Part 20

It would have been well could the Earl of Bristol have transmitted to his sons his other qualities. He was pious, moral, affectionate, sincere; a consistent Whig of the old school, and, as such, disapproving of Sir Robert Walpole, of the standing army, the corruptions, and that doctrine of expediency so unblushingly avowed by the ministers.

Created Earl of Bristol in 1714, the heir-apparent to his titles and estates was the elder brother, by a former marriage, of John, Lord Hervey; the dissolute, clever, whimsical Carr, Lord Hervey. Pope, in one of his satirical appeals to the _second_ Lord Hervey, speaks of his friendship with Carr, 'whose early death deprived the family' (of Hervey) 'of as much wit and honour as he left behind him in any part of it.' The _wit_ was a family attribute, but the _honour_ was dubious: Carr was as deistical as any Maccaroni of the day, and, perhaps, more dissolute than most: in one respect he has left behind him a celebrity which may be as questionable as his wit, or his honour; he is reputed to be the father of Horace Walpole, and if we accept presumptive evidence of the fact, the statement is clearly borne out, for in his wit, his indifference to religion, to say the least, his satirical turn, his love of the world, and his contempt of all that was great and good, he strongly resembles his reputed son; whilst the levity of Lady Walpole's character, and Sir Robert's laxity and dissoluteness, do not furnish any reasonable doubt to the statement made by Lady Louisa Stuart, in the introduction to Lord Wharncliffe's 'Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.' Carr, Lord Hervey, died early, and his half-brother succeeded him in his title and expectations.

John, Lord Hervey, was educated first at Westminster School, under Dr. Freind, the friend of Mrs. Montagu; thence he was removed to Clare Hall, Cambridge: he graduated as a nobleman, and became M.A. in 1715.

At Cambridge Lord Hervey might have acquired some manly prowess; but he had a mother who was as strange as the family into which she had married, and who was passionately devoted to her son: she evinced her affection by never letting him have a chance of being like other English boys. When his father was at Newmarket, Jack Hervey, as he was called, was to ride a race, to please his father; but his mother could not risk her dear boy's safety, and the race was won by a jockey. He was as precious and as fragile as porcelain: the elder brother's death made the heir of the Herveys more valuable, more effeminate, and more controlled than ever by his eccentric mother. A court was to be his hemisphere, and to that all his views, early in life, tended. He went to Hanover to pay his court to George I.: Carr had done the same, and had come back enchanted with George, the heir-presumptive, who made him one of the lords of the bedchamber. Jack Hervey also returned full of enthusiasm for the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II., and the Princess; and that visit influenced his destiny.

He now proposed making the grand tour, which comprised Paris, Germany, and Italy. But his mother again interfered: she wept, she exhorted, she prevailed. Means were refused, and the stripling was recalled to hang about the court, or to loiter at Ickworth, scribbling verses, and causing his father uneasiness lest he should be too much of a poet, and too little of a public man.

Such was his youth: disappointed by not obtaining a commission in the Guards, he led a desultory butterfly-like life; one day at Richmond with Queen Caroline, then Princess of Wales; another, at Pope's villa, at Twickenham; sometimes in the House of Commons, in which he succeeded his elder brother as member for Bury; and, at the period when he has been described as forming one of the quartett in Queen Caroline's closet at St. James's, as vice-chamberlain to his partial and royal patroness.

His early marriage with Mary Lepel, the beautiful maid of honour to Queen Caroline, insured his felicity, though it did not curb his predilections for other ladies.

Henceforth Lord Hervey lived all the year round in what were then called lodgings, that is, apartments appropriated to the royal household, or even to others, in St. James's, or at Richmond, or at Windsor. In order fully to comprehend all the intimate relations which he had with the court, it is necessary to present the reader with some account of the family of George II. Five daughters had been the female issue of his majesty's marriage with Queen Caroline. Three of these princesses, the three elder ones, had lived, during the life of George I., at St. James's with their grandfather; who, irritated by the differences between him and his son, then Prince of Wales, adopted that measure rather as showing his authority than from any affection to the young princesses. It was, in truth, difficult to say which of these royal ladies was the most unfortunate.

Anne, the eldest, had shown her spirit early in life whilst residing with George I.; she had a proud, imperious nature, and her temper was, it must be owned, put to a severe test. The only time that George I. did the English the _honour_ of choosing one of the beauties of the nation for his mistress, was during the last year of his reign. The object of his choice was Anne Brett, the eldest daughter of the infamous Countess of Macclesfield by her second husband. The neglect of Savage, the poet, her son, was merely one passage in the iniquitous life of Lady Macclesfield. Endowed with singular taste and judgment, consulted by Colley Cibber on every new play he produced, the mother of Savage was not only wholly destitute of all virtue, but of all shame. One day, looking out of the window, she perceived a very handsome man assaulted by some bailiffs who were going to arrest him: she paid his debt, released, and married him. The hero of this story was Colonel Brett, the father of Anne Brett.

