The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 1756, hinted at the existence of ‘certain passages between him and the king’ that he said were ‘of too high and secret a nature’ ever to be placed in writing. But for all the desire to find a single compelling explanation for their behaviour, there was in fact no one decisive event which produced the rapid decline in even nominal goodwill between George, Caroline and Frederick.

      Instead, it was a number of considerations that exacerbated an already unhappy situation. The family history of suspicion, betrayal and distrust weighed heavily upon Frederick’s parents. There were few examples in their own past of disinterested, affectionate conduct or calm self-effacement to guide or inspire them. George’s temper was irritable and easily provoked, especially by those he thought should be unquestioningly subordinate to his will. These private discontents were magnified by a political culture which anticipated and indeed positively rewarded a separation of interests between the king and his heir. Once embarked upon, it was all but impossible to prevent these public breaches from taking on a very personal dimension. ‘It ran a little in the blood of the family to hate the eldest son,’ summarised Horace Walpole, with succinct understatement.50 But as Walpole also understood, there was a more immediate trigger for the king’s first eruption of fury at his son, and that issue was money.

      When Frederick came of age, George II allowed him around £40,000 per annum from the Civil List. Frederick considered this inadequate, especially when compared to the £100,000 his father had received when he was Prince of Wales. Even Hervey had some sympathy with Frederick’s position. He pointed out to Caroline that ‘the best friends to her, the king and the administration were of the opinion that the prince had not enough money allowed him, and whilst he was so straitened in his circumstances, it was impossible he should ever be quiet’.51 Hervey hoped that the queen would work her magic upon her husband and persuade him to adopt a more generous stance. Caroline was, at this point, better disposed towards Frederick than her husband, preferring to think of him as badly advised rather than malicious in intent. ‘Poor creature,’ she told Hervey, ‘with not a bad heart, he is induced by knaves and fools to blow him up to do things that are as unlike an honest man as a wise one.’52 Caroline insisted that she had often interceded on his behalf with his father, assuring Frederick that ‘she wanted nothing so much as their being well together.’ She had, she declared, ‘sunk several circumstances the king had not seen and softened things that he had’ in order to present her son in the best possible light. She did this even though she saw no signs that Frederick appreciated her efforts. When Hervey told her that ‘it always had been his opinion, and still was so, that the prince loved Her Majesty in his heart’, she was sceptical. She agreed that ‘he has no inveterate hatred to me, but for love, I cannot say I see any great signs of it’.53

      The king’s response was both more straightforward and more hostile. He had no sympathy with his son’s demands. Frederick had already run up huge debts in Hanover which he had no prospect of repaying without his father’s help. George also argued that the larger allowance he had received as Prince of Wales had been required to support a growing family, whilst his son was responsible for no one but himself. Frederick’s persistence in pursuing a comparable sum confirmed all his father’s early apprehensions about the ambition and opportunism of his heir; he suspected the cash was intended to further Frederick’s political ends, financing an opposition that would inevitably be directed against him. Soon the king refused to speak to his son at all. ‘He hated to talk of him almost as much as to talk to him,’ observed Hervey; but he made his feelings known by ‘laying it on him pretty thick’ in more oblique references. ‘One very often sees a father a very brave man, and the son a scoundrel,’ the king once declared to a group of embarrassed listeners, ‘a father very honest СКАЧАТЬ