Dark Days of Georgian Britain

by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)

  Vaughan was, in fact, a corrupt officer who was setting up crimes to take the reward. He knew the date and time of the crime because he had organised it. He was caught by the evidence of Constable William Barrett. Barrett and Vaughan were drinking with John ‘Jack-a-Dandy’ Donnelly in the Falcon inn and Vaughan was told of a raid on Poole’s house to steal the cloth – the ‘broady’. It was agreed that Vaughan would facilitate the burglary by scaring Poole and making it easier to break into the house. Donnelly would escape, and the others would be captured, Donnelly would get a reward and would then leave the country.

  Vaughan lost more than his reward. Due to the diligence of fellow officers and John Donnelly’s statements at the trial, Vaughan was subsequently found guilty of abetting a theft of more than 40 shillings, having avoided a greater charge on a technicality. Vaughan was already doomed however, as this was not the first time that he had been caught in 1816.

  Vaughan was about to receive five years’ hard labour for organising a burglary at Mrs Ann McDonald’s house in Holborn. This time it was a onelegged criminal called William Drake who had sold information to Vaughan. Young boys were often taken by thieves to make entry into houses, and 13-year-old William Wood claimed in court that Drake had sent him for money from Vaughan to get the four thieves ‘lush’ (drunk) before the crime; jemmies and skeleton keys were also provided, and Vaughan arranged for Mrs McDonald to be out drinking on the night of the robbery. The first attempt was aborted when one of the robbers failed to turn up; this would have reduced the reward. After the robbery, Vaughan’s corrupt comrade, Robert McKay, planted a ring on one of them. McKay put his hand in his pocket and exclaimed ‘so you have a phorney (ring)’ to which the accused answered, ‘I do now, coz you have just put it there.’ It turned out that this was a useful precaution, for the amateur thieves were too scared to actually steal anything themselves, having been scared by the rustling of the trees.

  It was the Hatton Garden officers Limbrick and Read who secured the conviction. This included chasing Vaughan when he skipped bail, apprehending him in his uncle’s house with two pistols and a notebook listing his conspiratorial activities. There is no evidence of any of Vaughan’s earlier cases being reviewed. In 1814, Vaughan’s evidence had condemned three children to death for burglary – Moses Solomon, Joseph Burrell and John Morris. The first two boys were 9 years of age and John was 8. They were respited; but Vaughan was quite clearly ready to see them executed for a crime that he may well have organised. It was certainly all about the money.

  Chapter 10

  The Disgusting Prince Regent?

  According to Thomas Scott of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the Prince of Wales, George Augustus Frederick, was a ‘British Prince, in the exercise of his father’s venerable authority, assaulted and insulted by a lawless multitude, in defiance of the majesty of the laws and every sense of decency and justice’. Scott then compared the forgiving nature of the prince to that of Christ himself. Reverend Scott thought enough of himself to publish his sermons, and this one was in response to the so-called assassination attempt on the Regent in January 1817.

  George, who had been ruling as Regent since his father’s illness in 1811, attended the state opening of parliament and gave the customary speech. It was a lacklustre and indistinct effort, but the loyal Ladies Monthly Magazine suggested that it was the poor morale of the people that had depressed the prince too much for him to produce anything better. It would have seemed a very generous interpretation to most people in Britain. By 1811, the Prince Regent had been unpopular with the ordinary people for nearly twenty years, and much of the establishment only pretended to like him because it was politically necessary.

  The prince finished his mumbling in the House of Lords (‘Excellent Speech’ – Morning Post) and started his journey to Carlton House. As the coach arrived at St James Park, an ominously large crowd blocked its way. It seemed that the people, in their third year of terrible economic conditions, were inflamed by the ostentatious mode of transport used:

  The state carriage, with the eight beautiful cream coloured horses, ornamented with light blue ribbons; the Master of the Horse’s carriage, with six fine black horses, ornamented with red ribbons; and two other Royal carriages, with six bays, ornamented with red ribbons…His Royal Highness wore regimentals, with his splendid Orders of the Ribbons of the Garter.

