the Test Act would be bought at too dear a cost if it were the means of bringing the King into a distressing family quarrel. Therefore the Bishop declared that he would give no encouragement to such a scheme, of which, he said, he had lately heard nothing from the Prince; and that, whatever kindnesses he might receive from Frederick, he should never forget his duty to George. Walpole was delighted with Hoadley's bearing and Hoadley's answer, and seemed as if he never could praise him enough. No one can question Hoadley's sincerity, We must only try to get ourselves back into the framework and the spirit of an age when a sound patriot and a high-minded ecclesiastic could be willing to postpone indefinitely an act of justice to a whole section of the community in order to avoid the risk of having the Sovereign brought into disadvantageous comparison with the Sovereign's eldest son. Walpole approved of the Test Act no more than Hoadley did, although the spirit of his objection to it was far less positive and less exalted than that of Hoadley. But Walpole was, of course, an avowed Opportunist; he never professed or pretended to be anything better. There is nothing surprising in the fact that he regarded an act of justice to the Dissenters as merely a matter of public convenience, to be performed when it could be performed without disturbing anybody of importance. Hoadley must have looked at the subject from an entirely different point of view; it must have been to him a question of justice or injustice; yet he, too, was quite ready

1737.

HANOVER AGAIN.

149

to put it off indefinitely rather than allow it to be made the means of obtaining a certain amount of popular favour for the Prince of Wales as opposed to his father the King. We shall see such things occurring again and again in the course of this history. The agreement of Walpole and Hoadley did, indeed, put off the repeal of the Test Act for a pretty long time. The brand and stigma on the Protestant Dissenters as well as on the Roman Catholics was allowed to remain in existence for nearly another century of English history. We are now in 1737, and the Test Act was not repealed until 1828. Historians are sometimes reproached for paying too much attention to palace squabbles; yet a palace squabble becomes a matter of some importance if it can postpone an act of national justice for by far the greater part of a century.

There was a good deal of talk about this time of the possibility of adopting some arrangement for the separation of Hanover from the English crown. The fact of the Princess of Wales having given birth to a daughter and not a son naturally led to a revival of this question. The electorate of Hanover could not descend to a woman, and if the Prince of Wales should have no son some new arrangement would have to be made. The Queen was very anxious that Hanover should be secured for her second son, to whom she was much attached, and the King was understood to be in favour of this project. On the other hand, it was given out that the Prince of Wales would be quite willing to renounce his rights in favour of his

younger brother on condition of his getting the fifty thousand a year additional for which he had been clamouring in Parliament. Nothing could be more popular with the country than any arrangement which would sever the connection between the Crown of England and the electorate of Hanover. If the Prince were seeking popularity, such a proposal coming from him would be popular indeed, provided it were not spoiled by the stipulation about the fifty thousand a year. The Queen's comment upon the rumours as to the Prince's intention was that in her firm belief he would sell the reversion of the Crown of England to the Pretender if only the Pretender offered him money enough. Nothing came of the talk about Hanover just then. The King and the Queen had soon something else to think of.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE QUEEN'S DEATH-BED.

THE Queen had long been dying; dying by inches. In one of her confinements she had been stricken with an ailment from which she suffered severely. She refused to let anyone, even the King, know what was the matter with her. She had the strongest objection to being regarded as an invalid; and she feared, too, that if anything serious were known to be the matter with her she might lose her hold over her selfish husband, who only cared for people as long as they were active in serving and pleasing him. An invalid was to George merely a nuisance. Let us do Caroline justice. She was no doubt actuated by the most sincere desire to be of service to the King, and she feared that if she were to make it known how ill she was the King might insist on her giving up active life altogether. Not only did she take no pains to get better, but in order to prove that she was perfectly well she used to exert herself in a manner which might have been injurious to the health of a very strong woman. When at Richmond she used to walk several miles every morning with the King; and more than once, Walpole says, when she had the

gout in her foot, she dipped her whole leg in cold water to be ready to attend him. The pain,' says Walpole, her bulk, and the exercise threw her into such fits of perspiration as routed the gout; but those exertions hastened the crisis of her distemper.' History preserves some curious pictures of the manner in which the morning prayers were commonly said to Queen Caroline. The Queen was being dressed by her ladies in her bedroom; the door of the bedroom was left partly open; the chaplain read the prayers in the outer room, and had to kneel, as he read them, beneath a great painting of a naked Venus; and just within the half-open bedroom door Her Majesty, according to Horace Walpole, 'would frequently stand some minutes in her shift, talking to her ladies.'

Robert Walpole was the first to discover the real and the very serious nature of the Queen's malady. He was often alone with her for the purpose of arranging as to the course of action which they were to prevail upon the King to believe to be of his own. inspiration, and accordingly to adopt. Shortly after the death of Walpole's wife he was closeted with the Queen. Her Majesty questioned him closely about the cause of his wife's death. She was evidently under the impression that Lady Walpole had died from the effects of a peculiar kind of rupture, and she put to Walpole a variety of very intimate questions as to the symptoms and progress of the disease. Walpole had long suspected, as many others had, that there was something seriously wrong with the Queen. He allowed her to go on with her questions,