Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  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’.86

  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.87

  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’.88 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.89

  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.90

  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.’91

  The evening began like any other, hot and humid, as it was the ‘warmest season that anybody now alive remembers to have felt’.92 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.93

  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 discontented 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.94

  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.95

  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.

  *

  The trigger was Princess Augusta’s waters breaking. She could have now expected midwives to be summoned, pans of water heated, clean linen put onto her bed and the necessary witnesses – the queen, members of the Privy Council – to be called.

  But none of this took place. Prince Frederick, with a callous disregard for the health of his eighteen-year-old wife and unborn child, insisted instead on bundling Augusta through her bedchamber door and down the stairs. He wanted her out from under his parents’ roof before the baby was born.

  To get the wailing princess to descend to the waiting coach, Frederick pushed from behind, while his dancing master and one of his equerries pulled at each of her arms. Meanwhile, Lady Archibald Hamilton, one of Princess Augusta’s ladies, begged ‘for God’s sake’ that ‘the Prince would let her stay in quiet where she was, for that her pains were so great she could not set one foot before the other, and was upon the rack when they moved her’.96

  Considering the complicated nature of royal households, it comes as no surprise to learn that Lady Archibald Hamilton was another old flame of Prince Frederick’s. But her pleas on Princess Augusta’s behalf were in vain. The prince insisted that his wife be packed into the vehicle with
Mrs Clavering and Mrs Paine, two of her dressers, while Vreid, his faithful valet and a trained surgeon, sat on the box. They now drove hazardously through the night to St James’s Palace.

  Prince Frederick would later put it about that it was at Princess Augusta’s own ‘earnest request’ that they rushed away from Hampton Court. The journey was absolutely necessary, he claimed, because ‘there was neither midwife, nor linen, nor nurse at Hampton Court’, while all things were available in London.97

  And it was certainly true that Frederick was an anxious and jumpy father-to-be: in the weeks before the birth, he had been ‘twice or thrice in town to get advice of his physicians, and Mrs Cannon, the midwife’.98 They’d assured him that the intermittent pains Princess Augusta was feeling were caused only by colic. He may have married her in order to increase his allowance, but the prince did have tender feelings towards his wife.

  But nobody was fooled by this explanation that the journey resulted from the fears of a ‘wise and tender’ husband concerned for his wife’s safety: it was ‘far from truth’.99 Indeed, nothing could have been less likely than Princess Augusta herself choosing to endure her first labour in a coach, and ‘she cried and begged not to be carried away in her painful condition’.100

  Her husband’s tetchy reply was, ‘Come, come, all will be soon over,’ and ‘Courage! Courage! Ah, quelle sottise! [Ah, what foolishness!]’101 Prince Frederick was absolutely determined that he would deny his detested parents their privilege of witnessing the birth of an heir.

  The smuggling of the pregnant princess out of the palace took place while Caroline and George II’s evening was winding down, and the king and queen remained completely unaware of the commotion. As John Hervey described it, all was ‘just as usual’ until they separated ‘at ten of the clock; and, what is incredible to relate, went to bed all at eleven, without hearing one single syllable of the Princess’s being ill, or even of her not being in the house’.102

  For once Prince Frederick had managed to seize the initiative in the battle with his parents. In his desperation to make an impression on his implacable father, he willingly risked two lives. ‘Had he no way of affronting his parents but by venturing to kill his wife and the heir of the crown?’ was one verdict on this adventure. ‘A baby that wounds itself to vex its nurse is not more void of reflection.’103

  The journey in the coach must have been frightful. They covered the fifteen bumpy miles in only an hour and a quarter,104 and Prince Frederick and the three ladies had to hold down the screaming princess. (Frederick later complained that the force he’d been compelled to use had given him a terrible ache in his back.) They were ‘oblig’d to stop several times whilst she took her pains’, a treatment considered most ‘cruel’ by those who heard of it afterwards.105 While they were on the road, Frederick dispatched messengers to Chiswick and Lambeth to fetch Lord Wilmington and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the most convenient members of the Privy Council. He needed witnesses to the birth.106

  Although they thrust many handkerchiefs up Princess Augusta’s petticoats, her skirts were slowly soaked with ‘the filthy inundations which attend these circumstances’. When the coach eventually reached St James’s Palace, Prince Frederick ordered all the lights to be put out so that the servants there could not see this gruesome evidence of ‘his folly and her distress’.107

  Of course, nothing at St James’s was prepared, so they had to send out to the neighbours for napkins, warming pans and other ‘necessary implements’ for the operation of birth.108 One account of the evening presents the ludicrous spectacle of Prince Frederick and Lady Archibald Hamilton together airing the sheets for Princess Augusta’s bed, which turned out to be damp, forcing them to use tablecloths instead.109 Arriving all of a sudden, the little baby – ‘about the bigness of a good large toothpick case’ – had to be wrapped in a napkin.110

  In a final touch of farce, the official witnesses arrived too late, the Archbishop fifteen minutes after the child was born.

