According to Lord Hervey, the Queen’s confidant, the general opinion was that Madame Walmoden, the King’s new mistress, would oust the Queen from her influence, but the diplomatic Caroline rose to the occasion. She, to retain her power, expressed the utmost interest in the King’s new mistress, and awaited further details with impatience. She got them.[30] Not in such a manner as a profligate husband would write in our days, even to a mistress debased enough to read such letters, but hot and strong in the terms of Shakespeare expressed in French. So far from being offended, the Queen replied in the same strain, equalling in every respect her husband’s flights of fancy in the regions of Venus. It is this correspondence between Caroline and the King, coupled with her very objectionable letters to the Duchess of Orleans, which have caused many writers to take exception to the remark of Lord Mahon, which described this Queen’s character as “without a blemish.” At any rate it gives us an insight into the private life of the mother of our Prince Frederick, and accounts perhaps for some of her unnatural conduct towards him, for where there is not purity of mind, how can there be purity of motherly affection? Again, a mind which could take pleasure daily in the conversation of such a man as Lord Hervey--epigrammatic though that conversation might be--could not be expected to contain the natural solicitude which a loving parent would have for her first-born son. The little King, however, was having a particularly effulgent time in Hanover with his new light o’ love, a time which he kept up, not exactly religiously, until the very night before he left for England, when standing glass in hand at a supper party on that eventful evening he pledged himself to Madame Walmoden and the other demireps forming the company to return without fail on the following 29th May. Upon hearing of which promise some short time after, Sir Robert Walpole, his sturdy Prime Minister, remarked: “He wants to go to Hanover, does he”? he asked, when Lord Hervey told him of it, “and to be there by the 29th May? Well, he shan’t go for all that.” So much did the King enjoy his revels in Hanover that he had paintings made of them, each containing portraits, sent them to England and had them hung up in his wife’s dressing room! She must have enjoyed the privilege!