A forgotten Prince of Wales

Prince Frederick, accompanied by Colonel Lorne and a single servant, traversed Germany and Holland as a private gentleman, and embarked at Helvetsluis for England in the first days of December, 1728.

Never has a tamer arrival of an Heir-apparent been chronicled in history than this coming of the Prince to London. Here is the brief notice of it in the Daily Post of the 8th December, 1728:

“Yesterday His Royal Highness Prince Frederick came to Whitechapel about seven in the evening, and proceeded thence privately in a hackney coach to St. James’s. His Royal Highness alighted at the Friary, and walked down to the Queen’s backstairs, and was there conducted to Her Majesty’s apartment.”

There! no reception of any sort, no guards turning out, no escort, no tap of drum! It was more like the coming of the Court hairdresser to curl Her Majesty’s wig!

It is said, however, that his mother received him amiably,—after fourteen years’ separation! His father, however, treated him with great harshness. “George,” says Mr. Wilkins, “had an unnatural and deep-rooted aversion to his eldest son, whom he regarded as necessarily his enemy.”

Certainly the boy—for he was little more—had come home in a sort of disgrace, he had been detected in scheming to run away with a young lady, but he had been checkmated, and the matter was ended. Certainly if there grew up in the after time a feeling of resentment against his parents in the Prince’s heart, he had some reason for it. It is agreed on all hands that he never had a chance, and that which might have proved a loving nature—and it was a loving nature as will be shown later on—was warped by ill-treatment and neglect into callousness and depravity.

To a Prince naturally of a nervous and shy disposition this reception in a strange land must have been most painful, especially when one remembers that most of the slights were received from those who ought to have shown him the most affection and consideration.

Lord Hervey gives an insight into the kind of life he led when he first arrived. He says:

“Whenever the Prince was in the room with him (i.e., the King) it put one in mind of stories that one has heard of ghosts that appear to part of the company but are invisible to the rest; and in this manner, wherever the Prince stood, though the King passed him ever so often, or ever so near, it always seemed as if the King thought the Prince filled a void of space.”

According to Mr. Wilkins, “the Prince did not dine in public at St. James’s the Sunday after his arrival, but the Queen suffered him to hand her into her pew at the Chapel Royal, and this was his first appearance at the English Court.”

One can imagine those naughty maids-of-honour in their boarded-up pew in the gallery—perhaps poor Anne Vane there with them—saying anything but their prayers at their enclosed condition, which prevented them having a good look at the Prince. But if they did happen to catch a glimpse of him this is what they saw according to a contemporary letter of Lady Bristol, who describes him as “the most agreeable young man it is possible to imagine, without being the least handsome, his person little, but very well made and genteel, a loveliness in his eyes which is indescribable, and the most obliging address that can be conceived.”

Her account of him, however, falls far short of that which is generally accepted as being a description of his appearance in Smollett’s “Peregrine Pickle,” which depicts him at a Court ball; but as this was evidently some time after his arrival—as it is an event connected with his intrigue with Miss Vane—it is quite likely that he may have had time to add to his stature by natural growth. At a later period he was distinctly and creditably described as being tall. This is Smollett’s version:

“He was dressed in a coat of white cloth, faced with blue satin embroidered with silver, of the same piece with his waistcoat; his fine hair hung down his back in ringlets below his waist; his hat was laced with silver and garnished with a white feather; but his person beggared all description: he was tall and graceful, neither corpulent nor meagre, his limbs finely proportioned, his countenance open and majestic, his eyes full of sweetness and vivacity, his teeth regular, and his pouting lips of the complexion of the damask rose. In short, he was formed for love and inspired it wherever he appeared; nor was he a niggard of his talents, but liberally returned it, at least what passed for such; for he had a flow of gallantry for which many ladies of this land can vouch from their own experience.”

It must be remembered in reading above description of him, that he inherited his mother’s beautiful fair hair and complexion.

The Court poets were not behindhand with their fulsome verses concerning him, of which this is a sample:

Britain’s first hope apparently was George II.

But probably as regards his appearance when he first came to England, Lady Bristol was nearest the mark, though there is no doubt that from this time forward he steadily improved both in stature and in handsomeness of person. Another description of him which will appear in due course will give an idea of the dignity and stateliness to which he attained in his maturer years.

Prince Frederick came from the obscure old town of Hanover with its narrow streets and tall gabled houses to what was then, as it is now, one of the great capitals of the world, London. But yet a very different London to that of our own time. A London of streets narrow and paved with cobbles, unlit save for a few dim swinging oil lamps held across the streets by ropes, leaving the intervening spaces in darkness, so that in winter time a man with a link or torch was an absolute necessity.

The busy London, the shopping London lay principally between Fleet Street and the end of Cheapside. Ludgate Hill was an especially favourite place for dress-buying ladies. As for what we call the “West End” it did not exist, Westminster being a separate town, and between it and London City large expanses of waste land.

