Chapter XXIX

THE QUEEN'S DEATH-BED.

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

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

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

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

There are few chapters of history more full of strange, sardonic contrast, and grim, ghastly humor, than those which describe these death-bed scenes. The Queen, undergoing a succession of painful operations; now groaning and fainting, now telling the doctors not to mind her foolish cries; now indulging in some chaff with them—"Is not Ranby [the surgeon] sorry it isn't his own cross old wife he is cutting up?"—the King sometimes blubbering, and sometimes telling his dying wife that her staring eyes {116} looked like those of a calf whose throat had been cut; the King, who, in his sudden tenderness and grief, would persist in lying outside the bed, and thereby giving the poor, perishing sufferer hardly room to move; the messages of affected condolence arriving from the Prince of Wales, with requests to be allowed to see his mother, which requests the mother rejects with bitterness and contempt—all this sets before us a picture such as seldom, happily for the human race, illustrates a death-bed in palace, garret, or prison cell. The King was undoubtedly sincere in his grief, at least for the time. He did love the Queen in a sort of way; and she had worked upon all his weaknesses and vices and made herself necessary to him. He did not see how life was to go on for him without her; and as he thought of this he cried like a child whose mother is about to leave him. Over and over again has the story been told of the dying Queen's appeal to her husband to take a new wife after her death, and the King's earnest disclaimer of any such purpose; the assurance that he would have mistresses, and then the Queen's cry of cruel conviction from hard experience, "Oh, mon Dieu, cela n'empeche pas!" "I know," says Lord Hervey, who tells the story, "that this episode will hardly be credited, but it is literally true." One does not see why the episode should hardly be credited, why it should not be taken at once as historical and true. It is not out of keeping with all other passages of the story, it is in the closest harmony and symmetry with them. The King always made his wife the confidante of his amours and intrigues. He had written to her once, asking her to bring to Court the wife of some nobleman or gentleman, and he told her frankly that he admired this lady and wanted to have her near him in order that he might have an intrigue with her, and he knew that she, his wife, would always be glad to do him a pleasure. Thackeray, in his lecture, often speaks of the King as "Sultan George." George had, in the matter of love-making, no other notions than those of a sultan. [Sidenote: 1737—George's settled belief] He had no more idea of his wife objecting to his mistresses than {117} a sultan would have about the chief sultana's taking offence at the presence of his concubines. The fact that the Queen lay dying did not put any restraint on any of George's ways. He could not be kept from talking loudly all the time; he could not be kept from bawling out observations about his wife's condition which, if they were made only in whispers, must have tended to alarm and distress an invalid. It is not the frank brutality of George's words which surprises us; it is rather the sort of cross-light they throw on what was after all a tender part of his coarse and selfish nature. Every reader of the history and the memoirs of that reign must be prepared to understand and to appreciate the absolute sincerity of the King's words; the settled belief that the Queen could not possibly have any objection to his taking to himself as many mistresses as he pleased. One is a little surprised at the uncouth sentimentality of the thought that nevertheless it might be a disrespect to her memory if he were to take another wife. What a light all this lets in upon the man, and the Court, and the time! As regards indiscriminate amours and connections, poor, stupid, besotted George was simply on a level with the lower animals. Charles the Second, Louis the Fourteenth, Louis the Fifteenth even—these at their worst of times were gentlemen. It was only at the Hanoverian Court of England that such an interchange of appeal and reassurance could take place as that which was murmured and blubbered over the death-bed of Queen Caroline. "Horror," says one of the great Elizabethan poets, "waits on the death-beds of princes." Horror in the truest sense waited on the death-bed of that poor, patient, faithful, unscrupulous, unselfish Queen.

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

The Queen talked often to Princess Caroline, and commended to her the care of her two younger sisters. She talked to her son William, Duke of Cumberland, then little more than sixteen years old, admonished him to be a support to his father, and to "try to make up for the disappointment and vexation he must receive from your {119} profligate and worthless brother." But she also admonished him to attempt nothing against his brother, and only to mortify him by showing superior merit. She asked for her keys, and gave them to the King. She took off her finger a ruby ring which he had given her at her coronation, and put it on his finger, and said to him, almost as patient Grizzel does, "Naked I came to you, and naked I go from you." All who were present at this episode in the dying were in tears, except the Queen herself. She seemed absolutely composed; indeed she was anxious that the end should come. She had no belief in the possibility of her recovery, and she only wanted to be released now from "the fever called living." Except for the bitter outbursts of anger and hatred against the Prince of Wales, the poor Queen seems to have borne herself like a true-hearted, resigned, tender wife, kind mother, and Christian woman.

