George III, King of Great Britain, 1738-1820; Great Britain -- History -- George III, 1760-1820
"In the meantime, it is my pleasure that you leave St. James's with
all your family, when it can be done without prejudice or
inconvenience to the Princess. I shall for the present leave to the
Princess the care of my granddaughter, until a proper time calls
upon me to consider of her education.
"(signed) G. R."[20]
[20] _Letters ... between the King, Queen, Prince and Princess of Wales,
on the occasion of the birth of the young Princess, 1737._
The Prince, through Lord Baltimore, expressed a desire to make a
personal explanation to the Queen, who, through Lord Grantham, declined
to receive it; and later the Princess, doubtless prompted by her
husband, wrote to the King and Queen to express a desire for
reconciliation, but in vain, for, in the sovereign's eyes, their son's
offence was rank. Indeed, the King went so far as to print the
correspondence between himself and the Prince of Wales, to which the
latter made the effectual reply of publishing the not dissimilar letters
of his father, when Prince of Wales, to George I. This reduced the King
to impotent fury: he declared he did not believe Frederick could be his
son, and insisted that he must be "what in German we call a
_Wechselbalch_--I do not know if you have a word for it in English--it
is not what you call a foundling, but a child put in a cradle instead of
another."
What induced Frederick to risk the life of his wife and his unborn
child, and to put to hazard the succession was a mystery at the time,
and must for ever remain without satisfactory explanation. That it was
done solely to annoy his parents seems insufficient reason, though it is
all that offers, and Hervey suggests the hasty nocturnal removal was
effected to prevent the presence of the Queen at the birth. This
certainly seems insufficient to account for the unwarrantable
proceeding, but no other solution offers itself.
The Prince of Wales had in 1730 taken a lease from the Capel family of
Kew House (the fee of which was many years after purchased by George
III from the Dowager Countess of Essex), and there he and his wife
repaired for a while after being evicted from St. James's Palace; but
soon they came back to London, and held their court, first at Norfolk
House, St. James's Square, placed at their disposal by the Duke of
Norfolk, and later at Leicester House, Leicester Square. The King
expressed a wish that no one should visit his son, and actually caused
it to be intimated to foreign ambassadors that to call on the Prince of
Wales was objectionable to him; but this injunction was so generally
disregarded that he took the extraordinary step of issuing, through his
Chamberlain, a threat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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