FOOTNOTES:
[25] Coxe’s Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole.
CHAPTER IX.
The Duchess of Marlborough Throws for a Big Stake.
We now pass from the Prince’s political and financial entanglements to the softer theme of his love, or rather loves, for alas! there were several of them!
This subject, however, cannot be entered upon without a reference to one of two great ladies whose personalities overshadowed St. James’s at the time of Frederick’s coming to England. These were the Duchesses of Marlborough and Buckingham, near neighbours and rivals, one living at Buckingham House, which, as before stated, had been built amid a grove of trees celebrated for its singing birds—the site of the present Buckingham Palace—the other occupying a house bearing her name on the other side of the Park, which was pulled down to make room for the present Marlborough House, up till recently the residence of the Prince of Wales.
These two great ladies lived in fair amity, but had their little differences like the rest of womankind, of which the following incident is a fair sample.
The Duchess of Buckingham had had the misfortune to lose her son, who had died in Rome, and whose body she caused to be brought to England for sepulture in Westminster Abbey.
She sent across the Park to the widowed Duchess of Marlborough to borrow the hearse or funeral car on which the body of the great Duke had been borne to the grave some years before.
Sarah of Marlborough, in her none too refined manner, refused her request in the following terms:
“It carried my Lord Marlborough,” she replied, “and it shall never be used for any meaner mortal.”
This was hardly a consoling message to send to a sorrowing mother, but her Grace of Buckingham rose to the occasion even in her grief:
“I have consulted the undertaker,” she rejoined, “and he tells me I can have a finer for twenty pounds.”
The two seem to have outrivalled one another in pride and arrogance, and both affected to despise the House of Hanover, though they at times dissembled and attended the drawing-rooms “over the way,” which they considered doing the King and Queen an exceeding honour, and perhaps it was.
Both were enormously wealthy, she of Buckingham posing as an adherent of the House of Stuart, and no doubt using some of her wealth to support it, although it is said that she was mean enough to allow the pall covering the unburied coffin of James the Second in Paris to fall into rags, though she was in the habit of going there to weep over it.
“I believe I may sometime or other have complained of Sir Robert Walpole’s treatment of me,” observed Sarah Duchess of Marlborough to her friend and dependent Dr. Hare in one of her letters, “but I never went through with it, believing that it was not easy to him.”
If the Duchess had reason to complain of that distinguished statesman in that month of August, 1726, in which she wrote, she had considerably more reason to do so a few years later, when he wrecked one of her pet schemes as completely as he had that of Her Majesty the Queen of Prussia concerning Prince Frederick, which latter endeavour had, perhaps, set the brains of the astute Sarah working on the very same subject.
The Duchess was, as it has been said, enormously rich, powerful, and, in addition, exceedingly ambitious, so enterprising, indeed, in this latter respect that she made a bold bid to make her grand-daughter, Lady Diana Spencer, Queen Consort of England. It came about in this wise:
Though the Prince of Wales had established himself as a kind of power by his alliance with Bolingbroke and his party, yet he had gained nothing by it financially.
The King remained perfectly obdurate on the subject of increasing his allowance, and meanwhile the sum of the Prince’s debts mounted higher and higher.
The story of the Prince’s embarrassments very soon travelled across that little space of thoroughfare dividing St. James’s Palace from Marlborough House, and reached the ever open ears of the Duchess Sarah, always ready to hear any news from “over the way” the residence of “neighbour George” as she was in the habit of calling him.
The wily old Duchess must have brooded long before she took her next step; old diplomatiste as she was, it was a matter that could not have been entered upon without the deepest thought. It was about the boldest step “Sarah Jennings” had ever taken. When she had settled the matter in her mind, she sent a message to the Prince of Wales and asked him to favour her with an interview.
No record of this most interesting meeting has, unfortunately, been preserved; one would have liked to have seen a detailed account of it in Doddington’s diary, but there is nothing of it there.
There is no doubt, however, what was the nature of the interview; the wonderful old stateswoman there and then offered the Prince her favourite grand-daughter Lady Diana Spencer in marriage, and with her the sum of one hundred thousand pounds, which she no doubt calculated would come in very handy to the Prince in his involved condition.
It is necessary to make a comparison between the status of Lady Diana and that of the lady—the daughter of a petty German Prince—whom the Prince eventually married to understand that the Duchess’s offer was not by any means so outrageous as one would imagine. Indeed, there are those who think that Lady Diana’s birth and position, combined with her wit and beauty, were far superior to those of the German Princess. Lady Diana was the youngest daughter of Charles, Earl of Sunderland, by Anne, daughter of the great Duke of Marlborough and Sarah his wife, and was undoubtedly a young lady of exceptional wit and beauty.
