The village of Kensington was disturbed in its sweet repose one day, more than a century ago, by the rumbling of a ponderous coach and six, with four outriders and two equerries kicking up the dust; whilst a small body of heavy dragoons rode solemnly after the huge vehicle. It waded, with inglorious struggles, through a deep mire of mud, between the Palace and Hyde Park, until the cortÈge entered Kensington Park, as the gardens were then called, and began to track the old road that led to the red-brick structure to which William III. had added a higher story, built by Wren. There are two roads by which coaches could approach the house: 'one,' as the famous John, Lord Hervey, wrote to his mother, 'so convex, the other so concave, that, by this extreme of faults, they agree in the common one of being, like the high road, impassable.' The rumbling coach, with its plethoric steeds, toils slowly on, and reaches the dismal pile, of which no association is so precious as that of its having been the birthplace of our loved Victoria Regina. All around, as the emblazoned carriage impressively veers round into the grand entrance, savours of William and Mary, of Anne, of Bishop Burnet and Harley, Atterbury and Bolingbroke. But those were pleasant days compared to those of the second George, whose return from Hanover in this mountain of a coach is now described.

The panting steeds are gracefully curbed by the state coachman in his scarlet livery, with his cocked-hat and gray wig underneath it: now the horses are foaming and reeking as if they had come from the world's end to Kensington, and yet they have only been to meet King George on his entrance into London, which he has reached from Helvoetsluys, on his way from Hanover, in time, as he expects, to spend his birthday among his English subjects.

It is Sunday, and repose renders the retirement of Kensington and its avenues and shades more sombre than ever. Suburban retirement is usually so. It is noon; and the inmates of Kensington Palace are just coming forth from the chapel in the palace. The coach is now stopping, and the equerries are at hand to offer their respectful assistance to the diminutive figure that, in full Field-marshal regimentals, a cocked-hat stuck crosswise on his head, a sword dangling even down to his heels, ungraciously heeds them not, but stepping down, as the great iron gates are thrown open to receive him, looks neither like a king or a gentleman. A thin, worn face, in which weakness and passion are at once pictured; a form buttoned and padded up to the chin; high Hessian boots without a wrinkle; a sword and a swagger, no more constituting him the military character than the 'your majesty' from every lip can make a poor thing of clay a king. Such was George II.: brutal, even to his submissive wife. Stunted by nature, he was insignificant in form, as he was petty in character; not a trace of royalty could be found in that silly, tempestuous physiognomy, with its hereditary small head: not an atom of it in his made-up, paltry little presence; still less in his bearing, language, or qualities.

The queen and her court have come from chapel, to meet the royal absentee at the great gate: the consort, who was to his gracious majesty like an elder sister rather than a wife, bends down, not to his knees, but yet she bends, to kiss the hand of her royal husband. She is a fair, fat woman, no longer young, scarcely comely; but with a charm of manners, a composure, and a savoir faire that causes one to regard her as mated, not matched to the little creature in that cocked-hat, which he does not take off even when she stands before him. The pair, nevertheless, embrace: it is a triennial ceremony performed when the king goes or returns from Hanover, but suffered to lapse at other times; but the condescension is too great: and Caroline ends, where she began: 'gluing her lips to the ungracious hand held out to her in evident ill-humour.

They turn, and walk through the court, then up the grand staircase, into the queen's apartment. The king has been swearing all the way at England and the English, because he has been obliged to return from Hanover, where the German mode of life and new mistresses were more agreeable to him than the English customs and an old wife. He displays, therefore, even on this supposed happy occasion, one of the worst outbreaks of his insufferable temper, of which the queen is the first victim. All the company in the palace, both ladies and gentlemen, are ordered to enter: he talks to them all, but to the queen he says not a word.

She is attended by Mrs. Clayton, afterwards Lady Sundon, whose lively manners and great good temper and good will—lent out like leasehold to all, till she saw what their friendship might bring,—are always useful at these tristes rencontres. Mrs. Clayton is the amalgamating substance between chemical agents which have, of themselves, no cohesion; she covers with address what is awkward; she smooths down with something pleasant what is rude; she turns off—and her office in that respect is no sinecure at that court—what is indecent, so as to keep the small majority of the company who have respectable notions in good humour. To the right of Queen Caroline stands another of her majesty's household, to whom the most deferential attention is paid by all present; nevertheless, she is queen of the court, but not the queen of the royal master of that court. It is Lady Suffolk, the mistress of King George II., and long mistress of the robes to Queen Caroline. She is now past the bloom of youth, but her attractions are not in their wane; but endured until she had attained her seventy-ninth year. Of a middle height, well made, extremely fair, with very fine light hair, she attracts regard from her sweet, fresh face, which had in it a comeliness independent of regularity of feature. According to her invariable custom, she is dressed with simplicity; her silky tresses are drawn somewhat back from her snowy forehead, and fall in long tresses on her shoulders, not less transparently white. She wears a gown of rich silk, opening in front to display a chemisette of the most delicate cambric, which is scarcely less delicate than her skin. Her slender arms are without bracelets, and her taper fingers without rings. As she stands behind the queen, holding her majesty's fan and gloves, she is obliged, from her deafness, to lean her fair face with its sunny hair first to the right side, then to the left, with the helpless air of one exceedingly deaf—for she had been afflicted with that infirmity for some years: yet one cannot say whether her appealing looks, which seem to say, 'Enlighten me if you please,'—and the sort of softened manner in which she accepts civilities which she scarcely comprehends do not enhance the wonderful charm which drew every one who knew her towards this frail, but passionless woman.

