While Sophia Dorothea continued to linger in her prison, her husband and son, with the mistresses of the former and the wife of the latter, were enjoying the advantages and anxieties which surround a throne. The wife of the Prince of Wales, Caroline, arrived at Margate on the 13th of October. She was accompanied by her two eldest daughters, Anne and Amelia. Mother and children rested during one day in the town where they had landed, slept one night at Rochester, and arrived at St. James’s on the 15th. The royal coronation took place in Westminster Abbey on the 20th of the same month. Amid the pomp of the occasion, no one appears to have thought of her who should have been Queen-consort. There was much splendour and some calamity, for as the procession was sweeping by, several people were killed by the fall of scaffolding in the Palace Yard. The new King entered the Abbey amid the cheers and screams of an excited multitude. Three days after, the monarch, with the Prince and Princess of Wales, dined with the Lord Mayor and corporation in the Guildhall, London, and there George performed the first grateful service to his people, by placing a thousand guineas in the hands of the sheriffs, for the relief of the wretched debtors then immured in the neighbouring horrible prisons of Newgate and the Fleet. Within a month, the general festivities were a little marred by the proclamation of the Pretender, dated from Lorraine, wherein he laid claim to the throne which George was declared to have usurped. At this period the Duke of Lorraine was a sovereign prince, maintaining an envoy at our court; but the latter was ordered to withdraw from the country immediately after the arrival of the ‘Lorraine proclamation’ by the French mail. Already George I. began to feel that on the throne he was destined to enjoy less quiet than his consort in her prison. The counter-proclamations made in this country, chiefly on account of the Jacobite riots at Oxford and some other places, were made up of nonsense and malignity, and were well calculated to make a good cause wear the semblance of a bad one. They decreed, or announced, thanksgiving on the 20th of January, for the accession of the House of Hanover; and, to show what a portion of the people had to be thankful for, they ordered a rigorous execution of the laws against papists, non-jurors, and dissenters generally, who were assumed to be, as a matter of course, disaffected to the reigning house.