Queen Caroline bore all this without a murmur in order to retain her political influence with the king.  To the power of the queen she sacrificed the feelings of the woman.  With many good qualities and considerable ability, she shared in the prevailing coarseness.  Her son, the Prince of Wales, was a very disagreeable person.  Neither the queen nor the Princess Caroline “made much ceremony of wishing a hundred times a day that the prince might drop down dead of an apoplexy—­the queen cursing the hour of his birth, and the Princess Caroline declaring she grudged him every hour he continued to breathe; and reproaching Lord Hervey” for ever having believed “the nauseous beast (those were her words) cared for anybody but his own nauseous self."[120] The morning after the prince had been ordered to leave the palace, “the queen, at breakfast, every now and then repeated, ’I hope, in God, I shall never see him again’; and the king, among many other paternal douceurs in his valediction to his son, said,’Thank-God, to-morrow night the puppy will be out of my house.’"[121] “My dear Lord” said the queen to Hervey, “I will give it to you under my own hand, if you are in any fear of my relapsing, that my dear first-born is the greatest ass and the greatest liar and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world, and that I most heartily wish he was out of it."[122] After the royal family, Sir Robert Walpole was the most prominent person in the country.  He went about publicly with his mistress, and entertained his friends at his country-seat with orgies which disturbed the whole neighborhood.  When the queen died he urged the princesses to get their father some new mistress to distract him.  Lord Hervey says that Lady Sundon “had sense enough to perceive what black and dirty company, by living in a court, she was forced to keep."[123] Lady Deloraine, who was suspected of being the king’s mistress, “when she spoke seriously to Sir Robert Walpole, pretended not to have yet yielded; and said ’she was not of an age like a vain or a loving fool, but that if she did consent, that she would be well paid.’"[124] “She told Lady Sundon, with whom she was very little acquainted, that the king had been very importunate these two years; and had often told her how unkind she was to refuse him; that it was mere crossness, for that he was sure her husband would not take it at all ill."[125] The looseness of the marriage tie had been a prevailing evil ever since the Restoration.  Steele wrote in the Tatler in 1710:  “The wits of this island for above fifty years past, instead of correcting the vices of the age, have done all they could to inflame them.  Marriage has been one of the common topics of ridicule that every stage scribbler hath found his account in; for whenever there is an occasion for a clap, an impertinent jest upon matrimony is sure to raise it.  This hath been attended with very pernicious consequences.  Many a country squire, upon his setting up for a man of the town, has gone home in the gaiety of his heart and beat his wife.  A kind husband hath been looked upon as a clown, and a good wife as a domestic annual unfit for the company or conversation of the beau monde.  In short, separate beds, silent tables, and solitary homes have been introduced by your men of wit and pleasure of the age."[126]