When the Duke of Somerset, in 1715, resigned the Mastership of the Horse as a protest against the arrest of his son-in-law, Sir William Wyndham, Schulemburg, who was nothing if not a daughter of the horse-leech, suggested that the office should be left vacant and the salary, £7,500 per annum, paid to her. To the disgust of the nation the King complied with her wish. It does not say much for the dignity of the Court in those days that some of the leading Whig nobility and even their wives and daughters filled the rooms of these two old harridans at St James’s, which apartments were placed respectively at opposite ends of the Palace, with those of the King conveniently between them to keep peace, for they hated each other as much as their friend the Devil detests holy water. The lives of the Prince and Princess of Wales had been exceedingly gay, especially during the absence of George the First in Hanover. They extended a liberal hospitality, keeping almost open house, with the object no doubt of securing popularity against the time when they should be King and Queen. Hampton Court appears to have been a very favourite summer residence of theirs, the river offering a convenient mode of progression. In the summer of 1716 they proceeded to Hampton Court in state barges hung with crimson and gold, and preceded by a band of music. Here at this riverside Palace they collected a brilliant throng of the wittiest, the most learned, and most important of all from the point of view of a Court, the most beautiful. At the death of George the First the kingdom was ruled by his minister, Sir Robert Walpole, son of a Norfolk squire, Walpole of Houghton, to which estate they had in comparatively recent years removed from Walpole in the Marshland of Norfolk, from which latter place they evidently had originally derived their name. George the First being able to speak little or no English, and Sir Robert Walpole being innocent of French, Latin proved to be the only tongue in which they could converse, so that Walpole was in the habit of remarking that he governed the kingdom by means of bad Latin, the bad Latin possibly of his Eton days, though he certainly completed his education at King’s College, Cambridge. At about the age of twenty-five Walpole had married a beautiful girl, Catherine, daughter of John Shorter, Esquire, of Bybrook, Kent, and very soon after succeeding his father, old hard-drinking Squire Walpole, in the family estate he entered Parliament for the rotten borough of Castle Rising, which used to return two members to Parliament to half-a-dozen electors. He soon made a name in the House of Commons, and from that time forward it was indelibly stamped upon the politics of England.