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i

Empire of Letters
ii
iii

Empire of Letters
Writing in Roman Literature
and Thought
from Lucretius to Ovid

stephanie ann frampton

1
iv

1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Stephanie Ann Frampton, author.
Title: Empire of letters : writing in Roman literature and thought from
Lucretius to Ovid /​Stephanie Ann Frampton.
Description: Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018014534 (print) | LCCN 2018016152 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190915421 (epub) | ISBN 9780190915414 (updf ) |
ISBN 9780190915438 (oso) | ISBN 9780190915407 (bb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Latin literature—​History and criticism. |
Writing in literature. | Writing—​Rome—​History.
Classification: LCC PA6003 (ebook) | LCC PA6003 .F735 2018 (print) |
DDC 870.9/​001—​dc23
LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2018014534
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

v

For my parents
vi
vi

Contents

List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: More than Words 1

1. Classics and the Study of the Book 13
2. Writing and Identity 33
3. The Text of the World 55
4. Tablets of Memory 85
5. The Roman Poetry Book 109
6. Ovid and the Inscriptions 141
Conclusion: Texts and Objects 163

References 171
Index 195
vi
ix

Figures

1. Five reed pens bound to a board with a small piece of linen. Ptolemaic
Egypt. Brooklyn Museum 37.451E. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum. 3
2. Diagram of an ancient bookroll. Reproduced from Johnson (2009), 260,
fig. 11.2. 15
3. Latin letter in papryus from Suneros to Chios. Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. 30
bce–​14 ce. POxy 3208. Courtesy of the Egyptian Exploration
Society. 24
4. Wooden board with school exercises. Ca. fouth century ce, Egypt. PMich
763. Courtesy of the University of Michigan Library. 68
5. Graffito syllabary from the nypheum of the House of Neptune and
Amphitrite, (V, 6/7e), Herculaneum, Italy. Before 79 ce. CIL
4.10567. 84
6. Diptych writing tablets of wood with ivory hinges from the shipwreck off
of Uluburun, Turkey. Ca. 1300 bce. Courtesy of the Institute of Nautical
Archaeology. 86
7. The Muse Calliope holding writing tablets. Wall painting from the Inn
of the Sulpicii, Murecine, Italy. Before 79 ce. Copyright Pio Foglia/–​
Fotografica Foglia SAS. 87
8. The “Gallus Papyrus.” Egyptian Museum of Cairo PQasr Ibrîm 78-​3-​11/​1.
Reproduced from Capsasso (2003), 123, tav. 6 by kind permission. 110
9. Composite detail of Rodolfo Lanciani’s 1901 Forma Urbis Romae
showing the approximate locations of the public libraries in central
Rome. Copyright the Open Forma Urbis Romae (2012). Developed by
x

x Figures

the University of Oregon, Stanford University, and Dartmouth

College (http://mappingrome.com/). Courtesy of the University
of Oregon. 142
10. Greek epigram on papyrus from an Arsinoite miscellany. Egypt.
First century ce. PLond 256 b (recto). Courtesy of the British
Library. 164
xi

Acknowledgments

It is an enormous privilege to be able to acknowledge some of the debts that

I have accrued to individuals and institutions over the course of writing this
book. When I began, I had no sense of the number of scholars or the variety of
fields with which this work would bring me into contact. That has been one of
the greatest pleasures of this undertaking. Many friends and colleagues were
generous with their advice and expertise, showing enthusiasm for the project
at its various stages and offering feedback that greatly improved it. Though
it would be impossible to recognize each one of them here, warmest thanks
to Arthur Bahr, Alan Bowman, William Broadhead, Raffaella Cribiore, Erika
Zimmermann Damer, Joseph Farrell, Denis Feeney, Peta Fowler, Mary Fuller,
Diana Henderson, Joseph Howley, Damien Nelis, Hannah Marcus, Michael
McOsker, Duncan MacRae, John Oksanish, Emily Richmond Pollock, Aaron
Pratt, Victoria Rimell, John Schafer, Sharmila Sen, Donca Steriade, Michael
Suarez, Richard Tarrant, Barnaby Taylor, Rosalind Thomas, James Uden, and
Katharina Volk. Matthew Horrell undertook a much-​needed round of copy-​
editing at a critical moment. Michael Hendry helped to compile the index, and
caught many errors. I thank Matthew Kirschenbaum for suggesting my title.
Above all, Emma Dench, who supervised the dissertation from which this work
stems, has been an unflagging source of confidence, wisdom, and humor.
Portions of the book were written while on fellowship at the American
Academy in Rome, Balliol College at Oxford University, the University of
Cincinnati, and the Fondation Hardt in Vandoeuvres, Switzerland. I thank all
of those institutions, their faculty, staff, and librarians for the welcome I re-
ceived, as well as my colleagues at MIT for being extremely generous with
leave time and support. This publication was subsidized in part by the Harvard
xi

xii Acknowledgments

Studies in Comparative Literature and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation,

to whom I am also very grateful. Particular thanks are due to Prof. Bowman
for his hospitality at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, Oxford
during Hilary Term, 2016. I am indebted to Prof. Bowman and to Robin
Birley and Ralph Jackson for helping to arrange access for me to view Roman
leaf tablets at Vindolanda, the British Museum, and Blythe House in 2012.
Likewise, I thank Gianluca Del Mastro for coordinating my visit to the Officina
dei Papiri Ercolanesi at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli to see the Latin
fragments from Herculaneum in 2014. In the same year, Rebecca Benefiel was
kind enough to allow me to join the first field season of the Ancient Graffiti
Project. Jeff Kattenhorn arranged my viewing of PLond 256 and other materials
at the British Library in 2016, and Monica Tsuneishi helped with a visit to the
papyrology collection at the University of Michigan in 2015. Parts of this book
were presented at the American Academy in Rome, the Notre Dame Global
Gateway in Rome, Stanford University, and Columbia University between
2014 and 2018. My thanks to the audiences for insightful feedback on those
occasions. The bulk of the work, however, was done at home, in Cambridge.
Sincerest thanks to the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard for
securing my privileges at the Harvard Libraries all of these years.
It has been a great pleasure to find a home for this work at Oxford
University Press, where Stefan Vranka and his team have done an extraordi-
nary job to shepherd the text from manuscript to book. Finally, I give heartfelt
thanks to Cotton Seed for his ceaseless encouragement, sine qua non.
xi

Empire of Letters
xvi
1

Introduction
More than Words

The pen is ready, the ink is mixed, even the paper is

polished: now let me begin.1
—​Cicero Letters to Quintus 2.14.1

Toward the end of July 54 bce, the orator, lawyer, and sometime politi-
cian Marcus Tullius Cicero picked up pen and papyrus. He was writing
to his younger brother, Quintus, then in serving Gaul as a general in the
army of Julius Caesar that was advancing toward Britain. The elder Cicero
wrote that day from Rome about walking a political tightrope to stay in
the good graces of both Caesar and Pompey, about the high rate of in-
terest in the Forum, and about bribery in the election campaigns for the
year’s tribunes and his friend Cato’s attempts to thwart it.2 As he began,
Marcus Cicero had all the necessary materials at hand: a reed pen freshly
cut, some solid ink ready mixed with water, a sheet of papyrus burnished
with ivory to make its surface smooth and bright. An auspicious start, per-
haps. But Cicero says why he makes such a fuss: his last letter to Quintus
had been less than perfectly legible. “You write that you were hardly
able to read my previous letter. Brother, it was for none of the reasons

1. Cicero Q Fr. 2.14.1: calamo et atramento temperato, charta etiam dentata res agetur.
My rather loose translation. Throughout the book, short translations are typically
my own and longer ones sometimes are. Where I have used others’ translations,
I have tried always to indicate the sources. Further information about editions and
translations and abbreviations can be found in the References.
2. These were precarious times: within a little more than a decade, all five men—​
Pompey, Cato, Caesar, and both Ciceros—​and many hundreds of others were to be
assassinated or forced to commit suicide in the turmoil of civil war.
2

2 Empire of Letters

which you suppose, for I was not busy or bothered or angry with anyone.
It is just that whatever pen comes to my hand, I treat it as if it were a
good one.”3
Good pen or bad, the vagaries of writing a letter in the first century bce
were numerous. Reed pens and papyrus were imported from abroad and could
be costly or of poor quality.4 When authors say anything about their writing
tools, as Cicero does here, it is often to express annoyance. Pens needed to be
sharpened regularly (Figure 1). It’s likely Cicero’s previous one had been dull.
The grammarian Quintilian bemoans the fact that the frequent need to dip
the nib in ink disrupted one’s train of thought.5 The poet Persius, imagining
himself a student again, complains of ink sticking to the tip: “How can I study
with a pen like this?”6 Horace even warns that pens could be blamed for their
user’s lack of talent.7 Papyrus, too, was a source of trouble. According to Pliny’s
Natural History, certain kinds of papyrus paper were too thin to stand up to
fine pens and tended to tear or allow pigment to bleed through.8 He writes
of a papyrus shortage under Tiberius that he says would have “sent life into
chaos” had it not been managed by the senate.9 On the other hand, once you did
manage to send a letter off, there was no guarantee that it would reach its des-
tination. In the same summer that Cicero was corresponding with Quintus in
Gaul, his friend Atticus wrote from Greece to complain that he had received no
reply to an earlier letter: one of Cicero’s had gone astray.10 Anticipating hazards,
Cicero sometimes sent several copies of important notes with different carriers
or wrote them in code in order to frustrate unscrupulous ones.11 Although at the

