FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES.
There was another and more dangerous enemy whom Walpole could not
touch, and of whose dislike he was at this time not fully aware--the
Prince of Wales. Throughout the excise agitation the Prince had
silently and stealthily worked against his parents and the Prime
Minister. He had now become more familiar with the position of affairs
in England, and had learnt the importance of his position in the state.
The Prince was a constant source of trouble to the King, nor was the
blame wholly on Frederick’s side. The Queen urged the advisability
of giving the Prince a separate establishment, and went to look at a
house for him in George Street, Hanover Square, but the King stubbornly
refused to give the necessary money, and so Frederick had perforce to
live with his parents in apartments in one of the palaces, and to be
a daily recipient of his father’s slights. Such a position would have
been trying for the most virtuous and dutiful of sons, and the Prince
was neither virtuous nor dutiful. Moreover, though Parliament granted
the King £100,000 for the Prince of Wales, yet Frederick received
only a small allowance from his father, and even that was uncertain.
Under these circumstances he quickly accumulated debts, which the King
refused to pay. The Queen interceded for him, but in vain, and she
received no gratitude from her son, who resented, as far as he dared,
her being appointed Regent in the King’s absence instead of himself. As
he was entirely dependent on his father for money, he did not venture
to make a public protest, but he cherished a grudge against his mother
for superseding him.
With all these grievances, Frederick soon followed his father’s example
of caballing against his sire, and he found plenty of sympathy from
those who were in opposition to the court and the Government. He had
not been long in England before an opportunity was afforded him of
playing to the popular gallery by an unpopular demand of the Crown to
Parliament to make good a pretended deficiency in the Civil List of
£115,000; it was really a veiled form of making the King a further
grant. The measure was violently opposed by the Opposition, but Walpole
succeeded in carrying it through the House of Commons. A great deal
of ill-feeling against the court was produced in the country by this
extortionate demand, and the _Craftsman_ did its best to fan the
flame of discontent. The Prince of Wales, who was exceedingly sore
at his father’s meanness towards him, pretended to disapprove of the
King’s conduct in making this demand, and was inconsiderate enough
to say so to certain personages, and his words, repeated from mouth
to mouth, did not lose in the journey. Pulteney and Bolingbroke, and
other prominent members of the Opposition, quoted with approval what
the Prince had said, and condoled with him on the way in which he was
treated by his father. The rumour of this reaching the King’s ears
incensed him the more against his son, but he could not act merely on
hearsay. He had no tangible ground of complaint against him, for the
Prince was cautious.
Another cause which drew the Prince towards the Opposition was his
liking for literature and talent. He seems to have had a genuine taste
for _les belles lettres_, he wrote poetry in French and English, some
of it not absolutely indifferent.[92] The cleverest writers sided with
the Opposition and the polished periods of Bolingbroke, the eloquence
of Wyndham, and the wit of Chesterfield and Pulteney, all appealed to
him. Bolingbroke, especially, gained influence with the Prince, and in
time became his political mentor. Apart from the political aspect of
the union, there seems to have been a sincere friendship between the
two. Soon after Frederick came to England, Bolingbroke made overtures
to him, to which the Prince responded graciously, and the first
interview between them, a secret one, took place by appointment at the
house of a mutual friend. Bolingbroke who was the first to arrive,
was shown into the library, and was passing the time by turning over
the leaves of a bulky tome. The Prince entered the room unannounced.
The book fell to the floor, and in his haste to bend the knee,
Bolingbroke’s foot slipped, and had not the Prince stepped forward
to support him he would have fallen to the ground. “My lord,” said
Frederick, with exquisite tact, as he raised him, “I trust this may be
an omen of my succeeding in raising your fortunes.”
The Prince had charming manners, which he inherited from his mother,
and he had other gifts which won for him popularity, notably his
generosity, which verged on extravagance. He had that easy and affable
address which sits so well on a royal personage, and he was popular
with the people. It pleased them to see the heir apparent walking about
the streets unguarded, and followed only by a servant. And Frederick
had always a bow and a smile for the meanest of his father’s subjects
who recognised him.
