nothing unsaid that could demonstrate the opinion he had of her head and the value he set upon her heart. He told her too she knew him to be just in his nature, and how much he wished he could be everything she would have him. "Mais vous voyez mes passions, ma chère Caroline! Vous connaissez mes foiblesses—il n'y a rien de caché dans mon cœur pour vous—et plût à Dieu que vous pourriez me corriger avec la même facilité que vous m'approfondissez! Plut à Dieu que je pourrais vous imiter autant que je sais vous admirer, et que je pourrais apprendre de vous toutes les vertus que vous me faites voir, sentir, et aimer!" His Majesty theu came to the point of Madame Walmoden's coming to England, and said that she had told him she relied on the Queen's goodness, and would give herself up to whatever their Majesties thought fit... Sir Robert Walpole assured Lord Hervey that if the King was only to write to women, and never to strut and talk to them, he believed his Majesty would get the better of all the men in the world with them.'

Madame Walmoden, however, did not appear in England until Queen Caroline was no more. Her Majesty had for several years suffered from an organic lesion, which the King was aware of, but which was never told, except to Lady Sundon. The symptoms became very serious on Wednesday, the 9th of November, 1737; but the Queen persisted in concealing the nature and seat of her danger.

'At seven o'clock, when Lord Hervey returned to St. James's from M. de Cambis's, the French ambassador's, where he dined that day, he went up to the Queen's apartment and found her in bed, with the Princess Caroline only in the room, the King being gone, as usual at that hour, to play in the Princess Emily's apartment. The Queen asked Lord Hervey what he used to take in his violent fits of the cholic; and Lord Hervey, imagining the Queen's pain to proceed from a goutish humour in her stomach that should be driven from that dangerous seat into her limbs, told her nothing ever gave him immediate ease but strong things. To which the Queen replied, "Pshaw! you think now, like all the other fools, that this is the pain of an old nasty gout." her pain continuing in a degree that she could not lie one moment quiet, she said about an hour after to Lord Hervey, "Give me what you will, I will take it ;" and the Princess Caroline bidding him not lose this opportunity, he fetched some snake-root and brandy.'

But

Next evening (10th)—' whilst the Princess Caroline and he were alone with the Queen, she complaining and they comforting, she often said, "I have an ill which nobody knows of;" which they both understood to mean nothing more than that she felt what she could not describe, and more than anybody imagined.'

On the 11th-Lord Hervey went once or twice in the night, as he had promised, to Princess Caroline; the King sat up in the Queen's room, and Princess Emily lay on a couch in Mrs. Herbert's.'

On the night of the 12th, Princess Caroline, though herself in

VOL. LXXXII. NO. CLXIV.

2 N

very

very weak health, was in such alarm that she lay in the Queen's ante-chamber.

'Princess Emily sat up with the Queen, the King went to bed, and Lord Hervey lay on a mattress on the floor, at the foot of Princess Caroline's couch. About four o'clock on Sunday morning, the 13th, the wound had begun to mortify. Hulst [a surgeon] came to the Princess Caroline, and told her this terrible news, upon which she waked Lord Hervey, and told him if ever he saw the Queen again it must be immediately. ..Lord Hervey went in with them just to see the Queen once more, looked at her through his tears for a moment, and then returned to his mattress.'

These passages complete our notion of the extraordinary intimacy in which Hervey lived with the royal ladies. According to Sarah of Marlborough, the King had always hitherto disliked him, but was entirely changed in this respect by his constant watchfulness and evident distress during the Queen's illness. He says himself that he was never out of the sick-room for more than four or five hours at a time, and that he never left the King without being entreated to come back as soon as he could. It is plain that the most delicate (or indelicate) communications between the Queen and her family took place in his presence or were forthwith reported to him. Thus, as to the fatal concealment, after stating his firm belief' that the Queen, now aged fiftyfour, and after all the affairs of Lady Suffolk, Lady Deloraine, Madame Walmoden, &c., had still been mainly swayed by the fear of losing something in the King's fancy, and consequently in her power over him-he adds,

'Several things she said to the King in her illness, which both the King and the Princess Caroline told me again, plainly demonstrated how strongly these apprehensions of making her person distasteful to the King had worked upon her.'-vol. ii. p. 507.