Although there is strong evidence to prove that the Prince had not forgotten his love for his cousin, the Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia, yet he accepted the Duchess of Marlborough’s offer. Some say it was to annoy his royal father and mother—things had reached that stage by then—others said as they naturally would say, Lord Hervey, the Queen’s confidant and really a bitter enemy of her son the Prince, no doubt among the number, that the hundred thousand pounds put into the scale against the Prince’s debts decided the matter, but possibly the young lady’s bright eyes—she was evidently a consenting party—and the persuasions and arguments of the experienced Duchess had something to do with it, at any rate the marriage was arranged to take place secretly in the Duchess’s lodge in Windsor Park, and was to be celebrated by her private chaplain. The very day was fixed.
If the old Duchess had acquired the vulgar habit of rubbing her hands, there is no doubt she did so over this matter, for it promised a repayment of old debts and slights which had been heaping up interest for years.
No Royal Marriage Act existed or had been thought of at that time, and Lady Diana would have been the Prince’s lawful wife in the face of all England beyond question if the ceremony had taken place, but this time the Duchess Sarah had counted without her host, she had either left out of her calculations or ignored a very important personage indeed, viz., Sir Robert Walpole.
It is not at all surprising, when we consider the extraordinary little space which divided the residences of the two young people, that the fact that there was marriage in the air, and that a Royal one to boot, should creep out. Perhaps a confidential maid let the secret out—for there must have been a great question of dresses going on—or the young Prince betrayed it in a burst of confidence over a bowl—he was very good at drinking bon pères as we know—to some boon companion, but at any rate it reached the ears of Sir Robert Walpole, and Sir Robert stretched out his hand—and the arm belonging to it was a long one and could reach all over England and even across the Channel to foreign parts—and behold! the Royal Marriage Scheme of the great Sarah crumbled and was no more. “Sir Robert Walpole was able to prevent the marriage,” history records.
It must have been a dangerous act to have approached Her Grace of Marlborough during the few days following upon her disappointment. History gives us no information as to what she remarked upon the frustration of her hopes at the time, neither is it recorded what course Lady Diana’s grief took at the disappointment. It is safe to assert that both ladies had a “good cry” in private; but how the old Duchess of Buckingham must have chuckled over it!
Lady Diana evidently soon dried her tears, and apparently took the matter as lightly as the Prince did, for very shortly after she became the Duchess of Bedford, viz., on October 12th, 1731, but, unfortunately, died young (on the 27th of September, 1735). But the great Duchess Sarah was not of the nature to forget Sir Robert Walpole’s part in this affair, and it is interesting to read her opinion of him written to Lord Stair in her old age; this opinion was written by the Duchess avowedly for the use of future historians.
“In another book,” she writes, “are a great many particulars which the historian may like to look into; but I have omitted these to relate something of Sir Robert Walpole, which shows that he betrayed the Duke of Marlborough, even at a time when he made the greatest professions to him.
“The Duke of Marlborough was made so uneasy at the end of the Queen’s reign, by turning men of service out of the Army to put in Mr. Hill and Mr. Masham over the heads of people improperly, that Mr. Walpole was employed to show the Queen how detrimental to her service such steps must be. He had many opportunities of doing it. The Duke of Marlborough having obtained of the Queen that Cardonnel should be Secretary of War as a reward for his services, when the war was ended, which he hoped would be soon, and the Queen having allowed Mr. Cardonnel to kiss her hand upon that promise, but to let him go over with the Duke of Marlborough, that campaign or another, if the war happened to be not concluded. Mr. Walpole was so low then that he executed this place for Mr. Cardonnel, and attended the Duke of Marlborough when he was in England with a bag of writings like Mr. Cardonnel. He managed it so that to make the Duke of Marlborough believe that he had done all he could with the Queen, and at the same time gained all the points Mrs. Masham had desired for her husband and brother; and I had incontestable proofs afterwards that Mr. Walpole had acted this double part to oblige Mrs. Masham, and the Duke of Marlborough at that time had no reason to believe he could be so false.
“Sir Robert also had a great obligation to me; for by my interest wholly he was made Treasurer of the Navy when Sir T. Lyttleton died, though there were solicitations from many people for that employment, whom they thought it of more consequence to oblige. But I prevailed, and he had then only a small estate, and that much encumbered. And I have letters of acknowledgment to me, in which he says ‘he is very sensible that he was entirely obliged to me for it.’
