The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
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things the rather gauche young man was not – well travelled, assured, articulate, sophisticated, naturally at home in the elegant world. By the time Hervey’s third son was born in 1730, the two men were such close friends that, with the prince’s blessing, Hervey named the boy after him. They were seen everywhere together and supported each other through a variety of tribulations. When Hervey, whose health was always troublesome, collapsed ‘as if I had been shot’ in a fit at the prince’s feet, Frederick abandoned all other commitments to stay with his friend until he recovered. ‘The prince sat with me all day yesterday,’ Hervey wrote with satisfaction, ‘and has promised to do so again today.’39 Hervey returned the favour when Frederick in his turn fell ill. After he recovered, he presented Hervey with a gold snuffbox bearing his portrait and invited him down to his country retreat at Kew, where they played at ninepins all day. They were now so close that they had dropped any formal titles; the prince wrote to Hervey in playful tones as ‘my dear chicken’ or ‘my lord chicken’.40
By the summer of 1731, the relationship between Hervey and Frederick had become so intimate and so affectionate that Hervey’s established lover began to grow uneasy about it. Stephen Fox – known to his friends as Ste – was the brother of the politician Henry Fox and the uncle of the famous Charles. He and Hervey had been involved in a passionate affair for nearly five years, even though Ste shared few of Hervey’s interests. Where Hervey was happiest in the intrigue and incident of the city, Ste was a dedicated countryman, who could rarely be persuaded to leave his Somerset estate. Hervey’s wife Molly, who knew all about their relationship, said that ‘unless one could be metamorphosed into a bird or a hare, [Ste] will have nothing to say to one’.41 When they were apart, Hervey wrote constantly to Ste, doing all he could to convey his love for him in words. ‘I hear you in the deadliest silence and see you in the deepest darkness,’ he assured him. ‘For my own part, my mind never goes naked but in your territories.’42 Now Ste began to wonder whether the prince was edging him out of Hervey’s affections. When Hervey unguardedly told Ste how much he cared for the prince, Ste exploded in an outburst of jealousy and recrimination. Shocked by Ste’s response, Hervey did all he could to mollify his wounded feelings. ‘When I said I loved 7 [his codeword for the prince] as much as I loved you, I lied egregiously; I am as incapable of wishing to love anybody else so well as I am of wishing to love you less.’43 He insisted that Ste would always be his only real love, assuring him ‘that since first I knew you I have been yours without repenting, and still am, and ever shall be undividedly, and indissolubly yours’. Eventually, the storm passed.
While it is hard to know how conscious Frederick was of the effect he had on Hervey, it is difficult to imagine that he had no understanding of the emotions he had stirred up. When Hervey wrote to Frederick describing himself as Hephaistion, every educated man of the time would have known that Hephaistion was the male lover of a great prince, Alexander the Great. It is also perhaps significant that the pages which cover the period of greatest intimacy between Hervey and Frederick were removed and destroyed by Hervey’s grandson when he inherited Hervey’s memoirs. Considering the graphic and unflinching nature of what he left untouched, the excised section must have contained details he regarded as even more scandalous than what remains.
In the end, it was a row over a woman, not a man, that put an end to Frederick and Hervey’s friendship. None of the three men involved in the complicated triangle that played itself out in 1731–32 saw their relationship with each other as debarring them from affairs with women. All three married, and between them they produced a tribe of children. Down in Somerset, Ste preferred hunting and shooting to the active pursuit of women; neither Frederick nor Hervey saw any reason to interrupt their more conventional predatory habits. ‘What game you poach, sir,’ Hervey wrote archly to the prince, ‘what you hunt, what you catch, or what runs into your mouth, I don’t pretend to guess.’44 But when he discovered that Frederick had successfully seduced a woman he regarded as a conquest of his own, Hervey was incensed.
Anne Vane, one of Queen Caroline’s Maids of Honour, had been Hervey’s mistress since 1730. She was not considered much of a prize. ‘She is a fat and ill-shaped dwarf,’ said one uncharitable witness, ‘who has nothing good to recommend her that I know.’45 It was hardly a passionate affair; Hervey described her to Ste as ‘a little ragout that, though it is not one’s favourite dish, will prevent one either dying of hunger or choosing to fast’.46 Yet when he discovered that the prince had set her up in a house in Soho he was furious. It was not a thwarted sense of possessiveness on Hervey’s part. Anne Vane had so many lovers that when she became pregnant, three men claimed paternity of the baby, though it was the prince who was widely considered best entitled to that credit. Hervey was more hurt by what he considered the prince’s betrayal than Anne Vane’s faithlessness. When Frederick began to spend more and more time with Anne and less and less with his old friend, Hervey’s anger turned to desperation. In a last-ditch attempt to win back the favour that was so visibly ebbing away, he wrote a blistering letter to his ex-mistress, threatening to tell the prince everything he knew about her unless she promised to help reinstate him in Frederick’s good books. Anne collapsed with shock, and on her recovery, showed the letter to Frederick, who was extremely angry and never forgave Hervey. The breach between the two men was immediate and irrevocable; their years of friendship were swept away and replaced by volleys of insult and invective, claim and counterclaim, professions of outraged honour and betrayed loyalty. In the summer of 1732, Anne gave birth to a son, who was ostentatiously named Fitzfrederick. Frederick installed her in a palatial house in Grosvenor Square and gave her an annual allowance of £3,000.47 It was a very public demonstration of the transfer of his affections.
Reluctantly accepting that he had no real future with the son, Hervey now concentrated his attention on Frederick’s mother, who responded eagerly to his overtures. When the prince protested that ‘it was extremely hard a man the whole world knew had been so impertinent to him, and whom he never spoke to, should be picked out by the queen for her constant companion’, his complaints were ignored. Hervey later maintained that despite their quarrel, he would sometimes take Frederick’s side, arguing his case before the prince’s increasingly ill-disposed parents. He was candid enough to admit that he did this not as ‘an affectation of false generosity but merely from prudence and regard to himself’. He knew, he said, how common it was in families ‘for suspended affection to revive itself’ and did not want to find himself excoriated by both sides of a reunited dynasty.48 But as relations between the prince and his parents grew more bitter, Hervey took full advantage of the opportunities offered by his position around the queen to take revenge upon his erstwhile friend. He became one of the prince’s greatest enemies in a household in which there was considerable competition for that title, egging Caroline on to ever greater and more shocking declarations of anger and disgust with Frederick.
In the end he supplanted the prince in every aspect of his mother’s affection. As Caroline knew, Hervey disliked his own mother, whom he thought a loud and silly woman. ‘Your mother,’ she once told him, ‘is a brute that deserves just such a beast as my son. I hope I do not; and I wish with all my soul we could change, that they who are alike might go together, and that you and I might belong to one another.’49 Hervey, who did all he could to present himself to Caroline as the child she truly deserved, once ventured to suggest the possibility directly. ‘Supposing I had had the honour to be born Your Majesty’s son –’ ‘I wish to God you had,’ interrupted the queen. Few conversations could have given him such a sense of deep and vengeful satisfaction.
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In later years, there was a great deal of speculation about what had provoked the hatred that came to define the relations between the king and queen and their eldest son. Lord Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor from 1737 to