A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume II Part 5

The answer, as it seems to us, ought to be that the censorship is on the whole of some use; that we are better with it than without it. It would be idle to contend that it is of any great service to public morality in the higher sense, but is certainly of considerable advantage as a safeguard to public decency and decorum. The censorship of the stage in England to-day does not pretend to be a guardian of public morality. In all that relates to the higher moral law the public must take care of itself. Let us give one or two ill.u.s.trations.

Many sincere and not unintelligent persons firmly believe that the cause of public morality is injured by the representation of any play in which vice of a certain kind is brought under public notice, even though the object of the play may be to condemn the vice it exposes; but no censor of plays now would think of refusing to permit the performance of "Oth.e.l.lo" on that account. To take a lower ill.u.s.tration: many people believe, and on better ground, that such a piece as "The Lady of Lyons" is injurious to public morals, because in that play the man who makes himself a leading actor in an infamous fraud becomes glorified into a hero and wins fame, fortune, and wife in the end. But no censor would think of refusing to allow the performance of "The Lady of Lyons." The {99} censor regards it as his duty to take care that indecent words are not spoken, and that what society considers indecent dressing is not exhibited. That is not much, it may be said, but it is better than nothing, and it is all we can get or would have. The censor cannot go ahead of the prevailing habits and the common opinion of the society of his day. If we had a censor who started a lofty code of morality and propriety all his own, public opinion would not stand him and his code. Suppose we had a censor who considered "Oth.e.l.lo" shocking, and an ordinary _decolletee_ dress or an ordinary ballet costume indecent, an outcry would soon be raised against him which would compel him to resign his purposes or his office. All he can do is to endeavor to order things so that nothing is said or exhibited which might shock society's sense of propriety, and this he can as a rule fairly accomplish. He must also take his society as he finds it. A West End audience in London will stand allusions and jests and scantiness of costume which an East End audience, made up almost exclusively of the working-people and the poor, would not endure for a moment. The censor of plays can be much more rigid in his discipline when he is protecting the proprieties of poverty than when he is protecting the proprieties of fashion. The censorship works well in England on the whole, because it has almost always been worked by capable men of the world who understand that they are not dealing with children, who do not magnify their office, and do not strain after an austere authority which it would be quite impossible for them to exert.

[Sidenote: 1737--The Playhouse Bill]

The Playhouse Bill pa.s.sed through the House of Commons easily enough.

No one of any mark took much account of it, except Pulteney, who opposed it. The opposition offered by Pulteney does not appear to have been very severe or even serious, for no division was taken in the representative Chamber. The feeling of every one was not so much concerned about what we should now call immorality or indecency, but about lampoons on public men. This fear was common to the Opposition as well as to the {100} Government, was shared alike by the Patriots and the Court party; and so the Bill was sent speedily through both Houses.

[Sidenote: 1737--The censorship of the stage]

The debate was made memorable by the brilliant speech of Lord Chesterfield in the House of Lords. All contemporary accounts agree in describing this speech as one of the most fascinating and impressive ever heard in Parliament. Chesterfield strongly opposed the measure in the interests of public liberty and the freedom of the press. He knew where to hit hard when he called the licensing department which the Bill proposed to create "a new excise." The real object of the measure, he insisted, was not so much to restrain the stage as to shackle the press. "It is an arrow that does but glance at the stage; the mortal wound seems destined against the liberty of the press." His argument to this effect was decidedly clever, keen, plausible, and telling. "You can prevent a play from being acted," he said, "but you do not prevent it from being printed. Therefore a play which by your censorship you refuse to allow to come on the stage, and in the interests of public morals very properly refuse, you allow to come in a printed form on the shelves of the booksellers. The very fact that a play was not allowed to be put on the stage will only make people the more eager to read it in book form; prohibited publications are in all countries diligently and generally sought after. Plays will be written in order to be prohibited by the censor and then to be sold in book form. What will come of this? Unquestionably an extension of the present measure for the purpose of preventing the printing as well as the public representation of plays. It is out of the question that society could allow a play to be read by all the public which it would not allow to be recited on the boards of a theatre. Now then you have got so far as the preventing of plays from being printed, what happens next? That a writer will turn his rejected, prohibited play into a novel or something of the kind; will introduce a little narrative as well as dialogue, and in this slightly {101} altered form offer his piece of scandalous work to the general reader. Then it will be asked, What! will you allow an infamous libel to be printed and dispersed merely because it does not bear the t.i.tle of a play? Thus, my Lords, from the precedent before us, we may, we shall be induced, nay, we can find no reason for refusing to lay the press under a general license, and then we may bid adieu to the liberties of Great Britain."

