turesque, but because men had,
after so many experiments and changes, come to regard the monarchy as a
merely practical and prosaic institution, to be rated according to its
working merits. The majority in England at the time when George was
tossing about the North Sea, or waiting impatiently at Helvoetsluis,
had come to the conclusion {74} that on the whole the monarchy worked
better under the Hanoverians than it had done under the Stuarts, and
was more satisfactory than the protectorate of Cromwell. Therefore, we
do not believe there was the slightest probability that the loss of
George the Second would have brought any political trouble on the
State. One can imagine objections made even by very moderate and
reasonable Englishmen to each and all of the Hanoverian kings; but we
find it hard to imagine how any reasonable Englishman, who had quietly
put up with George the Second, should be at any pains to resist the
accession of George the Second's eldest son.

But the truth is that although in her many consultations with Walpole
and with Hervey the Queen did sometimes let drop a word or two about
the condition of the country and the danger to the State, she was not
thinking much about the state of the country. She was thinking
honestly about herself and those who were around her, and whom she
loved and wished to see maintained in comfort and in dignity. Her
conviction was that if her son Frederick came to the throne she and her
other children would be forced to go into an obscure life in Somerset
House, the old palace which had been assigned to her in her jointure,
and that they would even in that obscurity have to depend very much on
the charity of the new King. This was the view Walpole took of the
prospect. He thought those most in peril, those most to be pitied,
were the Queen and the duke, her son, and the princesses. "I do not
know," said Walpole to Hervey, "any people in the world so much to be
pitied as that gay young company with which you and I stand every day
in the drawing-room, at that door from which we this moment came, bred
up in state, in affluence, caressed and courted, and to go at once from
that into dependence on a brother who loves them not, and whose
extravagance and covetousness will make him grudge every guinea they
spend, as it must come from out of a purse not sufficient to defray the
expenses of his own vices."

{75}

Walpole, to do him justice, did think of the country. For all h