The child of such a mother was not likely to be even decently-respectable; and Anne was proud of her disgraceful preeminence and of her disgusting and royal lover. She was dark, and her flashing black eyes resembled those of a Spanish beauty. Ten years after the death of George I., she found a husband in Sir William Leman, of Northall, and was announced, on that occasion, as the half-sister of Richard Savage.

To the society of this woman, when at St. James's, as 'Mistress Brett,' the three princesses were subjected: at the same time the Duchess of Kendal, the king's German mistress, occupied other lodgings at St. James's.

Miss Brett was to be rewarded with the coronet of a countess for her degradation, the king being absent on the occasion at Hanover; elated by her expectations, she took the liberty, during his majesty's absence, of ordering a door to be broken out of her apartment into the royal garden, where the princesses walked. The Princess Anne, not deigning to associate with her, commanded that it should be forthwith closed. Miss Brett imperiously reversed that order. In the midst of the affair, the king died suddenly, and Anne Brett's reign was over, and her influence soon as much forgotten as if she had never existed. The Princess Anne was pining in the dulness of her royal home, when a marriage with the Prince of Orange, was proposed for the consideration of his parents. It was a miserable match as well as a miserable prospect, for the prince's revenue amounted to no more than £12,000 a year; and the state and pomp to which the Princess Royal had been accustomed could not be contemplated on so small a fortune. It was still worse in point of that poor consideration, happiness. The Prince of Orange was both deformed and disgusting in his person, though his face was sensible in expression; and if he inspired one idea more strongly than another when he appeared in his uniform and cocked hat, and spoke bad French, or worse English, it was that of seeing before one a dressed-up baboon.

It was a bitter cup for the princess to drink, but she drank it: she reflected that it might be the only way of quitting a court where, in case of her father's death, she would be dependent on her brother Frederick, or on that weak prince's strong-minded wife. So she consented, and took the dwarf; and that consent was regarded by a grateful people, and by all good courtiers, as a sacrifice for the sake of Protestant principles, the House of Orange being, _par excellence_, at the head of the orthodox dynasties in Europe. A dowry of £80,000 was forthwith granted by an admiring Commons--just double what had ever been given before. That sum was happily lying in the exchequer, being the purchase-money of some lands in St. Christopher's which had lately been sold; and King George was thankful to get rid of a daughter whose haughtiness gave him trouble. In person, too, the princess royal was not very ornamental to the Court. She was ill-made, with a propensity to grow fat; her complexion, otherwise very fine, was marked with the small-pox; she had, however, a lively, clean look--one of her chief beauties--and a certain royalty of manner.

The Princess Amelia died, as the world thought, single, but consoled herself with various love flirtations. The Duke of Newcastle made love to her, but her affections were centred on the Duke of Grafton, to whom she was privately married, as is confidently asserted.

The Princess Caroline was the darling of her family. Even the king relied on her truth. When there was any dispute, he used to say, 'Send for Caroline; she will tell us the right story.'

Her fate had its clouds. Amiable, gentle, of unbounded charity, with strong affections, which were not suffered to flow in a legitimate channel, she became devotedly attached to Lord Hervey: her heart was bound up in him; his death drove her into a permanent retreat from the world. No debasing connection existed between them; but it is misery, it is sin enough to love another woman's husband--and that sin, that misery, was the lot of the royal and otherwise virtuous Caroline.

The Princess Mary, another victim to conventionalities, was united to Frederick, Landgrave of Hesse Cassel; a barbarian, from whom she escaped, whenever she could, to come, with a bleeding heart, to her English home. She was, even Horace Walpole allows, 'of the softest, mildest temper in the world,' and fondly beloved by her sister Caroline, and by the 'Butcher of Culloden,' William, Duke of Cumberland.

Louisa became Queen of Denmark in 1746, after some years' marriage to the Crown Prince. 'We are lucky,' Horace Walpole writes on that occasion, 'in the death of kings.'

The two princesses who were still under the paternal roof were contrasts. Caroline was a constant invalid, gentle, sincere, unambitious, devoted to her mother, whose death nearly killed her. Amelia affected popularity, and assumed the _esprit fort_--was fond of meddling in politics, and after the death of her mother, joined the Bedford faction, in opposition to her father. But both these princesses were outwardly submissive when Lord Hervey became the Queen's chamberlain.

The evenings at St. James's were spent in the same way as those at Kensington.

Quadrille formed her majesty's pastime, and, whilst Lord Hervey played pools of cribbage with the Princess Caroline and the maids of honour, the Duke of Cumberland amused himself and the Princess Amelia at 'buffet.' On Mondays and Fridays there were drawing-rooms held; and these receptions took place, very wisely, in the evening.