3. Cic. Q Fr. 2.14.1: scribis enim te meas litteras superiores vix legere potuisse. in quo nihil
eorum, mi frater, fuit quae putas. neque enim occupatus eram neque perturbatus nec
iratus alicui. sed hoc facio semper ut, quicumque calamus in manus meas venerit, eo sic
utar tamquam bono.
4. Harris (1989), 193–​ 6, esp. 194 n. 104, on the expense of papyrus; though
Winsbury (2009), 18–​ 20 argues that claims of expense are overstated. Lewis
(1974, with 1989) is the standard history of its trade. The most extensive ancient
account of papyrus manufacture is Pliny Natural History 13.74–​89. Papyrus was
as a rule imported to Italy, but it is possible that the highest-​quality pens also
were: e.g. Martial’s gifted pens are Memphitica (Epigrams 14.38).
5. Quint. Inst. 10.3.31.
6. Persius Satires 3.19.
7. Horace Satires 2.3.7.
8. Plin. NH 13.80. The quality of papyrus paper had apparently improved significantly
between the Augustan period and Pliny’s day.
9. Plin. NH 13.89.
10. Cic. Letters to Atticus 2.13.
11. White (2010), 67, with 199 n. 24. Cf. Cic. Att. 2.19.5.
3

Introduction 3

Figure 1 Ptolemaic pen set bound to a palette with linen. Brooklyn Museum 37.451E.
Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

height of his fame the novelist Apuleius brags that he would trade all the goods
in the world for a writing pen, most Roman authors are not nearly so bullish.12
Despite frustrations, Romans did write, and wrote a lot. If the deposits of an-
cient wooden leaf tablets found at military settlements across Roman Britain are any
sign, Roman citizens with even moderate education put pen to paper (or, in this case,
to thin slip of wood) for lots of reasons: to ask for more beer and socks; to ask one’s
superior for leave; to copy lines from the Aeneid as schoolwork; and, in an example
famously signed in the hand of a Roman woman, Claudia Severa, to invite a friend
to one’s birthday party.13 The remains of documents from Roman Egypt, where pa-
pyrus was the writing surface of choice, tell a similar story: writing used to secure
funds or issue IOUs, writing used to introduce friends or to warn acquaintances
of conmen and cheats (as in Suneros’s note to Chios, POxy 3208, reproduced in
Chapter 1), writing of letters sent home to parents, writing of parents to children,
writing of school children and their teachers, and copyists making books.14 Much
of this material was written by scribes, professionals, paid to take down dictation
or to write up standard documents such as receipts and contracts, who could be
slaves, freedmen, or citizens.15 But many people who hired scribes signed their own
names, and it is clear that the business of being Roman by the turn of the

12. Apuleius Florida 9.27: pro his praeoptare me fateor uno chartario calamo me reficere
poemata, “above these, I confess I choose a single writing pen to create poetry.”
13. See Bowman and Thomas (1983) and (2003); Bowman (1994); and Bowman et al.
(2010). Tomlin (1996) is still a useful review of the material. Severa’s letter is Tab.
Vindol. II 291.
14. For an introduction to the variety of material, see the essays collected in Bagnall
(2009), with further bibliography pp. 27–​9.
15. See the discussion of Palme in Bagnall (2009), 358–​94. When he was busy, Cicero
himself often had a scribe (librarius) write his letters, e.g., Q Fr. 2.16: occupationum
4

4 Empire of Letters

millennium involved frequent recourse to written documents in daily life.16 High

and low, male and female, young and old: the discoveries from Roman Britain and
Egypt, and even the scarce examples of papyrus and tablet documents and wall
inscriptions that survive in Italy itself, reveal traces of the whole breadth of the
Roman people.17
Yet the surest sign that Romans wrote and read may indeed be the rich
legacy of literary texts that have reached us not through their direct physical
survival, but through a long and complex history of copying and recopying
in the age of manuscript books. Beginning at least in the third century bce,
with the staging of theatrical ludi, Rome became a center for the production
of literary works.18 Some of them, including the ludi Romani themselves,
were translations and adaptations of Greek models, from the epics of Homer
translated by Livius Andronicus and freely romanized by Virgil to philosoph-
ical writings of Epicureans, Academicians, and Stoics.19 Others took originally
Greek forms in radical new directions, such as profound innovations in the
genres of love elegy, hexameter satire, and literary epistle. According to L. D.
Reynolds and Nigel Wilson, by the year 500 ce, in the Latin west, Plautus,
Terence, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Persius, Juvenal, Cicero, Sallust, Livy, both Plinys,
Seneca, and Fronto were actively circulating in manuscript: works of drama,
prose, and poetry by authors who had been dead for three centuries or more.20
In the ensuing millennium, many, if not most, classical texts continued to
be maintained and renewed through copying within a network of monastery
scriptoria and cathedral libraries across Europe.21 The rise of the printing press
in the sixteenth century again provided a new vehicle for classical learning, a
machine fueling the study of Greek and Latin authors even into our own age,
when we find ourselves once more in the throes of a media revolution that is
reshaping our contact with classical learning.22

mearum tibi signum sit librari manus, “Let the hand of my scribe be to you a sign of
my busyness.”
16. Bagnall (2011). Harris (1989), of the late Republic and the high Empire: “In mani-
fold ways [. . .] the Roman world was now dependent on writing” (p. 232).
17. Graffiti: Garrucci (1856); Canali and Cavallo (1991); Solin et al. (1966); Milnor
(2014) discusses literary connections. Italian papyri and other documents: Capasso
(1991).
18. On the importance of the ludi for Rome’s sense of literature, see Wiseman (2015). If
I can be accused of overestimating the importance of writing in the Roman world,
Wiseman may be accused of underestimating it.
19. See especially Feeney (2016) on Rome’s “translation project.”
20. Reynolds and Wilson (2013, orig. 1968), 81.
21. Reynolds and Wilson (2013, orig. 1968), 80–​122.
22. Kallendorf (2015) is a fascinating study of the reception history of Virgil across time
and media, up to today. See also Pfeiffer (1976); Grafton (1997); O’Donnell (1998);
Grafton et al. (2010); and now Hunt, Smith, and Stok (2017).
5

Introduction 5

Interest in the history of the book in Europe has refocused attention on

the ways that texts are continually reconstituted in the hands of makers and
readers.23 At the same time, classical scholarship has done enormous work to
recuperate the original performativity of ancient texts.24 But just as the ideals
of song, performance, and occasion have considerable symbolic weight within
ancient literatures, so too did writing, and its various forms play a significant
symbolic role in the work of authors and artists across genres. Other languages
do a better job than English to distinguish writing itself (i.e., marks, made on
a surface, having some kind of linguistic character) from the acts that pro-
duce it (i.e., the making of such marks) and its metaphysical products (i.e.,
the linguistic information encoded therein). French has écriture, écrire, and
écrits; German, Schrift and schreiben. In English, all of these are “writing.” By
“writing,” then, I mean those marks, stains, scratches, impressions, scores,
gashes, grooves, and lines that are the visible signs of verbal communication,
as well as the material substrates or physical media that were made to contain
them.25
Bugs can be features, too. Rather, like Cicero’s letter to Quintus, writing’s
very failures always to transmit the perfect intention of an author—​and the
failures of certain pieces of writing ever to reach their intended readers—​reveal
one of writing’s most productive potentialities: that the medium is not actually
the message. That is, the inscribed artifact (the object that bears writing) and
the literary work (the intellectual substance embedded in it) are not one and
the same. This difference allows authors to play with the concinnity between
form and content in ways that are legible and meaningful to readers. Ovid
dresses his book poorly, since the poetry it contains is full of sorrow. Catullus
jokes about the grandness of a papyrus sheet used to copy the most overblown
poetry. Horace’s booklet of Odes can claim to outlast a monument. For Virgil,
we shall see, the particular textuality of his poetry becomes a kind of secret con-
fidence between the author and a coterie of readers, including the princeps and
excluding the general reading public.26
One of the greatest challenges of working in this field is the very poor
state of the material evidence for ancient Latin books. Hardly a lick of Latin
literature survives in its original form from the first centuries bce or ce. I can

