I had almost finished them the last time, but here are a few more quotes. The big climax of the memoirs and their finale are Queen Caroline's death and the immediate aftermath. Hervey ends his memoirs there, and like the essay says, for all that their title refers to the reign of George II, they should really be titled "reign of Caroline", for she is the central character in his narrative. She died a terrible death: Since her last pregnancy, Caroline had suffered from an umbilical hernia, or a hole in her belly, and couldn’t bear to have anything tight around her middle. Nor could she bear to have anyone know about such an embarrassing disorder, and she always kept on her shift when being undressed by her ladies. Finally, in 1737, a bit of her bowel popped out through that hole, and she could not disguise the fact that she was seriously ill. Her doctors should have pushed that loop of bowel back inside and hoped that the hole would heal, but instead they made a terrible error. They cut it off. Now Caroline’s digestive system was destroyed, and she took ten days to die. Incidentally, I had to look up the medical details, because our Victorian editor childes Hervey for providing them (about a lady! and a Queen!) and proudly announces he protects us readers from them as much as he can. What's still there is all the surrounding drama, which took place shortly after Fritz of Wales had that big break with his parents due to way his first legitimate daughter was born. When he heard about the Queen's state of health, he tried to see her, but no dice. Hervey of course thinks he was probably popping the champagne in anticipation and faking all filial feelings. FoW's parents heartily agree, as mentioned in my write-up of the Halsband biography. Here's a passage from shortly before Caroline's illness is discovered:
Lord Hervey took occasion upon this subject, among many other things, to say, he did not believe there ever was a father and a son so thoroughly unlike in every particular as the King and the Prince, and enumerated several points in which they differed, as little to the advantage of the Prince as to the dispraise or displeasure of the King. The King said he had really thought so himself a thousand times, and had often asked the Queen if the beast was his son. Lord Hervey said that question must be to very little purpose, for to be sure the Queen would never own it if he was not. The King said the first child generally was the husband's, "and therefore," says he, "I fancy he is what in German we call a Weckselbalch; (Hervey's spelling; it's actually "Wechselbalg") I do not know," continued he, " if you have a word for it in English : it is not what you call a foundling, but a child put in a cradle instead of another." " That is a changeling," replied Lord Hervey. The King was extremely pleased with this translation, and said, " I wish you could prove him a changeling in the German sense of the word as easily as anybody can prove him so in the other ;—though the Queen was a great while before her maternal affection would give him up for a fool, and yet I told her so before he had been acting as if he had not common sense." Lord Hervey said the Queen had often last year done the honours of his Royal Highness's understanding to him, and was very loth to give it quite up, but that of late he had not perceived she had any hope left of disguising it. "My dear Lord," replied the Queen, ' " I will give it you under my hand, if you are in any fear of my relapsing, that my dear first-born is the greatest ass and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world, and I that I most heartily wish he was out of it."
And so on, and so forth. Now, you may recall G2 had had a terrible relationship with his own father, G1, so FoW and/or his advisors get the idea to publish some letters between G1 and future G2 when G2 was Prince of Wales, with the implication: Hypocrite much? Considering most of said letters were burned by Caroline when G2 became King, the Royals think that Fritz must have gotten those letters from the Duchess of Kendal. (Aka Aunt Melusine to Katte, mistress of G1.) Otoh, Hervey thinks Fritz must have a spy in the palace, because the letters published are just those three not burned. In any event, he thinks they just demonstrate that G1 was a way harsher father, since he temporarily took G2's children from him during their biggest argument, while G2 generously declared he wouldn't do that to FoW.
