Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  Music alone could unite the different ranks of court society in attentive quiet.

  Kensington Palace was not Prince Frederick’s only home. In 1730, he had acquired an old country house at Kew, and had chosen none other than William Kent to remodel it. The property was extremely dilapidated (the prince’s ‘Rat Physician’ captured more than five hundred rodents in the house before work began) and became a major project for Kent.54

  Escaping from the royal palaces and building this practically new house made Prince Frederick feel more independent from his parents, and for Kent this was really his first venture into designing a whole edifice, as opposed to the purely decorative work he had done at Kensington. Frederick was evidently delighted with Kent’s ideas: a green and gilded study lined with ‘panels of Japan’, a gallery decorated with grotesque work, and a red damask bed in a scarlet bedroom.55

  In 1735, William Kent received yet another promotion, becoming Master Mason and Deputy Surveyor of the Office of the King’s Works, as well as architect to the heir to the throne.56

  *

  This foolish, malleable, musical prince, now happily married, nevertheless remained set upon a collision course with his parents over the issue of money. Prince Frederick thought that his income should be doubled to support his new married state, and was quick to emphasise that his father in his own day as Prince of Wales had enjoyed £100,000 a year. Somewhat understandably, Frederick wanted the same amount.

  Augusta’s refuge from the in-laws: the house that William Kent created for the Prince and Princess of Wales at Kew

  Meanwhile, he stirred up more ill will by failing to appear in the queen’s drawing room, by consorting with the king’s political enemies and by drinking crowd-pleasing toasts to ‘Liberty’ in Pall Mall. ‘My God,’ said Caroline, conveniently forgetting how dexterous she was at tweaking her own public image, ‘popularity always makes me sick; but Fretz’s popularity makes me vomit.’57

  Prince Frederick also exploited the enormous opposition to the government’s new Act intended to control the havoc created by the abuse of gin. He signalled that he too thought the legislators meddlesome spoilsports by ostentatiously raising a glass in the taverns while shouts of ‘No Gin! No King!’ echoed round London. By contrast, his mother Caroline was a strong supporter of the (ultimately futile) Gin Act that was supposed to regulate spirit sales. The Act’s becoming law in 1736 was celebrated with many mock funerals: ‘last Wednesday … several people made themselves very merry with the death of “Madam Gin”, and some of both sexes got soundly drunk at her funeral, of which the mob made a formal procession with torches’.58

  The prince’s advisors also urged him to take offence at all sorts of imagined slights from his parents. They were furious in May 1736, for example, when George II went off to Hanover but appointed his wife, not his son, as his British regent. And when the king dallied overlong overseas, to the disappointment of his British subjects, Prince Frederick was visited by ‘the chiefs of the discontented party’, who discreetly encouraged him to attempt a coup.59 But in this case he had the wisdom to refrain.

  Caroline, however, had no such expectation of her son. ‘I hear that yesterday, on his side of the house,’ she spluttered, ‘my good son strutted about as if he had been already King.’60 By January of the year 1737, when George II cancelled the court ball that Prince Frederick expected for his birthday, people refused to accept the official excuse – Caroline’s gout – but chose instead to believe that the king did not want people to show their respect to Frederick ‘at this time of misunderstanding between him and his father’.61

  The animosity over Prince Frederick’s allowance grew more and more intense, and the royal family were once again becoming dangerously oblivious to everything but their own disputes. Fed up with his father’s intransigence, Frederick eventually decided to go behind the royal back. He tried to get his money directly from Parliament, and in February 1737 the Opposition lost the measure to increase Frederick’s income by a mere thirty votes. Given that there were only 438 members, this was terrifyingly tight for the king’s supporters, and it demonstrated the political price to be paid when a prince had what was a kind of parliamentary party of his own.

  George II, meanwhile, was laid low with haemorrhoids, the embarrassing illness to which his father had also been a martyr. When the news of Frederick’s temerity and the closeness of the vote arrived at the royal apartments, John Hervey begged Caroline to keep it from the king. He was still very weak, and it might have ‘put him in such a passion’ as would go a ‘good way towards killing him’.

  In the event, the king’s rage seemed to act as a tonic and he began to recover, ‘though he looked pale and was much fallen away’.

  *

  Caroline and John Hervey were still in the habit of chatting and idling the morning away together in her apartments. One day, they happened to be looking out of Caroline’s dressing-room window when Prince Frederick passed by below. The sight prompted Caroline to snarl: ‘Look, there he goes – that wretch! – that villain! – I wish the ground would open this moment and sink the monster to the lowest hole in hell.’62

  These were horrendous things for a mother to say about her son, but Caroline admitted John Hervey to nearly all of her most intimate and secret thoughts. She found him clever, amusing, adoring and familiar: everything that Prince Frederick was not. Hervey had by now almost taken the place of the queen’s eldest child, while her real son was loathed rather than loved.

  Caroline, whose maternal instincts had been so strangely subverted, was also possessed by a prurient curiosity about her son’s sexual activities. She could not decide whether to believe that Prince Frederick was impotent or to give credence to the rumours that he was promiscuous and ‘often got nasty distempers from women’.63 His marriage to Princess Augusta brought the issue higher up the list of Caroline’s concerns as she was worried about the fate of her potential grandchildren.

  The usual royal paranoia about the provision of a true heir had Caroline firmly within its grip. She asked John Hervey to investigate the matter for her by seeking information from the licentious Lady Dudley. She had ‘lain with half the town as well as Fretz, and consequently must know whether he is like other men or not’.

