George II. arriving from Hanover.--His Meeting with the
Queen.--Lady Suffolk.--Queen Caroline.--Sir Robert
Walpole.--Lord Hervey.--A set of Fine Gentlemen.--An Eccentric
Race.--Carr, Lord Hervey.--A Fragile Boy.--Description of
George II.'s Family.--Anne Brett.--A Bitter Cup.--The Darling
of the Family.--Evenings at St. James's.--Frederick, Prince of
Wales.--Amelia Sophia Walmoden.--Poor Queen Caroline!--Nocturnal
Diversions of Maids of Honour.--Neighbour George's Orange
Chest.--Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey.--Rivalry.--Hervey's Intimacy
with Lady Mary.--Relaxations of the Royal Household.--Bacon's
Opinion of Twickenham.--A Visit to Pope's Villa.--The Little
Nightingale.--The Essence of Small Talk.--Hervey's Affectation
and Effeminacy.--Pope's Quarrel with Hervey and Lady
Mary.--Hervey's Duel with Pulteney.--'The Death of Lord Hervey:
a Drama.'--Queen Caroline's last Drawing-room.--Her Illness and
Agony.--A Painful Scene.--The Truth discovered.--The Queen's
Dying Bequests.--The King's Temper.--Archbishop Potter is sent
for.--The Duty of Reconciliation.--The Death of Queen
Caroline.--A Change in Hervey's Life.--Lord Hervey's
Death.--Want of Christianity.--Memoirs of his Own Time.
The village of Kensington was disturbed in its sweet repose one day,
more than a century ago, by the rumbling of a ponderous coach and six,
with four outriders and two equerries kicking up the dust; whilst a
small body of heavy dragoons rode solemnly after the huge vehicle. It
waded, with inglorious struggles, through a deep mire of mud, between
the Palace and Hyde Park, until the cortège entered Kensington Park, as
the gardens were then called, and began to track the old road that led
to the red-brick structure to which William III. had added a higher
story, built by Wren. There are two roads by which coaches could
approach the house: 'one,' as the famous John, Lord Hervey, wrote to his
mother, 'so convex, the other so concave, that, by this extreme of
faults, they agree in the common one of being, like the high road,
impassable.' The rumbling coach, with its plethoric steeds, toils slowly
on, and reaches the dismal pile, of which no association is so precious
as that of its having been the birthplace of our loved Victoria Regina.
All around, as the emblazoned carriage impressively veers round into the
grand entrance, savours of William and Mary, of Anne, of Bishop Burnet
and Harley, Atterbury and Bolingbroke. But those were pleasant days
compared to those of the second George, whose return from Hanover in
this mountain of a coach is now described.
The panting steeds are gracefully curbed by the state coachman in his
scarlet livery, with his cocked-hat and gray wig underneath it: now the
horses are foaming and reeking as if they had come from the world's end
to Kensington, and yet they have only been to meet King George on his
entrance into London, which he has reached from Helvoetsluys, on his way
from Hanover, in time, as he expects, to spend his birthday among his
English subjects.
It is Sunday, and repose renders the retirement of Kensington and its
avenues and shades more sombre than ever. Suburban retirement is usually
so. It is noon; and the inmates of Kensington Palace are just coming
forth from the chapel in the palace. The coach is now stopping, and the
equerries are at hand to offer their respectful assistance to the
diminutive figure that, in full Field-marshal regimentals, a cocked-hat
stuck crosswise on his head, a sword dangling even down to his heels,
ungraciously heeds them not, but stepping down, as the great iron gates
are thrown open to receive him, looks neither like a king or a
gentleman. A thin, worn face, in which weakness and passion are at once
pictured; a form buttoned and padded up to the chin; high Hessian boots
without a wrinkle; a sword and a swagger, no more constituting him the
military character than the 'your majesty' from every lip can make a
poor thing of clay a king. Such was George II.: brutal, even to his
submissive wife. Stunted by nature, he was insignificant in form, as he
was petty in character; not a trace of royalty could be found in that
silly, tempestuous physiognomy, with its hereditary small head: not an
atom of it in his made-up, paltry little presence; still less in his
bearing, language, or qualities.