The Prince’s chief favourite and counsellor was George Budd Doddington,
a curious man, whose geniality and vanity were in marked contrast
to his political intrigues. He was the nephew of Doddington, one
of the wealthiest land owners in England, whose sister had made a
_mésalliance_ with one Bubb, an apothecary of Carlisle. On the death
of Bubb, his widow was forgiven, and her son George succeeded to his
uncle’s vast estates, and assumed the name of Doddington by royal
licence. As he owned two boroughs, he entered the House of Commons and
attached himself to Walpole, but on being refused a peerage by that
statesman he turned against him. He made the acquaintance of the Prince
of Wales soon after his arrival in England, and threw in his lot with
him. Doddington was a useful friend to the Prince in many ways, for, in
addition to his social qualities and knowledge of men, his wealth was
of use. Doddington not only placed his purse at the Prince’s service,
but suffered himself to become the butt of Frederick’s not very refined
jests and practical jokes. “He submitted,” says Horace Walpole, “to
the Prince’s childish horseplay, being once rolled up in a blanket and
trundled downstairs. Nor was he negligent of paying more solid court
by lending his Royal Highness money.” Frederick once observed to some
of his boon companions: “This is a strange country, this England. I am
told Doddington is reckoned a clever man, yet I got £5,000 out of him
this morning; he has no chance of ever seeing it again.” But Doddington
was keenly alive to the social distinction which the Prince’s
friendship conferred upon him, and no doubt received what he considered
an equivalent for the money.
In the Prince’s next move for popularity Doddington played a passive
part. He was generally understood to represent the Prince in the House
of Commons, and when therefore he declined to speak in the House in
favour of the excise, it was regarded as a proof of the Prince’s
lukewarmness; and when another favourite, Townshend, who was the groom
of the bedchamber to the Prince, actually voted against the scheme, it
was understood that the Prince was hostile to it. Wyndham emphasised
this in one of his attacks on Walpole. He denounced corruption and
tyranny, and recalled certain unworthy king’s favourites of former
times: “What was their fate?” he asked. “They had the misfortune to
outlive their master, and his son, as soon as he came to the throne,
took off their heads.” The Prince of Wales was sitting under the
gallery listening to the debate, and the allusion was cheered to the
echo by the Opposition. The Prince’s attitude was further shown by his
exceeding graciousness to Lord Stair, who had told the Queen his mind,
and to Lord Chesterfield, who had offended her past forgiveness.
The King was exceedingly angry, and threatened to turn Townshend
out of the little appointment he held under the Prince, but Walpole
counselled letting him alone. Walpole would have punished Doddington
had he dared, for he regarded him as the chief instigator of the
Prince’s rebellious conduct. This was most unfair, for Doddington’s
advice was always on the side of caution, and his influence had more
than once prevented the Prince from rising in open revolt against his
parents. Walpole forgot for the moment that behind the Prince was one
much greater than Doddington whose enmity never slept, and that one was
Bolingbroke. Though debarred from his seat in the House of Lords, and
unable to raise his voice or vote, Bolingbroke yet, by his genius for
intrigue, the vigour of his political writings and his consummate power
of organisation, had done more than any man to stir up public feeling
against the excise, and to bring Walpole within measurable distance
of his fall. Most of the Opposition were puppets moved by this master
mind, Wyndham was his mouthpiece, even Pulteney at this time was wholly
under his spell. And under the ordinary working of the Constitution,
Bolingbroke would have led his hosts to victory had not the King and
Queen, unconstitutionally, it must be admitted, retained their Prime
Minister.
