The foreign
ministers were to come to court, and the king, in the midst of his real
grief, did not forget to send word to his pages to be sure to have his
last new ruffles sewed on the shirt he was to put on that day; a trifle
which often, as Lord Hervey remarks, shows more of the real character
than events of importance, from which one frequently knows no more of a
person's state of mind than one does of his natural gait from his
dancing.
Lady Sundon was, meantime, ill at Bath, so that the queen's secret
rested alone in her own heart. 'I have an ill,' she said, one evening,
to her daughter Caroline, 'that nobody knows of.' Still, neither the
princess nor Lord Hervey could guess at the full meaning of that sad
assertion.
The famous Sir Hans Sloane was then called in; but no remedy except
large and repeated bleedings were suggested, and blisters were put on
her legs. There seems to have been no means left untried by the faculty
to hasten the catastrophe--thus working in the dark.
The king now sat up with her whom he had so cruelly wounded in every
nice feeling. On being asked, by Lord Hervey, what was to be done in
case the Prince of Wales should come to inquire after the queen, he
answered in the following terms, worthy of his ancestry--worthy of
himself.
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