In the Prince’s next move for popularity Doddington played a passive part. He was generally understood to represent the Prince in the House of Commons, and when therefore he declined to speak in the House in favour of the excise, it was regarded as a proof of the Prince’s lukewarmness; and when another favourite, Townshend, who was the groom of the bedchamber to the Prince, actually voted against the scheme, it was understood that the Prince was hostile to it. Wyndham emphasised this in one of his attacks on Walpole. He denounced corruption and tyranny, and recalled certain unworthy king’s favourites of former times: “What was their fate?” he asked. “They had the misfortune to outlive their master, and his son, as soon as he came to the throne, took off their heads.” The Prince of Wales was sitting under the gallery listening to the debate, and the allusion was cheered to the echo by the Opposition. The Prince’s attitude was further shown by his exceeding graciousness to Lord Stair, who had told the Queen his mind, and to Lord Chesterfield, who had offended her past forgiveness.
The King was exceedingly angry, and threatened to turn Townshend out of the little appointment he held under the Prince, but Walpole counselled letting him alone. Walpole would have punished Doddington had he dared, for he regarded him as the chief instigator of the Prince’s rebellious conduct. This was most unfair, for Doddington’s advice was always on the side of caution, and his influence had more than once prevented the Prince from rising in open revolt against his parents. Walpole forgot for the moment that behind the Prince was one much greater than Doddington whose enmity never slept, and that one was Bolingbroke. Though debarred from his seat in the House of Lords, and unable to raise his voice or vote, Bolingbroke yet, by his genius for intrigue, the vigour of his political writings and his consummate power of organisation, had done more than any man to stir up public feeling against the excise, and to bring Walpole within measurable distance of his fall. Most of the Opposition were puppets moved by this master mind, Wyndham was his mouthpiece, even Pulteney at this time was wholly under his spell. And under the ordinary working of the Constitution, Bolingbroke would have led his hosts to victory had not the King and Queen, unconstitutionally, it must be admitted, retained their Prime Minister.
Meanwhile, though the Prince was proving himself a thorn in the side of his father and the Government, and though the Opposition championed his cause with fervour, he could not get his allowance increased, and he sank deeper and deeper into debt. It came to the ears of old Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, that the Prince was in pecuniary distress, and she bethought herself of a scheme which would at once gratify her ambition and wound the feelings of the King and Queen. She asked the Prince to honour her with a visit to Marlborough House, and, when he came, she offered him the hand of her favourite granddaughter, Lady Diana Spencer, in marriage, and promised to give him £100,000 as her portion. Lady Diana was a young lady of much wit and beauty, and the Prince, partly because he wanted the money, and partly because he knew the alliance would anger his father and mother beyond measure, accepted the offer. All arrangements were made. The day of the marriage was actually fixed, and the Prince was to be secretly wedded to Lady Diana by Duchess Sarah’s chaplain in the duchess’s private lodge in Windsor Great Park. The Royal Marriage Act, which made illegal the marriage of a member of the royal family without the consent of the reigning monarch, was not then in existence, and the marriage, if it had been contracted, would have been valid, and impossible to annul, except perhaps by a special Act, which would have had no chance of passing through Parliament. There would have been nothing objectionable about the marriage except its secrecy, for Lady Diana Spencer (who afterwards became Duchess of Bedford) was by birth and fortune, as by wit and beauty, far superior to the petty German princess whom the Prince afterwards married. But Walpole got to hear of the plot in time, and was able to prevent the marriage. It is a pity that it did not take place, for the subsequent interview of the parents with old Duchess Sarah on the one side and Queen Caroline on the other would have been one of the most interesting in history.