“Notwithstanding which at the commencement of his great power with the present family, he used me with all the folly and insolence upon every occasion, as he has treated several since he has acted as if he were King, which would be too tedious to relate.
“I am not sure that some account of this has not been given before. But if it has the truth is always the same. And it is no great matter, since what I write is only information of the historian to give character.
“For being perpetually interrupted, it is impossible to remember what I may have formally written on these subjects.”
All of which above tends to show that in her old age Duchess Sarah had grown testy, and not forgetful of her old enemies.
CHAPTER X.
The Beautiful Vanilla.
An early marriage with a beautiful girl such as Lady Diana Spencer would probably have been the best thing which could have happened to the young Prince of Wales; it would possibly have obliterated the scars of his old love for his cousin Wilhelmina, which wounds certainly broke out again at a later period, and it might have kept him from disgraceful liaisons; at any rate it would have left him without excuse for them. The first of these affaires du cœur, began in a flirtation and ended in a tragedy as so many of these unfortunate attachments do. Who knows its beginning? Perhaps a kiss in the dark corridors of St. James’s Palace!
The object of it was Miss Anne Vane (the “beautiful Vanilla”), daughter of Gilbert, 2nd Lord Barnard, a maid-of-honour to the Queen, and sister to the 1st Lord Darlington.
This young lady was possessed of much beauty, but is not credited with cleverness as we understand it, which was all the worse for her, as she found herself among a set of unscrupulous courtiers, such as Lords Harrington and Hervey, the latter of whom was not at all above boasting of conquests over the opposite sex which he had not achieved, if such a word can be used in connection with the meanest act on earth.
Miss Vane is said to have been full of levity which was the result of her want of cleverness, perhaps, and possessed, no doubt, the usual quantity of vanity which is allotted to a pretty girl with plenty of admirers, but on the whole it cannot be doubted that she was fond of the Prince, and, as a result of it, paid that penalty for a love which many young ladies do who place their affections on a man who is unable to marry them—she became a mother. The Prince of Wales, however, did a man’s duty, and at once acknowledged the child.
The whole matter appears to have been very deplorable. The birth of the child—a boy—took place in her apartments as maid-of-honour in the palace of St. James’s, and the baby was baptized in the Chapel Royal, and given the name of Fitz Frederick Vane, evidently with the Prince’s full concurrence. (1732). He made no denial of his blame in the matter either in public or in private, but took the whole responsibility upon his own shoulders. In addition, as will be seen, he loved children.
The Queen, of course, lost very little time in turning her unfortunate maid-of-honour out of the Palace as soon as she was fit to go, and her family accentuated the Queen’s action by at once turning their backs upon her. The Prince did what little he was able to do to atone in a way for the great injury he had done her. He took a house for her and her child in Grosvenor Street, and provided her with an income out of the uncertain allowance he received from the King. This affair, there is no doubt, laid the foundation of those debts which grew to be such a weight round his neck later on.
This state of affairs having continued for some time, there however appeared on the scene a remarkable person in the shape of Lady Archibald Hamilton, who from that time forth exerted a strong—and baneful—influence on the Prince’s life.[26]
Lady Archibald was five-and-thirty, the mother of ten children, and is said not to have possessed any special good looks, but she must, however, have been possessed of a strong will and a subtle power of fascination—which many plain women have—for she in a very short time subjugated the Prince of Wales and tied him, in the public gaze, at any rate, to her chariot wheels.
The very first act of this woman as is so often the case, was to turn the power she had gained against the poor girl, her rival, whose reputation the Prince had ruined. She urged him to get rid of her.
There is no question whatever that the Prince was at this time thoroughly fascinated by Lady Archibald. Lord Hervey, who plays a wretched part in this episode, comments on his infatuation as follows:
“He,” the Prince, “saw her often at her own house, where he seemed as welcome to the master as the mistress; he met her often at her sister’s; walked with her day after day for hours together tête-à-tête in a morning in St. James’s Park; and whenever she was at the Drawing Room (which was pretty frequent) his behaviour was so remarkable that his nose and her ear were inseparable.”
Lord Hervey, it has been said, played a despicable part in this affair, more despicable perhaps because he had been the Prince’s friend—a very false one.
John, Lord Hervey, was the eldest son of the first Earl of Bristol, had been Gentleman of the Bedchamber to George the Second when Prince of Wales, and was a great favourite with Caroline the Queen.