The queen forms the centre of the group. Caroline, daughter of the Marquis of Brandenburgh-Anspach, notwithstanding her residence in England of many years, notwithstanding her having been, at the era at which this biography begins, ten years its queen—is still German in every attribute. She retains, in her fair and comely face, traces of having been handsome; but her skin is deeply scarred by the cruel small-pox. She is now at that time of life when Sir Robert Walpole even thought it expedient to reconcile her to no longer being an object of attraction to her royal consort. As a woman, she has ceased to be attractive to a man of the character of George II.; but, as a queen, she is still, as far as manners are concerned, incomparable. As she turns to address various members of the assembly, her style is full of sweetness as well as of courtesy, yet on other occasions she is majesty itself. The tones of her voice, with its still foreign accent, are most captivating; her eyes penetrate into every countenance on which they rest. Her figure, plump and matronly, has lost much of its contour; but is well suited for her part. Majesty in women should be embonpoint. Her hands are beautifully white, and faultless in shape. The king always admired her bust; and it is, therefore, by royal command, tolerably exposed. Her fair hair is upraised in full short curls over her brow: her dress is rich, and distinguished in that respect from that of the Countess of Suffolk.—'Her good Howard'—as she was wont to call her, when, before her elevation to the peerage, she was lady of the bedchamber to Caroline, had, when in that capacity, been often subjected to servile offices, which the queen, though apologizing in the sweetest manner, delighted to make her perform. 'My good Howard' having one day placed a handkerchief on the back of her royal mistress, the king, who half worshipped his intellectual wife, pulled it off in a passion, saying, 'Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you hide the queen's!' All, however, that evening was smooth as ice, and perhaps as cold also. The company are quickly dismissed, and the king, who has scarcely spoken to the queen, retires to his closet, where he is attended by the subservient Caroline, and by two other persons.

Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister, has accompanied the king in his carriage, from the very entrance of London, where the famous statesman met him. He is now the privileged companion of their majesties, in their seclusion for the rest of the evening. His cheerful face, in its full evening disguise of wig and tie, his invariable good humour, his frank manners, his wonderful sense, his views, more practical than elevated, sufficiently account for the influence which this celebrated minister obtained over Queen Caroline, and the readiness of King George to submit to the tie. But Sir Robert's great source of ascendancy was his temper. Never was there in the annals of our country a minister so free of access: so obliging in giving, so unoffending when he refused; so indulgent and kind to those dependent on him; so generous, so faithful to his friends, so forgiving to his foes. This was his character under one phase: even his adherents sometimes blamed his easiness of temper; the impossibility in his nature to cherish the remembrance of a wrong, or even to be roused by an insult. But, whilst such were the amiable traits of his character, history has its lists of accusations against him for corruption of the most shameless description. The end of this veteran statesman's career is well known. The fraudulent contracts which he gave, the peculation and profusion of the secret service money, his undue influence at elections, brought around his later life a storm, from which he retreated into the Upper House, when created Earl of Orford. It was before this timely retirement from office that he burst forth in these words: 'I oppose nothing; give in to everything; am said to do everything; and to answer for everything; and yet, God knows, I dare not do what I think is right.'

With his public capacity, however, we have not here to do: it is in his character of a courtier that we view him following the queen and king. His round, complacent face, with his small glistening eyes, arched eyebrows, and with a mouth ready to break out aloud into a laugh, are all subdued into a respectful gravity as he listens to King George grumbling at the necessity for his return home. No English cook could dress a dinner; no English cook could select a dessert; no English coachman could drive; nor English jockey ride; no Englishman—such were his habitual taunts—knew how to come into a room; no Englishwoman understood how to dress herself. The men, he said, talked of nothing but their dull politics, and the women of nothing but their ugly clothes. Whereas, in Hanover, all these things were at perfection: men were patterns of politeness and gallantry; women, of beauty, wit, and entertainment. His troops there were the bravest in the world; his manufacturers the most ingenious; his people the happiest: in Hanover, in short, plenty reigned, riches flowed, arts flourished, magnificence abounded, everything was in abundance that could make a prince great, or a people blessed.

There was one standing behind the queen who listened to these outbreaks of the king's bilious temper, as he called it, with an apparently respectful solicitude, but with the deepest disgust in his heart. A slender, elegant figure, in a court suit, faultlessly and carefully perfect in that costume, stands behind the queen's chair. It is Lord Hervey. His lofty forehead, his features, which have a refinement of character, his well-turned mouth, and full and dimpled chin, form his claims to that beauty which won the heart of the lovely Mary Lepel; whilst the somewhat thoughtful and pensive expression of his physiognomy, when in repose, indicated the sympathising, yet, at the same time, satirical character of one who won the affections, perhaps unconsciously, of the amiable Princess Caroline, the favourite daughter of George II.

