In the bitterness of her mortification the queen consulted Lord Hervey and Sir Robert as to the possibility of her losing her influence, should she resent the king’s delay in returning.  They agreed, that her taking the ‘fiere turn’ would ruin her with her royal consort; Sir Robert adding, that if he had a mind to flatter her into her ruin, he might talk to her as if she were twenty-five, and try to make her imagine that she could bring the king back by the apprehension of losing her affection.  He said it was now too late in her life to try new methods; she must persist in the soothing, coaxing, submissive arts which had been practised with success, and even press his majesty to bring this woman to England!  ‘He taught her,’ says Lord Hervey, ’this hard lesson till she wept.’  Nevertheless, the queen expressed her gratitude to the minister for his advice.  ‘My lord,’ said Walpole to Hervey, ’she laid her thanks on me so thick that I found I had gone too far, for I am never so much afraid of her rebukes as of her commendations.’

Such was the state of affairs between this singular couple.  Nevertheless, the queen, not from attachment to the king, but from the horror she had of her son’s reigning, felt such fears of the prince’s succeeding to the throne as she could hardly express.  He would, she was convinced, do all he could to ruin and injure her in case of his accession to the throne.

The consolation of such a friend as Lord Hervey can easily be conceived, when he told her majesty that he had resolved, in case the king had been lost at sea, to have retired from her service, in order to prevent any jealousy or irritation that might arise from his supposed influence with her majesty.  The queen stopped him short, and said, ’No, my lord, I should never have suffered that; you are one of the greatest pleasures of my life.  But did I love you less than I do, or less like to have you about me, I should look upon the suffering you to be taken from me as such a meanness and baseness that you should not have stirred an inch from me.  You,’ she added, ‘should have gone with me to Somerset House;’ (which was hers in case of the king’s death).  She then told him she should have begged Sir Robert Walpole on her knees not to have sent in his resignation.

The animosity of the Prince of Wales to Lord Hervey augmented, there can be no doubt, his unnatural aversion to the queen, an aversion which he evinced early in life.  There was a beautiful, giddy maid of honour, who attracted not only the attention of Frederick, but the rival attentions of other suitors, and among them, the most favoured was said to be Lord Hervey, notwithstanding that he had then been for some years the husband of one of the loveliest ornaments of the court, the sensible and virtuous Mary Lepel.  Miss Vane became eventually the avowed favourite of the prince, and after giving birth to a son, who was christened Fitz-Frederick Vane, and who died in 1736, his unhappy mother died a few months afterwards.  It is melancholy to read a letter from Lady Hervey to Mrs. Howard, portraying the frolic and levity of this once joyous creature, among the other maids of honour; and her strictures show at once the unrefined nature of the pranks in which they indulged, and her once sobriety of demeanour.