23. See Cavallo and Chartier (1999, orig. 1995). Darnton (1986) is seminal.
24. The foundational work is Lord (1960). For Roman song and performance, see
Habinek (2005); Lowrie (2009).
25. On the semiotic implications of the characteristic of writing (and all other forms
of communication) that it can be used to refer to itself, see Winthrop-​Young (2013)
with Siegert (2014), 10–​12.
26. Ovid Tristia I.1; Catullus 22; Hor. Carmina 3.30; Virgil passim. These examples are
discussed in more detail elsewhere: Ovid, in Chapter 6, and the rest in Chapter 5.
Bibliographic references can be found there.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
22, 1723; the Princess Louisa, born December 7, 1724. All these
survived the Queen. There was also a prince born in November
1716, who did not survive his birth; and George William, Duke of
Gloucester, born November 2, 1717, who died in February of the
year following.
At the funeral of Caroline, which was called ‘decently private,’
but which was, in truth, marked by much splendour and ceremony,
not the King, but the Princess Amelia, acted as chief mourner; and
the anthem, ‘The Ways of Zion do mourn,’ was ‘set to Musick by Mr.
Handell.’ Of all the verses poured out on the occasion of her death,
two specimens are subjoined. They show how the Queen was
respectively dealt with by the Democritus and Heraclitus of her
subjects:—
 Here lies, lamented by the poor and great—
(Prop of the Church, and glory of the State)—
A woman, late a mighty monarch’s queen,
Above all flattery, and above all spleen;
Loved by the good, and hated by the evil,
Pursued, now dead, by satire and the devil.
With steadfast zeal (which kindled in her youth)
A foe to bigotry, a friend to truth;
Too generous for the lust of lawless rule,
Nor Persecution’s nor Oppression’s tool:
In Locke’s, in Clarke’s, in Hoadley’s paths she trod,
Nor fear’d to follow where they follow’d God.
To all obliging and to all sincere,
Wise to choose friendships, firm to persevere.
Free without rudeness; great without disdain;
An hypocrite in nought but hiding pain.
To courts she taught the rules of just expence,
Join’d with economy, magnificence;
Attention to a kingdom’s vast affairs,
Attention to the meanest mortal’s cares;
Profusion might consume, or avarice hoard,
’Twas hers to feed, unknown, the scanty board.
Thus, of each human excellence possess’d,
With as few faults as e’er attend the best;
Dear to her lord, to all her children dear,
And (to the last her thought, her conscience clear)
Forgiving all, forgiven and approved,
To peaceful worlds her peaceful soul removed.

The above panegyric was drawn up as a reply to an epitaph of

another character, which was then in circulation, from the pen of a
writer who contemplated his subject in another point of view. It was
to this effect:—
Here lies unpitied, both by Church and State,
The subject of their flattery and hate;
Flatter’d by those on whom her favours flow’d,
Hated for favours impiously bestow’d;
Who aim’d the Church by Churchmen to betray,
And hoped to share in arbitrary sway.
In Tindal’s and in Hoadley’s paths she trod,
An hypocrite in all but disbelief in God.
Promoted luxury, encouraged vice,
Herself a sordid slave to avarice.
True friendship’s tender love ne’er touch’d her heart,
Falsehood appear’d in vice disguised by art.
Fawning and haughty; when familiar, rude;
And never civil seem’d but to delude.
Inquisitive in trifling, mean affairs,
Heedless of public good or orphan’s tears;
To her own offspring mercy she denied,
And, unforgiving, unforgiven died.
 CHAPTER X.
THE REIGN OF THE WIDOWER.

Success of Admiral Vernon—Royal visit to ‘Bartlemy Fair’—Party-spirit runs

high about the King and Prince—Lady Pomfret—The mad Duchess of
Buckingham—Anecdote of Lady Sundon—Witty remark of Lady Mary
Wortley—Fracas at Kensington Palace—The battle of Dettingen—A
precocious child—Marriage of Princess Mary—A new opposition—Prince
George—Lady Yarmouth installed at Kensington—Death of Prince
Frederick—Conduct of the King on hearing of this event—Bubb
Dodington’s extravagant grief—The funeral scant—Conduct of the
widowed Princess—Opposition of the Prince to the King not undignified—
Jacobite epitaph on the Prince—The Prince’s rebuke for frivolous jeer on
Lady Huntingdon—The Prince’s patronage of literary men—Lady Archibald
Hamilton, the Prince’s favourite—The Prince and the Quakers—Anecdote
of Prince George—Princely appreciation of Lady Huntingdon.