During Caroline's ten days of dying, Hervey and the Royals, minus Fritz and Augusta who aren't allowed access, spend most at the time in Caroline's bed room or next door. This temporarly makes Hervey soften on the King, but not so much is second least favourite Hannover offspring, Emily/Amalia, quondam intended for Fritz of Prussia. An illustration in the following scene (re: storm - G2 and Emily are referencing G2 during his most recent return from Hannover being caught in a tempest across the channel):
One night whilst the Queen was ill, as (G2) was sitting in his nightgown and nightcap in a great chair, with his legs upon a stool, and nobody in the room with him but the Princess Emily, who lay upon a couch, and Lord Hervey, who sat by the fire, he talked in this strain of his own courage in the storm and his illness, till the Princess Emily, as Lord Hervey thought, fell fast asleep, whilst Lord Hervey, as tired as he was of the present conversation and this last week's watching, was left alone to act civil auditor and adroit courtier, to applaud what he heard, and every now and then to ask such proper questions as led the King into giving some more particular detail of his own magnanimity. The King, turning towards Princess Emily, and seeing her eyes shut, cried, "Poor good child! her duty, affection, and attendance on her mother have quite exhausted her spirits." And soon after he went into the Queen's room. As soon as his back was turned. Princess Emily started up, and said, " Is he gone ? How tiresome he is!" Lord Hervey, who had no mind to trust her Royal Highness with his singing her father's praises in duetto with her, replied only, " I thought your Royal Highness had been asleep." " No," said the Princess Emily ; " I only shut my eyes that I might not join in the ennuyant conversation, and wish I could have shut my ears too. In the first place, I am sick to death of hearing of his great courage every day of my life ; in the next place, one thinks now of Mama, and not of him. Who cares for his old storm ? I believe, too, it is a great lie, and that he was as much afraid as I should have been, for all what he says now ; and as to his not being afraid when he was ill, I know that is a lie, for I saw him, and I heard all his sighs and his groans, when he was in no more danger than I am at this moment. He was talking, too, for ever of dying, and that he was sure he should not recover." All this, considering the kind things she had heard the King say the minute before, when he imagined her asleep. Lord Hervey thought a pretty extraordinary return for her to make for that paternal goodness, or would have thought it so in anybody but her ; and looked upon this openness to him, whom she did not love, yet less to be accounted for, unless he could have imagined it was to draw him in to echo her, and then to relate what he said as if he had said it unaccompanied. Whilst she was going on with the panegyric on theKing which I have related, the King returned, upon which she began to rub her eyes as if she had that instant raised her head from her pillows, and said, "I have really slept very heartily. How long had Papa been out of the room ?" The King, who had very little or rather no suspicion in his composition, took these appearances for realities, and said, " It is time for us all to take a little rest. We will all go to bed, for by staying here we do the poor Queen no good, and ourselves hurt." And so dismissing Lord Hervey, they all retired.
You already know the famous "Marry again after my death"/ "No, I will have mistresses!" exchange in French between Caroline and G2, for which Hervey is the source. G2 was truly distraught upon her death, and mistresses or not, remained so. Caroline's coffin and later his own are of the kind where you can draw one of the walls back once both are laid next to each other; he wanted their dust to mingle. (Caroline died in 1737; G2 in 1761). Grieving Caroline together makes him bond with Hervey (enough so Hervey ends up being appointed Lord Privy Seal), and thus Hervey gets treated to G2's reflections on his German relations. Which brings us back to our main points of interest again. A reminder: G2's mother was Sophia Dorothea the older, locked up for 30 years for her affair with (probably murdered) Count Königsmarck, and dying in prison. The "Reminscences" are by Horace Walpole, son of Sir Robert Walpole and the other great bitchy memoirist of the Georgian era:
The King often said, and to many people at this time, that not only he and his family should have a great loss in the Queen's death, but the whole nation: and would instance occasions where he owned her good sense and good temper had kept his passions within bounds which they would otherwise have broken. And during this retirement (in which he was infinitely more talkative than I ever knew him at any other time of his whole life) he discoursed so constantly and so openly of himself, that if anybody had had a mind to write the memoirs of his life from his cradle to the present moment, the Princesses and Lord Hervey could have furnished them with materials of all the occurrences, transactions, and anecdotes, military, civil, amorous, foreign, and domestic, that could be comprehended in such a work, from his own lips : excepting what related to his mother, whom on no occasion I ever heard him mention, not even inadvertently or indirectly, any more than if such a person had never had a being. (*)
*Footnote by Victorian editor Croker: This is remarkable, and seems hardly reconcilable with the strong opinion of her innocence and the affectionate regard for her person attributed to him in the Reminiscences. "The second George loved his mother as much as he hated his father ; and purposed, it was said, if she had survived, to have brought her over and declared her Queen-Dowager. Lady Suffolk told me her surprise on going to the new Queen the morning after George I.'s death, at seeing hung up in the Queen's dressrng-room the whole-length of a lady in royal robes, and in the bed-chamber a half-length of the same person, which Lady Suffolk had never seen before." They were of his mother, which the Prince had till then kept concealed.