The queen and her court have come from chapel, to meet the royal
absentee at the great gate: the consort, who was to his gracious majesty
like an elder sister rather than a wife, bends down, not to his knees,
but yet she bends, to kiss the hand of her royal husband. She is a fair,
fat woman, no longer young, scarcely comely; but with a charm of
manners, a composure, and a _savoir faire_ that causes one to regard her
as mated, not matched to the little creature in that cocked-hat, which
he does not take off even when she stands before him. The pair,
nevertheless, embrace: it is a triennial ceremony performed when the
king goes or returns from Hanover, but suffered to lapse at other times;
but the condescension is too great: and Caroline ends, where she began:
'gluing her lips to the ungracious hand held out to her in evident
ill-humour.
They turn, and walk through the court, then up the grand staircase, into
the queen's apartment. The king has been swearing all the way at England
and the English, because he has been obliged to return from Hanover,
where the German mode of life and new mistresses were more agreeable to
him than the English customs and an old wife. He displays, therefore,
even on this supposed happy occasion, one of the worst outbreaks of his
insufferable temper, of which the queen is the first victim. All the
company in the palace, both ladies and gentlemen, are ordered to enter:
he talks to them all, but to the queen he says not a word.
She is attended by Mrs. Clayton, afterwards Lady Sundon, whose lively
manners and great good temper and good will--lent out like leasehold to
all, till she saw what their friendship might bring,--are always useful
at these _tristes rencontres_. Mrs. Clayton is the amalgamating
substance between chemical agents which have, of themselves, no
cohesion; she covers with address what is awkward; she smooths down with
something pleasant what is rude; she turns off--and her office in that
respect is no sinecure at that court--what is indecent, so as to keep
the small majority of the company who have respectable notions in good
humour. To the right of Queen Caroline stands another of her majesty's
household, to whom the most deferential attention is paid by all
present; nevertheless, she is queen of the court, but not the queen of
the royal master of that court. It is Lady Suffolk, the mistress of
King George II., and long mistress of the robes to Queen Caroline. She
is now past the bloom of youth, but her attractions are not in their
wane; but endured until she had attained her seventy-ninth year. Of a
middle height, well made, extremely fair, with very fine light hair, she
attracts regard from her sweet, fresh face, which had in it a comeliness
independent of regularity of feature. According to her invariable
custom, she is dressed with simplicity; her silky tresses are drawn
somewhat back from her snowy forehead, and fall in long tresses on her
shoulders, not less transparently white. She wears a gown of rich silk,
opening in front to display a chemisette of the most delicate cambric,
which is scarcely less delicate than her skin. Her slender arms are
without bracelets, and her taper fingers without rings. As she stands
behind the queen, holding her majesty's fan and gloves, she is obliged,
from her deafness, to lean her fair face with its sunny hair first to
the right side, then to the left, with the helpless air of one
exceedingly deaf--for she had been afflicted with that infirmity for
some years: yet one cannot say whether her appealing looks, which seem
to say, 'Enlighten me if you please,'--and the sort of softened manner
in which she accepts civilities which she scarcely comprehends do not
enhance the wonderful charm which drew every one who knew her towards
this frail, but passionless woman.
[Illustration: SCENE BEFORE KENSINGTON PALACE--GEORGE II. AND QUEEN
CAROLINE.]
The queen forms the centre of the group. Caroline, daughter of the
Marquis of Brandenburgh-Anspach, notwithstanding her residence in
England of many years, notwithstanding her having been, at the era at
which this biography begins, ten years its queen--is still German in
every attribute. She retains, in her fair and comely face, traces of
having been handsome; but her skin is deeply scarred by the cruel
small-pox. She is now at that time of life when Sir Robert Walpole even
thought it expedient to reconcile her to no longer being an object of
attraction to her royal consort. As a woman, she has ceased to be
attractive to a man of the character of George II.; but, as a queen, she
is still, as far as manners are concerned, incomparable. As she turns to
address various members of the assembly, her style is full of sweetness
as well as of courtesy, yet on other occasions she is majesty itself.
The tones of her voice, with its still foreign accent, are most
captivating; her eyes penetrate into every countenance on which they
rest. Her figure, plump and matronly, has lost much of its contour; but
is well suited for her part. Majesty in women should be _embonpoint_.
Her hands are beautifully white, and faultless in shape. The king always
admired her bust; and it is, therefore, by royal command, tolerably
exposed. Her fair hair is upraised in full short curls over her brow:
her dress is rich, and distinguished in that respect from that of the
Countess of Suffolk.--'Her good Howard'--as she was wont to call her,
when, before her elevation to the peerage, she was lady of the
bedchamber to Caroline, had, when in that capacity, been often subjected
to servile offices, which the queen, though apologizing in the sweetest
manner, delighted to make her perform. 'My good Howard' having one day
placed a handkerchief on the back of her royal mistress, the king, who
half worshipped his intellectual wife, pulled it off in a passion,
saying, 'Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you hide the queen's!'