Beneath all the show of gaiety and the freezing ceremony of those stately occasions, there was in that court as much misery as family dissensions, or, to speak accurately, family hatreds can engender. Endless jealousies, which seem to us as frivolous as they were rabid; and contentions, of which even the origin is still unexplained, had long severed the queen from her eldest son. George II. had always loved his mother: his affection for the unhappy Sophia Dorothea was one of the very few traits of goodness in a character utterly vulgar, sensual, and entirely selfish. His son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, on the other hand, hated his mother. He loved neither of his parents: but the queen had the preeminence in his aversion.

The king, during the year 1736, was at Hanover. His return was announced, but under circumstances of danger. A tremendous storm arose just as he was prepared to embark at Helvoetsluys. All London was on the look out, weather-cocks were watched; tides, winds, and moons formed the only subjects of conversation; but no one of his majesty's subjects was so demonstrative as the Prince of Wales, and his cheerfulness, and his triumph even, on the occasion, were of course resentfully heard of by the queen.

During the storm, when anxiety had almost amounted to fever, Lord Hervey dined with Sir Robert Walpole. Their conversation naturally turned on the state of affairs, prospectively. Sir Robert called the prince a 'poor, weak, irresolute, false, lying, contemptible wretch.' Lord Hervey did not defend him, but suggested that Frederick, in case of his father's death, might be more influenced by the queen than he had hitherto been. 'Zounds, my lord!' interrupted Sir Robert, 'he would tear the flesh off her bones with red-hot irons sooner! The distinctions she shows to you, too, I believe, would not be forgotten. Then the notion he has of his great riches, and the desire he has of fingering them, would make him pinch her, and pinch her again, in order to make her buy her ease, till she had not a groat left.'

What a picture of a heartless and selfish character! The next day the queen sent for Lord Hervey, to ask him if he knew the particulars of a great dinner which the prince had given to the lord mayor the previous day, whilst the whole country, and the court in particular, was trembling for the safety of the king, his father. Lord Hervey told her that the prince's speech at the dinner was the most ingratiating piece of popularity ever heard; the healths, of course, as usual. 'Heavens!' cried the queen: 'popularity always makes me sick, but _Fritz's_ popularity makes me vomit! I hear that yesterday, on the prince's side of the House, they talked of the king's being cast away with the same _sang froid_ as you would talk of an overturn; and that my good son strutted about as if he had been already king. Did you mark the airs with which he came into my drawing-room in the morning? though he does not think fit to honour me with his presence, or _ennui_ me with his wife's, of an evening? I felt something here in my throat that swelled and half-choked me.'

Poor Queen Caroline! with such a son, and such a husband, she must have been possessed of a more than usual share of German imperturbability to sustain her cheerfulness, writhing, as she often was, under the pangs of a long-concealed disorder, of which eventually she died. Even on the occasion of the king's return in time to spend his birthday in England, the queen's temper had been sorely tried. Nothing had ever vexed her more than the king's admiration for Amelia Sophia Walmoden, who, after the death of Caroline, was created Countess of Yarmouth. Madame Walmoden had been a reigning belle among the married women at Hanover, when George II. visited that country in 1735. Not that her majesty's affections were wounded; it was her pride that was hurt by the idea that people would think that this Hanoverian lady had more influence than she had. In other respects the king's absence was a relief: she had the _éclat_ of the regency; she had the comfort of having the hours which her royal torment decreed were to be passed in amusing his dulness, to herself; she was free from his 'quotidian sallies of temper, which,' as Lord Hervey relates, 'let it be charged by what hand it would, used always to discharge its hottest fire, on some pretence or other, upon her.'

It is quite true that from the first dawn of his preference for Madame Walmoden, the king wrote circumstantial letters of fifty or sixty pages to the queen, informing her of every stage of the affair; the queen, in reply, saying that she was only _one_ woman, and an old woman, and adding, 'that he might love _more and younger women_.' In return, the king wrote, 'You must love the Walmoden, for she loves _you_;' a civil insult, which he accompanied with so minute a description of his new favourite, that the queen, had she been a painter, might have drawn her portrait at a hundred miles' distance.

The queen, subservient as she seemed, felt the humiliation. Such was the debased nature of George II. that he not only wrote letters unworthy of a man to write, and unfit for a woman to read, to his wife, but he desired her to show them to Sir Robert Walpole. He used to 'tag several paragraphs,' as Lord Hervey expresses it, with these words, '_Montrez ceci, et consultez la-dessus de gros homme_,' meaning Sir Robert. But this was only a portion of the disgusting disclosures made by the vulgar licentious monarch to his too degraded consort.