It is difficult to estimate the amount of mischief this wretched man made between the Queen and her son, the Prince of Wales; one thing is quite certain, and that is, that from the time a coolness sprang up between the Prince and Lord Hervey—and there was good reason for it as will be seen—things began to take a much worse turn between the former and his royal parents.
Hervey was the Queen’s devoted companion, and bearer of tittle tattle. She did not scruple to even allow him to sit by her bed when she was ill and amuse her with gossip, and to this arrangement the King seems to have offered no objection, though he was devoted to Caroline. The Prince of Wales, however, expressed himself strongly on the subject of Hervey’s association with his mother and sisters.
The Queen appears to have selected a strange companion. The following is a description of his appearance and character:
“He was considered an exquisite beau and wit, and showed himself in after life to be possessed of considerable ability both as writer and orator.” (He was the author of the well-known “Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second”). “He was an accomplished courtier, and possessed some of the worst vices of courtiers; he was double-faced, untrustworthy, and ungrateful. He had a frivolous and effeminate character; he was full of petty spite and meannesses, and given to painting his face and other abominations, which earned for him the nickname of ‘Lord Fanny.’”
He is described by some of the poets of the time as being possessed of great personal beauty; the Duchess of Marlborough was of an opposite opinion:
“He has certainly parts and wit,” she writes, “but is the most wretched profligate man that ever was born, besides ridiculous; a painted face and not a tooth in his head.”[27]
He appears, however, to have been a favourite with the fair sex, even to marrying the beautiful Mary Lepel, maid-of-honour to the Queen when Princess of Wales.
National Portrait Gallery.Emery Walker.
LORD HERVEY.
Poor Mary!
Lord Hervey had been a married man over ten years when the first rumours of the Vane scandal began to permeate St. James’s about the end of 1731. It was then that the estrangement between the Prince of Wales and Lord Hervey began, and the reason for it is not far to seek.
Lord Hervey had been talking of Miss Vane, and his remarks had reached the ears of Frederick.
Horace Walpole gives the key to the whole matter in his “Reminiscences”; he states that the Prince of Wales, Lord Hervey and the 1st Lord Harrington each came to his brother, Sir Robert, and confided the fact of being the father of Miss Vane’s child!
As far as the Prince of Wales was concerned, it is to be understood; he had committed a grave fault, he had incurred a grave responsibility, he had no wish to shirk it, although as we know he was kept very short of money by his father. He knew that as a man he was bound to see this poor girl through her trouble at any cost, and he did it.
But how about the cur Hervey with the painted face, and his finicking woman’s tittle-tattle? How about Lord Harrington, who was little better?
Either these two were lying, or they were playing the most despicable parts that men could play, viz., boasting of their prowess in ruining a young girl, deserting her in her trouble, and shifting the public blame on to some one else.
But as far as Lord Hervey is concerned, it is more probable that he was lying; the circumstances look very much like it. He had evidently been an admirer of the beautiful Miss Vane before the Prince devoted himself to her; it is more than probable that the Prince cut him out, and that the reason of their quarrel was simply jealousy, accentuated by Hervey’s spiteful tongue. Certainly hereafter the Prince had no more bitter enemy than Lord Hervey, and, unfortunately, the latter was placed in a position about the Queen which enabled him to fan the embers of their quarrel, and to do the Prince’s cause an infinity of harm. Certainly no one can read the history of that period without coming to this conclusion.
It has been seen that the Prince of Wales, however, had formed an attachment to another lady, much older than himself, a woman of the world, the mother of ten children, Lady Archibald Hamilton, and this lady had availed herself of her ascendancy over him to urge him to break with Miss Vane. It may be very fairly surmised that the boastings of Hervey and Hamilton were pretty well dinned into his ears; at any rate Lady Archibald succeeded in persuading him, probably in a fit of jealous anger, to send one of his lords in waiting, Lord Baltimore, to Miss Vane with an insulting message.
This message, as it is recorded in history, does not read like a man’s message at all; it savours far more of the composition of a spiteful woman. In it the Prince is represented as desiring her to go abroad for two or three years, and to leave her son to be educated in England. If she agreed, she was to receive from the Prince her usual allowance of £1,600 a year for life. The message is said to have concluded in the following words: “If she would not live abroad, she might starve for him in England.”
A most unlikely ending to have come from the Prince, having regard to his known habits of kind-heartedness and courtesy.
It is needless to say that Miss Vane was deeply hurt at this message, and declined to answer it by Lord Baltimore.
It is here that Lord Hervey comes again upon the scene.
