This dance of mutual dislike continued unabated throughout the 1780s, but the political differences between the king and his heir were gradually whittled away. This was partly because the king’s popularity was slowly increasing and partly because the prince was too occupied by affairs of the heart and purse to concentrate on politics for long enough to do any real damage.
2
Growing and Living
The Prince of Wales grew up without any of the blushing self-consciousness his father had shown in his youth. Prince George was uninhibited and expressive in every way. A child of the age of sensibility, when feeling was taken as a sign of sincerity and tears were a quite acceptable accompaniment to joy or sadness, he was emotionally, physically and verbally unrestrained. Visitors were charmed by his unselfconscious affection. All his life he was kind to threatened and unthreatening creatures: animals, children and his unfortunate and often miserable sisters, with whom he sided and whom he frequently helped in their unequal battles with the king and queen to be allowed to lead lives of their own.
Once into his teens, the prince turned his roving eye on the women around him in the royal household. In 1779, at the age of sixteen, he fell in love with Lady Mary Hamilton, an assistant governess to his sisters. Never stopping to wonder whether she would welcome his attentions, he showered her with seventy-five letters in as many days, assuring her of his devotion and regretting that his rank prevented him from marrying her, at least for the present. Mary Hamilton was one of the few women recorded as refusing the prince’s tumultuous advances. She did so not only because she was shrewd enough to see that the role of a mistress could never end well, but also because her piety and propriety forbade her from succumbing. Prince George registered only temporary regret. Pretty soon he was looking beyond the stultifying court and its virtuous dull courtiers to the much more exciting arenas of the theatres, clubs and racier drawing rooms of the city. There he found all the delicious amorous opportunities that money and rank could put his way.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, after the end of the European wars in 1763 and at the start of large-scale commercial exploitation of Britain’s imperial possessions, money poured into London. The city quickly became the largest in Europe, a place of extravagance, poverty and constant change. After the Act of Settlement limited the power of the crown, political and financial power definitively passed from the court to the city. This, coupled with the fact that the press operated with a freedom and scope unparalleled anywhere else in the world, made London unique as a crucible of change and economic vitality.
Women, the objects of seduction, desire, scandal, poignancy and sympathy in a society where power and money overwhelmingly lay with men, offered some of the most valuable copy the press could find. The free press and the vibrant culture of theatre and display, backed by plenty of cash and a commitment to spend it, combined to produce the first fully fledged commercial culture of celebrity. Actresses and courtesans – who often doubled roles – became stars who could, if they were shrewd enough, rise up the social ranks, make a fortune and, in a few extraordinary cases, marry into the governing class. Those who flourished best were those who could operate without scruple, and live purely for social and commercial advantage. Those who mixed emotion, or even love, with the attention and excitement they were paid to provide, invariably suffered.
The Prince of Wales was keen to get into this glorious male playground as soon as he could after his failure with Mary Hamilton, and quickly fell for the actress Mary Robinson. He watched her playing Perdita in David Garrick’s adaptation of The Winter’s Tale at the Drury Lane Theatre in December 1779 and a few days later began to besiege her with letters, demands and declarations. He snipped off a lock of his hair and despatched it in an envelope on which he wrote ‘to be redeemed’. He sent a miniature of himself. He suggested that she come to an assignation with him, dressed as a boy. They met. Mary Robinson recorded later how sweet and melodious his voice was, how great his charm. The prince promised her £20,000 as soon as he was twenty-one, which was four long years away. Mrs Robinson gave up her husband and her day job, and, for a few months, until George grew bored, she became his mistress. Crowds followed her about London. She spent money lavishly, running up debts of several thousands of pounds. The end came when the prince, having turned his attention to a Scottish adventuress and divorcée, Grace Dalrymple Elliott, abruptly wrote to her to say that they must ‘meet no more’.1
Mrs Robinson held a good hand of cards in the form of the prince’s letters and written promises of cash, and she played it well. She refused as ‘insulting’ an initial bid of £5,000 for the letters from the prince’s advisers, and threatened to leave England and take them with her if a better offer was not forthcoming. Eventually she settled for the £5,000, an annuity of £500 a year and a legacy for her daughter of £250 a year. This was a hefty bill, and the prince had no way to settle it without involving his father. The king was predictably enraged and had to go cap in hand to the prime minister, Lord North, for the money. That this was a humiliating repeat of a request he had made a few years earlier on behalf of his scapegrace brother Prince Henry did not escape him, and it galled him the more since it was now in Henry’s house that the Prince of Wales was carousing away his evenings.
The form of social and private life the prince enjoyed remained substantially the same throughout his life. He didn’t hunt much, because he disliked killing animals, and though he was passionate about his stables and horses, he preferred to watch the racing rather than dashing about on horseback himself. His was an urban culture, even when the seaside charms of Brighton captured his imagination in the mid 1780s: a culture of street strolling, carriage driving, music, mimicry and drinking. In the wider society of the upper classes, the sexual segregation of pastimes increased, especially after the French Revolution, which in Britain killed off fashionable French mores. Though the Prince of Wales dallied in the male world of slumming and prize-fighting and in the clubs that flourished in Britain from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, he tended in his private life to stay true to aristocratic, and particularly Whig, drawing-room culture.
