DESCRIPTION OF GEORGE II.'S FAMILY.

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Such was his youth: disappointed by not obtaining a commission in the Guards, he led a desultory, butterfly-like life; one day at Richmond with Queen Caroline, then Princess of Wales; another, at Pope's villa, at Twickenham; sometimes in the House of Commons, in which he succeeded his elder brother as member for Bury; and, at the period when he has been described as forming one of the quartette in Queen Caroline's closet at St. James's, as vice-chamberlain to his partial and royal patroness.

His early marriage with Mary Lepel, the beautiful maid of honor to Queen Caroline, insured his felicity, though it did not curb his predilections for other ladies.

Henceforth Lord Hervey lived all the year round in what were then called lodgings, that is, apartments appropriated to the royal household, or even to others, in St. James's, or at Richmond, or at Windsor. In order fully to comprehend all the intimate relations which he had with the court, it is necessary to present the reader with some account of the family of George II. Five daughters had been the female issue of his majesty's marriage with Queen Caroline. Three of these princesses, the three elder ones, had lived, during the life of George I., at St. James's with their grandfather; who, irritated by the differences between him and his son, then Prince of Wales, adopted that measure rather as showing his authority than from any affection to the young princesses. It was, in truth, difficult to say which of these royal ladies was the most unfor

tunate.

Anne, the eldest, had shown her spirit early in life while residing with George I.; she had a proud, imperious nature, and her temper was, it must be owned, put to a severe test. The only time that George I. did the English the honor of choosing one of the beauties of the nation for his mistress, was during the last year of his reign.. The object of his choice was Anne Brett, the eldest daughter of the infamous Countess of Macclesfield by her second husband. The neglect of Savage, the poet, her son, was merely one passage in the iniquitous life of Lady Macclesfield. Endowed with singular taste and judgment, consulted by Colley Cibber on every new play he produced, the mother of Savage was not only wholly destitute of all virtue, but of all shame. One day, looking out of the window, she perceived a very handsome man assaulted by some bailiffs who were going to arrest him: she paid his debt, released, and married him. The hero of this story was Colonel Brett, the father of Anne Brett.

The child of such a mother was not likely to be even decently respectable; and Anne was proud of her disgraceful pre

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ANNE BRETT.-A BITTER CUP.

eminence and of her disgusting and royal lover. She was dark, and her flashing black eyes resembled those of a Spanish beauty. Ten years after the death of George I., she found a husband in Sir William Leman, of Northall, and was announced, on that occasion, as the half-sister of Richard Savage.

To the society of this woman, when at St. James's, as "Mistress Brett," the three princesses were subjected: at the same time the Duchess of Kendal, the king's German mistress, occupied other lodgings at St. James's.

Miss Brett was to be rewarded with the coronet of a countess for her degradation, the king being absent on the occasion at Hanover; elated by her expectations, she took the liberty, during his majesty's absence, of ordering a door to be broken out of her apartment into the royal garden, where the princesses walked. The Princess Anne, not deigning to associate with her, commanded that it should be forthwith closed. Miss Brett imperiously reversed that order. In the midst of the affair, the king died suddenly, and Anne Brett's reign was over, and her influence soon as much forgotten as if she had never existed. The Princess Anne was pining in the dullness of her royal home, when a marriage with the Prince of Orange, was proposed for the consideration of his parents. It was a miserable match as well as a miserable prospect, for the prince's revenue amounted to no more than £12,000 a year; and the state and pomp to which the Princess Royal had been accustomed could not be contemplated on so small a fortune. was still worse in point of that poor consideration, happiness. The Prince of Orange was both deformed and disgusting in his person, though his face was sensible in expression; and if he inspired one idea more strongly than another when he appeared in his uniform and cocked hat, and spoke bad French, or worse English, it was that of seeing before one a dressedup baboon.

It

It was a bitter cup for the princess to drink, but she drank it; she reflected that it might be the only way of quitting a court where, in case of her father's death, she would be dependent on her brother Frederick, or on that weak prince's strong-minded wife. So she consented, and took the dwarf; and that consent was regarded by a grateful people, and by all good courtiers, as a sacrifice for the sake of Protestant principles, the House of Orange being, par excellence, at the head of the orthodox dynasties of Europe. A dowry of £80,000 was forthwith granted by an admiring Commonsjust double what had ever been given before. That sum was happily lying in the exchequer, being the purchase-money of some lands in St. Christopher's which had lately been sold; and

THE DARLING OF THE FAMILY.

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King George was thankful to get rid of a daughter whose haughtiness gave him trouble. In person, too, the princess royal was not very ornamental to the court. She was illmade, with a propensity to grow fat: her complexion, otherwise very fine, was marked with the small-pox; she had, however, a lively, clean look-one of her chief beauties-and a certain royalty of manner.

The Princess Amelia died, as the world thought, single, but consoled herself with various love flirtations. The Duke of Newcastle made love to her, but her affections were centred on the Duke of Grafton, to whom she was privately married, as is confidently asserted.

The Princess Caroline was the darling of her family. Even the king relied on her truth. When there was any dispute, he used to say, "Send for Caroline; she will tell us the right story."

Her fate had its clouds. Amiable, gentle, of unbounded charity, with strong affections, which were not suffered to flow in a legitimate channel, she became devotedly attached to Lord Hervey: her heart was bound up in him; his death drove her into a permanent retreat from the world. No debasing connection existed between them; but it is misery, it is sin enough to love another woman's husband-and that sin, that misery, was the lot of the royal and otherwise virtuous Caroline.

