Hampton Court ... Illustrated with forty-three drawings by Herbert ...

HERVEY AND CAROLINE 219
cold-hearted, without any fixed standard of religion
or morals; the Prince dissolute, false, fatuously conceited;
the Princesses hypocritical, or weak, or callous.
*' What a set! " It was a court which the manners
of a Chesterfield might adorn, and which certainly his
morals did not disgrace.
My Lord Hervey, who writes his " Letter to a
Doctor of Divinity from a Nobleman at Hampton
Court," was scornful enough against the clergy, contemptuous
and bitter by turns, and, like most men of
ill life in that age, he professed to hold the most
sceptical opinions on religion. But he had at least
one Bishop to his friend, and was by no means unconcerned
in the matter of ecclesiastical patronage.
Here he copied the Queen his mistress, who, says
Chesterfield, " after puzzling herself with all the
whimsies and fantastical speculations of different sects,
fixed herself ultimately in Deism," but who was
keenly active in the distribution of Church appointments,
and commended Butler on her deathbed. It
is not unnatural that he should never give credit for a
good motive or hesitate to attribute a bad one. But
though he certainly extenuates nothing, he makes of
the Queen, after all, not a little of a heroine. Lord
Chesterfield in a few words gives a view not dissimilar
to the impression that comes from all Lord Hervey's
Memoirs : " Upon the whole, the agreeable woman
was liked by most people, while the Queen was neither
esteemed, beloved, nor trusted by any one but the
King "— and, we may add, Lord Hervey.