Abstract
The previous chapters assessed the different ways that friendship and private life were conceived within a public world rocked by crises of financial speculation and political rumour. The distinguishing features of this public world — party conflict confused by fractures in Whig ideology, ambivalence towards the very meaning and implication of public political argument — remain pertinent to the further historical circumstances discussed in this chapter. However, where I have hitherto explored a range of representational dilemmas posed by the conflicted discourses of the period, the present chapter is fundamentally concerned with one discourse, and with one problem faced by a small group of writers from the 1730s.
Copyright © 2011 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. This chapter first appeared in Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 40:1 (2011), 157–78. Revised and reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Notes
Material in this chapter relating to Frederick’s life is chiefly indebted to Averyl Edwards, Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, 1707–51 (London: Staples Press, 1947).
Frances Vivian, A Life of Frederick, Prince of Wales, 1707–1751, ed. Roger White (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006).
Another recent biography will also be referenced but is less reliable: Michael de-la-Noy, The King Who Never Was (London: Peter Owen, 1996).
Averyl Edwards argued that Frederick resembled his father in wishing ‘to appear before the public as an accomplished lady-killer’. See Edwards, Frederick Louis, p. 32. Most notoriously, Frederick conducted an affair with Anne Vane, maid of honour to Queen Caroline and also one of Lord Hervey’s lovers. Fitzfrederick, the illegitimate son resulting from this relationship, was brought up at the prince’s expense from 1732 until the death of both child and mother in 1735. See Memoirs, I, p. 290; II, p. 483; Moore, Amphibious Thing, pp. 138–40, 144–5; Vivian, A Life of Frederick, pp. 190–6; Robert Halsband, Lord Hervey, Eighteenth-Century Courtier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 127–8, 135–9. For public writings about the Anne Vane affair, see Vanelia: Or, The Amours of the Great (London: Printed for E. Rayner, 1732); Humours of the Court (London: Printed for W. James, 1732). Both plays were unperformed.
Ferdinando Shaw, A Sermon Preached on the Birth-Day of his Royal Highness, Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales (London, 1729), p. 4.
Henry Stephens, An Epistle to His Royal Highness Frederick, Prince of Wales (London, 1729), p. 3.
Smith and Taylor make reference to Christine Gerrard as the foremost authority on Patriot culture; this chapter will do the same. See Smith and Taylor, ‘Hephaestion and Alexander’, pp. 309–10; Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
George II at one point planned to have Frederick succeed only to the Electorate of Hanover, so as to leave the British throne free for family favourite, William. See Betty Kemp, ‘Frederick, Prince of Wales’, in Silver Renaissance, ed. Alex Natan (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 38–56 (47).
Mabel Hessler Cable, ‘The Idea of a Patriot King in the Propaganda of the Opposition to Walpole, 1735–1739’, Philological Quarterly 18:2 (1939), 119–30 (119).
See Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in his Time’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 15 (1981), 123–48 (139).
Simon Varey, ‘Hanover, Stuart and the Patriot King’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 6 (1983), 163–72.
Gerrard, Patriot Opposition, pp. 213–27; David Armitage, ‘A Patriot for Whom? The Afterlives of Bolingbroke’s Patriot King’, Journal of British Studies 36 (1997), 397–418 (401).
For a decline in ostentatious court culture beginning in Anne’s reign, see R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 135–6.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 197.
For a critique of these views that nevertheless emphasises the commodification of court culture at the expense of its grandeur, see Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture 1714–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Seneca, Moral Essays, ed. John W. Basore, 3 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1975), III, p. 7.
For a contemporary paraphrase, in its twelfth edition by 1722, see Roger L’Estrange, Seneca’s Morals Abstracted in Three Parts (London: Printed for Henry Brome, 1679).
Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, The Idea of a Patriot King, ed. Sydney W. Jackman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), p. 5.
For the argument that Bolingbroke’s correspondence with Cornbury was rooted in their Jacobite loyalties, see Eveline Cruickshanks, Lord Cornbury, Bolingbroke, and a Plan to Restore the Stuarts, 1731–1735 (Huntingdon: The Royal Stuart Society, 1986). Regardless of the truth of such claims, the text of the ‘Letter’ can still be considered as contributing to pro-Hanoverian oppositional discourse, based on its own efforts to fit within a more legitimate canon. See Letters, on the Spirit of Patriotism (London: Printed for A. Millar, 1749), p. 23.
See Cicero, Selected Works, trans. Michael Grant (London: Penguin Books, 1960), pp. 230–2.
Adrian Lashmore-Davies, ‘Viscount Bolingbroke and the Moral Reform of Politics, 1710–1738’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2004), p. 195.
