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rheinsbergHanna Smith and Stephen Taylor: Hephaestion and Alexander: Lord Hervey, Frederick, Prince of Wales, and the Royal Favourite in England in the 1730s.
Which is an excellent, highly readable essay of about 30 pages succeeding in what sets out to do, put the Hervey/FoW relationship into context and drawing conclusion. The authors always make it clear when they're speculating, but also on what grounds they do so.
In terms of context for Favourites: generally speaking, in public consciousness there lived two types of Favourites. The Bad Favourite, obviously, bleeding the realm dry, which is why Princes should not have just one but should dispense their favour among several. (Only human affection doesn't always work that way.) And the Good Favourite, the Trusted Faithful Lieutenant, who is loyal to his lord (or lady) but also speaks truth to power when necessary.
(cahn: Fritz: Well, if you're Heinrich it works that way, except that it actually doesn't work because all his favourites are Bad Favourites.
selenak : Heinrich: And yet, none of my favourites wrote a trashy tell-all or a letter based RPF. Or ran away from me to another country, never to return.)
When Sarah Churchill re: her relationship with Queen Anne prides herself on her candor, she's also pointing towards this role model. In terms of antique role models, Hephaistion is the Good Favourite - "He, too, is Alexander", loyal but never expoitative, unafraid to talk back to Alexander when needed, which is emphasiized in the most popular Alexander biography read at the time, the Quintus Curtius Rufus one. Which is one of the association Hervey will go for when picking the name. At the same time, the homoerotic association the Alexander/Hephaistion relationship evoked was definitely there as well, especially for someone who was as well read in the classics as Hervey was.
The other important context the authors establish is that of the changing attitude towards same sex relationships.
In Stuart times, the self proclaimed libertines included m/m and f/f in their erotic poetry, Rochester prominently. Same sex relationships were also used for slander, especially in a political context; again, see Sarah Churchill, when losing Anne's favour to Abigail Masham, causing scandalous poetry and pamphlets being written that accuse Abigail of a lesbian relationship with Anne. Still, there was a great deal of laissez faire in the nobility, and all the nobility clubs like the Kit Kat club which had a great deal of ribaldry and (het) sex objects swapping also had at the very least homoerotic jokes and phallocentric conversations through the 18th century in England, but as time went on, the attitudes changed. By the 1760s, a self proclaimed libertine and free thinker like John Wilkes isn't just aggressively heterosexual but aggressively attacking homoerotic relationships as decadent and coded into princely depravity and tyranny.
Hervey and his entourage were more old school, obviously. Now I had noticed Hervey in the later part of his memoirs mentioning our old aquaintance Charles Hanbury Williams as a young man, aka Poniatowski's future mentor, the Fritz-loathing future envoy. He was a part of Hervey's wider social circle, friends with both Fox brothers (i.e. Hervey's boyfriend Stephen and Stephen's brother Henry), and guess what:
Winnington and the Fox brothers were also close friends with Charles Hanbury Williams, who, in February 1740, penned a series of verses on Winnington's abandonment of Horatio Townshend for Teddy Byng. The following July, Hanbury Williams wrote an ode to Horatio Townshend that was even more explicit:
' Come to my Breast, my Lovely Boy!
Thou Source of Greek & Roman Joy!
And let my Arms entwine 'ye;
Behold my strong erected Tarse,
Display your plump, & milk-white Arse,
Young, blooming, Ligurine!
(Our authors note that Hanbury Williams and Henry Fox were also notorious womanizers and H-W wrote just as explicit het verses, so: bi, rather than gay.)