In this, as in many areas of his life, George followed habits that prevailed in Britain before the French Revolutionary Wars of the 1790s. He was a child of the 1760s and 1770s in his habits and pleasures, despite being forbidden by his father from travelling on the continent, which meant that he missed an essential part of aristocratic education and, for many, a continued pleasure of life. This did not change even after the French Revolution. In the 1790s and first decade of the nineteenth century, when young men of the upper classes were developing and inhabiting an increasingly male social and professional world, and the influence of evangelical religion was making headway against the moral laxity of Enlightenment culture, George continued to enjoy mixed and jolly company. He disliked and never adopted the growing division of the day into work and leisure, preferring to scramble things up so that visitors might arrive as he (notionally) went through his accounts or saw to official business. Quite often, wrote the memoirist Nathaniel Wraxall, visitors found him in bed, no matter what the hour, ‘rolling about from side to side in a state approaching to nudity’, and from there, ‘gave audience to his friends and received information of every sort; it constituted his throne, his cabinet, and his council-chamber’.2 Both in the parlour and, in the evening, in the drawing room he always had mixed groups, and enjoyed the company of women, especially comfortable, older women who were complaisant and flattering and took the edge off his boredom.
The prince’s method as a lover was to wear women down with staggeringly lengthy written declarations of his desires and needs. If these failed, or were tossed aside, he was sure to fall ill. He was subject to illness at times of emotional stress throughout his life, and was convinced that it usually started in the mind. In 1799, during a period of emotional strain, he wrote to his mother’s adviser, Dr John Turton, ‘Mine is a very nervous and so far a deli
cate fibre, consequently the disorders of the body in general with me owe their source to the mind.’3 This connection struck seasoned observers, among them Charles James Fox’s nephew Lord Holland, as self-serving. ‘He generally, it seems, assailed the hearts which he wished to carry by exciting their commiserations for his sufferings and their apprehensions for his health,’ Holland wrote wearily in 1806.4
Early in 1784, when he was twenty-one, the prince met Maria Fitzherbert, a twenty-seven-year-old Catholic, twice widowed and extremely devout. Attractive and pleasant-looking, with a warm air, deep brown eyes and the full figure that the prince was partial to, she instantly captured his attention when he spotted her at the opera. George declared his interest immediately, and talked incessantly of her beauty and his love for her. Maria was susceptible to his charm and flattered by the stream of gifts and invitations that he sent to her house in Park Street in Mayfair. She was often in his company and further endeared herself to him by showing herself a good listener and sympathetic to his many complaints. None the less, her piety was unwavering and she resisted all his advances.
George pressed on through the spring and early summer of 1784. Understanding that Maria had religious scruples, he declared that he wished to marry her. Mrs Fitzherbert was well aware that his promises were empty, however. Marriage to the Prince of Wales was forbidden by the terms of the Royal Marriages Act because George was under twenty-five and anyway could not marry without his father’s permission. Beyond that, marriage would debar the prince from the throne, since, by the terms of the 1701 Act of Settlement, he could not marry a Catholic and inherit the crown.
By the summer of 1784, Mrs Fitzherbert was harassed and worn out. She declared her intention to leave the country and stay abroad indefinitely. In response, the prince began to employ the most extreme of the tactics Lord Holland was to observe. First he fell ill and then on 8 July, the night before Mrs Fitzherbert was due to go, he stabbed himself in the chest (or, as another report suggested, he had been bled to relieve his high tension, and then ripped his bandages off to let the blood flow again). Mrs Fitzherbert was persuaded to come to his bedside in Carlton House, where she found him distraught, with blood still dripping from the fresh wound in his chest. Shocked by his condition, she promised to marry him, whereupon the prince was able to sit up in bed and slip a ring on her finger.
As soon as he had Mrs Fitzherbert’s consent, the prince rallied a great deal and declared that he would very soon follow her to France. Before she left the next day, Mrs Fitzherbert wrote a deposition saying that a promise of marriage extracted in such a way was worthless. None the less her agreement placed her under some emotional obligation and, just as importantly, gave the prince the excuse to bombard her with letters.
The moment Mrs Fitzherbert had gone, the prince applied to the king for permission to go abroad, citing his need to economize as the reason. George III chose to take his son’s explanation at face value, refusing to give him permission to travel, as a matter of course, but enthusiastically taking up the matter of the prince’s vast and mounting debts, which were the result of the ‘frivolous and irregular passion’ that directed his conduct.5 The prince had put his own head in this noose, and it only tightened in the following months. Pressing on, the king demanded to know the extent and nature of his son’s debts. Reluctantly, the prince asked his treasurer, Colonel Hotham, for a list and tally to submit to the king. When the account was delivered, it showed that already, only a year after setting up his own household, the prince owed the vast sum of £147,000.
