fajrdrako | Amphibious Thing...

Amphibious Thing by Lucy Moore is a biography of Lord Hervey.

And who, you might ask, is Lord Hervey? Well, I didn't know before I read this book, since he's hardly a biggie of history. He was an English celebrity of the mid-eighteenth century: a courtier, a politician, a man of letters with enough skill an polish to be known as a wit but not the genius that would get him into our general history books, or our English lit courses. He lived at the time of Alexander Pope and Voltaire and Sir Robert Walpole.

I read it because I'm interested in bisexual people, and Hervey was bisexual. This biography focuses more on his personal life than his public life, and as such, it's fascinating. A glimpse of the life of a high-born gentleman at the court of George II. When I saw Elizabeth I last week I remarked how often the Earl of Essex was called 'a pretty boy'. Lord Hervey was the 'pretty boy' of his generation.

Being pretty, witty, and fashionable, he was a favourite at court, and he loved it there, even if he complained about the two-faced gossip and the backstabbing. He married one of the Ladies in Waiting, who was known for her beauty and cleverness and virtue - that last being a rare thing at court. They married in secret, because they didn't have Royal permission to marry; it was a romantic story.

But Hervey already had a lover, a gentleman landowner whose name was Steven Fox. Fox preferred life in the country to life at court, so that even though they shared a townhouse in London, they were often apart, and Hervey wrote to Fox on what must have almost a daily basis for what must have been more than a decade. Long love letters that tell about life at court - often with bits in code, for the sake of discretion. But very witty. The only person Hervey wrote to almost as much as Fox was his friend Lady Mary Wortley Montague. Everyone was trying to outdo themselves in the matter of wit and charm, even if it was often barbed charm. No wonder Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son became a classic. And yes, Hervey was a friend of Chesterfield, too. These people made letter-writing into a real art form.

I liked the part where a political rival, Lord Pulteney, in cover of names-not-mentioned in anonymous pamphlets, called Hervey a lying sodomite. Since everyone knew who said it about whom, Hervey demanded a retraction and an apology. A duel was fought. Halfway through the duel, Pulteney - an old family friend - threw down his sword and said, "I couldn't live if I killed you, Jack!" and they embraced. End of duel.

It got more complicated. The author here plausibly supposes (with no evidence that I could see) that Hervey was also having sex with the Prince of Wales, Frederick, who was quite unlikeable. Hervey was certainly sleeping with a Lady in Waiting named Anne Vane. But Anne was cheating on him with Prince Frederick, which Hervey knew and grumbled about as a betrayal of his love and trust in his letters to Fox. When Anne became pregnant, it became known that she was also sleeping with Lord Harrington. Prince Frederick was happy to claim the paternity she foisted on him, possibly because there is more prestige in bearing a royal prince's bastard than a mere lord's, since he had feared he was sterile. Maybe he was: his mother claimed the baby, unsubtly named Fitzfrederick, looked exactly like Hervey's youngest son.

After many years, Fox and Hervey broke up, quarrelling over politics - or maybe it was because Fox was tired of the long-distance periods of their relationship, or because he fell in love with a girl. He married the thirteen-year-old daughter of his brother's mistress.

Hervey had the misfortune to take on Alexander Pope in a poetic battle of wits. Hervey was sharp but Pope was a genius, so I'd say Pope won that round. His poem Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot was about Hervey:

His wit all see-saw, between that and this ,
Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss,
And he himself one vile antithesis.
Amphibious thing! that acting either part,
The trifling head, or the corrupted heart,
Fop at the toilet, flatt'rer at the board,
Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord.
Eve's tempter thus the rabbins have express'd,
A cherub's face, a reptile all the rest;
Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust,
Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust.

Hervey himself might have acknowledged some truth in all that, though he probably flinched at the expression of it: he said himself -