THE ROMANCE OF THE CORONET. By W.W. HUTCHINGS,

Otago Witness, Issue 2654, 25 January 1905, Page 79

THE ROMANCE OF THE CORONET.

By W.W. HUTCHINGS,

Author of "Guilty or JSTot Guilty?" "His-

torical Tragedies of London Life," " Humours of Life," &c, &c.

[Copyright.]

IV. LADY SARAH LENNOX AXD HER

ROYAL LOVER

Of all the ladies of the Court when George 111, a handsome young man of two-and-twenty, came to the throne, none perhaps was more beautiful, and none more sprightly, than the Lady Sarah Lennox, then in her sixteenth year. Horaoe Walpole, as good a judge of feminine charms as most men, goes into dithyrambs when he writes about her. In the year after the young King's accession she took the part of Jane Shore in some private theatricals at Holland House, and he tells us that she was '" more beautiful than you can conceive." She was all in white, and her hair trailed along the ground. "No Magdalen by Correggio," he declares, '' was ever half so lovely and expressive." Fortunately we are not left to mere word-painting of this paragon of loveliness. On the walls of Holland House, Kensington, there still hangs Sir Joshua's portrait of her, " a mngnifieent masterpiece "" Thackeray describes, it, '"a canvas worthy of Titian." The great artist shows hex', holding a bird in her hand, looking from a window at young black-eyed . Charles James Fox, her nephew, before whom there lay a parliamentary career of the highest distinction. A Susceptible Peinte. Though we associate George 111 with the hum-drum and the bucolic, in his early days ho was noi wanting in susceptibility to the charms of the fair. He had already fallen in love with the beautiful Quakeress, Hannah Lightfoot, but from that attack he had recovered. What more natural, then, that he should now become enamoured of the Lady Sarah? Xot only had she beauty and vivacity, but her veins ran with royal blood, for her grandfather, the first Duke of Richmond and Lennox, was a son of Char'.es II by the Duchess of Portsmouth. Whether Lady Sarah, on her part, was in love with the King is not quite clear. Horace Walpole declares that on fine summer mornings, diessed in a fancy costume which mimicked a peasant's, she would gracefully share the labours of the haymakers in the meadow in front of Holland House in order to give the King a reason for coming that way in his morning ride from St. James's Palace, and that he did not come without being reu aided nixh her sweetest smiles. But Walpole was a gossip, and is not to be followed blindly. It so happened that the young beauty's affections were already ■engaged. She had formed a girlish attachment for Lhe youthful Lord Ne^ bottle. ; grandson of the Maiquis of Lothian, and, i proud as she must have been to have made a, real conquest., die was not so heartless i as to be able to discard her eailier lover I j without a struggle.

The Krxc as Lover.

