Queen Caroline, living her hard life in those fine rooms that look out upon the Fountain Garden, was, with all her coarseness, a very different woman from the Schulenberg or the Kilmansegge, or the "avaricious fury of a niece" Lady Walsingham, or Lady Deloraine with her utter disregard of self-respect, or Madame de Walmoden, or even the good-natured, kind-hearted Lady Suffolk. She was a stateswoman, not a mere leader of a court.
"You may strut, dapper George, but 'twill all be in vain;
We know 'tis Queen Caroline, not you that reign—
You govern no more than Don Philip of Spain.
Then if you would have us fall down and adore you,
Lock up your fat spouse, as your dad did before you."
Yet very different was her life to that of Elizabeth Farnese, to whom this squib compared her. Elizabeth's was a servitude, but Caroline's was slavery. George's "fat Venus" was snubbed, and bullied, and worried night and day. Hour after hour she must listen to her husband's silly gasconading, or his immoral tales, or his ill-tempered condemnation of everything and every person that did not suit his humour.
Lord Hervey tells a story of the change in the pictures in the great drawing-room at Kensington as an instance of the "accumulated trifles" that marked his ill-temper and insolence; and he ends it by a picture of a typical morning scene.[1] "His Majesty stayed about five minutes in the gallery, snubbed the Queen, who was drinking chocolate, for being always
- ↑ Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 35.