A general air of languor, ill concealed by the most studied artifice of countenance, and even of posture, characterizes Lord Hervey. He would have abhorred robustness; for he belonged to the clique then called Maccaronis; a set of fine gentlemen, of whom the present world would not be worthy, tricked out for show, fitted only to drive out fading majesty in a stage coach; exquisite in every personal appendage, too fine for the common usages of society; point-device, not only in every curl and ruffle, but in every attitude and step; men with full satin roses on their shining shoes; diamond tablet rings on their forefingers; with snuff-boxes, the worth of which might almost purchase a farm; lace worked by the delicate fingers of some religious recluse of an ancestress, and taken from an altar-cloth; old point-lace, dark as coffee-water could make it; with embroidered waistcoats, wreathed in exquisite tambour-work round each capricious lappet and pocket; with cut steel buttons that glistened beneath the courtly wax-lights: with these and fifty other small but costly characteristics that established the reputation of an aspirant Maccaroni. Lord Hervey was, in truth, an effeminate creature: too dainty to walk; too precious to commit his frame to horseback; and prone to imitate the somewhat recluse habits which German rulers introduced within the court: he was disposed to candle-light pleasures and cockney diversions; to Marybone and the Mall, and shrinking from the athletic and social recreations which, like so much that was manly and English, were confined almost to the English squire pur et simple after the Hanoverian accession; when so much degeneracy for a while obscured the English character, debased its tone, enervated its best races, vilified its literature, corrupted its morals, changed its costume, and degraded its architecture.

Beneath the effeminacy of the Maccaroni, Lord Hervey was one of the few who united to intense finery in every minute detail, an acute and cultivated intellect. To perfect a Maccaroni it was in truth advisable, if not essential, to unite some smattering of learning, a pretension to wit, to his super-dandyism; to be the author of some personal squib, or the translator of some classic. Queen Caroline was too cultivated herself to suffer fools about her, and Lord Hervey was a man after her own taste; as a courtier he was essentially a fine gentleman; and, more than that, he could be the most delightful companion, the most sensible adviser, and the most winning friend in the court. His ill-health, which he carefully concealed, his fastidiousness, his ultra-delicacy of habits, formed an agreeable contrast to the coarse robustness of 'Sir Robert,' and constituted a relief after the society of the vulgar, strong-minded minister, who was born for the hustings and the House of Commons rather than for the courtly drawing-room.

John Lord Hervey, long vice-chamberlain to Queen Caroline, was, like Sir Robert Walpole, descended from a commoner's family, one of those good old squires who lived, as Sir Henry Wotton says, 'without lustre and without obscurity.' The Duchess of Marlborough had procured the elevation of the Herveys of Ickworth to the peerage. She happened to be intimate with Sir Thomas Felton, the father of Mrs. Hervey, afterwards Lady Bristol, whose husband, at first created Lord Hervey, and afterwards Earl of Bristol, expressed his obligations by retaining as his motto, when raised to the peerage, the words 'Je n'oublieray jÀmais,' in allusion to the service done him by the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough.

The Herveys had always been an eccentric race; and the classification of 'men, women, and Herveys,' by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was not more witty than true. There was in the whole race an eccentricity which bordered on the ridiculous, but did not imply want of sense or of talent. Indeed this third species, 'the Herveys,' were more gifted than the generality of 'men and women.' The father of Lord Hervey had been a country gentleman of good fortune, living at Ickworth, near Bury in Suffolk, and representing the town in parliament, as his father had before him, until raised to the peerage. Before that elevation he had lived on in his own county, uniting the character of the English squire, in that fox-hunting county, with that of a perfect gentleman, a scholar, and a most admirable member of society. He was a poet, also, affecting the style of Cowley, who wrote an elegy upon his uncle, William Hervey, an elegy compared to Milton's 'Lycidas' in imagery, music, and tenderness of thought. The shade of Cowley, whom Charles II. pronounced, at his death, to be 'the best man in England,' haunted this peer, the first Earl of Bristol. He aspired especially to the poet's wit; and the ambition to be a wit flew like wildfire among his family, especially infecting his two sons, Carr, the elder brother of the subject of this memoir, and Lord Hervey.

It would have been well could the Earl of Bristol have transmitted to his sons his other qualities. He was pious, moral, affectionate, sincere; a consistent Whig of the old school, and, as such, disapproving of Sir Robert Walpole, of the standing army, the corruptions, and that doctrine of expediency so unblushingly avowed by the ministers.

Created Earl of Bristol in 1714, the heir-apparent to his titles and estates was the elder brother, by a former marriage, of John, Lord Hervey; the dissolute, clever, whimsical Carr, Lord Hervey. Pope, in one of his satirical appeals to the second Lord Hervey, speaks of his friendship with Carr, 'whose early death deprived the family' (of Hervey) 'of as much wit and honour as he left behind him in any part of it.' The wit was a family attribute, but the honour was dubious: Carr was as deistical as any Maccaroni of the day, and, perhaps, more dissolute than most: in one respect he has left behind him a celebrity which may be as questionable as his wit, or his honour; he is reputed to be the father of Horace Walpole, and if we accept presumptive evidence of the fact, the statement is clearly borne out, for in his wit, his indifference to religion, to say the least, his satirical turn, his love of the world, and his contempt of all that was great and good, he strongly resembles his reputed son; whilst the levity of Lady Walpole's character, and Sir Robert's laxity and dissoluteness, do not furnish any reasonable doubt to the statement made by Lady Louisa Stuart, in the introduction to Lord Wharncliffe's 'Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.' Carr, Lord Hervey, died early, and his half-brother succeeded him in his title and expectations.

