Hanover, tried to get access to his mother, George Lewis, then Elector of Hanover, arrested Prince George also, and it is said, would have put him to death if the Emperor of Germany had not protected him as a Prince of the German Empire. During the reign of George II., Frederick, Prince of Wales, whom his father denounced as a "changeling," published an account of how George I. had turned Frederick's father out of the palace. These Guelphs have been a loving family. The Edinburgh Review declares that "the terms on which the eldest sons of this family have always lived with their fathers have been those of distrust, opposition, and hostility." Even after George Lewis had ascended the throne of England, his hatred to George Augustus was so bitter, that there was some proposition that James, Earl Berkeley and Lord High Admiral, should carry off the Prince to America and keep him there.

Thackeray says: "When George I. made his first visit to Hanover, his son was appointed regent during the Royal absence. But this honor was never again conferred on the Prince of Wales; he and his father fell out presently. On the occasion of the christening of his second son, a Royal row took place, and the Prince, shaking his fist in the Duke of Newcastle's face, called him a rogue, and provoked his august father. He and his wife were turned out of St. James's, and their princely children taken from them, by order of the Royal head of the family. Father and mother wept piteously at parting from their little ones. The young ones sent some cherries, with their love, to papa and mamma, the parents watered the fruit with their tears. They had no tears thirty-five years afterwards, when Prince Frederick died, their eldest son, their heir, their enemy."

A satirical ballad on the expulsion of Prince George from St. James's Palace, which was followed by the death of the newly-christened baby Prince, is droll enough to here repeat:—

Mahon, despite all his desire to make out the best for the Whig revolution and its consequences, occasionally makes some pregnant admissions: "The jealousy which George I. entertained for his son was no new feeling. It had existed even at Hanover, and had since been inflamed by an insidious motion of the Tories that out of the Civil List £100,-000 should be allotted as a separate revenue for the Prince of Wales. This motion was overruled by the Ministerial party, and its rejection offended the Prince as much as its proposal had the King.... In fact it is remarkable.... that since that family has reigned, the heirs-apparent have always been on ill terms with the sovereign. There have been four Princes of Wales since the death of Anne, and all four have gone into bitter opposition." "That family," said Lord Carteret one day in full Council, "always has quarrelled, and always will quarrel, from generation to generation."

"Through the whole of the reign of George I., and through nearly half of the reign of George II.," says Lord Macaulay, "a Tory was regarded as the enemy of the reigning house, and was excluded from all the favors of the Crown. Though most of the country gentlemen were Tories, none but Whigs were appointed deans and bishops. In every County, opulent and well-descended Tory squires complained that their names were left out of the Commission of the Peace, while men of small estate and of mean birth, who were for toleration and excise, septennial parliaments and standing armies, presided at Quarter Sessions, and became deputy-lieutenants."

In attacking the Whigs, my object is certainly not to write in favor of the Tories, but some such work is needful while so many persons labor under the delusion that the Whigs have always been friends to liberty and progress.

Although George I. brought with him no wife to England, he was accompanied by at least two of his mistresses, and our peerage roll was enriched by the addition of Madame Kielmansegge as Countess of Darlington, and Mademoiselle Erangard Melosine de Schulenberg as Duchess of Kendal and Munster, Baroness of Glastonbury, and Countess of Feversham. These peeresses were received with high favor by the Whig aristocracy, although the Tories refused to countenance them, and "they were often hooted by the mob as they passed through the streets." The Edinburgh Review described them as "two big blowsy German women." Here I have no room to deal fairly with Charlotte Sophia, Baroness of Brentford and Countess of Darlington; her title is extinct, and I can write nothing of any good or useful act to revive her memory. Lord Chesterfield says of George I.: "No woman came amiss to him, if she were only very willing and very fat." John Heneage Jesse, in his "Memoirs of the Court of England"—speaking of the Duchess of Kendal, the Countess Platen (the co-partner in the murder of Konigsmark), afterwards Countess of Darlington, and many others less known to infamy—says that George I. "had the folly and wickedness to encumber himself with a seraglio of hideous German prostitutes." The Duchess of Kendal was for many years the chief mistress of George, and being tall and lean was caricatured as the Maypole or the Giraffe. She had a pension of £7,500 a year, the profits of the place of Master of the Horse, and other plunder. The Countess of Darlington's figure may be judged from the name of Elephant or Camel, popularly awarded to her. Horace Walpole says of her: "I remember as a boy being terrified at her enormous figure. The fierce black eyes, large and rolling, between two lofty-arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed, and was not distinguished from the lower part of her body, and no part restrained by stays. No wonder that a child dreaded such an ogress." She died 1724. Mahon says: "She was unwieldy in person, and rapacious in character."

Phillimore declares that "George I. brought with him from Hanover mistresses as rapacious, and satellites as ignoble, as those which drew down such deserved obloquy on Charles H., Bothman, Bernstoff, Robethon, and two Turks—Mustapha and Mahomet,—meddled more with public affairs, and were to the full as venal as Chiffin, Pepys and Smith." Mahon, who calls Robethon "a prying, impertinent, venomous creature," adds that "coming from a poor electorate, a flight of hungry Hanoverians, like so many famished vultures, fell with keen eyes and bended talons on the fruitful soil of England."

One of the earliest acts of the Whig aristocracy, in the reign of George I., was to pass a measure through Parliament, lengthening the existence of that very Parliament to seven years, and giving to the King the power to continue all subsequent Parliaments to a like period. The Triennial Parliaments were thus lengthened