The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick — John Shaqi
The Impeachment of the House of BrunswickBradlaugh, Charles
History
The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick
Bradlaugh, Charles
Great Britain -- History -- 1714-1837; Hanover, House of
On the 20th of November, 1737, Queen Caroline died, never having spoken
to her son since the quarrel. "She was," says Walpole, "implacable in
hatred even to her dying moments. She absolutely refused to pardon,
or even to see, her son." The death-bed scene is thus spoken of by
Thackeray: "There never was such a ghastly farce;" and as sketched by
Lord Hervey, it is a monstrous mixture of religion, disgusting comedy,
and brutishness. "We are shocked in the very chamber of death by the
intrusion of egotism, vanity, buffoonery, and inhumanity. The King is
at one moment dissolved in a mawkish tenderness, at another sunk into
brutal apathy. He is at one moment all tears for the loss of one
who united the softness and amiability of one sex to the courage and
firmness of the other; at another all fury because the object of his
regrets cannot swallow, or cannot change her posture, or cannot animate
the glassy fixedness of her eyes; at one moment he begins an elaborate
panegyric on her virtues, then breaks off into an enumeration of his
own, by which he implies that her heart has been enthralled, and her
intelligence awed. He then breaks off into a stupid story about a storm,
for which his daughter laughs at him, and then while he is weeping
over his consort's death-bed, she advises him to marry again; and we
are--what the Queen was not--startled by the strange reply, 'Non, faurai
des maitresses,' with the faintly moaned out rejoinder, 'Cela, n'empeche
pas.'" So does the Edinburgh reviewer, following Lord Hervey, paint the
dying scene of the Queen of our second George.
After the death of the Queen, the influence of the King's mistresses
became supreme, and Sir R. Walpole, who, in losing Queen Caroline had
lost his greatest hold over George, paid court to Lady Walmoden, in
order to maintain his weakened influence. In the private letters of the
Pelham family, who succeeded to power soon after Walpole's fall, we find
frequent mention of the Countess of Yarmouth as a power to be gained, a
person to stand well with. "I read," says Thackeray, "that Lady Yarmouth
(my most religious and gracious King's favorite) sold a bishopric to a
clergyman for £5,000. (He betted her £5,000 that he would not be made a
bishop, and he lost, and paid her.) Was he the only prelate of his time
led up by such hands for consecration? As I peep into George H.'s St.
James's, I see crowds of cassocks rustling up the back-stairs of the
ladies of the Court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps;
that godless old Bang yawning under his canopy in his Chapel Royal, as
the chaplain before him is discoursing."
On the 23d of May, 1738, George William Frederick, son of Frederick, and
afterwards George III., was born.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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