It was such a pleasure, in the midst of her anxieties, to spend an hour with the child. He always greeted her gravely, giving her the required homage and then having done his duty he would chat in a carefree way without a hint of shyness.
“How is my nephew today?” asked Mary.
“My dear Queen,” he answered, “I am taken too much care of. Did they take too much care of
“I don’t think they did,” replied Mary.
“You were lucky. ‘He mustn’t walk too much.’ As if I could? ‘He is getting over excited. He must be bled.’ Do you know there is a blister on the back of my neck?”
“No. Show me.”
He did.
“It is the doctors. They are always doing something to me.” He began to laugh. “They tried to fit me with a periwig. The blister was in the way.”
“So no periwig,” laughed Mary. “I think I like you better without.”
“Still, as heir to the throne I should have a periwig. I should like to be Prince of Wales. Why cannot I be?”
A difficult question. He knew nothing of his grandfather who had been driven from his throne, for all those about him had been forbidden to mention the matter. Why couldn’t he be Prince of Wales? How could one explain that in France there was a boy who was called the Prince of Wales. Not that he was accepted as such over here. But to give this boy the title would immediately give the Jacobites a fresh cause for complaint.
“You are young yet. All in good time.”
“Some people have been Prince of Wales when they are babies.”
“I think Duke of Gloucester a better title.”
“I don’t,” said the boy.
“Well, come and look at the men working on the masonry. You will be interested and I want to see how they are getting on.”
“It is good.”
“What?”
“To be a mason. I would like to be a mason.”
Mary smiled. Prince of Wales one moment, a mason the next.
“I think,” she said, “you enjoy these little jaunts to the Palace.”
“It is good to escape from them all. There is Lewis, my governess and her husband, and Mama as well as Pack. They are always there to see I do not tire myself, or if I need the leeches. Of course I wish I could walk better.”
“You will when you’re older.”
“There is so much to wait for. I wish I were older.”
“Most of us grow up too quickly.”
That was a point which made him pause to consider. Later he would inform someone that most of us grew up too quickly—that was as if he had convinced himself that it was so.
But when he watched the masons he was a child again, crying out with pleasure when one of the masons gave him a tool and showed him how to work with it. His big head on one side, an expression of deepest concentration on his face, he did as instructed and then turned to Mary, his eyes alight with triumph.
“I wish I were a mason,” he said.
“You are all wishes.”
“And you are not?”
She was silent and he went on: “But then you are the Queen. You can have everything you want so you don’t have to wish long.”
She looked at him wistfully and thought: If you were my son I should be very happy.
When she left him she told him that a surprise would be coming to him.
In a few days he received a set of exquisite ivory tools. They had cost twenty pounds, which was a large sum, but worth it, Mary thought, to give him pleasure.
He played with them for a few days; then he saw the soldiers when he was out on one of his trips in the carriage with Lewis Jenkins, his Welsh attendant. He insisted on stopping to watch them drill, and spoke to them.
Then he knew that more than anything on earth, more than a mason, more than Prince of Wales, he wanted to be a soldier.
Anne, whose greatest quality was her devotion to her family, went to Campden House and stayed there. Sarah
