Chapter X: Part 10

This happy state of things came, however, as is often the case, in close intimacies, to a painful conclusion. There was too little reality, too little earnestness of feeling, for the friendship between Pope and Lady Mary, including Lord Hervey, to last long. His lordship had his affectations, and his effeminate nicety was proverbial. One day being asked at dinner if he would take some beef, he is reported to have answered, 'Beef? oh no! faugh! don't you know I never eat beef, nor _horse_, nor curry, nor any of those things?' Poor man! it was probably a pleasant way of turning off what he may have deemed an assault on a digestion that could hardly conquer any solid food. This affectation offended Lady Mary, whose _mot_, that there were three species, 'Men, women, and Herveys'--implies a perfect perception of the eccentricities even of her gifted friend, Lord Hervey, whose mother's friend she had been, and the object of whose admiration she undoubtedly was.

Pope, who was the most irritable of men, never forgot or forgave even the most trifling offence. Lady Bolingbroke truly said of him that he played the politician about cabbages and salads, and everybody agrees that he could hardly tolerate the wit that was more successful than his own. It was about the year 1725, that he began to hate Lord Hervey with such a hatred as only he could feel; it was unmitigated by a single touch of generosity or of compassion. Pope afterwards owned that his acquaintance with Lady Mary and with Hervey was discontinued, merely because they had too much wit for him. Towards the latter end of 1732, 'The Imitation of the Second Satire of the First Book of Horace,' appeared, and in it Pope attacked Lady Mary with the grossest and most indecent couplet ever printed: she was called Sappho, and Hervey, Lord Fanny; and all the world knew the characters at once.

In retaliation for this satire, appeared 'Verses to the Imitator of Horace;' said to have been the joint production of Lord Hervey and Lady Mary. This was followed by a piece entitled 'Letter from a Nobleman at Hampton Court to a Doctor of Divinity.' To this composition Lord Hervey, its sole author, added these lines, by way, as it seems, of extenuation.

Pope's first reply was in a prose letter, on which Dr. Johnson has passed a condemnation. 'It exhibits,' he says, 'nothing but tedious malignity.' But he was partial to the Herveys, Thomas and Henry Hervey, Lord Hervey's brothers, having been kind to him--'If you call a dog _Hervey_,' he said to Boswell, 'I shall love him.'

Next came the epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, in which every infirmity and peculiarity of Hervey are handed down in calm, cruel irony, and polished verses, to posterity. The verses are almost too disgusting to be revived in an age which disclaims scurrility. After the most personal rancorous invective, he thus writes of Lord Hervey's conversation:--

His wit all see-saw between this and _that_--
Now high, now low--now _master_ up, now _miss_--
And he himself one vile antithesis.

* * * * *

Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board,
Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord.
Eve's tempter, thus the rabbins have expressed--
A cherub's face--a reptile all the rest.
Beauty that shocks you, facts that none can trust,
Wit that can creep, and pride that bites the dust.'

'It is impossible,' Mr. Croker thinks, 'not to admire, however we may condemn, the art by which acknowledged wit, beauty, and gentle manners--the queen's favour--and even a valetudinary diet, are travestied into the most odious offences.'

Pope, in two lines, pointed to the intimacy between Lady Mary and Lord Hervey:--

'Once, and but once, this heedless youth was hit,
And liked that dangerous thing, a female wit.'

Nevertheless, he _afterwards_ pretended that the name _Sappho_ was not applied to Lady Mary, but to women in general; and acted with a degree of mean prevarication which greatly added to the amount of his offence.

The quarrel with Pope was not the only attack which Lord Hervey had to encounter. Among the most zealous of his foes was Pulteney, afterwards Lord Bath, the rival of Sir Robert Walpole, and the confederate with Bolingbroke in opposing that minister. The 'Craftsman,' contained an attack on Pulteney, written, with great ability, by Hervey. It provoked a _Reply_ from Pulteney. In this composition he spoke of Hervey as 'a thing below contempt,' and ridiculed his personal appearance in the grossest terms. A duel was the result, the parties meeting behind Arlington House, in Piccadilly, where Mr. Pulteney had the satisfaction of almost running Lord Hervey through with his sword. Luckily the poor man slipped down, so the blow was evaded, and the seconds interfered: Mr. Pulteney then embraced Lord Hervey, and expressing his regret for their quarrel, declared that he would never again, either in speech or writing, attack his lordship. Lord Hervey only bowed, in silence; and thus they parted.

The queen having observed what an alteration in the palace Lord Hervey's death would cause, he said he could guess how it would be, and he produced 'The Death of Lord Hervey; or, a Morning at Court; a Drama:' the idea being taken it is thought, from Swift's verses on his own death, of which Hervey might have seen a surreptitious copy. The following scene will give some idea of the plot and structure of this amusing little piece. The part allotted to the Princess Caroline is in unison with the idea prevalent of her attachment to Lord Hervey:--

ACT I.

SCENE: _The Queen's Gallery. The time, nine in the
morning._

_Enter the_ QUEEN, PRINCESS EMILY, PRINCESS CAROLINE,
_followed by_ LORD LIFFORD, _and_ MRS. PURCEL.

_Queen._ Mon Dieu, quelle chaleur! en vérité on étouffe. Pray
open a little those windows.

_Lord Lifford._ Hasa your Majesty heara de news?

_Queen._ What news, my dear Lord?

_Lord Lifford._ Dat my Lord Hervey, as he was coming last night
to _tone_, was rob and murdered by highwaymen and tron in a
ditch.

