But when the Prince and Princess of Wales repaired to Leicester House, Leicester Fields soon became the fashionable part of the town. At night it was crowded with coaches and sedan-chairs, bearers and runners, linkmen with flambeaux and gorgeously liveried footmen. Lords and men of fashion in gold-laced coats, with enormous periwigs, and ladies in hoops and powder, tripped across the court-yard of Leicester House at all hours of the day and far into the night, for the Prince and Princess of Wales kept a brilliant court here, especially in the first years of their occupation. The discontented among the politicians, especially the Whigs, rallied around the Prince. “The most promising of the young lords and gentlemen of that party,” says Horace Walpole, “and the prettiest and liveliest of the young ladies, formed the new Court of the Prince and Princess of Wales. The apartment of the bedchamber woman-in-waiting became the fashionable evening rendezvous of the most distinguished wits and beauties.” A drawing-room was held every morning, and three times a week receptions took place in the evening, which were thronged by the most elegant beaux, the most accomplished wits, and the most beautiful of the ladies of quality. Balls, routs and assemblies were the order of the day, or rather of the night, at Leicester House, and on the evenings when there were none of these entertainments, the Prince and Princess showed themselves at the theatre, the opera, or some other public resort, always followed by a splendid suite. Leicester House became a synonym for brilliancy, and if it was the wish of the Prince and Princess to outshine the old King’s court, they quickly achieved it. The fashion they set of a court of pleasure was soon followed by many of the nobility, who sought to excel each other in the splendour of their entertainments. At no time had the social life of London been more brilliant, or more varied, than in these early days at Leicester House. Lord Chesterfield, that most polished of courtiers, writes of this period: “Balls, assemblies and masquerades have taken the place of dull, formal visiting-days, and the women are more agreeable triflers than they were designed. Puns are extremely in vogue, and the licence very great. The variation of three or four letters in a word breaks no squares, in so much that an indifferent punster may make a very good figure in the best companies.” He was as ready with puns as Lord Hervey was with epigrams, or Lord Bath with verses.
Lord Chesterfield—he was Lord Stanhope then, but we use the title by which he was afterwards famous—was about twenty-five years of age. He had proved himself at Cambridge an accomplished classical scholar, and on leaving the university he made the then fashionable tour of Europe. He wasted a good deal of money gaming at the Hague—a vice to which he was much given—and then went to Paris, where, as he was young, handsome and wealthy, he achieved a great success. “I shall not give you my opinion of the French,” he writes, “as I am very often taken for one; and many a Frenchman has paid me the highest compliment he thinks he can pay to any one, which is, ‘Sir, you are just like one of us’. I talk a great deal; I am very loud and peremptory; I sing and dance as I go along; and, lastly, I spend a monstrous deal of money in powder, feathers, white gloves, etc.” When he came back to England he was appointed a gentleman of the bedchamber to the Prince of Wales, and at the court of Leicester House he was one of the most shining ornaments. Johnson speaks of him as “a wit among lords and a lord among wits”. He warmly espoused the cause of the Prince against his father, and he often delighted the Princess by ridiculing the dull court of the King, and especially the mistresses, whom he described as “two considerable specimens of the King’s bad taste and strong stomach”. The Princess was mocking one day at Kielmansegge’s painted face. “She looks young—if one may judge from her complexion,” she said, “not more than eighteen or twenty.” “Yes, madam,” replied Chesterfield, “eighteen or twenty stone.” And then he went on to say: “The standard of his Majesty’s taste, as exemplified in his mistress, makes all ladies who aspire to his favour, and who are near the suitable age, strain and swell themselves, like the frogs in the fable, to rival the bulk and the dignity of the ox. Some succeed, and others—burst.” Whereat the Princess and her ladies laughed heartily. But Chesterfield’s wit was a two-edged sword, which he sometimes directed against the Princess herself, mimicking her gestures and her foreign accent the moment her back was turned. She soon became aware through her ladies, who, of course, told tales, that she was mocked at by him, and once she warned him, half in jest and half in earnest. “You have more wit, my lord, than I,” she said, “but I have a bitter tongue, and always repay my debts with exorbitant interest”—a speech which he had later reason to remember. Of course he denied, with exquisite grace, that he could possibly have dared to ridicule the most charming of princesses, but Caroline did not trust him. His sarcasms made him many enemies, though his great object, he declares, when a young man, was “to make every man I met like me, and every woman love me”.
Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough, the soldier and statesman, also came to Leicester House from time to time. His days of adventure were now over, so he had leisure to indulge in his love of gallantry and the arts. He tempered his wit with a vein of philosophy. He affected a superiority over the ordinary conventions of life, and never lost an opportunity of showing his contempt for fops and fools. One day, seeing a dancing-master picking his way along with pearl-coloured silk stockings, he was so irritated at the sight of this epicene being, that he leaped out of his coach and ran at him with drawn sword, driving the man and his stockings into the mud. As this was an age of over-dressed beaux, Peterborough would sometimes show his disregard for outward appearances by going to the opposite extreme. Mary Lepel, then Lady Hervey, wrote once from Bath: “Lord Peterborough is here, and has been so some time, though, by his dress one would believe he had not designed to make any stay; for he wears boots all day, and as I hear, must do so, having brought no shoes with him. It is a comical sight to see him with his blue ribbon and star and a cabbage under each arm, or a chicken in his hand, which, after he himself has purchased from market, he carries home for his dinner.”[87] If we may believe the Duchess of Orleans, Peterborough was in love with the Princess of Wales, and often told her so, but she certainly did not encourage him. Her conduct was a model in this respect, notwithstanding that the King about this time spread many injurious reports against her: “He will get laughed at by everybody for doing this,” says the Duchess, “for the Princess has a spotless reputation”.[88]
A more frequent figure at Leicester House than Peterborough was John, Lord Hervey, eldest son of the first Earl of Bristol, who was a gentleman of the bedchamber to the Prince, and a great favourite with the Princess of Wales. He was considered an exquisite beau and wit, and showed himself in after life to be possessed of considerable ability, both as writer[89] and orator. 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 a man 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.” Despite his affectations and his constitutional ill-health, he had great success with the fair sex, and two or three years later he wedded one of the beauties of Leicester House, the incomparable Mary Lepel.
The eccentric Duchess of Buckingham, “mad with pride,” was also wont to attend the drawing-rooms at Leicester House, not because she had any affection for the Prince and Princess of Wales—on the contrary, she hated the Hanoverian family, and was always plotting against them—but because she thought that by going she would annoy the King. She was the acknowledged daughter of James the Second, by Katherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, and she was inordinately proud of her Stuart ancestry, though Horace Walpole, who was among her enemies, declares that her mother said to her: “You need not be so vain, daughter, you are not the King’s child, but Colonel Graham’s”. Graham’s daughter, the Countess of Berkshire, was supposed to be very like the duchess, and he himself was not unwilling to claim paternity, though she stoutly denied the suggestion. “Well, well,” said Graham, “kings are all powerful, and one must not complain, but certainly the same man was the father of those two women.” On the other hand, James the Second always treated the duchess as his child, bestowed upon her the rank and precedence of a duke’s daughter, and gave her leave to bear the royal arms with a slight variation. She first married James, Earl of Anglesey, and later became the third wife of the magnificent John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, and survived him. At Buckingham House the wealthy duchess lived in semi-regal state, and she made journeys to Paris, which were like royal progresses, to visit the church where lay the unburied body of James the Second, and to weep over it. She refused to visit Versailles unless the French Court received her with the honours due to a princess of the blood royal, which, of course, were not granted her. She had her opera box in Paris decorated in the same way as those set apart for crowned heads, and she sometimes appeared at the opera in London in royal robes of red velvet and ermine. On one occasion, when she wished to drive through Richmond Park, she was told by the gatekeeper that she must not pass as the road was reserved for royalty. “Tell the King,” she cried indignantly, “that if it is reserved for royalty, I have more right to go through it than he has.” She was inordinately vain, and had a great love of admiration and society, always wishing to see and be seen.
