never thwarted any of his children, he suffered me to be too much indulged, and permitted her to gratify the first vehement inclination that I ever expressed, and which, as I have never since felt any enthusiasm for royal persons, I must suppose that the female attendants in the family must have put into my head, to long to see the king. This childish caprice was so strong, that my mother solicited the Duchess of Kendal to obtain for me the honour of kissing his Majesty's hand before he set out for Hanover. A favour so unusual to be asked for a boy of ten years old, was still too slight to be refused to the wife of the first minister for her darling child; yet not being proper to be made a precedent, it was settled to be in private, and at night.

Accordingly, the night but one before the king began his last journey, my mother carried me at ten at night to the apartment of the Countess of Walsingham,' on the ground floor, towards the garden at St. James's, which opened into that of her aunt, the Duchess of Kendal's apartments occupied by George II. after his queen's death, and by his successive mistresses, the Countesses of Suffolk and Yarmouth.

Notice being given that the king was come down to supper, Lady Walsingham took me alone into the duchess's ante-room, where we found alone the king and her. I knelt down, and kissed his hand. He said a few words to me, and my conductress led me back to my mother.

The person of the king is as perfect in my memory as if I saw him but yesterday. It was that of an elderly man, rather pale, and exactly like his pictures and coins; not tall; of an aspect rather good than august; with a dark tie-wig, a plain coat, waistcoat, and breeches of snuff-coloured cloth, with stockings of the same colour, and a blue riband over all. So entirely was he my object that I do not believe I once looked at the duchess; but as I could not avoid seeing her on entering the room, I remember that just beyond his Majesty stood a very tall, lean, ill-favoured old lady; but I did not retain the least idea of her features, nor know what the colour of her dress was.

My childish loyalty, and the condescension in gratifying it, were, I suppose, causes that contributed, very soon afterwards, to make me shed a flood of tears for that sovereign's death, when, with the other scholars at Eton college, I walked in procession to the proclamation of the successor; and which (though I think they partly fell because I imagined it became the son of a prime-minister to be more concerned than other boys) were no doubt imputed by many of the spectators who were politicians, to fears of my father's most probable fall, but of which I had not the smallest conception, nor should have met

a Melusina Schulemberg, niece of the Duchess of Kendal, created Countess of Walsingham, and afterwards married to the famous Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield.

The following is the account of this introduction given in "Walpoliana :”—“I do remember something of George the First. My father took me to St. James's while I was a very little boy; after waiting some time in an ante-room, a gentleman came in all dressed in brown, even his stockings, and with a riband and star. He took me up in his arms, kissed me, and chatted some time."-E.

with any more concern than I did when it really arrived, in the year 1742; by which time I had lost all taste for courts and princes and power, as was natural to one who never felt an ambitious thought for himself.

It must not be inferred from her obtaining this grace for me, that the Duchess of Kendal was a friend to my father; on the contrary, at that moment she had been labouring to displace him, and introduce Lord Bolingbroke into the administration; on which I shall say more hereafter.

It was an instance of Sir Robert's singular fortune, or evidence of his talents, that he not only preserved his power under two successive monarchs, but in spite of the efforts of both their mistresses to remove him. It was perhaps still more remarkable, and an instance unparalleled, that Sir Robert governed George the First in Latin, the King not speaking English, and his minister no German, nor even French. It was much talked of, that Sir Robert, detecting one of the Hanoverian ministers in some trick or falsehood before the King's face, had the firmness to say to the German, "Mentiris, impudentissime!" The good-humoured monarch only laughed, as he often did when Sir Robert complained to him of his Hanoverians selling places, nor would be persuaded that it was not the practice of the English court; and which an incident must have planted in his mind with no favourable impression of English disinterestedness. "This is a strange country!" said his Majesty; "the first morning after my arrival at St. James's, I looked out of the window, and saw a park with walks, a canal, &c. which they told me were mine. The next day, Lord Chetwynd, the ranger of my park, sent me a fine brace of carp out of my canal; and I was told I must give five guineas to Lord Chetwynd's servant for bringing me my own carp out of my own canal in my own park!"

I have said, that the Duchess of Kendal was no friend of Sir

The well-known Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, secretary of state to Queen Anne; on whose death he fled, and was attainted. ["We have the authority of Sir Robert Walpole himself," says Coxe, "that the restoration of Lord Bolingbroke was the work of the Duchess of Kendal. He gained the duchess by a present of eleven thousand pounds, and obtained a promise to use her influence over the King, for the purpose of forwarding his complete restoration."]

b The Duchess of Kendal and Lady Suffolk.

