“Your Royal Highness need not be put in mind who I am, nor whence you took me: that I acted not like what I was born, others may reproach me; but you took me from happiness and brought me to misery, that I might reproach you. That I have long lost your heart I have long seen, and long mourned: to gain it, or rather to reward the gift you made me of it, I sacrificed my time, my youth, my character, the world, my family, and everything that a woman can sacrifice to a man she loves; how little I considered my interest, you must know by my never naming my interest to you when I made this sacrifice, and by my trusting to your honour, when I showed so little regard, when put in balance with my love to my own. I have resigned everything for your sake but my life; and, had you loved me still, I would have risked even that too to please you; but as it is, I cannot think, in my state of health, of going out of England, far from all friends and all physicians I can trust, and of whom I stand in so much need. My child is the only consolation I have left; I cannot leave him, nor shall anything but death ever make me quit the country he is in.”
When Frederick received this letter, instead of being touched by its pathos, he flew into a rage, and swore that the minx could never have written it, and he would be revenged on the rascal who helped her to concoct it. He took all his friends into his confidence, and Miss Vane took all hers, and the matter soon became the principal topic of conversation at court, from the Queen and the Princesses downwards. Miss Vane gained much sympathy by repeating the Prince’s brutal message, that “if she would not live abroad she might for him starve in England”. Everybody sympathised with her, and everybody blamed the Prince, who thereupon threw over Lord Baltimore, and declared that he had never sent such a message; he must have been misunderstood. On hearing this, Miss Vane, acting on the advice of Pulteney, who was thought by many to have written for her the first letter, and other friends, wrote a more submissive letter to the Prince. In it she declared that she had certainly received the message from Lord Baltimore, though she could hardly believe that it came from the Prince’s lips. It was for him to show whether he had said those words or not. If he had not, she felt sure he would treat her fairly; if he had, then all the world would know how she had been ill-treated and betrayed.
Meanwhile the affair from being the gossip of the court became the talk of the town, and ballads and pamphlets on the fair Vanilla were everywhere circulated, under such titles as “Vanilla on the Straw,” “Vanilla, or the Amours of the Court,” “Vanessa, or the Humours of the Court of Modern Gallantry,” etc. The Prince seeing that he could not abandon the lady without considerable discredit, at last agreed to settle on her £1,600 a year for life, to give her the house in Grosvenor Street which she had occupied since she had been dismissed from court, and to allow her son to remain with her—in short, he yielded all her terms.
Poor Miss Vane did not long enjoy her fortune. Perhaps she really loved her faithless wooer; she died at Bath soon after, her friends said of a broken heart. Her child died about the same time. The Queen and Princess Caroline declared that the Prince showed more feeling at the loss of this child than they had thought him capable of possessing. Perhaps it was remorse.
The two elder Princesses, Anne and Amelia, were always quarrelling with their brother. Amelia at first pretended to be his friend, and then betrayed him to the King. When the Prince found this out he hated her, and when the King discovered it he despised her; so she became disliked by both. Anne, Princess Royal, was at perpetual feud with her brother, and their strife came to a head, strangely enough, over music. The Princess had been instructed by Handel, and helped him by every means in her power. When Handel took over the management of the opera at the Haymarket, the Princess induced the King and Queen to take a box there, and to frequently attend the performances. All those who wished to be in favour with the court followed suit and the Haymarket became a fashionable resort. The Prince saw in this an opportunity of annoying his sister, and of showing disrespect to the King and Queen. He affected not to care about Handel’s music, and set to work to organise a series of operas at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Party feeling ran very high just then, and seeing that the Prince of Wales was so much interested in the opera at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, many of the Opposition, and all those who had a grudge against the court, made a point of attending the opera there, and it soon became a formidable rival to the Haymarket. Instead of ignoring this, the King and Queen took the matter up, and made it a personal grievance. They patronised Handel more than ever, and made it a point that their courtiers should do the same. Thus it came about that all those who appeared at the Haymarket were regarded as the friends of the King and Queen, and all those who attended Lincoln’s Inn Fields were looked upon as the Prince’s friends.
