free of her person, and that he had the greatest inclination imaginable to pay his addresses to a daughter of the late Regent of France, the Duke of Orleans--'un plaisir' (for he always wrote in French), 'que je suis sur, ma chere Caroline, vous serez bien aise de me procurer, quand je vous dis combien je le souhaite.' Such a request to his wife respecting a woman he never saw, and during his connection with Madame Walmoden, speaks much stronger in a bare narrative of the fact, than by any comment or reflections; and is as incapable of being heightened as difficult to be credited."[119] Queen Caroline bore all this without a murmur in order to retain her political influence with the king. To the power of the queen she sacrificed the feelings of the woman. With many good qualities and considerable ability, she shared in the prevailing coarseness. Her son, the Prince of Wales, was a very disagreeable person. Neither the queen nor the Princess Caroline "made much ceremony of wishing a hundred times a day that the prince might drop down dead of an apoplexy--the queen cursing the hour of his birth, and the Princess Caroline declaring she grudged him every hour he continued to breathe; and reproaching Lord Hervey" for ever having believed "the nauseous beast (those were her words) cared for anybody but his own nauseous self."[120] The morning after the prince had been ordered to leave the palace, "the queen, at breakfast, every now and then repeated, 'I hope, in God, I shall never see him again'; and the king, among many other paternal _douceurs_ in his valediction to his son, said,'Thank-God, to-morrow night the puppy will be out of my house.'"[121] "My dear Lord" said the queen to Hervey, "I will give it to you under my own hand, if you are in any fear of my relapsing, that my dear first-born is the greatest ass and the greatest liar and the greatest _canaille_, and the greatest beast in the whole world, and that I most heartily wish he was out of it."[122] After the royal family, Sir Robert Walpole was the most prominent person in the country. He went about publicly with his mistress, and entertained his friends at his country-seat with orgies which disturbed the whole neighborhood. When the queen died he urged the princesses to get their father some new mistress to distract him. Lord Hervey says that Lady Sundon "had sense enough to perceive what black and dirty company, by living in a court, she was forced to keep."[123] Lady Deloraine, who was suspected of being the king's mistress, "when she spoke seriously to Sir Robert Walpole, pretended not to have yet yielded; and said 'she was not of an age like a vain or a loving fool, but that if she did consent, that she would be well paid.'"[124] "She told Lady Sundon, with whom she was very little acquainted, that the king had been very importunate these two years; and had often told her how unkind she was to refuse him; that it was