CHAPTER XXX.The Residuum.
And for the rest, what remains? What flotsam did this apparently wasted existence leave upon the surface of the tide of life as it sank beneath it?
Indeed, it is little; little that is reliable, little that can be trusted as unbiased testimony of his virtues or his vices.
Horace Walpole and Lord Hervey are the leaders of his vilifiers, both King’s men, both hating him.
What does Walpole say?
“Thus died Frederick, Prince of Wales, having resembled his pattern the Black Prince in nothing but in dying before his father.”
“His chief passion was women....”
“He was really childish, affectedly a protector of arts and sciences, fond of displaying what he knew; a mimic, the Lord knows what a mimic—of the celebrated Duke of Orleans, in imitation of whom he wrote two or three silly French songs. His best quality was generosity; his worst, insincerity and indifference to truth, which appeared so early that Earl Stanhope wrote to Lord Sunderland from Hanover, what I shall conclude his character with, ‘He has his father’s head and his mother’s heart.’”
No great compliment either to his father or mother if this latter assertion be true!
Lord Hervey, in summing up the Prince’s character, goes much farther than this, so much farther indeed that his assertions take the colour of a very bitter display of personal animosity and spite. These are his words:
“And when I have mentioned his (the Prince’s) temper, it is the single ray of light I can throw on his character to gild the otherwise universal blackness that belongs to it, and it is surprising how any character made up of so many contradictions should never have the good fortune to have stumbled (par contre-coupat least) upon any one virtue; but as every vice has its opposite vice as well as its opposite virtue, so this heap of iniquity to complete at once its uniformity in vice in general, as well as its contradiction in particular vices like variety of poisons—whether hot or cold, sweet or bitter—was still poison, and had never an antidote.”
These stilted passages of Lord Hervey seem to have been put together with a double object; first to show his hatred for Prince Frederick; secondly to display his own learning. Though succeeding admirably in one, he seems to have failed in the other. No man of learning would ever commit himself to assertions which he was not in a position to substantiate, and Lord Hervey was certainly never in a position to prove any of the assertions he put forward against the Prince, or he most assuredly would have done so.
He was no more able to prove these vague charges—they were always vague, even to the cowardly hints which he gave in his Memoirs that he knewsomething; something very detrimental to the Prince’s character—than he was able to prove his boastful assertion to Sir Robert Walpole that he was the father of Anne Vane’s child, the child which had been acknowledged by the Prince as his own.
He stated in his Memoirs that he was aware of certain facts very damaging to the Prince of Wales, which accounted for the King and Queen’s hatred of him. If so then he must have been acquainted with some crime committed in Frederick’s childhood, say at the age of seven, for that was about the time when his father and mother began to hate him.
But what are Lord Hervey’s and Horace Walpole’s charges against the Prince?
Hervey says he was vicious; Hervey of whom Sarah of Marlborough remarked:—
“He has certainly parts and wit, but is the most wretched profligate man that ever was born....”
If Frederick possessed vices, where is there any record of them in history?
Lord Hervey’s are very thinly veiled,videPope’s verses on him.
It is acknowledged that Frederick made a fool of himself with women when he was a young unmarried man, and that this foolishness began over in Hanover, where he was left a mere boy to his ownresources in an atmosphere permeated with the vices of his father and grandfather.
There was the Vane episode; true, and he behaved as honourably as a man could under such circumstances.
Then there was the affair of Lady Archibald Hamilton, and that is exceedingly doubtful; doubtful in the extreme whether there was any guilt between this young man of seven and twenty and the plain lady of thirty-five, mother of ten children. The more one reads of his inner life, the more one doubts it.
He was certainly vain, and fond of having women about him, clever women especially, but there cannot be a scintilla of a doubt that he loved his wife devotedly, and, moreover, that she possessed the feminine attribute of attracting him through his senses, and holding him. The surest way of holding a husband.
If, therefore, he was devotedly in love with his pretty wife, and she satisfied him in every way, as he admits in his verses to her, that she did, what attraction would two plain women—Lady Archibald Hamilton and Lady Middlesex have for him, one eight years older than himself and the mother of ten children; the other “short and dark like a winter’s day,” and as “yellow as a November morning?”
“Ah, yes,” remarks one of his enemies, “beauty in the case of mistresses was never a necessity in the Prince’s family!”
This assertion is quite wrong; George the Second’s mistresses, Mrs. Howard, Lady Deloraine, the Walmoden, were all exceedingly pretty, the little man, though coarse and vulgar, had a great eye for beauty, and if he could have got her—but he could not, she was a pure woman—he would have had one of the most beautiful girls in England, Mary Bellenden.
In the Prince’s case, Miss Vane, the only mistress he was known to have had, was described as a very pretty girl, therefore he was not unacquainted with beauty.
