“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-coup_ at 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 knew _something_; 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, _vide_ Pope’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 own resources 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.