George III. had first been ‘smitten’ by seeing Lady Sarah Lennox making hay in a field close to the high road in Kensington. She was charming in feature, figure, and expression; but her great beauty, according to Henry Fox, was ‘a peculiarity of countenance that made her at the same time different from, and prettier than, any other girl I ever saw.’ At a private court ball, the young King said to Lady Susan Strangways: ‘There will be no coronation until there is a Queen, and I think your friend is the fittest person for it; tell her so from me.’ Subsequently, the enamoured monarch had an opportunity of asking Lady Sarah if she had received the message confided to Lady Susan. On the young lady replying in the affirmative, and on her being asked what she thought of it, her answer was: ‘Nothing, sir!’ Her friends, however, thought a good deal of it. As Lady Sarah was once entering the presence chamber, Lady Barrington gently pulled the skirt of her dress, and said: ‘Let me go in before you; for you will never have another opportunity of seeing my beautiful back.’ Lady Barrington was famed for the beauty of her shoulders. Lady Sarah, too, had thought more about the King’s message than she had confessed to the King himself. When the news reached her that the young Sovereign was about to marry a ‘Princess of Mecklenburgh,’ she wrote to Lady Susan: ‘Does not your choler rise at hearing this. I shall take care to show that I am not mortified to anybody; but if it is true that one can vex anybody with a cold, reserved manner, he shall have it, I promise him.’ Anon, the writer thinks she only liked him a little, and the ‘disappointment affected her only for an hour or two.’ Ultimately, she remarks: ‘If he were to change his mind again (which can’t be, tho’), and not give a _very, very_ good reason for his conduct, I would not have him. We are to act a play and have a little ball, to show that we are not so melancholy quite!’ And thus the disappointment was ostensibly got over. Walpole has described the lady who first raised a tender feeling in the breast of George in very graphic terms: ‘There was a play at Holland House, acted by children; not all children, for Lady Sarah Lennox’ (subsequently Lady Sarah Napier) ‘and Lady Susan Strangways played the women. It was ‘Jane Shore.’ Charles Fox was Hastings. The two girls were delightful, and acted with so much nature that they appeared the very things they represented. Lady Sarah was more beautiful than you can conceive; and her very awkwardness gave an air of truth to the sham of the part, and the antiquity of the time, kept up by her dress, which was taken out of Montfaucon. Lady Susan was dressed from Jane Seymour. I was more struck with the last scene between the two women than ever I was when I have seen it on the stage. When Lady Sarah was in white, with her hair about her ears, and on the ground, no Magdalen of Correggio was half so lovely and expressive.’