ld it long enough to become perhaps the most unpopular
Prime Minister England has ever had.

[Sidenote: 1760--Hannah Lightfoot and Lady Sarah Lennox]

The youth of George the Third was starred with a strange romance. The
full truth of the story of Hannah Lightfoot will probably never be
known. What is known is sufficiently romantic without the additions of
legend. Hannah Lightfoot was a beautiful Quaker girl, the daughter of
a decent tradesman in Wapping. Association with the family of an
uncle, a linendraper, who lived near the {9} Court, brought the girl
into the fashionable part of the town. The young Prince saw her by
accident somehow, somewhere, in the early part of 1754, and fell in
love with her. From that moment the girl disappears from certain
knowledge, and legend busies itself with her name. It is asserted that
she was actually married to the young Prince; that William Pitt,
afterwards Earl of Chatham, was present at the marriage; that she bore
the Prince several children. Other versions have it that she was
married as a mere form to a man named Axford, who immediately left her,
and that after this marriage she lived with the Prince. She is
supposed to have died in a secluded villa in Hackney. It is said that
not only the wife of George the Third but the wife of George the Fourth
believed that the marriage had taken place. We must not attach too
much importance to a story which in itself is so very unlikely. It is
in the last degree improbable that a statesman like Pitt would have
lent himself to so singular a proceeding. Even if an enamoured young
Prince were prepared to sanction his affections by a marriage, he would
scarcely have found an assistant in the ablest politician of the age.
The story of the Axford marriage is far more probable. If Hannah
Lightfoot had been married to George she would have been Queen of
England, for there was no Royal Marriage Act in those days.

Another and more famous romance is associated with the youth of George
the Third. Lady Sarah Lennox, the youngest daughter of the second Duke
of Richmond, was one of the most beautiful women of her time. The
writers of the day rave about her, describe her as "an angel," as
lovelier than any Magdalen by Correggio. When she was only seventeen
years old her beauty attracted the young King, who soon made no secret
of his devotion to her. The new passion divided the Court into two
camps. The House of Lennox was eager to b