As noted in my previous Hervey write-ups, Hervey being attacked by Pulteney specifically for his sexual ambiguity is also a sign of this changing time, of homoeroticism put more and more into a negative satiric context, and othered. And that was if you were a protected by your status noble. Really news to me and very important for not just the British climate towards same sex relationships was this bit of information:
And what may have given their fears extra impetus was the growing climate of moral panic over sodomy, itself provoked by the sensational trials of around three hundred men and boys for sodomy which were taking place in many of the leading cities of the United Provinces from 1730 onwards.The Dutch sodomy trials had swiftly made their way into the British press. Such reports not only expressed their abhorrence of this 'abominable Vice' and described in detail how the 'detested Criminals' were executed by being partially strangled, 'burnt with Straw', and drowned." They also noted how the accused included those who had held important political office. As the London Evening Post commented in June 1730, 'all Ranks are infected to that Degree, that the Magistrates are almost at a Loss how to Extinguish this Infernal Heat', and cited by name two prominent Dutch politicians suspected of the crime. The Daily Journal went further and described the fury of the Amsterdam crowd when it became known that those who had been convicted of sodomy amongst 'the richer Sort of People' had been granted the privilege of a private execution. 'The Populace arising in Arms, and demanding publick Execution of the Rich as well as the Poor ... the Magistrates were obliged to send to the Hague ... to quell this Mob'.' Thus, when Pulteney wrote of how the 'unnatural, reigning Vice' of which he accused Hervey had 'of late, been severely punish'd in a neighbouring Nation', he was making both a highly emotive connection that his readers would have immediately understood-and suggesting, by implication, that Hervey deserved the same brutal punishment.
(mildred_of_midgard: Wooow, that's right as the escape attempt via the Netherlands is happening. Must keep this in mind!
selenak: No kidding. Imagine Peter Keith asking after the Come d'Alberville, being disappointed there, going into a Dutch inn only to find out everyone is talking about how more sodomites should be executed in public, as gruesomely as possible. And then he finds out FW is after him. No wonder he threw himself at the mercy of Chesterfield's people and got the hell out of there. )
Yet another context in which the Hervey and Fritz of Wales relationship plays out is that of the Royal Family.
Here our authors do us the immense service and point out the timing, and remind us of the dates:
1716: 20 years old Hervey, when on his Grand Tour, visits Hannover and as urged by his father take the trouble to make nice with 9 years old Fritz, in order to impress the future monarch.
December 1728: adult Fritz of Wales finally arrives in England following the death of G1 and the coronation of his father as G2. During this time, however, Hervey is on his second Europe journey, this one with Stephen Fox.
October 1729: Hervey returns to England.
May 1730: Hervey becomes appointed Vice Chamberlain
1731: Hervey's friendship with FoW peaks; this is where the two preserved letters from FoW to Hervey (all others were destroyed) are from. (Hervey's own original letters to FoW were also destroyed, - after Fritz of Wales died, Augusta supposedly burned most of his correspondance - but luckily Hervey kept copies of his outgoing mail, so we do have his letters to the prince in copy.)
Late autumn and winter of 1731: Hervey writes angry letters about FoW to boyfriend Stephen Fox and to Lord Bristol, Hervey's father. FoW's affair with Hervey's mistress Anne Vane becomes public; Hervey is replaced as FoW's advisor by Bubb Dodington (what a name!).
April of 1732: Hervey tries to blackmail and bully Anne Vane into getting the Prince to take him back as advisor, thereby allienating the Prince even further. The relationship is over for good.
You may have noticed from the dates that Hervey establishing himself as royal Chamberlain and as the confidant to Queen Caroline and Hervey's friendship with Fritz of Wales happen exactly at the same time. This wasn't clear to me before, and it's hugely important. Our authors speculate that Hervey might have had Buckingham in mind as a role model of a generation uniting Royal Favourite. ([personal profile] cahn, the Duke of Buckingham started out as the Favourite (and lover) to James I., befriended James' son Charles - future Charles I. - while Charles was still Prince of Wales, and thus later after James' death continued firmly as Charles' Favourite as well until his assassination.) An example for this is that Hervey's letters to FoW show that parts of them were meant to be shared with Queen Caroline and read out loud; she expected it. (Hervey marks the parts not for public consumption.) However, the Buckingham model was not one that could work with the Hannovers. Instead of getting closer to his estranged family, FoW drifted further away, and sharing a confidant with Mom was really not likely to be workable given this. What's more, Hervey in the Sir Robert Walpole vs Pulteney struggle had sided with Walpole, the PM, and again, given that Walpole of course was 100% behind G2 in terms of what budget and freedom the Prince of Wales should have, Fritz of Wales was starting to eye the parliamentary opposition.
