Her learning I have said was superficial; her knowledge of languages as little accurate.  The King, with a bluff Westphalian accent, spoke English correctly.  The Queen’s chief study was divinity, and she had rather weakened her faith than enlightened it.  She was at least not orthodox; and her confidante, Lady Sundon, an absurd and pompous simpleton, swayed her countenance towards the less-believing clergy.  The Queen, however, was so sincere at her death, that when Archbishop Potter was to administer the sacrament to her, she declined taking it, very few persons being in the room.  When the prelate retired, the courtiers in the ante-room crowded round him, crying, “My lord, has the queen received?” His grace artfully eluded the question, only saying most devoutly , “Her Majesty was in a heavenly disposition"-and the truth escaped the public.

She suffered more unjustly by declining to see her son, the Prince of Wales, to whom she sent her blessing and forgiveness; but conceiving the extreme distress it would lay on the King, should he thus be forced to forgive so impenitent a son, or to banish him again if once recalled, she heroically preferred a meritorious husband to a worthless child.

The Queen’s greatest error was too high an opinion of her own address and art; she imagined that all who did not dare to contradict her were imposed upon; and she had the additional weakness of thinking that she could play off @any persons without being discovered.  That mistaken humour, and at other times her hazarding very offensive truths, made her many enemies; and her duplicity in fomenting jealousies between the ministers, that each might be more dependent on herself, was no sound wisdom.  It was the Queen who blew into a flame the ill-blood between Sir Robert Walpole and his brother-in-law, Lord Townshend.  Yet though she disliked some of the cabinet, she never let her own prejudices disturb the King’s affairs, provided the obnoxious paid no court to the mistress.  Lord Islay was the only man, who, by managing Scotland for Sir Robert Walpole, was maintained by him in spite of his attachment to Lady Suffolk.

The Queen’s great secret was her own rupture, which, till her last illness, nobody knew but the King, her German nurse, Mrs. Mailborne, and one other person.  To prevent all suspicion, her Majesty would frequently stand some minutes in her shift talking to her ladies (114) and though labouring with so dangerous a complaint, she made it so invariable a rule never to refuse a desire of the King, that every morning at Richmond she walked several miles with him; and more than once, when she had the gout in her foot, she dipped her whole leg in cold water to be ready to attend him.  The pain, her bulk, and the exercise, threw her into such fits of perspiration as vented the gout; but those exertions hastened the crisis of her distemper.  It was great shrewdness in Sir Robert Walpole, who, before her distemper broke