An early and congenial marriage might have been the saving of the Prince of Wales. Like his father and grandfather he affected a reputation for gallantry, and he was always involved in affairs of a more or less disreputable nature. In pursuit of adventures of this kind he behaved more like a schoolboy than a prince arrived at years of discretion. Peter Wentworth gives an account of one of his absurd escapades. He writes:—
“Thursday morning, as the King and Queen were going to their chaise through the garden, I told them the Prince had got his watch again. Our farrier’s man had found it at the end of the Mall with the two seals to’t. The Queen laughed and said: ‘I told you before ’twas you who stole it, and now ’tis very plain that you got it from the woman who took it from the Prince, and you gave it to the farrier’s man to say he had found it, to get the reward’. (This was twenty guineas, which was advertised with the promise of no questions being asked.) I took her Majesty’s words for a very great compliment, for it looked as if she thought I could please a woman better than his Highness. Really his losing his watch, and its being brought back in the manner it has been, is very mysterious, and a knotty point to be unravelled at Court, for the Prince protests he was not out of his coach in the park on the Sunday night it was lost. But by accident I think I can give some account of this affair, though it is not my business to say a word of it at Court, not even to the Queen, who desired me to tell her all I knew of it, with a promise that she would not tell the Prince. (And I desire also the story may never go out of Wentworth Castle again.) My man, John Cooper, saw the Prince that night let into the park through St. James’s Mews alone, and the next morning a grenadier told him the Prince was robbed last night of his watch and twenty-two guineas and a gold medal by a woman who had run away from him. The Prince bid the grenadier run after her and take the watch from her, which, with the seals, were the only things he valued; the money she was welcome to, he said, and he ordered him, when he had got the watch, to let the woman go. But the grenadier could not find her, so I suppose in her haste she dropped it at the end of the Mall, or laid it down there, for fear of being discovered by the watch and seals, if they should be advertised.”[93]
The Prince also followed his forbears’ example in setting up an accredited mistress. His first intrigue was with Miss Vane (the beautiful Vanilla), daughter of Lord Barnard, and one of the Queen’s maids of honour, who, it was wittily said, “was willing to cease to be one on the first opportunity”. Miss Vane had many admirers. Lord Harrington was one of them, and Lord Hervey declared himself to be another. But Lord Hervey was fond of posing as a gallant, and his testimony on the subject of his conquests is of little worth. Miss Vane had a good deal of beauty, but little understanding, and her levity and vanity led her into a fatal error. About a year after the Prince had come to England she gave birth to a son in her apartments in St. James’s Palace, and the child was baptised in the Chapel Royal, and given the name of Fitz-Frederick Vane, which was, of course, tantamount to explaining to all the world that the Prince of Wales was its father, a fact which the Prince in no wise sought to deny.
Queen Caroline at once dismissed Miss Vane from her service, and sharply reprimanded the Prince, telling him that in future he must carry on his intrigues outside the circle of her household. No such scandal had occurred since the disgrace of Miss Howe. Miss Vane’s family likewise cast her off. The Prince took a house for her, and made her an allowance. But the unfortunate girl soon had experience of the fickleness of men in general, and of princes in particular. Frederick neglected her, and began to pay marked attentions to Lady Archibald Hamilton. Lady Archibald was no longer young, she was five and thirty, and the mother of ten children, and, unlike Miss Vane, she had no great beauty. But she was clever and intriguing, and soon gained great ascendency over her royal lover, whose attentions to her became of the most public description. “He,” says Lord Hervey, “saw her often at her own house, where he seemed as welcome to the master as the mistress; he met her often at her sister’s; walked with her day after day for hours together tête-à-tête in a morning in St. James’s Park; and whenever she was at the drawing-room (which was pretty frequently) his behaviour was so remarkable that his nose and her ear were inseparable.”
Miss Vane had small chance with so clever a rival, and Lady Archibald urged the Prince to get rid of her. In this the Queen concurred, for she resented the indiscretion of her ex-maid of honour, and as there was some thought of marrying the Prince at this time, she thought it best that he should be clear of affairs of this kind. She did not reflect, or did not know, that by getting rid of Miss Vane she was merely paving the way for a far more dangerous woman to take her place. The Prince was easily persuaded to part with Miss Vane. He sent Lord Baltimore, one of his lords in waiting, to her with a message desiring her to go abroad for two or three years, and leave her son to be educated in England. If she complied the Prince was willing to allow her £1,600 a year for life, the sum he had given her annually since she had been dismissed from court; if she refused, the message wound up by saying that: “If she would not live abroad she might starve for him in England”. The unfortunate young lady was much hurt by the matter and manner of the communication. She declined to send any answer by Lord Baltimore, on the ground that she must have time to think. Lord Hervey says that she then sent for him, and asked him as a friend to advise her what was best to be done. He and Miss Vane composed a letter to the Prince, in which the betrayed lady was made to say to her betrayer:—
FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES.