Opposition is always popular, and the Prince managed to gather around him the younger and livelier spirits among the nobility, and the most beautiful and fashionable of the ladies of quality. Certainly Lincoln’s Inn Fields was much more patronised, and the King and Queen and the Princess Royal would often go to one of Handel’s operas at the Haymarket and find a half empty house. This gave Lord Chesterfield an opportunity of uttering one of his witticisms. One night when he came to Lincoln’s Inn Fields he told the Prince that he had just looked in at the Haymarket, but found nobody there but the King and Queen, “and as I thought they might be talking business I came away,” he said; a joke which vastly pleased the Prince, and greatly incensed the court. Referring to the large attendance of peers at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Princess Royal said, with a sneer, that she “expected in a little while to see half the House of Lords playing in the orchestra in their robes and coronets”. Conscious of failure she felt extremely bitter against her brother, and abused him roundly. But the Prince had won and could afford to laugh at his sister’s invectives. The court was so deplorably dull, he said, that all those with any pretensions to wit, beauty or fashion refused to follow its lead, and looked to him, the heir to the throne, as their natural leader, notwithstanding the way in which he was treated by the King and Queen. Certainly the private life of the Court was far from lively. The clockwork regularity of the King, both in business and in pleasure, and the limited range of his amusements and interests tended to make his court appallingly dull--in contrast to the old days at Leicester House. Mrs. Howard, whose little parties had once been so popular, now withdrew more and more to herself. She would probably have retired from court altogether had it not been that by the death of her brother-in-law, her husband became Earl of Suffolk. As she was now a countess she could no longer hold the inferior position of bedchamber-woman, and placed her resignation in the Queen’s hands, who, however, met the case by making her Mistress of the Robes, and so retaining her about the court. Lady Suffolk had no longer to perform the duties at the Queen’s toilet which had given her so much umbrage, and her position became pleasanter in consequence of the change. We find her writing to Gay a little later: “To prevent all future quarrels and disputes I shall let you know that I have kissed hands for the place of Mistress of the Robes. Her Majesty did me the honour to give me the choice of lady of the bedchamber, or that which I find so much more agreeable to me that I did not take one moment to consider it. The Duchess of Dorset resigned it for me; and everything as yet promises more happiness for the latter part of my life than I have yet had the prospect of. Seven nights’ quiet sleep and seven easy days have almost worked a miracle in me.”[94]