On that Sunday, the 13th,

the King talked perpetually to Lord Hervey, the physicians and surgeons, and his children, who were the only people he ever saw out of the Queen's room, of the Queen's good qualities, his fondness for her, his anxiety for her welfare, and the irreparable loss her death would be to him; and repeated every day, and many times in the day, all her merits in every capacity with regard to him and every other body she had to do with; that he never had been tired in her company one minute; that he was sure he could have been happy with no other woman upon earth for a wife, and that, if she had not been his wife, he had rather have had her for his mistress than any woman he had ever been acquainted with; that she had not only softened all his leisure hours, but been of more use to him as a minister than any other body had ever been to him or to any other prince; that with a patience which he knew he was not master of, she had listened to the nonsense of all

the

the impertinent fools that wanted to talk to him, and had taken all that trouble off his hands; and that, as to all the brillant and enjouement of the Court, there would be an end of it when she was gone; there would be no bearing a drawing-room when the only body that ever enlivened it, and one that always enlivened it, was no longer there. "Poor woman, how she always found something obliging, agreeable, and pleasing to say to everybody! Comme elle soutenoit sa dignité avec grace, avec politesse, avec douceur!"'

That afternoon the Queen took a solemn leave of the King, her daughters, and the young Duke of Cumberland. Hervey's minute narrative leaves no doubt that she never saw the Prince of Wales during her illness at all-hence the sting of Pope's last tribute to her memory—(the italics are his own) :

Hang the sad Verse on Carolina's Urn,

:

And hail her Passage to the Realms of Rest

All Parts perform'd, and all her Children blest.'

Hervey's account of her farewell to the King is certainly one of the most startling things in this book :

It is not necessary to examine whether the Queen's reasoning was good or bad in wishing the King, in case she died, should marry again: -it is certain she did wish it; had often said so when he was present, and when he was not present, and when she was in health, and gave it now as her advice to him when she was dying-upon which his sobs began to rise and his tears to fall with double vehemence. Whilst in the midst of this passion, wiping his eyes, and sobbing between every word, with much ado he got out this answer: Non, j'aurai des maîtresses." To which the Queen made no other reply than “Ah! mon Dieu! cela n'empêche pas." I know this episode will hardly be credited, but it is literally true.

66

The Queen after this said she believed she should not die till Wednesday, for that she had been born on a Wednesday, married on a Wednesday, and brought to bed of her first child on a Wednesday; she had heard the first news of the late King's death on a Wednesday, and been crowned on a Wednesday. This I own showed a weakness in her, but one which might be excused, as most people's minds are a little weakened on these occasions, and few people, even of the strongest minds, are altogether exempt from some little taint of that weakness called superstition. Many people have more of it than they care to let others know they have, and some more of it than they know themselves.'

Walpole all this while was in Norfolk-his colleague the Duke of Newcastle is said to have wished to conceal the Queen's danger from him; but Hervey does not tell why he himself did not convey proper information. No doubt he was busy enough. At last, however, the truth reached Houghton; and on Wednesday the 16th Sir Robert arrived at St. James's. He was alone with the Queen for a few minutes, during which she committed the

King, the family, and the country to his care.' As he came out he found the Princesses in the ante-chamber surrounded by some wise, some pious, and some very busy people,' who, to the pity or scorn of Hervey, were urging the essential duty' of having in some prelate to perform sacred offices;

'And when the Princess Emily made some difficulty about taking upon her to make this proposal to the King or Queen, Sir Robert (in the presence of a dozen people who really wished this divine physician for the Queen's soul might be sent for, upon the foot of her salvation) very prudently added, by way of stimulating the Princess Emily, "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 all atheists if we don't pretend to be as great fools as they are." After this eloquent and discreet persuasion-the whole company staring with the utmost astonishment at Sir Robert Walpole, some in admiration of his piety, and others of his prudencethe Princess Emily spoke to the King, the King to the Queen, and the Archbishop [Potter] was sent for; but the King went out of the room before his episcopal Grace was admitted. . The Queen desired the Archbishop to take care of Dr. Butler, her Clerk of the Closet; and he was the only body I ever heard of her recommending particularly and by name all the while she was ill. Her servants in general she recommended to the King, saying he knew whom she liked and disliked, but did not, that I know of, name anybody to him in particular.'— vol. ii. p. 529.