Meanwhile, though the Prince was proving himself a thorn in the side
of his father and the Government, and though the Opposition championed
his cause with fervour, he could not get his allowance increased, and
he sank deeper and deeper into debt. It came to the ears of old Sarah,
Duchess of Marlborough, that the Prince was in pecuniary distress,
and she bethought herself of a scheme which would at once gratify her
ambition and wound the feelings of the King and Queen. She asked the
Prince to honour her with a visit to Marlborough House, and, when he
came, she offered him the hand of her favourite granddaughter, Lady
Diana Spencer, in marriage, and promised to give him £100,000 as her
portion. Lady Diana was a young lady of much wit and beauty, and the
Prince, partly because he wanted the money, and partly because he knew
the alliance would anger his father and mother beyond measure, accepted
the offer. All arrangements were made. The day of the marriage was
actually fixed, and the Prince was to be secretly wedded to Lady Diana
by Duchess Sarah’s chaplain in the duchess’s private lodge in Windsor
Great Park. The Royal Marriage Act, which made illegal the marriage
of a member of the royal family without the consent of the reigning
monarch, was not then in existence, and the marriage, if it had been
contracted, would have been valid, and impossible to annul, except
perhaps by a special Act, which would have had no chance of passing
through Parliament. There would have been nothing objectionable about
the marriage except its secrecy, for Lady Diana Spencer (who afterwards
became Duchess of Bedford) was by birth and fortune, as by wit and
beauty, far superior to the petty German princess whom the Prince
afterwards married. But Walpole got to hear of the plot in time, and
was able to prevent the marriage. It is a pity that it did not take
place, for the subsequent interview of the parents with old Duchess
Sarah on the one side and Queen Caroline on the other would have been
one of the most interesting in history.
An early and congenial marriage might have been the saving of the
Prince of Wales. Like his father and grandfather he affected a
reputation for gallantry, and he was always involved in affairs of a
more or less disreputable nature. In pursuit of adventures of this
kind he behaved more like a schoolboy than a prince arrived at years
of discretion. Peter Wentworth gives an account of one of his absurd
escapades. He writes:--
“Thursday morning, as the King and Queen were going to their chaise
through the garden, I told them the Prince had got his watch again. Our
farrier’s man had found it at the end of the Mall with the two seals
to’t. The Queen laughed and said: ‘I told you before ’twas you who
stole it, and now ’tis very plain that you got it from the woman who
took it from the Prince, and you gave it to the farrier’s man to say
he had found it, to get the reward’. (This was twenty guineas, which
was advertised with the promise of no questions being asked.) I took
her Majesty’s words for a very great compliment, for it looked as if
she thought I could please a woman better than his Highness. Really
his losing his watch, and its being brought back in the manner it has
been, is very mysterious, and a knotty point to be unravelled at Court,
for the Prince protests he was not out of his coach in the park on
the Sunday night it was lost. But by accident I think I can give some
account of this affair, though it is not my business to say a word of
it at Court, not even to the Queen, who desired me to tell her all I
knew of it, with a promise that she would not tell the Prince. (And I
desire also the story may never go out of Wentworth Castle again.) My
man, John Cooper, saw the Prince that night let into the park through
St. James’s Mews alone, and the next morning a grenadier told him the
Prince was robbed last night of his watch and twenty-two guineas and
a gold medal by a woman who had run away from him. The Prince bid the
grenadier run after her and take the watch from her, which, with the
seals, were the only things he valued; the money she was welcome to,
he said, and he ordered him, when he had got the watch, to let the
woman go. But the grenadier could not find her, so I suppose in her
haste she dropped it at the end of the Mall, or laid it down there,
for fear of being discovered by the watch and seals, if they should be
advertised.”[93]
The Prince also followed his forbears’ example in setting up an
accredited mistress. His first intrigue was with Miss Vane (the
beautiful Vanilla), daughter of Lord Barnard, and one of the Queen’s
maids of honour, who, it was wittily said, “was willing to cease to
be one on the first opportunity”. Miss Vane had many admirers. Lord
Harrington was one of them, and Lord Hervey declared himself to be
another. But Lord Hervey was fond of posing as a gallant, and his
testimony on the subject of his conquests is of little worth. Miss
Vane had a good deal of beauty, but little understanding, and her
levity and vanity led her into a fatal error. About a year after the
Prince had come to England she gave birth to a son in her apartments
in St. James’s Palace, and the child was baptised in the Chapel Royal,
and given the name of Fitz-Frederick Vane, which was, of course,
tantamount to explaining to all the world that the Prince of Wales was
its father, a fact which the Prince in no wise sought to deny.
