away with the princess, he had transferred his services to Saxony,
where he was made a general. For that reason, and still more for the
persuasive supplications of his sister, the beautiful Aurora von
Konigsmarck, the Elector Augustus the Strong caused some inquiry to be
made. It led to no result. But Aurora became the mother of the
Marshal of Saxony, who defeated the English at Fontenoy, and conquered
the Austrian Netherlands for the French. From the marshal was
descended George Sand, the most famous Frenchwoman of the last
generation. The Hanoverian government issued a lying report, but
attempted no defence. Nobody doubted that Konigsmarck had been made
away with, and that the author of the crime was the King of England,
whose proper destination therefore should have been not St. James's
but Newgate, and indeed not Newgate but Tyburn. Such was the
character that preceded the founder of our reigning line of kings,
and such were the weapons in the hands of his dynastic foes.

His most dangerous enemy was the Prince of Wales; not the Stuart who
held his court in Lorraine, but his own eldest son. For George II
believed in the prisoner of Ahlden; believed that his mother had been
cruelly treated, wrongfully accused, and unjustly divorced, and was
therefore able to see his father by an exceedingly clear light. Thence
arose a bitter enmity between them, and that tendency to opposition in
the princes of Wales which became a family tradition and a salutary
factor in the Constitution.

George I found that, as long as he respected English institutions,
things went very well with him, and he made no attempt to overturn
them. The fear that a sovereign who was nominally absolute in one
place could never govern under a constitution in another proved to be
unnecessary. His interests, and those of his continental advisers,
were mainly continental. In political science he had long had the
ablest counsellor in Europe at his elbow, Leibnitz, the friend of the
electress. And although that great man did not enjoy unbroken favour,
it was not easy to be blind to the flood of light which he poured on
every subject. Leibnitz had been instrumental in securing the
succession, and he abounded in expositions of constitutional policy.
He professed himself so good a Whig that he attributed to that cause
his unpopularity with many people in England, especially at Cambridge,
and most of all at Trinity. He seems not to have known that h