Rituals of Royal Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Frederick, Prince of Wales, Takes a Mistress

Abstract

Although scholars have examined the history of middling and elite masculinity in eighteenth-century Britain, few consider how ideals of manhood shaped the representation and perception of early Georgian rulers. This article re-examines the relationship of Frederick, Prince of Wales, with his publicly recognized mistress, Anne Vane, as a symbolic rite of passage that helped enhance his manly prowess, prestige and position at court. Their affair included social rituals of deference and patronage through which the Prince asserted his maturity, independence from his parents and rank as heir to the throne. Through an analysis of little-studied contemporary scandal literature about Frederick and Vane, this essay argues that royal mistresses were generally accepted figures at the eighteenth-century British court and that expressions of extramarital sexuality were tolerated as a component of youthful elite masculinity. Published discussions of the Prince’s intimacies were central to his emerging reputation as an accessible regal figure and recognizable personality, and masculine images of rulers appealed to men and engaged gendered forms of allegiance.

Notes

1 Owen Brittan, ‘The Print Depiction of King William III’s Masculinity’, The Seventeenth Century 33-2 (2018), pp. 219-39, p. 221. On how questions of gender influenced expectations and representations of male rulers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Cynthia Herrup, ‘The King’s Two Genders’, Journal of British Studies 45 (2006), pp. 493-510; Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge, 2011); and Susan Doran, ‘Monarchy and Masculinity in Early Modern England’, in C. Fletcher, S. Brady, R.E. Moss and L. Riall (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Political Culture in Europe (London, 2018), pp. 201-05.

2 Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 19-58.

3 Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester, 2005).

4 Sonya Wynne, ‘“The Brightest Glories of the British Sphere”: Women at the Court of Charles II’, in Catharine MacLeod and Julia Marciari Alexander (eds), Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II (London, 2001), pp. 36-49; Tracy Adams and Christine Adams, The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry (University Park, PA, 2020).

5 Matthew Kilburn, ‘Vane, Anne (d.1736)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004; online edn 2008), accessed 23 March 2018; British Library [hereafter BL] Add MS 22629, fols. 28-9, Anne Vane to Henrietta Howard, 5 October 1730.

6 Ingrid H. Tague, Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 (Rochester, 2002), pp. 179-80. On Howard’s role as George II’s mistress, see Tracy Borman, King’s Mistress, Queen’s Servant: The Life and Times of Henrietta Howard (London, 2010).

7 John Hervey, Some Materials Towards Memoirs of the Reign of George II, ed. Romney Sedgwick, 3 vols (London, 1931); Robert Halsband, ‘A Prince, a Lord and a Maid of Honour at the Court of George II’, Part I and Part II, History Today 23 (1973), pp. 305-12, 391-97.

8 Suffolk Record Office [hereafter SRO] 941/41/4, fol. 321, 14 December 1731. On the breakdown of their friendship, see Hannah Smith and Stephen Taylor, ‘Hephaestion and Alexander: Lord Hervey, Frederick, Prince of Wales, and the Royal Favourite in England in the 1730s’, English Historical Review 124 (2009), pp. 283-312.

9 Julie Schlarman, ‘The Social Geography of Grosvenor Square: Mapping Gender and Politics, 1720–1760’, The London Journal 28-1 (2003), pp. 18-19.

10 Robert Halsband, Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier (Oxford, 1974), pp. 182-5.

11 Hannah Smith, ‘The Court in England, 1714–1760: A Declining Political Institution?’, History 90 (2005), pp. 23-41, p. 33.

12 Sally Holloway and Lucy Worsley, ‘“Every body took notice of the scene of the drawing room”: Performing Emotions at the Early Georgian Court, 1714–60’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40 (2017), pp. 443-62; Hannah Greig, The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London (Oxford, 2013), pp. 99-130.

13 Tague, Women of Quality, pp. 194-223; Elaine Chalus, Elite Women in English Political Life, c.1754–1790 (Oxford, 2005).

14 Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘Countesses and Courtesans’, History Workshop Journal 62 (2006), p. 282.