John, Lord Hervey, was educated first at Westminster School, under Dr. Freind, the friend of Mrs. Montagu; thence he was removed to Clare Hall, Cambridge: he graduated as a nobleman, and became M.A. in 1715.

At Cambridge Lord Hervey might have acquired some manly prowess; but he had a mother who was as strange as the family into which she had married, and who was passionately devoted to her son: she evinced her affection by never letting him have a chance of being like other English boys. When his father was at Newmarket, Jack Hervey, as he was called, was to ride a race, to please his father; but his mother could not risk her dear boy's safety, and the race was won by a jockey. He was as precious and as fragile as porcelain: the elder brother's death made the heir of the Herveys more valuable, more effeminate, and more controlled than ever by his eccentric mother. A court was to be his hemisphere, and to that all his views, early in life, tended. He went to Hanover to pay his court to George I.: Carr had done the same, and had come back enchanted with George, the heir-presumptive, who made him one of the lords of the bedchamber. Jack Hervey also returned full of enthusiasm for the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II., and the Princess; and that visit influenced his destiny.

He now proposed making the grand tour, which comprised Paris, Germany, and Italy. But his mother again interfered: she wept, she exhorted, she prevailed. Means were refused, and the stripling was recalled to hang about the court, or to loiter at Ickworth, scribbling verses, and causing his father uneasiness lest he should be too much of a poet, and too little of a public man.

Such was his youth: disappointed by not obtaining a commission in the Guards, he led a desultory butterfly-like life; one day at Richmond with Queen Caroline, then Princess of Wales; another, at Pope's villa, at Twickenham; sometimes in the House of Commons, in which he succeeded his elder brother as member for Bury; and, at the period when he has been described as forming one of the quartett in Queen Caroline's closet at St. James's, as vice-chamberlain to his partial and royal patroness.

His early marriage with Mary Lepel, the beautiful maid of honour to Queen Caroline, insured his felicity, though it did not curb his predilections for other ladies.

Henceforth Lord Hervey lived all the year round in what were then called lodgings, that is, apartments appropriated to the royal household, or even to others, in St. James's, or at Richmond, or at Windsor. In order fully to comprehend all the intimate relations which he had with the court, it is necessary to present the reader with some account of the family of George II. Five daughters had been the female issue of his majesty's marriage with Queen Caroline. Three of these princesses, the three elder ones, had lived, during the life of George I., at St. James's with their grandfather; who, irritated by the differences between him and his son, then Prince of Wales, adopted that measure rather as showing his authority than from any affection to the young princesses. It was, in truth, difficult to say which of these royal ladies was the most unfortunate.

Anne, the eldest, had shown her spirit early in life whilst residing with George I.; she had a proud, imperious nature, and her temper was, it must be owned, put to a severe test. The only time that George I. did the English the honour of choosing one of the beauties of the nation for his mistress, was during the last year of his reign. The object of his choice was Anne Brett, the eldest daughter of the infamous Countess of Macclesfield by her second husband. The neglect of Savage, the poet, her son, was merely one passage in the iniquitous life of Lady Macclesfield. Endowed with singular taste and judgment, consulted by Colley Cibber on every new play he produced, the mother of Savage was not only wholly destitute of all virtue, but of all shame. One day, looking out of the window, she perceived a very handsome man assaulted by some bailiffs who were going to arrest him: she paid his debt, released, and married him. The hero of this story was Colonel Brett, the father of Anne Brett.

The child of such a mother was not likely to be even decently-respectable; and Anne was proud of her disgraceful preeminence and of her disgusting and royal lover. She was dark, and her flashing black eyes resembled those of a Spanish beauty. Ten years after the death of George I., she found a husband in Sir William Leman, of Northall, and was announced, on that occasion, as the half-sister of Richard Savage.

To the society of this woman, when at St. James's, as 'Mistress Brett,' the three princesses were subjected: at the same time the Duchess of Kendal, the king's German mistress, occupied other lodgings at St. James's.

Miss Brett was to be rewarded with the coronet of a countess for her degradation, the king being absent on the occasion at Hanover; elated by her expectations, she took the liberty, during his majesty's absence, of ordering a door to be broken out of her apartment into the royal garden, where the princesses walked. The Princess Anne, not deigning to associate with her, commanded that it should be forthwith closed. Miss Brett imperiously reversed that order. In the midst of the affair, the king died suddenly, and Anne Brett's reign was over, and her influence soon as much forgotten as if she had never existed. The Princess Anne was pining in the dulness of her royal home, when a marriage with the Prince of Orange, was proposed for the consideration of his parents. It was a miserable match as well as a miserable prospect, for the prince's revenue amounted to no more than £12,000 a year; and the state and pomp to which the Princess Royal had been accustomed could not be contemplated on so small a fortune. It was still worse in point of that poor consideration, happiness. The Prince of Orange was both deformed and disgusting in his person, though his face was sensible in expression; and if he inspired one idea more strongly than another when he appeared in his uniform and cocked hat, and spoke bad French, or worse English, it was that of seeing before one a dressed-up baboon.