When it comes to "why did Hervey respond to the breakup to badly?", the authors don't think it was about Anne Vane as such, because Hervey's set was fine with mistress sharing more often than not, and Hervey never comes across caring about Anne Vane for more than sex. (Especially when compared to the love letters he writes to Stephen Fox or Algarotti.) But being dumped for a man like Dodington, that's what hurt. Along with losing the prospect of being the next King's Favourite. But the authors don't think it was just all careerism on Hervey's part, not if he'd been even partly serious with picking Hephaistion as his role model. Hephaistion dumped by Alexander is unthinkable.
The question as to why Fritz of Wales dumped Hervey gets replied by taking all these various factors into account. Fritz of Wales wanted to establish his own identity outside the family he didn't get along with, and Hervey simultanously vying for Mom's favor and his own was an active negative rather than a positive here.
(BTW, re: the Hervey and Caroline relationship, the author says the relentless emphasis on Caroline as a mother figure here is on the one hand stretching things - since Caroline was only thirteen years older than Hervey - but on the other allowed the two of them to express their affection scandal free and in public; no one, not even the most relentless Hervey hater who accused Hervey of having pimped Anne Vane to FoW and of being Sporus and an evil gay etc., ever accused him of having illicit designs on the Queen's virtue, or the Queen to behave in any way inappropriate towards a man not her husband. This is a great contrast to what happened after of FoW' death with his poor widow, Augusta, who was accused to have an affair with her son future G3's tutor Lord Bute, who'd later become G3's minister of state (and also Lady Mary's son-in-law). Going by all we know, there was zero truth in that, and G3's fondness for Lord Bute was because the man had been a father figure to him in his adolescence, but there was still a great deal of hostility, satire and misogyny directed against Augusta, and even her coffin was cursed by the crowd as that of a shameless whore. With, again, zero evidence that she ever had done anything with Lord Bute.)
The Pulteney scandal and the ensueing duel plus even more scandal didn't seem to immediately affect FoW's feelings for Hervey - Hervey even makes a light hearted joke about it in one of his letters at the time - but the authors speculate that the affair in combination with the Dutch scandal of the trials against gay men and the fact that Fritz of Wales started to court a good public opinion at this point in order to get some standing in England (where he was looked at as a foreigner while brother future Billy the Butcher had been born and raised in the country) might have all contributed to Fritz of Wales deciding to trade in Hervey to Dodington.
Lastly: when they were close, how close where they?
The essay starts with that quote from Hervey's letter to Stephen Fox where he says he wished he could love Fritz of Wales the way he loves Stephen Fox. Now, when I had read that quote first, in Halsband's Hervey biography, I had read it negatively, meaning "since this relationship could be the making of me, I wish I could love the guy at all, and I pretend to, but I don't". This, of course, is not how Stephen Fox took it; he seems to have read it as "I wish I could love the Prince the way I love you, i.e. romantically", hence the further exchange of tearful letters and Hervey apologizing and swearing he loves no one the way he loves Stephen.
