There is no doubt that this admonition was seriously called for. The conduct of the Princess had been that of an indiscreet, rash, and over-bold woman. At the court of the two preceding Georges such conduct would only have been called lively; but the example of Charlotte had put an end to such vivacity. The Queen Caroline of the former reign had, in her conversations with Sir Robert Walpole especially, gone far beyond the gaiety of the dialogues maintained by the Princess Caroline and Sir Sidney Smith under George III. But the Princess was as yet ‘without blemish,’ only in the degree that Queen Caroline was. She was not delicately minded, and was defiant of the Court-world when she had been cast out from it unjustly. The two Carolines were wronged in much the same degree, but the husband of the one respected the virtue of the wife whom he insulted; the husband of the other had no respect for either virtue or wife; nay, he would have been glad to prove that there had been a divorce between the two. He had failed to do so, and the King’s intimation to the Princess that ‘his Majesty was convinced that it was no longer necessary for him to decline receiving the Princess into the royal presence,’ while it was the triumphant justification of the wife, was the unqualified condemnation of the husband, beneath whose roof the slander was first uttered by Sir John Douglas to the Duke of Sussex. And so ended the ‘delicate investigation.’ A history of it was actually printed, but the copies were bought up and suppressed. A writer in ‘Notes and Queries’ (No. 128, 1852), says:-- ‘Several years ago I was present when the sum of 500_l._ was paid for a copy of “The Delicate Investigation” by an officer high in the service of the then government.--H. B.’