All, however, that evening was smooth as ice, and perhaps as cold also.
The company are quickly dismissed, and the king, who has scarcely spoken
to the queen, retires to his closet, where he is attended by the
subservient Caroline, and by two other persons.
Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister, has accompanied the king in his
carriage, from the very entrance of London, where the famous statesman
met him. He is now the privileged companion of their majesties, in their
seclusion for the rest of the evening. His cheerful face, in its full
evening disguise of wig and tie, his invariable good humour, his frank
manners, his wonderful sense, his views, more practical than elevated,
sufficiently account for the influence which this celebrated minister
obtained over Queen Caroline, and the readiness of King George to submit
to the tie. But Sir Robert's great source of ascendancy was his temper.
Never was there in the annals of our country a minister so free of
access: so obliging in giving, so unoffending when he refused; so
indulgent and kind to those dependent on him; so generous, so faithful
to his friends, so forgiving to his foes. This was his character under
one phase: even his adherents sometimes blamed his easiness of temper;
the impossibility in his nature to cherish the remembrance of a wrong,
or even to be roused by an insult. But, whilst such were the amiable
traits of his character, history has its lists of accusations against
him for corruption of the most shameless description. The end of this
veteran statesman's career is well known. The fraudulent contracts which
he gave, the peculation and profusion of the secret service money, his
undue influence at elections, brought around his later life a storm,
from which he retreated into the Upper House, when created Earl of
Orford. It was before this timely retirement from office that he burst
forth in these words: 'I oppose nothing; give in to everything; am said
to do everything; and to answer for everything; and yet, God knows, I
dare not do what I think is right.'
With his public capacity, however, we have not here to do: it is in his
character of a courtier that we view him following the queen and king.
His round, complacent face, with his small glistening eyes, arched
eyebrows, and with a mouth ready to break out aloud into a laugh, are
all subdued into a respectful gravity as he listens to King George
grumbling at the necessity for his return home. No English cook could
dress a dinner; no English cook could select a dessert; no English
coachman could drive; nor English jockey ride; no Englishman--such were
his habitual taunts--knew how to come into a room; no Englishwoman
understood how to dress herself. The men, he said, talked of nothing but
their dull politics, and the women of nothing but their ugly clothes.
Whereas, in Hanover, all these things were at perfection: men were
patterns of politeness and gallantry; women, of beauty, wit, and
entertainment. His troops there were the bravest in the world; his
manufacturers the most ingenious; his people the happiest: in Hanover,
in short, plenty reigned, riches flowed, arts flourished, magnificence
abounded, everything was in abundance that could make a prince great, or
a people blessed.
There was one standing behind the queen who listened to these outbreaks
of the king's bilious temper, as he called it, with an apparently
respectful solicitude, but with the deepest disgust in his heart. A
slender, elegant figure, in a court suit, faultlessly and carefully
perfect in that costume, stands behind the queen's chair. It is Lord
Hervey. His lofty forehead, his features, which have a refinement of
character, his well-turned mouth, and full and dimpled chin, form his
claims to that beauty which won the heart of the lovely Mary Lepel;
whilst the somewhat thoughtful and pensive expression of his
physiognomy, when in repose, indicated the sympathising, yet, at the
same time, satirical character of one who won the affections, perhaps
unconsciously, of the amiable Princess Caroline, the favourite daughter
of George II.
A general air of languor, ill concealed by the most studied artifice of
countenance, and even of posture, characterizes Lord Hervey. He would
have abhorred robustness; for he belonged to the clique then called
Maccaronis; a set of fine gentlemen, of whom the present world would not
be worthy, tricked out for show, fitted only to drive out fading majesty
in a stage coach; exquisite in every personal appendage, too fine for
the common usages of society; _point-device_, not only in every curl and
ruffle, but in every attitude and step; men with full satin roses on
their shining shoes; diamond tablet rings on their forefingers; with
snuff-boxes, the worth of which might almost purchase a farm; lace
worked by the delicate fingers of some religious recluse of an
ancestress, and taken from an altar-cloth; old point-lace, dark as
coffee-water could make it; with embroidered waistcoats, wreathed in
exquisite tambour-work round each capricious lappet and pocket; with cut
steel buttons that glistened beneath the courtly wax-lights: with these
and fifty other small but costly characteristics that established the
reputation of an aspirant Maccaroni. Lord Hervey was, in truth, an
effeminate creature: too dainty to walk; too precious to commit his
frame to horseback; and prone to imitate the somewhat recluse habits
which German rulers introduced within the court: he was disposed to
candle-light pleasures and cockney diversions; to Marybone and the Mall,
and shrinking from the athletic and social recreations which, like so
much that was manly and English, were confined almost to the English
squire _pur et simple_ after the Hanoverian accession; when so much
degeneracy for a while obscured the English character, debased its tone,
enervated its best races, vilified its literature, corrupted its morals,
changed its costume, and degraded its architecture.
