The Princess was both unable and unwilling to mediate in the way suggested, for her sympathies were wholly with her husband. The situation was still exceedingly strained; the King only received the Princess formally and under protest. Caroline probably went to the King’s Court in the hope of softening his heart, and of being allowed to have her children. She was also anxious that her son Prince Frederick, Duke of Gloucester, should be brought over from Hanover, for he was growing up a stranger to her, and the accounts which reached her of his manners and morals were far from reassuring. The malcontent Whigs also considered this a grievance, on the ground that the young Prince should early become acquainted with the country over which he would one day reign. But the King was obdurate. He held that his prerogative gave him absolute power over all the royal children without reference to their parents, and quoted as a precedent Charles the Second’s authority over the daughters of the Duke of York. Caroline was deeply wounded by this refusal, and shed many bitter tears. But it made no difference to her policy of keeping up appearances at all cost. Outside her immediate circle she ignored the fact that there was a difference in the Royal Family, and was careful always to speak of the King in public with great respect. She paid several visits to seats of the principal nobility and gentry near London--we read of her supping with General Harvey at Mitcham, dining with Lord Uxbridge at Drayton, and so forth--and tried in all ways to maintain the credit of the dynasty with the people. When, therefore, a low fellow insulted her and spat in her face one day as she was crossing Leicester Fields in her chair, he was nearly torn to pieces by the crowd, who resented this gross insult upon a woman, and the only popular member of the Royal Family. The man was handed over to the authorities for punishment, who certainly did not spare the rod if we may judge from the following account:-- “On Thursday morning last, Moore the chairman, who insulted the Princess, was whipped, pursuant to his sentence, from Somerset House to the end of the Hay market. ’Twas observed that during the performance of this corporal exercise (in which the executioner followed his work pretty close), he wore about his neck, tied to a piece of red string, a small red cross; though he needed not to have hung out that infallible sign of his being one of the Pope’s children, since none but an inveterate Papist would have affronted so excellent a Protestant Princess, whom her very worst enemies cannot charge with a fault. The respect her Royal Highness has among all parties was remarkable in the general cry there was all the way he pass’d of ‘Whip him,’ ‘Whip him’; and by the great numbers of people that caressed and applauded the executioner after his work was over, who made him cry, ‘God bless King George’ before he had done with him.”[102]