  Hails of stones appeared, along with insults and attacks on the horse guards and the horses themselves. A bullet-sized hole punctured the window of the prince’s coach. There were dents in the protective copper panels, added after a similar attack on his father in 1795. The Prince Regent arrived home in a panic and summoned the Home Secretary, who added insult to injury by not turning up for a very long time.

  The newspapers raged the next morning. ‘HORRIBLE AND TREASONABLE ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE THE PRINCE REGENT!’ was one example. Even before an investigation started, the Morning Post already knew who was responsible. ‘There is no doubt that this is a deep laid plot, the offspring of the doctrines, if not the very conception of our mischievous reformers.’ On that very day, the parliamentary reformers Henry Hunt and Lord Thomas Cochrane were presenting a petition to the House, and a few days earlier the revolutionary Spencean Philanthropists were put in prison awaiting trial for high treason. It is not certain which of these groups were the ‘mischievous people’ the newspaper was worrying about; as Hunt had spoken at the Spa Fields meeting in 1816 which had led to the Spenceans being imprisoned, it is probable that both groups were in the frame.

  The main suspect was a Thomas Scott (no relation to the Reverend who had denounced him from the pulpit). This Thomas Scott resided in Goodge Street, but did not fit the archetype that the newspaper needed. The paper was perplexed to report that he was a minor property owner who did not need to work (in the Regency there was a big moral difference between not working and not needing to work). Despite having soft hands that had seen no manual work, Scott was no friend of the establishment. He was not going to take his arrest without protest; the slightly less deferential Morning Chronicle reported that Scott pleaded not guilty, but understood that somebody had to be arrested, so it was clearly going to be him. He insinuated that some informer would receive a reward for his indictment.

  The evidence against Scott was not very convincing. There had been two bullet shaped holes in the carriage. No bullet was found in the coach. No gun was heard discharging. No smoke was seen. Rather than conclude that the event had not happened, it was decided that the weapon of choice must have been an airgun.

  An attempt to make the charge stick came a week later at Bow Street Magistrates. Scott, ‘a small robust man, with the look of a stable keeper’ was in the groaning, hissing and stone-throwing crowd and the witness heard somebody call the Prince Regent a ‘----------- –------------’, and to ‘pull the ---------- out!’ The witness saw Scott throwing stones; Scott said he had not. Another witness heard the mob, including Scott, hurl abuse at the Life Guards: ‘Piccadilly Butchers’, a name they had gained during earlier riots in 1811. Another witness testified that Scott had attacked no soldiers; Scott himself commented that it would have been foolish to assault a soldier armed with a drawn sabre.

  Despite the underwhelming evidence, he was sent to the King’s Bench Prison to be examined on the more serious crime of high treason. Scott did not seem at all surprised. Judge Hicks allowed him to see relatives in prison, but no strangers, thus implying that Scott was part of a plot of desperate men who might try to rescue him.

  It was standing room only on Saturday 1 February when Scott was examined. Lord James Murray, in the coach with the Prince Regent, used his military credibility to convince people that he recognised bullet holes in glass when he saw them; they had been fired by a stick gun from above, possibly from a tree. Yes, the holes were pea sized, and no, the fact that they were fired downward did not mean that the bullets were in the coach. The glass could not be inspected as it had shattered completely when hit
by more stones. No other witness was able to link Scott with any crime and the second examination was concluded.

  The case against Scott collapsed in the third examination on 5 February. Some Life Guards disputed whether there were bullets at all; Scott was seen with an umbrella, protecting himself from the horses. He was bailed for £400, which he was able to find, and was indicted instead for aiding and abetting a riot. The judge lamented the fact that, out of a huge mob, only one person had been arrested.

  Why was the Prince Regent so unpopular? Why were his Life Guards so unpopular? Why were the horses so hated? The horses were fed with better quality oats than many of the people, now in their second decade of high food prices. The Life Guards were part of the victors of Waterloo, but were now seen as an oppressive force. However, it was the prince who was really unpopular, and had been so for two decades. The government then made itself unpopular by suspending habeas corpus, which protected a person’s right not to be imprisoned without trial. Sidmouth genuinely believed that the unrest and misery in the country was about to translate into conspiracy and insurrection.