Beneath the effeminacy of the Maccaroni, Lord Hervey was one of the few
who united to intense _finery_ in every minute detail, an acute and
cultivated intellect. To perfect a Maccaroni it was in truth advisable,
if not essential, to unite some smattering of learning, a pretension to
wit, to his super-dandyism; to be the author of some personal squib, or
the translator of some classic. Queen Caroline was too cultivated
herself to suffer fools about her, and Lord Hervey was a man after her
own taste; as a courtier he was essentially a fine gentleman; and, more
than that, he could be the most delightful companion, the most sensible
adviser, and the most winning friend in the court. His ill-health, which
he carefully concealed, his fastidiousness, his ultra-delicacy of
habits, formed an agreeable contrast to the coarse robustness of 'Sir
Robert,' and constituted a relief after the society of the vulgar,
strong-minded minister, who was born for the hustings and the House of
Commons rather than for the courtly drawing-room.
John Lord Hervey, long vice-chamberlain to Queen Caroline, was, like Sir
Robert Walpole, descended from a commoner's family, one of those good
old squires who lived, as Sir Henry Wotton says, 'without lustre and
without obscurity.' The Duchess of Marlborough had procured the
elevation of the Herveys of Ickworth to the peerage. She happened to be
intimate with Sir Thomas Felton, the father of Mrs. Hervey, afterwards
Lady Bristol, whose husband, at first created Lord Hervey, and
afterwards Earl of Bristol, expressed his obligations by retaining as
his motto, when raised to the peerage, the words 'Je n'oublieray
jàmais,' in allusion to the service done him by the Duke and Duchess of
Marlborough.
The Herveys had always been an eccentric race; and the classification of
'men, women, and Herveys,' by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was not more
witty than true. There was in the whole race an eccentricity which
bordered on the ridiculous, but did not imply want of sense or of
talent. Indeed this third species, 'the Herveys,' were more gifted than
the generality of 'men and women.' The father of Lord Hervey had been a
country gentleman of good fortune, living at Ickworth, near Bury in
Suffolk, and representing the town in parliament, as his father had
before him, until raised to the peerage. Before that elevation he had
lived on in his own county, uniting the character of the English squire,
in that fox-hunting county, with that of a perfect gentleman, a scholar,
and a most admirable member of society. He was a poet, also, affecting
the style of Cowley, who wrote an elegy upon his uncle, William Hervey,
an elegy compared to Milton's 'Lycidas' in imagery, music, and
tenderness of thought. The shade of Cowley, whom Charles II. pronounced,
at his death, to be 'the best man in England,' haunted this peer, the
first Earl of Bristol. He aspired especially to the poet's _wit_; and
the ambition to be a wit flew like wildfire among his family, especially
infecting his two sons, Carr, the elder brother of the subject of this
memoir, and Lord Hervey.
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.
Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey, whose attractions, great as they were, proved
insufficient to rivet the exclusive admiration of the accomplished
Hervey, had become his wife in 1720, some time before her husband had
been completely enthralled with the gilded prison doors of a court. She
was endowed with that intellectual beauty calculated to attract a man of
talent: she was highly educated, of great talent; possessed of _savoir
faire_, infinite good temper, and a strict sense of duty. She also
derived from her father, Brigadier Lepel, who was of an ancient family
in Sark, a considerable fortune. Good and correct as she was, Lady
Hervey viewed with a fashionable composure the various intimacies formed
during the course of their married life by his lordship.
