Read Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court Online
Authors: Lucy Worsley
Tags: #England, #History, #Royalty
While copies of many of the letters sent by Hervey to his Ste survive, some of their number have been mysteriously removed from Hervey’s letter book.
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This was probably because of their sexually explicit content, and likewise there is a curious gap in John Hervey’s memoirs.
Hervey himself never published this work. Usually known as
Some Materials Towards Memoirs of the Reign of King George II
, it remained in manuscript form for a century after his death. He started to write in 1733, first going back in time to cover events since 1727. The text covering the period from May 1730 to the late summer of 1732, during which his relationship with Prince Frederick was at its closest, is the very part that’s mysteriously missing.
The excision and destruction of these pages of the original manuscript is usually blamed on a prudish nineteenth-century descendant of John Hervey’s, the first Marquess of Bristol. He’s thought to have removed all references to a homosexual relationship in order to protect the family reputation. It was he who
authorised the publication of a sanitised version of the memoirs in 1848.
If this is true, who was the other man in the relationship that John Hervey described? There’s a very strong case that it was none other than Prince Frederick himself.
In 1780, Horace Walpole reported gossip that Hervey’s son had banned the publication of his father’s papers in order ‘to prevent disagreeable truths appearing’ with regard to Frederick, Prince of Wales.
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And some historians argue that the few letters between Hervey and Prince Frederick which do survive from the period of the ‘missing’ memoirs are highly suggestive. In them Frederick refers to himself and Hervey as ‘Orestes’ and ‘Philades’, inseparable friends, and Hervey casts himself as ‘Hephaistion’ to Frederick’s ‘Alexander’ (a well-known same-sex couple), choices that tell their own tale of love and lovers.
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Among John Hervey’s circle of witty, often married male friends there was nothing particularly unusual about having a short but intense physical relationship. A discreet, close male friendship would not automatically become subject to suspicion until the nineteenth century. What was less acceptable, and what would have invited condemnation if more widely known, was the possibility that Prince Frederick had an exclusive male favourite. The phenomenon of the favourite had been feared and despised throughout history, so the real reason for secrecy was this, plus the fear of public prosecution. The aristocracy’s private moral code would have found nothing wrong.
Caroline later scolded her favourite for having hoped to draw lasting nourishment from his relationship with her unreliable son. She thought John Hervey ridiculously foolish ‘for having ever loved him’ and for thinking ‘that he had been ever beloved’.
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By December 1731, whatever affection there may have been between ‘Alexander’ and ‘Hephaistion’ had clearly soured. ‘That fool 7 [Frederick, according to their agreed cipher] plagues my heart out,’ John Hervey complained to Ste Fox. ‘He is false, too, as
he is silly.’
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Maybe he was bored with the puppyish prince, or maybe this was hurt pride speaking if Prince Frederick had been the one to break off the relationship.
And Frederick clearly came nowhere near to Ste’s privileged position in John Hervey’s heart. Even in the affectionate phase of his relationship with the prince, Hervey wrote to Stephen that
when I said I wish’d I loved 7 as well as I do you, I lied egregiously; I am as incapable of wishing to love anybody else so well … God forbid any mortal should ever have the power over me you have … since I first knew you I have been without repenting and still am and ever shall be undividedly and indissolubly yours.
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Molly Hervey, meanwhile, had to accept that she would never again be ‘undividedly and indissolubly’ her husband’s. While Ste and her spouse were jaunting round Italy together in 1728 in search of a cure for John Hervey’s gall-bladder complaint, Molly wrote a pitiful letter to Ste, timidly asking for an honest account of the invalid. It is painful to see the poised and polished Molly reduced to asking her husband’s lover for news, afraid that Ste will think her very troublesome, begging for information about John’s health and requesting that he ‘mayn’t know’ about her letter for fear of her being a bother.
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Molly was last heard of by us taking a tour of France while John Hervey was taken up with Anne Vane, and in fact in France she would find something like salvation.
She began to spend increasing amounts of time there, an eccentricity which embarrassed her children. She started to pick up lofty French mannerisms and to behave with ‘a foreign tinge, which some call affected’.
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She sometimes came back to court during her periodic returns from the continent. Regulars at the palace drawing room were once actually disappointed that she appeared there ‘drest quite English’ and had ‘not much more paint on, than usual’.
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Molly’s drawing-room manner, always so problematic, continued
to disguise her uncertainty and shyness: ‘I affect an air of grandeur which does not suit my stature, and makes me appear haughty and disdainful.’
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At least her proud habit of reserve prevented her from gaining a reputation as a loose woman as well as an abandoned wife: ‘her total, real indifference to mankind has prevented her ever having a lover. For I am sure it was not love to her lord that prevented her.’
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Abroad, alone and now estranged from her old employers in the Hanoverian court, Molly felt freer to expose the Stuart-supporting sympathies which came naturally to her. She’d had to keep these deeply buried while in Caroline’s employment, but now it began to be said that ‘notwithstanding her constant close connextion with the old court, she was, at heart and in opinion, a zealous Jacobite’.
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Like the other great English eccentric, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who found peace at last in an Italian garden, Molly Hervey was simply too extraordinary for a limited life in London.