The era of peace ended with Caroline. Walpole endeavoured to

prolong the era, but Spanish aggressions against the English flag in
South America drove the ministry into a war. The success of Vernon
at Porto Bello rendered the war highly popular. The public
enthusiasm was sustained by Anson, but it was materially lowered
by our defeat at Carthagena, which prepared the way for the
downfall of the minister of Caroline. Numerous and powerful were
the opponents of Walpole, and no section of them exhibited more
fierceness or better organisation than that of which the elder son of
Caroline was the founder and great captain.
Frederick, however, was versatile enough to be able to devote as
much time to pleasure as to politics.
As the roué Duke of Orleans, when regent, and indeed before he
exercised that responsible office, was given to stroll with his witty
but graceless followers, and a band of graceful but witless ladies,
through the fairs of St. Laurent and St. Germain, tarrying there till
midnight to see and hear the drolleries of ‘Punch’ and the plays of
the puppets, so the princes of the royal blood of England
condescended, with much alacrity, to perambulate Bartholomew Fair,
and to enjoy the delicate amusements then and there provided. An
anonymous writer, some thirty years ago, inserted in the ‘New
European Magazine,’ from an older publication, an account of a royal
visit, in 1740, to the ancient revels of St. Bartholomew. In this
amusing record we are told, that ‘the multitude behind was impelled
violently forwards, and a broad blaze of red light, issuing from a
score of flambeaux, streamed into the air. Several voices were loudly
shouting, ‘Room there for Prince Frederick! make way for the Prince!’
and there was that long sweep heard to pass over the ground which
indicates the approach of a grand and ceremonious train. Presently
the pressure became much greater, the voices louder, the light
stronger, and, as the train came onward, it might be seen that it
consisted, firstly of a party of yeomen of the guards clearing the
way; then several more of them bearing flambeaux, and flanking the
procession; while in the midst of all appeared a tall, fair, and
handsome young man, having something of a plump foreign visage,
seemingly about four-and-thirty years of age, dressed in a ruby-
coloured frock-coat, very richly guarded with gold lace, and having
his long flowing hair curiously curled over his forehead and at the
sides, and finished with a very large bag and courtly queue behind.
The air of dignity with which he walked; the blue ribbon and star-
and-garter with which he was decorated; the small, three-cornered,
silk court-hat which he wore while all around him were uncovered;
the numerous suite, as well of gentlemen as of guards, which
marshalled him along; the obsequious attention of a short stout
person who, by his flourishing manner, seemed to be a player: all
these particulars indicated that the amiable Frederick, Prince of
Wales, was visiting Bartholomew Fair by torchlight, and that
Manager Rich was introducing his royal guest to all the amusements
of the place. However strange,’ adds the author, ‘this circumstance
may appear to the present generation, yet it is nevertheless strictly
true; for about 1740, when the revels of Smithfield were extended to
three weeks and a month, it was not considered derogatory to
persons of the first rank and fashion to partake in the broad humour
and theatrical entertainments of the place.’
In the following year the divisions between the King and the
prince made party-spirit run high, and he who followed the sire very
unceremoniously denounced the son. To such a one there was a
court at St. James’s, but none at Carlton House. Walpole tells a story
which illustrates at once this feeling and the sort of wit possessed by
the courtiers of the day. ‘Somebody who belonged to the Prince of
Wales said he was going to court. It was objected, that he ought to
say “going to Carlton House;” that the only court is where the King
resides. Lady Pomfret, with her paltry air of learning and absurdity,
said, “Oh, Lord! is there no court in England but the King’s? sure,
there are many more! There is the Court of Chancery, the Court of
Exchequer, the Court of King’s Bench, &c.” Don’t you love her? Lord
Lincoln does her daughter.’ Lord Lincoln, the nephew of the Duke of
Newcastle, the minister, was a frequenter of St. James’s, and, says
Horace, ‘not only his uncle-duke, but even Majesty is fallen in love
with him. He talked to the King at his levée without being spoken to.
That was always thought high treason, but I don’t know how the
gruff gentleman liked it.’ The gruff gentleman was the King, and the
phrase paints him at a stroke, like one of Cruikshank’s lines, by
which not only is a figure drawn, but expression given to it.
The prince’s party, combined with other opponents, effected the
overthrow of Caroline’s favourite minister, Walpole, in 1742. The
succeeding cabinet, at the head of which was Lord Wilmington, did
not very materially differ in principles and measures from that of
their predecessors. In the same year died Caroline’s other favourite,
Lady Sundon, mistress of the robes.
‘Lord Sundon is in great grief,’ says Walpole. ‘I am surprised, for
she has had fits of madness ever since her ambition met such a
check by the death of the Queen. She had great power with her,
though the Queen affected to despise her; but had unluckily told her,
or fallen into her power by, some secret. I was saying to Lady
Pomfret, “To be sure she is dead very rich.” She replied with some
warmth, “She never took money.” When I came home I mentioned
this to Sir Robert. “No,” said he, “but she took jewels. Lord Pomfret’s
place of master of the horse to the Queen was bought of her for a
pair of diamond ear-rings, of fourteen hundred pounds value.” One
day that she wore them at a visit at old Marlbro’s, as soon as she
was gone, the duchess said to Lady Mary Wortley, “How can that
woman have the impudence to go about in that bribe?” “Madam,”
said Lady Mary, “how would you have people know where wine is to
be sold unless there is a sign hung out?” Sir Robert told me that in
the enthusiasm of her vanity, Lady Sundon had proposed to him to
unite with her and govern the kingdom together: he bowed, begged
her patronage, but, he said, he thought nobody fit to govern the
kingdom but the King and Queen.’ That King, unsustained by his
consort, appears to have become anxious to be reconciled with his
son the Prince of Wales, at this time, when reports of a Stuart
rebellion began to be rife, and when theatrical audiences applied
passages in plays, in a favourable sense to the prince. The
reconciliation was effected; but it was clumsily contrived, and was
coldly and awkwardly concluded. An agent from the King induced
the prince to open the way by writing to his father. This was a step
which the prince was reluctant to take, and which he only took at
last with the worst possible grace. The letter reached the King late at
night, and on reading it he appointed the following day for the
reception of Frederick, who, with five gentlemen of his court,
repaired to St. James’s, where he was received by ‘the gruff
gentleman’ in the drawing-room. The yielding sire simply asked him,
‘How does the princess do? I hope she is well.’ The dutiful son
answered the query, kissed the paternal hand, and respectfully, as
far as outward demonstration could evidence it, took his leave. He
did not depart, however, until he had distinguished those courtiers
present whom he held to be his friends by speaking to them; the
rest he passed coldly by. As the reconciliation was accounted of as
an accomplished fact, and as the King had condescended to speak a
word or two to some of the most intimate friends of his son; and
finally, as the entire royal family went together to the Duchess of
Norfolk’s, where ‘the streets were illuminated and bonfired;’ there
was a great passing to and fro of courtiers of either faction between
St. James’s and Carlton House. Secker, who went to the latter
residence with Benson, Bishop of Gloucester, to pay his respects,
says that the prince and princess were civil to both of them.
The reconciliation was worth an additional fifty thousand pounds
a-year to the prince, so that obedience to a father could hardly be
more munificently rewarded. ‘He will have money now,’ says
Walpole, ‘to tune up Glover, and Thomson, and Dodsley again:—
Et spes et ratio studiorum in Cæsare tantum.’
There was much outward show of gladness at this court,
pageants and ‘reviews to gladden the heart of David and triumphs of
Absalom,’ as Walpole styles his Majesty and the heir-apparent. The
latter, with the princess, went ‘in great parade through the city and
the dust to dine at Greenwich. They took water at the Tower, and
trumpeting away to Grace Tosier’s—
Like Cimon, triumphed over land and wave.’
In another direction, there were some lively proceedings, which
would have amused Caroline herself. Tranquil and dull as Kensington
Palace looks, its apartments were occasionally the scene of more
rude than royal fracas. Thus we are told of one of the daughters of
the King pulling a chair from under the Countess Deloraine, just as
that not too exemplary lady was about to sit down to cards. His
Majesty laughed at the lady’s tumble, at which she was so doubly
pained, that, watching for revenge and opportunity, she contrived to
give the Sovereign just such another fall. The sacred person of the
King was considerably bruised, and the trick procured nothing more
for the countess than exclusion from court, where her place of
favour was exclusively occupied by Madame Walmoden, Countess of
Yarmouth.
We often hear of the wits of one era being the butts of the next,
and without wit enough left to escape the shafts let fly at them.
