The Queen narrates a sort of quarrel which she had with Lady Suffolk, a woman so notoriously scandalous, that the wife of George II. ought not to have suffered her to approach her person. The quarrel was, as a note conceives it, not about holding a basin for the Queen to wash in, but about holding it on her knees. (What person of any degree of self-respect can discover the difference?) But Lady Suffolk, on this nice distinction, consulted the well-known Lady Masham, bedchamber woman to Queen Anne, as to the point of etiquette. This authority delivered her judgment of chambermaid duties, in the following style:—“When the Queen washed her hands, a page of the backstairs brought and set down upon a side-table the basin and ewer. Then the bedchamber woman set it before the Queen, and knelt on the other side of the table over against the Queen, the bedchamber lady only looking on. The bedchamber woman brought in the chocolate, and gave it kneeling.” Lady Suffolk, formerly Mrs Howard, had been bedchamber woman, and of course had performed this menialism! “We shall see by-and-by,” adds the note, “that, the lady of the bedchamber, though a countess, presented the basin for the Queen’s washing, on her knees.”
If such things were done, we must own that it wholly exceeds our comprehension how they could be exacted on the one side, or submitted to on the other. We are sure that there is not a scullion in England who would stoop to hold a basin for her mistress’s ablutions on her knees. Yet, however we may be surprised at the existence of such practices, it is impossible to feel the slightest sympathy for the persons whom their salaries tempt to the sufferance.
We have left ourselves but little room for the biography of Lord Hervey himself. He was born in 1696, the second son of the first Lord Bristol. He travelled; returned to solicit a commission; failed in his solicitation; became, of course, “a virtuous opponent of the court,” and attached himself to the Prince and Princess, who held a sort of Opposition court at Richmond. Hervey, young, handsome, and polished, became a general favourite. He won the most accomplished woman of her time; married; and, in 1723, became Lord Hervey by the death of his elder brother, a man of ability, but of habits remarkably profligate.
On the death of George I., Hervey changed his politics; abandoned Pulteney; leveed Walpole; obtained a pension of £1000 a-year; received another gilded fetter, in the office of vice-chamberlain, and became a courtier for life.
Whether to console himself for this showy slavery, or to indulge a natural taste for the sarcasm which is forbidden in the atmosphere of high life, he wrote the Memoirs, of which we have given a sketch. The prudence of his son, the third earl, kept them in secret. The marquis, nephew of that earl, probably regarding the time as past when they could provoke private resentment, has suffered them to emerge, and Mr Croker has edited them, for the benefit of the rising generation.
Whether the editor has done credit to himself or service to the public, by this employment of his hours of retirement, has been the subject of considerable question. That the volumes are amusing there can be no doubt; that they are flippant and frivolous there can be no question whatever; that they disclose conceptions of the interior of courts which may “make the rabble laugh and the judicious grieve,” that, though filtered through three generations of correctors, they yet remain miry enough still, requires no further proof than their perusal.
We say this in no favouritism for either the King or the Queen: the truth was probably told of both. Their foreign habits evidently clung to them; and the purer feelings of England, as evidently, had not the power to purify the practices of their foreign descent. But if Lord Hervey’s mind was exercised in giving the secret life of courts to the world, we think that a much more contemptuous subject for the pencil might be found, in the man who, earning his daily bread by his courtiership, pretended to independence of opinion; who, listening to every expression of royalty with a bow, and receiving every command with the submission of a slave, threw off the sycophant only to assume the satirist, and revenged his sense of servitude only by privately registering the errors of those, the dust of whose shoes he licked for twelve hours in every twenty-four.
But we must hope that the Memoirs of Lord Hervey will be the last with which the national curiosity is to be stimulated. We must have no further ill-natured overflowing on the absurdities of high life. If this fashion shall invade the shelves and scrinia of noble families, there is probably not a household of the higher ranks which may not furnish its tribute. We shall be overrun with feeble gossiping and obsolete scandal. No rational purpose can be held in view by indulging the posthumous malice of a discontented slave. No manly curiosity can be gratified by breaking up the tomb, showing us only the decay so long hidden by its marbles and escutcheons from the eye.—Requiescat.