The exact nature of George III’s illness may never be known. Regarded as madness at the time, it was retrospectively diagnosed as an organic disease, porphyria, by Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter in 1969.10 Although Hunter and Macalpine were psychiatrists rather than experts in porphyria or any other organic disease, this diagnosis was seized on by those who regarded mental illness as a stigma that cast a taint on the royal family. It was widely accepted for half a century, but recently the pendulum has swung back towards a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. The diagnosis is immaterial. The effects of physical and mental illness could not and cannot be separated; the king was both ill and mad.
During the next three months, a period which came to be known as the Regency Crisis, Parliament struggled as much as the king’s doctors with the consequences of his illness and with his complete inability to carry out his duties. In such circumstances it was accepted that a regent who had full royal powers had to be installed. That of course meant the Prince of Wales, who was the last person the prime minister, William Pitt, wanted. By November 1788, Pitt could no longer put off the issue. Despite his popularity in the country, the prime minister was a fairly isolated figure, personally disliked by those around him. He could not count on a parliamentary majority. Once he became Regent, the Prince of Wales would acquire the royal prerogative to dismiss and form governments, and it was widely assumed that he would dismiss Pitt and bring in the opposition, with Fox at its head.
Given Mrs Fitzherbert’s dislike of Fox and the prince’s subsequent political behaviour, this assumption may have been over-optimistic on the opposition’s part. Pitt skilfully stalled for time by adjourning Parliament on 20 November. When it reassembled in December, Fox overplayed his hand in the House of Commons debate, declaring that the prince had the same right to assume royal powers as he would if the king were dead, a position that shocked Parliament and was condemned by much of the press as unconstitutional. The debate dragged on, and Pitt succeeded in getting sufficient restrictions placed on any regency to make it likely that he would remain in power. On 12 February 1789, the Regency Bill passed the Commons and went up to the Lords. At that very moment, to the astonishment of his family, George III was declared by his doctors to be ‘in a progressive state of amendment’.11 In the following days he began to recover. Pitt survived, and went on to head the Tory administration until February 1801. The opposition had lost its chance.
The king was weakened and submissive after his ordeal, and wept piteously when the Prince of Wales, accompanied by his brother Frederick, Duke of York, arrived at Kew to see him on 23 February 1789. Queen Charlotte, however, was implacably angry that her son had allowed Parliament to debate the question of the king’s illness. She did not know that drafts of a speech accepting a regency had already been written when the king began to recover. Had she done so she might never have forgiven her son. As it was, numerous slights of protocol were directed towards the Prince of Wales and his brother Frederick. They retaliated by petulant acts of family disobedience: talking loudly throughout the service of thanksgiving for the king’s recovery in April, and ostentatiously absorbing themselves in pleasure and dissipation. It did the Prince of Wales no good, and his behaviour dragged the opposition down with him.
In the long battle between father and son, the king was now definitely on top. His illness and frailty, and the humility with which he accepted them, endeared him greatly to the public. George III was more popular than he had been since his accession, while the prince was regarded as a loose-living sybarite, careless in his life and his friends and unfeeling towards his own father.