Walpole thus describes a drawing-room held at St. James’s, to which
some courtiers resorted in the dresses they had worn under Queen
Anne. ‘There were so many new faces,’ says Horace, ‘that I scarce
knew where I was; I should have taken it for Carlton House, or my
Lady Mayoress’s visiting day, only the people did not seem enough at
home, but rather as admitted to see the King dine in public. It is
quite ridiculous to see the number of old ladies, who, from having
been wives of patriots, have not been dressed these twenty years;
out they come with all the accoutrements that were in use in Queen
Anne’s days. Then the joy and awkward jollity of them is
inexpressible; they titter, and, wherever you meet them, are always
going to court, and looking at their watches an hour before the time.
I met several at the birth-day, and they were dressed in all the
colours of the rainbow; they seem to have said to themselves twenty
years ago: “Well; if I ever do go to court again, I will have a pink
and silver, or a blue and silver,” and they kept their resolutions.’
The English people had now been long looking towards that
great battle-field of Europe, Flanders, mingling memories of past
triumphs with hopes of future victories. George II. went heartily into
the cause of Maria Theresa, when the French sought to deprive her
of her imperial inheritance. In the campaign which ensued was
fought that battle of Dettingen which Lord Stair so nearly lost, where
George behaved so bravely, mounted or a-foot, and where the Scots
Greys enacted their bloody and triumphant duel with the gens-
d’arme of France.
Meanwhile, Frederick was unemployed. When the King and the
Duke of Cumberland proceeded to the army in Flanders, a regency
was formed, of which Walpole says, ‘I think the prince might have
been of it when Lord Gower is. I don’t think the latter more Jacobite
than his royal highness.’
When the King and the duke returned from their triumphs on the
Continent, the former younger for his achievements, the latter older
by the gout and an accompanying limp, London gave them a
reception worthy of the most renowned of heroes. In proportion as
the King saw himself popular with the citizens did he cool towards
the Prince of Wales. The latter, with his two sisters, stood on the
stairs of St. James’s Palace to receive the chief hero; but though the
princess was only confined the day before, and Prince George lay ill
of the small-pox, the King passed by his son without offering him a
word or otherwise noticing him. This rendered the King unpopular,
without turning the popular affection towards the elder son of
Caroline. Nor was that son deserving of such affection. His heart had
few sympathies for England, nor was he elated by her victories or
made sad by her defeats. On the contrary, in 1745, when the news
arrived in England of the ‘tristis gloria,’ the illustrious disaster at
Fontenoy, which made so many hearts in England desolate,
Frederick went to the theatre in the evening, and two days after, he
wrote a French ballad, ‘Bacchic, Anacreontic, and Erotic,’ addressed
to those ladies with whom he was going to act in Congreve’s
masque, ‘The Judgment of Paris.’ It was full of praise of late and
deep drinking, of intercourse with the fair, of stoical contempt for
misfortune, of expressed indifference whether Europe had one or
many tyrants, and of a pococurantism for all things and forms except
his chère Sylvie, by whom he was good-naturedly supposed to mean
his wife. But this solitary civility cannot induce us to change our self-
gratulation at the fact that a man with such a heart was not
permitted to ascend the throne of Great Britain. In the year after he
wrote the ballad alluded to, he created a new opposition against the
crown, by the counsels of Lord Bath, ‘who got him from Lord
Granville: the latter and his faction acted with the court.’ Of the
princess, Walpole says, ‘I firmly believe, by all her quiet sense, she
will turn out a Caroline.’
In this year, 1743, died that favourite of George I. who more
than any other woman had enjoyed in his household and heart the
place which should have belonged to his wife Sophia Dorothea.
Mademoiselle von der Schulenburg, of the days of the Electorate,
died Duchess of Kendal by favour of the King of England, and
Princess of Eberstein by favour of the Emperor of Germany. She died
at the age of eighty-five, immensely rich. Her wealth was inherited
by her so-called ‘niece,’ Lady Walsingham, who married Lord
Chesterfield. ‘But I believe,’ says Walpole, ‘that he will get nothing by
the duchess’s death—but his wife. She lived in the house with the
duchess, where he had played away all his credit.’
George loved to hear his Dettingen glories eulogised in annual
odes sung before him. But, brave as he was, he had not much cause
for boasting. The Dettingen laurels were changed into cypress at
Fontenoy by the Duke of Cumberland in 1744, whose suppression of
the Scottish rebellion in 1745 gained for him more credit than he
deserved. The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, by which our Continental
war was concluded in 1748, gave peace to England, but little or no
glory.
The intervening years were years of interest to some of the
children of Caroline. Thus, in June 1746, the Prince of Hesse came
over to England to marry the second daughter of Caroline, the
Princess Mary. He was royally entertained; but on one occasion met
with an accident which Walpole calls ‘a most ridiculous tumble
t’other night at the opera. They had not pegged up his box tight
after the ridotto, and down he came on all fours. George Selwyn
says he carried it off with an unembarrassed countenance.’
In a year Mary was glad to escape from the brutality of her
husband and repair to England, under pretext of being obliged to
drink the Bath waters. She was an especial favourite with her
brother, the Duke of Cumberland, and with the Princess Caroline.
The result of this marriage gave little trouble to the King. He was
much more annoyed when the Prince of Wales formally declared a
new opposition (in 1747), which was never to subside till he was on
the throne. ‘He began it pretty handsomely, the other day,’ says
Walpole, ‘with 143 to 184, which has frightened the ministry like a
bomb. This new party wants nothing but heads; though not having
any,’ says Horace, wittily, ‘to be sure the struggle is fairer.’ It was led
by Lord Baltimore, a man with ‘a good deal of jumbled knowledge.’
The spirit of the father certainly dwelt in some of his children. The
King, we are told, sent Steinberg, on one occasion, to examine the
prince’s children in their learning. The boy, Prince Edward, acquitted
himself well in his Latin grammar, but Steinberg told him that it
would please his Majesty and profit the prince, if the latter would
attend more to attain proficiency in the German language. ‘German,
German!’ said the boy; ‘any dull child can learn that!’ The prince, as
he said it, ‘squinted’ at the baron, and the baron was doubtless but
little flattered by the remark or the look of the boy. The King was
probably as surprised and as little pleased to hear the remark as he
was a few months later to discover that the Prince of Wales and the
Jacobite party had united in a combined parliamentary opposition
against the government. However, Prince Edward’s remark and the
Prince of Wales’s opposition did not prevent the King from conferring
the Order of the Garter on the little Prince George in 1749. The
youthful knight, afterwards King of England, was carried in his
father’s arms to the door of the King’s closet. There the Duke of
Dorset received him, and carried him to the King. The boy then
commenced a speech, which had been taught him by his tutor,
Ayscough, Dean of Bristol. His father no sooner heard the oration
commenced, than he interrupted its progress by a vehement ‘No,
no!’ The boy, embarrassed, stopped short; then, after a moment of
hesitation, recommenced his complimentary harangue; but, with the
opening words, again came the prohibitory ‘No, no!’ from the prince,
and thus was the eloquence of the young chevalier rudely silenced.
But it was not only the peace of the King, his very palaces were
put in peril at this time. The installation of Lady Yarmouth at
Kensington, after the fracas occasioned by Lady Deloraine, had
nearly resulted in the destruction of the palace. Lady Yarmouth
resided in the room which had been occupied by Lady Suffolk, who
disregarded damp, and cared nothing for the crop of fungi raised by
it in her room. Not so Lady Yarmouth, at least after she had
contracted an ague. She then kept up such a fire that the woodwork
caught, and destruction to the edifice was near upon following.
There were vacant chambers enough, and sufficiently comfortable;
but the King would not allow them to be inhabited, even by his
favourite. ‘The King hoards all he can,’ writes Walpole, ‘and has
locked up half the palace since the Queen’s death; so he does at St.
James’s; and I believe would put the rooms out at interest if he
could get a closet a-year for them.’
The division which had again sprung up between sire and son
daily widened until death relieved the former of his permanent
source of vexation. This event took place in 1751. Some few years
previous to that period, the Prince of Wales, when playing at tennis
or cricket, at Cliefden, received a blow from a ball, which gave him
some pain, but of which he thought little. It was neglected; and one
result of such neglect was a permanent weakness of the lungs. In
the early part of this year he had suffered from pleurisy, but had
recovered—at least, partially recovered. A previous fall from his
horse had rendered him more than usually delicate. Early in March
he had been in attendance at the House of Lords on occasion of the
King, his father, giving his royal sanction to some bills. This done,
