The Hon. Thomas Hervey, MP (1699-1775)

John Fayram (active c.1713–d.1744). Oil painting on canvas, The Hon. Thomas Hervey, MP (1699-1775) by John Fayram (active c.1713–d.1744), circa 1725-1730. Painted oval. Half-length portrait of a young man, turned slightly to the right, gazing at the spectator, in a pale brown, powdered wig, wearing a grey satin coat with a blue cloak over his left shoulder.Brown eyes, fresh complexion. Painted at bottom 'The Honble Thomas Hervey'. Apparently pair with Felton Hervey. Thomas Hervey (1698-1775) the eccentric pamphleteer, was the second son of John Hervey, 1st Earl of Bristol (1665-1751) and his second wife Elizabeth Felton (1676-1741), daughter and heiress of Sir Thomas Felton, Bt. of Playford, Suffolk. He matriculated at Christchurch, Oxford, in 1717, but was taken away from there before taking a degree and sent to Lincoln’s Inn, rather than – as he wanted – into the Army. Thereupon he gave himself up to drink, fought two duels, spent eleven years without a continuous night’s sleep, and was racked by a constant fever, for which he was bled over a hundred times in seventeen or eighteen years; so that, before reaching his majority, his mind was unhinged. Nonetheless, from 1733 to 1747 he was MP for Bury St Edmunds, from 1727 to 1737 Equerry to Queen Caroline (d. 1737) and from 1728 Vice-Chamberlain of her Household, and from 1738 Superintendant of the Royal Palaces and Gardens. Samuel Johnson’s epitaph was: “Tom Hervey, though a vicious man [i.e. given to (sexual) vice, rather than in our current understanding of the word], was one of the genteelest men that ever lived.” Ickworth, Suffolk (Accredited Museum)