In the meantime the Regent had his difficulties. He who betrayed the Whigs, by whose advice he had been guided during the time of his father’s sanity, but who had cast them off after the death of Fox in 1806, now sought to strengthen his government by the accession of some of his old friends. The Whigs, however, would not act with Perceval, and after the assassination of that minister in 1812 they lost, by their arrogance, the opportunity of forming an independent administration. The boast of Grey and Grenville that they would ride rough-shod through Carlton Palace led to the formation of the Liverpool Tory Ministry, which began its long tenure of office in June 1812. During these changes and negotiations the Princess of Wales remained at Kensington or Blackheath, while her mother was very indifferently lodged in New Street, Spring Gardens, in half-furnished, dirty, and comfortless apartments. Amid filthy lamps on a sideboard, and common chairs ranged along dingy walls, sat the aged Duchess, ‘a melancholy spectacle of decayed royalty.’ She is described as having good-nature impressed upon her features, frankness in her manners, with a rough, abrupt style of conversation, that rendered her remarkable. She loved to dwell upon the past, though it was full of melancholy remembrances; and she is said to have been charitable to the frailties of the period of her own early days, but a strict censurer of those of the contemporaries of her old age. Up to the period of the King’s illness the Princess of Wales did not want for friends to attend her dinners and evening parties. When the only advocate she had among the royal family virtually died, and the Prince of Wales became really King, under the title of Regent, the number of her allies seriously diminished. They had to choose, as in the days of the first and second George, between two courts. They declared for that which was most likely to bring them most profit in galas and gaieties. Still the diminished court at Kensington was not so dull as that made up of a few venerable dowagers at the Duchess of Brunswick’s. The Princess called her mother’s court a ‘Dullification,’ and yawned when she attended it, with more sincerity than good manners. But freedom from restraint was ever a delight to her, and she has been known on a birthday, kept at Kensington, to receive her congratulating visitors wrapped up in a pink dressing-gown. It was at a birthday reception that her brother, the Duke of Brunswick, who afterwards fell at Quatre Bras, presented her with a splendid compliment and a worthless ring. It was as much as duchyless duke could afford. On the other hand, on the same natal day, Queen Charlotte showed a good-natured memory of the festival by sending the Princess a very handsome aigrette. The young Princess Charlotte was with her mother on that day, and she observed, rather flippantly, that the present was ‘really pretty well, considering who sent it!’[11] The Princess was at