And now for the Prussians. G2's aunt was Sophie Charlotte, not just mother of FW but foster mother of Caroline, praised as not just one of the most beautiful but definitely one of the best educated and smartest women of her time, which is why I find this statement, err, interesting: Of his aunt, the Queen of Prussia, too he spoke well, who, by what I heard from others, and particularly the Queen, was a very vain, good-for-nothing woman.
Et tu, Caroline? You owe your education to her, among other things. I feel let down. G2's sister is of course Sophia Dorothea the younger, wife of FW, and on her, grieving G2 apparantly had this to say in 1737:
For his sister, the present Queen of Prussia, he had the contempt she deserved, and a hatred she did not deserve.
WTF? For both Hervey and G2. Hervey having zilch interest in the Prussians per se, and dying when Fritz is still busy conquering Silesia, I don't see how he'd have any motive to make this up. But see: Hervey never met SD. He visited Hannover only once, as a young man on his Grand Tour (when he first encountered nine years old Fritz of Wales), and I don't think she was visiting Hannover as well on that occasion. Prussia, he didn't visit at all. So what is this estimation - that SD deserved contempt but not hate - based on? Perhaps all that begging for the English marriages struck him as pathetic, even if he didn't care enough to note it down, but that's the only thing I can think of.
(Now of course SD with her own treatment of her children provides enough reasons to dislike her, but Hervey seems to know nothing about this.)
As to why G2 should have contempt and hate for his sister: search me. It's not like she was madly in love with FW and rejecting her family of birth, au contraire. I'm almost starting to come around to Fritz' pov on Hannover versus Hohenzollern, but luckily your Ziebura read through reminds me this would be wrong. The rest of the Prussian pasage:
What he thought and said of the King of Prussia was much the same as what the King of Prussia thought and said of him ; that he was a proud, brutal, tyrannical, wrong-headed, impracticable fellow, who loved nobody and would use everybody ill that was in his power. How far these two Kings were in the right in this point, or how little they were so in every other, is not my business here to determine.
Meaning: peas in a pod. Again, based on all this, my speculation re: G2 pleading with the other European monarchs for Fritz' life is that it was mostly because if he didn't get to kill his son, FW certainly wouldn't. And speaking of murder: if Fritz and Wilhelmine had made those marriages, do want to place any bets on when things would have gotten violent? (Provided most circumstances stay the same.) Would Fritz of Prussia have had the fatal relationship and fallout with Hervey instead of Fritz of Wales? Would Caroline and G2 have accused Wilhelmine, too, of faking her pregnancy because their oldest surely can't sire a child? Would Fritz of Prussia have killed Fritz of Wales for taking Wilhelmine in labor for a one and a half hour drive because he didn't want his parents to be present at the birth? Place your bets!
Hervey's Memoirs: King Lear's Family has nothing on this
Lord Hervey took occasion upon this subject, among many other things, to say, he did not believe there ever was a father and a son so thoroughly unlike in every particular as the King and the Prince, and enumerated several points in which they differed, as little to the advantage of the Prince as to the dispraise or displeasure of the King. The King said he had really thought so himself a thousand times, and had often asked the Queen if the beast was his son. Lord Hervey said that question must be to very little purpose, for to be sure the Queen would never own it if he was not. The King said the first child generally was the husband's, "and therefore," says he, "I fancy he is what in German we call a Weckselbalch; (Hervey's spelling; it's actually "Wechselbalg") I do not know," continued he, " if you have a word for it in English : it is not what you call a foundling, but a child put in a cradle instead of another."
" That is a changeling," replied Lord Hervey. The King was extremely pleased with this translation, and said, " I wish you could prove him a changeling in the German sense of the word as easily as anybody can prove him so in the other ;—though the Queen was a great while before her maternal affection would give him up for a fool, and yet I told her so before he had been acting as if he had not common sense."
Lord Hervey said the Queen had often last year done the honours of his Royal Highness's understanding to him, and was very loth to give it quite up, but that of late he had not perceived she had any hope left of disguising it. "My dear Lord," replied the Queen, ' " I will give it you under my hand, if you are in any fear of my relapsing, that my dear first-born is the greatest ass and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world, and I that I most heartily wish he was out of it."
