The Prince and the Quakeress: (Georgian Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

that an attendant should have expressed an opinion. He disliked the fellow in any case. He had heard he had a great influence with the Prince of Wales and that he accompanied them everywhere. The Prince commanded him to attend on the Princess while he enjoyed the company of Lady Archibald Hamilton, Lady Middlesex and Lady Huntingdon. It made a cosy foursome, a little bourgeois community. Frederick liked to live simply at Cliveden. It would have to be different when he ascended the throne, which Cumberland hoped would not be for a long time. Fred as King was a prospect which did not appeal to him.
    Augusta was clearly pregnant, so Frederick was doing his duty in spite of the ladies. She looked well content with the arrangement, too. A stupid woman, thought Cumberland; but a docile one. She never raised her voice against Fred. She was very different from their mother. Cumberland was sad, thinking of the Queen’s death. She had doted on him and had done her best to have Fred passed over for him. He was the son both his father and mother would have liked to see mount the throne. But Fred was the eldest, and although his parents had done their best to keep him in Hanover and had not allowed him to come to England until he was twenty-one, he was Prince of Wales, and nothing was allowed to interfere with that.
    Well, Fred could keep his yellow-skinned mistress; he could keep his docile wife; but the education of the boy who would one day be King of England was surely a matter with which the family should concern itself. George was doubtless a goodboy, but he was obviously a simpleton. He should be taught something about life. They should try to make a soldier and a man of him. Cumberland would speak to his father about the boy and if King George said his grandson must be educated in a certain manner, then so it would be.
    Cumberland turned away from Lord Bute as though he had not spoken and said he would like to have the chance of teaching the boys something about the strategem of war.
    Frederick replied that the boys had the best tutors in the country and he and the Princess were very pleased with their progress.
    Cumberland nodded ironically and replied that he was sure of that – that the Prince and Princess of Wales were pleased, he meant.
    Then Frederick suggested that as the time set for his sons’ lessons was not yet at an end, he and the Princess should show the Duke the gardens at Cliveden, as he was sure he would find something there to interest him.
    *
    Trouble in the family. It was distressing. George wished that they could all be friends together and that his grandfather did not hate his father, and that when an uncle called it could be an occasion for rejoicing rather than for anger, for he was well aware of the indignation this impromptu visit had aroused.
    His mother talked of his uncle. He was a crude man, a brutal man. He liked bloodshed. When she spoke Uncle Cumberland’s name she did so with loathing. He loved war, this uncle. It was not so much that he wished to save the crown as that he wanted to kill… for the sake of killing. He liked the sight of blood; he liked to see men suffer. The people called him The Butcher.
    The Butcher? George shivered at the name.
    The Butcher, repeated his mother. That was when they heard of all his cruelty at Culloden. Oh, when he had returned from that battlefield they had shouted for him in the streets. They had reverenced Duke Billy, as they called him; but when they heard what had really happened, the cruelty he had delighted in practising they called him ‘Butcher’.
    ‘It is a hateful name to be given to a man,’ said George.
    ‘Hateful indeed,’ replied his mother. ‘Why, when it wasproposed that he should be elected an Alderman of the City… this was after Culloden, one of the aldermen said: “Let it be of the Butchers.” So you see that is how the people think of him. Once when there was a disturbance at the Haymarket Theatre he lost his sword and the