There was a great deal of force and of justice in Chesterfield's reasoning. But its defect was that it made no account of the amount of common-sense which must go to the administration of law in every progressive country. If the censorship of the stage had been worked in the spirit and style which Chesterfield expected, then it is beyond question that it would have to be followed up by a censorship of the press or withdrawn altogether. It would clearly be impossible to allow the very words which were not to be spoken on the stage to be set out in the clearest type on the shelves of every bookseller. But Chesterfield's own speech showed that he had entirely misconceived the extent and operation of a censorship of the stage in a country like England. The censorship of the stage which Chesterfield a.s.sumed to be coming, and which he condemned, could not possibly, as we have shown, exist in those islands. The censorship of the stage, if it were to move in such a direction, would not be paving the way for a censorship of the press, but simply paving the way for its own abolition. The speech was a capital and a telling piece of argument addressed to an audience who were glad to hear something decided and animated on the subject; but it never could have deceived Chesterfield himself. It took no account of the elementary political fact that all legislation is compromise, and that the supposed logical and extreme consequences of no measure are ever allowed to follow its enactment. The censorship of plays has gone on since that time, and it has not interfered with the general liberty of acting and of publishing dramatic pieces. It has not compelled {102} Parliament to choose between introducing a censorship of the press or abolishing the censorship of plays. We have never heard of any play worth seeing which was lost to the English stage through the censorship of the drama, nor was the suggestion ever made by the most reactionary Ministry that it should be followed up by a censorship of the press.

[Sidenote: 1737--Educated libellers]

Indeed in Walpole's day it might almost have seemed as if the stage required censorship less than the ballad. Probably, if it had been thought humanly possible to prevent the publication and the circulation of scurrilous poems against eminent men and women, Walpole might have ventured on the experiment. But he had too much robust common-sense not to recognize the impossibility of doing anything effective in the way of repression in that field of art.

Certainly the Muse of Song made herself very often a shrieking sister in those days. When she turned her attention to politics, and had her patrons to be sung up and her patrons' enemies to be sung down, she very often screamed and called names, and cursed like an intoxicated fish-wife. Pope, Swift, Gay, Hervey, flung metrical abuse about in the coa.r.s.est fashion. There seemed to be hardly any pretence at accuracy of description or epithet. If the poet or the poet's patron did not like a man or woman, no word of abuse was too coa.r.s.e or foul to be employed against the odious personage. Women, indeed, got off rather worse than men on the whole; even Lord Hervey did not suffer so much at the hands of Pope as did Mary Wortley Montagu. The poets of one faction did not spare even the princes and princesses, even the King or Queen, of another. Furious and revolting lines were written about George and his wife by one set of versifiers; about the Prince of Wales by another. No hour, no event, was held sacred. Around a death-bed the wits were firing off their sarcasms on its occupant. Some of the verses written about Queen Caroline, verses often containing the foulest and filthiest libels, followed her into the sick-chamber, {103} the bed of death, the coffin, and the grave. One could easily understand all this if the libellers had been vulgar and venal Grub Street hacks who were paid to attack some enemy of their paymaster.

But the vilest calumnies of the time were penned by men of genius, by men of the highest rank in literature; by men whose literary position made them the daily companions of great n.o.bles and of princes and princesses. Political and social hatred seemed to level all distinctions and to obliterate most of the Christian virtues.

