THE BEAUTIFUL VANILLA.
An early marriage with a beautiful girl such as Lady Diana Spencer
would probably have been the best thing which could have happened to
the young Prince of Wales; it would possibly have obliterated the scars
of his old love for his cousin Wilhelmina, which wounds certainly
broke out again at a later period, and it might have kept him from
disgraceful liaisons; at any rate it would have left him without excuse
for them. The first of these _affaires du cœur_, began in a flirtation
and ended in a tragedy as so many of these unfortunate attachments do.
Who knows its beginning? Perhaps a kiss in the dark corridors of St.
James’s Palace!
The object of it was Miss Anne Vane (the “beautiful Vanilla”), daughter
of Gilbert, 2nd Lord Barnard, a maid-of-honour to the Queen, and sister
to the 1st Lord Darlington.
This young lady was possessed of much beauty, but is not credited with
cleverness as we understand it, which was all the worse for her, as
she found herself among a set of unscrupulous courtiers, such as Lords
Harrington and Hervey, the latter of whom was not at all above boasting
of conquests over the opposite sex which he had not achieved, if such
a word can be used in connection with the meanest act on earth.
Miss Vane is said to have been full of levity which was the result of
her want of cleverness, perhaps, and possessed, no doubt, the usual
quantity of vanity which is allotted to a pretty girl with plenty of
admirers, but on the whole it cannot be doubted that she was fond of
the Prince, and, as a result of it, paid that penalty for a love which
many young ladies do who place their affections on a man who is unable
to marry them--she became a mother. The Prince of Wales, however, did a
man’s duty, and at once acknowledged the child.
The whole matter appears to have been very deplorable. The birth of the
child--a boy--took place in her apartments as maid-of-honour in the
palace of St. James’s, and the baby was baptized in the Chapel Royal,
and given the name of Fitz Frederick Vane, evidently with the Prince’s
full concurrence. (1732). He made no denial of his blame in the matter
either in public or in private, but took the whole responsibility upon
his own shoulders. In addition, as will be seen, he loved children.
The Queen, of course, lost very little time in turning her unfortunate
maid-of-honour out of the Palace as soon as she was fit to go, and her
family accentuated the Queen’s action by at once turning their backs
upon her. The Prince did what little he was able to do to atone in a
way for the great injury he had done her. He took a house for her and
her child in Grosvenor Street, and provided her with an income out of
the uncertain allowance he received from the King. This affair, there
is no doubt, laid the foundation of those debts which grew to be such a
weight round his neck later on.
This state of affairs having continued for some time, there however
appeared on the scene a remarkable person in the shape of Lady
Archibald Hamilton, who from that time forth exerted a strong--and
baneful--influence on the Prince’s life.[26]
Lady Archibald was five-and-thirty, the mother of ten children, and
is said not to have possessed any special good looks, but she must,
however, have been possessed of a strong will and a subtle power of
fascination--which many plain women have--for she in a very short time
subjugated the Prince of Wales and tied him, in the public gaze, at any
rate, to her chariot wheels.
The very first act of this woman as is so often the case, was to turn
the power she had gained against the poor girl, her rival, whose
reputation the Prince had ruined. She urged him to get rid of her.
There is no question whatever that the Prince was at this time
thoroughly fascinated by Lady Archibald. Lord Hervey, who plays a
wretched part in this episode, comments on his infatuation as follows:
“He,” the Prince, “saw her often at her own house, where he seemed
as welcome to the master as the mistress; he met her often at
her sister’s; walked with her day after day for hours together
_tête-à-tête_ in a morning in St. James’s Park; and whenever she was
at the Drawing Room (which was pretty frequent) his behaviour was so
remarkable that his nose and her ear were inseparable.”
Lord Hervey, it has been said, played a despicable part in this affair,
more despicable perhaps because he had been the Prince’s friend--a very
false one.
John, Lord Hervey, was the eldest son of the first Earl of Bristol, had
been Gentleman of the Bedchamber to George the Second when Prince of
Wales, and was a great favourite with Caroline the Queen.
It is difficult to estimate the amount of mischief this wretched man
made between the Queen and her son, the Prince of Wales; one thing is
quite certain, and that is, that from the time a coolness sprang up
between the Prince and Lord Hervey--and there was good reason for it as
will be seen--things began to take a much worse turn between the former
and his royal parents.
Hervey was the Queen’s devoted companion, and bearer of tittle tattle.
She did not scruple to even allow him to sit by her bed when she was
ill and amuse her with gossip, and to this arrangement the King seems
to have offered no objection, though he was devoted to Caroline. The
Prince of Wales, however, expressed himself strongly on the subject of
Hervey’s association with his mother and sisters.