15 Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, 2004); Marilyn Morris, Sex, Money and Personal Character in Eighteenth-Century British Politics (New Haven, 2014), esp. pp. 98-134.

16 Morris, Sex, Money and Personal Character, pp. 118-20, quote 120.

17 Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 194-8, 195; Robin Eagles, ‘Frederick, Prince of Wales, the “Court” of Leicester House and the “Patriot” Opposition to Walpole, c. 1733-42’, The Court Historian 21 (2016), pp. 140-56.

18 Eagles, ‘Frederick, Prince of Wales’, pp. 142-4; Christine Gerrard, ‘Queens-in-Waiting: Caroline of Anspach and Augusta of Saxe-Gotha as Princesses of Wales’, in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Queenship in Early Modern Britain, 1600–1837 (Manchester, 2002), pp. 152-7; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 206-07.

19 Gerrard, ‘Queens in Waiting’, p. 152; Halsband, Lord Hervey, pp. 127-30; Lucy Moore, Amphibious Thing: The Life of Lord Hervey (New York, 2000), p. 137-43; Smith and Taylor, ‘Hephastion and Alexander’, pp. 283-312. For Pulteney’s attack on Hervey, see Morris, Sex, Money and Personal Character, pp. 37-44.

20 Smith and Taylor, ‘Hephaestion and Alexander’, p. 310.

21 Rachel Judith Weil, ‘The Female Politician in the Late Stuart Age’, in Julia Marciari Alexander and Catharine MacLeod (eds), Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II (New Haven, 2007), pp. 177-91, p. 181.

22 On rites of passage, see Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), esp. pp. 19-54.

23 On changing ideals of masculinity, see Michael McKeon, ‘Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (1995), pp. 295-322; Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (New York, 1999), esp. pp. 207-20; Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660–1800 (New York, 2002); Karen Harvey, ‘The History of Masculinity, circa 1650–1800’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), pp. 296-311; eadem, The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2012), esp. pp. 1-23. On the persistence of elite libertinism, see Jason M. Kelly, ‘Riots, Revelries, and Rumour: Libertinism and Masculine Association in Enlightenment London’, Journal of British Studies 45 (2006), pp. 759-95; and Erin Mackie, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 2009).

24 Kevin Sharpe, ‘“Thy Longing Country’s Darling and Desire”: Aesthetics, Sex, and Politics in the England of Charles II’, in Marciari Alexander and MacLeod (eds) Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II, pp. 1-32, p. 10.

25 Sharpe, “‘Thy Longing Country’s Darling and Desire”’, p. 18. See also Rachel Weil, ‘Sometimes a Scepter is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York, 1996), pp. 124-53.

26 Erin Keating, ‘In the Bedroom with the King: Affective Politics in the Restoration Secret History’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 15 (2015), pp. 58-82, p. 73.

27 Sharpe, “‘Thy Longing Country’s Darling and Desire’”, p. 19.

28 Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor, 2007), p. 44; idem, ‘Public Intimacy: The Prior History of “It”’, in Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (eds), Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000 (New York, 2005), pp. 15-30.

29 On the politics of royal intimacy, see David Starkey, ‘Representation Through Intimacy: A Study in the Symbolism of Monarchy and Court Office in Early-Modern England’, in Ioan Lewis (ed.), Symbols and Sentiments: Cross-Cultural Studies in Symbolism (London, 1977), pp. 187-224.

30 John Stalker and George Parker, Treatise of Japaning and Vanishing (Oxford, 1688), p. 31.

31 James Grantham Turner, ‘Pepys and the Private Parts of Monarchy’, in Gerald MacLean (ed.) Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 101-10, p. 101; idem, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 164-96; Robert Latham and William Matthews (eds), The Diary of Samuel Pepys (London, 2000), vol. III, p. 175, 23 August 1662.

32 Latham and Matthews (eds), Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. III, p. 230, 20 October 1662; vol. VII, p. 393, 1 December 1666; Turner, ‘Pepys and the Private Parts of Monarchy’, p. 102.