It was a bitter cup for the princess to drink, but she drank it: she reflected that it might be the only way of quitting a court where, in case of her father's death, she would be dependent on her brother Frederick, or on that weak prince's strong-minded wife. So she consented, and took the dwarf; and that consent was regarded by a grateful people, and by all good courtiers, as a sacrifice for the sake of Protestant principles, the House of Orange being, par excellence, at the head of the orthodox dynasties in Europe. A dowry of £80,000 was forthwith granted by an admiring Commons—just double what had ever been given before. That sum was happily lying in the exchequer, being the purchase-money of some lands in St. Christopher's which had lately been sold; and King George was thankful to get rid of a daughter whose haughtiness gave him trouble. In person, too, the princess royal was not very ornamental to the Court. She was ill-made, with a propensity to grow fat; her complexion, otherwise very fine, was marked with the small-pox; she had, however, a lively, clean look—one of her chief beauties—and a certain royalty of manner.

The Princess Amelia died, as the world thought, single, but consoled herself with various love flirtations. The Duke of Newcastle made love to her, but her affections were centred on the Duke of Grafton, to whom she was privately married, as is confidently asserted.

The Princess Caroline was the darling of her family. Even the king relied on her truth. When there was any dispute, he used to say, 'Send for Caroline; she will tell us the right story.'

Her fate had its clouds. Amiable, gentle, of unbounded charity, with strong affections, which were not suffered to flow in a legitimate channel, she became devotedly attached to Lord Hervey: her heart was bound up in him; his death drove her into a permanent retreat from the world. No debasing connection existed between them; but it is misery, it is sin enough to love another woman's husband—and that sin, that misery, was the lot of the royal and otherwise virtuous Caroline.

The Princess Mary, another victim to conventionalities, was united to Frederick, Landgrave of Hesse Cassel; a barbarian, from whom she escaped, whenever she could, to come, with a bleeding heart, to her English home. She was, even Horace Walpole allows, 'of the softest, mildest temper in the world,' and fondly beloved by her sister Caroline, and by the 'Butcher of Culloden,' William, Duke of Cumberland.

Louisa became Queen of Denmark in 1746, after some years' marriage to the Crown Prince. 'We are lucky,' Horace Walpole writes on that occasion, 'in the death of kings.'

The two princesses who were still under the paternal roof were contrasts. Caroline was a constant invalid, gentle, sincere, unambitious, devoted to her mother, whose death nearly killed her. Amelia affected popularity, and assumed the esprit fort—was fond of meddling in politics, and after the death of her mother, joined the Bedford faction, in opposition to her father. But both these princesses were outwardly submissive when Lord Hervey became the Queen's chamberlain.

The evenings at St. James's were spent in the same way as those at Kensington.

Quadrille formed her majesty's pastime, and, whilst Lord Hervey played pools of cribbage with the Princess Caroline and the maids of honour, the Duke of Cumberland amused himself and the Princess Amelia at 'buffet.' On Mondays and Fridays there were drawing-rooms held; and these receptions took place, very wisely, in the evening.

Beneath all the show of gaiety and the freezing ceremony of those stately occasions, there was in that court as much misery as family dissensions, or, to speak accurately, family hatreds can engender. Endless jealousies, which seem to us as frivolous as they were rabid; and contentions, of which even the origin is still unexplained, had long severed the queen from her eldest son. George II. had always loved his mother: his affection for the unhappy Sophia Dorothea was one of the very few traits of goodness in a character utterly vulgar, sensual, and entirely selfish. His son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, on the other hand, hated his mother. He loved neither of his parents: but the queen had the preeminence in his aversion.

The king, during the year 1736, was at Hanover. His return was announced, but under circumstances of danger. A tremendous storm arose just as he was prepared to embark at Helvoetsluys. All London was on the look out, weather-cocks were watched; tides, winds, and moons formed the only subjects of conversation; but no one of his majesty's subjects was so demonstrative as the Prince of Wales, and his cheerfulness, and his triumph even, on the occasion, were of course resentfully heard of by the queen.

During the storm, when anxiety had almost amounted to fever, Lord Hervey dined with Sir Robert Walpole. Their conversation naturally turned on the state of affairs, prospectively. Sir Robert called the prince a 'poor, weak, irresolute, false, lying, contemptible wretch.' Lord Hervey did not defend him, but suggested that Frederick, in case of his father's death, might be more influenced by the queen than he had hitherto been. 'Zounds, my lord!' interrupted Sir Robert, 'he would tear the flesh off her bones with red-hot irons sooner! The distinctions she shows to you, too, I believe, would not be forgotten. Then the notion he has of his great riches, and the desire he has of fingering them, would make him pinch her, and pinch her again, in order to make her buy her ease, till she had not a groat left.'

What a picture of a heartless and selfish character! The next day the queen sent for Lord Hervey, to ask him if he knew the particulars of a great dinner which the prince had given to the lord mayor the previous day, whilst the whole country, and the court in particular, was trembling for the safety of the king, his father. Lord Hervey told her that the prince's speech at the dinner was the most ingratiating piece of popularity ever heard; the healths, of course, as usual. 'Heavens!' cried the queen: 'popularity always makes me sick, but Fritz's popularity makes me vomit! I hear that yesterday, on the prince's side of the House, they talked of the king's being cast away with the same sang froid as you would talk of an overturn; and that my good son strutted about as if he had been already king. Did you mark the airs with which he came into my drawing-room in the morning? though he does not think fit to honour me with his presence, or ennui me with his wife's, of an evening? I felt something here in my throat that swelled and half-choked me.'

