These acts irritated the King beyond endurance, and even the Queen was stung out of her usual calm by the attacks made upon her. But anger and strong language availed nothing. The Prince was heir to the throne, and an heir to a throne is never without friends. In Frederick’s case his friends were all the Patriots; even Carteret, finding his overtures to the Queen led to nothing, had gone back to him. The triumph of the Prince would mean the triumph of the Opposition too, the defeat of the King and Queen, the defeat of the Government. Walpole knew this, and realised that if any reconciliation were brought about he would probably have to go. It was obviously to the advantage of the Royal Family that these quarrels should end, and Lord Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor, earnestly strove to bring about a reconciliation. But Walpole advised the King against it, an easy task, for the King’s inclination was all for revenge. Another message, an ultimatum, was therefore composed and sent by the King, denouncing the Prince’s conduct in the strongest terms, and ending, “It is my pleasure that you leave St. James’s with all your family”.[121] This was equivalent to a total separation. The Prince received the King’s message without comment, and, as the orders were peremptory, two days later he and the Princess removed from St. James’s Palace to Kew. All communications between the two courts were now broken off, and shortly afterwards the Prince took up his residence at Norfolk House, St. James’s Square, which immediately became a rival court and the centre of the Opposition, much as Leicester House had been in the reign of George the First.[122] The court of Norfolk House, though small in numbers, was not without brilliancy. The Prince had wit and pleasing manners and was ably seconded by his young and beautiful consort. His love of letters attracted many of the ablest writers, and his political views drew around him the rising men among the Tories. The Prince of Wales’s court became a focus of all the talents and a rallying place of the younger Tories, and as time went on, it influenced considerably the course of English politics. A generation was growing up in the Tory party which knew not the Stuarts, and saw a way of overthrowing the Whig ascendency, not by the forcible restoration of James, but in the peaceable accession of Frederick. They were doomed to wander many years in the wilderness of opposition before their dreams came true; and the Whig domination was at last beaten down, not by Frederick, but by his son. But at this time Frederick’s accession to the throne seemed comparatively near at hand. It was in view of his future reign, and as a satire on his father’s, that Bolingbroke composed his magnificent essay, _The Ideal of a Patriot King_, a sublime conception of government, but impossible to be acted upon, because it presupposed the existence of a monarch of almost superhuman wisdom and virtues. Such an