Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (33 page)

Back at the palace, a huge new row was brewing within the royal family. George II had spent years wrangling with his father, and now it seemed that history was repeating itself: ‘it ran a little in the blood of the family to hate the eldest son’.
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The family’s frightful feuding spelt danger for the whole British nation. In the words of Sir Robert Walpole, ‘divisions in the palace’ would lead inevitably to ‘divisions in the kingdom’, a situation ‘much more terrible to think of than difficult to foresee’.
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On the night of 31 July 1737, events in the king’s embattled relationship with his own heir, Prince Frederick, came to a head. A ‘very extraordinary quarrel at Court’ saw a heavily pregnant princess being rushed dangerously through the night by coach.
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It was the culmination of yet another battle royal, and at its centre was yet another royal baby.

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As the story unfolded over the summer of 1737, John Hervey was once again present to record its every twist and turn. By chance he’d also witnessed the very inception of the quarrel, which lay more than twenty years in the past.

Long ago, Henrietta Howard had gone to Hanover to seek her fortune, and the youthful John Hervey had made a similar journey to Germany. Exactly like her, he’d hoped to make important connections to help along his future court career.

In 1716, aged nineteen, John set out upon a young aristocrat’s conventional grand tour of the sights of Europe. His first stop was Paris, and Hanover was to be his second.

Business in the principality had proceeded as usual after George I had decamped to Britain in 1714. The small, dull,
provincial state continued to support the two royal palaces, one in the city on the River Leine, the other in the country at Herrenhausen, and there was a rural hunting lodge at Göhrde. The state’s silver mines kept its Elector personally wealthy, while his subjects were stubborn and hard workers in the fields.

Because of its ruling family’s connection with Britain, Hanover after 1714 had become accustomed to being overrun with English tourists. The sightseers squabbled over the limited lodgings available in the town, while their coaches whipped up the dust that coated the leaves of the long lime avenue leading out to Herrenhausen.

John Hervey hurried on his way to Hanover in 1716 so that his visit would coincide with one of George I’s extended holidays at his former home. Soon he had an appointment to wait upon the king (and, with youthful thoughtlessness, neglected to take his tutor with him).
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He also got himself an introduction to the king’s grandson, the then nine-year-old Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707–51). Prince Frederick headed Hanover’s permanent court and generally welcomed royal or other important visitors to the town when his grandfather and parents were away in Britain.

This meeting with Prince Frederick in 1716, made out of a careful calculation of future gain, would prove an important turning point in John Hervey’s emotional life as well as his career.

He and the prince immediately took to each other. Hervey’s father advised that he should get to know the boy and leave Hanover only when his ‘foundation in Prince Frederick’s favour’ was laid ‘indelibly’; this proved easy to achieve.
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Just like his marriage to Molly, though, Hervey’s initially adoring relationship with Prince Frederick would eventually become mired in misunderstanding. Unlike his marriage, this would become one of the most significant relationships of his life.

In this chapter, for the first time in our story so far, we will see John Hervey in pain.

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Both John Hervey and the boy prince were slight and feminine in
appearance. Prince Frederick – also known as ‘Fretz’ by his family – had hair ‘with a yellowish cast’ and a ‘face fair but not handsome; his eyes grey like a cat and very dull’.
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His legs were spindly because he’d suffered from rickets.

Frederick, Prince of Wales: his ‘face fair but not handsome; his eyes grey like a cat’

 

Unable to find much to praise in his appearance, courtiers describing Prince Frederick tended to fall back upon his charm. One observed that he had that certain ‘something so very engaging and easy in his behaviour’, as well as ‘the fine fair hair’ of his mother Caroline.
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Another found him not the least bit handsome but still ‘the most agreeable young man it is possible to imagine … his person little but very well made and genteel’, an indescribable liveliness in his eyes.
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The prince certainly had a captivating and amusing manner: ‘the Lord knows what a mimic!’

But Prince Frederick was a little short-sighted, in two senses. His slightly protuberant eyes were myopic, and he was also a little lazy in his outlook upon life. He lacked integrity and tended to take the easy way out of problems. ‘His best quality was generosity,’ it was said, and ‘his worst, insincerity, and indifference to truth’.
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The sharp and cynical John Hervey, witness of Prince Frederick’s
formative years, was certainly not the best person to provide firm moral guidance. With kind guardianship and good advice, this boy could have been a fine king. Yet Frederick’s childhood was even more damaging than that of an orphan: he was a child deserted and positively disliked by his parents.

His birth had taken place in Hanover’s Leine Palace in 1707, and he was dogged by rumour about its exact circumstances. Because of the coolness between Queen Anne and the Electoral family of Hanover, there had been no official British witness present during Caroline’s labour. The English envoy to Hanover found this ‘unaccountable’ and ‘very extraordinary’.
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It would indeed have been a wise precaution to have had one present, given all the trouble that rumours about an impostor baby had caused when the unpopular James II’s son was born. When his Catholic wife, Mary of Modena, had fortuitously produced a healthy boy, English Protestants claimed that a lapse in palace surveillance had allowed a live infant to be slipped in to replace a dead, miscarried child. The king’s enemies spread it about that a surrogate baby boy had been smuggled into the queen’s bed in a warming pan. Many people believed the scandal, and the incident became an important step along the road to James II’s eventual overthrow.