  Paranoia also led Caroline and Hervey to indulge in one particularly morbid and gothic flight of fantasy. They tried to imagine whether it might be possible for Prince Frederick to insinuate a man more virile than himself into Princess Augusta’s bed, without Augusta noticing the difference, in order to father a child. Hervey thought it might just be possible, if Frederick prepared well: falling into a habit of going ‘to bed several hours after his wife’, getting up ‘for a flux several times in the night’ and perfuming ‘himself always with some predominant smell’. He reckoned that these tricks could help the prince to put ‘any man near his own size upon her that he pleased’. Hervey thought that he could probably even impregnate Augusta himself.

  ‘I know not what to think,’ concluded Caroline, ‘but altogether I know it makes me very uneasy.’64

  Deviant, topsy-turvy, almost unbelievable: these strange speculations were really caused by the reversionary problem, which set generations of the royal family against each other at the very deepest level.

  But there was also another angle to the mystery underlying this seemingly shocking perversion of normal family relationships. It’s all tied up with the explanation of why John Hervey hated Prince Frederick so passionately, when they had once been the closest of friends.

  *

  Although John Hervey had been away on a continental tour when Prince Frederick arrived in Britain in 1728, his earlier spadework in Hanover meant that he quickly became part of Frederick’s inner circle when he returned to London. Intriguingly, the relevant part of Hervey’s memoirs, which might explain why this close friendship turned into equally passionate hatred, is missing.

  Perhaps, like so much palace scandal, the quarrel between Prince Frederick and his form
er favourite had its roots in the apartment of the Maids of Honour. John Hervey was not the only person to enjoy the favours of Anne Vane, Maid of Honour, and his rivals included the prince himself. This certainly caused a falling-out between the friends.

  Anne Vane had long since lost her despised virginity, and counted Prince Frederick among her numerous lovers. She gave birth to a baby that was probably his son, a fact that she stressed by giving her child the name Cornwall FitzFrederick. The beau monde was secretly delighted, and scurrilous ballads circulated:

  Of a hundred amours, she (at least) was accused.

  A hundred! (she cries) Heavens how I’m abused,

  For I’ll swear the dear Babe (or else I may starve) is

  The Prince’s, or Stanhope’s, my footman’s or Hervey’s.65

  (This poem draws attention to the fact that ‘Hervey’ was pronounced ‘Harvey’.) Although Prince Frederick was growing tired of Anne, he was nevertheless rather put out when John Hervey took her off his hands. One of Hervey’s friends sympathetically depicted the Vane incident with an animal metaphor: Prince Frederick was a poor puppy, with a bottle (Anne Vane) cruelly tied to his tail; Hervey made a kind effort to free the puppy by removing the bottle but was repaid only with a vicious bite.66

  Anne Vane herself, defenceless, exploited, more sinned against than sinning, came to a bad end and died young.

  The more perceptive courtiers, though, noticed that on the subject of sex Prince Frederick ‘talked more of feats this way than he acts’.67 And there is another, rival explanation for the quarrel between Prince Frederick and John Hervey: a homosexual relationship gone wrong.

  People in the eighteenth-century had no notion of a person’s being ‘homosexual’ as we would understand it today. But sexual relationships between people of the same gender nevertheless took place, and there’s no question that John Hervey was sexually attracted to both women and men.68

  He was absent from England at the actual moment of Prince Frederick’s arrival because he’d abandoned his promising political career in order to make a tour of Italy. This was partly for his health and partly to pursue his passion for his fellow traveller Stephen (or Ste) Fox, the young man who had superseded Molly in his affections.

  The British courtiers thought that Italy was the home to unnatural vice. ‘Both the word and the thing came to them from Italy, and are strangers to England,’ it was said, while the English themselves ‘love the fair sex too well to fall into such an abomination’.69 The author of Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England, published in 1728, thought homosexual proclivities must be caused by deficiencies in the education of boys, the growing effeminacy of men’s dress, the ‘barbarity’ of women and the increasing popularity of the Italian opera.70 Italy was a congenial place for the young aristocrats, both for its culture and its moral laxity.

  And now we begin see the vulnerability beneath John Hervey’s sarcastic, witty, courtly facade. Hervey the courtier did his best to disguise Hervey the lover. Yet just sometimes, as his shotgun marriage to Molly had shown, the lover threw off the courtier’s mask. Hervey, who so often seems to have been born with a splinter of ice in his heart, was totally floored by his relationship with Ste Fox: ‘I love you & love you more than I thought I could love anything.’71

  Georgian aristocratic men often prized their male friendships above their relationships with their wives, and clearly had little in common with the established subculture of homosexuality that would form in centuries to follow. They believed that their sexuality formed no part of their public personas. Yet John Hervey and Ste Fox nevertheless shared a physical relationship that would in modern terms be considered homosexual, for at least some of the many years of their friendship. Hervey wrote of ‘favours’ or bruises received from Ste, ‘written in such lasting character upon every limb, that ’tis impossible for me to look on a leg or an arm, without having my memory refreshed’.72

  They had to be careful to keep their relationship secret. In the eyes of a contemporary pamphlet-writer, men kissing men, even in polite greeting, was a ‘detestable’ practice.73 In the eyes of the law, sodomy was still punishable by death. The over-articulate John Hervey often expressed his love in letters and lived in constant fear of being discovered through a written indiscretion. He warned Ste Fox that a recent letter ‘had been opened, as every one I have written or received since I came to England has been; so take care what you say’.74

  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.75 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.76

  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.77

  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’.78

  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.’79 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 undi
videdly and indissolubly yours.80

  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.81

  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’.82 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’.83

  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.’84 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.’85