_Princess Caroline._ Eh! grand Dieu!

_Queen_ [_striking her hand upon her knee._] Comment est-il
véritablement mort? Purcel, my angel, shall I not have a little
breakfast?

_Mrs. Purcel._ What would your Majesty please to have?

_Queen._ A little chocolate, my soul, if you give me leave, and a
little sour cream, and some fruit. [_Exit_ MRS. PURCEL.

_Queen_ [_to Lord Lifford._] Eh bien! my Lord Lifford, dites-nous
un peu comment cela est arrivé. I cannot imagine what he had to
do to be putting his nose there. Seulement pour un sot voyage
avec ce petit mousse, eh bien?

_Lord Lifford._ Madame, on scait quelque chose de celui de Mon.
Maran, qui d'abord qu'il a vu les voleurs s'est enfin venu à
grand galoppe à Londres, and after dat a waggoner take up the
body and put it in his cart.

_Queen._ [_to_ PRINCESS EMILY.] Are you not ashamed,
Amalie, to laugh?

_Princess Emily._ I only laughed at the cart, mamma.

_Queen._ Oh! that is a very fade plaisanterie.

_Princess Emily._ But if I may say it, mamma, I am not very
sorry.

_Queen._ Oh! fie donc! Eh bien! my Lord Lifford! My God! where is
this chocolate, Purcel?

As Mr. Croker remarks, Queen Caroline's breakfast-table, and her parentheses, reminds one of the card-table conversation of Swift:--

'The Dean's dead: (pray what are trumps?)
Then Lord have mercy on his soul!
(Ladies, I'll venture for the vole.)
Six Deans, they say, must bear the pall;
(I wish I knew what king to call.)'

Fragile as was Lord Hervey's constitution, it was his lot to witness the death-bed of the queen, for whose amusement he had penned the jeu d'esprit just quoted, in which there was, perhaps, as much truth as wit.

The wretched Queen Caroline had, during fourteen years, concealed from every one, except Lady Sundon, an incurable disorder, that of hernia. In November (1737) she was attacked with what we should now call English cholera. Dr. Tessier, her house-physician, was called in, and gave her Daffey's elixir, which was not likely to afford any relief to the deep-seated cause of her sufferings. She held a drawing-room that night for the last time, and played at cards, even cheerfully. At length she whispered to Lord Hervey, 'I am not able to entertain people.' 'For heaven's sake, madam,' was the reply, 'go to your room: would to heaven the king would leave off talking of the Dragon of Wantley, and release you!' The Dragon of Wantley was a burlesque on the Italian opera, by Henry Carey, and was the theme of the fashionable world.

The next day the queen was in fearful agony, very hot, and willing to take anything proposed. Still she did not, even to Lord Hervey, avow the real cause of her illness. None of the most learned court physicians, neither Mead nor Wilmot, were called in. Lord Hervey sat by the queen's bed-side, and tried to soothe her, whilst the Princess Caroline joined in begging him to give her mother something to relieve her agony. At length, in utter ignorance of the case, it was proposed to give her some snakeroot, a stimulant, and, at the same time, Sir Walter Raleigh's cordial; so singular was it thus to find that great mind still influencing a court. It was that very medicine which was administered by Queen Anne of Denmark, however, to Prince Henry; that medicine which Raleigh said, 'would cure him, or any other, of a disease, except in case of poison.'

However, Ranby, house-surgeon to the king, and a favourite of Lord Hervey's, assuring him that a cordial with this name or that name was mere quackery, some usquebaugh was given instead, but was rejected by the queen soon afterwards. At last Raleigh's cordial was administered, but also rejected about an hour afterwards. Her fever, after taking Raleigh's cordial, was so much increased, that she was ordered instantly to be bled.

Then, even, the queen never disclosed the fact that could alone dictate the course to be pursued. George II., with more feeling than judgment, slept on the outside of the queen's bed all that night; so that the unhappy invalid could get no rest, nor change her position, not daring to irritate the king's temper.

The next day the queen said touchingly to her gentle, affectionate daughter, herself in declining health, 'Poor Caroline! you are very ill, too: we shall soon meet again in another place.'

Meantime, though the queen declared to every one that she was sure nothing could save her, it was resolved to hold a _levée_. The foreign ministers were to come to court, and the king, in the midst of his real grief, did not forget to send word to his pages to be sure to have his last new ruffles sewed on the shirt he was to put on that day; a trifle which often, as Lord Hervey remarks, shows more of the real character than events of importance, from which one frequently knows no more of a person's state of mind than one does of his natural gait from his dancing.

Lady Sundon was, meantime, ill at Bath, so that the queen's secret rested alone in her own heart. 'I have an ill,' she said, one evening, to her daughter Caroline, 'that nobody knows of.' Still, neither the princess nor Lord Hervey could guess at the full meaning of that sad assertion.

The famous Sir Hans Sloane was then called in; but no remedy except large and repeated bleedings were suggested, and blisters were put on her legs. There seems to have been no means left untried by the faculty to hasten the catastrophe--thus working in the dark.

The king now sat up with her whom he had so cruelly wounded in every nice feeling. On being asked, by Lord Hervey, what was to be done in case the Prince of Wales should come to inquire after the queen, he answered in the following terms, worthy of his ancestry--worthy of himself. It is difficult to say which was the most painful scene, that in the chamber where the queen lay in agony, or without, where the curse of family dissensions came like a ghoul to hover near the bed of death, and to gloat over the royal corpse. This was the royal dictum:--'If the puppy should, in one of his impertinent airs of duty and affection, dare to come to St. James's, I order you to go to the scoundrel, and tell him I wonder at his impudence for daring to come here; that he has my orders already, and knows my pleasure, and bid him go about his business; for his poor mother is not in a condition to see him act his false, whining, cringing tricks now, nor am I in a humour to bear with his impertinence; and bid him trouble me with no more messages, but get out of my house.'