33 Weil, ‘The Female Politician in the Late Stuart Age’, p. 181.

34 Sharpe, “‘Thy Longing Country’s Darling and Desire’”, p. 12.

35 Weil, ‘Sometimes A Scepter is Only a Scepter’, pp. 124-53; see also Tim Harris, ‘“There is None That Love Him but Drunk Whores and Whoremongers”: Popular Criticisms of the Restoration Court’, in Marciari Alexander and MacLeod (eds), Politics, Transgression, and Representation, pp. 35-58.

36 John Phillips, The Secret History of the Reigns of K. Charles II and K. James II ([London], 1690), p. 2. On secret history, see Rebecca Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure, 1675–1725: Secret History Narratives (London, 2009); and Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, 2005), esp. chapters 3 and 12.

37 Keating, ‘In the Bedroom of the King’, pp. 58-82.

38 Anthony Hamilton (ed.), Memoirs of the Life of Count de Grammont, transl. Abel Boyer (London, 1714), n.p.; Spencer Cowper (ed.), The Diary of Mary Countess Cowper, Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess of Wales, 1714–1720 (London, 1885), pp. 93-5.

39 Sharpe, “‘Thy Longing Country’s Darling and Desire,’” p. 25; idem, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (New Haven, 2013), pp. 255-6.

40 Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Reformation (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 90-110.

41 Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England, 1680–1714 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 187-230.

42 Christine Gerrard, ‘Queens-in-Waiting’, pp. 143-51; Smith, Georgian Monarchy, pp. 32-7.

43 Andrew Thompson, George II: King and Elector (New Haven, 2013), pp. 127-8; Linda Colley, Britons, pp. 195-236; on late eighteenth-century royal sex scandals, see Morris, Sex, Money and Personal Character, pp. 59-61, 98-134.

44 Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society.

45 Tague, Women of Quality, pp. 72-96; Harvey, The Little Republic.

46 Philip Carter, ‘James Boswell’s Manliness’, in Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (eds), English Masculinities, 1660–1800 (New York, 1999), pp. 111-30; Jason Kelly, ‘Riots, Revelries, and Rumor’, pp. 759-95; Randolph Trumbach, ‘Erotic Fantasy and Male Libertinism in Enlightenment England’, in Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography, pp. 253-82; Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), pp. 243-75.

47 Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, p. 272.

48 Holloway and Worsley, ‘Every body took notice of the scene of the drawing room’, pp. 448-52; Smith, Georgian Monarchy, pp. 100-01.

49 SRO, 941/41/4, fol. 416, 31 July 1733.

50 Thompson, George II, pp. 99-100; Hervey, Memoirs, I, p. 44; SRO, 941/41/4, fol. 297, 18 November 1731.

51 See Read’s Weekly Journal; Or, British Gazetteer, 10 June 1732, no. 377; The Craftsman (London, 1731), vol. VII, 14 November 1730, no 228, pp. 103-12; Halsband, Lord Hervey, p. 105.

52 Thompson, George II, pp. 65-6, 70-72; Hervey, Memoirs, I, p. 40.

53 Thompson, George II, p. 71.

54 Hervey, Memoirs, II, p. 491, 602.

55 Laurence Eusden, A Poem Humbly to His Royal Highness Prince Frederic (London, 1729), pp. 5, 6.

56 Ferdinando Shaw, A Sermon Preached on the Birth-Day of His Highness Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales (London, 1729), p. 6. Italics original.

57 Smith and Taylor, ‘Hephaestion and Alexander’, p. 302; Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition, pp. 40-41; Eagles, ‘Frederick, Prince of Wales’, p. 147; Thompson, George II, pp. 84-5.

58 Halsband, Lord Hervey, p. 135; HMC, Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont. Diary of Viscount Percival, Afterwards First Earl of Egmont, 3 vols (London, 1920-23), vol. I, pp. 264-5, 30 April 1732, and p. 225, 23 February 1732; Hervey, Memoirs, vol. II, p. 475-83.

59 St. James’s Evening Post, 23 January 1733, no. 2760; London Evening Post, 23 January 1735, no. 1120; Kimerly Rorschach, ‘Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707–51), as Collector and Patron’, Walpole Society 55 (1989/1990), p. 8.

