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.