*
Her extraordinary husband, meanwhile, continued as Vice-Chamberlain at court, where his sexual preferences were tacitly tolerated. Sir Andrew Fontaine, one of Caroline’s Vice-Chamberlains, was equally welcome at court despite having been accused of effeminate vices by both Tobias Smollett and Alexander Pope.
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But John Hervey’s frail and increasingly effete appearance meant that he was vulnerable to damaging speculation about his sexuality. His girlish face was painted to cover up the scar left by an operation to remove a tumour, he was infamous for his light verse and he constantly chatted with the court ladies almost as one of their own number. His enemies began to call him ‘Lord Fanny’.
What would have made London life impossible for Hervey were public accusations of homosexual acts. Indeed, back in 1731, again during the time of the missing memoirs, such accusations had led to another close comrade nearly killing him in a duel.
John Hervey’s relationship with the rival politician William Pulteney, formerly a great friend, turned nasty when their previously
political disputes became personal. They had been fighting a lively and enjoyable duel of words through a series of anonymous pamphlets. But Pulteney went too far. He referred to Hervey in print as ‘Mr
Fainlove
’, ‘a
delicate Hermaphrodite
’ and a ‘pretty, little,
Master-Miss
’.
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Hervey was forced to insist that the debate be continued with drawn swords in Green Park. They met there early in the misty morning of 25 January 1731. At first they seemed evenly matched and each of them managed to wound the other. But Pulteney gained the advantage, and their seconds intervened just before he gave Hervey a fatal blow.
So John Hervey’s honour was sadly dented. Much to the detriment of his lasting reputation, Pulteney’s insinuations were also repeated and exaggerated by Alexander Pope. The poet created the renowned and enduring picture of John Hervey as a noxious queen:
His wit all see-saw between
that
and
this
,Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss,
And he himself one vile antithesis:
Amphibious thing! that acting either part,
The trifling head, or the corrupted heart,
Fop at the toilet, flatt’rer at the board,
Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord.
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The savagery of this caricature is breathtaking and – fair or not – it set the tone of how Hervey would be remembered in future centuries.
This spat with Alexander Pope also had its origin in sexual matters, for long ago Pope himself had been among John Hervey’s rivals for Molly’s heart. He thought that Hervey, having been fortunate enough to win the hand of the court’s beloved
Schatz
, had behaved criminally in tossing aside such a wondrous treasure.
*
Prince Frederick, homosexual or not, managed to get his wife Augusta pregnant, and the tangled ties between him, his family and John Hervey tightened towards their crisis in 1737.
As she began to pick up English, Princess Augusta became one of the more popular members of a tarnished royal family, but often found herself in the role of pawn rather than princess. She was drawn into disputes about palace access and etiquette. Caroline, for example, sent orders that Augusta must use a secondary entrance to the chapel, because the princess had caused great inconvenience in ‘crowding by the Queen’. Prince Frederick therefore commanded his wife to stay away from the chapel altogether. On this occasion he disdained to argue because he was saving his energy to dispute his allowance instead.
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But never was Princess Augusta more at the mercy of her quarrelsome new family’s rivalries than upon the night her labour pains began. Queen Caroline and Prince Frederick had very different ideas about the location and circumstances in which her baby would be born.
On the evening of Sunday, 31 July 1737, Princess Augusta, her husband and her parents-in-law were at Hampton Court Palace, where they had all spent the summer. Caroline was determined to be present when Augusta gave birth to her grandchild, although she suspected that her son might well attempt to prevent it. ‘At her labour I positively will be,’ Caroline was heard to say, ‘let her liein where she will; for she cannot be brought to bed as quick as one can blow one’s nose and I will be sure it is her child.’
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The evening began like any other, hot and humid, as it was the ‘warmest season that anybody now alive remembers to have felt’.
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Evenings with George II were a particularly trying time of day. On this particular Sunday, the royal family had spent the morning at chapel, had ‘dined afterwards in publick, as usual, before a great number of spectators’, and had then retired to their private apartments for their usual hours of twilight entertainment, if ‘entertainment’ is the right word for something so humdrum and predictable.
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George II, Caroline and their close circle were by now accustomed to tamer pleasures than the wild parties they’d enjoyed in their younger years. ‘At night the King plays at commerce and
backgammon, and the Queen at quadrille,’ writes John Hervey.
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 discon
tented ghost that oft appears and is forbid to speak
… At last the King comes up, the pool finishes, and everybody has their dismissal: their Majesties retire.
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But John Hervey, the favourite, was not allowed to escape even then, when the formal part of the evening was over. He would spend the hours between nine and eleven in the queen’s dressing room. Here Caroline would sit ‘yawning’ over her needlework, while George II would take a candle and recite to Hervey the subjects of all the pictures on the walls in their fine gilt frames. Hervey, while ‘peeping over His Majesty’s shoulder’ at the paintings, would also be ‘shrugging up his own, and now and then stealing a look to make faces at the Queen’, who was ‘a little angry, and little peevish, and a little tired’ with her husband’s endless soliloquies.
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On this particular evening, with a day of exhausting public appearances in the chapel and dining room over at last, everyone eventually began to prepare for bed, candles were snuffed and silence fell.
Then – at 7 o’clock according to some accounts, at 11 o’clock according to others – things began to happen.