[Sidenote: 1737—A fatal mistake]

An operation was tried, with the consent of the King. Thereupon arises a controversy not unlike that which followed an imperial death in very modern European history. Lord Hervey insists that the surgeons showed utter incapacity, made a shocking and fatal mistake; cut away as mortified flesh that in which there was no mortification whatever. Then Sir Robert Walpole, who had been sent for, comes on the scene. The King ordered him to be brought in from the outer room, and Walpole came in and tried to drop on his knees to kiss the King's hand. It was not easy to do, Sir Robert was so bulky and unwieldy. He found it hard to get down, and harder still to get up again. However, the solemn duty was accomplished somehow, and then Sir Robert was conducted to the Queen's bedside. He dropped some tears, which we may be sure were sincere, even if by no means unselfish. He was in utter dread of losing all his power over the King if the Queen were to die. The Queen recommended the King, her children, and the kingdom to his care, and Sir Robert seems to have been much pleased with the implied compliment of the recommendation.

{120}

The moment Walpole got to private speech with Lord Hervey, he at once exhibited the nature of his grief and alarm. "My lord," he exclaimed, "if this woman should die, what a scene of confusion will there be! Who can tell into whose hands the King will fall, or who will have the management of him?" Lord Hervey tried to reassure him, and told him that his influence over the King would be stronger than ever. Walpole could not see it, and they argued the matter over for a long time. The talk lasted two or three hours, much to Lord Hervey's dissatisfaction, for it kept him out of bed, and this happened to be the first night since the Queen had fallen ill when he had any chance of a good night's rest; and now behold, with the Prime-minister's unseasonable anxiety about the affairs of State, Lord Hervey's chance is considerably diminished. Even this little episode has its fit and significant place in the death-bed story. The Prime-minister will insist on talking over the prospects—his own prospects or those of the nation—with the lord-in-waiting; and the lord-in-waiting is very sleepy, and, having had a hope of a night's rest, is only alarmed lest the hope should be disappointed. No one appears to have said a word as to what would be better or worse for the Queen.

The Queen was strongly under the belief that she would die on a Wednesday. She was born on a Wednesday, married on a Wednesday, crowned on a Wednesday, gave birth to her first child on a Wednesday; almost all the important events of her life had befallen her on Wednesday, and it seemed in the fitness of things that Wednesday should bring with it the close of that life. Wednesday came; and, as Lord Hervey puts it, "some wise, some pious, and a great many busy, meddling, impertinent people about the Court" began asking each other, and everybody else they met, whether the Queen had any clergyman to pray for her and minister to her. Hervey thought all this very offensive and absurd, and was of opinion that if the Queen cared about praying, and that sort of thing, she could pray for herself as well as any one else could do it. {121} Hervey, however, kept this free and easy view of things discreetly to himself. He was shocked at the rough cynicism of Sir Robert Walpole, who cared as little about prayer as Hervey or any other man living, but was perfectly willing that all the world should know his views on the subject. The talk of the people about the Court reached Walpole's ears, and he recommended the Princess Emily to propose to the King and Queen that the Archbishop of Canterbury should be sent for. The princess seemed to be a little afraid to make so audacious a proposal to the King, Defender of the Faith, as the suggestion that a minister of the Church should be allowed to pray by the bedside of the dying Queen. Sir Robert encouraged her in his characteristic way. In the presence of a dozen people, Hervey tells, Sir Robert said to the princess: "Pray, madam, let this farce be played; the archbishop will act it very well. You may bid him be as short as you will. It will do the Queen no hurt, no more than any good; and it will satisfy all the wise and good fools who will call us atheists if we don't pretend to be as great fools as they are."