Partly to get away from his family, partly as an exercise in damage limitation, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York left London and travelled up to the north of England, where they stayed at Wentworth Woodhouse and then Castle Howard as guests of Lord Fitzwilliam and the Earl of Carlisle respectively. Despite the prominence of Fitzwilliam and Carlisle in Whig circles, Prince George ‘was properly attentive & civil to those who were adverse in their politicks, so as rather to please than to offend them’, Edmund Burke wrote approvingly to the prince’s equerry, Captain Payne.12 The Times reported that he garnered ‘great affection from all ranks of people’ wherever he went.13
This change in sentiment was only temporary. Back in London, the prince was once again sidelined and shunned at Windsor and Kew and pilloried in the press for womanizing and drunkenness. Now described equivocally in The Times as a man ‘who at all times would prefer a girl and a bottle, to politics and a sermon’, he gave his critics plenty of evidence for his profligacy. Drunk at Boodle’s club, hauled out of Ranelagh Gardens for misbehaviour, widely rumoured to be married as well as womanizing, hanging out with reprobates whose escapades filled the newspapers, accused of rigging the odds at Newmarket, arriving hours late for his own levees and dinners at Carlton House: it was at this time that the caricaturist James Gillray portrayed him splayed out drunk after dinner in A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion. In this famous print, published in 1792, the prince’s immense stomach fills the centre of the picture, as he leans back, waistcoat unbuttoned and bursting, and picks his teeth with a fork. In obvious contrast to Gillray’s depictions of the king and queen as austere and parsimonious, if familial and loving, the prince is alone and degraded. Decanters and a wine glass stand on one side, an overflowing chamber pot and a cascade of bills on the other, and empty wine bottles lie scattered under the chair. The prince stares defiantly out of the picture, much as he must have tried to face down his father’s disapproval.
Relations between the Prince of Wales and his father did not improve. The king could find no way to love his heir, and had no pressing need to do so. The mood in the country was on his side. The French Revolution, which began a few months after the king’s illness, quickly engendered an upsurge in patriotism, and a respect for both the monarchy and the dutiful, austere, self-regulated and uncomplaining way of life that George III exemplified.
The Revolution, and then the long war against France, which would last for nearly two decades, resulted in a intense hostility to what were seen as loose French-style morals and compounded the backlash against the prince. A new kind of British masculinity was formed in these years, which in the following decades would be solidified in the forges of empire and in the notion of service to monarch and country. Despite his intelligence, generosity and charm, the Prince of Wales was a poor avatar for this emerging form of Britishness. He represented its opposite; his father, who had declared in his first speech to Parliament that he ‘gloried in the name of Briton’, was discovered to embody it already.
Few reactions of the Prince of Wales to the early years of the French Revolution survive. Charles James Fox had welcomed the outbreak of the Revolution by declaring, ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!’14 In his maiden speech to the House of Lords in May 1792, the prince spoke against increasing censorship of the press and a proclamation against seditious writings; but his mood hardened with that of the country and the government after the imprisonment of the French royal family, the September Massacres and the abolition of the French monarchy on 21 September 1792. When news of Louis XVI’s execution on 21 January 1793 reached the prince, the full implications of the Revolution for his own family and what he described a few months later as ‘THE VERY EXISTANCE OF EVERY PRINCE AT THIS MOMENT’ hit home.15 The next day he wrote to his mother: ‘I am not equal to meeting any of you this evening, overpowered with the shocking & horrid events of France.’16
After war was declared on Britain by France on 1 February 1793, the prince followed its course avidly, but his hopes of being allowed to serve in the army in anything more than a ceremonial capacity were soon dashed. The rapprochement with his parents occasioned by the guillotining of Louis XVI was little more than skin deep, and he had to follow the great events of the next twenty years from the sidelines. The change in his domestic political affiliation, however, was soon evident. H
e became an unashamed supporter of the Tory government. He turned against abolition of the slave trade (and thus irretrievably against Fox), heartily endorsing a speech in the House of Lords that attacked the abolitionist politician William Wilberforce, and began to measure politics against a single standard: whether it was, in his opinion, for or against monarchical principles.17
Despite the prince’s new approbation of the austere William Pitt, his own private behaviour changed little in the years between the Regency Crisis and the mid 1790s. His debts rose inexorably, to almost £630,000. His relationship with Mrs Fitzherbert became rocky and fractured. After five or six years, the eye which he had sent her painted and encased in gold when she was in France had begun to wander. It settled, after a couple of adventures, on the actress Anna Maria Crouch, who had come into fame acting Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera. This was a role that had form. Half a century earlier, the original Polly, Lavinia Fenton, had parlayed her stage role as the moll of the dashing highwayman Macheath into the altogether more solid position as the mistress and then wife of the Duke of Bolton. Perhaps fancying himself as another Macheath surrounded by adoring women, the prince pursued Anna Maria enthusiastically. Astutely, she negotiated, and received a very large fee before her surrender. Gossip had it that she made £10,000 on the deal, and that the prince, in the end, slept with her only once.