The prince left Hotham’s list on his desk for several months, and by the time it was eventually sent to the king, in March 1785, he had lost interest in it. His only real concern, sitting there, was to write enormous letters to Maria Fitzherbert, who was drifting aimlessly about the continent, her resolve weakened by their almost daily arrival. It was a miserable half-life, as the prince knew very well. Eventually she wavered and gave some sort of assent to his entreaties. A final letter of forty-five pages arrived in France in mid November 1785, accompanied by a little painting of one of the prince’s blue-grey eyes, spookily floating against an azure ground. He was not letting her out of his sight. In his letter, George gave Mrs Fitzherbert a long, undoubtedly specious explanation of why the king would connive at their marriage, and ended with his clarion call: ‘Come then, oh! come, dearest of wives, best & most adored of women, come & for ever crown with bliss him who will thro’ life endeavour to convince you by his love & attention of his wishes to be [the] best of husbands & who will ever remain unto [the] latest moments of his existence, unalterably thine.’6
Maria came back. The two were married on 15 December 1785 by a clergyman sprung from debtors’ prison for the purpose and rewarded not just by the payment of his immediate debts of £500, but by his appointment as a chaplain to the prince, and the promise of a bishopric when George succeeded to the throne. Under canon law and, all-importantly for Maria, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, the marriage was valid; but under English law it was not – a happy situation for the prince, who could thus both have a wife and not have one. Maria, at least, had saved her immortal soul.
So things went on contentedly for a couple of years, the prince in Carlton House, Mrs Fitzherbert, as she continued to be called, in a grand residence round the corner in Pall Mall. They spent most days and evenings, if not nights, together. Despite numerous rumours, it seems unlikely that they had any children, though claims were made at various times that children who lived with them, or with Mrs Fitzherbert alone, were theirs, especially a boy called James Ord and a girl, Mary Anne Smythe, whom Mrs Fitzherbert described as her adopted niece. Mary Anne married the younger son of a peer, a marriage that might lend support to the idea that she was the prince’s daughter. But no real evidence of children appears in what remains of Mrs Fitzherbert’s archive, or elsewhere.
The prince’s new domesticity, together with the splendour of Mrs Fitzherbert’s house, which was redecorated at a cost of £50,000, inevitably led to intense speculation about a possible marriage and to increasing pressure on George’s finances. By mid 1786, he was petitioning his father again to come to his aid, adding insult to the injury of Colonel Hotham’s list, which he had simply disregarded. The king continued to address his son with lofty disdain, using his annoying tactic of addressing the Prince of Wales in the third person, to emphasize the moral distance between them: ‘From everything which has passed between me and the Prince of Wales during these last two years, relative to his embarrassed situation, he must have seen that I hold it impossible even to enter on the consideration of any means to relieve him untill I should receive a sufficient explanation of his past expences, and see a prospect of reasonable security against a continuation of his extravagance.’7
Perhaps the prince did try to economize for a while, at least moving out of London during the summer, which might have suggested a drop in his expenses. In 1786 he took the lease of the house in Brighton that would eventually become the Royal Pavilion. He established Mrs Fitzherbert in a villa nearby and passed the time in quiet seaside pursuits. But by the spring of the following year his finances had not improved and he determined to bypass the king and go directly to Parliament in search of redress. Since his Whig friends were unwilling to raise the issue in Parliament, knowing that it would draw with it questions as to whether the prince was married to a Catholic, which would be disastrous for the opposition cause, George turned to an independent MP who was prepared to bring a motion for relief of his finances to the House. But as soon as this was done, it predictably brought with it the question of the prince’s constitutional status, and thus the question of his marriage. George denied to Fox that he was married and Fox repeated his denial to the House of Commons in good faith, saying that he had His Royal Highness’s ‘direct authority’ for his statement.8
Fox’s emphatic declaration had the required effect. In the spring of 1787 Parliament voted the prince £161,000 to pay his debts, along with £60,000 to
finish Carlton House, and the king added another £10,000 a year to his son’s income from the Civil List. However, when Fox learned that he had been misled, his relationship with the prince, already strained because of Mrs Fitzherbert’s dislike of him, began to falter. The extraordinary events of the following few years eroded it further. By the early 1790s, the opposition had lost all hope that the prince might support it, or bring it into government should he accede to power.
In October 1788, George III suffered a recurrence of the severe stomach pain and breathing difficulties that he had suffered in 1765 and again in 1787. This time, however, he did not recover after a few days, as he had before. His illness grew rapidly worse, with continued stomach pains, swollen feet, yellow eyes and brown urine. These symptoms were accompanied by acute mental disturbance, constant, rapid talking, hallucinations and the utmost misery. A stream of doctors came and went, baffled and terrified. The king could find no solace in music, and his vision began to go. One day he burst into tears and cried out that ‘He wished to God he might die, for he was going to be mad.’9
George IV Page 3