On the other hand, Fritz of Wales actually uses the same nickname for Hervey as did Stephen Fox, and in one of the two preserved letters gets a bit teasing and flirtatious about it:
(T)hese show a deep affection for Hervey which leaps from the page. Frederick adopted the classical mythological personas of Orestes and Pylades for Hervey and himself, writing in one letter as 'the warm Orestes, to his Dear Pilades'. Orestes was the son of King Agamemnon, and he and Pylades were celebrated in classical literature as the inseparable friends who were willing to die for each other. The pair feature in Ambrose Philips's popular neo-classical drama, The Distrest Mother (1712), a play with which the prince was already acquainted, having ordered a command performance of it in January 1729. Frederick also had a more familiar name for Hervey-'My L[or] d Chicken', and 'my Dear Chicken'-an epithet, it seems, about Hervey's lack of physical robustness, and one which Hervey also liked to use about himself in his letters to both the prince and Stephen Fox. In 1730, then, Frederick liked to suggest, or indeed saw, Hervey as his intimate, immutable companion.
Of course FoW had girlfriends throughout the relationship and pre Anne Vane confided to Hervey about them - one of Hervey's "Hephaistion" letters asks whether "Roxana or Statira is in favour", making references to Alexander the Great's wives - but that doesn't exclude some homoerotic frisson, for, as the authors write: It is possible to read Hervey's and Frederick's relationship as having a similar heterosexual and homoerotic charge. This might explain Frederick's rather flirtatious wish in one letter to bait Stephen Fox about Frederick's and Hervey's friendship. Frederick wrote to Hervey, when he was visiting Stephen Fox in Somerset, by joking that 'being a fraid that this Letter should be opened if I sent it directly to you so I make a direction to Mr Fox, as if it was written to You by a Lady, to make you be teazed a little a bout it Adieu my Dear'.
Perhaps the most compelling-if opaque-evidence for the complexity of Hervey's and Frederick's feelings for each other comes from Hervey's letters to Stephen Fox in the autumn of I73I. Hervey's and Frederick's relationship seems to have reached an intensity by late August I73I that unsettled Hervey. On 26 August Hervey told Fox that the prince had been seriously ill with a fever and added mysteriously, 'I should say many things to you if you were here which I shall not trust even to a Cypher. Solomon you know says speak not in Palaces for the Walls have Ears, nor of Princes for the Birds of the Air will reveal it.'
In conclusion: how an erastes and eromenos relationship can go truly, badly wrong, even if it remained subtextual between them.
Which is an excellent, highly readable essay of about 30 pages succeeding in what sets out to do, put the Hervey/FoW relationship into context and drawing conclusion. The authors always make it clear when they're speculating, but also on what grounds they do so.
In terms of context for Favourites: generally speaking, in public consciousness there lived two types of Favourites. The Bad Favourite, obviously, bleeding the realm dry, which is why Princes should not have just one but should dispense their favour among several. (Only human affection doesn't always work that way.) And the Good Favourite, the Trusted Faithful Lieutenant, who is loyal to his lord (or lady) but also speaks truth to power when necessary.
(
cahn: Fritz: Well, if you're Heinrich it works that way, except that it actually doesn't work because all his favourites are Bad Favourites.selenak : Heinrich: And yet, none of my favourites wrote a trashy tell-all or a letter based RPF. Or ran away from me to another country, never to return.) When Sarah Churchill re: her relationship with Queen Anne prides herself on her candor, she's also pointing towards this role model. In terms of antique role models, Hephaistion is the Good Favourite - "He, too, is Alexander", loyal but never expoitative, unafraid to talk back to Alexander when needed, which is emphasiized in the most popular Alexander biography read at the time, the Quintus Curtius Rufus one. Which is one of the association Hervey will go for when picking the name. At the same time, the homoerotic association the Alexander/Hephaistion relationship evoked was definitely there as well, especially for someone who was as well read in the classics as Hervey was.
The other important context the authors establish is that of the changing attitude towards same sex relationships.