Queen Caroline at once dismissed Miss Vane from her service, and
sharply reprimanded the Prince, telling him that in future he must
carry on his intrigues outside the circle of her household. No such
scandal had occurred since the disgrace of Miss Howe. Miss Vane’s
family likewise cast her off. The Prince took a house for her, and made
her an allowance. But the unfortunate girl soon had experience of the
fickleness of men in general, and of princes in particular. Frederick
neglected her, and began to pay marked attentions to Lady Archibald
Hamilton. Lady Archibald was no longer young, she was five and thirty,
and the mother of ten children, and, unlike Miss Vane, she had no
great beauty. But she was clever and intriguing, and soon gained great
ascendency over her royal lover, whose attentions to her became of the
most public description. “He,” says Lord Hervey, “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 frequently) his behaviour
was so remarkable that his nose and her ear were inseparable.”
Miss Vane had small chance with so clever a rival, and Lady Archibald
urged the Prince to get rid of her. In this the Queen concurred, for
she resented the indiscretion of her ex-maid of honour, and as there
was some thought of marrying the Prince at this time, she thought it
best that he should be clear of affairs of this kind. She did not
reflect, or did not know, that by getting rid of Miss Vane she was
merely paving the way for a far more dangerous woman to take her place.
The Prince was easily persuaded to part with Miss Vane. He sent Lord
Baltimore, one of his lords in waiting, to her with a message desiring
her to go abroad for two or three years, and leave her son to be
educated in England. If she complied the Prince was willing to allow
her £1,600 a year for life, the sum he had given her annually since she
had been dismissed from court; if she refused, the message wound up by
saying that: “If she would not live abroad she might starve for him in
England”. The unfortunate young lady was much hurt by the matter and
manner of the communication. She declined to send any answer by Lord
Baltimore, on the ground that she must have time to think. Lord Hervey
says that she then sent for him, and asked him as a friend to advise
her what was best to be done. He and Miss Vane composed a letter to the
Prince, in which the betrayed lady was made to say to her betrayer:--
[Illustration: FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES.]
“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,
of going out of England, far from all friends and all physicians I
can trust, and of whom I stand in so much 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 Frederick received this letter, instead of being touched by its
pathos, he flew into a rage, and swore that the minx could never have
written it, and he would be revenged on the rascal who helped her to
concoct it. He took all his friends into his confidence, and Miss
Vane took all hers, and the matter soon became the principal topic of
conversation at court, from the Queen and the Princesses downwards.
Miss Vane gained much sympathy by repeating the Prince’s brutal
message, that “if she would not live abroad she might for him starve
in England”. Everybody sympathised with her, and everybody blamed the
Prince, who thereupon threw over Lord Baltimore, and declared that
he had never sent such a message; he must have been misunderstood.
On hearing this, Miss Vane, acting on the advice of Pulteney, who
was thought by many to have written for her the first letter, and
other friends, wrote a more submissive letter to the Prince. In it
she declared that she had certainly received the message from Lord
Baltimore, though she could hardly believe that it came from the
Prince’s lips. It was for him to show whether he had said those words
or not. If he had not, she felt sure he would treat her fairly; if he
had, then all the world would know how she had been ill-treated and
betrayed.