The fact is, that the aim of both was not so much to insure their
domestic felicity as to gratify their ambition. Probably they were
disappointed in both these aims--certainly in one of them; talented,
indefatigable, popular, lively, and courteous, Lord Hervey, in the House
of Commons, advocated in vain, in brilliant orations, the measures of
Walpole. Twelve years, fourteen years elapsed, and he was left in the
somewhat subordinate position of vice-chamberlain, in spite of that high
order of talents which he possessed, and which would have been displayed
to advantage in a graver scene. The fact has been explained: the queen
could not do without him; she confided in him; her daughter loved him;
and his influence in that court was too powerful for Walpole to dispense
with an aid so valuable to his own plans. Some episodes in a life thus
frittered away, until, too late, promotion came, alleviated his
existence, and gave his wife only a passing uneasiness, if even indeed
they imparted a pang.
One of these was his dangerous passion for Miss Vane; another, his
platonic attachment to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
Whilst he lived on the terms with his wife which is described even by
the French as being a '_Ménage de Paris_,' Lord Hervey, found in another
quarter the sympathies which, as a husband, he was too well-bred to
require. It is probable that he always admired his wife more than any
other person, for she had qualities that were quite congenial to the
tastes of a wit and a beau in those times. Lady Hervey was not only
singularly captivating, young, gay, and handsome; but a complete model
also of the polished, courteous, high-bred woman of fashion. Her manners
are said by Lady Louisa Stuart to have 'had a foreign tinge, which some
called affected; but they were gentle, easy, and altogether exquisitely
pleasing.' She was in secret a Jacobite--and resembled in that respect
most of the fine ladies in Great Britain. Whiggery and Walpolism were
vulgar: it was _haut ton_ to take offence when James II. was
anathematized, and quite good taste to hint that some people wished well
to the Chevalier's attempts: and this way of speaking owed its fashion
probably to Frederick of Wales, whose interest in Flora Macdonald, and
whose concern for the exiled family, were among the few amiable traits
of his disposition. Perhaps they arose from a wish to plague his
parents, rather than from a greatness of character foreign to this
prince.
Lady Hervey was in the bloom of youth, Lady Mary in the zenith of her
age, when they became rivals: Lady Mary had once excited the jealousy of
Queen Caroline when Princess of Wales.
'How becomingly Lady Mary is dressed to-night,' whispered George II. to
his wife, whom he had called up from the card-table to impart to her
that important conviction. 'Lady Mary always dresses well,' was the cold
and curt reply.
Lord Hervey had been married about seven years when Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu re-appeared at the court of Queen Caroline, after her long
residence in Turkey. Lord Hervey was thirty-three years of age; Lady
Mary was verging on forty. She was still a pretty woman, with a piquant,
neat-featured face; which does not seem to have done any justice to a
mind at once masculine and sensitive, nor to a heart capable of
benevolence--capable of strong attachments, and of bitter hatred.
Like Lady Hervey, she lived with her husband on well-bred terms: there
existed no quarrel between them; no avowed ground of coldness; it was
the icy boundary of frozen feeling that severed them; the sure and
lasting though polite destroyer of all bonds, indifference. Lady Mary
was full of repartee, of poetry, of anecdote, and was not averse to
admiration; but she was essentially a woman of common sense, of views
enlarged by travel, and of ostensibly good principles. A woman of
delicacy was not to be found in those days, any more than other
productions of the nineteenth century: a telegraphic message would have
been almost as startling to a courtly ear as the refusal of a fine lady
to suffer a _double entendre_. Lady Mary was above all scruples, and
Lord Hervey, who had lived too long with George II. and his queen to
have the moral sense in her perfection, liked her all the better for her
courage--her merry, indelicate jokes, and her putting things down by
their right names, on which Lady Mary plumed herself: she was what they
term in the north of England, 'Emancipated.' They formed an old
acquaintance with a confidential, if not a tender friendship; and that
their intimacy was unpleasant to Lady Hervey was proved by her
refusal--when, after the grave had closed over Lord Hervey, late in
life, Lady Mary ill, and broken down by age, returned to die in
England--to resume an acquaintance which had been a painful one to her.
Lord Hervey was a martyr to illness of an epileptic character; and Lady
Mary gave him her sympathy. She was somewhat of a doctor--and being
older than her friend, may have had the art of soothing sufferings,
which were the worse because they were concealed. Whilst he writhed in
pain, he was obliged to give vent to his agony by alleging that an
attack of cramp bent him double: yet he lived by rule--a rule harder to
adhere to than that of the most conscientious homoeopath in the
present day. In the midst of court gaieties and the duties of office, he
thus wrote to Dr. Cheyne:--
... 'To let you know that I continue one of your most pious votaries,
and to tell you the method I am in. In the first place, I never take
wine nor malt drink, nor any liquid but water and milk-tea; in the next,
I eat no meat but the whitest, youngest, and tenderest, nine times in
ten nothing but chicken, and never more than the quantity of a small one
at a meal. I seldom eat any supper, but if any, nothing absolutely but
bread and water; two days in the week I eat no flesh; my breakfast is
dry biscuit, not sweet, and green tea; I have left off butter as
bilious; I eat no salt, nor any sauce but bread-sauce.'