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CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE BANISHED PRINCE.

[Sidenote: 1737--An important affair]

The conduct of the Prince of Wales was becoming more and more insolent to the King and Queen every day. Perhaps King George was right in his belief that Walpole's policy of compromise had made Frederick think himself of some real account in public affairs. It is certain that he began to act as if he were determined the whole nation should know how thoroughly independent he was of the authority of his father and mother. He had soon a peculiar opportunity of making a display of this ferocious independence.

The Princess of Wales was about to have her first child. For some reason, which no one could well explain, the news of the coming event was not made known to the King and Queen until the hour of its coming was very near. Even then there seems to have been some conscious or unconscious misleading of the King and Queen as to the actual time when according to calculations the child was to be born. The King and Queen were left under the impression that it was a good deal further off than it really proved to be. The Queen, with all her natural goodness of heart, was painfully suspicious. She was suspicious sometimes even of those she loved and trusted; and she hated both the Prince and the Princess of Wales. She had taken it into her head that the Princess of Wales was not likely to have a child. She persisted in a.s.serting to those around her that the princess was not pregnant and never would be.

Naturally when she allowed her mind to be filled with this idea, the next conclusion for her to jump at was the conviction that a supposit.i.tious infant was about to be palmed off on the Palace and the {105} country. This idea took full possession of her mind, and she kept constantly telling those around her that, no matter when or where the event might take place, she was determined to be in at that birth.

In the most explicit and emphatic way she told people that she would make sure for herself that no child was imported in a warming-pan this time.

The King and Queen were now in Hampton Court Palace; the Prince and Princess of Wales were also living there. Nothing would have been easier for the Queen than to carry out her purpose if the princess were allowed to remain in the palace until after her confinement. It was reported to her that the prince had said he was anxious that his wife should be confined in London--in St. James's Palace. This the Queen was determined to prevent if she could. The Princess Caroline fully shared her mother's belief that the Prince of Wales was quite capable of palming off a spurious child on the country; and indeed the King became after a while as well convinced of it as his wife and his daughter. It was resolved that a message should be sent from the King to the Prince of Wales, giving a sort of Royal command that the princess should remain at Hampton Court until after her confinement.

Lord Hervey shook his head at all this. He did not believe in the warming-pan fantasy; and he felt sure that in any case the Prince of Wales would contrive to get his wife out of Hampton Court if he wished to do so. What was to prevent the princess going up to London a little before her time, and then affecting to fall suddenly ill there, and declaring that she could not endure the pain and danger of removal?

Lord Hervey had seen a good deal of the prince in old days. They had had friendships and quarrels and final estrangement, and he knew his prince pretty well.

What Hervey had predicted came to pa.s.s, but in a worse way than he had ventured to predict. The Queen kept urging Walpole to send the King's order to the prince. Walpole kept putting it off. For one reason, the {106} minister had been told the confinement was to be expected in October, and this was only July. It is very likely, too, that he shared Hervey's scepticism alike as to the supposit.i.tious child and the possibility of keeping the prince's wife at Hampton Court against the prince's will. The Royal command was never sent.

[Sidenote: 1737--Neighbors requisitioned]

