It has been charged upon the princes of the House of Hanover that they are given to quarrelling, and that between sovereign and heir-apparent there has never been good-will, while they have on several occasions disgusted the world by the vehemence of their hatred for each other.  That George I. hated his heir is well known; and George II. hated his son Frederick with far more intensity than he himself had been hated by his own father.  The Memoirs of Lord Hervey show the state of feeling that existed in the English royal family during the first third of the reign of George II., and the spectacle is hideous beyond parallel; and for many years longer, until Frederick’s death, there was no abatement of paternal and filial hate.  George III. was disgusted with his eldest son’s personal conduct and political principles, as well he might be; for while the father was a model of decorum, and a bitter Tory, the son was a profligate, and a Whig,—­and the King probably found it harder to forgive the Whig than the profligate.  The Prince cared no more for Whig principles than he did for his marriage-vows, but affected them as a means of annoying his father, whose Toryism was of proof.  He, as a man, toasted the buff and blue, when that meant support of Washington and his associates, for the same reason that, as a boy, he had cheered for Wilkes and Liberty,—­because it was the readiest way of annoying his father; but he ever deserted the Whigs when his aid and countenance could have been useful to them.  George IV. had no child with whom to quarrel, but while Prince Regent he did his worst to make his daughter unhappy, as we find established in Miss Knight’s Memoirs.  The good-natured and kind-hearted William IV. had no legitimate children, but he was strongly attached to the Fitzclarences, who were borne to him by Mrs. Jordan.  Indeed, monarchs have often been as full of love for their offspring born out of wedlock as of hate for their children born in that holy state.  Being men, they must love something, and what so natural as that they should love their natural children, whose helpless condition appeals so strongly to all their better feelings, and who never can become their rivals?

Queen Victoria is the first sovereign of the House of Hanover who, having children, has not pained the world by quarrelling with them.  A model sovereign, she has not allowed an infirmity supposed to be peculiar to her illustrious House to control her clear and just mind, so that her career as a mother is as pleasing as her career as a sovereign is splendid.  About the time of the death of Prince Albert, a leading British journal published some articles in which it was insinuated, not asserted, that there had been trouble in the Royal Family, and that that quarrelling between parent and child which had been so common in that family in former times was about to be exhibited again.  It was even said that domestic peace was an impossibility in the House of Hanover, which was but an indorsement of Earl Granville’s remark, in George II.’s reign.  “This family,” said that eccentric peer, “always has quarrelled, and always will quarrel, from generation to generation”; and he did not live to see the ill feeling that existed between George III. and his eldest son.