Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/312

224 in her heroism than in her horrible hatred of her son. "I will give it you under my hand, if you are in any fear of relapsing, that my dear first-born is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world, and I most heartily wish he was out of it."

George III. has been blamed for giving up the Palace as a royal residence; and the little story of his grandfather having boxed his ears is made to account for it. But can one wonder that a prince of such a fine moral feeling should shrink from associations such as his youth would recall of the palace of George II.? For the last years, when the Queen was dead, were worse than ever. Now Madame Walmoden had come over from Hanover, and was Countess of Yarmouth, and she would drive with the King to Hampton Court on Saturday afternoons, says Horace Walpole, "in coaches and six, with heavy horseguards kicking up the dust before them—dined, walked an hour in the garden, returned in the same dusty parade, and his Majesty fancied himself the most gallant and lively prince in Europe."

The short visits of George II. are almost the last royal memories of Hampton Court. Some of the rooms are just as he left them. In the Queen's bathing-closet one can fancy that the chaplains may be heard praying next door, as in Lord Hervey's satiric play. The public dining-room, of which the decoration is said to date from 1740, with its rather later Georgian pictures, effectively recalls the last years