What does Walpole say?
“Thus died Frederick, Prince of Wales, having resembled his pattern the Black Prince in nothing but in dying before his father.”
“His chief passion was women....”
“He was really childish, affectedly a protector of arts and sciences, fond of displaying what he knew; a mimic, the Lord knows what a mimic—of the celebrated Duke of Orleans, in imitation of whom he wrote two or three silly French songs. His best quality was generosity; his worst, insincerity and indifference to truth, which appeared so early that Earl Stanhope wrote to Lord Sunderland from Hanover, what I shall conclude his character with, ‘He has his father’s head and his mother’s heart.’”
No great compliment either to his father or mother if this latter assertion be true!
Lord Hervey, in summing up the Prince’s character, goes much farther than this, so much farther indeed that his assertions take the colour of a very bitter display of personal animosity and spite. These are his words:
“And when I have mentioned his (the Prince’s) temper, it is the single ray of light I can throw on his character to gild the otherwise universal blackness that belongs to it, and it is surprising how any character made up of so many contradictions should never have the good fortune to have stumbled (par contre-coup at least) upon any one virtue; but as every vice has its opposite vice as well as its opposite virtue, so this heap of iniquity to complete at once its uniformity in vice in general, as well as its contradiction in particular vices like variety of poisons—whether hot or cold, sweet or bitter—was still poison, and had never an antidote.”
These stilted passages of Lord Hervey seem to have been put together with a double object; first to show his hatred for Prince Frederick; secondly to display his own learning. Though succeeding admirably in one, he seems to have failed in the other. No man of learning would ever commit himself to assertions which he was not in a position to substantiate, and Lord Hervey was certainly never in a position to prove any of the assertions he put forward against the Prince, or he most assuredly would have done so.
He was no more able to prove these vague charges—they were always vague, even to the cowardly hints which he gave in his Memoirs that he knew something; something very detrimental to the Prince’s character—than he was able to prove his boastful assertion to Sir Robert Walpole that he was the father of Anne Vane’s child, the child which had been acknowledged by the Prince as his own.
He stated in his Memoirs that he was aware of certain facts very damaging to the Prince of Wales, which accounted for the King and Queen’s hatred of him. If so then he must have been acquainted with some crime committed in Frederick’s childhood, say at the age of seven, for that was about the time when his father and mother began to hate him.