  Respectable newspapers of the time were a poor source for criticisms of ‘Fat Prinny’. Not only did they fail to criticise; they rarely made the mistake of repeating insults in order to condemn them. The radical press that had grown up since the French Revolution was different – they were both braver and more foolhardy. In response to a particularly obsequious report in the Morning Post in March 1812, John and Leigh Hunt in the Examiner produced an angry, sarcastic and insulting editorial. ‘Why’, said the brothers on page one, ‘were the papers full of the most trivial information about the prince?’ It started with a not so guarded comment about greed and parasitism and a quite graphic image.

  The Prince Regent is in everybody’s mouth

  If a person takes a newspaper, the first thing he does when he reads it, is to give out the old groan and say - what of the Prince Regent now?

  The Examiner continued its parody of a world where the Regent was everything, with a description of a Prinny-dominated evening:

  At dinner the Prince Regent quite eclipses the goose or the calf’s head; the tea table rings of the Prince Regent. If the company go to the theatre to see ‘The Hypocrite’…they cannot help thinking about the Prince Regent…People, in their nightcap, will see something to remind them of the Prince Regent.

  They finished with pure insults rather than mere innuendo:

  That this Breather of Eloquence could not say a few decent extempore words – if we are to judge at least from what he said to his regiment on its embarkation to Portugal! That this Conqueror of Hearts was the disappointer of hopes! That this Exciter of Desire—this Adonis in loveliness, was a corpulent man of fifty!— In short, this delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable, honourable, virtuous, true, and immortal PRINCE, was a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country, or the respect of posterity.

  To sum up: Prinny was a stupid, unattractive, cowardly, fat, debt-ridden, mendacious, gambling womaniser, with appalling friends and no redeeming achievements. The government’s desire to strike back was understandable.

  When their editorial was read back to the brothers Hunt at Bow Street in December 1812 they pleaded not guilty to libel. The prosecution case was that this was a deliberate planned attack of such falsity and ferocity that there could be no defence, especially to the assertion that the prince had done nothing at all for his country. Lord Brougham, for the defence argued that this was an unimportant, hastily written article in an obscure magazine, and that the government and the prince should ignore such ‘small shots’ as these.

  Brougham was unsuccessful. Both brothers received two-year prison sentences. John Hunt was dispatched to Coldbath Fields in London, and Leigh Hunt to the New Jail in Surrey. Both were fined £500, but still had enough money to live in reasonable comfort in a prison system where anything was available for cash. Leigh Hunt was visited by Byron and both men had the vocal support of Shelley and Keats. Despite the libel conviction, and the realisation that they would never be able to write about the prince ever again, many people realised that their comments were substantially true. His unpopularity continued. Prinny could pass 10,000 people in his coach, as he did in 1812, to a dead silence that said more than the traditional groaning and hissing.

  Was he the repulsive specimen that the Hunt brothers portrayed? His excessive lifestyle took a toll quite early. Caricatures by Gilray and Cruikshank laying out Prinny’s weaknesses were on open sale in the Regency. In 1792, he is represented as a fat spherical object that moves around on a board with wheels. Prinny is a debauched physical specimen in another Gilray print, ‘A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion’. The Prince is slumped in his chair, with unpaid bills and full chamber pots around him, picking his teeth with a fork. Dice and lists of horses at Newmarket races show his addiction to gambling; his coat of arms is a crossed knife and fork and he has medicine for stinking breath and piles next to him. Those looking carefully would see the name of two quack medicines designed to ease the symptoms of venereal disease.

  Was he a libertine? He had mistresses throughout his life. This would make him no different to many other aristocratic men, including Wellington, the hero of Waterloo. The use of taxpayer’s money was the main difference. His first mistress was Mary Robinson, an actress to whom he gave extravagant gifts of money. Later she used his love letters to blackmail him. Grace Elliott was a scandalous member of the court set, by whom the prince may have had an illegitimate child. Lady Melbourne also had an affair with the Prince of Wales during the period 1780 to 1784. At the same time as Lady Melbourne, Elizabeth Armistead, wife of his friend and political ally Charles James Fox, was the prince’s mistress. Later, as king, George gave Elizabeth a pension of £500 per year. Frances, Lady Jersey, was his mistress when he married Princess Caroline of Brunswick for money in 1795.

