‘Heavens!’ cried the queen:  ’popularity always makes me sick, but Fritz’s popularity makes me vomit!  I hear that yesterday, on the prince’s side of the House, they talked of the king’s being cast away with the same sang froid as you would talk of an overturn; and that my good son strutted about as if he had been already king.  Did you mark the airs with which he came into my drawing-room in the morning? though he does not think fit to honour me with his presence, or ennui me with his wife’s, of an evening?  I felt something here in my throat that swelled and half-choked me.’

Poor Queen Caroline! with such a son, and such a husband, she must have been possessed of a more than usual share of German imperturbability to sustain her cheerfulness, writhing, as she often was, under the pangs of a long-concealed disorder, of which eventually she died.  Even on the occasion of the king’s return in time to spend his birthday in England, the queen’s temper had been sorely tried.  Nothing had ever vexed her more than the king’s admiration for Amelia Sophia Walmoden, who, after the death of Caroline, was created Countess of Yarmouth.  Madame Walmoden had been a reigning belle among the married women at Hanover, when George II. visited that country in 1735.  Not that her majesty’s affections were wounded; it was her pride that was hurt by the idea that people would think that this Hanoverian lady had more influence than she had.  In other respects the king’s absence was a relief:  she had the eclat of the regency; she had the comfort of having the hours which her royal torment decreed were to be passed in amusing his dulness, to herself; she was free from his ‘quotidian sallies of temper, which,’ as Lord Hervey relates, ’let it be charged by what hand it would, used always to discharge its hottest fire, on some pretence or other, upon her.’

It is quite true that from the first dawn of his preference for Madame Walmoden, the king wrote circumstantial letters of fifty or sixty pages to the queen, informing her of every stage of the affair; the queen, in reply, saying that she was only one woman, and an old woman, and adding, ‘that he might love more and younger women.’  In return, the king wrote, ‘You must love the Walmoden, for she loves you;’ a civil insult, which he accompanied with so minute a description of his new favourite, that the queen, had she been a painter, might have drawn her portrait at a hundred miles’ distance.

The queen, subservient as she seemed, felt the humiliation.  Such was the debased nature of George II. that he not only wrote letters unworthy of a man to write, and unfit for a woman to read, to his wife, but he desired her to show them to Sir Robert Walpole.  He used to ’tag several paragraphs,’ as Lord Hervey expresses it, with these words, ’Montrez ceci, et consultez la-dessus de gros homme,’ meaning Sir Robert.  But this was only a portion of the disgusting disclosures made by the vulgar licentious monarch to his too degraded consort.