In the evening, whilst Lord Hervey sat at tea in the queen's outer apartment with the Duke of Cumberland, a page came to the duke to speak to the prince in the passage. It was to prefer a request to see his mother. This message was conveyed by Lord Hervey to the king, whose reply was uttered in the most vehement rage possible. 'This,' said he, 'is like one of his scoundrel tricks; it is just of a piece with his kneeling down in the dirt before the mob to kiss her hand at the coach door when she came home from Hampton Court to see the Princess, though he had not spoken one word to her during her whole visit. I always hated the rascal, but now I hate him worse than ever. He wants to come and insult his poor dying mother; but she shall not see him: you have heard her, and all my daughters have heard her, very often this year at Hampton Court desire me if she should be ill, and out of her senses, that I would never let him come near her; and whilst she had her senses she was sure she should never desire it. No, no! he shall not come and act any of his silly plays here.'

In the afternoon the queen said to the king, she wondered the _Griff_, a nickname she gave to the prince, had not sent to inquire after her yet; it would be so like one of his _paroitres_. 'Sooner or later,' she added, 'I am sure we shall be plagued with some message of that sort, because he will think it will have a good air in the world to ask to see me; and, perhaps, hopes I shall be fool enough to let him come, and give him the pleasure of seeing the last breath go out of my body, by which means he would have the joy of knowing I was dead five minutes sooner than he could know it in Pall Mall.'

She afterwards declared that nothing would induce her to see him except the king's absolute commands. 'Therefore, if I grow worse,' she said, 'and should I be weak enough to talk of seeing him, I beg you, sir, to conclude that I doat--or rave.'

The king, who had long since guessed at the queen's disease, urged her now to permit him to name it to her physicians. She begged him not to do so; and for the first time, and the last, the unhappy woman spoke peevishly and warmly. Then Ranby, the house-surgeon, who had by this time discovered the truth, said, 'There is no more time to be lost; your majesty has concealed the truth too long: I beg another surgeon may be called in immediately.'

The queen, who had, in her passion, started up in her bed, lay down again, turned her head on the other side, and, as the king told Lord Hervey, 'shed the only tear he ever saw her shed whilst she was ill.'

At length, too late, other and more sensible means were resorted to: but the queen's strength was failing fast. It must have been a strange scene in that chamber of death. Much as the king really grieved for the queen's state, he was still sufficiently collected to grieve also lest Richmond Lodge, which was settled on the queen, should go to the hated _Griff_:[22] and he actually sent Lord Hervey to the lord chancellor to inquire about that point. It was decided that the queen could make a will, so the king informed her of his inquiries, in order to set her mind at ease, and to assure her it was impossible that the prince could in any way benefit pecuniarily from her death. The Princess Emily now sat up with her mother. The king went to bed. The Princess Caroline slept on a couch in the antechamber, and Lord Hervey lay on a mattress on the floor at the foot of the Princess Caroline's couch.

On the following day (four after the first attack) mortification came on, and the weeping Princess Caroline and Lord Hervey were informed that the queen could not hold out many hours. Hervey was ordered to withdraw. The king, the Duke of Cumberland, and the queen's four daughters alone remained, the queen begging them not to leave her until she expired; yet her life was prolonged many days.

When alone with her family, she took from her finger a ruby ring, which had been placed on it at the time of the coronation, and gave it to the king. 'This is the last thing,' she said, 'I have to give you; naked I came to you, and naked I go from you; I had everything I ever possessed from you, and to you whatever I have I return.' She then asked for her keys, and gave them to the king. To the Princess Caroline she intrusted the care of her younger sisters; to the Duke of Cumberland, that of keeping up the credit of the family. 'Attempt nothing against your brother, and endeavour to mortify him by showing superior merit,' she said to him. She advised the king to marry again; he heard her in sobs, and with much difficulty got out this sentence: '_Non, j'aurai des maitresses_' To which the queen made no other reply than '_Ah, mon Dieu! cela n'empêche pas._' 'I know,' says Lord Hervey, in his Memoirs, 'that this episode will hardly be credited, but it is literally true.'

She then fancied she could sleep. The king kissed her, and wept over her; yet when she asked for her watch, which hung near the chimney, that she might give him the seal to take care of, his brutal temper broke forth. In the midst of his tears he called out, in a loud voice, 'Let it alone! _mon Dieu!_ the queen has such strange fancies; who should meddle with your seal? It is as safe there as in my pocket.'

The queen then thought she could sleep, and, in fact, sank to rest. She felt refreshed on awakening and said, 'I wish it was over; it is only a reprieve to make me suffer a little longer; I cannot recover, but my nasty heart will not break yet.' She had an impression that she should die on a Wednesday: she had, she said, been born on a Wednesday, married on a Wednesday, crowned on a Wednesday, her first child was born on a Wednesday, and she had heard of the late king's death on a Wednesday.

On the ensuing day she saw Sir Robert Walpole. 'My good Sir Robert,' she thus addressed him, 'you see me in a very indifferent situation. I have nothing to say to you but to recommend the king, my children, and the kingdom to your care.'