Meanwhile the affair from being the gossip of the court became the
talk of the town, and ballads and pamphlets on the fair Vanilla were
everywhere circulated, under such titles as “Vanilla on the Straw,”
“Vanilla, or the Amours of the Court,” “Vanessa, or the Humours of
the Court of Modern Gallantry,” etc. The Prince seeing that he could
not abandon the lady without considerable discredit, at last agreed
to settle on her £1,600 a year for life, to give her the house in
Grosvenor Street which she had occupied since she had been dismissed
from court, and to allow her son to remain with her--in short, he
yielded all her terms.
Poor Miss Vane did not long enjoy her fortune. Perhaps she really loved
her faithless wooer; she died at Bath soon after, her friends said
of a broken heart. Her child died about the same time. The Queen and
Princess Caroline declared that the Prince showed more feeling at the
loss of this child than they had thought him capable of possessing.
Perhaps it was remorse.
The two elder Princesses, Anne and Amelia, were always quarrelling
with their brother. Amelia at first pretended to be his friend, and
then betrayed him to the King. When the Prince found this out he hated
her, and when the King discovered it he despised her; so she became
disliked by both. Anne, Princess Royal, was at perpetual feud with
her brother, and their strife came to a head, strangely enough, over
music. The Princess had been instructed by Handel, and helped him by
every means in her power. When Handel took over the management of the
opera at the Haymarket, the Princess induced the King and Queen to take
a box there, and to frequently attend the performances. All those who
wished to be in favour with the court followed suit and the Haymarket
became a fashionable resort. The Prince saw in this an opportunity
of annoying his sister, and of showing disrespect to the King and
Queen. He affected not to care about Handel’s music, and set to work
to organise a series of operas at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Party feeling ran very high just then, and seeing that the Prince of
Wales was so much interested in the opera at Lincoln’s Inn Fields,
many of the Opposition, and all those who had a grudge against the
court, made a point of attending the opera there, and it soon became
a formidable rival to the Haymarket. Instead of ignoring this, the
King and Queen took the matter up, and made it a personal grievance.
They patronised Handel more than ever, and made it a point that their
courtiers should do the same. Thus it came about that all those who
appeared at the Haymarket were regarded as the friends of the King and
Queen, and all those who attended Lincoln’s Inn Fields were looked upon
as the Prince’s friends.
Opposition is always popular, and the Prince managed to gather around
him the younger and livelier spirits among the nobility, and the
most beautiful and fashionable of the ladies of quality. Certainly
Lincoln’s Inn Fields was much more patronised, and the King and Queen
and the Princess Royal would often go to one of Handel’s operas at the
Haymarket and find a half empty house. This gave Lord Chesterfield an
opportunity of uttering one of his witticisms. One night when he came
to Lincoln’s Inn Fields he told the Prince that he had just looked in
at the Haymarket, but found nobody there but the King and Queen, “and
as I thought they might be talking business I came away,” he said; a
joke which vastly pleased the Prince, and greatly incensed the court.
Referring to the large attendance of peers at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the
Princess Royal said, with a sneer, that she “expected in a little while
to see half the House of Lords playing in the orchestra in their robes
and coronets”. Conscious of failure she felt extremely bitter against
her brother, and abused him roundly. But the Prince had won and could
afford to laugh at his sister’s invectives. The court was so deplorably
dull, he said, that all those with any pretensions to wit, beauty or
fashion refused to follow its lead, and looked to him, the heir to the
throne, as their natural leader, notwithstanding the way in which he
was treated by the King and Queen.
