The Hanoverian Courtier Whose Memoirs Are the Single Best Source on the Reign of George II

John Hervey (1696–1743), 2nd Baron Hervey by courtesy and styled Lord Hervey of Ickworth, was the most observant courtier of the early Hanoverian period. He had been at court since 1720 in subordinate roles, became Vice-Chamberlain of the Royal Household in 1730 (the second-ranking executive officer below the Lord Chamberlain), and held the position for the next ten years. The position gave him direct daily access to King George II, to Queen Caroline of Ansbach, to Prime Minister Robert Walpole, and to the substantive senior household figures of the Anglo-Hanoverian government.

He took notes.

The Memoirs

Hervey kept a substantial private diary throughout his Vice-Chamberlain decade, written up at length each night in his St James’s Palace lodgings. The text he produced — eventually titled Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second and amounting to approximately 600 manuscript pages — is the single best primary source for the personalities and politics of the early-Hanoverian court. It records the Queen’s substantial influence over royal policy (the Hanoverian court was substantively run by Caroline through her partnership with Walpole, with George II’s blustering essentially worked around); the King’s bouts of bad temper and public mistreatment of his wife; the mutual loathing between George II and his eldest son Frederick, Prince of Wales; and the substantive day-to-day texture of the court’s domestic life that no other source documents.

The portraits are unsparing and often cruel. Hervey describes the King as petty, mean, and vain; describes Caroline as intelligent but trapped; describes Frederick as stupid and physically grotesque; describes Walpole as competent and corrupt. The voice is literary — Hervey was a published author in his own right — and the substantive details (clothing, food, weather, specific overheard remarks) are recorded with the precision of a novelist’s notebook.

The suppression

Hervey died of a chronic illness (probably advanced epilepsy compounded by years of chronic dieting) at his Ickworth estate in August 1743, aged 47. He left his manuscript Memoirs to his eldest son George, with substantive instructions that the document was not to be published in the lifetime of any of the substantive people described in it. The son obeyed. The Memoirs were retained at Ickworth through three generations.

The substantive Hervey family extended the suppression beyond the original instruction. Frederick Hervey, 5th Earl of Bristol (the Earl-Bishop of Derry), permitted limited scholarly access in the early 19th century but blocked publication. The manuscript was substantively allowed into print only in 1848, ninety years after Hervey’s death, by editorial agreement between the 3rd Marquess of Bristol and the historian John Wilson Croker. The 1848 edition was substantively bowdlerised; the substantive scholarly edition (Romney Sedgwick, 1931) restored omissions.

The Pope feud

Hervey was also substantively the witty pen behind a portion of the anonymous verse satire of the 1730s and 1740s. His most famous literary altercation was with Alexander Pope. Pope had attacked Hervey by name (under the alias Sporus) in Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735) — substantively the most famous personal-attack passage in 18th-century English poetry:

Let Sporus tremble — A. What? that thing of silk, Sporus, that mere white curd of asses’ milk? Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

The substantive provocation had been Hervey’s earlier collaboration with Mary Wortley Montagu on a pamphlet ridiculing Pope’s Imitations of Horace. The Pope-Hervey feud ran for the substantive remainder of Pope’s life (Pope died in 1744, the year after Hervey) and substantively defined the literary politics of the period.

The standing reputation

Hervey is substantively remembered through three independent traditions. The political-historical tradition substantively uses the Memoirs as the substantive primary source for early-Hanoverian court history. The substantive literary-biographical tradition substantively uses the Pope feud as the substantive episode of mid-18th-century literary personality politics. The substantive Bristol-family architectural tradition substantively uses the Hervey-built Ickworth Park rotunda as the substantive monument to the family’s substantive eccentricity.

He died substantively unfulfilled politically — the Vice-Chamberlain position was substantively the highest he was ever offered — but immortal as a writer. The Memoirs remain the substantive book one reads to learn what the Hanoverian court actually felt like to be in.