Lord Hervey, when the minister retired, asked him what he thought of the queen's state.

'My lord,' was the reply, 'she is as much dead as if she was in her coffin; if ever I heard a corpse speak, it was just now in that room!'

It was a sad, an awful death-bed. The Prince of Wales having sent to inquire after the health of his dying mother, the queen became uneasy lest he should hear the true state of her case, asking 'if no one would send those ravens,' meaning the prince's attendants, out of the house. 'They were only,' she said, 'watching her death, and would gladly tear her to pieces whilst she was alive.' Whilst thus she spoke of her son's courtiers, that son was sitting up all night in his house in Pall Mall, and saying, when any messenger came in from St. James's, 'Well, sure, we shall soon have good news, she cannot hold out much longer.' And the princesses were writing letters to prevent the Princess Royal from coming to England, where she was certain to meet with brutal unkindness from her father, who could not endure to be put to any expense. Orders were, indeed, sent to stop her if she set out. She came, however, on pretence of taking the Bath waters; but George II., furious at her disobedience, obliged her to go direct to and from Bath without stopping, and never forgave her.

Notwithstanding her predictions, the queen survived the fatal Wednesday. Until this time no prelate had been called in to pray by her majesty, nor to administer the Holy Communion and as people about the court began to be scandalized by this omission, Sir Robert Walpole advised that the Archbishop of Canterbury should be sent for: his opinion was couched in the following terms, characteristic at once of the man, the times, and the court:--

'Pray, madam,' he said to the Princess Emily, 'let this farce be played; the archbishop will act it very well. You may bid him be as short as you will: it will do the queen no hurt, no more than any good; and it will satisfy all the wise and good fools, who will call us atheists if we don't pretend to be as great fools as they are.'

Unhappily, Lord Hervey, who relates this anecdote, was himself an unbeliever; yet the scoffing tone adopted by Sir Robert seems to have shocked even him.

In consequence of this advice, Archbishop Potter prayed by the queen morning and evening, the king always quitting the room when his grace entered it. Her children, however, knelt by her bedside. Still the whisperers who censured were unsatisfied--the concession was thrown away. Why did not the queen receive the communion? Was it, as the world believed, either 'that she had reasoned herself into a very low and cold assent to Christianity?' or 'that she was heterodox?' or 'that the archbishop refused to administer the sacrament until she should be reconciled to her son?' Even Lord Hervey, who rarely left the antechamber, has only by his silence proved that she did _not_ take the communion. That antechamber was crowded with persons who, as the prelate left the chamber of death, crowded around, eagerly asking, 'Has the queen received?' 'Her majesty,' was the evasive reply, 'is in a heavenly disposition:' the public were thus deceived. Among those who were near the queen at this solemn hour was Dr. Butler, author of the 'Analogy.' He had been made clerk of the closet, and became, after the queen's death, Bishop of Bristol. He was in a remote living in Durham, when the queen, remembering that it was long since she had heard of him, asked the Archbishop of York 'whether Dr. Butler was dead?'--'No, madam,' replied that prelate (Dr. Blackburn), 'but he is buried;' upon which she had sent for him to court. Yet he was not courageous enough, it seems, to speak to her of her son and of the duty of reconciliation; whether she ever sent the prince any message or not is uncertain; Lord Hervey is silent on that point, so that it is to be feared that Lord Chesterfield's line--

'And, unforgiving, unforgiven, dies!'

had but too sure a foundation in fact; so that Pope's sarcastic verses--

'Hang the sad verse on Carolina's urn,
And hail her passage to the realms of rest;
All _parts performed_ and _all_ her children blest,'

may have been but too just, though cruelly bitter. The queen lingered till the 20th of November. During that interval of agony her consort was perpetually boasting to every one of her virtues, her sense, her patience, her softness, her delicacy; and ending with the praise, '_Comme elle soutenoit sa dignité avec grace, avec politesse, avec douceur!_' Nevertheless he scarcely ever went into her room. Lord Hervey states that he did, even in this moving situation, _snub_ her for something or other she did or said. One morning, as she lay with her eyes fixed on a point in the air, as people sometimes do when they want to keep their thoughts from wandering, the king coarsely told her 'she looked like a calf which had just had its throat cut.' He expected her to die in state. Then, with all his bursts of tenderness he always mingled his own praises, hinting that though she was a good wife he knew he had deserved a good one, and remarking, when he extolled her understanding, that he did not 'think it the worse for her having kept him company so many years.' To all this Lord Hervey listened with, doubtless, well-concealed disgust; for cabals were even then forming for the future influence that might or might not be obtained.

The queen's life, meantime, was softly ebbing away in this atmosphere of selfishness, brutality, and unbelief. One evening she asked Dr. Tessier impatiently how long her state might continue.

'Your Majesty,' was the reply, 'will soon be released.'

'So much the better,' the queen calmly answered.

At ten o'clock that night, whilst the king lay at the foot of her bed, on the floor, and the Princess Emily on a couch-bed in the room, the fearful death-rattle in the throat was heard. Mrs. Purcell, her chief and old attendant, gave the alarm: the Princess Caroline and Lord Hervey were sent for; but the princess was too late, her mother had expired before she arrived. All the dying queen said was, 'I have now got an asthma; open the window:' then she added, '_Pray!_' That was her last word. As the Princess Emily began to read some prayers, the sufferer breathed her last sigh. The Princess Caroline held a looking-glass to her lips, and finding there was no damp on it, said, ''Tis over!' Yet she shed not one tear upon the arrival of that event, the prospect of which had cost her so many heartrending sobs.

