Walpole and his friends about the court were much exercised as to what would happen to the Queen if the King were really drowned, and the Prince ascended the throne. Walpole declared that “he (the Prince) would tear the flesh off her bones with hot irons,” so much did he hate his mother. Lord Hervey, on the other hand, thought that he would probably make use of the Queen’s great knowledge and experience in the management of affairs, and her position would not become so intolerable as some imagined. The Princess Caroline differed from him. “My good lord,” she said, “you must know very little of him if you believe that, for in the first place, he hates mamma, in the next, he has so good an opinion of himself that he thinks he wants no advice, and of all advice, no woman’s.” She said also that the moment he was King “she would run out of the house, _au grand galop_”. But the Queen declared that she would not budge an inch before she was compelled to go. This uncertainty continued for more than a week, and one morning the Prince of Wales, with a satisfaction he could ill conceal, came to the Queen with the news that he had received a letter from a correspondent near Harwich saying that the night before guns had been heard at sea, signals of distress, and part of the fleet that escorted the King’s yacht had been dispersed. The poor Queen passed a day of the greatest anxiety and depression, but at night a King’s messenger, who had been three days at sea, and had landed by a miracle at Yarmouth, arrived at the palace with a letter from the King, telling the Queen that he had not yet stirred out of Helvoetsluys. Directly the Queen read the letter she cried out to the whole court: “The King is safe! the King is safe!” with a joy that showed how greatly she had feared.