfield and Lord Cobham got a glimpse of this scheme they went to the prince and prevented it. At the same time all kinds of stories were circulated, and probably for the most part invented, to exasperate the prince still more against the prime minister, and to render Walpole odious and ridiculous to the people. It was said, for example, that, when a deputation was appointed to compliment the prince on the birth of his child, Sir Robert called across the House to Alderman Heathcote, member for Southwark, who was one of those named to go up with the address-" Take a bank bill of 20,000l. with you; he needs it; he will touch!" It was also said that Walpole called the Prince of Wales one of the pretenders to the king's crown, saying that there were two of them, one at Rome, the other at Norfolk House! "You may guess," says the Earl of Marchmont, "how this is taken. . . . . . What does not such fellow deserve? What do you think of all this flagitious madness from one in his situation? The Duchess of Marlborough showed me a drawing which points out his deserved exit. You know where it came from." This able and busy Scot professed to love the prince well "for many valuable qualities," especially for his goodness of heart, which did not dispose him to be over fond of money or of

a

power:" but it is quite evident that he could never depend upon the prince's promises and solemn assurances, and that he considered his royal highness as little better than a well-oiled weathercock, affected by the slightest breath of air, and always denoting the last wind that blew.

The session of parliament, which began in January, was very stormy, and seemed to prove to most men that Walpole would not be able long to maintain the pacific system on which he prided himself. The " patriots," as they persisted in calling themselves, resolved to inflame the public mind against Spain, and that country unfortunately pursued a jealous and unamiable course, which afforded a broad background for high colouring and exaggeration. Yet, while they clamoured for a foreign war, these "patriots" cried out quite as lustily against any increase of the forces as if war were to be made by means of loud speeches in St. Stephen's Chapel. Walpole proposed 17,000 men for the army-no great number, considering that if we went to war at all we were likely to have France as well as Spain against us; but they insisted that 12,000 men would be enough. The minister, irritated at the declamations of the disguised Jacobites, laid them bare and scourged them with unusual severity. "No man of common prudence," cried he, "will now profess himself openly a Jacobite; as by so doing he not only may injure his private fortune, but must render himself less able to do any effectual service to his cause.... Your right Jacobite now disguises his true sentiments; he roars out for revolutionary principles; he pretends to be a great friend to liberty, and a great admirer of our ancient constitution; and under this pretence there are numbers who every day endeavour to sow discontent among the people. These men know that discontent and disaffection are, like wit and madness, separated by thin partitions, and therefore they hope that, if they can once render the people thoroughly discontented, it will be easy for them to render them disaffected." The patriots paid so much homage to truth as to remain silent, and the increase of the army was carried without a division. Atterbury had called Walpole in rhyme, "The cur-dog of Britain and spaniel of Spain;" and the Jacobites and discontented Whigs now went on to prove the latter part of the proposition, by showing that he had not protected smuggling, had not put down the Spanish Guarda Costas in the West Indies, and had not proclaimed a war to force the Spanish court to change its commercial code and admit the principle of free trade for her colonies in South America and everywhere else. By the law of nations, which sanctioned to every independent power the right of regulating her trade and colonies in her own way, however jealous, exclusive, or irrational-by treaties, old and new, which sanctified this principle, and expressly bound England to submit to the Spanish regulations in the New World-Walpole had been deterred from pursuing the course which he was now censured for not following. By the treaty of 1670 Spain