The king kissed the lifeless face and hands of his often-injured wife, and then retired to his own apartment, ordering that a page should sit up with him for that and several other nights, for his Majesty was afraid of apparitions, and feared to be left alone. He caused himself, however, to be buried by the side of his queen, in Henry VII.'s chapel, and ordered that one side of his coffin and of hers should be withdrawn; and in that state the two coffins were discovered not many years ago.

With the death of Queen Caroline, Lord Hervey's life, as to court, was changed. He was afterwards made lord privy seal, and had consequently to enter the political world, with the disadvantage of knowing that much was expected from a man of so high a reputation for wit and learning. He was violently opposed by Pelham, Duke of Newcastle, who had been adverse to his entering the ministry, and since, with Walpole's favour, it was impossible to injure him by fair means, it was resolved to oppose Lord Hervey by foul ones. One evening, when he was to speak, a party of fashionable Amazons, with two duchesses--her grace of Queensberry and her grace of Ancaster--at their head, stormed the House of Lords and disturbed the debate with noisy laughter and sneers. Poor Lord Hervey was completely daunted, and spoke miserably. After Sir Robert Walpole's fall Lord Hervey retired. The following letter from him to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu fully describes his position and circumstances:--

'I must now,' he writes to her, 'since you take so friendly a part in what concerns me, give you a short account of my natural and political health; and when I say I am still alive, and still privy seal, it is all I can say for the pleasure of one or the honour of the other; for since Lord Orford's retiring, as I am too proud to offer my service and friendship where I am not sure they will be accepted of, and too inconsiderable to have those advances made to me (though I never forgot or failed to return any obligation I ever received), so I remain as illustrious a nothing in this office as ever filled it since it was erected. There is one benefit, however, I enjoy from this loss of my court interest, which is, that all those flies which were buzzing about me in the summer sunshine and full ripeness of that interest, have all deserted its autumnal decay, and from thinking my natural death not far off, and my political demise already over, have all forgot the death-bed of the one and the coffin of the other.'

Again he wrote to her a characteristic letter:--

'I have been confined these three weeks by a fever, which is a sort of annual tax my detestable constitution pays to our detestable climate at the return of every spring; it is now much abated, though not quite gone off.'

He was long a helpless invalid; and on the 8th of August, 1743, his short, unprofitable, brilliant, unhappy life was closed. He died at Ickworth, attended and deplored by his wife, who had ever held a secondary part in the heart of the great wit and beau of the court of George II. After his death his son George returned to Lady Mary all the letters she had written to his father: the packet was sealed: an assurance was at the same time given that they had not been read. In acknowledging this act of attention, Lady Mary wrote that she could almost regret that he had not glanced his eye over a correspondence which might have shown him what so young a man might perhaps be inclined to doubt--'the possibility of a long and steady friendship subsisting between two persons of different sexes without the least mixture of love.'

Nevertheless some expressions of Lord Hervey's seem to have bordered on the tender style, when writing to Lady Mary in such terms as these. She had complained that she was too old to inspire a passion (a sort of challenge for a compliment), on which he wrote: 'I should think anybody a great fool that said he liked spring better than summer, merely because it is further from autumn, or that they loved green fruit better than ripe only because it was further from being rotten. I ever did, and believe ever shall, like woman best--

'"Just in the noon of life--those golden days,
When the mind ripens ere the form decays."'

Certainly this looks very unlike a pure Platonic, and it is not to be wondered at that Lady Hervey refused to call on Lady Mary, when, long after Lord Hervey's death, that fascinating woman returned to England. A wit, a courtier at the very fount of all politeness, Lord Hervey wanted the genuine source of all social qualities--Christianity. That moral refrigerator which checks the kindly current of neighbourly kindness, and which prevents all genial feeling from expanding, produced its usual effect--misanthropy. Lord Hervey's lines, in his 'Satire after the manner of Persius,' describe too well his own mental canker:--

'Mankind I know, their motives and their art,
Their vice their own, their virtue best apart,
Till played so oft, that all the cheat can tell,
And dangerous only when 'tis acted well.'

Lord Hervey left in the possession of his family a manuscript work, consisting of memoirs of his own time, written in his own autograph, which was clean and legible. This work, which has furnished many of the anecdotes connected with his court life in the foregoing pages, was long guarded from the eye of any but the Hervey family, owing to an injunction given in his will by Augustus, third Earl of Bristol, Lord Hervey's son, that it should not see the light until after the death of his Majesty George III. It was not therefore published until 1848, when they were edited by Mr. Croker. They are referred to both by Horace Walpole, who had heard of them, if he had not seen them, and by Lord Hailes, as affording the most intimate portraiture of a court that has ever been presented to the English people. Such a delineation as Lord Hervey has left ought to cause a sentiment of thankfulness in every British heart for not being exposed to such influences, to such examples as he gives, in the present day, when goodness, affection, purity, benevolence, are the household deities of the court of our beloved, inestimable Queen Victoria.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 22: Prince Frederick.]

PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE, FOURTH EARL OF CHESTERFIELD.