Mr. Wilkins gives a good account of the Court and its environs. He says:

“The political and fashionable life of London collected round St. James’s and the Mall. St. James’s Park was the fashionable promenade; it was lined with avenues of trees, and ornamented with a long canal and a duck pond. St. James’s Palace was much as it is now, and old Marlborough House (the residence at that time of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough) occupied the site of the present one; but on the site of Buckingham Palace stood Buckingham House, the seat of the powerful Duke of Buckingham, a stately mansion which the Duke had built in a ‘little wilderness full of blackbirds and nightingales.’ In St. James’s Street were the most frequented and fashionable coffee and chocolate houses, and also a few select ‘mug houses.’ Quaint signs, elaborately painted, carved and gilded, overhung the streets and largely took the place of numbers; houses were known as ‘The Blue Boar,’ ‘The Pig and Whistle,’ ‘The Merry Maidens,’ ‘The Red Bodice,’ and so forth.”

Piccadilly was practically a country road with a few mansions here and there. It ended in Hyde Park, then a wild heath.

Marylebone on the west, and Stepney on the east, were distinct villages some distance away; while as for the south, London appears to have ended at London Bridge, although the “Old Tabard” Inn in the Borough must certainly have existed at that time.

Bloomsbury, Soho and Seven Dials were fashionable suburbs, occupying, perhaps, much the same position as Kensington did fifty years ago. Grosvenor Square had been begun some twelve years, and was probably fairly covered by houses.

The most popular and agreeable mode of communication between London and the Court was by the Thames, and a stately barge with liveried rowers was as much a part of a nobleman’s equipment as his carriage or his “chair.” Very pretty must have been the appearance of the Thames at that time, although there was no Thames Embankment to view it from.

The streets at night were manifestly unsafe, being infested by a description of drunken young blackguards known as “Mohocks,” who apparently “squared” the equally drunken watchmen, and insulted women with impunity.

The public conveyance seems to have been of much the same description as that which one recollects in one’s youth in the shape of the ancient growler, musty and full of damp straw to keep the feet warm, but represented then by a rumbling old disused coach, very mouldy, with straw as above, and in which it must have been a great treat to traverse the irregular cobbles of the metropolitan streets. But with all its drawbacks London of 1728 rose immeasurably superior to London of the twentieth century in one respect, and one respect only. It had no fogs.

The streets apparently rang with more or less agreeable cries of itinerant traders, among which the still familiar cry of the milkman—or perhaps milk-girl—and the tinkle of the muffin bell must even then have been well established. There were, however, other street cries which are unknown to us in the present day, those of the professional rat-catcher and the street gambler, which latter apparently stood in the gutter and rattled a dice-box as an invitation to passers by to come and have a throw, an invitation which, in all probability, ended in disaster to the unwary who accepted it.

Drunkenness, too, was very rife among all classes, the following inscription on a public-house being a fair sample of the tastes of the people:

As regards the time for meals in fashionable circles in those days, there was really little difference between those times and our own except that the meals were called by different names.

Dinner was taken in the middle of the day or a little later, which would very well correspond to our luncheon. As for the afternoon, why ladies of quality did very much the same then as they do now; they were trotted about in their sedan-chairs or coaches from one friend’s house to another drinking “dishes” of tea at each and destroying their nervous systems just as they do in 1911. Supper was the most pleasant meal of the day, and might well be set down to correspond with the very late dinner hour of the fashionable world at the present time.

So the world—the beau monde at any rate—has gone on for nearly two hundred years with but very little variation in its feeding time at any rate.

Very much the same might be said of the life in St. James’s Street as it is lived at the present time. There was no electric light, but the scene must have been very much more brilliant especially at night. The men-about-town of those days dressed in silks, satins, and velvets of varied colours, heavily laced with gold. Their sword hilts were either of gold or silver and very often jewelled. They carried in their hands long canes frequently jewelled too, and to add to the stateliness of their appearance they either wore white wigs or had their own hair powdered. The coffee and chocolate houses of St. James’s Street of those days, when full of their patrons, must have presented scenes worth looking upon. White’s Chocolate House was the principal, and the Cocoa Tree its rival, both represented at the present time by clubs of almost identical names. Of clubs, as we understand them, there were none in the year 1728, if we except such as the “October Club” and the “Hell Fire Club,” the former composed of old Jacobite squires who probably met at an inn, and the latter the drunken desecrators of Medmenhain Abbey on the Thames, neither of which societies had a club house as we understand it.

As for the ladies, they outrivalled the sterner sex, as they should do, in the splendour of their attire. They wore powder, patches and hoops—the latter a revival apparently of Elizabeth’s day—which grew in size with the progression of the Georges, until fashion took a sudden revulsion in the days of the last, and left them off altogether, which was considered at the time highly indelicate.

In the earlier period referred to ladies did not scruple to walk abroad with their dresses even more than decolletée, a custom which possibly was not long persevered in on account of the climate. Ladies of the present day will rejoice to hear that enormous muffs were carried.

To sum up this topic so interesting to the softer sex, ladies at that time wore just as many furs and feathers, silks and satins, jewels and fine laces, as they do at the present day, and the craving after them, the debts incurred in their procuring, wrought them, possibly, quite as much harm, and were the cause, no doubt, of just as many broken marriage vows.

The world is very much the same at all times, except that now and then we take on a little extra enamel, which we call civilization, to hide our natural barbarism for a time, as the Greeks and the Romans and the Egyptians before them did—these latter even to having their hollow teeth gold-crowned as we do—until some upheaval from within, or a crushing blow from without, breaks the thin crust, and leaves us just the natural savages we were at first.