Walpole and the Queen had hitherto affected to treat the King’s affair with Madame Walmoden as a joke, but now they recognised that it was beyond a joke and might become a public danger as it already was a public scandal. They therefore put affectation aside and looked the matter in the face. Walpole repeated, with even greater frankness, the views he had expressed on the subject some time before, and he told the Queen that she could no longer keep the King to her side by the arts and charms she had employed when she was a younger woman. He therefore recommended that she should maintain her influence by accepting the situation and making the best of it. Since the King would not live anywhere long without his Walmoden, the Queen must go so far as to ask him to bring her to England. The Queen wept bitterly when the Prime Minister gave her this advice, but at last declared that she would do as he suggested. Walpole, profligate and cynical though he was, had his doubts at first whether the Queen, as a wife and a woman, would carry her complaisance thus far. Two or three days after, when he met her walking in the gardens at Richmond, she taxed him with not believing that she would keep her promise. Walpole replied: “Madam, your Majesty in asking if I disbelieved you, would put a word into my mouth so coarse that I could not give it place even in my thoughts, but if you oblige me to answer this question I confess _I feared_”. “Well,” replied the Queen, “I understand what ‘I feared’ means on this occasion. To show you that your fears were ill-founded I have considered what you said to me, and am determined this very day to write to the King just as you would have me, and on Monday when we meet at Kensington you shall see the letter.” Accordingly Caroline wrote the letter and despatched it to her faithless husband, assuring him that she had nothing but his happiness at heart, and urging him to bring the Walmoden to England if such a step would conduce to it. Heaven knows what mortification and anguish the Queen suffered before she brought herself to write that letter. She has been greatly blamed by the moralists for writing it, but the great excuse that can be urged for her is that her action was strongly dictated by political expediency, for the King’s prolonged absence at Hanover was bringing his throne into peril.