On Sunday, July 31, 1737, the Prince of Wales and the princess dined publicly with the King and Queen in Hampton Court Palace. Not a word was said to any one about an early approach of the confinement. The princess seemed in her usual condition. The two sets of royal personages did not talk with each other at this time, although they thus had ceremonial meetings in public. The Queen called the attention of some one near her to the princess's appearance, and insisted that she was not going to have a child at all. When dinner was over, the prince and princess went back to their own apartments, and later that evening the princess was taken with the pains of labor. Then followed what has hardly ever happened in the story of the life of a poor washer-woman or a peasant's wife. The unfortunate princess was far gone in her agony before any one had time to think; and before those around them had much time to think the Prince of Wales had determined to carry her off, groaning in labor as she was, and take her ten miles to London. The whole story is a shocking one; and we shall put it into a very narrow compa.s.s. But it has to be told somehow. By the help of an equerry and a dancing-master, the writhing princess was hoisted down-stairs and got into a carriage. The dancing-master, Dunoyer, was a hanger-on and favorite of the prince; and, being employed to teach dancing to the younger children of George the Second, acted as a kind of licensed spy, so Hervey says, on the one family and the other. In the carriage with the prince and princess came Lady Archibald Hamilton, who was understood to be the prince's mistress. No royal movement in those days would seem to be thought quite complete without the presence of some mistress of the {107} King or prince. The carriage reached London about ten o'clock. It had been driven at full gallop, the poor princess writhing and screaming all the time, and the prince scolding at her and telling her it was nonsense to cry and groan about pain which would so soon be over. When they got to St. James's Palace there were naturally no preparations made for a lying-in. The prince and Lady Archibald Hamilton set to work to get some things in readiness, and found they had to send round the neighborhood to collect some of the most necessary appliances for such an occasion. So pitifully unprovided was the palace that no clean sheets could be found, and the prince and his mistress put the princess to bed between two table-cloths. At a quarter before eleven the birth took place. A tiny baby was born; "a little rat of a girl," Lord Hervey says, "about the bigness of a good large tooth-pick." The little rat of a girl grew up, however, to be a handsome woman. She was seen by John Wilson Croker in 1809 and had still the remains of beauty. The Lords of the Council had been hurriedly sent for to be present at the birth; but the event was so sudden and so unexpected that only Lord Wilmington, the President of the Council, and Lord G.o.dolphin, the Privy Seal, arrived in time to be able to testify that no warming-pan operation was accomplished.

The unsuspecting King and Queen had gone to bed, according to their usual quiet custom, at eleven o'clock. Their feelings, as a certain cla.s.s of writers are in the habit of saying, may be more easily imagined than described when they were roused from sleep about two in the morning by the couriers, who came to tell them that the princess had become the mother of a girl, and that the prince and princess were at St. James's Palace, London. There was racing and chasing. Within half an hour the Queen was on the road to London with the two eldest princesses, Lord Hervey, and others. The Queen comported herself with some patience and dignity when she saw the prince and princess. The child was shown to her. {108} No clothes had yet been found for it but some napkins and an old red cloak. "The good G.o.d bless you, poor little creature," said the Queen in French; "you have come into a very disagreeable world!"

[Sidenote: 1737--Applying a precedent]

The King and Queen consented to become the G.o.dfather and G.o.dmother of the poor little creature who had been brought thus disagreeably into this disagreeable world. But the conduct of the prince was regarded as unpardonable, and he was banished by Royal letter from the King's palace, whether at Hampton Court or St. James's. The prince's own party, Pulteney and his colleagues, utterly refused to give their sanction to the extraordinary course which Frederick had taken.

Bolingbroke wrote from France, angrily and scornfully condemning it.

But the Patriots were willing, and resolved to stand the prince's friends all the same, and they had not even the courage to advise him to make a frank and full apology for his conduct. Indeed the action of the prince seems to suggest an approach to insanity rather than deliberate and reasoned perverseness. He had forced his wife to run the risk of losing her own life and her child's life, he had grossly and wantonly offended his father and mother, and he had thrown a secrecy and mystery round the birth of the infant which, if ever there came to be a dispute about the succession, would give his enemies the most plausible excuse for proclaiming that a spurious child had been imposed upon the country. As a friend of the Queen said at the time, if ever the Crown came to be fought for again, the only question could be whether the people would rather have the Whig b.a.s.t.a.r.d or the Tory b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

The whole business, as might be expected, caused a terrible scandal.