Among the most cherished relaxations of the royal household were visits
to Twickenham, whilst the court was at Richmond. The River Thames, which
has borne on its waves so much misery in olden times--which was the
highway from the Star-chamber to the tower--which has been belaboured in
our days with so much wealth, and sullied with so much impurity; that
river, whose current is one hour rich as the stream of a gold river, the
next hour, foul as the pestilent churchyard,--was then, especially
between Richmond and Teddington, a glassy, placid stream, reflecting on
its margin the chestnut-trees of stately Ham, and the reeds and wild
flowers which grew undisturbed in the fertile meadows of Petersham.
Lord Hervey, with the ladies of the court, Mrs. Howard as their
chaperon, delighted in being wafted to that village, so rich in names
which give to Twickenham undying associations with the departed great.
Sometimes the effeminate valetudinarian, Hervey, was content to attend
the Princess Caroline to Marble Hill only, a villa residence built by
George II. for Mrs. Howard, and often referred to in the correspondence
of that period. Sometimes the royal barge, with its rowers in scarlet
jackets, was seen conveying the gay party; ladies in slouched hats,
pointed over fair brows in front, with a fold of sarsenet round them,
terminated in a long bow and ends behind--with deep falling mantles over
dresses never cognizant of crinoline: gentlemen, with cocked-hats, their
bag-wigs and ties appearing behind; and beneath their puce-coloured
coats, delicate silk tights and gossamer stockings were visible, as they
trod the mossy lawn of the Palace Gardens at Richmond, or, followed by a
tiny greyhound, prepared for the lazy pleasures of the day.
Sometimes the visit was private; the sickly Princess Caroline had a
fancy to make one of the group who are bound to Pope's villa.
Twickenham, where that great little man had, since 1715, established
himself, was pronounced by Lord Bacon to be the finest place in the
world for study. 'Let Twitnam Park,' he wrote to his steward, Thomas
Bushell, 'which I sold in my younger days, be purchased, if possible,
for a residence for such deserving persons to study in, (since I
experimentally found the situation of that place much convenient for the
trial of my philosophical conclusions)--expressed in a paper sealed, to
the trust--which I myself had put in practice and settled the same by
act of parliament, if the vicissitudes of fortune had not intervened and
prevented me.'
Twickenham continued, long after Bacon had penned this injunction, to be
the retreat of the poet, the statesman, the scholar; the haven where the
retired actress, and broken novelist found peace; the abode of Henry
Fielding, who lived in one of the back-streets; the temporary refuge,
from the world of London, of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the life-long
home of Pope.
Let us picture to ourselves a visit from the princess to Pope's
villa:--As the barge, following the gentle bendings of the river, nears
Twickenham, a richer green, a summer brightness, indicates it is
approaching that spot of which even Bishop Warburton says that 'the
beauty of the owner's poetic genius appeared to as much advantage in the
disposition of these romantic materials as in any of his best-contrived
poems.' And the loved toil which formed the quincunx, which perforated
and extended the grotto until it extended across the road to a garden on
the opposite side--the toil which showed the gentler parts of Pope's
better nature--has been respected, and its effects preserved. The
enamelled lawn, green as no other grass save that by the Thames side is
green, was swept until late years by the light boughs of the famed
willow. Every memorial of the bard was treasured by the gracious hands
into which, after 1744, the classic spot fell--those of Sir William
Stanhope.
In the subterranean passage this verse appears; adulatory it must be
confessed:--
'The humble roof, the garden's scanty line,
Ill suit the genius of the bard divine;
But fancy now assumes a fairer scope,
And Stanhope's plans unfold the soul of Pope.'
It should have been Stanhope's 'gold,'--a metal which was not so
abundant, nor indeed so much wanted in Pope's time as in our own. Let us
picture to ourselves the poet as a host.