In Stuart times, the self proclaimed libertines included m/m and f/f in their erotic poetry, Rochester prominently. Same sex relationships were also used for slander, especially in a political context; again, see Sarah Churchill, when losing Anne's favour to Abigail Masham, causing scandalous poetry and pamphlets being written that accuse Abigail of a lesbian relationship with Anne. Still, there was a great deal of laissez faire in the nobility, and all the nobility clubs like the Kit Kat club which had a great deal of ribaldry and (het) sex objects swapping also had at the very least homoerotic jokes and phallocentric conversations through the 18th century in England, but as time went on, the attitudes changed. By the 1760s, a self proclaimed libertine and free thinker like John Wilkes isn't just aggressively heterosexual but aggressively attacking homoerotic relationships as decadent and coded into princely depravity and tyranny.
Hervey and his entourage were more old school, obviously. Now I had noticed Hervey in the later part of his memoirs mentioning our old aquaintance Charles Hanbury Williams as a young man, aka Poniatowski's future mentor, the Fritz-loathing future envoy. He was a part of Hervey's wider social circle, friends with both Fox brothers (i.e. Hervey's boyfriend Stephen and Stephen's brother Henry), and guess what:
Winnington and the Fox brothers were also close friends with Charles Hanbury Williams, who, in February 1740, penned a series of verses on Winnington's abandonment of Horatio Townshend for Teddy Byng. The following July, Hanbury Williams wrote an ode to Horatio Townshend that was even more explicit:
' Come to my Breast, my Lovely Boy!
Thou Source of Greek & Roman Joy!
And let my Arms entwine 'ye;
Behold my strong erected Tarse,
Display your plump, & milk-white Arse,
Young, blooming, Ligurine!
(Our authors note that Hanbury Williams and Henry Fox were also notorious womanizers and H-W wrote just as explicit het verses, so: bi, rather than gay.)
As noted in my previous Hervey write-ups, Hervey being attacked by Pulteney specifically for his sexual ambiguity is also a sign of this changing time, of homoeroticism put more and more into a negative satiric context, and othered. And that was if you were a protected by your status noble. Really news to me and very important for not just the British climate towards same sex relationships was this bit of information:
And what may have given their fears extra impetus was the growing climate of moral panic over sodomy, itself provoked by the sensational trials of around three hundred men and boys for sodomy which were taking place in many of the leading cities of the United Provinces from 1730 onwards.The Dutch sodomy trials had swiftly made their way into the British press. Such reports not only expressed their abhorrence of this 'abominable Vice' and described in detail how the 'detested Criminals' were executed by being partially strangled, 'burnt with Straw', and drowned." They also noted how the accused included those who had held important political office. As the London Evening Post commented in June 1730, 'all Ranks are infected to that Degree, that the Magistrates are almost at a Loss how to Extinguish this Infernal Heat', and cited by name two prominent Dutch politicians suspected of the crime. The Daily Journal went further and described the fury of the Amsterdam crowd when it became known that those who had been convicted of sodomy amongst 'the richer Sort of People' had been granted the privilege of a private execution. 'The Populace arising in Arms, and demanding publick Execution of the Rich as well as the Poor ... the Magistrates were obliged to send to the Hague ... to quell this Mob'.' Thus, when Pulteney wrote of how the 'unnatural, reigning Vice' of which he accused Hervey had 'of late, been severely punish'd in a neighbouring Nation', he was making both a highly emotive connection that his readers would have immediately understood-and suggesting, by implication, that Hervey deserved the same brutal punishment.
(
mildred_of_midgard: Wooow, that's right as the escape attempt via the Netherlands is happening. Must keep this in mind!selenak: No kidding. Imagine Peter Keith asking after the Come d'Alberville, being disappointed there, going into a Dutch inn only to find out everyone is talking about how more sodomites should be executed in public, as gruesomely as possible. And then he finds out FW is after him. No wonder he threw himself at the mercy of Chesterfield's people and got the hell out of there. ) Yet another context in which the Hervey and Fritz of Wales relationship plays out is that of the Royal Family.
Here our authors do us the immense service and point out the timing, and remind us of the dates:
1716: 20 years old Hervey, when on his Grand Tour, visits Hannover and as urged by his father take the trouble to make nice with 9 years old Fritz, in order to impress the future monarch.