The Princess Mary, another victim to conventionalities, was united to Frederick, Landgrave of Hesse Cassel; a barbarian, from whom she escaped, whenever she could, to come, with a bleeding heart, to her English home. She was, even Horace Walpole allows, "of the softest, mildest temper in the world," and fondly beloved by her sister Caroline, and by the "Butcher of Culloden," William, Duke of Cumberland.

Louisa became Queen of Denmark in 1746, after some years' marriage to the Crown Prince. "We are lucky," Horace Walpole writes on that occasion, "in the death of kings."

The two princesses who were still under the paternal roof were contrasts. Caroline was a constant invalid, gentle, sincere, unambitious, devoted to her mother, whose death nearly killed her. Amelia affected popularity, and assumed the esprit fort-was fond of meddling in politics, and after the death of her mother, joined the Bedford faction, in opposition to her father. But both these princesses were outwardly submissive when Lord Hervey became the Queen's chamberlain.

The evenings at St. James's were spent in the same way as those at Kensington.

Quadrille formed her majesty's pastime, and, while Lord

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EVENINGS AT ST. JAMES'S.

Hervey played pools of cribbage with the Princess Caroline and the maids of honor, the Duke of Cumberland amused himself and the Princess Amelia at "buffet." On Mondays and Fridays there were drawing-rooms held; and these receptions took place, very wisely, in the evening.

Beneath all the show of gayety and the freezing ceremony of those stately occasions, there was in that court as much misery as family dissensions, or, to speak accurately, family hatreds can engender. Endless jealousies, which seem to us as frivolous as they were rabid; and contentions, of which even the origin is still unexplained, had long severed the queen from her eldest son. George II. had always loved his mother: his affection for the unhappy Sophia Dorothea was one of the very few traits of goodness in a character utterly vulgar, sensual, and entirely selfish. His son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, on the other hand, hated his mother. He loved neither of his parents; but the queen had the pre-eminence in his aversion.

The king, during the year 1736, was at Hanover. His return was announced, but under circumstances of danger. A tremendous storm arose just as he was prepared to embark at Helvoetsluys. All London was on the look-out, weather-cocks were watched; tides, winds, and moons formed the only subjects of conversation; but no one of his majesty's subjects were so demonstrative as the Prince of Wales, and his cheerfulness, and his triumph even, on the occasion, were of course resentfully heard of by the queen.

During the storm, when anxiety had almost amounted to fever, Lord Hervey dined with Sir Robert Walpole. Their conversation naturally turned on the state of affairs, prospectively. Sir Robert called the Prince a "poor, weak, irresolute, false, lying, contemptible wretch." Lord Hervey did not defend him, but suggested that Frederick, in case of his father's death, might be more influenced by the queen than he had hitherto been. "Zounds, my lord," interrupted Sir Robert, "he would tear the flesh off her bones with red-hot irons sooner! The distinctions she shows to you, too, I believe, would not be forgotten. Then the notion he has of his great riches, and the desire he has of fingering them, would make him pinch her, and pinch her again, in order to make her buy her ease, till she had not a groat left."

What a picture of a heartless and selfish character! The next day the queen sent for Lord Hervey, to ask him if he knew the particulars of a great dinner which the prince had given to the lord mayor the previous day, while the whole country, and the court in particular, was trembling for the

AMELIA SOPHIA WALMODEN.

179

safety of the king, his father. Lord Hervey told her that the prince's speech at the dinner was the most ingratiating piece of popularity ever heard; the healths, of course, as usual. "Heavens!" cried the queen: "popularity always makes me sick, but Fritz's popularity makes me vomit! I hear that yesterday, on the prince's side of the House, they talked of the king's being cast away with the same sang froid as you would talk of an overturn; and that my good son strutted about as if he had been already king. Did you mark the airs with which he came into my drawing-room in the morning? though he does not think fit to honor me with his presence, or ennui me with his wife's, of an evening. I felt something here in my throat that swelled and half choked me."

Poor Queen Caroline! with such a son, and such a husband, she must have been possessed of a more than usual share of German imperturbability to sustain her cheerfulness, writhing, as she often was, under the pangs of a long-concealed disorder, of which eventually she died. Even on the occasion of the king's return in time to spend his birthday in England, the queen's temper had been sorely tried. Nothing had ever vexed her more than the king's admiration for Amelia Sophia Walmoden, who, after the death of Caroline, was created Countess of Yarmouth. Madame Walmoden had been a reigning belle among the young married women at Hanover, when George II. visited that country in 1735. Not that her majesty's affections were wounded; it was her pride that was hurt by the idea that people would think that this Hanoverian lady had more influence than she had. In other respects the king's absence was a relief: she had the éclat of the regency; she had the comfort of having the hours which her royal torment decreed were to be passed in amusing his dullness, to herself; she was free from his "quotidian sallies of temper, which," as Lord Hervey relates, "let it be charged by what hand it would, used always to discharge its hottest fire, on some pretense or other, upon her."

It is quite true that from the first dawn of his preference for Madame Walmoden, the king wrote circumstantial letters of fifty or sixty pages to the queen, informing her of every stage of the affair; the queen, in reply, saying that she was only one woman, and an old woman, and adding, "that he might love more and younger women. In return, the king wrote, "You must love the Walmoden, for she loves you, a civil insult, which he accompanied with so minute a description of his new favorite, that the queen, had she been a painter, might have drawn her portrait at a hundred miles' distance.

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The queen, subservient as she seemed, felt the humiliation.