That Lady Archibald, and Lady Middlesex were bright, clever, witty women, useful to have in the Household can be understood; but to say that the Prince had turned his house into a seraglio as his grandfather George the First had done, is absurd.
He was not the same kind of person; his tastes, his disposition, his feelings were utterly different.
He lived in loose immoral times, and in all probability was not immaculate, but to say that he kept two plain mistresses in the same house as the pretty wife to whom he was absolutely devoted, and among the children he adored, is a vile calumny which emanated from persons who hated him for other reasons, and either could not, orwouldnot, understand his nature.
Walpole accuses him of lying, but as usual gives no proof. Where are the lies? We know his fatherlied; it can be traced in history, but where are Frederick’s lies?
In the numerous letters he wrote and which have appeared in these pages, especially those excusing the removal of his wife from Hampton Court, surely there would have been traceable some of these gross falsehoods of which he is accused.
But there are none. Excuses, fencing apologies—and we can guess the reason—yes; but lies; no.
Let us now turn to the other side, and hear what the impartial witnesses of his life say about him:
Here is an extract from a letter written by the Duchess of Somerset to Dr. Doddridge:
“Providence seems to have directed the blow where we thought ourselves the most secure; for among the many schemes of hopes and fears which people were laying down to themselves, this was never mentioned as a supposable event. The harmony which appears to subsist between His Majesty and the Princess of Wales, is the best support for the spirits of the nation under their present concern and astonishment. He died in the forty-fifth year of his age, and is generally allowed to have been a prince of amiable and generous disposition, of elegant manners and considerable talent.”
“When the Rambler appeared, he so enjoyed its stately wisdom,” says Dr. Doran, “that he sought after the author in order to serve him if he neededservice. His method of serving an author was not mere lip compliment. Pope indeed might be satisfied with receiving from him a complimentary visit at Twickenham. The poet there was on equal terms with the Prince; and when the latter asked him how it was that the author who hurled his shafts against kings could be so friendly towards the son of a King, Pope somewhat pertly answered, that he who dreaded the lion, might safely enough fondle the cub. But Frederick could really be princely to authors, and what is even more, he could do a good action gracefully, an immense point where there is a good action to be done.
“Thus to Tindal he sent a gold medal worth forty guineas; and to dry and dusty Glover, for whose ‘Leonidas’ he had much respect, he sent a note for five hundred pounds, when the poet was in difficulties. This handsome gift, too, was sent unasked. The son of song was honoured, and not humiliated, by the gift.
“It does not matter whether Lyttelton or any one else taught him to be the patron of literature and literary men; it is to his credit that he recognised them, acknowledged their services, and saw them with pleasure at his little court, often giving them precedence over those whose greatness was the mere result of accident of birth.”
And this little anecdote of Lady Huntingdon.
He missed her from his circle one day, and asked Lady Charlotte Edwin where she was.
“Oh! I dare say,” exclaimed Lady Charlotte, who was not pious then, but became so after, “I dare say she is praying with her beggars!”
Frederick the “childish,” “whose passion was women,” turned and looked at her.
“Lady Charlotte,” he answered, “when I am dying I think I shall be happy to seize the skirt of Lady Huntingdon’s mantle to lift me up to Heaven!”
Finally, listen to what Dr. Doran says of him a hundred years after, summing up his character.
“He walked the streets unattended to the great delight of the people;[75]was the presiding Apollo at great festivals, conferred the prizes at rowings and racings, and talked familiarly with Thames fishermen on the mysteries of their craft. He would enter the cottages of the poor, listen with patience to their twice-told tales, and partake with relish of the humble fare presented to him. So did the old soldier find in him a ready listener to the story of his campaigns and the subject of his petitions; and never did the illustrous maimed appeal to him in vain. He was a man to be loved in spite of all his vices. He would have been adored had his virtues been more, or more real.”
And had he any other quality which perhaps has been forgotten? Some memory of a kindly, tender feeling, which, maybe, has covered many ofhis sins? Let us think, who have read these pages. Yes; there was one quality; one which can come only from the heart of a good man or woman, and which he possessed in great fulness; a quality much despised in those days and in these,
HE LOVED LITTLE CHILDREN.
“Not all unhappy, having loved God’s best.”—Tennyson.
“Not all unhappy, having loved God’s best.”—Tennyson.
FOOTNOTES:[75]At his death the popular cry was: “Oh! that it was but his brother! Oh! that it was but the butcher!”
[75]At his death the popular cry was: “Oh! that it was but his brother! Oh! that it was but the butcher!”
[75]At his death the popular cry was: “Oh! that it was but his brother! Oh! that it was but the butcher!”
THE END.