December 1728: adult Fritz of Wales finally arrives in England following the death of G1 and the coronation of his father as G2. During this time, however, Hervey is on his second Europe journey, this one with Stephen Fox.
October 1729: Hervey returns to England.
May 1730: Hervey becomes appointed Vice Chamberlain
1731: Hervey's friendship with FoW peaks; this is where the two preserved letters from FoW to Hervey (all others were destroyed) are from. (Hervey's own original letters to FoW were also destroyed, - after Fritz of Wales died, Augusta supposedly burned most of his correspondance - but luckily Hervey kept copies of his outgoing mail, so we do have his letters to the prince in copy.)
Late autumn and winter of 1731: Hervey writes angry letters about FoW to boyfriend Stephen Fox and to Lord Bristol, Hervey's father. FoW's affair with Hervey's mistress Anne Vane becomes public; Hervey is replaced as FoW's advisor by Bubb Dodington (what a name!).
April of 1732: Hervey tries to blackmail and bully Anne Vane into getting the Prince to take him back as advisor, thereby allienating the Prince even further. The relationship is over for good.
You may have noticed from the dates that Hervey establishing himself as royal Chamberlain and as the confidant to Queen Caroline and Hervey's friendship with Fritz of Wales happen exactly at the same time. This wasn't clear to me before, and it's hugely important. Our authors speculate that Hervey might have had Buckingham in mind as a role model of a generation uniting Royal Favourite. ([personal profile] cahn, the Duke of Buckingham started out as the Favourite (and lover) to James I., befriended James' son Charles - future Charles I. - while Charles was still Prince of Wales, and thus later after James' death continued firmly as Charles' Favourite as well until his assassination.) An example for this is that Hervey's letters to FoW show that parts of them were meant to be shared with Queen Caroline and read out loud; she expected it. (Hervey marks the parts not for public consumption.) However, the Buckingham model was not one that could work with the Hannovers. Instead of getting closer to his estranged family, FoW drifted further away, and sharing a confidant with Mom was really not likely to be workable given this. What's more, Hervey in the Sir Robert Walpole vs Pulteney struggle had sided with Walpole, the PM, and again, given that Walpole of course was 100% behind G2 in terms of what budget and freedom the Prince of Wales should have, Fritz of Wales was starting to eye the parliamentary opposition.
When it comes to "why did Hervey respond to the breakup to badly?", the authors don't think it was about Anne Vane as such, because Hervey's set was fine with mistress sharing more often than not, and Hervey never comes across caring about Anne Vane for more than sex. (Especially when compared to the love letters he writes to Stephen Fox or Algarotti.) But being dumped for a man like Dodington, that's what hurt. Along with losing the prospect of being the next King's Favourite. But the authors don't think it was just all careerism on Hervey's part, not if he'd been even partly serious with picking Hephaistion as his role model. Hephaistion dumped by Alexander is unthinkable.
The question as to why Fritz of Wales dumped Hervey gets replied by taking all these various factors into account. Fritz of Wales wanted to establish his own identity outside the family he didn't get along with, and Hervey simultanously vying for Mom's favor and his own was an active negative rather than a positive here.
(BTW, re: the Hervey and Caroline relationship, the author says the relentless emphasis on Caroline as a mother figure here is on the one hand stretching things - since Caroline was only thirteen years older than Hervey - but on the other allowed the two of them to express their affection scandal free and in public; no one, not even the most relentless Hervey hater who accused Hervey of having pimped Anne Vane to FoW and of being Sporus and an evil gay etc., ever accused him of having illicit designs on the Queen's virtue, or the Queen to behave in any way inappropriate towards a man not her husband. This is a great contrast to what happened after of FoW' death with his poor widow, Augusta, who was accused to have an affair with her son future G3's tutor Lord Bute, who'd later become G3's minister of state (and also Lady Mary's son-in-law). Going by all we know, there was zero truth in that, and G3's fondness for Lord Bute was because the man had been a father figure to him in his adolescence, but there was still a great deal of hostility, satire and misogyny directed against Augusta, and even her coffin was cursed by the crowd as that of a shameless whore. With, again, zero evidence that she ever had done anything with Lord Bute.)
