“The Queen is thus placed under the painful necessity of intimating to the Princess of Wales the impossibility of her Majesty’s receiving her Royal Highness at her drawing-rooms.
ANSWER OF THE PRINCESS OF WALES TO THE QUEEN.
“MADAM,—I have received the letter which your Majesty has done me the honour to address to me, prohibiting my appearance at the public drawing-rooms which will be held by your Majesty in the ensuing month, with great surprise and regret.
“I will not presume to discuss with your Majesty topics which must be as painful to your Majesty as to myself.
“Your Majesty is well acquainted with the affectionate regard with which the King was so kind as to honour me up to the period of his Majesty’s indisposition, which no one of his Majesty’s subjects has so much cause to lament as myself: and that his Majesty was graciously pleased to bestow upon me the most unequivocal and gratifying proof of his attachment and approbation, by his public reception of me at his court at a season of severe and unmerited affliction, when his protection was most necessary to me. There I have since uninterruptedly paid my respects to your Majesty. I am now without appeal or protection. But I cannot so far forget my duty to the King, and to myself, as to surrender my right to appear at any public drawing-room to be held by your Majesty.
“That I may not, however, add to the difficulty and uneasiness of your Majesty’s situation, I yield in the present instance to the will of his Royal Highness the Prince Regent, announced to me by your Majesty, and shall not present myself at the drawing-rooms of the next month.
“It would be presumptuous in me to attempt to inquire of your Majesty the reasons of his Royal Highness the Prince Regent for this harsh proceeding, of which his Royal Highness can alone be the judge. I am unconscious of offence; and in that reflection I must endeavour to find consolation for all the mortifications I experience; even for this, the last, the most unexpected, and the most severe; the prohibition given to me alone, to appear before your Majesty, to offer my congratulations upon the happy termination of those calamities with which Europe has been so long afflicted, in the presence of the illustrious personages who will in all probability be assembled at your Majesty’s court, with whom I am so closely connected by birth and marriage.