Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/173

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GEORGE I
111

Queen continued her kindness to the nurse and her family, she could never forget the anxious days when her baby hung between life and death.

XII

With George I. the court returned to Hampton, and made from time to time long sojourns there. At some periods the King, with the atrocious Schulenberg, Duchess of Kendal, and Kilmansegge, Countess of Darlington; at others the Prince of Wales and his clever wife, Caroline of Anspach, held possession. The greatest confusion seems to have reigned during this period. Not only were the King and Prince at daggers-drawn—and George called his daughter-in-law, "cette diablesse la Princesse"—till a reconciliation, hollow enough, was patched up in 1720, when "the officers of the two courts kissed, embraced, and congratulated one another," but the arrangement of the Palace was in hopeless disorder. Anybody who had the impudence to enter might, it would seem, be lodged in the Palace: the officials practically let apartments; and the Crown had to issue a proclamation, to which nobody paid any attention.

George I. amused himself from time to time by having plays acted in the great hall. In 1718, Hamlet and Henry VIII. were acted there, and the King listened with delight to allusions which seemed to fit his own ministers. But the interest