Not merely was the prince banished from the palace, not merely did the King refuse to see him or to hold further communication with him, but it was formally announced by the Secretaries of State to all the foreign ministers that it would be considered a mark of respect to the Sovereign if they would abstain from visiting the prince. Furthermore, a message was sent in {109} writing to all peers, peeresses, and privy councillors, declaring that no one who went to the prince's court would be admitted into the King's presence. Never probably was domestic dirty linen more publicly washed. Nevertheless, it very soon was made apparent that the course taken by the King was in strict accordance with a precedent which at one time had a very direct application to himself. Some of the prince's friends thought it a clever stroke of policy just then to print and publish the letters which pa.s.sed between the late King and the present Sovereign when the latter was Prince of Wales and got into a quarrel with his father. The late King sent his vice-chamberlain to order his son "that he and his domestics must leave my house." A copy was also published of a circular letter signed by the honored name of Joseph Addison, then Secretary of State, addressed to the English ministers at foreign courts, giving the King's version of the whole quarrel, in order that they might report him and his cause aright to the unsatisfied.

Lord Hervey is inclined to think that it was not the friends of the prince, but rather Walpole himself, who got these letters printed.

Hervey does not see what good the publication could do to the prince and the prince's cause, but suggests that it might be a distinct service to Walpole and Walpole's master to show that the reigning king in his early days had been treated with even more harshness than he had just shown to his own son, and with far less cause to justify the harshness. Still it seems to us natural for the prince's friends to believe it would strengthen him in popular sympathy if it were brought before men's minds that the very same sort of treatment of which George the Second complained when it was visited on him by his own father he now had not scrupled nor shamed to visit upon his son. Among other discoveries made at this time with regard to the more secret history of the late reign, it was found out that George the First actually entertained and encouraged a project for having the Prince of Wales, now George the Second, put on board {110} some war-vessel and "carried off to any part of the world that your Majesty may be pleased to order." This fact--for a fact it seems to be--did not get to the public knowledge; but it came to the knowledge of Lord Hervey, who probably had it from the Queen herself, and it is confirmed by other and different testimony. A Prince of Wales kidnapped and carried out of civilization by the command of his royal father would have made a piquant chapter in modern English history.

[Sidenote: 1737--Bishop Hoadley and the Test Act]

The prince and princess went to Kew in the first instance, and then the prince took Norfolk House, in St. James's Square, for his town residence, and Cliefden for his country place. The prince put himself forward more conspicuously than ever as the head of the Patriot party.

It was reported to Walpole that in Frederick's determination to make himself popular he was resolved to have a Bill brought forward in the coming session of Parliament to repeal the Test Act. The Test Act was pa.s.sed in the reign of Charles the Second, 1673, and it declared that all officers, civil or military, of the Government must take the sacrament according to the forms of the Church of England, and must take the oaths against the doctrine of transubstantiation. This Act was, of course, regarded as a serious grievance by the Dissenters of all denominations. Some few eminent Churchmen, like Dr. Hoadley, Bishop of Winchester, had always been opposed to the narrow-minded policy of the Act. Hoadley, indeed, had made himself a sort of leader of the dissenting communities on this subject. For that and other reasons he had been described as the greatest Dissenter who ever wore a mitre. When the report got about that an attempt was to be made to have the Test Act repealed, Walpole, with his usual astuteness, sent for the bishop, knowing very well that, if such a determination had been come to, Dr. Hoadley would be among the very first men to be consulted on the subject. Walpole expressed his mind very freely to Hoadley. A coldness had long existed between them, which Walpole's gift of the Bishopric of Winchester had not removed. {111} Hoadley had thought Walpole slow, lukewarm, and indifferent about movements in reform of Church and State, which Hoadley regarded as essential parts of the programme of the Whig party. Walpole was perfectly frank with him on this occasion, and explained to him the difficulty which would come up in English affairs if the Prince of Wales were encouraged to seek popularity at the expense of the King and Queen by making himself the champion of the Dissenters' grievances. Hoadley met Walpole in a spirit of similar frankness. He declared that he always had been and always should be in favor of the repeal of the Test Act, but that he disapproved altogether of the prince being set up in opposition to the King; and he believed that even the repeal of the Test Act would be bought at too dear a cost if it were the means of bringing the King into a distressing family quarrel. Therefore the bishop declared that he would give no encouragement to such a scheme, of which, he said, he had lately heard nothing from the prince; and that, whatever kindnesses he might receive from Frederick, he should never forget his duty to George. Walpole was delighted with Hoadley's bearing and Hoadley's answer, and seemed as if he never could praise him enough. No one can question Hoadley's sincerity. We must only try to get ourselves back into the framework and the spirit of an age when a sound patriot and a high-minded ecclesiastic could be willing to postpone indefinitely an act of justice to a whole section of the community in order to avoid the risk of having the Sovereign brought into disadvantageous comparison with the Sovereign's eldest son. Walpole approved of the Test Act no more than Hoadley did, although the spirit of his objection to it was far less positive and less exalted than that of Hoadley. But Walpole was, of course, an avowed Opportunist; he never professed or pretended to be anything better. There is nothing surprising in the fact that he regarded an act of justice to the Dissenters as merely a matter of public convenience, to be performed when it could be performed without disturbing anybody of {112} importance. Hoadley must have looked at the subject from an entirely different point of view; it must have been to him a question of justice or injustice; yet he, too, was quite ready to put it off indefinitely rather than allow it to be made the means of obtaining a certain amount of popular favor for the Prince of Wales as opposed to his father the King. We shall see such things occurring again and again in the course of this history. The agreement of Walpole and Hoadley did, indeed, put off the repeal of the Test Act for a pretty long time. The brand and stigma on the Protestant Dissenters as well as on the Roman Catholics was allowed to remain in existence for nearly another century of English history. We are now in 1737, and the Test Act was not repealed until 1828.