The Queen appears to have selected a strange companion. The following
is a description of his appearance and character:
“He was considered an exquisite beau and wit, and showed himself in
after life to be possessed of considerable ability both as writer
and orator.” (He was the author of the well-known “Memoirs of the
Reign of George the Second”). “He was an accomplished courtier, and
possessed some of the worst vices of courtiers; he was double-faced,
untrustworthy, and ungrateful. He had a frivolous and effeminate
character; he was full of petty spite and meannesses, and given to
painting his face and other abominations, which earned for him the
nickname of ‘Lord Fanny.’”
He is described by some of the poets of the time as being possessed of
great personal beauty; the Duchess of Marlborough was of an opposite
opinion:
“He has certainly parts and wit,” she writes, “but is the most wretched
profligate man that ever was born, besides ridiculous; a painted face
and not a tooth in his head.”[27]
He appears, however, to have been a favourite with the fair sex,
even to marrying the beautiful Mary Lepel, maid-of-honour to the Queen
when Princess of Wales.
[Illustration:
_National Portrait Gallery._ _Emery Walker._
LORD HERVEY.]
Poor Mary!
Lord Hervey had been a married man over ten years when the first
rumours of the Vane scandal began to permeate St. James’s about the end
of 1731. It was then that the estrangement between the Prince of Wales
and Lord Hervey began, and the reason for it is not far to seek.
Lord Hervey had been talking of Miss Vane, and his remarks had reached
the ears of Frederick.
Horace Walpole gives the key to the whole matter in his
“Reminiscences”; he states that the Prince of Wales, Lord Hervey and
the 1st Lord Harrington _each_ came to his brother, Sir Robert, and
confided the fact of being the father of Miss Vane’s child!
As far as the Prince of Wales was concerned, it is to be understood; he
had committed a grave fault, he had incurred a grave responsibility,
he had no wish to shirk it, although as we know he was kept very short
of money by his father. He knew that as a man he was bound to see this
poor girl through her trouble at any cost, and he did it.
But how about the cur Hervey with the painted face, and his finicking
woman’s tittle-tattle? How about Lord Harrington, who was little better?
Either these two were lying, or they were playing the most despicable
parts that men could play, viz., boasting of their prowess in ruining a
young girl, deserting her in her trouble, and shifting the public blame
on to some one else.
But as far as Lord Hervey is concerned, it is more probable that he
was lying; the circumstances look very much like it. He had evidently
been an admirer of the beautiful Miss Vane before the Prince devoted
himself to her; it is more than probable that the Prince cut him out,
and that the reason of their quarrel was simply jealousy, accentuated
by Hervey’s spiteful tongue. Certainly hereafter the Prince had no
more bitter enemy than Lord Hervey, and, unfortunately, the latter
was placed in a position about the Queen which enabled him to fan the
embers of their quarrel, and to do the Prince’s cause an infinity of
harm. Certainly no one can read the history of that period without
coming to this conclusion.
It has been seen that the Prince of Wales, however, had formed an
attachment to another lady, much older than himself, a woman of the
world, the mother of ten children, Lady Archibald Hamilton, and this
lady had availed herself of her ascendancy over him to urge him to
break with Miss Vane. It may be very fairly surmised that the boastings
of Hervey and Hamilton were pretty well dinned into his ears; at any
rate Lady Archibald succeeded in persuading him, probably in a fit of
jealous anger, to send one of his lords in waiting, Lord Baltimore, to
Miss Vane with an insulting message.
This message, as it is recorded in history, does not read like a man’s
message at all; it savours far more of the composition of a spiteful
woman. In it the Prince is represented as desiring her to go abroad for
two or three years, and to leave her son to be educated in England. If
she agreed, she was to receive from the Prince her usual allowance of
£1,600 a year for life. The message is said to have concluded in the
following words: “If she would not live abroad, she might starve for
him in England.”
A most unlikely ending to have come from the Prince, having regard to
his known habits of kind-heartedness and courtesy.
It is needless to say that Miss Vane was deeply hurt at this message,
and declined to answer it by Lord Baltimore.
It is here that Lord Hervey comes again upon the scene.
He states that Miss Vane sent for him and telling him of the Prince’s
message asked his advice as a friend; the result was the following
letter, which, if Miss Vane wrote it, certainly Lord Hervey composed
it, with a view, as it can easily be seen, to its future publication;
it ran as follows:
“Your Royal Highness need not be put in mind who I am, nor whence you
took me; that I acted not like what I was born, others may reproach
me, but you took me from happiness and brought me to misery, that I
might reproach you. That I have long lost your heart I have long seen,
and long mourned; to gain it, or rather to reward the gift you made
me of it, I sacrificed my time, my youth, my character, the world, my
family, and everything that a woman can sacrifice to a man she loves;
how little I considered my interest you must know by my never naming
my interest to you, when I made this sacrifice, and by my trusting to
your honour, when I showed so little regard, when put in balance with
my love to my own. I have resigned everything for your sake but my
life; and had you loved me still, I would have risked even that, too,
to please you; but as it is I cannot think in my state of health[28]
of going out of England, far from all friends and all physicians I
can trust, and of whom I stand so much in need. My child is the only
consolation I have left, I cannot leave him, nor shall anything but
death ever make me quit the country he is in.”
