The King too was greatly enraged, regarding the attack upon the duke as an insult offered to himself, and Schulemburg and Kielmansegge were greatly shocked by this filial disrespect. The duke believed, or pretended to believe, that the Prince had said: “I will _fight_ you,” and so had practically challenged him to a duel. The long smouldering resentment of the King burst into a flame; he had more self-control than his son, he did not stamp about and make scenes, but his anger was more deadly. When he had relieved his feelings by a few round oaths, he gave orders that the Prince was to be put under arrest. The Princess declared that if her husband were arrested she would be arrested too, and so he remained the night in his wife’s chamber under guard. “What was my astonishment,” says Mrs. Howard, “when going to the Princess’s apartment next morning the yeomen in the guard chamber pointed their halberds at my breast, and told me I must not pass. I urged that it was my duty to attend the Princess, but they said, ‘No matter, I must not pass that way’.” The news of the disturbance ran through the Court, and soon was noised abroad over the town. The frequenters of the coffee-houses and mug-houses talked of nothing else, and the Jacobites, who saw in this quarrel another proof of the unfitness of the House of Hanover to reign over them, were greatly elated. The Prime Minister went to the King and represented that something must be done, as the present situation was clearly impossible; the heir to the throne could not be kept shut up in his room as if he were a recalcitrant schoolboy, and the absurdity of the situation was increased by the fact that the Princess was locked up with him. The King was for sending them both to the Tower, but more moderate counsels prevailing, he ordered them to quit St. James’s Palace forthwith. No time was given them to pack up their effects, and so getting together what they most needed, the Prince and Princess left the palace before the day was over, and sought temporary shelter in Lord Grantham’s house in Albemarle Street. The Princess swooned on arriving at Lord Grantham’s, and continued for some days in a serious condition. It had been represented to the King that the Princess of Wales, being hardly yet over her confinement, was not in a fit state to be moved, and he sent her word that if she liked to separate herself from her husband, and hold no communication with him, she might remain with her children. But she sent back a defiant message, saying that whither he went she would go, and that “her children were not as a grain of sand compared to him”. The maids of honour were all in tears, and it must have been a melancholy procession that made its way up St. James’s Street between seven and eight o’clock that November evening. All the ladies of the Princess’s household were greatly depressed, except Mary Bellenden, whose high spirits were equal even to this sad