Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court by Worsley Lucy

Author:Worsley, Lucy [Worsley, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: England, History, Royalty
ISBN: 9780571258260
Google: 6NWI6CEc78sC
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-05-06T07:00:00+00:00

Both John Hervey and the boy prince were slight and feminine in appearance. Prince Frederick – also known as ‘Fretz’ by his family – had hair ‘with a yellowish cast’ and a ‘face fair but not handsome; his eyes grey like a cat and very dull’.7 His legs were spindly because he’d suffered from rickets.

Frederick, Prince of Wales: his ‘face fair but not handsome; his eyes grey like a cat’

Unable to find much to praise in his appearance, courtiers describing Prince Frederick tended to fall back upon his charm. One observed that he had that certain ‘something so very engaging and easy in his behaviour’, as well as ‘the fine fair hair’ of his mother Caroline.8 Another found him not the least bit handsome but still ‘the most agreeable young man it is possible to imagine … his person little but very well made and genteel’, an indescribable liveliness in his eyes.9 The prince certainly had a captivating and amusing manner: ‘the Lord knows what a mimic!’

But Prince Frederick was a little short-sighted, in two senses. His slightly protuberant eyes were myopic, and he was also a little lazy in his outlook upon life. He lacked integrity and tended to take the easy way out of problems. ‘His best quality was generosity,’ it was said, and ‘his worst, insincerity, and indifference to truth’.10

The sharp and cynical John Hervey, witness of Prince Frederick’s formative years, was certainly not the best person to provide firm moral guidance. With kind guardianship and good advice, this boy could have been a fine king. Yet Frederick’s childhood was even more damaging than that of an orphan: he was a child deserted and positively disliked by his parents.

His birth had taken place in Hanover’s Leine Palace in 1707, and he was dogged by rumour about its exact circumstances. Because of the coolness between Queen Anne and the Electoral family of Hanover, there had been no official British witness present during Caroline’s labour. The English envoy to Hanover found this ‘unaccountable’ and ‘very extraordinary’.11

It would indeed have been a wise precaution to have had one present, given all the trouble that rumours about an impostor baby had caused when the unpopular James II’s son was born. When his Catholic wife, Mary of Modena, had fortuitously produced a healthy boy, English Protestants claimed that a lapse in palace surveillance had allowed a live infant to be slipped in to replace a dead, miscarried child. The king’s enemies spread it about that a surrogate baby boy had been smuggled into the queen’s bed in a warming pan. Many people believed the scandal, and the incident became an important step along the road to James II’s eventual overthrow.

Still, such rumours usually originated from political enemies. It reveals the depth of George II’s bad feeling towards Prince Frederick that he referred to his own son as a ‘Wechselbalg’, or changeling, or as ‘the Griff’. The latter may have simply meant that Frederick looked like a griffin, but the word can also

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