Poor Queen Caroline! with such a son, and such a husband, she must have been possessed of a more than usual share of German imperturbability to sustain her cheerfulness, writhing, as she often was, under the pangs of a long-concealed disorder, of which eventually she died. Even on the occasion of the king's return in time to spend his birthday in England, the queen's temper had been sorely tried. Nothing had ever vexed her more than the king's admiration for Amelia Sophia Walmoden, who, after the death of Caroline, was created Countess of Yarmouth. Madame Walmoden had been a reigning belle among the married women at Hanover, when George II. visited that country in 1735. Not that her majesty's affections were wounded; it was her pride that was hurt by the idea that people would think that this Hanoverian lady had more influence than she had. In other respects the king's absence was a relief: she had the Éclat of the regency; she had the comfort of having the hours which her royal torment decreed were to be passed in amusing his dulness, to herself; she was free from his 'quotidian sallies of temper, which,' as Lord Hervey relates, 'let it be charged by what hand it would, used always to discharge its hottest fire, on some pretence or other, upon her.'

It is quite true that from the first dawn of his preference for Madame Walmoden, the king wrote circumstantial letters of fifty or sixty pages to the queen, informing her of every stage of the affair; the queen, in reply, saying that she was only one woman, and an old woman, and adding, 'that he might love more and younger women.' In return, the king wrote, 'You must love the Walmoden, for she loves you;' a civil insult, which he accompanied with so minute a description of his new favourite, that the queen, had she been a painter, might have drawn her portrait at a hundred miles' distance.

The queen, subservient as she seemed, felt the humiliation. Such was the debased nature of George II. that he not only wrote letters unworthy of a man to write, and unfit for a woman to read, to his wife, but he desired her to show them to Sir Robert Walpole. He used to 'tag several paragraphs,' as Lord Hervey expresses it, with these words, 'Montrez ceci, et consultez la-dessus de gros homme,' meaning Sir Robert. But this was only a portion of the disgusting disclosures made by the vulgar licentious monarch to his too degraded consort.

In the bitterness of her mortification the queen consulted Lord Hervey and Sir Robert as to the possibility of her losing her influence, should she resent the king's delay in returning. They agreed, that her taking the 'fiÈre turn' would ruin her with her royal consort; Sir Robert adding, that if he had a mind to flatter her into her ruin, he might talk to her as if she were twenty-five, and try to make her imagine that she could bring the king back by the apprehension of losing her affection. He said it was now too late in her life to try new methods; she must persist in the soothing, coaxing, submissive arts which had been practised with success, and even press his majesty to bring this woman to England! 'He taught her,' says Lord Hervey, 'this hard lesson till she wept.' Nevertheless, the queen expressed her gratitude to the minister for his advice. 'My lord,' said Walpole to Hervey, 'she laid her thanks on me so thick that I found I had gone too far, for I am never so much afraid of her rebukes as of her commendations.'

Such was the state of affairs between this singular couple. Nevertheless, the queen, not from attachment to the king, but from the horror she had of her son's reigning, felt such fears of the prince's succeeding to the throne as she could hardly express. He would, she was convinced, do all he could to ruin and injure her in case of his accession to the throne.

The consolation of such a friend as Lord Hervey can easily be conceived, when he told her majesty that he had resolved, in case the king had been lost at sea, to have retired from her service, in order to prevent any jealousy or irritation that might arise from his supposed influence with her majesty. The queen stopped him short, and said, 'No, my lord, I should never have suffered that; you are one of the greatest pleasures of my life. But did I love you less than I do, or less like to have you about me, I should look upon the suffering you to be taken from me as such a meanness and baseness that you should not have stirred an inch from me. You,' she added, 'should have gone with me to Somerset House;' (which was hers in case of the king's death). She then told him she should have begged Sir Robert Walpole on her knees not to have sent in his resignation.

The animosity of the Prince of Wales to Lord Hervey augmented, there can be no doubt, his unnatural aversion to the queen, an aversion which he evinced early in life. There was a beautiful, giddy maid of honour, who attracted not only the attention of Frederick, but the rival attentions of other suitors, and among them, the most favoured was said to be Lord Hervey, notwithstanding that he had then been for some years the husband of one of the loveliest ornaments of the court, the sensible and virtuous Mary Lepel. Miss Vane became eventually the avowed favourite of the prince, and after giving birth to a son, who was christened Fitz-Frederick Vane, and who died in 1736, his unhappy mother died a few months afterwards. It is melancholy to read a letter from Lady Hervey to Mrs. Howard, portraying the frolic and levity of this once joyous creature, among the other maids of honour; and her strictures show at once the unrefined nature of the pranks in which they indulged, and her once sobriety of demeanour.

She speaks, on one occasion, in which, however, Miss Vane did not share the nocturnal diversion, of some of the maids of honour being out in the winter all night in the gardens at Kensington—opening and rattling the windows, and trying to frighten people out of their wits; and she gives Mrs. Howard a hint that the queen ought to be informed of the way in which her young attendants amused themselves. After levities such as these, it is not surprising to find poor Miss Vane writing to Mrs. Howard, with complaints that she was unjustly aspersed, and referring to her relatives, Lady Betty Nightingale and Lady Hewet, in testimony of the falsehood of reports which, unhappily, the event verified.