Mrs Fitzherbert could and did forgive the prince his dalliances. Things were patched up; but greater difficulty arrived in 1793 in the shape of the Countess of Jersey, an experienced and older woman who was closer to the prince’s day-to-day life.
Lady Jersey was in her early forties and married with nine children. She knew the ways of the court, where her elderly husband had held various positions. The memoirist Nathaniel Wraxall described her as a woman of ‘irresistible seduction and fascination’.18 It was soon clear that she was more than a match for Mrs Fitzherbert, who had none of her controlling allure and was unable to keep her temper when hurt. The prince was in the mood for change and wanted to be told what to do. He seized on Lady Jersey’s suggestion that Mrs Fitzherbert was the cause of his unpopularity. Without her, Lady Jersey pointed out, he would easily be able to get rid his massive debts: all he had to do was declare publicly his intention of getting married.
After some hesitation, the prince agreed. He wrote two letters to Mrs Fitzherbert on the same day in June 1794. The first began with an evasive formula, ‘My dear love, I have just receiv’d a letter from my sister by the coach this evening, desiring me to come to Windsor, which …’ He signed off, ‘Adieu, my dear love, excuse haste, Ever thine’, but followed this with a blunt message saying that he would never enter her house again. Mrs Fitzherbert wrote on the prince’s second letter, ‘Lady Jersey’s influence’, and left Brighton immediately.19
The prince professed his misery at this unreasonable behaviour. ‘I really think myself too ill used,’ he wrote to his equerry Captain Payne in July, adding: ‘God knows what I have done to merit it’;20 but the break allowed him, a month later, to go to the king and declare his intention of what George III declared ‘a more creditable line of life’ – that is, to get married.21 He had even chosen a bride, his first cousin, twenty-six-year-old Princess Caroline of Brunswick.
3
Loving and Hating
Although, in 1791, the Prince of Wales had declared to his brother Frederick that he would never marry unless ‘I preferr’d the woman I was going to marry to every creature existing in the world, and knew enough of the disposition of my wife to think it would form the happiness and not the misery of my future days’, three years later he disregarded this certain self-knowledge entirely.1 As soon as he had decided to get married publicly and legally, George made a hasty choice and settled on a bride without either the customary half-disguised diplomatic visit of scrutiny or, apparently, any serious preliminary research at all.
If it occurred to the prince that Caroline of Brunswick was a human being he would have to live with, talk to and behave well towards, rather than an overdraft reduction scheme and the means of delivering an heir, he did not show it. Contempt, blame and self-pity were the emotions that predominated in his conduct from the moment he decided to get married and throughout the debacle of his marriage itself. His vaunted condescension, kindness and charm were very rarely in evidence.
Just how the prince settled on Princess Caroline from among the available European Protestant princesses is not clear. Certainly his mother and father had nothing to do with it: the prince announced his choice at the same time as his intention. The king was delighted at an alliance of cousins, calling it ‘the only proper alliance’,2 but the queen was horrified, convinced by her own enquiries that Caroline was lewd and indecent. Writing to her brother Charles, she described Caroline as ‘a woman I do not recommend at all’.3
Surprisingly, it took four months after the prince’s announcement of his choice before his envoy James Harris arrived in Brunswick to make the formal request for Princess Caroline’s hand. Harris was a seasoned diplomat and a man who knew Prince George well. From the moment he saw Princess Caroline, he was filled with foreboding. She was small, plump, full-chested and fair-haired, but neither pretty nor complaisant in the manner that attracted the prince. Over the next few days, Harris became progressively more horrified at her behaviour: she was from their first meeting boisterous, uninhibited and outspoken. She had little time for etiquette and revelled in flirting, dancing and intimate revelations.