60 HMC, Egmont, vol. I, p. 225, 23 February 1732, and p. 235, 13 March 1732.

61 A. A. Hanham, ‘Vane, Henry, First Earl of Darlington’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004; online edn 2008), accessed 25 September 2020.

62 HMC Egmont, vol. I, pp. 236, 280.

63 HMC Egmont, vol. II, p. 471, 17 March 1738.

64 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, 1995), p. 93.

65 Hervey, Memoirs, vol. II, p. 617-18.

66 Hervey, Memoirs, vol. II, p, 614; Smith and Taylor, ‘Hephaestion and Alexander’, p. 303.

67 HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of the Late Reginald Rawdon Hastings (London, 1934), vol. II, pp. 11-12, 28 February 1732; Halsband, Lord Hervey, p. 135.

68 See, for instance, Morris, Sex, Money and Personal Character, pp. 52-3, 119-20, passim; Tague, Women of Quality, esp. pp. 1-17, 35-43; Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Los Angeles, 1996), chap. 2; David M. Turner, Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex, and Civility in England (Cambridge, 2002).

69 Berta Joncus, ‘“The Assemblage of Every Female Folly”: Lavinia Fenton, Kitty Clive, and the Genesis of Ballad Opera’, in Tiffany Potter (ed.), Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century (Toronto, 2012), pp. 25-51; Douglas Franklin O’Keefe, ‘Ballad Opera, Imitation, and the Formation of Genre’, Ph.D. diss (Northwestern University, 2007), pp. 31-2. The first ballad opera was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728).

70 Calhoun Winton, John Gay and the London Theatre (Lexington, 1993), pp. 93, 103-06; Farid Azfar, ‘Sturdy Beggars and Political Crisis in 1730s England’, Historical Reflections 37 (2011), pp. 107-30.

71 Vanelia: Or, The Amours of the Great. An Opera (London, 1732), p. iv.

72 Humours of the Court: Or, Modern Gallantry (London, 1732), p. v; Michael Harris, ‘Cultural Policing in the Early Eighteenth Century: Print, Politics, and the Case of William Rayner’, in Howard Tumber (ed.), Media Power, Professionals and Policies (London, 2000), pp. 178-89.

73 Humours of the Court, pp. iv, 10.

74 Ibid., pp. 16, 18, and 24, respectively.

75 O’Keefe, ‘Ballad Opera’, p. 196, see also pp. 201-02.

76 Vanelia, p. vi and 45, respectively.

77 Ibid., pp. v, 2[1], 13, and 4, respectively.

78 Ibid., pp. vi and 53, respectively.

79 On contemporary interest in sexual scandals, see Turner, Fashioning Adultery, pp. 8-9, passim; on readers and romans à clef, see Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure, esp. pp. 94-8; and Keating, ‘In the Bedroom of the King’, pp. 60-63.

80 Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge, 2004), p. 77.

81 Karen Harvey, ‘The Majesty of the Masculine-Form: Multiplicity and Male Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Erotica’, in Hitchcock and Cohen (eds), English Masculinities, 1660–1800, p. 195; eadem, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 39-40.

82 Humours of the Court, 34.

83 Hervey, Memoirs, vol. II, p. 563; Morris, Sex, Money and Personal Character, pp. 45-6.

84 The Portraiture and Character of His Royal Highness Prince Frederick (London, c. 1716-27), Royal Collections [hereafter RCIN] 604093; for other examples, RCIN 604116 and 604150. For newspaper coverage, see British Journal, 9 January 1731; Daily Courant, 31 January 1732, 16 February 1732, and 19 February 1732; Daily Journal, 3 April 1732 and 26 March 1733.

85 Quoted in Gerrard, Patriot Opposition, p. 195; John L. Bullion, ‘“To play what game she pleased without observation”: Princess Augusta and the Political Drama of Succession, 1736–56’, in Orr (ed.), Queenship in Early Modern Britain, pp. 208-12.

86 On eighteenth-century erotica as a genre, see Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century, esp. pp. 20-34.

