When Mrs. Howard had won what was called the ‘regard’ of the prince, she separated from her husband. _He_, it is true, had little regard _for_, and merited no regard _from_, his wife; but he was resolved that she should attain not even a bad eminence unless he profited by it. He was a wretched, heartless, drunken, gambling profligate; too coarse, even, for the coarse fine gentlemen of the day. When he found himself deserted by his wife, therefore, and discovered that she had established her residence in the household of the prince, he went down to the palace, raised an uproar in the courtyard, before the guards and other persons present, and made vociferous demands for the restoration to him of a wife whom he really did not want. He was thrust out of the quadrangle without much ceremony, but he was not to be silenced. He even appears to have interested the Archbishop of Canterbury in the matter. The prelate affected to look upon the princess as the protectress of her bedchamber-woman and the cause of the latter living separate from her husband, to whom he recommended, by letter, that she should be restored. Walpole says, further, that the archbishop delivered an epistle from Mr. Howard himself, addressed through the Princess Caroline to his wife, and that the princess ‘had the malicious pleasure of delivering the letter to her rival.’ Mrs. Howard continued to reside under the roof of this strangely-assorted household. There was no scandal excited thereby at the period, and she was safe from conjugal importunity, whether at St. James’s Palace or Leicester House. ‘The case was altered,’ says Walpole, ‘when, on the arrival of summer, their royal highnesses were to remove to Richmond. Being only woman of the bedchamber, etiquette did not allow Mrs. Howard the entrée of the coach with the princess. She apprehended that Mr. Howard might seize her upon the road. To baffle such an attempt, her friends, John, Duke of Argyle, and his brother, the Earl of Islay, called for her in the coach of one of them, by eight o’clock in the morning of the day by noon of which the prince and princess were to remove, and lodged her safely in their house at Richmond.’ It would appear, that after this period the servant of Caroline and the favourite of George Augustus ceased to be molested by her husband; and, although there be no proof of that gentleman having been ‘bought off,’ he was of such character, tastes, and principles, that he cannot be thought to have been of too nice an honour to allow of his agreeing to terms of peace for pecuniary ‘consideration.’ George thought his show of regard for Mrs. Howard would stand for proof that he was not ‘led’ by his wife. The regard wore an outwardly Platonic aspect, and daily at the same hour the royal admirer resorted to the apartment of the lady, where an hour or two was spent in ‘small talk’ and conversation of a generally uninteresting character.