This special concern as to the great author of the Analogy is one of the few circumstances in Hervey's detail that it is at all agreeable to dwell upon. Indeed it is one of Indeed it is one of very few satisfactory details that occur in this book respecting her Majesty's interference with the ecclesiastical patronage of the Crown. Lord Mahon (History, ii. p. 172) exalts her discerning and praiseworthy' selection of Bishops; but nothing can be more offensive than Hervey's whole account of her exertions on behalf of Hoadley, whom she forced up step by step in spite-(not to mention the repugnance of the clergy and the nation)—of the King's own unusual stiffness on the avowed ground that 'the man did not believe one word of the Bible;' and we suspect there is no uncharitableness in the surmise that in Butler himself she patronised not the divine, but the philosopher. Yet the Queen's last word was pray

The Queen died at ten on the night of Sunday the 20th :

'Princess Caroline was sent for, and Lord Hervey, but before the last arrived the Queen was just dead. All she said before she died was, "I have now got an asthma. Open the window." Then she said "Pray." Upon which the Princess Emily began to read some

prayers,

prayers, of which she scarce repeated ten words before the Queen expired. The Princess Caroline held a looking-glass to her lips, and, finding there was not the least damp upon it, cried, ""Tis over;" and said not one word more, nor shed as yet one tear, on the arrival of a misfortune the dread of which had cost her so many. The King kissed the face and hands of the lifeless body several times, but in a few minutes left the Queen's apartment and went to that of his daughters, accompanied only by them. Then, advising them to go to bed, and take care of themselves, he went to his own side; and as soon as he was in bed sent for Lord Hervey to sit by him, where, after talking some time, and more calmly than one could have expected, he dismissed Lord H. and sent for one of his pages; and as he ordered one of them, for some time after the death of the Queen, to lie in his room, and that I am very sure he believed many stories of ghosts and witches and apparitions, I take this (with great deference to his magnanimity on other occasions) to have been the result of the same way of thinking that makes many weak minds fancy themselves more secure from any supernatural danger in the light than in the dark, and in company than alone. Lord Hervey went back to the Princess Caroline's bedchamber, where he stayed till five o'clock in the morning, endeavouring to lighten her grief by indulging it, and not by that silly way of trying to divert what cannot be removed, or to bring comfort to such affliction as time only can alleviate.'—vol. ii. p. 540.

During the interval before the interment the King remained invisible, except to his daughters, to Hervey, and for a moment occasionally to Walpole. Meantime, in the antechamber, the great subject of discussion is, in what female hand the power is now to be vested. Newcastle and Grafton, both admirers of the Princess Emily, are in great hopes that at the King's age he may allow that favoured daughter to replace the mother in his confidence; but

'Sir Robert, in his short, coarse way, said he should look to the King's mistress as the most sure means of influence. "I'll bring Madame Walmoden over, and I'll have nothing to do with your girls: I was for the wife against the mistress, but I will be for the mistress against the daughters." And accordingly he advised the King, and pressed him, to send for Madame Walmoden immediately from Hanover; said he must look forward for his own sake, for the sake of his family, and for the sake of all his friends, and not ruin his health by indulging vain regret and grief for what was past recall. The King listened to this way of reasoning more kindly every time it was repeated; but Sir Robert Walpole tried this manner of talking to the Princesses, not quite so judiciously, respectfully, or successfully; for the pride of Emily and the tenderness of Caroline were so shocked, that he laid the foundation of an aversion to him in both, which I believe nobody will live to see him ever get over.'-vol. ii. pp. 544, 545.

Lord Hervey wrote the Queen's epitaph in Latin and in

English,