[Sidenote: 1737—Praying with the Queen]

The advice of the statesman was taken. The wise and good fools were allowed to have it their own way. The archbishop was sent for, and he came and prayed with the Queen every morning and evening; the King always graciously bolting out of the room the moment the prelate came in. But the wise and good fools were not satisfied with the concession which enlightenment had condescended to make. Up to this time they kept asking, "Has the Queen no one to pray with her?" Now the whispered question was, "Has the Queen taken—will the Queen take—the sacrament?" Some people hinted that she could not receive the sacrament because she could not make up her mind to be reconciled to her son; others doubted whether she had religious feeling enough to consent to ask for the sacrament or to receive it. All this time the King chattered perpetually to Lord Hervey, to the physicians and surgeons, and to his children, about the virtues {122} and gifts of the Queen. He deplored in advance the lonely, dull life he would have to lead when she was taken from him. He was in frequent bursts of tears. He declared that he had never been tired one moment in her company; that he could never have been happy with any other woman in the world; and he paid her the graceful and delicate compliment of saying that if she had not been his wife he would rather have her for a mistress than any other woman with whom he had ever held such relationship. Yet he hardly ever went into her room, after one of these outpourings of tender affection, without being rough to her and shouting at her and bullying her. When her pains and her wounds made her move uneasily in her bed, he asked her how the devil she could sleep when she would never lie still a moment. He walked heavily about the room as if it were a chamber in a barrack; he talked incessantly; gave all manner of directions; made the unfortunate Queen swallow all manner of foods and drinks because he took it into his head that they would do her good; and she submitted, poor, patient, pitiable creature, and swallowed and vomited, swallowed again and vomited again, and uttered no complaint.

[Sidenote: 1737—Would not play second fiddle]

Even in his outbursts of grief the King's absurd personal vanity constantly came out; for he was always telling his listeners that the Queen was devoted to him because she was wildly enamoured of his person as well as his genius. Then he told long stories about his own indomitable courage, and went over and over again an account of the heroism he had displayed during a storm at sea. One night the King was in the outer room with the Princess Emily and Lord Hervey. The puffy little King wore his nightgown and nightcap, and was sitting in a great chair with his thick legs on a stool; a heroic figure, decidedly. The princess was lying on a couch. Lord Hervey sat by the fire. The King started the old story of the storm and his own bravery, and gave it to his companions in all its familiar details. The princess at last closed her eyes, and seemed to be fast asleep. The King presently went into {123} the Queen's room, and then the princess started up and asked, "Is he gone?" and added, fervently, "How tiresome he is!" Lord Hervey asked if she had not been asleep; she said no; she had only closed her eyes in order to escape taking part in the conversation, and that she very much wished she could close her ears as well. "I am sick to death," the dutiful princess said, "of hearing of his great courage every day of my life. One thinks now of mamma, and not of him. Who cares for his old storm? I believe, too, it is a great lie, and that he was as much afraid as I should have been, for all what he says now," and she added a good many more comments to the same effect. Then the King came back into the room, and his daughter ceased her comment on his bravery and his truthfulness.

"One thinks of mamma, and not of him." That was exactly what George would not have. He did dearly love the Queen after his own fashion; he was deeply grieved at the thought of losing her; but he did not choose to play second fiddle even to the dying. So in all his praises of her and his laments for her he never failed to endeavor to impress on his hearers the idea of his own immense superiority to her and to everybody else. There is hardly anything in fiction so touching, so pitiful, so painful, as this exposition of a naked, brutal, yet not quite selfish, not wholly unloving, egotism. The Queen did not die on the Wednesday. Thursday and Friday passed over in just the same way, with just the same incidents—with the King alternately blubbering and bullying, with the panegyrics of the dying woman, and the twenty times told tale of "his old storm." The Queen was growing weaker and weaker. Those who watched around her bed wondered how she was able to live so long in such a condition of utter weakness. On the evening of Sunday, November 20th, she asked Dr. Tesier quietly how long it was possible that her struggle could last. He told her that he was "of opinion that your Majesty will be soon relieved." She thanked him for telling her, and said in French, "So much the better." About {124} ten o'clock that same night the crisis came. The King was asleep in a bed laid on the floor at the foot of the Queen's bed. The Princess Emily was lying on a couch in a corner of the room. The Queen began to rattle in her throat. The nurse gave the alarm, and said the Queen was dying. The Princess Caroline was sent for, and Lord Hervey. The princess came in time; Lord Hervey was a moment too late. The Queen asked in a low, faint voice that the window might be opened, saying she felt an asthma. Then she spoke the one word, "Pray." The Princess Emily began to read some prayers, but had only got out a few words before the Queen shuddered and died. The Princess Caroline held a looking-glass to the Queen's lips, and, finding the surface undimmed, quietly said, "'Tis over"; and, according to Lord Hervey, "said not one word more, nor as yet shed one tear, on the arrival of a misfortune the dread of which had cost her so many."