When the Prince received this letter, strangely enough, he did not
dissolve into tears at its pathos; he was on the contrary exceedingly
angry. He said at once that Miss Vane--or “the minx” as it is
reported--“was incapable of writing such a letter, and that he would
punish the ‘rascal’ who had dictated it to her.”
He was probably well acquainted with her capabilities in this respect,
and possibly knew her modes of expression very well; as a rule the
ladies of the Court of that time were nothing like so refined in their
correspondence; this was evidently the composition of a man and one
indeed skilled in letters. All this would be extremely strange if one
element which prevailed at the time were not well known, viz., that
the clever, diplomatic, Queen Caroline was exceedingly anxious that
the Prince, her son, should break with Miss Vane, as she had a strong
wish that he should marry, and this well-known liaison might form an
obstacle, though apparently she had no particular Princess in view.
There is another point, also, which must not be lost sight of, and that
is that during the three years and more that the Prince had been in
England, he had grown year by year in popular favour, and had entirely
eclipsed the Queen’s favourite son, the Duke of Cumberland, whom as
we know the King and Queen would gladly have seen in his brother
Frederick’s place as heir to the English throne.
It is impossible to say how far the crafty Hervey with his great
influence over the Queen may have worked upon this feeling of jealousy
at her eldest son’s popularity.
Unnatural as it seems, unless we read it in the light of later events,
the Queen may have been induced to take a hidden part in this affair of
Miss Vane to decrease the Prince of Wales’s growing popularity with the
people.
For what followed? Very soon the details of this affair began to leak
out among the public, a series of scurrilous songs and pamphlets began
to make their appearance: “Vanilla, or the Amours of the Court”;
“Vanessi, or the Humours of the Court of Modern Gallantry”; and a
particularly offensive one “Vanilla on the Straw.”
Knowing as we do that Lord Hervey composed Miss Vane’s answer to the
Prince’s message, that the copy of it was soon made public, and the
Prince’s cruel message widely disseminated by Miss Vane, who apparently
was at this time entirely under Lord Hervey’s influence, it is
impossible to doubt for a moment that Hervey was striking a very heavy
blow at the Prince’s popularity.
At this juncture, however, the mature judgment of Pulteney, the leader
of the Opposition, came to the Prince’s aid, as it did at a later time
also, and under his advice Miss Vane received the provision which the
Prince had originally intended for her, viz., a settlement of £1,600 a
year for life, a gift of the house in Grosvenor Street in which she had
resided since her dismissal from Court, and that which she doubtless
prized more than all, the custody of her child. All this without any
request to her to leave the country.
And so the matter faded away, out of the public eye, and out of the
public knowledge, for Miss Vane, with her child, went away to Bath,
where very soon after both died; the child first, the mother after.
Perhaps, as it is said, this poor girl had a true affection for the
Prince, and the separation broke her heart; certainly after the death
of the child she could have very little left to live for; forsaken by
the man who had wronged her, robbed by death of the little one on whom
possibly all her hopes and love were then centred.
But it was not the poor broken-hearted mother who bore the whole of
the sorrow at this little child’s death, the Queen, and the Princess
Caroline, her daughter, both bear testimony “that they never believed
it possible that the Prince of Wales could show such grief as he did
at the death of the boy.” Perhaps a fitting conclusion to this chapter
will be an Extract from the Register of Westminster Abbey, 26th
February, 1735-6:
“Fitz Frederick, natural child of the Prince of Wales by Anne Vane,
daughter of Gilbert, Lord Barnard, buried, aged four.”
FOOTNOTES:
[26] Jane, daughter of Lord Abercorn, and wife of Lord Archibald
Hamilton, was Mistress of the Robes to the Princess of Wales, and for
some years governed absolutely at the Prince’s Court, and had planted
so many of her relations about her that one day at Carlton House, Sir
William Stanhope called everybody there whom he did not know “Mr. or
Mrs. Hamilton.” Lady Archibald quitted that Court soon after Mr. Pitt
accepted a place in the administration. Walpole’s Memoirs, vol. I., p.
75.
[27] Wilkins’ “Caroline the Illustrious,” vol. I.
[28] She was undoubtedly very ill at this time.