And so on, and so forth. Now, you may recall G2 had had a terrible relationship with his own father, G1, so FoW and/or his advisors get the idea to publish some letters between G1 and future G2 when G2 was Prince of Wales, with the implication: Hypocrite much? Considering most of said letters were burned by Caroline when G2 became King, the Royals think that Fritz must have gotten those letters from the Duchess of Kendal. (Aka Aunt Melusine to Katte, mistress of G1.) Otoh, Hervey thinks Fritz must have a spy in the palace, because the letters published are just those three not burned. In any event, he thinks they just demonstrate that G1 was a way harsher father, since he temporarily took G2's children from him during their biggest argument, while G2 generously declared he wouldn't do that to FoW.
During Caroline's ten days of dying, Hervey and the Royals, minus Fritz and Augusta who aren't allowed access, spend most at the time in Caroline's bed room or next door. This temporarly makes Hervey soften on the King, but not so much is second least favourite Hannover offspring, Emily/Amalia, quondam intended for Fritz of Prussia. An illustration in the following scene (re: storm - G2 and Emily are referencing G2 during his most recent return from Hannover being caught in a tempest across the channel):
One night whilst the Queen was ill, as (G2) was sitting in his nightgown and nightcap in a great chair, with his legs upon a stool, and nobody in the room with him but the Princess Emily, who lay upon a couch, and Lord Hervey, who sat by the fire, he talked in this strain of his own courage in the storm and his illness, till the Princess Emily, as Lord Hervey thought, fell fast asleep, whilst Lord Hervey, as tired as he was of the present conversation and this last week's watching, was left alone to act civil auditor and adroit courtier, to applaud what he heard, and every now and then to ask such proper questions as led the King into giving some more particular detail of his own magnanimity. The King, turning towards Princess Emily, and seeing her eyes shut, cried, "Poor good child! her duty, affection, and attendance on her mother have quite exhausted her spirits." And soon after he went into the Queen's room. As soon as his back was turned. Princess Emily started up, and said, " Is he gone ? How tiresome he is!"
Lord Hervey, who had no mind to trust her Royal Highness with his singing her father's praises in duetto with her, replied only, " I thought your Royal Highness had been asleep." " No," said the Princess Emily ; " I only shut my eyes that I might not join in the ennuyant conversation, and wish I could have shut my ears too. In the first place, I am sick to death of hearing of his great courage every day of my life ; in the next place, one thinks now of Mama, and not of him. Who cares for his old storm ? I believe, too, it is a great lie, and that he was as much afraid as I should have been, for all what he says now ; and as to his not being afraid when he was ill, I know that is a lie, for I saw him, and I heard all his sighs and his groans, when he was in no more danger than I am at this moment. He was talking, too, for ever of dying, and that he was sure he should not recover." All this, considering the kind things she had heard the King say the minute before, when he imagined her asleep. Lord Hervey thought a pretty extraordinary return for her to make for that paternal goodness, or would have thought it so in anybody but her ; and looked upon this openness to him, whom she did not love, yet less to be accounted for, unless he could have imagined it was to draw him in to echo her, and then to relate what he said as if he had said it unaccompanied.
Whilst she was going on with the panegyric on theKing which I have related, the King returned, upon which she began to rub her eyes as if she had that instant raised her head from her pillows, and said, "I have really slept very heartily. How long had Papa been out of the room ?" The King, who had very little or rather no suspicion in his composition, took these appearances for realities, and said, " It is time for us all to take a little rest. We will all go to bed, for by staying here we do the poor Queen no good, and ourselves hurt." And so dismissing Lord Hervey, they all retired.
