This miserable matrimonial squabble with all its sordid details rapidly assumed the dimensions of a political struggle which rent the country in twain. The Whigs had never forgiven George for using them as long as he was Prince of Wales and throwing them over when he became Regent in 1812. They therefore espoused the cause of the Queen; and as far as possible--for they had little admiration of her conduct--defended her. The Whig lawyers rallied to her cause, notably Henry Brougham, who, despite his great talents, had suffered from the exclusiveness of the great Whig families. As a parvenu, high political office was closed to Brougham, but the case of the Queen gave him an unrivalled chance as a lawyer. More honest and unselfish and almost as useful to Queen Caroline was Alderman Wood, a prominent citizen of London, who more than once filled the office of Lord Mayor. Despised by the polite society of the time, called by the King, with his usual delicacy, “that beast Wood,” the alderman understood better than anyone the effect of the Queen’s return to the country. He knew that, however great her indiscretions, her wrongs would win her popular sympathy, and that her courage in facing her accusers would be sure to range the nation on her side. That he was no vulgar demagogue is attested by the facts that the royal family often sought his counsel; that it is due to his advice that Queen Victoria was born in England; and that he was the first baronet she created shortly after her accession to the throne. But of all the Queen’s friends there is no one who was more honest and faithful than that gaunt Scotch spinster, the Lady Ann Hamilton, whose memoirs were published when she was very old, without her consent and greatly to her distress. The daughter of the Duke of Hamilton and sister to the radical Lord Archibald Hamilton, she was six foot high, awkward and ungainly, and an object of ridicule to Caroline and her friends. They called her Joan of Arc, and shewed her no consideration and little courtesy. Yet in her hours of trial Caroline had no truer or stauncher friend. Her “Secret History of the Court of England,” published under the circumstances to which I have alluded, is extraordinarily scurrilous, but it reflects the fierceness of party spirit which animated the Whig faction; and I may have to recur to it.