The King of Table Wits.--Early Years.--Hervey's Description of his
Person.--Resolutions and Pursuits.--Study of Oratory.--The
Duties of an Ambassador.--King George II.'s Opinion of his
Chroniclers.--Life in the Country.--Melusina, Countess of
Walsingham.--George II. and his Father's Will.--Dissolving
Views.--Madame du Bouchet.--The Broad-Bottomed
Administration.--Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in Time of
Peril.--Reformation of the Calendar.--Chesterfield
House.--Exclusiveness.--Recommending 'Johnson's
Dictionary.'--'Old Samuel,' to Chesterfield.--Defensive
Pride.--The Glass of Fashion.--Lord Scarborough's Friendship
for Chesterfield.--The Death of Chesterfield's Son.--His
Interest in his Grandsons.--'I must go and Rehearse my
Funeral.'--Chesterfield's Will.--What is a Friend?--Les
Manières Nobles.--Letters to his Son.

The subject of this memoir may be thought by some rather the modeller of wits than the original of that class; the great critic and judge of manners rather than the delight of the dinner-table: but we are told to the contrary by one who loved him not. Lord Hervey says of Lord Chesterfield that he was 'allowed by everybody to have more conversable entertaining table-wit than any man of his time; his propensity to ridicule, in which he indulged himself with infinite humour and no distinction; and his inexhaustible spirits, and no discretion; made him sought and feared--liked and not loved--by most of his acquaintance.'

This formidable personage was born in London on the 2nd day of September, 1694. It was remarkable that the father of a man so vivacious, should have been of a morose temper; all the wit and spirit of intrigue displayed by him remind us of the frail Lady Chesterfield, in the time of Charles II.[23]--that lady who was looked on as a martyr because her husband was jealous of her: 'a prodigy,' says De Grammont, 'in the city of London,' where indulgent critics endeavoured to excuse his lordship on account of his bad education, and mothers vowed that none of their sons should ever set foot in Italy, lest they should 'bring back with them that infamous custom of laying restraint on their wives.'

Even Horace Walpole cites Chesterfield as the 'witty earl:' apropos to an anecdote which he relates of an Italian lady, who said that she was only four-and-twenty; 'I suppose,' said Lord Chesterfield, 'she means four-and-twenty stone.'

By his father the future wit, historian, and orator was utterly neglected; but his grandmother, the Marchioness of Halifax, supplied to him the place of both parents, his mother--her daughter, Lady Elizabeth Saville--having died in his childhood. At the age of eighteen, Chesterfield, then Lord Stanhope, was entered at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It was one of the features of his character to fall at once into the tone of the society into which he happened to be thrown. One can hardly imagine his being 'an absolute pedant,' but such was, actually, his own account of himself:--'When I talked my best, I quoted Horace; when I aimed at being facetious, I quoted Martial; and when I had a mind to be a fine gentleman, I talked Ovid. I was convinced that none but the ancients had common sense; that the classics contained everything that was either necessary, useful, or ornamental to men; and I was not even without thoughts of wearing the toga virilis of the Romans, instead of the vulgar and illiberal dress of the moderns.'

Thus, again, when in Paris, he caught the manners, as he had acquired the language, of the Parisians. 'I shall not give you my opinion of the French, because I am very often taken for one of them, and several have paid me the highest compliment they think it in their power to bestow--which is, "Sir, you are just like ourselves." I shall only tell you that I am insolent; I talk a great deal; I am very loud and peremptory; I sing and dance as I walk along; and, above all, I spend an immense sum in hair-powder, feathers, and white gloves.'

Although he entered Parliament before he had attained the legal age, and was expected to make a great figure in that assembly, Lord Chesterfield preferred the reputation of a wit and a beau to any other distinction. 'Call it vanity, if you will,' he wrote in after-life to his son, 'and possibly it was so; but my great object was to make every man and every woman love me. I often succeeded: but why? by taking great pains.'

According to Lord Hervey's account he often even sacrificed his interest to his vanity. The description given of Lord Chesterfield by one as bitter as himself implies, indeed, that great pains were requisite to counterbalance the defects of nature. Wilkes, one of the ugliest men of his time, used to say, that with an hour's start he would carry off the affections of any woman from the handsomest man breathing. Lord Chesterfield, according to Lord Hervey, required to be still longer in advance of a rival.

'With a person,' Hervey writes, 'as disagreeable, as it was possible for a human figure to be without being deformed, he affected following many women of the first beauty and the most in fashion. He was very short, disproportioned, thick and clumsily made; had a broad, rough-featured, ugly face, with black teeth, and a head big enough for a Polyphemus. One Ben Ashurst, who said a few good things, though admired for many, told Lord Chesterfield once, that he was like a stunted giant--which was a humorous idea and really apposite.'

Notwithstanding that Chesterfield, when young, injured both soul and body by pleasure and dissipation, he always found time for serious study: when he could not have it otherwise, he took it out of his sleep. How late soever he went to bed, he resolved always to rise early; and this resolution he adhered to so faithfully, that at the age of fifty-eight he could declare that for more than forty years he had never been in bed at nine o'clock in the morning, but had generally been up before eight. He had the good sense, in this respect, not to exaggerate even this homely virtue. He did not rise with the dawn, as many early risers pride themselves in doing, putting all the engagements of ordinary life out of their usual beat, just as if the clocks had been set two hours forward. The man in ordinary society, who rises at four in this country, and goes to bed at nine, is a social and family nuisance. Strong good sense characterized Chesterfield's early pursuits. Desultory reading he abhorred. He looked on it as one of the resources of age, but as injurious to the young in the extreme. 'Throw away,' thus he writes to his son, 'none of your time upon those trivial, futile books, published by idle necessitous authors for the amusement of idle and ignorant readers.'