You already know the famous "Marry again after my death"/ "No, I will have mistresses!" exchange in French between Caroline and G2, for which Hervey is the source. G2 was truly distraught upon her death, and mistresses or not, remained so. Caroline's coffin and later his own are of the kind where you can draw one of the walls back once both are laid next to each other; he wanted their dust to mingle. (Caroline died in 1737; G2 in 1761). Grieving Caroline together makes him bond with Hervey (enough so Hervey ends up being appointed Lord Privy Seal), and thus Hervey gets treated to G2's reflections on his German relations. Which brings us back to our main points of interest again. A reminder: G2's mother was Sophia Dorothea the older, locked up for 30 years for her affair with (probably murdered) Count Königsmarck, and dying in prison. The "Reminscences" are by Horace Walpole, son of Sir Robert Walpole and the other great bitchy memoirist of the Georgian era:
The King often said, and to many people at this time, that not only he and his family should have a great loss in the Queen's death, but the whole nation: and would instance occasions where he owned her good sense and good temper had kept his passions within
bounds which they would otherwise have broken. And during this retirement (in which he was infinitely more talkative than I ever knew him at any other time of his whole life) he discoursed so constantly and so openly of himself, that if anybody had had a mind to write the memoirs of his life from his cradle to the present moment, the Princesses and Lord Hervey could have furnished them with materials of all the occurrences, transactions, and anecdotes, military, civil, amorous, foreign, and domestic, that could be comprehended in such a work, from his own lips : excepting what related to his mother, whom on no occasion I ever heard him mention, not even inadvertently or indirectly, any more than if such a person had never had a being. (*)
*Footnote by Victorian editor Croker: This is remarkable, and seems hardly reconcilable with the strong opinion of her innocence and the affectionate regard for her person attributed to him in the Reminiscences. "The second George loved his mother as much as he hated his father ; and purposed, it was said, if she had survived, to have brought her over and declared her Queen-Dowager. Lady Suffolk told me her surprise on going to the new Queen the morning after George I.'s death, at seeing hung up in the Queen's dressrng-room the whole-length of a lady in royal robes, and in the bed-chamber a half-length of the same person, which Lady Suffolk had never seen before." They were of his mother, which the Prince had till then kept concealed.
And now for the Prussians. G2's aunt was Sophie Charlotte, not just mother of FW but foster mother of Caroline, praised as not just one of the most beautiful but definitely one of the best educated and smartest women of her time, which is why I find this statement, err, interesting:
Of his aunt, the Queen of Prussia, too he spoke well, who, by what I heard from others, and particularly the Queen, was a very vain, good-for-nothing woman.
Et tu, Caroline? You owe your education to her, among other things. I feel let down. G2's sister is of course Sophia Dorothea the younger, wife of FW, and on her, grieving G2 apparantly had this to say in 1737:
For his sister, the present Queen of Prussia, he had the contempt she deserved, and a hatred she did not deserve.
WTF? For both Hervey and G2. Hervey having zilch interest in the Prussians per se, and dying when Fritz is still busy conquering Silesia, I don't see how he'd have any motive to make this up. But see: Hervey never met SD. He visited Hannover only once, as a young man on his Grand Tour (when he first encountered nine years old Fritz of Wales), and I don't think she was visiting Hannover as well on that occasion. Prussia, he didn't visit at all. So what is this estimation - that SD deserved contempt but not hate - based on? Perhaps all that begging for the English marriages struck him as pathetic, even if he didn't care enough to note it down, but that's the only thing I can think of.
(Now of course SD with her own treatment of her children provides enough reasons to dislike her, but Hervey seems to know nothing about this.)
As to why G2 should have contempt and hate for his sister: search me. It's not like she was madly in love with FW and rejecting her family of birth, au contraire. I'm almost starting to come around to Fritz' pov on Hannover versus Hohenzollern, but luckily your Ziebura read through reminds me this would be wrong. The rest of the Prussian pasage:
What he thought and said of the King of Prussia was much the same as what the King of Prussia thought and said of him ; that he was a proud, brutal, tyrannical, wrong-headed, impracticable fellow, who loved nobody and would use everybody ill that was in his power. How far these two Kings were in the right in this point, or how little they were so in every other, is not my business here to determine.
Meaning: peas in a pod. Again, based on all this, my speculation re: G2 pleading with the other European monarchs for Fritz' life is that it was mostly because if he didn't get to kill his son, FW certainly wouldn't. And speaking of murder: if Fritz and Wilhelmine had made those marriages, do want to place any bets on when things would have gotten violent? (Provided most circumstances stay the same.) Would Fritz of Prussia have had the fatal relationship and fallout with Hervey instead of Fritz of Wales? Would Caroline and G2 have accused Wilhelmine, too, of faking her pregnancy because their oldest surely can't sire a child? Would Fritz of Prussia have killed Fritz of Wales for taking Wilhelmine in labor for a one and a half hour drive because he didn't want his parents to be present at the birth? Place your bets!