John, Lord Hervey (born 1696, died 1743), succeeded to the peerage on the death of his brother in 1723. During the greater part of his career he was a supporter of Sir Robert Walpole. In 1731 he fought a duel with Pulteney, on account of a libel against himself which Pulteney refused to disavow. Both combatants were slightly wounded. In 1740 he was appointed Lord Privy Seal against the wish of the Duke of Newcastle, and we find him subsequently intriguing with Pulteney and Chesterfield against Sir Robert Walpole. In 1743 he distinguished himself by a speech against the Gin Act. Lord Hervey left behind him certain memoirs of his own time, which form a most valuable addition to the history of the period of which they treat. He had the misfortune to offend Pope, who has handed his name down to posterity under the pseudonym of Sporus in the “Prologue to the Satires.” Lord Hervey’s “Memoirs of the Reign of George II.” were first published by Mr. J. W. Croker in 1848.

Personal

  Lord Hervey is at this time always with the king, in vast favour. He has certainly parts and wit, but is the most wretched, profligate man that ever was born, besides ridiculous; a painted face and not a tooth in his head: and it is not above six months ago that the king hated him so, that he would not suffer him to be one in his diversions at play. I think ’tis possible that sir Robert Walpole may make some use of him at first, and perhaps the other may have vanity enough to imagine that he may work himself up to be a great man; but that is too mad, I think, to be ever effected, because all the world except sir Robert abhors him, and notwithstanding all the mischiefs sir Robert has done the nation, and myself in particular, which people generally resent in the first place, I had much rather he should continue in power than my lord Hervey.

  The last stages of an infirm life are filthy roads, and like all other roads I find the farther one goes from the capital the more tedious the miles grow and the more rough and disagreeable the way. I know of no turnpikes to mend them; medicine pretends to be such, but doctors who have the management of it, like the commissioners for most other turnpikes, seldom execute what they undertake: they only put the toll of the poor cheated passenger in their pockets, and leave every jolt at least as bad as they found it, if not worse. “May all your ways (as Solomon says of wisdom) be ways of pleasantness, and all your paths peace;” and when your dissolution must come may it be like that of your lucky workman. Adieu!

  You will see in the papers that Lord Hervey is dead—luckily, I think, for himself; for he had outlived his last inch of character.

  Beneath the effeminacy of the Maccaroni, Lord Hervey was one of the few who united to intense finery in every minute detail, an acute and cultivated intellect. To perfect a Maccaroni it was in truth advisable, if not essential, to unite some smattering of learning, a pretension to wit, to his super-dandyism; to be the author of some personal squib, or the translator of some classic. Queen Caroline was too cultivated herself to suffer fools about her, and Lord Hervey was a man after her own taste: as a courtier he was essentially a fine gentleman; and, more than that, he could be the most delightful companion, the most sensible adviser, and the most winning friend in the court. His ill health, which he carefully concealed, his fastidiousness, his ultra delicacy of habits, formed an agreeable contrast to the coarse robustness of “Sir Robert,” and constituted a relief after the society of the vulgar, strong-minded minister, who was born for the hustings and the House of Commons rather than for the courtly drawing-room.

  Hervey was a remarkable man. His physical frame was as feeble as that of Voltaire. He suffered from epilepsy and a variety of other ailments. He had to live mainly on a dietary of ass’s milk. His face was so meagre and so pallid, or rather livid, that he used to paint and make up like an actress or a fine lady. Pope, who might have been considerate to the weak of frame, was merciless in his ridicule of Hervey. He ridiculed him as Sporus, who could neither feel satire nor sense, and as Lord Fanny. Yet Hervey could appreciate satire and sense; could write satire and sense. He was a man of very rare capacity. He had already distinguished himself as a debater in the House of Commons, and was afterwards to distinguish himself as a debater in the House of Lords. He wrote pretty verses and clever pamphlets, and he has left to the world a collection of “Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second,” which will always be read for its vivacity, its pungency, its bitterness, and its keen, penetrating good-sense. Hervey succeeded in obtaining the hand of one of the most beautiful women of the day, the charming Mary Lepell, whose name has been celebrated in more than one poetical panegyric by Pope, and he captivated the heart of one of the royal princesses. The historical reader must strike a sort of balance for himself in getting at an estimate of Hervey’s character. No man has been more bitterly denounced by his enemies or more warmly praised by his friends.