Even in those days such books 'swarm and buzz about one:' 'flap them away,' says Chesterfield, 'they have no sting.' The earl directed the whole force of his mind to oratory, and became the finest speaker of his time. Writing to Sir Horace Mann, about the Hanoverian debate (in 1743, Dec. 15), Walpole praising the speeches of Lords Halifax and Sandwich, adds, 'I was there, and heard Lord Chesterfield make the finest oration I have ever heard there.' This from a man who had listened to Pulteney, to Chatham, to Carteret, was a singularly valuable tribute.

Whilst a student at Cambridge, Chesterfield was forming an acquaintance with the Hon. George Berkeley, the youngest son of the second Earl of Berkeley, and remarkable rather as being the second husband of Lady Suffolk, the favourite of George II., than from any merits or demerits of his own.

This early intimacy probably brought Lord Chesterfield into the close friendship which afterwards subsisted between him and Lady Suffolk, to whom many of his letters are addressed.

His first public capacity was a diplomatic appointment: he afterwards attained to the rank of an ambassador, whose duty it is, according to a witticism of Sir Henry Wotton's '_to lie_ abroad for the good of his country;' and no man was in this respect more competent to fulfil these requirements than Chesterfield. Hating both wine and tobacco, he had smoked and drunk at Cambridge, 'to be in the fashion;' he gamed at the Hague, on the same principle; and, unhappily, gaming became a habit and a passion. Yet never did he indulge it when acting, afterwards, in a ministerial capacity. Neither when Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, or as Under-secretary of State, did he allow a gaming-table in his house. On the very night that he resigned office he went to _White's_.

The Hague was then a charming residence: among others who, from political motives, were living there, were John Duke of Marlborough and Queen Sarah, both of whom paid Chesterfield marked attention. Naturally industrious, with a ready insight into character--a perfect master in that art which bids us keep one's thoughts close, and our countenances open, Chesterfield was admirably fitted for diplomacy. A master of modern languages and of history, he soon began to like business. When in England, he had been accused of having 'a need of a certain proportion of talk in a day:' 'that,' he wrote to Lady Suffolk, 'is now changed into a need of such a proportion of writing in a day.'

In 1728 he was promoted: being sent as ambassador to the Hague, where he was popular, and where he believed his stay would be beneficial both to soul and body, there being 'fewer temptations, and fewer opportunities to sin,' as he wrote to Lady Suffolk, 'than in England.' Here his days passed, he asserted, in doing the king's business, very ill--and his own still worse:--sitting down daily to dinner with fourteen or fifteen people; whilst at five the pleasures of the evening began with a lounge on the Voorhoot, a public walk planted by Charles V.:--then, either a very bad French play, or a '_reprise quadrille_,' with three ladies, the youngest of them fifty, and the chance of losing, perhaps, three florins (besides one's time)--lasted till ten o'clock; at which time 'His Excellency' went home, 'reflecting with satisfaction on the innocent amusements of a well-spent day, that left nothing behind them,' and retired to bed at eleven, 'with the testimony of a good conscience.'

All, however, of Chesterfield's time was not passed in this serene dissipation. He began to compose 'The History of the Reign of George II.' at this period. About only half a dozen chapters were written. The intention was not confined to Chesterfield: Carteret and Bolingbroke entertained a similar design, which was completed by neither. When the subject was broached before George II., he thus expressed himself; and his remarks are the more amusing as they were addressed to Lord Hervey, who was, at that very moment, making his notes for that bitter chronicle of his majesty's reign, which has been ushered into the world by the late Wilson Croker--'They will all three,' said King George II., 'have about as much truth in them as the _Mille et Une Nuits_. Not but I shall like to read Bolingbroke's, who of all those rascals and knaves that have been lying against me these ten years has certainly the best parts, and the most knowledge. He is a scoundrel, but he is a scoundrel of a higher class than Chesterfield. Chesterfield is a little, tea-table scoundrel, that tells little womanish lies to make quarrels in families: and tries to make women lose their reputations, and make their husbands beat them, without any object but to give himself airs; as if anybody could believe a woman could like a dwarf baboon.'

Lord Hervey gave the preference to Bolingbroke; stating as his reason, that 'though Lord Bolingbroke had no idea of wit, his satire was keener than any one's. Lord Chesterfield, on the other hand, would have a great deal of wit in them; but, in every page you see he intended to be witty: every paragraph would be an epigram. _Polish_, he declared, would be his bane;' and Lord Hervey was perfectly right.

In 1732 Lord Chesterfield was obliged to retire from his embassy on the plea of ill-health, but probably, from some political cause. He was in the opposition against Sir Robert Walpole in the Excise Bill; and felt the displeasure of that all-powerful minister by being dismissed from his office of High Steward.

Being badly received at court he now lived in the country; sometimes at Buxton, where his father drank the waters, where he had his recreations, when not persecuted by two young brothers. Sir William Stanhope and John Stanhope, one of whom performed 'tolerably ill upon a broken hautboy, and the other something worse upon a cracked flute.' There he won three half-crowns from the curate of the place, and a shilling from 'Gaffer Foxeley' at a cock-match. Sometimes he sought relaxation in Scarborough, where fashionable beaux 'danced with the pretty ladies all night,' and hundreds of Yorkshire country bumpkins 'played the inferior parts; and, as it were, only tumble, whilst the others dance upon the high ropes of gallantry.' Scarborough was full of Jacobites: the popular feeling was then all rife against Sir Robert Walpole's excise scheme. Lord Chesterfield thus wittily satirized that famous measure:--

'The people of this town are, at present, in great consternation upon a report they have heard from London, which, if true, they think will ruin them. They are informed, that considering the vast consumption of these waters, there is a design laid of _excising_ them next session; and, moreover, that as bathing in the sea is become the general practice of both sexes, and as the kings of England have always been allowed to be masters of the seas, every person so bathing shall be gauged, and pay so much per foot square, as their cubical bulk amounts to.'

