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arrive (one, I trust, is far distant) when I must appear in public, and your Royal Highness must be present also. . . . . Has your Royal Highness forgotten the approaching marriage of our daughter, and the possibility of our coronation. . . . The illustrious heir of the House of Orange had announced himself to her, she said, as her future son-in-law; and then she adds, coupling the presence of the Orange Prince with that of the illustrious strangers in the metropolis: "This season your Royal Highness has chosen for treating me with fresh and unprovoked indignity; and of all his Majesty's subjects I alone am prevented, by your Royal Highness, from appearing in my place to partake of the general joy, and am deprived of the indulgence in those feelings of pride and affection permitted to every mother but me." It was possible, as the writer remarked, that this letter was never read to the exalted individual to whom it was addressed. It is certain that the letter was not thought worthy of notice. But the presumed writer was determined that, escaping the courteous notice of her husband, it should not escape the more general notice of the world. She accordingly sent copies of her correspondence with the Queen and one of the correspondence of the latter with the Prince, to the House of Commons, with an expression of her fears that there were "ultimate objects in view pregnant with danger to the security of the succession and the domestic peace of the realm."

This communication raised a discussion, and Mr. Methuen proposed an address to the Prince, requesting him to acquaint the house by whose advice he had determined never to meet the Princess. The proposition, however, was withdrawn. Mr. Bathurst, the only government advocate, stated that no imputation was intended against the character of the Princess. "The charges of guilt," he admitted, "had been irresistibly refuted at a former period." The so-called exclusion from court, he said, simply resolved itself into the non-invitation of the Princess to a court festival-nothing more. But, as Mr. Whitbread subsequently remarked, "such non-invitation was an infliction worse than loss of life: it is loss of reputation,

blasting to her character, fatal to her fame." The government thought to pacify the Princess by holding out to her the prospect of an increase of income; but her friends in parliament asserted that she would scorn to barter her rights for an increased income, or to allow her silence to be purchased in exchange for an adequate provision.

CHAPTER VI.

A DOUBLE FLIGHT.

The Prince of Orange proposes to the Princess Charlotte-His suit declinedDr. Parr-A new household appointed for the Princess Charlotte-Her astonishment and immediate flight Alarm and pursuit Princess

Charlotte removed to Cranbourne Lodge-The Princess of Wales determines to leave England-Her departure from Worthing-The Regent's continued hatred of her.

AMONG the refugees of exalted rank whom revolution and the fortunes of war had driven to seek an asylum in England, the members of the family of the Stadtholder of Holland were the most conspicuous. The eldest son of this noble family became almost an Englishman by education and habit, and Oxford yet reckons him, with pride, among the most honoured of her alumni.

As revolution and the fortunes of war had brought the family hither, so a happy turn in the same took them home, and restored them to a country which had now become for them a kingdom. At the peace of 1814, the Prince of Orange once more came to England, not as a refugee, but a visitor and suitor. The heir to a Dutch throne came to sue for the hand of the heiress to the crown of Great Britain, and his suit was powerfully backed by the sanction of the heiress's father. Her mother gave no such sanction, nor was she, indeed, asked for any. Most important of all, the young lady thus wooed did not at all sanction the proceeding. Of all the episodes of the season, there was none more stirring than this.

It was said that the Regent himself had procured the previous admission into Warwick House, under the feigned name of the Chevalier de St. George, but that the Princess would not receive him. In this refusal she was supposed to be supported

by her mother, and to act under the advice of the Duchess of Oldenburgh, who already had in view a humbler, and, as it turned out, a luckier aspirant, for the hand of the heiress. Meanwhile, all England agreed to approve of the match, and chose to look upon the union as a thing settled. The balladsingers made the streets re-echo with singing "Orange Boven," and Irish wits smilingly accused her Royal Highness of holding an Orange Lodge..

The Regent had this match at heart, and longed to see it concluded. The Princess allowed herself to be handed to her carriage by the princely wooer from the dykes, and granted him more than one interview. It soon became evident that they were not agreed. The Princess pleaded her youth, her love of country, and her desire to be more intimately acquainted with the latter and with its laws, history, and constitution, before she should surrender herself to the cares and duties of the married state. The Prince of Orange insisted, as far as lover dared, that his wife must necessarily reside with him in Holland. The prospect made the Princess shudder; but it remarkably suited the wishes of her sire, whose most ardent desire was, to place as wide a distance as possible between the daughter and her mother. The Prince of Orange had made no secret of his desire, that, in the event of his marriage with the Princess, her mother should take up no permanent residence in Holland. This desire-not over mildly expressed-had, perhaps, the most to do with rendering the union impossible. The Princess, indeed, was not inclined towards the Prince, and would not willingly have left the country of her birth; but to her warm friends, at least, she declared, that, in the present critical situation of the Princess of Wales, she would not abandon her mother. The latter was touched; but it was just the moment when she was most strongly possessed by a desire to go abroad, and she thought that this desire might be more speedily realised if her daughter were married than if she remained single. She was on the whole rather disappointed than otherwise—except that the breaking off of the match was an annoyance to the Regent, and that was some consolation, at all events.

VOL. II.

Y

Meanwhile, the dinners at Connaught House and the little parties at Blackheath continued as usual. If a great deal of frivolity were present at them, it cannot be said that grave wisdom was always lacking; for, by the side of a public singer, would sometimes be seated no less a person than Doctor Parr. Of personal intercourse between the mother and daughter, there was now scarcely any; but their correspondence was still kept up; and it was not the less sincere on the poor mother's side, from the circumstance of her occasionally forgetting orthography in the ardour of her affection.

The Regent, soured by his defeat with respect to the union of his daughter and the Prince of Orange, was more than commonly irritated by the knowledge that his wife and child were engaged in a frequent epistolary correspondence, and that he had, hitherto, been unable to prevent it. He was satisfied that such correspondence could not be maintained without the connivance of the ladies of his daughter's household, and he determined to meet the evil by dissolving the establishment.

Before this resolution had been arrived at, the Princess was · subjected to much petty persecution, rendered the more annoying by being continual, and which made up in enduring length what it wanted in intensity. It was said, at the time, that even the letters in her writing-desk found their way into her father's hands; and there was so much done at this time that was degrading to the doers, that the report is recommended at least by its probability. At all events, "wearied out by a series of acts all proceeding from the spirit of petty tyranny, and each more vexatious than another, though none of them very important in itself," the Princess was driven to a very extreme measure by the uncalled-for and undignified severity of her irritated sire.

On the 16th of July, 1814, the Prince Regent, who had previously secured Cranbourne Lodge, in Windsor Forest, as a residence for his daughter, and had even, equally unknown to her, but in concert with Queen Charlotte, nominated the new ladies of the Princess's household, repaired to Warwick House, accompanied by the ladies so named. The party had only to

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