  We have said that Lord Hervey was a man of considerable parts, a wit, a ready writer, a keen and amusing observer of character, but when this has been said all has been said. In a lax age his profligacy was notorious. He was a sceptic, and took the greatest delight in wounding the religious susceptibilities of those he came across. In his creed there was nothing great, nothing noble, nothing of good report; all was hollow, artificial, and insincere. As a necessary consequence of his distorted faith, he believed in nothing, except perhaps himself, and in nobody, except perhaps Queen Caroline.

  Hervey was a clever and unprincipled man, of loose morals and sceptical opinions. He was an effective though somewhat pompous speaker, a ready writer, and a keen observer of character. His wit and charm of manner made him a special favourite of women.

  As long as the loathsome traits which are delineated in the character of “Sporus” repel and sicken mankind, so long will the name of John Lord Hervey be infamous. Of the impotence of truth to contend with the fiction of so great an artist as Pope, the result of Mr. Croker’s attempt to vindicate Hervey’s fame is a striking illustration. In 1848 Mr. Croker published that nobleman’s “Memoirs,” prefixing an Introduction, in which he proved, as indeed the “Memoirs” themselves proved, that the original of Pope’s picture was a man whose genius and temper had been cast rather in the mould of St. Simon and Tacitus than in that of the foppish and loathsome hermaphrodite with whom he had been associated. But the popular estimate of Hervey remains unchanged. He was “Sporus” to our ancestors, who had neither his “Memoirs” nor Mr. Croker’s Introduction before them, and he is “Sporus” to us who have both, but who, unfortunately for Hervey, care for neither, and know Pope’s verses by heart.

  One has certainly to fortify oneself by the recollection of Horace and his sic visum Veneri. Everything that one hears of the brilliant and cynical John Hervey, with his “coffin-face” and his painted cheeks, his valetudinarian, anaemic beauty, and his notorious depravity of life, makes it difficult to understand what particular qualities in him—apart from opportunity and proximity—could possibly have attracted the affection of a young and a very charming woman, who was besides far in advance of her contemporaries in parts and education. Yet it must be remembered that

Memoirs of the Reign of George II

  Lord Hervey himself fairly admits that impartiality in such cases as his is not to be expected, and he justifies that confession to its fullest extent; but though we see that his colouring may be capricious and exaggerated—no one can feel the least hesitation as to the substantial and, as to mere facts, the minute accuracy of his narrative. He may, and I have no doubt too often does, impute a wrong motive to an act, or a wrong meaning to a speech; but we can have no doubt that the act or the speech themselves are related as he saw and heard them: and there are many indications that the greater part was written from day to day as the events occurred. I know of no such near and intimate picture of the interior of a court; no other memoirs that I have ever read bring us so immediately, so actually into not merely the presence, but the company of the personages of the royal circle. Lord Hervey is, may I venture to say, almost the Boswell of George II. and Queen Caroline—but Boswell without his good nature. He seems to have taken—perhaps under the influence of that “wretched health” of which he so frequently complained—a morbid view of mankind, and to have had little of the milk of human kindness in his temper.

  Lord Hervey, for we put aside his poetical effusions, gave to our own day a present which, one may say, has enriched the treasury of our social literature with some very bad coin. For years his “Diary” was buried; until, at last, the late Mr. Croker, on whose shoulders the mantle of the bitter satirist had fallen, exhumed it and gave it, slightly mangled, to the world. His Lordship’s “Diary” is very clever, very revolting, and, we fear, very true. At all events, it is the report of an anatomist who has made deep and daily search into the physiology of princes, princesses, statesmen, and courtiers. He has thoroughly dissected their hearts; and he knows every throb, and its consequence. He has left a picture such as no human skill could have invented nor conceived, and which we must therefore believe to be accurate; but it is told in such cold-blooded terms, it is so dark with the endless delineations of selfishness and turpitude, that we would willingly believe that “Lady Fanny’s” mind was diseased, had we not other proofs that the revelations are essentially veracious.

