Caroline was sensible of the harm this disunion was doing the dynasty, and tried to keep up appearances as far as she could. When the first soreness was over, she attended occasionally the King’s drawing-rooms (the Prince, of course, never went), and by addressing him in public forced him to make some sort of answer to her remarks. At first it was thought that the Princess’s appearance at the King’s drawing-rooms foreshadowed a reconciliation. The subsidised organs in the press hailed it as imminent. One scribe wrote: “It is with extreme joy that I must now congratulate my country upon the near prospect there is of a reconciliation between his Majesty and his Royal Highness. The Princess of Wales’s appearance at court can forebode no less. A woman of her consummate conduct and goodness, and so interested in the issue, is such a mediator as one could wish in such a cause. And when it is known that she has been in long conference with the King, there can be no doubt but she has first won upon the Prince to make that submission without which ’tis absurd to think of healing the breach.”[101] A petition was also drawn up praying the Princess to act as mediator, which ran as follows:-- “To her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales. “The petition of several loyal subjects, Englishmen and Protestants, “Humbly sheweth, “Whereas the difference between his Majesty and the Prince is of such a nature, as not easily to be decided by any subjects; neither can a Ministry presume to intercede with all the freedom requisite to the determination of it: That by this means it still continues to the unspeakable detriment of the public, the deep sorrow of the well affected to your Royal Highness’s family; and the fresh hope and merriment of the disloyal, who were otherwise reduced to the saddest despair. That in such a dismal conjecture we can apply to none so proper as your Royal Highness to assuage these jealousies and reduce both parties to a reunion. Your petitioners therefore beg and entreat your Royal Highness to put in practice that persuasive eloquence by which you are distinguished, and to employ all your interest for this purpose; before the breach be made too wide to admit of a cure, and we involved in irretrievable confusion. “And your Royal Highness’s petitioners will ever pray, etc.”