The Pulteney scandal and the ensueing duel plus even more scandal didn't seem to immediately affect FoW's feelings for Hervey - Hervey even makes a light hearted joke about it in one of his letters at the time - but the authors speculate that the affair in combination with the Dutch scandal of the trials against gay men and the fact that Fritz of Wales started to court a good public opinion at this point in order to get some standing in England (where he was looked at as a foreigner while brother future Billy the Butcher had been born and raised in the country) might have all contributed to Fritz of Wales deciding to trade in Hervey to Dodington.
Lastly: when they were close, how close where they?
The essay starts with that quote from Hervey's letter to Stephen Fox where he says he wished he could love Fritz of Wales the way he loves Stephen Fox. Now, when I had read that quote first, in Halsband's Hervey biography, I had read it negatively, meaning "since this relationship could be the making of me, I wish I could love the guy at all, and I pretend to, but I don't". This, of course, is not how Stephen Fox took it; he seems to have read it as "I wish I could love the Prince the way I love you, i.e. romantically", hence the further exchange of tearful letters and Hervey apologizing and swearing he loves no one the way he loves Stephen.
On the other hand, Fritz of Wales actually uses the same nickname for Hervey as did Stephen Fox, and in one of the two preserved letters gets a bit teasing and flirtatious about it:
(T)hese show a deep affection for Hervey which leaps from the page. Frederick adopted the classical mythological personas of Orestes and Pylades for Hervey and himself, writing in one letter as 'the warm Orestes, to his Dear Pilades'. Orestes was the son of King Agamemnon, and he and Pylades were celebrated in classical literature as the inseparable friends who were willing to die for each other. The pair feature in Ambrose Philips's popular neo-classical drama, The Distrest Mother (1712), a play with which the prince was already acquainted, having ordered a command performance of it in January 1729. Frederick also had a more familiar name for Hervey-'My L[or] d Chicken', and 'my Dear Chicken'-an epithet, it seems, about Hervey's lack of physical robustness, and one which Hervey also liked to use about himself in his letters to both the prince and Stephen Fox. In 1730, then, Frederick liked to suggest, or indeed saw, Hervey as his intimate, immutable companion.
Of course FoW had girlfriends throughout the relationship and pre Anne Vane confided to Hervey about them - one of Hervey's "Hephaistion" letters asks whether "Roxana or Statira is in favour", making references to Alexander the Great's wives - but that doesn't exclude some homoerotic frisson, for, as the authors write: It is possible to read Hervey's and Frederick's relationship as having a similar heterosexual and homoerotic charge. This might explain Frederick's rather flirtatious wish in one letter to bait Stephen Fox about Frederick's and Hervey's friendship. Frederick wrote to Hervey, when he was visiting Stephen Fox in Somerset, by joking that 'being a fraid that this Letter should be opened if I sent it directly to you so I make a direction to Mr Fox, as if it was written to You by a Lady, to make you be teazed a little a bout it Adieu my Dear'.
Perhaps the most compelling-if opaque-evidence for the complexity of Hervey's and Frederick's feelings for each other comes from Hervey's letters to Stephen Fox in the autumn of I73I. Hervey's and Frederick's relationship seems to have reached an intensity by late August I73I that unsettled Hervey. On 26 August Hervey told Fox that the prince had been seriously ill with a fever and added mysteriously, 'I should say many things to you if you were here which I shall not trust even to a Cypher. Solomon you know says speak not in Palaces for the Walls have Ears, nor of Princes for the Birds of the Air will reveal it.'
In conclusion: how an erastes and eromenos relationship can go truly, badly wrong, even if it remained subtextual between them.
