There the story was that Her Highness had been hurried away by force to a place of confinement.
When it could no longer be denied that her flight had been voluntary, numerous fictions were invented to account for it.

She had been grossly insulted; she had been threatened; nay, though she was in that situation in which woman is entitled to peculiar tenderness, she had been beaten by her cruel stepmother.

The populace, which years of misrule had made suspicious and irritable, was so much excited by these calumnies that the Queen was scarcely safe.

Many Roman Catholics, and some Protestant Tories whose loyalty was proof to all trials, repaired to the palace that they might be in readiness to defend her in the event of an outbreak.

In the midst of this distress and tenor arrived the news of Prince George's flight.