But what are Lord Hervey’s and Horace Walpole’s charges against the Prince?
Hervey says he was vicious; Hervey of whom Sarah of Marlborough remarked:—
“He has certainly parts and wit, but is the most wretched profligate man that ever was born....”
If Frederick possessed vices, where is there any record of them in history?
Lord Hervey’s are very thinly veiled, vide Pope’s verses on him.
It is acknowledged that Frederick made a fool of himself with women when he was a young unmarried man, and that this foolishness began over in Hanover, where he was left a mere boy to his own resources in an atmosphere permeated with the vices of his father and grandfather.
There was the Vane episode; true, and he behaved as honourably as a man could under such circumstances.
Then there was the affair of Lady Archibald Hamilton, and that is exceedingly doubtful; doubtful in the extreme whether there was any guilt between this young man of seven and twenty and the plain lady of thirty-five, mother of ten children. The more one reads of his inner life, the more one doubts it.
He was certainly vain, and fond of having women about him, clever women especially, but there cannot be a scintilla of a doubt that he loved his wife devotedly, and, moreover, that she possessed the feminine attribute of attracting him through his senses, and holding him. The surest way of holding a husband.
If, therefore, he was devotedly in love with his pretty wife, and she satisfied him in every way, as he admits in his verses to her, that she did, what attraction would two plain women—Lady Archibald Hamilton and Lady Middlesex have for him, one eight years older than himself and the mother of ten children; the other “short and dark like a winter’s day,” and as “yellow as a November morning?”