She speaks, on one occasion, in which, however, Miss Vane did not share the nocturnal diversion, of some of the maids of honour being out in the winter all night in the gardens at Kensington—­opening and rattling the windows, and trying to frighten people out of their wits; and she gives Mrs. Howard a hint that the queen ought to be informed of the way in which her young attendants amused themselves.  After levities such as these, it is not surprising to find poor Miss Vane writing to Mrs. Howard, with complaints that she was unjustly aspersed, and referring to her relatives, Lady Betty Nightingale and Lady Hewet, in testimony of the falsehood of reports which, unhappily, the event verified.

The prince, however, never forgave Lord Hervey for being his rival with Miss Vane, nor his mother for her favours to Lord Hervey.  In vain did the queen endeavour to reconcile Fritz, as she called him, to his father;—­nothing could be done in a case where the one was all dogged selfishness; and where the other, the idol of the opposition party, as the prince had ever been, so legere de tete as to swallow all the adulation offered to him, and to believe himself a demigod.  ’The queen’s dread of a rival,’ Horace Walpole remarks, ’was a feminine weakness:  the behaviour of her eldest son was a real thorn.’  Some time before his marriage to a princess who was supposed to augment his hatred of his mother, Frederick of Wales had contemplated an act of disobedience.  Soon after his arrival in England, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, hearing that he was in want of money, had sent to offer him her granddaughter, Lady Diana Spencer, with a fortune of L100,000.  The prince accepted the young lady, and a day was fixed for his marriage in the duchess’s lodge at the Great Park, Windsor.  But Sir Robert Walpole, getting intelligence of the plot, the nuptials were stopped.  The duchess never forgave either Walpole or the royal family, and took an early opportunity of insulting the latter.  When the Prince of Orange came over to marry the Princess Royal, a sort of boarded gallery was erected from the windows of the great drawing-room of the palace, and was constructed so as to cross the garden to the Lutheran chapel in the Friary, where the duchess lived.  The Prince of Orange being ill, went to Bath, and the marriage was delayed for some weeks.  Meantime the widows of Marlborough House were darkened by the gallery.  ‘I wonder,’ cried the old duchess, ’when my neighbour George will take away his orange-chest!’ The structure, with its pent-house roof, really resembling an orange-chest.

Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey, whose attractions, great as they were, proved insufficient to rivet the exclusive admiration of the accomplished Hervey, had become his wife in 1720, some time before her husband had been completely enthralled with the gilded prison doors of a court.  She was endowed with that intellectual beauty calculated to attract a man of talent:  she was highly educated, of great talent; possessed of savoir faire, infinite good temper, and a strict sense of duty.  She also derived from her father, Brigadier Lepel, who was of an ancient family in Sark, a considerable fortune.  Good and correct as she was, Lady Hervey viewed with a fashionable composure the various intimacies formed during the course of their married life by his lordship.