87 Daily Journal, 8 March 1732; Daily Post, 9 March 1732; quote Daily Courant, 14 March 1732.

88 The Fair Concubine: Or, The Secret History of the Beautiful Vanella (London, 1732), pp. 35, vii, and x, respectively.

89 Ibid., pp. xvi and 18, respectively. Italics original.

90 Ibid., pp. vii, viii, and vi, respectively.

91 Ibid., pp. 27, 48.

92 The Fair Concubine, pp. 48, 47.

93 Palace Amours: Or, The Genuine History of Alexis (London, 1733), p. 9.

94 Ibid., pp. 6 and 9, respectively.

95 Ibid., 15.

96 Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, pp. 264-75.

97 Palace Amours, pp. 38, 44.

98 Harvey argues that eighteenth-century erotica, which often circulated in homosocial environments and was the subject of group reading, indulged sexual pleasure without abandoning ideals of manly sociability and self-mastery. See Harvey, Reading Sex, pp. 54-77. On Arbor Vitae and Ovid’s Art of Love, see pp. 16-8, 39.

99 Palace Amours, p. 9.

100 Smith and Taylor, ‘Hephaestion and Alexander’, pp. 287-8.

101 Ibid., p. 287; SRO, 941/47/4, fol. 269, Hervey to Frederick, Prince of Wales, 6 November 1731. See also SRO, 941/47/1 and 941/47/4, fol. 199.

102 Palace Amours, p. 39.

103 Morris, Sex, Money and Personal Character, pp. 79-97.

104 Palace Amours, pp. 7 and 15, respectively.

105 Ibid., p. 55. See, for instance, Lord Blunder’s Confession; Or, Guilt Makes a Coward (1733), a ballad opera also published by Thomas Reynolds.

106 Faramerz Dabhoiwala, ‘The Appropriation of Hogarth’s Progresses’, Huntington Library Quarterly 75 (2012), pp. 577-95; idem, The Origins of Sex: History of the First Sexual Revolution (Oxford, 2012), pp. 283-96.

107 Vanella’s Progress. In Eight Scenes (London, 1736), p. 3.

108 Ibid., p. 7; see also Authentick Memoirs of the Unfortunate Vanella (London, 1736), pp. 19-21.

109 Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, p. 313.

110 Harvey, Reading Sex, pp. 75-6.

111 Carter, ‘James Boswell’s Manliness’, pp. 111-30.

112 Gerrard, Patriot Opposition, p. 195.

113 Clark, Scandal.

114 David Hume, Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 1994), p. 31.

115 Ibid., p. 39.

116 Tim Blanning, ‘The Hanoverian Monarchy and the Culture of Representation’, in Andreas Gestrich and Michael Schaich (eds), The Hanoverian Succession. Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Culture (Farnham, 2015), pp. 129-46; Stephanie Koscak, Monarchy, Print Culture, and Reverence in Early Modern England: Picturing Royal Subjects (New York, 2020), pp. 186-241.

117 Eagles, ‘Frederick, Prince of Wales’, p. 146; Koscak, Monarchy, Print Culture, and Reverence, p. 216.

118 Angela McShane, ‘Subjects and Objects: Material Expressions of Love and Loyalty in Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies 48 (2009), pp. 871-86; Edward Vallance, Loyalty, Memory and Public Opinion in England, 1658–1727 (Manchester, 2019); Matthew McCormack, ‘Rethinking “Loyalty” in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35 (2012), pp. 407-21.

119 Colley, Britons, pp. 268-73.

120 Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, ed. Paul Smith (Cambridge, 2001), p. 37.

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Notes on contributors

Stephanie Koscak

Stephanie Koscak

Stephanie Koscak is Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. Her first book, Monarchy, Print Culture, and Reverence in Early Modern England: Picturing Royal Subjects (Routledge, 2020), explores how the expanding sphere of commercial print, both visual and textual, impacted the representation of royalty and ideas about sovereignty between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. Her new research examines histories of lost property and material loss in the eighteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic world as a consequence of imperial expansion, urban development and economic change.