In the bitterness of her mortification the queen consulted Lord Hervey and Sir Robert as to the possibility of her losing her influence, should she resent the king's delay in returning. They agreed, that her taking the '_fière_ turn' would ruin her with her royal consort; Sir Robert adding, that if he had a mind to flatter her into her ruin, he might talk to her as if she were twenty-five, and try to make her imagine that she could bring the king back by the apprehension of losing her affection. He said it was now too late in her life to try new methods; she must persist in the soothing, coaxing, submissive arts which had been practised with success, and even press his majesty to bring this woman to England! 'He taught her,' says Lord Hervey, 'this hard lesson till she _wept_.' Nevertheless, the queen expressed her gratitude to the minister for his advice. 'My lord,' said Walpole to Hervey, 'she laid her thanks on me so thick that I found I had gone too far, for I am never so much afraid of her rebukes as of her commendations.'

Such was the state of affairs between this singular couple. Nevertheless, the queen, not from attachment to the king, but from the horror she had of her son's reigning, felt such fears of the prince's succeeding to the throne as she could hardly express. He would, she was convinced, do all he could to ruin and injure her in case of his accession to the throne.

The consolation of such a friend as Lord Hervey can easily be conceived, when he told her majesty that he had resolved, in case the king had been lost at sea, to have retired from her service, in order to prevent any jealousy or irritation that might arise from his supposed influence with her majesty. The queen stopped him short, and said, 'No, my lord, I should never have suffered that; you are one of the greatest pleasures of my life. But did I love you less than I do, or less like to have you about me, I should look upon the suffering you to be taken from me as such a meanness and baseness that you should not have stirred an inch from me. You,' she added, 'should have gone with me to Somerset House;' (which was hers in case of the king's death). She then told him she should have begged Sir Robert Walpole on her knees not to have sent in his resignation.

The animosity of the Prince of Wales to Lord Hervey augmented, there can be no doubt, his unnatural aversion to the queen, an aversion which he evinced early in life. There was a beautiful, giddy maid of honour, who attracted not only the attention of Frederick, but the rival attentions of other suitors, and among them, the most favoured was said to be Lord Hervey, notwithstanding that he had then been for some years the husband of one of the loveliest ornaments of the court, the sensible and virtuous Mary Lepel. Miss Vane became eventually the avowed favourite of the prince, and after giving birth to a son, who was christened Fitz-Frederick Vane, and who died in 1736, his unhappy mother died a few months afterwards. It is melancholy to read a letter from Lady Hervey to Mrs. Howard, portraying the frolic and levity of this once joyous creature, among the other maids of honour; and her strictures show at once the unrefined nature of the pranks in which they indulged, and her once sobriety of demeanour.

She speaks, on one occasion, in which, however, Miss Vane did not share the nocturnal diversion, of some of the maids of honour being out in the winter all night in the gardens at Kensington--opening and rattling the windows, and trying to frighten people out of their wits; and she gives Mrs. Howard a hint that the queen ought to be informed of the way in which her young attendants amused themselves. After levities such as these, it is not surprising to find poor Miss Vane writing to Mrs. Howard, with complaints that she was unjustly aspersed, and referring to her relatives, Lady Betty Nightingale and Lady Hewet, in testimony of the falsehood of reports which, unhappily, the event verified.

The prince, however, never forgave Lord Hervey for being his rival with Miss Vane, nor his mother for her favours to Lord Hervey. In vain did the queen endeavour to reconcile Fritz, as she called him, to his father;--nothing could be done in a case where the one was all dogged selfishness; and where the other, the idol of the opposition party, as the prince had ever been, so _legère de tête_ as to swallow all the adulation offered to him, and to believe himself a demigod. 'The queen's dread of a rival,' Horace Walpole remarks, 'was a feminine weakness: the behaviour of her eldest son was a real thorn.' Some time before his marriage to a princess who was supposed to augment his hatred of his mother, Frederick of Wales had contemplated an act of disobedience. Soon after his arrival in England, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, hearing that he was in want of money, had sent to offer him her granddaughter, Lady Diana Spencer, with a fortune of £100,000. The prince accepted the young lady, and a day was fixed for his marriage in the duchess's lodge at the Great Park, Windsor. But Sir Robert Walpole, getting intelligence of the plot, the nuptials were stopped. The duchess never forgave either Walpole or the royal family, and took an early opportunity of insulting the latter. When the Prince of Orange came over to marry the Princess Royal, a sort of boarded gallery was erected from the windows of the great drawing-room of the palace, and was constructed so as to cross the garden to the Lutheran chapel in the Friary, where the duchess lived. The Prince of Orange being ill, went to Bath, and the marriage was delayed for some weeks. Meantime the widows of Marlborough House were darkened by the gallery. 'I wonder,' cried the old duchess, 'when my neighbour George will take away his orange-chest!' The structure, with its pent-house roof, really resembling an orange-chest.