“When the Prince led the Queen to her coach, which she would not have had him have done, there was a great concourse of people; and notwithstanding all that had passed before, she expressed so much kindness, that she hugged and kissed him with great passion. The King after this sent a message in writing by my Lord Essex in the following words: “‘That his Majesty looks upon what the Prince had done in carrying the Princess to London in such a manner, as a deliberate indignity offered to himself and to the Queen, and resented it in the highest degree and forbid him the court.’ “All the sycophants and agents of the Court spread millions of falsities on this occasion, and all the language there was that this was so great a crime that even those that went with the Prince ought to be prosecuted. How this will end nobody yet knows, at least I am sure I don’t.” Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough to Lord Stair, August, 1737. A pretty satire written before August 29th, 1737, by Dr. Hollings, who attended the Princess of Wales, concerning the baby Princess, but really directed against the Queen. It is by comparison, not difficult to see on which side Dr. Hollings’s sympathies were. This writing was found among the papers of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. “I am sensible how difficult it really is to be impartial, and how much more difficult it is to seem so, in drawing the characters of persons of the highest path and rank. The praise or the blame which they may justly deserve, is severally ascribed to the interested views or the private resentment of the author. I should therefore not have attempted the character of this most excellent Princess, could there have been the least room for suspicions of that nature. But having no obligation or disobligation whatsoever to her, I shall speak the truth in the sincerity of my heart, and I likewise call upon all and everyone of those who have the honour to know her as well as I do, to contradict me if they can in any one particular. I have observed her with attention almost from the hour of her birth, and have carefully marked the progressive steps of nature. I have seen her in her most unguarded moments, and have seriously and critically considered whatever fell from her; so that I may, without vanity, assert that nobody is better qualified to tell the truth than myself, though others might be much more capable of adorning it. “I shall say nothing of the beauty of this incomparable Princess, it is her mind, and not her person, which we intend to delineate. Neither shall I dwell upon her high birth and station any longer than to observe that she seems to be the only person ignorant of that superiority. She has never been heard to give the most remote hint of it, much less has she ever been observed to assume even that degree of state which others, much inferior to her in birth, are so foolishly fond of.