the prince returned, much heated, in a chair with the windows
down, to Carlton House. He changed his dress, put on light, unaired
clothing, and, as if that had not been perilous enough, he had the
madness, after hurrying to Kew and walking about the gardens there
in very inclement weather, to lie down for three hours after his
return to Carlton House, upon a couch in a very cold room which
opened upon the gardens. Lord Egmont alluded to the danger of
such a course; the prince laughed at the thought. He was as
obstinate as his father, to whom Sir Robert Walpole once observed,
on finding him equally intractable during a fit of illness, ‘Sir, do you
know what your father died of? Of thinking he could not die.’ The
prince removed to Leicester House. He ridiculed good counsel, and
before the next morning his life was in danger. He rallied, and during
one of his hours of least suffering he sent for his eldest son, and,
embracing him with tenderness, remarked, ‘Come, George, let us be
good friends while we are permitted to be so.’ Three physicians, with
Wilmot and Hawkins, the surgeons, were in constant attendance
upon him, and, curiously enough, their united wisdom pronounced
that the prince was out of danger only the day before he died. Then
came a relapse, an eruption of the skin, a marked difficulty of
breathing, and an increase of cough. Still he was not considered in
danger. Some members of his family were at cards in the adjacent
room, and Desnoyers, the celebrated dancing-master, who, like St.
Leon, was as good a violinist as he was a dancer, was playing the
violin at the prince’s bedside, when the latter was seized with a
violent fit of coughing. When this had ceased, Wilmot expressed a
hope that his royal patient would be better, and would pass a quiet
night. Hawkins detected symptoms which he thought of great
gravity. The cough returned with increased violence, and Frederick,
placing his hand upon his stomach, murmured feebly, ‘Je sens la
mort!’ (‘I feel death!’). Desnoyers held him up, and feeling him
shiver, exclaimed, ‘The prince is going!’ At that moment the Princess
of Wales was at the foot of the bed: she caught up a candle, rushed
to the head of the bed, and, bending down over her husband’s face,
she saw that he was dead.
So ended the wayward life of the elder son of Caroline; so
terminated the married life of him, which began so gaily when he
was gliding about the crowd in his nuptial chamber, in a gown and
night-cap of silver tissue. The bursting of an imposthume between
the pericardium and diaphragm, the matter of which fell upon the
lungs, suddenly killed him whom the heralds called ‘high and mighty
prince,’ and the heir to a throne lay dead in the arms of a French
fiddler. Les extrêmes se touchent!—though Desnoyers, be it said,
was quite as honest a man as his master.
Intelligence of the death of his son was immediately conveyed to
George II., by Lord North. The King was at Kensington, and when
the messenger stood at his side and communicated in a whisper the
doleful news, his Majesty was looking over a card-table at which the
players were the Princess Amelia, the Duchess of Dorset, the Duke
of Grafton, and the Countess of Yarmouth. He turned to the
messenger, and merely remarked in a low voice, ‘Dead, is he? Why,
they told me he was better;’ and then going round to his mistress,
the Countess of Yarmouth, he very calmly observed to her,
‘Countess, Fred is gone!’ And that was all the sorrow expressed by a
father at the loss of a first-born boy, who had outlived his father’s
love. The King, however, sent kind messages to the widow, who
exhibited on the occasion much courage and sense.
As the prince died without priestly aid, so was his funeral
unattended by a single bishop to do him honour or pay him respect.
With the exception of Frederick’s own household and the lords
appointed to hold the pall, ‘there was not present one English lord,
not one bishop, and only one Irish peer (Limerick), two sons of
dukes, one baron’s son, and two privy councillors.’ It was not that
want of respect was intentional, but that no due notice was issued
from any office as to the arrangement of the funeral. The body was
carried from the House of Lords to Westminster Abbey, but without a
canopy, and the funeral service was performed, undignified by either
anthem or organ.
But the prince’s friend, Bubb Dodington, poured out a sufficient
quantity of expressed grief to serve the entire nation, and make up
for all lack of ceremony or of sorrow elsewhere. In a letter to Mann,
he swore that the prince was the delight, ornament, and expectation
of the world. In losing him the wretched had lost their refuge, balm,
and shelter. Art, science, and grace had to deplore the loss of a
patron, and in that loss a remedy for the ills of society had perished
also! ‘Bubb de Tristibus’ goes on to say, that he had lost more than
any other man by the death of the prince, seeing that his highness
had condescended to stoop to him, and be his own familiar friend.
Bubb protested that if he ever allowed the wounds of his grief to
heal he should be for ever infamous, and finally running a-muck with
his figures of speech, he declares—‘I should be unworthy of all
consolation if I was not inconsolable.’ This is the spirit of a partisan;
but, on the other side, the spirit of party was never exhibited in a
more malignantly petty aspect than on the occasion of the death of
the prince. The gentlemen of his bedchamber were ordered to be in
attendance near the body, from ten in the morning till the conclusion
of the funeral. The government, however, would order them no
refreshment, and the Board of Green Cloth would provide them with
none, without such order. Even though princes die, il faut que tout le
monde vive; and accordingly these poor gentlemen sent to a
neighbouring tavern and gave orders for a cold dinner to be
furnished them. The authorities were too tardily ashamed of thus
insulting faithful servants of rank and distinction, and commanded
the necessary refreshments to be provided. They were accepted, but
the tavern dinner was paid for and given to the poor.
The widowed Augusta, who had throughout her married life
exhibited much mental superiority, with great kindness of
disposition, and that under circumstances of great difficulty, and
sometimes of a character to inflict vexation on the calmest nature,
remained in the room by the side of the corpse of her husband for
full four hours, unwilling to believe in the assurances given her that
he was really dead. She was then the mother of eight children,
expecting to be shortly the mother of a ninth, and she was brought
reluctantly to acknowledge that their father was no more. It was six
in the morning before her attendants could persuade her to retire to
bed; but she rose again at eight, and then, with less thought for her
grief than anxiety for the honour of him whose death was the cause
of it, she proceeded to the prince’s room and burned the whole of
his private papers. By this action the world lost some rare
supplementary chapters to a Chronique Scandaleuse.
The death of Frederick disconcerted all the measures of
intriguing men, and brought about a great change in the councils of
the court as of the factions opposed to the court. ‘The death of our
prince,’ wrote Whitfield, ‘has afflicted you. It has given me a shock;
but the Lord reigneth, and that is my comfort.’ The Duchess of
Somerset, writing to Dr. Doddridge, says on the same subject:
‘Providence seems to have directed the blow where we thought
ourselves the most secure; for among the many schemes of hopes
and fears which people were laying down to themselves, this was
never mentioned as a supposable event. The harmony which
appears to subsist between his Majesty and the Princess of Wales is
the best support for the spirits of the nation under their present
concern and astonishment. He died in the forty-fifth year of his age,
and is generally allowed to have been a prince of amiable and
generous disposition, of elegant manners, and of considerable
talents.’
The opposition which the prince had maintained against the
government of the father who had provoked him to it was not
undignified. Unlike his sire, he did not ‘hate both bainting and
boetry;’ and painters and poets were welcome at his court, as were
philosophers and statesmen. It was only required that they should
be adverse to Walpole. Among them were the able and urbane wits,
Chesterfield and Carteret, Pulteney and Sir William Wyndham; the
aspiring young men, Pitt, Lyttelton, and the Grenvilles: Swift, Pope,
and Thomson lent their names and pens to the prince’s service;
while astute and fiery Bolingbroke aimed to govern in the circle
where he affected to serve.
All the reflections made upon the death of the prince were not
so simple of quality as those of the Duchess of Somerset. Horace
Walpole cites a preacher at Mayfair Chapel, who ‘improved’ the
occasion after this not very satisfactory or conclusive fashion: ‘He
had no great parts, but he had great virtues—indeed, they
degenerated into vices. He was very generous; but I hear his
generosity has ruined a great many people; and then, his
condescension was such that he kept very bad company.’ Not less
known, and yet claiming a place here, is the smart Jacobite epitaph,
so little flattering to the dead, that had all Spartan epitaphs been as
little laudatory, the Ephori would have never issued a decree entirely
prohibiting them. It was to this effect:
 Here lies Fred,
Who was alive and is dead!
Had it been his father,
I had much rather.
Had it been his brother,
Still better than another.
Had it been his sister,
No one could have missed her.
Had it been the whole generation,
Still better for the nation:
But since ’tis only Fred,
Who was alive and is dead,
There is no more to be said.

