This bright summer at Hampton Court was looked back upon in after years by those who had taken part in it as the pleasantest time in their lives: “I wish we were all in the Swiss Cantons again,” sighs Mary Bellenden, after her marriage, and many years later Molly Lepell, then Lady Hervey, fondly recalls Hampton Court, in answering a letter Mrs. Howard had written to her from there: “The place your letter was dated from recalls a thousand agreeable things to my remembrance, which I flatter myself I do not quite forget. I wish I could persuade myself that you regret them, or that you could think the tea-table more welcome in the morning if attended, as formerly, by the Schatz (a pet name given to Molly Lepell).... I really believe frizelation (flirtation) would be a surer means of restoring my spirits than the exercise and hartshorn I now make use of. I do not suppose that name still subsists; but pray let me know if the thing itself does, or if they meet in the same cheerful manner to sup as formerly. Are ballads and epigrams the consequence of these meetings? Is good sense in the morning, and wit in the evening, the subject, or rather the foundation, of the conversation? That is an unnecessary question; I can answer it myself, since I know you are of the party, but, in short, do you not want poor Tom, and Bellenden, as much as I want ‘Swiss’ in the first place, and them?” Nothing could be happier than the long golden days at Hampton Court, but there was a serpent even in this paradise, and that was Bothmar, who was there nearly all the time, playing the spy and reporting the growing popularity of the Prince and Princess to the King in Hanover. George the First had told him to keep his eye on the Prince, “to keep all things in order, and to give an account of everything that was doing”. Politics, too, intruded to break the harmony. The Prince and Princess seemed determined to be of no party--or rather to create one of their own. They received malcontent Whigs, Tories, and even suspected Jacobites at Hampton Court; and Argyll, though dismissed from his offices by the King’s command, still stood high in their favour. Townshend and Walpole, the two most powerful Ministers, complained greatly at first: “By some things that daily drop from him” (the Prince), wrote Walpole to Stanhope in Hanover, “he seems to be preparing to keep up an interest of his own in Parliament, independent of the King’s.... We are here chained to the oar, working like slaves, and are looked upon as no other.”[76] It was felt that something must be done by the Government to gain the Prince’s confidence and to counteract Argyll’s influence, and therefore Townshend determined to go oftener to Hampton Court and ingratiate himself with the Prince. At first he made the mistake of leaving the Princess out of his calculations, “even to showing her all the contempt in the world,” while he paid a good deal of attention to Mrs. Howard. As he got to