t and reasoned with herself before she allowed it to be
filled forever with hatred to her son. Lord Hervey, who had a true
regard for her, and in whom she trusted as much as she trusted any
human being, does not appear to have ever fully understood the cause of
the Queen's feelings towards the prince; nor does he appear to have
shared her utter distrust and dislike of him. As far as one can judge,
the prince appears to have been fickle, inconsiderate, and flighty
rather than deliberately bad. He sometimes did things which made him
seem like a madman. Such a person would not be charmed into a
healthier condition of mind and temper by the knowledge daily thrust
upon him that his own father and mother, and his own sister, were the
three persons who hated him most in the world. Of course, in this as
in other cases of a palace quarrel between a king and an eldest son,
there was a bitter wrangle about money. The prince demanded an
allowance of one hundred thousand a year to be secured to him
independently of his father's power to recall or reduce it. The King
had hitherto only given him what Frederick called a beggarly allowance
of fifty thousand a year, and even that had not been made over to the
prince unconditionally and forever. The prince argued that his
father's civil list was now much larger than that of George the First
at the time when the Prince of Wales of that day, George the Second
now, was allowed an income of one {78} hundred thousand a year. The
Princess of Wales had as yet received no jointure, and she and the
prince were thus kept, as Frederick's friends insisted, in the
condition of mere pensioners and dependants upon the royal bounty. The
prince's friends were, for the most part, eager to stir him up to some
open measure of hostility; especially the younger men of the party were
doing their best to drive the prince on. Pulteney, it must be said,
was not for any such course of action, indeed, was against it, and had
given the prince good advice; and Carteret was not for it. But Lord
Chesterfield and several other peers, and Lyttelton and William Pitt in
the House of Commons, were eager for the fray, and their counsels
prevailed. To use an expression which became famous at a much later
day, "the young man's head was on fire," and it soon became known to
the King and Queen that the prince had resolved to act upon a
suggestion made by Bolingbroke two years before, and submit his claim
to the decisi