"Sir Robert was frequently heard to say, that during the reign of the first George, he governed the kingdom by means of bad Latin: it is a matter of wonder that, under such disadvantages, the King should take pleasure in transacting business with him; a circumstance which was principally owing to the method and perspicuity of his calculations, and to the extreme facility with which he arranged and explained the most abstruse and difficult combinations of finance." Coxe.-E.

d Prince William, afterwards Duke of Cumberland, then a child, being carried to his grandfather on his birthday, the King asked him at what hour he rose. The Prince replied, "when the chimney-sweepers went about." "Vat is de chimney-sweeper?" said the King." Have you been so long in England," said the boy," and do not know what a chimney-sweeper is? Why, they are like that man there;" pointing to Lord Finch, afterwards Earl of Winchilsea and Nottingham, of a family uncommonly swartby and dark

"the black funereal Finches-"

Sir Charles Williams's Ode to a Number of Great Men, 1742.

Robert, and wished to make Lord Bolingbroke minister in his room. I was too young to know any thing of that reign, nor was acquainted with the political cabals of the court, which, however, I might have learnt from my father in the three years after his retirement; but being too thoughtless at that time, nor having your laudable curiosity, I neglected to inform myself of many passages and circumstances, of which I have often since regretted my faulty igno

rance.

By what I can at present recollect, the Duchess seems to have been jealous of Sir Robert's credit with the King, which he had acquired, not by paying court, but by his superior abilities in the House of Commons, and by his knowledge in finance, of which Lord Sunderland and Craggs had betrayed their ignorance in countenancing the South Sea scheme; and who, though more agreeable to the King, had been forced to give way to Walpole, as the only man capable of repairing that mischief. The Duchess, too, might be alarmed at his attachment to the Princess of Wales; from whom, in case of the King's death, her grace could expect no favour. Of her jealousy I do know the following instance; Queen Anne had bestowed the rangership of Richmond New Park on her relations the Hydes for three lives, one of which was expired. King George, fond of shooting, bought out the term of the last Earl of Clarendon, and of his son Lord Cornbury, and frequently shot there; having appointed my eldest brother, Lord Walpole, ranger nominally, but my father in reality, wished to hunt there once or twice a week. The park had run to great decay under the Hydes, nor was there any mansion* better than the common lodges of the keepers. The King ordered a stone lodge, designed by Henry, Earl of Pembroke, to be erected for himself, but merely as a banqueting-house, with a large eatingroom, kitchen, and necessary offices, where he might dine after his sport. Sir Robert began another of brick for himself, and the underranger, which, by degrees, he much enlarged; usually retiring thither from business, or rather, as he said himself, to do more business than he could in town, on Saturdays and Sundays. On that edifice, on the thatched-house, and other improvements, he laid out fourteen thousand pounds of his own money. In the meantime, he hired a small house for himself on the hill without the park; and in that small tenement the King did him the honour of dining with him more than once after shooting. His Majesty, fond of private joviality, was

The Earl of Rochester, who succeeded to the title of Clarendon on the extinction of the elder branch, had a villa close without the park; but it had been burnt down, and only one wing was left. W. Stanhope, Earl of Harrington, purchased the ruins, and built the house, since bought by Lord Camelford.

b It was afterwards enlarged by Princess Amelia; to whom her father, George II. had granted the reversion of the rangership after Lord Walpole. Her Royal Highness sold it to George III. for a pension on Ireland of twelve hundred pounds a-year, and his Majesty appointed Lord Bute ranger for life.

The King hated the parade of royalty. When he went to the opera, it was in no state; nor did he sit in the stage-box, nor forwards, but behind the Duchess of Kendal and Lady Walsingham, in the second box, now allotted to the maids of honour.

pleased with punch after dinner, and indulged in it freely. The Duchess, alarmed at the advantage the minister might make of the openness of the King's heart in those convivial, unguarded hours, and at a crisis when she was conscious Sir Robert was apprised of her inimical machinations in favour of Lord Bolingbroke, enjoined the few Germans who accompanied the King at those dinners to prevent his Majesty from drinking too freely. Her spies obeyed too punctually, and without any address. The King was offended, and silenced the tools by the coarsest epithets in the German language. He even, before his departure, ordered Sir Robert to have the stone lodge finished against his return: no symptom of a falling minister, as has since been supposed Sir Robert then was, and that Lord Bolingbroke was to have replaced him, had the King lived to come back. But my presumption to the contrary is more strongly corroborated by what had recently passed: the Duchess had actually prevailed on the King to see Bolingbroke secretly in his closet. That intriguing Proteus, aware that he might not obtain an audience long enough to efface former prejudices, and make sufficient impression on the King against Sir Robert, and in his own favour, went provided with a long memorial, which he left in the closet, and begged his Majesty to peruse coolly at his leisure. The King kept the paper, but no longer than till he saw Sir Robert, to whom he delivered the poisoned remonstrance. If that communication prognosticated the minister's fall, I am at a loss to know what a mark of confidence is.

