SHABBINESS OF KING'S ADVISERS 93 



Banks remained a sincere, well-meaning friend to the 

 last." Not many days after (May 8, 1827) she writes 

 what it never occurred to her, apparently, might 

 account for this alleged mean-spirited shabbiness: 

 " When in 1758 he again went to England, it was 

 under such unpleasant circumstances that he was 

 obliged to leave it to his mother to send his trunk 



O 



after him to Hamburg." 1 The nation or mob that 

 shot Admiral Byng for incapacity four months before 

 the Hanoverian bandsman deserted, that cashiered Lord 

 George Sackville for less two years before, and that 

 not only ridiculed the King's own uncle, "the poor 

 Duke," as Cumberland was called, " the lump of fat 

 crowned with laurel on the altar," 2 but " were new 

 grinding their teeth and nails to tear him to pieces the 

 instant he lands," 3 for a similar fault to Byng's, had 

 to be reckoned with in bestowing honours on a deserter. 

 So the King may have thought, and so his dilatoriness 

 and apparent shabbiness may be accounted for, as well 

 as the secrecy in which the affair was shrouded during 

 their lives. 



But there are circumstances which involve in still 

 greater obscurity the whole of these so-called bargains 

 between the King and William Herschel. Some years 

 after the death of both, an English writer spoke of the 

 ingratitude of England. But there is no proof that 

 Herschel, though settled in England, was ever natural- 

 ised. His sister, so far as words could go, threw off 

 her German nationality ; but words are not law. " I 

 was always sure to be noticed by the Duke of Cam- 

 bridge as his countrywoman," she wrote in 1835, " (and 



1 Memoirs, p. 211. 2 Referring to a cartoon of the day. 



3 Walpole's Letters, iii. 475, 284. 