But if the court of the Prince and Princess of Wales had consisted only of duchesses, young noblemen and beautiful women of fashion, it would have been much like any other court. What gave Leicester House its peculiar distinction was the presence of poets, writers and learned men, who were drawn thither by the Princess. The Prince, like his father, had a great contempt for men of letters, and for literature generally. He did not love “boetry,” as he called it, and once when Lord Hervey was composing a poem he said to him testily that such an occupation was unbecoming to a man of his rank; he should leave the scribbling of verses to “little Mr. Pope”. But Caroline thought differently, and she endeavoured at Leicester House to set up a court modelled upon the one she had known in her early years at Lützenburg, and she held, as far as she could, the same réunions. Learned and scientific men were more familiar figures at courts in those days than now. Louis the Fourteenth had set the fashion among royal personages for appreciating “learned incense”. In the latter part of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth century the more famous writers were to be met as a matter of course in the highest social and political circles, and the position of men of letters never stood higher in England than during the reign of Anne. Tories and Whigs vied with one another in winning over to their side the ablest writers of the day. It is not contended that this advanced the higher interests of literature, but an age which produced Pope, Addison, Swift, Congreve, Defoe, Gay and Steele (to name only a few) cannot be considered barren. There was an intimate link between diplomacy and letters. Matthew Prior, in return for scribbling some indifferent verses, rose to become ambassador at Paris; Addison, who undertook a good deal of diplomatic work, became eventually Secretary of State; Gay had dabbled in diplomacy; and Steele, from being a trooper in the Guards, was advanced to a lucrative position in the Civil Service. Many men of letters, at the advice of their patrons, took Holy Orders, and the Church was regarded as a convenient way of providing for their necessities; Swift was an instance of this, and many another besides. The press, as we understand it to-day, was then only in its infancy; but in the patronage extended by statesmen and noble lords who wished to play the part of Mæcenas to pamphleteers, playwrights, poetasters and so forth, we see the first recognition of what is now known as the power of the press. When George the First ascended the throne, nearly all the cleverest pamphleteers were Tories or Jacobites, and the King was indifferent whether they were so or not. But Caroline saw the necessity of employing some able writers on the side of the dynasty, and so counteracting the Jacobite publications. In pursuance of this policy, after the Jacobite rising, Addison was employed by the Government to write up, in The Freeholder, the Hanoverian succession and Whig policy, and he was rewarded shortly after by a lucrative appointment. His social ambition led him to marry the Dowager Countess of Warwick, a haughty virago, who treated him more like a lackey than a husband. Both Addison and the countess were often to be seen at Leicester House.
Pope, who had just had his famous quarrel with Addison, often came to Leicester House, and was on friendly terms with Mrs. Howard and many of the maids of honour. He was probably brought before the notice of the Princess of Wales by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu before she left for Constantinople. He had already achieved fame by his Rape of the Lock and his Pastorals, and he had published the first four books of his translation of the Iliad. He was a Roman Catholic, had entered upon his career as a Tory with a leaning to Jacobitism; his patrons had been Oxford, Harcourt and Bolingbroke, all fallen statesmen now. But these things made no difference to Caroline, who quickly recognised the poet’s genius, and with her genius stood before every other consideration.
Gay, the poet, found his way here too, careless, good-humoured, popular with every one. He had first made Caroline’s acquaintance at Hanover, whither he went as secretary to Lord Clarendon on his special mission just before the death of Queen Anne. He wrote to Swift from there, speaking of himself as strutting in silver and blue through the clipped avenues of Herrenhausen, perfecting himself in the diplomatic arts “of bowing profoundly, speaking deliberately, and wearing both sides of my long periwig before”. He was a very necessitous poet, always in difficulties, and he hit upon a plan of making a little money, and at the same time winning the favour of the Court. He wrote a long poem to the Princess of Wales, in which he mingled her praises with his necessities. The only practical result of this effusion was that Caroline went to Drury Lane to honour the first performance of Gay’s next effort, which he described as a tragi-comi-pastoral-farce, “What d’ye call it?” a burlesque on the plays of the time; it was a failure, notwithstanding this distinguished patronage. Gay at this time was a far greater social success than a literary one, and the maids of honour especially delighted in his sunny, cheery presence.
Tickell, the poet-laureate, a favourite of Addison, also paid his court to the Princess, and wrote odes to the Royal Family, notably his Royal Progress, but Caroline did not care for him, despite his fulsome verses. Voltaire and Swift did not come until later, towards the end of the reign. Arbuthnot, the fashionable physician and the friend of Chesterfield, Pulteney and Mrs. Howard, was often seen at Leicester House, though he no longer held a position at court, and through him Caroline made the acquaintance of many of the rising writers of the day. Arbuthnot was the “friend, doctor and adviser of all the wits”. Pope wrote of him in dedicating one of his volumes:—
Friend of my life, which did not you prolong,