"Pray!" That was the last word the Queen ever spoke, All the wisdom of the Court statesmen, all the proud, intellectual unbelief, all the cynical contempt for the weaknesses of intellect which allow ignorant people to believe their destiny linked with that of some other and higher life—all that Bolingbroke, Chesterfield, Walpole, would have taught and sworn oaths for—all was mocked by that one little word, "pray," which came last from the lips of Queen Caroline. Bring saucy Scepticism there; make her laugh at that!

The story would be incomplete if it were not added that while the Queen's body was yet unburied the King came to Hervey and told him, laughing and crying alternately, that he had just seen Horace Walpole, the brother of Robert, and that Walpole was weeping for the Queen with so bad a grace "that in the middle of my tears he forced me to burst into laughter." Amid this explosion of tears and laughter the story of the Queen's life comes fittingly to an end.

[Sidenote: 1737—Walpole strengthens his position]

The moment the breath was out of the Queen's body, {125} Walpole set about a course of action which should strengthen his position as Prime-minister of the King. At first his strong fear was that with the life of the Queen had passed away his own principal hold upon the confidence of George. He told Hervey that no one could know how often he had failed utterly by argument and effort of his own to bring the King to agree to some action which he considered absolutely necessary for the good of the State, and how after he had given up the attempt in mere despair the Queen had taken the matter in hand, and so managed the King that his Majesty at last became persuaded that the whole idea was his own original conception, and he bade her send for Walpole and explain it to him, and get Walpole to carry it into execution. Hervey endeavored to reassure him by many arguments, and among the rest by one which showed how well Hervey understood King George's weaknesses. Hervey said the one thing which was in Walpole's way while the Queen lived was the fear George had of people saying Walpole was the Queen's minister, not the King's, and suggesting that the King's policy was ruled by his wife. Now that the Queen was gone, George would be glad to prove to the world that Walpole had always been his minister, and that he retained Walpole's services because he himself valued them, and not because they had been pressed upon him by a woman. Hervey proved to be right.

Walpole, however, was for strengthening himself after the old fashion. He was determined to put the King into the hands of some woman who would play into the hands of the minister. The Duke of Grafton and the Duke of Newcastle tried to persuade Walpole to make use of the influence of the Princess Emily. They insisted that she was sure to succeed to the management of the King, but that if Walpole approached her at once he might easily make her believe that she owed it all to him, and that she might thus be induced to stand by him and to assist him. Walpole would have nothing of the kind. He only believed in the ruling power of a mistress now that the {126} Queen was gone. He gave his opinions in his blunt, characteristic way. He meant, he said, to bring over Madame de Walmoden, and would have nothing to do with "the girls." "I was for the wife against the mistress, but I will be for the mistress against the daughters." Accordingly he earnestly advised the King not to fret any longer with a vain sorrow, but to try to distract himself from grief, and urged him, for this purpose, to send over at once to Hanover for Madame Walmoden. Walpole's way of talking to the young princesses would seem absolutely beyond belief if we did not know that the reports of it are true. He told the princesses that they must try to divert their father's melancholy by bringing women round him; he talked of Madame Walmoden, and repeated to them what he had said to Lord Hervey, that, though he had been for the Queen against Lady Suffolk and every other woman, yet now he would be for Madame Walmoden, and advised them in the mean time to bring Lady Deloraine, a former mistress, to her father, adding with brutal indecency that "people must wear old gloves until they get new ones." He offended and disgusted the Princesses Caroline and Emily, and they hated him forever after. Walpole did not much care. He was not thinking much about "the girls," as he called them. He believed he saw his way.