Historians are sometimes reproached for paying too much attention to palace squabbles; yet a palace squabble becomes a matter of some importance if it can postpone an act of national justice for by far the greater part of a century.

[Sidenote: 1737--A question of price]

There was a good deal of talk about this time of the possibility of adopting some arrangement for the separation of Hanover from the English Crown. The fact of the Princess of Wales having given birth to a daughter and not a son naturally led to a revival of this question.

The electorate of Hanover could not descend to a woman, and if the Prince of Wales should have no son some new arrangement would have to be made. The Queen was very anxious that Hanover should be secured for her second son, to whom she was much attached, and the King was understood to be in favor of this project. On the other hand, it was given out that the Prince of Wales would be quite willing to renounce his rights in favor of his younger brother on condition of his getting the fifty thousand a year additional for which he had been clamoring in Parliament. Nothing could be more popular with the country than any arrangement which would sever the connection between the Crown of England and the electorate of Hanover. If the prince were seeking popularity, such a proposal coming from him would be popular indeed, provided {113} it were not spoiled by the stipulation about the fifty thousand a year. The Queen's comment upon the rumors as to the prince's intention was that in her firm belief he would sell the reversion of the Crown of England to the Pretender if only the Pretender offered him money enough. Nothing came of the talk about Hanover just then. The King and the Queen had soon something else to think of.

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CHAPTER XXIX.

THE QUEEN'S DEATH-BED.

[Sidenote: 1737--Caroline's death-stroke]

The Queen had long been dying; dying by inches. In one of her confinements she had been stricken with an ailment from which she suffered severely. She refused to let any one, even the King, know what was the matter with her. She had the strongest objection to being regarded as an invalid; and she feared, too, that if anything serious were known to be the matter with her she might lose her hold over her selfish husband, who only cared for people as long as they were active in serving and pleasing him. An invalid was to George merely a nuisance. Let us do Caroline justice. She was no doubt actuated by the most sincere desire to be of service to the King, and she feared that if she were to make it known how ill she was, the King might insist on her giving up active life altogether. Not only did she take no pains to get better, but in order to prove that she was perfectly well, she used to exert herself in a manner which might have been injurious to the health of a very strong woman. When at Richmond she used to walk several miles every morning with the King; and more than once, Walpole says, when she had the gout in her foot, she dipped her whole leg in cold water to be ready to attend him. "The pain," says Walpole, "the bulk, and the exercise threw her into such fits of perspiration as routed the gout; but those exertions hastened the crisis of her distemper." History preserves some curious pictures of the manner in which the morning prayers were commonly said to Queen Caroline. The Queen was being dressed by her ladies in her bedroom; the door of the bedroom was left partly open, the {115} chaplain read the prayers in the outer room, and had to kneel, as he read them, beneath a great painting of a naked Venus; and just within the half-open bedroom door her Majesty, according to Horace Walpole, "would frequently stand some minutes in her shift, talking to her ladies."

