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One royal soul there is who never will consent to have the Double-Marriage die: Queen Sophie. She had passed her own private act-of-parliament for it; she was a very obstinate wife, to a husband equally obstinate. She corresponds on it with Queen Caroline of England; she keeps her two children true to it, especially her Son, the more important of them.
These things may slightly ruffle some tempers at Hanover; but it is now 1733, and our poor Double-Marriage is clean out of the game by that time!
These delays about the Double-Marriage Treaty are not a pleasing feature of it to Friedrich Wilhelm; who is very capable of being hurt by slights; who, at any rate, dislikes to have loose thrums flying about, or that the business of to-day should be shoved over upon to-morrow.
Settled many or all things were by Townshend and the others: but before signing, there was Parliament to be apprised, there were formalities, expenditure of time; between the cup and the lip, such things to intervene; and the sad fact is, the Double-Marriage Treaty never was signed at all!
That of the "Double-Marriage," for example; of marrying her Prince and Princess to a Princess and Prince of the English-Hanoverian House; it was a pleasant eligible plan, consented to by Papa and the other parties; but when it came to be perfected by treaty, amid the rubs of external and internal politics, what new amazing discrepancies rose upon her poor children and her!
Enough that High Heads are set upon it; that the diplomatic wigs are all wagging with it, from about the beginning of October, 1732; and rumors are rife and eager, occasionally spurting out into the Newspapers: Double-Marriage after all, hint the old Rumors: Double-Marriage somehow or other; Crown-Prince to have his English Princess, Prince Fred of England to console the Brunswick one for loss of her Crown-Prince; or else Prince Karl of Brunswick to And half a dozen other ways; which Rumor cannot settle to its satisfaction.
Her poor Mother, once so radiant, now so dim and angry, shut in the Castle of Ahlden, does not approve this Double-Marriage; not she for her part; as indeed evil to all Hanoverian interests is now chiefly her good, poor Lady; and she is growing more and more of a Megaera every day.
To Queen Sophie herself, who saw only the outside of Seckendorf and his Apparatus, the matter doubtless seemed big with difficulties; but to us, who see the interior, the difficulties are plainly hopeless. Unless the Kaiser's mind change, unless many fixed things change, the Double-Marriage is impossible.
These were the first rubs Queen Sophie met with, in pushing on the Double-Marriage; and sore rubs they were, though she at last got over them.
What were Grumkow's news at home-coming, I did not hear; but he continues very low and shaky; refuses, almost with horror, to have the least hand in Seckendorf's mad project, of resuscitating the English Double-Marriage, and breaking off the Brunswick one, at the eleventh hour and after word pledged.
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