  *

  The baby princess, to be named Augusta like her mother, was born at about eleven or midnight (accounts vary), and a messenger bearing the news was immediately sent post-haste to Hampton Court.

  There must have been much anxious discussion among the queen’s servants before, at half past one in the morning, Caroline was woken by her Bedchamber Woman Charlotte Amelia Titchborne. Caroline’s first thought was that the palace must be on fire. But no, Mrs Titchborne explained, it was just that Princess Augusta’s labour had begun.

  The queen called for her nightgown, expecting to go to her daughter-in-law’s apartment a few metres away. ‘Your nightgown, Madam,’ replied Mrs Titchborne, ‘and your coaches too; the Princess is at St James’s.’ ‘Are you mad?’ Caroline interrupted, ‘or are you asleep, my good Titchborne?’

  All was soon explained, and the eruption of George II’s wrath when he heard what had happened must have been one of the most spectacular ever.

  Baulked from being present at the actual birth, Caroline was anxious to get there as soon as possible afterwards. Very grim and sober, she called for her coach and for John Hervey, and together they drove off to St James’s in a kind of tragicomic chase. Of course, no one at St James’s Palace was expecting them, so when they arrived Caroline had to sit waiting in the dark ‘till a footman was found who had a candle and lighted her up to the Princess’s apartment’.111

  Upstairs in Princess Augusta’s rooms Caroline found the baby girl wrapped in table linen. ‘God bless you, poor little creature!’ the old queen said to her granddaughter. ‘You have come into a disagreeable world.’112 This was a rare and brief moment for grandmother and baby to bond, a tiny lull in the war between the generations.

  After drinking hot chocolate with John Hervey, Caroline departed from St James’s at about 4 o’clock in the morning. Back at Hampton Court she found her husband still ‘in an infinite passion’ at Prince Frederick’s sneaking away with ‘no notice to him or the Queen of his design’.113

  The king’s terrible tantrum continued all the next day, and a courtier returning to the palace to begin a week on duty ‘found all the folks here in a comical sort of way, with their being call’d up in the night’. Information about what had actually happened was hard to come by: ‘everybody here being dealers in mysteries’, while ‘all the sycophants and agents of the Court spread millions of falsities’.114

  But everybody agreed that this was indisputably an act of war.

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  This action of Prince Frederick’s was more than a foolish risk taken with his child’s life; it was a deliberate piece of the most extreme provocation. Nothing could have been calculated to give more offence than tricking George II and Caroline into missing the birth of their grandchild by whisking their daughter-in-law away from the palace without a word. The king ‘swells, struts and storms’ with rage, wrote one courtier.115

  Over the next few weeks, Caroline steadfastly visited her granddaughter at St James’s, but observers noticed that she never addressed her son, nor he her. When his mother was leaving the palace, though, Prince Frederick took advantage of the crowd of spectators in the courtyard to sink ostentatiously to his knees, ‘down in the dirt’, and to kiss her hand with a false but ‘most respectful show of duty’.116

  He was not the only one acting a part in order to win the war for public approval. Despite her gruelling night-time journey and repeated visits to her daughter-in-law, Caroline too admitted privately that ‘one does not care a farthing for them, the giving oneself all this trouble is une bonne grimace pour le publique [putting on a good show for the public]’.

  After several solicitous visits she could bear it no longer. George II was glad that she stopped going, telling her she was ‘well enough served for thrusting her nose where it had been shit upon already’.117

  Part of the reason for Caroline and George II’s fury was their obsessive suspicion that they might have had a fraudulent heir thrust into their family, a fear that had been rife in
royal circles since the birth of James II’s son, the Old Pretender, in 1688. George II and Caroline were worried that Prince Frederick, by arranging for Princess Augusta to give birth in private, might have likewise introduced an impostor. ‘A false child will be put upon you,’ the king thundered at the queen.

  Having seen Augusta’s baby girl, though, Caroline did not suspect her son of having planted someone else’s child upon her. ‘I own to you, I had my doubts upon the road that there would be some juggle,’ she said to John Hervey later, and ‘if, instead of this poor, little ugly she-mouse, there had been a brave, large, fat, jolly boy, I should not have been cured of my suspicions’.118

  Now it was openly acknowledged that ‘the two Courts of the King and the Prince, over which a cloud has hung for some time’, were ‘at last quite separated by a storm that has broken out upon the lying-in of the Princess’.119 A stand-off through the medium of letters commenced, just as it had in the ‘christening quarrel’ of 1717.

  Prince Frederick fired off a volley of what he thought were submissive missives apologising for his behaviour, but it was inevitable that his parents failed to find them sufficiently remorseful.

  On 5 August 1737, Hervey wearily reported to Ste Fox’s brother Henry (also an old friend) that ‘yesterday’s letter’ from Prince Frederick to George II ‘was to desire earnestly to be re-admitted into the King’s presence, protesting the uprightness of his intentions, and not owning himself in the wrong at any step’. It gave offence for including ‘not a word of or to the Queen’. The king’s answer was that ‘as the purport of the letter was the same as that which Lord Jersey brought the night before, it required no other answer than what had been given to that’.