In 1733, Lord Chesterfield married Melusina, the supposed niece, but, in fact, the daughter of the Duchess of Kendal, the mistress of George I. This lady was presumed to be a great heiress, from the dominion which her mother had over the king. Melusina had been created (for life) Baroness of Aldborough, county Suffolk, and Countess of Walsingham, county Norfolk, nine years previous to her marriage.

Her father being George I., as Horace Walpole terms him, 'rather a good sort of man than a shining king,' and her mother 'being no genius,' there was probably no great attraction about Lady Walsingham, except her expected dowry.

During her girlhood Melusina resided in the apartments at St. James's--opening into the garden; and here Horace Walpole describes his seeing George I., in the rooms appropriated to the Duchess of Kendal, next to those of Melusina Schulemberg, or, as she was then called, the Countess of Walsingham. The Duchess of Kendal was then very 'lean and ill-favoured.' 'Just before her,' says Horace, 'stood a tall, elderly man, rather pale, of an aspect rather good-natured than august: in a dark tie-wig, a plain coat, waistcoat, and breeches of snuff-coloured cloth, with stockings of the same colour, and a blue riband over all. That was George I.'

The Duchess of Kendal had been maid of honour to the Electress Sophia, the mother of George I. and the daughter of Elizabeth of Bohemia. The duchess was always frightful; so much so that one night the electress, who had acquired a little English, said to Mrs. Howard, afterwards Lady Suffolk,--glancing at Mademoiselle Schulemberg--'Look at that _mawkin_, and think of her being my son's passion!'

The duchess, however, like all the Hanoverians, knew how to profit by royal preference. She took bribes:--she had a settlement of £3,000 a year. But her daughter was eventually disappointed of the expected bequest from her father, the king.[24]

In the apartments at St. James's Lord Chesterfield for some time lived, when he was not engaged in office abroad; and there he dissipated large sums in play. It was here, too, that Queen Caroline, the wife of George II., detected the intimacy that existed between Chesterfield and Lady Suffolk. There was an obscure window in Queen Caroline's apartments, which looked into a dark passage, lighted only by a single lamp at night. One Twelfth Night Lord Chesterfield, having won a large sum at cards, deposited it with Lady Suffolk, thinking it not safe to carry it home at night. He was watched, and his intimacy with the mistress of George II. thereupon inferred. Thenceforth he could obtain no court influence; and, in desperation, he went into the opposition.

On the death of George I., a singular scene, with which Lord Chesterfield's interests were connected, occurred in the Privy Council. Dr Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, produced the king's will, and delivered it to his successor, expecting that it would be opened and read in the council; what was his consternation, when his Majesty, without saying a word, put it into his pocket, and stalked out of the room with real German imperturbability! Neither the astounded prelate nor the subservient council ventured to utter a word. The will was never more heard of: and rumour declared that it was burnt. The contents, of course, never transpired; and the legacy of £40,000, said to have been left to the Duchess of Kendal, was never more spoken of, until Lord Chesterfield, in 1733, married the Countess of Walsingham. In 1743, it is said, he claimed the legacy--in right of his wife--the Duchess of Kendal being then dead: and was 'quieted' with £20,000, and got, as Horace Walpole observes, nothing from the duchess--'except his wife.'

The only excuse that was urged to extenuate this act on the part of George II., was that his royal father had burned two wills which had been made in his favour. These were supposed to be the wills of the Duke and Duchess of Zell and of the Electress Sophia. There was not even common honesty in the house of Hanover at that period.

Disappointed in his wife's fortune, Lord Chesterfield seems to have cared very little for the disappointed heiress. Their union was childless. His opinion of marriage appears very much to have coincided with that of the world of malcontents who rush, in the present day, to the court of Judge Cresswell, with 'dissolving views.' On one occasion he writes thus: 'I have at last done the best office that can be done to most married people; that is, I have fixed the separation between my brother and his wife, and the definitive treaty of peace will be proclaimed in about a fortnight.'

Horace Walpole related the following anecdote of Sir William Stanhope (Chesterfield's brother) and his lady, whom he calls 'a fond couple.' After their return from Paris, when they arrived at Lord Chesterfield's house at Blackheath, Sir William, who had, like his brother, a cutting, polite wit, that was probably expressed with the 'allowed simper' of Lord Chesterfield, got out of the chaise and said, with a low bow, 'Madame, I hope I shall never see your face again.' She replied, 'Sir, I will take care that you never shall;' and so they parted.

There was little probability of Lord Chesterfield's participating in domestic felicity, when neither his heart nor his fancy were engaged in the union which he had formed. The lady to whom he was really attached, and by whom he had a son, resided in the Netherlands: she passed by the name of Madame du Bouchet, and survived both Lord Chesterfield and her son. A permanent provision was made for her, and a sum of five hundred pounds bequeathed to her, with these words: 'as a small reparation for the injury I did her.' 'Certainly,' adds Lord Mahon, in his Memoir of his illustrious ancestor, 'a small one.'

For some time Lord Chesterfield remained in England, and his letters are dated from Bath, from Tonbridge, from Blackheath. He had, in 1726, been elevated to the House of Lords upon the death of his father. In that assembly his great eloquence is thus well described by his biographer:--[25]