Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/450

436 her son to delay this intention for a few days; and during that interval Walpole, at the king's dictation, drew np a very violent message to the prince. This was then submitted to the judgments of lords Hardwicke, Wilmington, and Harrington. Hardwicke counselled much gentler terms; Wilmington advised that the letter should go as it was, and Harrington said nothing. So this harsh and unwise message was sent on the 3rd of August. It was to express the king's resentment in the highest degree at the removal of the princess under the circumstances already mentioned. The prince again expressed his sorrow, and George took no notice whatever of the expression. A peremptory order was issued for the baptism of the child on the 29th of August, and then the king proceeded to still harsher and more unnatural measures. Though the prince continued to express sorrow for his conduct, the king remained wholly unmollified, and determined to expel the repentant son from the palace. At the conference on this subject lord Hardwicke again urged conciliation, but Walpole is reported by Hardwicke to have said, "It would be better to be short at first." "Walpole must now have made up his mind that he had sinned unpardonably against the successor, and therefore took no care, except to gratify the morose desire of the king.

On the 9th of September, therefore, was dispatched a long letter from the king to his son, after having been submitted to and approved by all the lords of the cabinet council then in town. It was carried by the duke of Grafton, the duke of Richmond, and the earl of Pembroke. It said that the king could not be imposed on by the words of the prince, so contrary to his actions. It reiterated at great length the conduct of the prince regarding the confinement of the princess, all which the prince had repeatedly expressed his sorrow for; that until he renounced the company of all those by whom he was mischievously counselled, it was the king's determination that he should not reside in his palace; that he would receive no reply; but that, when his conduct evinced his proper return to duty and submission, the king might be induced to pardon him; that he required him to quit the palace with all his family as speedily as could be done without injury to the princess; and he intimated that he should leave the little daughter just born in the care of the princess till such time as he should see fit to take her away for her education.

Perhaps in all the annals of kings and of nations there is no example of a father expelling his son from his house, after the most earnest expression of sorrow for his faults, and of entire submission, with so hard and unchristian a spirit as this. Never was there so revolting a display, not of mere lack of affection, but of downright hatred and malice, as in this family. Father against son, and son against father, one generation after another, and it descended still farther down. The Stuarts were tyrants, but they had strong affections generally towards each other; but the present dynasty presented to the whole world the most revolting and astonishing exhibition of family discord and paternal and filial hate which had amazed mankind since the days of Atreus.

This harsh conduct was not the way to reclaim an erring son, but to indurate him in the wrong. It had the immediate effect of driving the prince more completely into the arms of the opposition. He betook himself to Norfolk House, St. James's Square, and there all the opponents of his father's government collected around him. The prince was now the head and centre of the opposition himself. Though the king and his ministers might have clearly foreseen this, such was George's exasperation, that he directly issued an order that every person who visited his son at Norfolk House should be excluded from the royal presence in any palace where he might be residing. Not content with this, George had an account of the affair and the correspondence betwixt himself and the prince drawn up and sent to all the foreign ambassadors in London. Thus did this stupid monarch spread the disgrace of his family rancour over the whole civilised world. Causes, too mysterious to be unveiled to the public, were attributed to this odious state of things. "Sir Robert Walpole," says lord Hardwicke, "informed me of certain passages between the king and himself, and between the queen and the prince, of too high and secret a nature ever to be trusted to this narrative. From these I formed 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."

This open breach of the royal family was quickly followed by the death of the queen. Besides the misery of seeing her son and husband so awfully at variance, she had long been struggling with a complaint which, out of false delicacy, she had carefully concealed. "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, lady Sundon. To prevent all suspicion, her majesty would frequently stand some minutes in her shift talking to her ladies, and, though labouring under so dangerous a complaint, she made it so invariable 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 ousted the gout; but these exertions hastened the crisis of her complaint." She continued till nearly the last to conceal from the surgeons the real cause of her sufferings, and was treated by the medical men for gout in the stomach. When the secret was at length disclosed, it was too late, though one of the surgeons declared, that, if they had been informed two days earlier, they could have saved her.

Admirable as was the character of Caroline, she has been accused of retaining her resentment against her son to the last. Pope and Chesterfield affirm that she died refusing to see or forgive her son; but Ford, though he says she would not see him, she "heartily forgave him;" and Horace Walpole not only says she not only forgave him, but would have seen him, only that she feared to irritate her husband. To Sir Robert Walpole she expressed her earnest hope that he would continue to serve the king as faithfully as he had done, and, curiously enough, recommended the king to him, not him to the king. She died on the 20th of November,