“Your Royal Highness need not be put in mind who I am, nor whence you took me; that I acted not like what I was born, others may reproach me, but you took me from happiness and brought me to misery, that I might reproach you. That I have long lost your heart I have long seen, and long mourned; to gain it, or rather to reward the gift you made me of it, I sacrificed my time, my youth, my character, the world, my family, and everything that a woman can sacrifice to a man she loves; how little I considered my interest you must know by my never naming my interest to you, when I made this sacrifice, and by my trusting to your honour, when I showed so little regard, when put in balance with my love to my own. I have resigned everything for your sake but my life; and had you loved me still, I would have risked even that, too, to please you; but as it is I cannot think in my state of health[28] of going out of England, far from all friends and all physicians I can trust, and of whom I stand so much in need. My child is the only consolation I have left, I cannot leave him, nor shall anything but death ever make me quit the country he is in.” When the Prince received this letter, strangely enough, he did not dissolve into tears at its pathos; he was on the contrary exceedingly angry. He said at once that Miss Vane--or “the minx” as it is reported--“was incapable of writing such a letter, and that he would punish the ‘rascal’ who had dictated it to her.” He was probably well acquainted with her capabilities in this respect, and possibly knew her modes of expression very well; as a rule the ladies of the Court of that time were nothing like so refined in their correspondence; this was evidently the composition of a man and one indeed skilled in letters. All this would be extremely strange if one element which prevailed at the time were not well known, viz., that the clever, diplomatic, Queen Caroline was exceedingly anxious that the Prince, her son, should break with Miss Vane, as she had a strong wish that he should marry, and this well-known liaison might form an obstacle, though apparently she had no particular Princess in view. There is another point, also, which must not be lost sight of, and that is that during the three years and more that the Prince had been in England, he had grown year by year in popular favour, and had entirely eclipsed the Queen’s favourite son, the Duke of Cumberland, whom as we know the King and Queen would gladly have seen in his brother Frederick’s place as heir to the English throne. It is impossible to say how far the crafty Hervey with his great influence over the Queen may have worked upon this feeling of jealousy at her eldest son’s popularity. Unnatural as it seems, unless we read it in the light of later events, the Queen may have been induced to take a hidden part in this affair of Miss Vane to decrease the Prince of Wales’s growing popularity with the people.