Harris, however, was a diplomat who stuck to his brief. He was not required to report any of this, to advise the prince against his choice or to take steps to school the princess in how she would be required to behave when she was married to the heir to the throne of Great Britain. His instructions were simply to demand Caroline’s hand and escort her to London. None the less, he attempted to tell the princess what might be in store, strenuously recommending ‘perfect silence on all subjects for six months after her arrival’ and an approach to the prince that had ‘softness, enduring, and caresses’ at its heart.4
Caroline knew that she could not expect fidelity from the prince, and cheerfully told Harris that she was ‘determined never to appear jealous’, but her impetuosity boded ill.5 The prince was not going to alter his way of life: a tranquil marriage would depend on how he was managed. Exactly the same could be said of Caroline, but the onus was all on her. A prince could behave as he wished; his wife must behave as was expected of her. This double standard, which was simply a magnification of wider mores, was inherent in the arrangement. Of Princess Caroline and Prince George, only one was obliged to change.
Caroline was ill-equipped to endure loneliness and lacked the ability to anticipate or plan for the long term. Harris noted in his diary, ‘On summing up Princess Caroline’s character to-day’, that she had ‘no judgment’ and was ‘caught by the first impression, led by the first impulse … loving to talk, and prone to confide’. Harris knew that the prince would dislike Caroline’s disregard for etiquette and would make no effort to get her impulsiveness under control. ‘In short,’ he concluded gloomily, ‘the Princess in the hands of a steady and sensible man would probably turn out well, but where it is likely she will find faults perfectly analogous to her own, she will fail.’6
On the boat over to Britain, Harris had to entreat Caroline to wash ‘all over’, explaining that the prince was ‘very delicate’ and would expect ‘a long and very careful toilette de propreté’.7 Washed and well dressed, Caroline arrived at Greenwich on 5 April 1795. Her escort to St James’s Palace turned out to be none other than Lady Jersey, who had been appointed her lady-in-waiting and whom she already knew to be the prince’s mistress.
At the palace, Caroline waited with Harris for the prince to appear. When he eventually came into the room, George took a look at his bride-to-be, who had followed Harris’s advice and was attempting to kneel before him, ‘raised her (gracefully enough), and embraced her’. Then, after a few words, he turned round, retreated to
a far corner of the room and said to Harris, ‘I am not well; pray get me a glass of brandy.’ Harris demurred, saying, ‘Sir, had you not better have a glass of water?’ The prince lost his temper and left the room, saying, ‘No; I will go directly to the Queen.’8 Poor Caroline was left alone and told Harris in humiliated retaliation that the prince was very fat and not nearly as handsome as his portrait had suggested.
From this very bad start, things grew quickly worse. The prince was so drunk at the wedding on 8 April that he had to be helped into the Chapel Royal, and seemed on the point of tears throughout the ceremony. Report had it that he spent the wedding night collapsed in the fireplace, only climbing into bed with his bride in the morning. The prince told Harris that at that point Caroline had said, ‘Ah mon dieu qu’il est gros!’, which convinced him that she was not a virgin because ‘how should she know this without a previous means of comparison’?9
Luckily, the princess was obviously pregnant by the last week in June. The prince claimed to have been repelled by his wife’s uncleanliness and only to have slept with her three times. Her pregnancy not only released him from the marital bed, but also delighted Queen Charlotte. For a while relations between the prince and his mother were warmer and closer as a result.
Indeed, from the time of his marriage, the prince’s running battles with his parents, and particularly with the king, sometimes now dropped into the background. Although the prince’s feud with his father remained a central drama of his family life, it was now joined, and often superseded, by his growing hatred of his wife. The impulsive decision to marry turned into a long nightmare of rage and regret in which both husband and wife lost standing, happiness and tranquillity.
George IV Page 4