Still, such rumours usually originated from political enemies. It reveals the depth of George II’s bad feeling towards Prince Frederick that he referred to his own son as a ‘
Wechselbalg
’, or changeling, or as ‘the
Griff
’. The latter may have simply meant that Frederick looked like a griffin, but the word can also mean a person of mixed race (a suggestion which cast grave aspersions upon Caroline’s character and conduct).
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In 1714, when the Hanoverians came over to London en masse, George I insisted that Frederick’s parents should leave their seven-year-old son behind. There were actually very good political reasons for this. A significant figure from the family was needed as its representative in Hanover, and Caroline was expected to have British-born heirs to follow. Yet to the little boy it must have felt like his parents were abandoning him.

Prince Frederick was placed in the care of his uncle, George I’s younger brother. Hanover remained his main concern, although he was also taught English and sent packets of parliamentary papers and models of British warships in preparation for his future role as king of Britain.
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Tittle-tattle claimed that Frederick’s sexual education was provided by one Madame d’Elitz from the Schulenburg family, completing a hat-trick that she’d begun by seducing Frederick’s grandfather, George I, and then George II.
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(‘There’s nothing new under the sun, or the grandson either,’ people said.)

During the long summer holidays, when George I returned to lime-lapped Herrenhausen, grandfather and grandson grew close. Prince Frederick called his grandfather his ‘best friend’, demonstrating that they had an intimate relationship which his absent father inevitably resented.
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When George I died, Frederick was left to languish in Hanover until his father’s bewilderingly sudden command to uproot himself and come to England for the first time at the end of 1728, when he was twenty-one.

There was some compensation for Prince Frederick in the thought that in London he might have more chance of meeting his dashing, grown-up friend John Hervey once again.

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And now, with Prince Frederick in England, the trouble really began. Just as George II in his own day as Prince of Wales had formed the focus for the Opposition in Parliament, all the politicians opposed to Sir Robert Walpole’s long regime began to gather round the prince.

The sound political reasons for having left Prince Frederick behind in Hanover for so long were lost in a fog of resentment on Frederick’s side, and impatience on his father’s. By 1734, it was thought that the ‘misunderstanding between the father and son had increased to a very alarming degree’ and that Prince Frederick had been ‘encouraged by the opposition’ to create an ‘open rupture’.
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To outsiders it was obvious that the politicians hoped to divide, and therefore to rule, the royal family.
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But Prince Frederick’s rather passive stupidity meant that he was putty in the hands of his advisors. As Molly Hervey observed, his very servants sought ‘to aggravate everything’. ‘Poor man!’ she exclaimed. ‘He does not see that every stroke that is aimed at his father recoils upon him.’
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Opinion was sharply divided on Prince Frederick, and even in the present day there is no clear consensus. His doctor enjoyed his ‘pleasant facetious humour, which is easy and natural to him’.
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The novelist Tobias Smollett found him ‘a tender and obliging husband, a fond parent, kind master, liberal, generous, candid and humane’.
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All this was to the prince’s credit, and perhaps in any other family he could have flourished.

At the same time, diametrically opposed views of Prince Frederick also existed. A potential bride of the prince’s was warned that he had a ‘very narrow mind’ and no self-discipline. ‘Provided you can have the complaisance to put up with his debauches,’ she was told, ‘you may then govern him entirely’ and ‘be more king than he’.
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His old tutor thought the prince possessed ‘the most vicious nature and the most false heart that ever man had, nor are his vices the vices of a gentleman, but the mean base tricks of a knavish footman’.
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His parents – and eventually even his friend John Hervey – came to share this view.

It was becoming horribly clear that conflict between a king and his son would form the permanent backdrop to eighteenth-century court and political life. In private the courtiers tried to please the king by describing his son as ‘so awkward a fellow and so mean a looking scoundrel’.
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In public, though, Prince Frederick was ‘no more talked of now than if he had never been born’.
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Whenever he appeared in the same room as his father, he went unacknowledged: ‘it put one in mind of stories one has heard of ghosts that appear to part of the company and are invisible to the rest’.
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In the Hanover that Prince Frederick had now also left behind, business continued to tick over smoothly. Money sent from
Britain kept its army strong, its residents were far better-educated than their British equivalents, and Hanover’s well-organised burghers planned European firsts such as systematic street signs and gas street lighting. At the royal palace the table was laid each day as if the family were still in residence, and, although absent, George II maintained ‘the same number of gentlemen, pages, domestics, and guards; and the same number of horses, grooms, & c. in his stables’.
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Like George I, he returned to this haven of prosperous and peaceful deference as often as possible for holidays.