The Queen took infinite pains to hide the nature of her illness, frequently consulting doctors, and yet leaving them in ignorance of her real malady. For years, amid the splendours of her court, in the plenitude of her power, Caroline had carried with her this dread secret, and maintained a smiling face to the world. From time to time she must have suffered agonies, but she bore them with Spartan heroism. It was only during the King’s absences at Hanover that she indulged in the luxury of a collapse, and then she ascribed her weakness to the gout, or any cause but the real one. She held drawing-rooms as usual, but more than once she had to be wheeled into the presence-chamber in a chair, physically unable to stand. Of one of these breakdowns Peter Wentworth writes:-- “The Queen has been so ill. I went every day to the backstairs and had the general answer that she was better, but I knew when they told me true and when not, and was often in great pain for my good Queen, but it is not the fashion to show any at Court. The first day that she came out into her drawing-room she told a lady, whom I stood behind, that she had really been very bad and dangerously ill, but it was her own fault, for she had a fever a fortnight before she came from Kensington, but she kept it a secret, for she resolved to appear on the King’s birthday. She owned she did wrong, and said she would do so no more, upon which I made her a bow, as much as to say, I hoped she would do as she then said. I believe she understood me for she smiled upon me.”[123] In some way the Queen connected the decline of her influence over the King, and his passion for the Walmoden, with the failing of her physical health, and she struggled against it to the death. It is no exaggeration to say that she would have died rather than let her malady become known--in fact her concealment of it led to her death. This secret anxiety gnawing always at her heart, combined with the worries she had to endure from without and within, told upon her strength. For the last two or three years she had been on the rack daily, a martyr to physical and mental anguish. The infidelity of the King, the unfilial conduct of the Prince of Wales, the hard work inseparable from her position, and the effort at all costs to keep a brave front to the world, told upon her health, until at last she could bear the strain no longer. It was in vain that she sought relaxation in her best-loved pursuits; the haunting fear never left her day or night.