George II. behaved at first not unkindly to his widowed daughter-in-law and grandchildren. He visited the bereaved family, throwing off royal ceremonial, kissed them, wept with them, and gave the princes good advice: “They must be brave boys, obedient to their mother, and deserve the fortune to which they were born.” Horace Walpole remarks in his malicious way that the King, who had never acted the tender father, grew so pleased with playing the part of grandfather that he soon became it in earnest. For the moment, natural good-feeling reigned in the families that had been such bad neighbours. The Opposition was crushed by the death of its patron, the Prince; and the discordant place-hunters of the day let themselves be tuned to a comparative harmony of interest under the Pelham brothers, who now had all their own way. Later on there sprang up fresh clouds between Kew and Kensington, the respective horizons of the rising and of the setting sun. For a little, Prince George appears to have lived with his grandfather at Hampton Court; but they did not take to each other, and the boy went back under his mother’s wing. The first care of the King and the Ministry was to appoint instructors for the young Princes, an important choice in the case of the Heir to the Crown. The Governor appointed was Lord Harcourt, who “wanted a governor himself,” says Horace Walpole, and sneers at him as unfit to “teach the young Prince any arts but what he knew himself--hunting and drinking.” For Preceptor was chosen the Bishop of Norwich. Under these figure-heads were the tutors who should be about the royal children and do the actual work of education. Stone, the sub-governor, was a personal favourite of the King, “a dark, proud man, very able and very mercenary.” As sub-preceptor, or real schoolmaster, was kept on Mr. Scott, who had already been chosen by the Princess to teach her sons, when she found that at eleven Prince George could not read English. Of him, in old age, George III. spoke highly, and seems to have liked him best of all his instructors. But he was suspected in some quarters as recommended by Bolingbroke, the author of that “patriot-king” theory so abhorrent to Whigs. [Illustration: THE LAKE]