Robert Walpole was the first to discover the real and the very serious nature of the Queen's malady. He was often alone with her for the purpose of arranging as to the course of action which they were to prevail upon the King to believe to be of his own inspiration, and accordingly to adopt. Shortly after the death of Walpole's wife he was closeted with the Queen. Her Majesty questioned him closely about the cause of his wife's death. She was evidently under the impression that Lady Walpole had died from the effects of a peculiar kind of rupture, and she put to Walpole a variety of very intimate questions as to the symptoms and progress of the disease. Walpole had long suspected, as many others had, that there was something seriously wrong with the Queen. He allowed her to go on with her questions, and he became satisfied in his own mind that the Queen herself was suffering from the disorder about which she was so anxious to be told.

On August 26, 1737, it was reported over London that the Queen was dead. The report was unfounded, or at least premature. Caroline had had a violent attack, but she rallied and was able to go about again at Hampton Court with the King. On Wednesday, November 9, 1737, she was suddenly stricken down, and this was her death-stroke. She did not die at once, but lingered and lingered.

There are few chapters of history more full of strange, sardonic contrast, and grim, ghastly humor, than those which describe these death-bed scenes. The Queen, undergoing a succession of painful operations; now groaning and fainting, now telling the doctors not to mind her foolish cries; now indulging in some chaff with them--"Is not Ranby [the surgeon] sorry it isn't his own cross old wife he is cutting up?"--the King sometimes blubbering, and sometimes telling his dying wife that her staring eyes {116} looked like those of a calf whose throat had been cut; the King, who, in his sudden tenderness and grief, would persist in lying outside the bed, and thereby giving the poor, perishing sufferer hardly room to move; the messages of affected condolence arriving from the Prince of Wales, with requests to be allowed to see his mother, which requests the mother rejects with bitterness and contempt--all this sets before us a picture such as seldom, happily for the human race, ill.u.s.trates a death-bed in palace, garret, or prison cell. The King was undoubtedly sincere in his grief, at least for the time. He did love the Queen in a sort of way; and she had worked upon all his weaknesses and vices and made herself necessary to him. He did not see how life was to go on for him without her; and as he thought of this he cried like a child whose mother is about to leave him. Over and over again has the story been told of the dying Queen's appeal to her husband to take a new wife after her death, and the King's earnest disclaimer of any such purpose; the a.s.surance that he would have mistresses, and then the Queen's cry of cruel conviction from hard experience, "Oh, mon Dieu, cela n'empeche pas!" "I know,"