As the barge is moored close to the low steps which lead up from the
river to the villa, a diminutive figure, then in its prime, (if prime it
_ever_ had), is seen moving impatiently forward. By that young-old face,
with its large lucid speaking eyes that light it up, as does a rushlight
in a cavern--by that twisted figure with its emaciated legs--by the
large, sensible mouth, the pointed, marked, well-defined nose--by the
wig, or hair pushed off in masses from the broad forehead and falling
behind in tresses--by the dress, that loose, single-breasted black
coat--by the cambric band and plaited shirt, without a frill, but fine
and white, for the poor poet has taken infinite pains that day in
self-adornment--by the delicate ruffle on that large thin hand, and
still more by the clear, most musical voice which is heard welcoming his
royal and noble guests, as he stands bowing low to the Princess
Caroline, and bending to kiss hands--by that voice which gained him more
especially the name of the little nightingale--is Pope at once
recognized, and Pope in the perfection of his days, in the very zenith
of his fame.
One would gladly have been a sprite to listen from some twig of that
then stripling willow which the poet had planted with his own hand, to
talk of those who chatted for a while under its shade, before they went
in-doors to an elegant dinner at the usual hour of twelve. How
delightful to hear, unseen, the repartees of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
who comes down, it is natural to conclude, from her villa near to that
of Pope. How fine a study might one not draw of the fine gentleman and
the wit in Lord Hervey, as he is commanded by the gentle Princess
Caroline to sit on her right hand; but his heart is across the table,
with Lady Mary! How amusing to observe the dainty but not sumptuous
repast contrived with Pope's exquisite taste, but regulated by his
habitual economy--for his late father, a worthy Jacobite hatter, erst in
the Strand, disdained to invest the fortune he had amassed, from the
extensive sale of cocked-hats, in the Funds, over which an Hanoverian
stranger ruled; but had lived on his capital of £20,000 (as spendthrifts
do, without either moral, religious, or political reasons), as long as
it lasted him; yet _he_ was no spendthrift. Let us look, therefore, with
a liberal eye, noting, as we stand, how that fortune, in league with
nature, who made the poet crooked, had maimed two of his fingers, such
time as, passing a bridge, the poor little poet was overturned into the
river, and he would have been drowned, had not the postilion broken the
coach window and dragged the tiny body through the aperture. We mark,
however, that he generally contrives to hide this defect, as he would
fain have hidden every other, from the lynx eyes of Lady Mary, who knows
him, however, thoroughly, and reads every line of that poor little heart
of his, enamoured of her as it was.
[Illustration: POPE AT HIS VILLA--DISTINGUISHED VISITORS.]
Then the conversation! How gladly would we catch here some drops of what
must have been the very essence of small-talk, and small-talk is the
only thing fit for early dinners! Our host is noted for his easy
address, his engaging manners, his delicacy, politeness, and a certain
tact he had of showing every guest that he was welcome in the choicest
expressions and most elegant terms. Then Lady Mary! how brilliant is her
slightest turn! how she banters Pope--how she gives _double entendre_
for _double entendre_ to Hervey! How sensible, yet how gay is all she
says; how bright, how cutting, yet how polished is the _équivoque_ of
the witty, high-bred Hervey! He is happy that day--away from the coarse,
passionate king, whom he hated with a hatred that burns itself out in
his lordship's 'Memoirs;' away from the somewhat exacting and pitiable
queen; away from the hated Pelham, and the rival Grafton.
And conversation never flags when all, more or less, are congenial; when
all are well-informed, well-bred and resolved to please. Yet there is a
canker in that whole assembly; that canker is a want of confidence; no
one trusts the other; Lady Mary's encouragement of Hervey surprises and
shocks the Princess Caroline, who loves him secretly; Hervey's
attentions to the queen of letters scandalizes Pope, who soon afterwards
makes a declaration to Lady Mary. Pope writhes under a lash just held
over him by Lady Mary's hand. Hervey feels that the poet, though all
suavity, is ready to demolish him at any moment, if he can; and the only
really happy and complacent person of the whole party is, perhaps,
Pope's old mother, who sits in the room next to that occupied for
dinner, industriously spinning.
This happy state of things came, however, as is often the case, in close
intimacies, to a painful conclusion. There was too little reality, too
little earnestness of feeling, for the friendship between Pope and Lady
Mary, including Lord Hervey, to last long. His lordship had his
affectations, and his effeminate nicety was proverbial. One day being
asked at dinner if he would take some beef, he is reported to have
answered, 'Beef? oh no! faugh! don't you know I never eat beef, nor
_horse_, nor curry, nor any of those things?' Poor man! it was probably
a pleasant way of turning off what he may have deemed an assault on a
digestion that could hardly conquer any solid food. This affectation
offended Lady Mary, whose _mot_, that there were three species, 'Men,
women, and Herveys'--implies a perfect perception of the eccentricities
even of her gifted friend, Lord Hervey, whose mother's friend she had
been, and the object of whose admiration she undoubtedly was.
