The danger in which George had been, and out of which he had escaped, did not in any way soften the hearts of King and prince, of father and son, towards each other. The prince still occupied a suite of rooms in St. James's Palace, and the King and he met on public occasions, but they never spoke. The Queen was even more constant in her hatred to the prince than the King himself. It does {77} not seem possible to find out how this detestation of the son by the mother ever began to fill the Queen's heart. She was not an unloving mother; indeed, where her affection to the King did not stand in the way, she was fond and tender to nearly all her children. But towards her eldest son she seems to have felt something like a physical aversion. Then, again, the King was a dull, stupid, loutish man, over whose clouded faculties any absurd prejudice or dislike might have settled unquestioned; but Caroline was a bright, clever, keen-witted woman, who asked herself and others why this or that should be. She must have many times questioned her own heart and reasoned with herself before she allowed it to be filled forever with hatred to her son. Lord Hervey, who had a true regard for her, and in whom she trusted as much as she trusted any human being, does not appear to have ever fully understood the cause of the Queen's feelings towards the prince; nor does he appear to have shared her utter distrust and dislike of him. As far as one can judge, the prince appears to have been fickle, inconsiderate, and flighty rather than deliberately bad. He sometimes did things which made him seem like a madman. Such a person would not be charmed into a healthier condition of mind and temper by the knowledge daily thrust upon him that his own father and mother, and his own sister, were the three persons who hated him most in the world. Of course, in this as in other cases of a palace quarrel between a king and an eldest son, there was a bitter wrangle about money. The prince demanded an allowance of one hundred thousand a year to be secured to him independently of his father's power to recall or reduce it. The King had hitherto only given him what Frederick called a beggarly allowance of fifty thousand a year, and even that had not been made over to the prince unconditionally and forever. The prince argued that his father's civil list was now much larger than that of George the First at the time when the Prince of Wales of that day, George the Second now, was allowed an income of one {78} hundred thousand a year. The Princess of Wales had as yet received no jointure, and she and the prince were thus kept, as Frederick's friends insisted, in the condition of mere pensioners and dependants upon the royal bounty. The prince's friends were, for the most part, eager to stir him up to some open measure of hostility; especially the younger men of the party were doing their best to drive the prince on. Pulteney, it must be said,