Certainly the private life of the Court was far from lively. The
clockwork regularity of the King, both in business and in pleasure,
and the limited range of his amusements and interests tended to make
his court appallingly dull--in contrast to the old days at Leicester
House. Mrs. Howard, whose little parties had once been so popular,
now withdrew more and more to herself. She would probably have
retired from court altogether had it not been that by the death of
her brother-in-law, her husband became Earl of Suffolk. As she was
now a countess she could no longer hold the inferior position of
bedchamber-woman, and placed her resignation in the Queen’s hands,
who, however, met the case by making her Mistress of the Robes, and so
retaining her about the court. Lady Suffolk had no longer to perform
the duties at the Queen’s toilet which had given her so much umbrage,
and her position became pleasanter in consequence of the change. We
find her writing to Gay a little later: “To prevent all future quarrels
and disputes I shall let you know that I have kissed hands for the
place of Mistress of the Robes. Her Majesty did me the honour to give
me the choice of lady of the bedchamber, or that which I find so much
more agreeable to me that I did not take one moment to consider it. The
Duchess of Dorset resigned it for me; and everything as yet promises
more happiness for the latter part of my life than I have yet had the
prospect of. Seven nights’ quiet sleep and seven easy days have almost
worked a miracle in me.”[94]
Even Lord Hervey complained bitterly at this time of the monotony
of his daily round. He was dissatisfied, and considered that his
services to the Government and the Crown should be repaid by some
more considerable appointment than the one he held, which most people
thought equal to his abilities, and was certainly in excess of his
deserts. But Walpole, who knew how useful Hervey was as go-between,
would not remove him from his post about the Queen, notwithstanding
his representations. Chafing under this refusal Lord Hervey wrote
the following letter to his friend Mrs. Clayton, another courtier
and favourite who could sympathise with him in his _ennui_. It gives
anything but a flattering picture of the royal circle:--
“I will not trouble you with any account of our occupations at Hampton
Court. No mill-horse ever went in a more constant track, or a more
unchanging circle, so that by the assistance of an almanack for the
day of the week, and a watch for the hour of the day, you may inform
yourself fully, without any other intelligence but your memory, of
every transaction within the verge of the Court. Walking, chaises,
levées, and audiences fill the morning; at night the King plays at
commerce and backgammon, and the Queen at quadrille, where poor Lady
Charlotte (de Roussie) runs her usual nightly gauntlet--the Queen
pulling her hood, Mr. Schütz sputtering in her face, and the Princess
Royal rapping her knuckles, all at a time. It was in vain she fled
from persecution for her religion: she suffers for her pride what she
escaped for her faith; undergoes in a drawing-room what she dreaded
from the Inquisition, and will die a martyr to a Court, though not to a
Church.
“The Duke of Grafton takes his nightly opiate of lottery, and sleeps as
usual between the Princesses Amelia and Caroline; Lord Grantham strolls
from one room to another (as Dryden says) _like some discontented ghost
that oft appears, and is forbid to speak_, and stirs himself about, as
people stir a fire, not with any design, but in hopes to make it burn
brisker, which his lordship constantly does, to no purpose, and yet
tries as constantly as if he had ever once succeeded.
“At last the King comes up, the pool finishes, and everybody has their
dismission: their Majesties retire to Lady Charlotte and my Lord
Lifford; the Princesses to Bilderbec and Lony; my Lord Grantham to Lady
Frances and Mr. Clark; some to supper, and some to bed; and thus (to
speak in the Scripture phrase) the evening and the morning make the
day.”[95]
Lord Hervey may have been prejudiced, but independent testimony comes
from Lady Pomfret, who was then in attendance at court. She writes:
“All things appear to move in the same manner as usual, and all our
actions are as mechanical as the clock which directs them.”[96]
FOOTNOTES TO BOOK III, CHAPTER IX:
[92] One stanza of his poem addressed to Sylvia (the Princess of Wales)
ends thus:--
“Peu d’amis, reste d’un naufrage,
Je rassemble autour de moi,
Et me ris d’ l’étalage
Qu’a chez lui toujours un Roi!”
[93] The Hon. Peter Wentworth to Lord Strafford, London, 1734.
[94] Lady Suffolk to Gay, Hampton Court, 29th June, 1731. _Suffolk
Correspondence._
[95] Lord Hervey to Mrs. Clayton, Hampton Court, 31st July, 1733.
_Sundon Correspondence._
[96] The Countess of Pomfret to Mrs. Clayton, Hampton Court. _Sundon
Correspondence._