  In the period of his regency, his main paramour was Isabella, Lady Hartford, who lasted until he became king in 1820. His affair with her was common knowledge and satirical cartoons could be bought on the street for pennies. Cartoons show them on a new style bicycle, the velocipede, going on a journey from ‘Wales to Hertford’. Another shows the prince handing over the content of the privy purse to his lover at her home at Manchester House. In the eyes of the establishment, the prince’s sin was not his behaviour, but his unwillingness to show any discretion.

  He treated his wife appallingly and did not hide it. In 1795 he had married Caroline of Brunswick only because his father promised to pay off his debt of £670,000 which had been accumulated over a mere seven years. He graciously allowed the taxpayer to pay £52,000 for a wedding that he did not want, was drunk on the day and extremely drunk on his wedding night. Lady Jersey, his mistress, was appointed the Queen’s Lady of the Bedchamber to humiliate Caroline and to spy on her. In 1806 he urged the government to launch the mis-named ‘Delicate Investigation’ to find out whether Caroline had produced an illegitimate child with her butler. Even when exonerated, her access to Charlotte, their only child, was restricted, and when Charlotte died in 1817 after an agonizing fifty-one hours of childbirth, the prince refused to tell Caroline and failed to attend their daughter’s funeral because, the newspapers claimed, he was ‘overcome with grief’.

  Caroline did not know of her own child’s death immediately because she had moved to Italy with her lover, Bartolomeo Pergami, and £35,000 from the taxpayer. Caroline enjoyed a lavish and lascivious lifestyle in Milan but claimed to be living the simple life – promenades, theatre, reading, – with her platonic companion Pergami. These lies were not believed by anybody in Britain. Yet she was still more popular than the Regent.

  When Charlotte died, George was determined to remove her mother from the line of succession. He spent £30,000 on spies to collect evidence of t
he queen’s adultery. The quality of the witnesses and their bought evidence was so poor that the findings of the ‘Milan Commission’ were rejected in 1819, bringing disrepute to the prince and the government. A famous cartoon of Caroline and Pergami in the bath was bought widely on the streets, even if it did contradict the prince’s whispering that she never bathed and smelled appallingly.

  When he became king in 1820, George continued to persecute his wife. He regurgitated the adultery case against Pergami and tried to use an Act of Parliament to divorce her. When she was banned from George’s coronation in 1821 (cost: £243,000) it caused pro-Caroline riots in the streets from the poor, who had no reason to support the spendthrift princess. Throughout the Regency and during his reign, support for Caroline was mostly a proxy for hatred of George. So, on the charge of womaniser, the jury is still out, but he can be called out as a cowardly and callous husband and a roaring hypocrite. Jane Austen disliked the prince – but still found it convenient to dedicate Emma (1815) to him. In 1813 she showed her support for Princess Caroline in a letter to a friend: ‘Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman and because I hate her Husband.’

  Was he a gambler? In an aristocratic world where excessive gambling was common, Prinny stood out as one of the most extravagant. While other members of the aristocracy would blow their brains out after suffering massive losses, George just asked for more money, and got it.

  Was he a poor soldier? He never actually led soldiers into battle, but his constitutional position precluded that. He was made a Colonel in the 10th Hussars, with his promotion backdated a year to ensure his precedence over others of the same rank. He enjoyed his review of the Hussars every year in August at Belle Vue Fields in Brighton and liked going on manoeuvres in tents, but his tent was especially luxurious. He also enthusiastically reviewed the various county militia at the annual Brighton camp or Wimbledon common. To reward the Life Guards and Blues, who bravely led the cavalry charge at Waterloo, he made himself their Captain General. He also enjoyed redesigning uniforms for the army. In 1811 he simplified some British army uniforms, while exempting his own, perhaps not coincidentally. So perhaps it would be unfair to call him a bad soldier, but he was certainly a dabbler and a fantasist, with the public paying the bill.