I have not mentioned among those who were the frequenters of

his court the name of Lady Huntingdon. Frederick had the good
sense to appreciate Lady Huntingdon, and he did not despise her
because of a little misdirected enthusiasm. On missing her from his
circle, he enquired of the gay, but subsequently the godly, Lady
Charlotte Edwin, where Lady Huntingdon could be, that he no longer
saw her at his court. ‘Oh, I dare say,’ exclaimed the unconcerned
Lady Charlotte—‘I dare say she is praying with her beggars!’
Frederick had the good sense and the courage to turn sharply round
upon her, and say: ‘Lady Charlotte, when I am dying I think I shall
be happy to seize the skirt of Lady Huntingdon’s mantle to lift me up
to Heaven.’ This phrase was not forgotten when the adapter of
Cibber’s ‘Nonjuror’ turned that play into the ‘Hypocrite,’ and,
introducing the fanatic Mawworm, put into his mouth a sentiment
uttered for the sake of the laugh which it never failed to raise, but
which originated, in sober sadness, with Frederick, Prince of Wales.
The character of Caroline’s son was full of contradictions. He had
low tastes, but he also possessed those of a gentleman and a prince.
When the ‘Rambler’ first appeared, he so enjoyed its stately wisdom
that he sought after the author, in order to serve him if he needed
service. His method of ‘serving’ an author was not mere lip
compliment. Pope, indeed, might be satisfied with receiving from
him a complimentary visit at Twickenham. The poet there was on
equal terms with the prince; and when the latter asked how it was
that the author who hurled his shafts against kings could be so
friendly towards the son of a king, Pope somewhat pertly answered,
that he who dreaded the lion might safely enough fondle the cub.
But Frederick could really be princely to authors; and what is even
more, he could do a good action gracefully, an immense point where
there is a good action to be done. Thus to Tindal he sent a gold
medal worth forty guineas; and to dry and dusty Glover, for whose
‘Leonidas’ he had much respect, he sent a note for 500l. when the
poet was in difficulties. This handsome gift, too, was sent unasked.
The son of song was honoured and not humiliated by the gift. It
does not matter whether Lyttelton, or any one else, taught him to be
the patron of literature and literary men; it is to his credit that he
recognised them, acknowledged their services, and saw them with
pleasure at his little court, often giving them precedence over those
whose greatness was the mere result of the accident of birth.
The prince not only protected poets but he wooed the Muses.
Those shy ladies, however, loved him none the better for being a
benefactor to their acknowledged children. The rhymes of Frederick
were generally devoted to the ecstatic praises of his wife. The
matter was good, but the manner was execrable. The lady deserved
all that was said, but her virtues merited a more gracefully skilful
eulogist. The reasoning was perfect, but the rhymes halted
abominably. But how could it be otherwise? Apollo himself would not
stoop to inspire a writer who, while piling up poetical compliments
above the head of his blameless wife, was paying adoration, at all
events not less sincere, to most worthless ladies of the court? The
apparently exemplary father within the circle of home, where
presided a beautiful mother over a bright young family, was a
wretched libertine outside of that circle. His sin was great, and his
taste of the vilest. His ‘favourites’ had nothing of youth, beauty, or
intellect to distinguish them, or to serve for the poor apology of
infidelity. Lady Archibald Hamilton was plain and in years when she
enjoyed her bad pre-eminence. Miss Vane was impudent, and a maid
of honour by office; nothing else: while Lady Middlesex was ‘short
and dark, like a cold winter’s day,’ and as yellow as a November
morning. Notwithstanding this, he played the father and husband
well. He loved to have his children with him, always appeared most
happy when in the bosom of his family, left them with regret, and
met them again with smiles, kisses, and tears. He walked the streets
unattended, to the great delight of the people; was the presiding
Apollo at great festivals, conferred the prizes at rowings and racings,
and talked familiarly with Thames fishermen on the mysteries of
their craft. He would enter the cottages of the poor, listen with
patience to their twice-told tales, and partake with relish of the
humble fare presented to him. So did the old soldier find in him a
ready listener to the story of his campaigns and the subject of his
petitions; and never did the illustriously maimed appeal to him in
vain. He was a man to be loved in spite of all his vices. He would
have been adored had his virtues been more, or more real. But his
virtue was too often—like his love for popular and parliamentary
liberty—rather affected than real; and at all events, not to be relied
upon.
When a deputation of Quakers waited on the prince to solicit him
to support by himself and friends a clause of the Tything bill in their
favour, he replied: ‘As I am a friend to liberty in general, and to
toleration in particular, I wish you may meet with all proper favour;
but, for myself, I never gave my vote in parliament; and to influence
my friends or direct my servants in theirs does not become my
station. To leave them entirely to their own consciences and
understandings is a rule I have hitherto prescribed to myself, and
purpose through life to observe.’ Andrew Pitt, who was at the head
of the deputation, replied: ‘May it please the Prince of Wales, I am
greatly affected with thy excellent notions of liberty, and am more
pleased with the answer thou hast given us than if thou hadst
granted our request.’ But the answer was not a sincere one, and the
parliamentary friends and servants of the prince were expected to
hold their consciences at his direction. Once Lord Doneraile ventured
to disregard this influence; upon which the prince observed: ‘Does
he think that I will support him unless he will do as I would have
him? Does he not consider that whoever may be my ministers, I
must be king?’ Of such a man Walpole’s remark was not far wide of
truth when he said that Frederick resembled the Black Prince only in
one circumstance—in dying before his father!
He certainly exhibited little of the chivalrous spirit of the Black
Prince. In 1745, vexed at not being promoted to the command of
the army raised to crush the rebellion, and especially annoyed that it
was given to his brother, the Duke of Cumberland, who had less
vanity and more courage, he ridiculed all the strategic dispositions of
the authorities; and when Carlisle was being besieged by the rebels,
a representation in paste of the citadel was served up at his table, at
dessert, which, at the head of the maids of honour, he bombarded
with sugar-plums.
The young Prince George, afterwards George III., ‘behaved
excessively well on his father’s death.’ The words are Walpole’s; and
he establishes his attestation by recording, that when he was
informed of his father’s decease, he turned pale and laid his hand on
his breast. Upon which his reverend tutor, Ayscough, said, very much
like a simpleton, and not at all like a divine, ‘I am afraid, sir, you are
not well.’ ‘I feel,’ said the boy, ‘something here, just as I did when I
saw the two workmen fall from the scaffold at Kew.’ It was not the
speech of a boy of parts, nor an epitaph deeply filial in sentiment on
the death of a parent; but one can see that the young prince was
conscious of some painful grief, though he hardly knew how to dress
his sensations in equivalent words.
Another son of Frederick, Edward, Duke of York, was ‘a very
plain boy, with strange loose eyes, but was much the favourite. He is
a sayer of things,’ remarks Walpole. Nine years after his father’s
death, Prince Edward had occasion to pay as warm a compliment to
Lady Huntingdon as ever had been paid her by his father. The
occasion was a visit to the Magdalen, in 1760. A large party
accompanied Prince Edward from Northumberland House to the
evening service. They were rather wits than worshippers; for among
them were Horace Walpole, Colonel Brudenell, and Lord Hertford,
with Lords Huntingdon and Dartmouth to keep the wits within
decent limits. The ladies were all gay in silks, satins, and rose-
coloured taffeta; there were the Lady Northumberland herself,
Ladies Chesterfield, Carlisle, Dartmouth, and Hertford, Lady Fanny
Shirley, Lady Selina Hastings, Lady Gertrude Hotham, and Lady Mary
Coke. Lord Hertford, at the head of the governors, met the prince
and his brilliant suite at the doors, and conducted him to a sort of
throne in front of the altar. The clergyman, who preached an
eloquent and impressive sermon from Luke xix. 20, was, not many
years after, dragged from Newgate to Tyburn, and there
ignominiously hung. Some one in the company sneeringly observed
that Dr. Dodd had preached a very Methodistical sort of sermon. ‘You
are fastidious indeed,’ said Prince Edward to the objector: ‘I thought
it excellent, and suitable to season and place; and in so thinking, I
have the honour of being of the same opinion as Lady Huntingdon
here, and I rather fancy that she is better versed in theology than
any of us.’ This was true, and it was gracefully said. The prince,
moreover, backed his opinion by leaving a fifty-pound note in the
plate.
 CHAPTER XI.
THE LAST YEARS OF A REIGN.

