The Prince of Wales’s marriage over, the King became very impatient to return to Hanover. The pledge he had given to Madame Walmoden last year, that he would be with her on May 29th, had become known to Walpole, who swore to the Queen that the King should not go if he could prevent it. The Quakers’ Bill was just then before Parliament and the bishops were giving a great deal of trouble to the Government in the House of Lords; the King’s departure for Hanover again so soon would be another source of embarrassment. But neither Walpole’s protests nor the Queen’s more diplomatic representations were of any avail with the King. “I am sick to death of all this foolish stuff,” said the Defender of the Faith to the Queen one day when she was speaking to him about the bishops’ action in the House of Lords, “and wish with all my heart that the devil may take all your bishops and the devil take your minister, and the devil take the parliament, and the devil take the whole island, provided I can get out of it and go to Hanover.” After this there was clearly nothing more to be said, and in the middle of May the King set out for Hanover, this time taking Horace Walpole with him as minister in attendance instead of Harrington, whom the Queen and Walpole determined should never go with the King to Hanover again. He again appointed the Queen Regent, and sent a message to the Prince of Wales telling him that wherever the Queen-Regent resided, there would be apartments provided for himself and the Princess. The Prince resented this message, which forced him, he said, to move his household at the Queen’s pleasure, and made him practically a prisoner in her palace. That was perhaps an exaggeration, but the order was evidently designed to prevent the Prince and Princess setting up a court of their own in the King’s absence. The Prince considered that his marriage gave him an additional claim to be appointed Regent instead of the Queen. He therefore tried in many small ways to set her authority as Regent at defiance, and he trumped up the excuse of the Princess’s indisposition to hinder him from occupying the same house as the Queen according to the King’s command. The Queen, who suspected that this was only an evasion, came up from Richmond, where she had removed after the King left, to London to find out if the Princess of Wales were really ill. But her intention was baffled, for when she arrived she was told that the Princess was in bed and could not receive her, and when the Queen insisted on being shown to her daughter-in-law’s chamber, she found the room so dark that she could scarcely see her, and had to return to Richmond no better informed than when she set out. Shortly afterwards the Queen removed to Hampton Court, and with some little delay the Prince and Princess followed, and had their suite of apartments allotted them there.