  Lord Hervey was a person whom the world never appreciates, and does not like. To the English reading public, a courtier and a hater of the clergy is always unacceptable. This anti-ecclesiastical eighteenth century tone is not forgiven either in Gibbon or in Adam Smith, and to its presence in Lord Hervey’s “Memoirs” we must ascribe the fact that they are so little relished. They are, even in the mutilated state in which we have them, one of the best productions in our language of a kind of writing in which the French are so rich, and we so poor. No parallel is intended between Pope’s “Satires” and Lord Hervey’s “Memoirs” on any other point but the one of flashing a vivid light upon their surroundings during a period little otherwise illuminated. The two books have no other resemblance, and may be obviously contrasted. Lord Hervey paints the Court from St. James’s; Pope, at Twickenham, vents the spleen of the opposition. Lord Hervey relates matter of fact in simple prose; Pope deals in distant allusions and veiled sneers. However, such as they are, the two together, Pope and Lord Hervey, mortal foes as they were, are the two most important witnesses of the period in question.

  Though the portrait of Sporus is described by Johnson as the meanest part of this Epistle, it is difficult to suppose that such would have been his deliberate judgment if he had not been prejudiced in favour of Lord Hervey. The morals of the latter, as displayed by himself in his “Memoirs of the Reign of George II.,” show that Pope’s satire is as just as it is ardent and poetical.

  The world owes him some thanks for a really interesting book, the very boldness and bitterness of which enhance to a certain extent its historical value.

  Of all these Mémoires pour servir there are few that can compare, in novelty of information, in humour, in mordant descriptions of character, in hate and cynicism, with the pages of John, Lord Hervey…. Throughout the pages of his “Memoirs” detraction is the principal feature. His enemies are of course painted in the blackest colours, their characters picked out in the aqua fortis of hate; but even in his descriptions of his friends there is always something spiteful and malicious, which casts into the shade the praise that may have been bestowed. Everybody is a knave or a sycophant; the world revolves upon the axis of humbug, and between the poles of venality and corruption. A politician is one who identifies his own interests with those of the country; a priest is a scheming hypocrite who makes the best of both worlds, and who would sell his soul for a mitre; justice, truth, morality, and all the other attributes of virtue, are only so many masks to conceal motives and to further the cause of self-advancement. We rise from the splenetic pages of Lord Hervey with the feelings of a sane man who has been shut up with the afflicted in mind, and who longs to mix again with his sound and healthy fellows, so as to dispel the morbid associations of the past; or with the feelings of one confined in a hothouse, and who craves for the inspiriting breezes of the moorland.

General

  Lord Hervey was not destitute of wit, though some of his lines have been absurdly overpraised. His recriminations on Pope are the best, indeed the only good things he wrote.

  Intellectually he was reckoned one of the most brilliant men of that most intellectually brilliant period. His satires were sharp-edged, clever, and bright, his Parliamentary speeches full of force, and his political pamphlets were “equal to any that ever were written,” according to Sir Robert Walpole: moreover, he was a linguist, and had a spice of classic lore.

  Hervey’s style, though somewhat elaborated, is lively and forcible. Throughout his writings, which in many ways bear a curious resemblance to those of Horace Walpole, a bitter tone of cynicism and a morbid spirit of universal detraction are always apparent.

  He is at his best as a writer when he has to describe some dramatic scene; he can then be terse and vivid, but only to lapse after a few good sentences into his customary mode. His place in a descriptive history of English prose is due to the fact that his writing represents what the English of his time was in the hands of a cultivated man, undistinguished as a master of writing.