Princess Augusta named Regent in the event of a minority—Cause of the

Prince’s death—Death of the Prince of Orange—The King’s fondness for
the theatre—Allusion to the King’s age—Death of the Queen of Denmark—
Her married life unhappy—Suffered from a similar cause with her mother
—Rage of Lady Suffolk at a sermon by Whitfield—Lady Huntingdon
insulted by her—War in Canada—Daily life of the King—Establishments of
the sons of Frederick—Death of the truth-loving Princess Caroline—Deaths
of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Anne—Queen Caroline’s rebuke of her—
Death of the King—Dr. Porteous’s eulogistic epitaph on him—The King’s
personal property—The royal funeral—The burlesque Duke of Newcastle.

The last nine years of the reign of the consort of Caroline were of a
very varied character. The earliest of his acts after the death of
Frederick was one of which Caroline would certainly not have
approved. In case of his demise before the next heir to the throne
should be of age, he, with consent of parliament, named the widow
of Frederick as regent of the kingdom. This appointment gave great
umbrage to the favourite son of Caroline, William, Duke of
Cumberland, and it was one to which Caroline herself would never
have consented.
But George now cared little for what the opinions of Caroline
might have been; and the remainder of his days was spent amid
death, gaiety, and politics. The year in which Frederick died was
marked by the decease of the husband of Caroline’s eldest daughter,
of whose plainness, wooing, and marriage I have previously spoken.
The Prince of Orange died on the 11th of October 1751. He had not
improved in beauty since his marriage, but, increasingly ugly as he
became, his wife became also increasingly jealous of him.
Importunate, however, as the jealousy was, it had the merit of being
founded on honest and healthy affection.
The immediate cause of the prince’s death was an imposthume
in the head. Although his health had been indifferent, his death was
rather sudden and unexpected. Lord Holdernesse was sent over
from England by the King, Walpole says, ‘to learn rather than to
teach,’ but certainly with letters of condolence to Caroline’s widowed
daughter. She is said to have received the paternal sympathy and
advice in the most haughty and insulting manner. She was proud,
perhaps, of being made the gouvernante of her son; and she
probably remembered the peremptory rejection by her father of the
interested sympathy she herself had offered him on the decease of
her mother, to whose credit she had hoped to succeed at St.
James’s.
But George himself had little sympathy to spare, and felt no
immoderate grief for the death of either son or son-in-law. On the
6th of November 1751, within a month of the prince’s death, and not
very many after that of his son and heir to the throne, George was
at Drury Lane Theatre. The entertainment, played for his especial
pleasure, consisted of Farquhar’s ‘Beaux Stratagem’ and Fielding’s
‘Intriguing Chambermaid.’ In the former, the King was exceedingly
fond of the ‘Foigard’ of Yates and the ‘Cherry’ of Miss Minors. In the
latter piece, Mrs. Clive played her original part of ‘Lettice,’ a part in
which she had then delighted the town—a town which could be
delighted with such parts—for now seventeen years. Walpole thus
relates an incident of the night. He is writing to Sir Horace Mann,
from Arlington Street, under the date of the 22nd of November
1751: ‘A certain King, that, whatever airs you may give yourself, you
are not at all like, was last week at the play. The intriguing
chambermaid in the farce says to the old gentleman, ‘You are
villainously old; you are sixty-six; you can’t have the impudence to
think of living above two years.’ The old gentleman in the stage-box
turned about in a passion, and said, “This is d—d stuff!”’
 George was right in his criticism, but rather coarse than king-like
in expressing it. Walpole too, it may be noticed, misquotes what his
friend Mrs. Clive said in her character of Lettice, and he misquotes
evidently for the purpose of making the story more pointed against
the King, who was as sensitive upon the point of age as Louis XIV.
himself. Lettice does not say to Oldcastle ‘you are villainously old.’
She merely states the three obstacles to Oldcastle marrying her
young mistress. ‘In the first place your great age; you are at least
some sixty-six. Then there is, in the second place, your terrible
ungenteel air; and thirdly, that horrible face of yours, which it is
impossible for any one to see without being frightened.’ She does,
however, add a phrase which must have sounded harshly on the ear
of a sensitive and sexagenarian King; though not more so than on
that of any other auditor of the same age. ‘I think you could not
have the conscience to live above a year or a year and a half at
most.’ The royal criticism, then, was correct, however roughly
expressed.
In the same year, 1751, died another of the children of George
and Caroline—Louisa, Queen of Denmark. She had only reached her
twenty-seventh year, and had been eight years married. Her mother
loved her, and the nation admired her for her grace, amiability, and
talents. Her career, in many respects, resembled that of her mother.
She was married to a king who kept a mistress in order that the
world should think he was independent of all influence on the part of
his wife. She was basely treated by this king; but not a word of
complaint against him entered into the letters which this spirited and
sensible woman addressed to her relations. Indeed, she had said at
the time of her marriage that, if she should become unhappy, her
family should never know anything about it. She died, in the flower
of her age, a terrible death, as Walpole calls it, and after an
operation which lasted an hour. The cause of it was the neglect of a
slight rupture, occasioned by stooping suddenly when enceinte, the
injury resulting from which she imprudently and foolishly concealed.
This is all the more strange, as her mother, on her death-bed, said to
her: ‘Louisa, remember I die by being giddy and obstinate, in having
kept my disorder a secret.’ Her farewell letter to her father and
family, a most touching address, and the similitude of her fate to
that of her mother, sensibly affected the almost dried-up heart of the
King. ‘This has been a fatal year to my family,’ groaned the son of
Sophia Dorothea. ‘I lost my eldest son, but I was glad of it. Then the
Prince of Orange died, and left everything in confusion. Poor little
Edward has been cut open for an imposthume in his side; and now
the Queen of Denmark is gone! I know I did not love my children
when they were young; I hated to have them coming into the room;
but now I love them as well as most fathers.’
The Countess of Suffolk (the servant of Caroline and the
mistress of Caroline’s husband) was among the few persons whom
the eloquence and fervour of Whitfield failed to touch. When this
latter was chaplain to Lady Huntingdon, and in the habit of
preaching in the drawing-room of that excellent and exemplary
woman, there was an eager desire to be among the privileged to be
admitted to hear him. This privilege was solicited of Lady
Huntingdon by Lady Rockingham, for the King’s ex-favourite, Lady
Suffolk. The patroness of Whitfield thought of Magdalen repentant,
and expressed her readiness to welcome her, an additional sheep to
an increasing flock. The beauty came, and Whitfield preached
neither more nor less earnestly, unconscious of her presence. So
searching, however, was his sermon, and so readily could the
enraged fair one apply its terrible truths to herself, that it was only
with difficulty she could sit it out with apparent calm. Inwardly, she
felt that she had been the especial object at which her assailant had
flung his sharpest arrows. Accordingly, when Whitfield had retired,
the exquisite fury, chafed but not repentant, turned upon the
meditative Lady Huntingdon, and well nigh annihilated her with the
torrent and power of her invective. Her sister-in-law, Lady Betty
Germain, implored her to be silent; but only the more unreservedly
did she empty the vials of her wrath upon the saintly lady of the
house, who was lost in astonishment, anger, and confusion. Old
Lady Bertie and the Dowager Duchess of Ancaster rose to her
rescue; and, by right of their relationship with the lady whom the
King delighted to honour, required her to be silent or civil. It was all
in vain: the irritated fair one maintained that she had been brought
there to be pilloried by the preacher; and she finally swept out of the
room, leaving behind her an assembly in various attitudes of wonder
and alarm; some fairly deafened by the thundering echoes of her
expressed wrath, others at a loss to decide whether Lady
Huntingdon had or had not directed the arrows of the preacher, and
all most charmingly unconscious that, be that as it might, the lady
was only smarting because she had rubbed against a sermon
bristling with the most stinging truths.
Whitfield made note of those of the royal household who
repaired to the services over which he presided in Lady Huntingdon’s
house. In 1752, when he saw regularly attending among his
congregation one of Queen Caroline’s ex-ladies, Mrs. Grinfield, he
writes thereupon: ‘One of Cæsar’s household hath been lately
awakened by her ladyship’s instrumentality, and I hope others will
meet with the like blessing.’
In 1755 England and France were at issue touching their
possessions in Canada. The dispute resulted in a war; and the war
brought with it the temporary loss of the Electorate of Hanover to
England, and much additional disgrace; which last was not wiped
out till the great Pitt was at the helm, and by his spirited
administration helped England to triumph in every quarter of the
globe. Amid misfortune or victory, however, the King, as outwardly
‘impassible’ as ever, took also less active share in public events than
he did of old; and he lived with the regularity of a man who has a
regard for his health. Every night, at nine o’clock, he sat down to
cards. The party generally consisted of his two daughters, the
Princesses Amelia and Caroline, two or three of the late Queen’s
ladies, and as many of the gentlemen of the household—whose
presence there was a proof of the Sovereign’s personal esteem for
them. Had none other been present, the party would have been one
on which remark would not be called for. But at the same table with
the children of good Queen Caroline was seated their father’s
mistress, the naturalised German Baroness Walmoden—Countess of
Yarmouth. George II. had no idea that the presence of such a
woman was an outrage committed upon his own children. Every
Saturday, in summer, he carried those ladies, but without his
daughters, to Richmond. They went in coaches-and-six, in the
middle of the day, with the heavy horse-guards 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
44
and lively prince in Europe.
He had leisure, however, to think of the establishment of the
sons of Frederick; and in 1756 George II. sent a message to his
grandson, now Prince of Wales, whereby he offered him 40,000l. a-
year and apartments at Kensington and St. James’s. The prince
accepted the allowance, but declined the residence, on the ground
that separation from his mother would be painful to her. When this
plea was made, the prince, as Dodington remarks in his diary, did
not live with his mother, either in town or country. The prince’s
brother Edward, afterwards created Duke of York, was furnished
with a modest revenue of 5,000l. a-year. The young prince is said to
have been not insensible to the attractions of Lady Essex, daughter
of Sir Charles Williams. ‘The prince,’ says Walpole, ‘has got his
liberty, and seems extremely disposed to use it, and has great life
and good humour. She has already made a ball for him. Sir Richard
Lyttelton was so wise as to make her a visit, and advise her not to
meddle with politics; that the Princess (Dowager of Wales) would
conclude that it was a plan laid for bringing together Prince Edward
and Mr. Fox. As Mr. Fox was not just the person my Lady Essex was
thinking of bringing together with Prince Edward, she replied, very
cleverly, “And, my dear Sir Richard, let me advise you not to meddle
with politics neither.”’
From the attempt to establish the Prince of Wales under his own
superintendence, the King was called to mourn over the death of
another child.
The truth-loving Caroline Elizabeth was unreservedly beloved by
her parents, was worthy of the affection, and repaid it by an ardent
attachment. She was fair, good, accomplished, and unhappy. The
cause of her unhappiness may be perhaps more than guessed at in
the circumstance of her retiring from the world on the death of Lord
Hervey. The sentiment with which he had, for the sake of vanity or
ambition, inspired her was developed into a sort of motherly love for
his children, for whom she exhibited great and constant regard.
Therewith she was conscious of but one strong desire—a desire to
die. For many years previous to her decease she lived in her father’s
palace, literally ‘cloistered up,’ inaccessible to nearly all, yet with
active sympathy for the poor and suffering classes in the metropolis.
Walpole, speaking of the death of the Princess Caroline, the third
daughter of George II., says: ‘Though her state of health had been
so dangerous for years, and her absolute confinement for many of
them, her disorder was, in a manner, new and sudden, and her
death unexpected by herself, though earnestly her wish. Her
goodness was constant and uniform, her generosity immense, her
charities most extensive; in short, I, no royalist, could be lavish in
her praise. What will divert you is that the Duke of Norfolk’s and
Lord Northumberland’s upper servants have asked leave to put
themselves in mourning, not out of regard for this admirable
princess, but to be more sur le bon ton. I told the duchess I
supposed they would expect her to mourn hereafter for their
relations.’
The princess died in December 1757, and early in the following
year the King was seized with a serious fit of illness, which
terminated in a severe attack of gout, ‘which had never been at
court above twice in his reign,’ says Walpole, and the appearance of
which was considered as giving the royal sufferer a chance of five or
six years more of life. But it was not to be so; for the old royal lion in
the Tower had just expired, and people who could ‘put that and that
together’ could not but pronounce oraculary that the royal man
would follow the royal brute. ‘Nay,’ says Lord Chesterfield to his son,
‘this extravagancy was believed by many above people.’ The fine
gentleman means that it was believed by many of his own class.
 It was not the old King, however, who was first to be summoned
from the royal circle by the Inevitable Angel. A young princess
passed away before the more aged Sovereign. Walpole has a word
or two to say upon the death of the Princess Elizabeth, the second
daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales, who died in the September
of this year. The immediate cause of death was an inflammation,
which carried her off in two days. ‘Her figure,’ he says, ‘was so very
unfortunate that it would have been difficult for her to be happy; but
her parts and application were extraordinary. I saw her act in “Cato”
at eight years old (when she could not stand alone, but was forced
to lean against the side-scene), better than any of her brothers and
sisters. She had been so unhealthy that, at that age, she had not
been taught to read, but had learned the part of Lucia by hearing
the others study their parts. She went to her father and mother, and
begged she might act. They put her off as gently as they could; she
desired leave to repeat her part, and when she did, it was with so
much sense, that there was no denying her.’
Before George’s hour had yet come, another child was to
precede the aged father to the tomb. In 1759 Anne, the eldest and
least loved of the daughters of Caroline, died in Holland. At the
period of her birth, the 9th of October 1709, her godmother, Queen
Anne, was occupying the throne of England; her grandfather,
George, was Elector of Hanover; Sophia Dorothea was languishing in
the castle of Ahlden, and her father and mother bore the title of
Electoral Prince and Princess. She was born at Hanover; and was
five years old when, with her sister, Amelia Sophia, who was two
years younger, her mother, the Princess Caroline, afterwards Queen,
arrived in this country on the 15th of October 1714. She early
exhibited a haughty and imperious disposition; possessed very little
feeling for, and exercised very little gentleness towards, those who
even rendered her a willing service. Queen Caroline sharply
corrected this last defect. She discovered that the princess was
accustomed to make one of her ladies-in-waiting stand by her
bedside every night, and read aloud to her till she fell asleep. On
one occasion the princess kept her lady standing so long, that she at