Hugh Kenrick by Edward Cline Read Free Book Online Page B

country in disgrace. For years, the Earl had sent the Duke a birthday present of five pounds of sweetmeats in a bentwood box adorned with military tableaux painted by the best illustrator in London; and to Augusta, the Princess of Wales, a birthday present of a silver brocaded quilt of flowers stuffed with the finest Dorset wool and swans’ down.
    The Prince left more turmoil in his wake than he had caused in his lifetime. Leicester House, the Prince’s domicile in London, ceased to be the fulcrum of parliamentary opposition to the king, and the enmity once focused on Frederick by his parents—his mother, Caroline, had so hated him thatshe even refused to see him on her deathbed—gradually shifted in the widowed king to William Augustus. Cumberland, in the event of his father’s death or incapacitation, could become either king or Regent. There were many in all strata of English society who feared that Cumberland would seize the reins of power from the heir-presumptive, George, son of the Prince and Princess of Wales, before the latter reached his majority, and establish a military kingship not unlike that of Frederick of Prussia’s.
    Cumberland was at this time Captain General of the Army, and busy reforming it. At the same time he was still living under the shadow of recrimination for his and his staff’s depredations in Scotland following the quelling of the Jacobite Rebellion, and even his most obsequious sycophants and admirers had ceased proclaiming his name. The merciless and often indiscriminate execution of Highland Scots and the brutal uprooting of their clans had shocked even Englishmen, most of whom had no love for the Scots. It was said that, when the Livery Companies of London were contesting each other for the privilege of granting the Duke the status of freedman in the City (for English kings and their immediate family could not enter London except by permission of the Lord Mayor), someone caustically suggested that he be made a member of the Company of Butchers. The newspapers subsequently nicknamed him “the Butcher.”
    Nevertheless, the Earl and his brother the Baron knew that the Duke would be courted now by many of the men who had once flocked to Leicester House and the Prince of Wales and plotted with Frederick Louis to bedevil the king in and out of Parliament.
    “Billy,” remarked the Baron, “will need friends.”
    “He is sure to be pressed to take the lead,” said the Earl.
    “He might be persuaded to, but he heeds his father’s every wish and whim.”
    “True,” conceded the Earl with a sigh. “If his father ordered him to give up women and horses, he would. He has proven that he will do nothing that will antagonize
Mr. Lewis
.”
    “So it would need a strong man—one more persuasive than his father—to get him to move, to take the right actions, to make the right friends.”
    “Do you know of such a man?”
    “No,” said the Baron. “And I know that it is neither of us.”
    “He strikes me,” broached the Baroness, “as a man who is content with the back bench. He would make a poor and indifferent pawn, and a worsesovereign. His toy soldiers, horses, and dice are all he wants from his rank.” She paused to take a sip of her tea. “He has no ambition.”
    The Earl hummed pensively. “There are men who would act in the Duke’s interests,” he said. “Fox, for example.”
    “And men who would oppose them with equal vigor,” said the Baron. “Pitt, for example.”
    The Baroness smiled. “Do not discount the determination of the Princess to secure the succession for her son, George.”
    The Earl scoffed. “I cannot seriously entertain the notion of Augusta in the role of Regent,” he said. “If she is anything like her late husband, she must share his gift for tactlessness and spite, and will scotch any chance she might have.”
    “I must agree with you, Basil,” replied the Baroness. “But you both neglect an important factor here, one which will nullify all