The prince, however, never forgave Lord Hervey for being his rival with Miss Vane, nor his mother for her favours to Lord Hervey. In vain did the queen endeavour to reconcile Fritz, as she called him, to his father;—nothing could be done in a case where the one was all dogged selfishness; and where the other, the idol of the opposition party, as the prince had ever been, so legÈre de tÊte as to swallow all the adulation offered to him, and to believe himself a demigod. 'The queen's dread of a rival,' Horace Walpole remarks, 'was a feminine weakness: the behaviour of her eldest son was a real thorn.' Some time before his marriage to a princess who was supposed to augment his hatred of his mother, Frederick of Wales had contemplated an act of disobedience. Soon after his arrival in England, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, hearing that he was in want of money, had sent to offer him her granddaughter, Lady Diana Spencer, with a fortune of £100,000. The prince accepted the young lady, and a day was fixed for his marriage in the duchess's lodge at the Great Park, Windsor. But Sir Robert Walpole, getting intelligence of the plot, the nuptials were stopped. The duchess never forgave either Walpole or the royal family, and took an early opportunity of insulting the latter. When the Prince of Orange came over to marry the Princess Royal, a sort of boarded gallery was erected from the windows of the great drawing-room of the palace, and was constructed so as to cross the garden to the Lutheran chapel in the Friary, where the duchess lived. The Prince of Orange being ill, went to Bath, and the marriage was delayed for some weeks. Meantime the widows of Marlborough House were darkened by the gallery. 'I wonder,' cried the old duchess, 'when my neighbour George will take away his orange-chest!' The structure, with its pent-house roof, really resembling an orange-chest.

Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey, whose attractions, great as they were, proved insufficient to rivet the exclusive admiration of the accomplished Hervey, had become his wife in 1720, some time before her husband had been completely enthralled with the gilded prison doors of a court. She was endowed with that intellectual beauty calculated to attract a man of talent: she was highly educated, of great talent; possessed of savoir faire, infinite good temper, and a strict sense of duty. She also derived from her father, Brigadier Lepel, who was of an ancient family in Sark, a considerable fortune. Good and correct as she was, Lady Hervey viewed with a fashionable composure the various intimacies formed during the course of their married life by his lordship.

The fact is, that the aim of both was not so much to insure their domestic felicity as to gratify their ambition. Probably they were disappointed in both these aims—certainly in one of them; talented, indefatigable, popular, lively, and courteous, Lord Hervey, in the House of Commons, advocated in vain, in brilliant orations, the measures of Walpole. Twelve years, fourteen years elapsed, and he was left in the somewhat subordinate position of vice-chamberlain, in spite of that high order of talents which he possessed, and which would have been displayed to advantage in a graver scene. The fact has been explained: the queen could not do without him; she confided in him; her daughter loved him; and his influence in that court was too powerful for Walpole to dispense with an aid so valuable to his own plans. Some episodes in a life thus frittered away, until, too late, promotion came, alleviated his existence, and gave his wife only a passing uneasiness, if even indeed they imparted a pang.

One of these was his dangerous passion for Miss Vane; another, his platonic attachment to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Whilst he lived on the terms with his wife which is described even by the French as being a 'MÉnage de Paris,' Lord Hervey, found in another quarter the sympathies which, as a husband, he was too well-bred to require. It is probable that he always admired his wife more than any other person, for she had qualities that were quite congenial to the tastes of a wit and a beau in those times. Lady Hervey was not only singularly captivating, young, gay, and handsome; but a complete model also of the polished, courteous, high-bred woman of fashion. Her manners are said by Lady Louisa Stuart to have 'had a foreign tinge, which some called affected; but they were gentle, easy, and altogether exquisitely pleasing.' She was in secret a Jacobite—and resembled in that respect most of the fine ladies in Great Britain. Whiggery and Walpolism were vulgar: it was haut ton to take offence when James II. was anathematized, and quite good taste to hint that some people wished well to the Chevalier's attempts: and this way of speaking owed its fashion probably to Frederick of Wales, whose interest in Flora Macdonald, and whose concern for the exiled family, were among the few amiable traits of his disposition. Perhaps they arose from a wish to plague his parents, rather than from a greatness of character foreign to this prince.

Lady Hervey was in the bloom of youth, Lady Mary in the zenith of her age, when they became rivals: Lady Mary had once excited the jealousy of Queen Caroline when Princess of Wales.

'How becomingly Lady Mary is dressed to-night,' whispered George II. to his wife, whom he had called up from the card-table to impart to her that important conviction. 'Lady Mary always dresses well,' was the cold and curt reply.

Lord Hervey had been married about seven years when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu re-appeared at the court of Queen Caroline, after her long residence in Turkey. Lord Hervey was thirty-three years of age; Lady Mary was verging on forty. She was still a pretty woman, with a piquant, neat-featured face; which does not seem to have done any justice to a mind at once masculine and sensitive, nor to a heart capable of benevolence—capable of strong attachments, and of bitter hatred.