See Jeffrey Hart, Viscount Bolingbroke, Tory Humanist (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 83–6.
See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 81–2.
George Bickham, The Beauties of Stow: or, A Description of the Pleasant Seat, and Noble Gardens of the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Cobham (London: George Bickham, 1750), p. 53.
Charles Philips, The Henry the Fifth Club or ‘The Gang’ (1734 or 1735). See Gerrard, Patriot Opposition, p. 214; Oliver Millar, The Tudor, Stuart and Early Georgian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, 2 vols. (London: Phaidon Press, 1963), I, pp. 177–8.
Desmond Shawe-Taylor, The Conversation Piece: Scenes of Fashionable Life (London: Royal Collection, 2009); Edwards, Frederick Louis, p. 24.
See Hannah Smith’s statement that ‘the military fashioning of the early Georgian monarchy … can be seen as a strategy driven primarily by military and political concerns, although it was also pushed forward by personal royal enthusiasm for soldiering and soldierly activity’. Smith, Georgian Monarchy, p. 115. For Cumberland’s activities during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, see John Prebble, Culloden (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1961), pp. 197–204.
Memoirs, III, p. 839. For the original line, see Joseph Addison, Cato (London: Printed for J. Tonson, 1713), p. 54.
For the continuing frequency of Cato in London’s repertory, see Bonnie A. Nelson, Serious Drama and the London Stage: 1729–39 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1981), p. 96.
Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 52–3.
Henry Brooke, Gustavus Vasa, The Deliverer of His Country (London: Printed for R. Dodsley, 1739).
See John Loftis, The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 128–53.
P. J. Crean, ‘The Stage Licensing Act of 1737’, Modern Philology 35:3 (1938), 239–55.
The New Cambridge Modern History, Volume II: The Reformation, ed. G. R. Elton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), pp. 146–53.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 9, section 10. In the same section of the Ethics Aristotle does go on to state that it is possible to be friendly with many fellow-citizens but that this should be distinguished from true friendship. See also Erasmus’s Amicitia (1533), in Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, ed. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 1033–55 (1046).
See J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century’, William and Mary Quarterly 22:4 (1965), 549–83; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 361–400, 423–505.
Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 9.
David Mallet, Mustapha. A Tragedy (London: A. Millar, 1739).
See John Loftis, ‘Thomson’s Tancred and Sigismunda’, in The Stage and the Page: London’s ‘Whole Show’ in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre, ed. George Winchester Stone Jr. (London: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 34–54 (39).
Sandro Jung, ‘Love and Honour in James Thomson’s Tancred and Sigismunda (1745)’, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 17 (2002), 39–50.
Ake Eriksson, The Tragedy of Liberty: Civic Concern and Disillusionment in James Thomson’s Tragic Dramas (Uppsala: Uppsala University Library, 2002), p. 23.
For Thomson’s position within the Patriot movement following earlier literary and administrative associations with Walpole, see James Sambrook, James Thomson 1700–1748 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 60, 126, 134.
Loftis, ‘Thomson’s Tancred and Sigismunda’, p. 39. Such views of Edward and Eleonora are apparently supported by the licenser’s refusal to allow the play’s performance. See Alan D. McKillop, ‘Thomson and the Licensers of the Stage’, Philological Quarterly 37 (1958), 448–53.
Brean S. Hammond, ‘“O Sophonisba! Sophonisba o!”: Thomson the Tragedian’, in James Thomson: Essays for the Tercentenary, ed. Richard Terry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 15–33 (22).
James Thomson, Edward and Eleonora (London: A. Millar, 1739), p. 37.
Gerrard argues that Frederick was ‘almost certainly’ a co-author of the book, if not the main author. See Gerrard, Patriot Opposition, p. 61. For the conflicting argument that Themiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe was responsible for the text, see John B. Shipley, ‘James Ralph, Prince Titi, and the Black Box of Frederick, Prince of Wales’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 71 (1967), 143–57 (145). Frances Vivian also treats the theory of Frederick’s authorship with scepticism. See Vivian, Life of Frederick, pp. 462–3.
The History of Prince Titi (London: E. Curll, 1736); this edition, its translation attributed to Eliza Stanley, is briefly mentioned in Baines and Rogers, Edmund Curll, p. 273. Anne Dodd’s edition, The Memoirs and History of Prince Titi (London: A. Dodd, 1736), advertised as translated by ‘a Person of Quality’, provides the basis for discussion in the current chapter; hereafter Prince Titi. For Fielding’s Titi play, see Frederick G. Ribble, ‘New Light on Henry Fielding from the Malmesbury Papers’, Modern Philology 103:1 (2005), 51–94.
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Jones, E.D. (2013). Friendship and the Patriot Prince. In: Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137300508_6
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