Of his love for the Lady Sarah the i King made no secret to her friends. At ( a drawing room at St James's he went up to her cousin and confidante, Lady Susan Strangeways, and asked in a whisper if she did not think the Coronation would be a much finer sight if there was a Queen. She did, of course. Well, did she not know somebody " who would grace the ceremony in the properest manner ? " At this very maladroit question the Lady ; Susan was a good deal embarrassed. the \ quite excusably thought the King vras ' speaking to her. He had therefore to ex- . plain — Let us hope he enjoyed it ! — that he ' meant the Lad}' Sarah Lennox. " Tell , her so," he added, " and let me have her J answer the next drawing room day." On another occasion the King, addressing the same lady, hoped she was not leaving town. She said she was. " But you will return in summer for the Coronation'! 1 " j said the King. When Lady Susan j answered that she hoped to, the King j said : " They talk of a wedding. There have been many proposals ; but I think ' an English match would do better than a foreign one. Pi ay tell Lady Sarah Lennox I say so."' This was as explicit as anything short of a formal proposal could be. It "was more than enough for the Lady Sarah's friends, and especially for her ambitious brother-in-law, Henry Fox, afterwards Lord Holland, the father of the Lady Sarah's black-eyed nephew ; and no opportunity i was lost of throwing her in her royal lover's way. Bub there was that unfortunate fondness for young Lord Newbottle. j She -found herself, as so many have done before and since, with a divided mind, j "and according to Grenville she confided * her hesitations to the King himself, pointing out to him, as briefly as she could, the inconveniences and difficulties in which he would be involved by an engagement ■ with her. He said, we learn from Gren- j ville. that '" that was his business ; he would stand them all ; his part was taken, 1 he wished to hear hers was likewise.' 1 j Lovr, vEEsrs Politics. ' Small wonder that in these circumstances^ poor Lady Sarah, broke with Lord New-" bottle, "very reluctantly," Grenville ' assures us, and we can well believe it. i Having made this sacrifice, she went into ' the country for a few da} r s. But now the I Fates intervened. By a fall from a horse ' she broke her leg, and her absence from town was necessarily prolonged from days to weeks. What a godseaid to those who were opposed to the match, and had already done their best to frustrate it ! The Princess Dowager, the widow of the King's father, fhe Prince of Wales, had a shrewd notion of what she and her children might expect if the King shared his throne with this lovely girl, and his counsels with her ambitious relatives ; and Lord Bute, her confidant, and the future Tory Prime Minister, had obvious reason for detesting the thought of a match with one who was so closely associated with Holland House. He had taken every oppofcunity to interrupt the conversations between the King and the Lady Sarah, and as for the Princess she had been, disgracefully rude to the lovely girl, had thrust herself in her wa3", and laughed in her face in the most offensive fashion. In the Lady Sarah's absence, her enemies relied mainly upon an appeal to the King's jealousy. Who could doubt. '. they insinuated, that she was still enamoured of her first love, Lord New- ' bottle V Precisely how the argument was presented we know not,, but whatever form ' it took, it prevailed. A marriage with the ! Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz had already been mooted. This was now ' pressed as the best solution of all the dim.- ' culties of the situation, and when the Lady , Sarah returned to town she found that she . had just mi&sed the crown ! And this after breaking with the lover of her own choice, who, as she said, complained as much of her as she did of the King ! BItrDESIIAID, XOT QIJEEK. It must have been with strange feelings that the La ly Sarah accepted the King's invitation to be one of the 10 unmarried daughters of dukes and earls who were to hold up the Queen's train at the wedding. Perhaps she found assuagement of her disappointment in the consciousness of outshining by her personal attractions the demuro little lady whose bridesmaid she was. Whatever the King felt he betrayed no emotion until the Archbishop of Canteibury came to the words. "As thou didst send Thy blessing upon Abraham and Sarah, to their great comfort, so vouchsafe to send Thy blessing upon these Thy servant?-." Then the royal cheeks blushed. At tbf Drawing Room on the following clay the King's equanimity was exposed to further trial. The aged Earl of Westmoreland mistook the Lady Sarah for her royal jujstiv&s, and would haye knelt and docs

homage to her! Fortunately the by. standers intervened, and a really shocking contretemps was just averted. As all the world knows, the King was a loyal husband to Queen Charlotte, and in a placid jog-trot fashion the royal pair lived happly enough. But he never ceased to have a feeling of tenderness for the beautiful woman whom he had come within air ace of raising to the throne. Many years after his marriage he paid a rare visit to the theatre, and when Mrs Pope, an actress who, both in voice and manner, was strikingly like the Lady Sarah, came on, he was heard to murmur, in a moment of abstraction, "She is like Lady Sarah still ! " Aruiß KO3IAKCE— Beauty. When, in the year after the King's marriage, the Lady' Sarah went to the altar on her own account, it was not her first love whom she met there, but Sir Charles Banbury, a sporting baronet. The match turned out badly, and 14 years later it Avas dissolved by Act of Parliament. She next married Colonel , George Napier, by whom she had five sons and three daughters. Of her sons, four became famous. Three rose to distinction as soldiers — Sir Charles James, the conqueror of Scinde ; George Thomas, who, as Commander-in-Chief at the Cape, turned the Boers out of Ports Xatal, and after the battle of Chillianwalla would have had the chief command in India, but that he considered it belonged by right to his brother Charts ; and William Francis, who both fought in and wrote a monumental history of the Peninsular war. A fourth son, Henry Edward, made his fame as an historian. At Colonel Napier's death, George 111 settled upon his widow and her children an income of £1000 a year. She died totally blind, but still keen and sprightly, in 1826, in her eighty-second year — the last surviving great-granddaughter, it was believed, of Charles 11.