Nor was that discovery the first intimation that Walpole had received of the measure of Bolingbroke's gratitude. The minister, against the earnest representations of his family and most intimate friends, had consented to the recall of that incendiary from banishment, excepting only his readmission into the House of Lords, that every field of annoyance might not be open to his mischievous turbulence. Bolingbroke, it seems, deemed an embargo laid on his tongue would warrant his hand to launch every envenomed shaft against his benefactor, who by restricting had paid him the compliment of avowing that his eloquence was not totally inoffensive. Craftsmen, pamphlets, libels, combinations, were showered on or employed for years against the prime-minister, without shaking his power or ruffling his temper; and Bolingbroke had the mortification of finding his rival had abilities to maintain his influence against the mistresses of two kings, with whom his antagonist had plotted in vain to overturn him.b

Bolingbroke at his return co not avoid waiting on Sir Robert to thank him, and was invited to dine with him at Chelsea; but whether tortured at witnessing Walpole's serene ankness and felicity, or suffocated with indignation and confusion at being forceu to be obliged to one whom he hated and envied, the first morsel he put into his mouth was near choking him, and he was reduced to rise from table and leave the room for some minutes. I never heard of their meeting more.

b George II. parted with Lady Suffolk, on Princess Amelia informing Queen Caroline from Bath, that the mistress had interviews there with Lord Bolingbroke. Lady Suffolk, above twenty years after, protested to me that she had not once seen his lordship there; and I should believe she did not, for she was a woman of truth: but her great intimacy

CHAPTER II.

Marriage of George the First, while Electoral Prince, to the Princess Sophia Dorothea-Assassination of Count Konigsmark-Separation from the PrincessLeft-handed Espousal-Piety of the Duchess of Kendal-Confiuement and Death of Sophia Dorothea in the Castle of Alden-French Prophetess-The King's Superstition--Mademoiselle Schulemberg-Royal Inconstancy-Countess of Platen.-Anne Brett-Sudden Death of George the First.

GEORGE THE FIRST, while Electoral Prince, had married his cousin, the Princess Dorothea,' only child of the Duke of Zell; a match of convenience to reunite the dominions of the family. Though she was very handsome, the Prince, who was extremely amorous, had several mistresses; which provocation, and his absence in the army of the confederates, probably disposed the Princess to indulge some degree of coquetry. At that moment arrived at Hanover the famous and beautiful Count Konigsmark, the charms of whose person ought not to have obliterated the memory of his vile assassination of Mr. Thynne.

b

and connexion with Pope and Swift, the intimate friends of Bolingbroke, even before the death of George I. and her being the channel through whom that faction had flattered themselves they should gain the ear of the new King, can leave no doubt of Lady Suffolk's support of that party. Her dearest friend to her death was William, afterwards Lord Chetwynd, the known and most trusted confidant of Lord Bolingbroke. Of those political intrigues I shall say more in these Reminiscences.

a Her names were Sophia Dorothea; but I call her by the latter, to distinguish her from the Princess Sophia, her mother-in-law, on whom the crown of Great Britain was settled.

b Konigsmark behaved with great intrepidity, and was wounded at a bull-feast in Spain. See Letters from Spain of the Comtesse D'Anois, vol. ii. He was brother of the beautiful Comtesse de Konigsmark, mistress of Augustus the Second, King of Poland.

It was not this Count Konigsmark, but an elder brother, who was accused of having suborned Colonel Vratz, Lieutenant Stern, and one George Boroskey, to murder Mr. Thynne in Pall-Mall, on the 12th of February, 1682, and for which they were executed in that street on the 10th of March. For the particulars, see Howell's State Trials, vol. ix. p. 1, and Sir John Reresby's Memoirs, p. 135. "This day," says Evelyn, in his Diary of the 10th of March, "was executed Colonel Vrats, for the execrable murder of Mr. Thynne, set on by the principal, Konigsmark: he went to execution like an undaunted hero, as one that had done a friendly office for that base coward, Count Konigsmark, who had hopes to marry his widow, the rich Lady Ogle, and was acquitted by a corrupt jury, and so got away: Vrats told a friend of mine, who accompanied him to the gal lows, and gave him some advice, that he did not value dying of a rush, and hoped and believed God would deal with him like a gentleman." Mr. Thynne was buried in Westminster Abbey; the manner of his death being represented on his monument. He was the Issachar of Absalom and Achitophel; in which poem Dryden, describing the respect and favour with which Monmouth was received upon his progress in the year 1631 says:

Hospitable hearts did most commend

Wise Issachar, his wealthy, western friend."

Reresby states, that Lady Ogle, immediately after the marriage," repenting herself of the match, fled from him into Holland, before they were bedded." This circumstance, added to the fact, that Mr. Thynne had formerly seduced Miss Trevor, one of the maids of honour to Catherine of Portugal, wife of Charles II., gave birth to the following lines: 7

VOL. I.