Pope, who was the most irritable of men, never forgot or forgave even
the most trifling offence. Lady Bolingbroke truly said of him that he
played the politician about cabbages and salads, and everybody agrees
that he could hardly tolerate the wit that was more successful than his
own. It was about the year 1725, that he began to hate Lord Hervey with
such a hatred as only he could feel; it was unmitigated by a single
touch of generosity or of compassion. Pope afterwards owned that his
acquaintance with Lady Mary and with Hervey was discontinued, merely
because they had too much wit for him. Towards the latter end of 1732,
'The Imitation of the Second Satire of the First Book of Horace,'
appeared, and in it Pope attacked Lady Mary with the grossest and most
indecent couplet ever printed: she was called Sappho, and Hervey, Lord
Fanny; and all the world knew the characters at once.
In retaliation for this satire, appeared 'Verses to the Imitator of
Horace;' said to have been the joint production of Lord Hervey and Lady
Mary. This was followed by a piece entitled 'Letter from a Nobleman at
Hampton Court to a Doctor of Divinity.' To this composition Lord Hervey,
its sole author, added these lines, by way, as it seems, of extenuation.
Pope's first reply was in a prose letter, on which Dr. Johnson has
passed a condemnation. 'It exhibits,' he says, 'nothing but tedious
malignity.' But he was partial to the Herveys, Thomas and Henry Hervey,
Lord Hervey's brothers, having been kind to him--'If you call a dog
_Hervey_,' he said to Boswell, 'I shall love him.'
Next came the epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, in which every infirmity and
peculiarity of Hervey are handed down in calm, cruel irony, and polished
verses, to posterity. The verses are almost too disgusting to be
revived in an age which disclaims scurrility. After the most personal
rancorous invective, he thus writes of Lord Hervey's conversation:--
His wit all see-saw between this and _that_--
Now high, now low--now _master_ up, now _miss_--
And he himself one vile antithesis.
* * * * *
Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board,
Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord.
Eve's tempter, thus the rabbins have expressed--
A cherub's face--a reptile all the rest.
Beauty that shocks you, facts that none can trust,
Wit that can creep, and pride that bites the dust.'
'It is impossible,' Mr. Croker thinks, 'not to admire, however we may
condemn, the art by which acknowledged wit, beauty, and gentle
manners--the queen's favour--and even a valetudinary diet, are
travestied into the most odious offences.'
Pope, in two lines, pointed to the intimacy between Lady Mary and Lord
Hervey:--
'Once, and but once, this heedless youth was hit,
And liked that dangerous thing, a female wit.'
Nevertheless, he _afterwards_ pretended that the name _Sappho_ was not
applied to Lady Mary, but to women in general; and acted with a degree
of mean prevarication which greatly added to the amount of his offence.
The quarrel with Pope was not the only attack which Lord Hervey had to
encounter. Among the most zealous of his foes was Pulteney, afterwards
Lord Bath, the rival of Sir Robert Walpole, and the confederate with
Bolingbroke in opposing that minister. The 'Craftsman,' contained an
attack on Pulteney, written, with great ability, by Hervey. It provoked
a _Reply_ from Pulteney. In this composition he spoke of Hervey as 'a
thing below contempt,' and ridiculed his personal appearance in the
grossest terms. A duel was the result, the parties meeting behind
Arlington House, in Piccadilly, where Mr. Pulteney had the satisfaction
of almost running Lord Hervey through with his sword. Luckily the poor
man slipped down, so the blow was evaded, and the seconds interfered:
Mr. Pulteney then embraced Lord Hervey, and expressing his regret for
their quarrel, declared that he would never again, either in speech or
writing, attack his lordship. Lord Hervey only bowed, in silence; and
thus they parted.
The queen having observed what an alteration in the palace Lord Hervey's
death would cause, he said he could guess how it would be, and he
produced 'The Death of Lord Hervey; or, a Morning at Court; a Drama:'
the idea being taken it is thought, from Swift's verses on his own
death, of which Hervey might have seen a surreptitious copy. The
following scene will give some idea of the plot and structure of this
amusing little piece. The part allotted to the Princess Caroline is in
unison with the idea prevalent of her attachment to Lord Hervey:--