He states that Miss Vane sent for him and telling him of the Prince’s message asked his advice as a friend; the result was the following letter, which, if Miss Vane wrote it, certainly Lord Hervey composed it, with a view, as it can easily be seen, to its future publication; it ran as follows:
“Your Royal Highness need not be put in mind who I am, nor whence you took me; that I acted not like what I was born, others may reproach me, but you took me from happiness and brought me to misery, that I might reproach you. That I have long lost your heart I have long seen, and long mourned; to gain it, or rather to reward the gift you made me of it, I sacrificed my time, my youth, my character, the world, my family, and everything that a woman can sacrifice to a man she loves; how little I considered my interest you must know by my never naming my interest to you, when I made this sacrifice, and by my trusting to your honour, when I showed so little regard, when put in balance with my love to my own. I have resigned everything for your sake but my life; and had you loved me still, I would have risked even that, too, to please you; but as it is I cannot think in my state of health[28] of going out of England, far from all friends and all physicians I can trust, and of whom I stand so much in need. My child is the only consolation I have left, I cannot leave him, nor shall anything but death ever make me quit the country he is in.”
When the Prince received this letter, strangely enough, he did not dissolve into tears at its pathos; he was on the contrary exceedingly angry. He said at once that Miss Vane—or “the minx” as it is reported—“was incapable of writing such a letter, and that he would punish the ‘rascal’ who had dictated it to her.”
He was probably well acquainted with her capabilities in this respect, and possibly knew her modes of expression very well; as a rule the ladies of the Court of that time were nothing like so refined in their correspondence; this was evidently the composition of a man and one indeed skilled in letters. All this would be extremely strange if one element which prevailed at the time were not well known, viz., that the clever, diplomatic, Queen Caroline was exceedingly anxious that the Prince, her son, should break with Miss Vane, as she had a strong wish that he should marry, and this well-known liaison might form an obstacle, though apparently she had no particular Princess in view.
There is another point, also, which must not be lost sight of, and that is that during the three years and more that the Prince had been in England, he had grown year by year in popular favour, and had entirely eclipsed the Queen’s favourite son, the Duke of Cumberland, whom as we know the King and Queen would gladly have seen in his brother Frederick’s place as heir to the English throne.
It is impossible to say how far the crafty Hervey with his great influence over the Queen may have worked upon this feeling of jealousy at her eldest son’s popularity.
Unnatural as it seems, unless we read it in the light of later events, the Queen may have been induced to take a hidden part in this affair of Miss Vane to decrease the Prince of Wales’s growing popularity with the people.
For what followed? Very soon the details of this affair began to leak out among the public, a series of scurrilous songs and pamphlets began to make their appearance: “Vanilla, or the Amours of the Court”; “Vanessi, or the Humours of the Court of Modern Gallantry”; and a particularly offensive one “Vanilla on the Straw.”
Knowing as we do that Lord Hervey composed Miss Vane’s answer to the Prince’s message, that the copy of it was soon made public, and the Prince’s cruel message widely disseminated by Miss Vane, who apparently was at this time entirely under Lord Hervey’s influence, it is impossible to doubt for a moment that Hervey was striking a very heavy blow at the Prince’s popularity.
At this juncture, however, the mature judgment of Pulteney, the leader of the Opposition, came to the Prince’s aid, as it did at a later time also, and under his advice Miss Vane received the provision which the Prince had originally intended for her, viz., a settlement of £1,600 a year for life, a gift of the house in Grosvenor Street in which she had resided since her dismissal from Court, and that which she doubtless prized more than all, the custody of her child. All this without any request to her to leave the country.
And so the matter faded away, out of the public eye, and out of the public knowledge, for Miss Vane, with her child, went away to Bath, where very soon after both died; the child first, the mother after.
Perhaps, as it is said, this poor girl had a true affection for the Prince, and the separation broke her heart; certainly after the death of the child she could have very little left to live for; forsaken by the man who had wronged her, robbed by death of the little one on whom possibly all her hopes and love were then centred.
But it was not the poor broken-hearted mother who bore the whole of the sorrow at this little child’s death, the Queen, and the Princess Caroline, her daughter, both bear testimony “that they never believed it possible that the Prince of Wales could show such grief as he did at the death of the boy.” Perhaps a fitting conclusion to this chapter will be an Extract from the Register of Westminster Abbey, 26th February, 1735-6:
“Fitz Frederick, natural child of the Prince of Wales by Anne Vane, daughter of Gilbert, Lord Barnard, buried, aged four.”