Like Lady Hervey, she lived with her husband on well-bred terms: there existed no quarrel between them; no avowed ground of coldness; it was the icy boundary of frozen feeling that severed them; the sure and lasting though polite destroyer of all bonds, indifference. Lady Mary was full of repartee, of poetry, of anecdote, and was not averse to admiration; but she was essentially a woman of common sense, of views enlarged by travel, and of ostensibly good principles. A woman of delicacy was not to be found in those days, any more than other productions of the nineteenth century: a telegraphic message would have been almost as startling to a courtly ear as the refusal of a fine lady to suffer a double entendre. Lady Mary was above all scruples, and Lord Hervey, who had lived too long with George II. and his queen to have the moral sense in her perfection, liked her all the better for her courage—her merry, indelicate jokes, and her putting things down by their right names, on which Lady Mary plumed herself: she was what they term in the north of England, 'Emancipated.' They formed an old acquaintance with a confidential, if not a tender friendship; and that their intimacy was unpleasant to Lady Hervey was proved by her refusal—when, after the grave had closed over Lord Hervey, late in life, Lady Mary ill, and broken down by age, returned to die in England—to resume an acquaintance which had been a painful one to her.

Lord Hervey was a martyr to illness of an epileptic character; and Lady Mary gave him her sympathy. She was somewhat of a doctor—and being older than her friend, may have had the art of soothing sufferings, which were the worse because they were concealed. Whilst he writhed in pain, he was obliged to give vent to his agony by alleging that an attack of cramp bent him double: yet he lived by rule—a rule harder to adhere to than that of the most conscientious homoeopath in the present day. In the midst of court gaieties and the duties of office, he thus wrote to Dr. Cheyne:—

... 'To let you know that I continue one of your most pious votaries, and to tell you the method I am in. In the first place, I never take wine nor malt drink, nor any liquid but water and milk-tea; in the next, I eat no meat but the whitest, youngest, and tenderest, nine times in ten nothing but chicken, and never more than the quantity of a small one at a meal. I seldom eat any supper, but if any, nothing absolutely but bread and water; two days in the week I eat no flesh; my breakfast is dry biscuit, not sweet, and green tea; I have left off butter as bilious; I eat no salt, nor any sauce but bread-sauce.'

Among the most cherished relaxations of the royal household were visits to Twickenham, whilst the court was at Richmond. The River Thames, which has borne on its waves so much misery in olden times—which was the highway from the Star-chamber to the tower—which has been belaboured in our days with so much wealth, and sullied with so much impurity; that river, whose current is one hour rich as the stream of a gold river, the next hour, foul as the pestilent churchyard,—was then, especially between Richmond and Teddington, a glassy, placid stream, reflecting on its margin the chestnut-trees of stately Ham, and the reeds and wild flowers which grew undisturbed in the fertile meadows of Petersham.

Lord Hervey, with the ladies of the court, Mrs. Howard as their chaperon, delighted in being wafted to that village, so rich in names which give to Twickenham undying associations with the departed great. Sometimes the effeminate valetudinarian, Hervey, was content to attend the Princess Caroline to Marble Hill only, a villa residence built by George II. for Mrs. Howard, and often referred to in the correspondence of that period. Sometimes the royal barge, with its rowers in scarlet jackets, was seen conveying the gay party; ladies in slouched hats, pointed over fair brows in front, with a fold of sarsenet round them, terminated in a long bow and ends behind—with deep falling mantles over dresses never cognizant of crinoline: gentlemen, with cocked-hats, their bag-wigs and ties appearing behind; and beneath their puce-coloured coats, delicate silk tights and gossamer stockings were visible, as they trod the mossy lawn of the Palace Gardens at Richmond, or, followed by a tiny greyhound, prepared for the lazy pleasures of the day.

Sometimes the visit was private; the sickly Princess Caroline had a fancy to make one of the group who are bound to Pope's villa. Twickenham, where that great little man had, since 1715, established himself, was pronounced by Lord Bacon to be the finest place in the world for study. 'Let Twitnam Park,' he wrote to his steward, Thomas Bushell, 'which I sold in my younger days, be purchased, if possible, for a residence for such deserving persons to study in, (since I experimentally found the situation of that place much convenient for the trial of my philosophical conclusions)—expressed in a paper sealed, to the trust—which I myself had put in practice and settled the same by act of parliament, if the vicissitudes of fortune had not intervened and prevented me.'

Twickenham continued, long after Bacon had penned this injunction, to be the retreat of the poet, the statesman, the scholar; the haven where the retired actress, and broken novelist found peace; the abode of Henry Fielding, who lived in one of the back-streets; the temporary refuge, from the world of London, of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the life-long home of Pope.

Let us picture to ourselves a visit from the princess to Pope's villa:—As the barge, following the gentle bendings of the river, nears Twickenham, a richer green, a summer brightness, indicates it is approaching that spot of which even Bishop Warburton says that 'the beauty of the owner's poetic genius appeared to as much advantage in the disposition of these romantic materials as in any of his best-contrived poems.' And the loved toil which formed the quincunx, which perforated and extended the grotto until it extended across the road to a garden on the opposite side—the toil which showed the gentler parts of Pope's better nature—has been respected, and its effects preserved. The enamelled lawn, green as no other grass save that by the Thames side is green, was swept until late years by the light boughs of the famed willow. Every memorial of the bard was treasured by the gracious hands into which, after 1744, the classic spot fell—those of Sir William Stanhope.

In the subterranean passage this verse appears; adulatory it must be confessed:—

'The humble roof, the garden's scanty line,

Ill suit the genius of the bard divine;

But fancy now assumes a fairer scope,

And Stanhope's plans unfold the soul of Pope.'