says Lord Hervey, who tells the story, "that this episode will hardly be credited, but it is literally true." One does not see why the episode should hardly be credited, why it should not be taken at once as historical and true. It is not out of keeping with all other pa.s.sages of the story, it is in the closest harmony and symmetry with them. The King always made his wife the confidante of his amours and intrigues. He had written to her once, asking her to bring to Court the wife of some n.o.bleman or gentleman, and he told her frankly that he admired this lady and wanted to have her near him in order that he might have an intrigue with her, and he knew that she, his wife, would always be glad to do him a pleasure. Thackeray, in his lecture, often speaks of the King as "Sultan George." George had, in the matter of love-making, no other notions than those of a sultan. [Sidenote: 1737--George's settled belief] He had no more idea of his wife objecting to his mistresses than {117} a sultan would have about the chief sultana's taking offence at the presence of his concubines. The fact that the Queen lay dying did not put any restraint on any of George's ways. He could not be kept from talking loudly all the time; he could not be kept from bawling out observations about his wife's condition which, if they were made only in whispers, must have tended to alarm and distress an invalid. It is not the frank brutality of George's words which surprises us; it is rather the sort of cross-light they throw on what was after all a tender part of his coa.r.s.e and selfish nature. Every reader of the history and the memoirs of that reign must be prepared to understand and to appreciate the absolute sincerity of the King's words; the settled belief that the Queen could not possibly have any objection to his taking to himself as many mistresses as he pleased. One is a little surprised at the uncouth sentimentality of the thought that nevertheless it might be a disrespect to her memory if he were to take another wife. What a light all this lets in upon the man, and the Court, and the time! As regards indiscriminate amours and connections, poor, stupid, besotted George was simply on a level with the lower animals. Charles the Second, Louis the Fourteenth, Louis the Fifteenth even--these at their worst of times were gentlemen. It was only at the Hanoverian Court of England that such an interchange of appeal and rea.s.surance could take place as that which was murmured and blubbered over the death-bed of Queen Caroline. "Horror," says one of the great Elizabethan poets, "waits on the death-beds of princes." Horror in the truest sense waited on the death-bed of that poor, patient, faithful, unscrupulous, unselfish Queen.

The Queen kept rallying and sinking, and rallying again; and the King's moods went up and down with each pa.s.sing change in his wife's condition. Now she sank, and he buried his face in the bedclothes and cried; now she recovered a little, and he rated at her and made rough jokes at her. At one moment he appeared to be all {118} tenderness to her, at another moment he went on as if the whole illness were a mere sham to worry him, and she might get up and be well if she would only act like a sensible woman. The Prince of Wales made an attempt to see the Queen. The King spoke of him as a puppy and a scoundrel; jeered at his impudent, affected airs of duty and affection, declared that neither he nor the Queen was in a condition to see him act his false, whining, cringing tricks now, and sent him orders to get out of the place at once. His Majesty continued all through the dying scenes to rave against the Prince of Wales, and call him rascal, knave, puppy, and scoundrel. The Queen herself, although she did not use language quite as strong, yet expressed just as resolute a dislike or detestation of her son, and an utter disbelief in his sincerity. She declared that she knew he only wanted to see her in order that he should have the joy of knowing she was dead five minutes sooner than if he had to wait in Pall Mall to hear the glad tidings. She told the listeners that if ever she should consent to see the prince they might be sure she had lost her senses. Princess Caroline was in constant attendance on the Queen. So was Lord Hervey. The princess, however, became unwell herself and the Princess Emily sat up with the Queen.

But Caroline would not consent to be removed from her mother. A couch was fitted up for her in a room adjoining the Queen's; and Lord Hervey lay on a mattress on the floor at the foot of the princess's bed. The King occasionally went to his own rooms, and there was peace for the time in the dying woman's chamber. Probably the only two that truly and unselfishly loved the Queen were occupying the couch and the mattress in that outer room.

The Queen talked often to Princess Caroline, and commended to her the care of her two younger sisters. She talked to her son William, Duke of c.u.mberland, then little more than sixteen years old, admonished him to be a support to his father, and to "try to make up for the disappointment and vexation he must receive from your {119} profligate and worthless brother." But she also admonished him to attempt nothing against his brother, and only to mortify him by showing superior merit.

She asked for her keys, and gave them to the King. She took off her finger a ruby ring which he had given her at her coronation, and put it on his finger, and said to him, almost as patient Grizzel does, "Naked I came to you, and naked I go from you." All who were present at this episode in the dying were in tears, except the Queen herself. She seemed absolutely composed; indeed she was anxious that the end should come. She had no belief in the possibility of her recovery, and she only wanted to be released now from "the fever called living." Except for the bitter outbursts of anger and hatred against the Prince of Wales, the poor Queen seems to have borne herself like a true-hearted, resigned, tender wife, kind mother, and Christian woman.

[Sidenote: 1737--A fatal mistake]