Opposition is always popular, and the Prince managed to gather around him the younger and livelier spirits among the nobility, and the most beautiful and fashionable of the ladies of quality. Certainly Lincoln’s Inn Fields was much more patronised, and the King and Queen and the Princess Royal would often go to one of Handel’s operas at the Haymarket and find a half empty house. This gave Lord Chesterfield an opportunity of uttering one of his witticisms. One night when he came to Lincoln’s Inn Fields he told the Prince that he had just looked in at the Haymarket, but found nobody there but the King and Queen, “and as I thought they might be talking business I came away,” he said; a joke which vastly pleased the Prince, and greatly incensed the court. Referring to the large attendance of peers at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Princess Royal said, with a sneer, that she “expected in a little while to see half the House of Lords playing in the orchestra in their robes and coronets”. Conscious of failure she felt extremely bitter against her brother, and abused him roundly. But the Prince had won and could afford to laugh at his sister’s invectives. The court was so deplorably dull, he said, that all those with any pretensions to wit, beauty or fashion refused to follow its lead, and looked to him, the heir to the throne, as their natural leader, notwithstanding the way in which he was treated by the King and Queen.
Certainly the private life of the Court was far from lively. The clockwork regularity of the King, both in business and in pleasure, and the limited range of his amusements and interests tended to make his court appallingly dull—in contrast to the old days at Leicester House. Mrs. Howard, whose little parties had once been so popular, now withdrew more and more to herself. She would probably have retired from court altogether had it not been that by the death of her brother-in-law, her husband became Earl of Suffolk. As she was now a countess she could no longer hold the inferior position of bedchamber-woman, and placed her resignation in the Queen’s hands, who, however, met the case by making her Mistress of the Robes, and so retaining her about the court. Lady Suffolk had no longer to perform the duties at the Queen’s toilet which had given her so much umbrage, and her position became pleasanter in consequence of the change. We find her writing to Gay a little later: “To prevent all future quarrels and disputes I shall let you know that I have kissed hands for the place of Mistress of the Robes. Her Majesty did me the honour to give me the choice of lady of the bedchamber, or that which I find so much more agreeable to me that I did not take one moment to consider it. The Duchess of Dorset resigned it for me; and everything as yet promises more happiness for the latter part of my life than I have yet had the prospect of. Seven nights’ quiet sleep and seven easy days have almost worked a miracle in me.”[94]
Even Lord Hervey complained bitterly at this time of the monotony of his daily round. He was dissatisfied, and considered that his services to the Government and the Crown should be repaid by some more considerable appointment than the one he held, which most people thought equal to his abilities, and was certainly in excess of his deserts. But Walpole, who knew how useful Hervey was as go-between, would not remove him from his post about the Queen, notwithstanding his representations. Chafing under this refusal Lord Hervey wrote the following letter to his friend Mrs. Clayton, another courtier and favourite who could sympathise with him in his ennui. It gives anything but a flattering picture of the royal circle:—
“I will not trouble you with any account of our occupations at Hampton Court. No mill-horse ever went in a more constant track, or a more unchanging circle, so that by the assistance of an almanack for the day of the week, and a watch for the hour of the day, you may inform yourself fully, without any other intelligence but your memory, of every transaction within the verge of the Court. Walking, chaises, levées, and audiences fill the morning; at night the King plays at commerce and backgammon, and the Queen at quadrille, where poor Lady Charlotte (de Roussie) runs her usual nightly gauntlet—the Queen pulling her hood, Mr. Schütz sputtering in her face, and the Princess Royal rapping her knuckles, all at a time. It was in vain she fled from persecution for her religion: she suffers for her pride what she escaped for her faith; undergoes in a drawing-room what she dreaded from the Inquisition, and will die a martyr to a Court, though not to a Church.
“The Duke of Grafton takes his nightly opiate of lottery, and sleeps as usual between the Princesses Amelia and Caroline; Lord Grantham strolls from one room to another (as Dryden says) like some discontented ghost that oft appears, and is forbid to speak, and stirs himself about, as people stir a fire, not with any design, but in hopes to make it burn brisker, which his lordship constantly does, to no purpose, and yet tries as constantly as if he had ever once succeeded.