His early death guaranteed Octavius an especially privileged place in the king’s heart. Fixed for ever in an eternal, sunny and complaisant childhood, he had never grown up to disappoint or frustrate his father. The comparison with his surviving brothers was, in George’s mind, only too apparent. Announcing the news of Octavius’s death to Prince William, the king informed him bleakly that ‘it has pleased God to put an end very unexpectedly to the most amiable as well as the most attached child a parent could have. May I find those I have as warmly attached as he was,’ he concluded meaningfully, ‘and I cannot expect more.’52
*
There was little doubt in the king’s mind which of his sons failed most profoundly to reach the high standard of affection and trust he believed he had enjoyed with Octavius. As the Prince of Wales approached adulthood, the king looked in vain for evidence of the mature deliberation in thought and behaviour that he expected from his heir. Instead, the prince seemed determined to provoke him. His costly affair with the actress Mary Robinson was followed by a succession of liaisons bound to invoke his father’s disapproval. His relationship with the divorced Grace Elliot may have produced a daughter; others were briefer, more fleeting moments, generally with worldly, experienced women not averse to an indulgent flirtation with the heir to the throne. It soon became clear that the prince’s love affairs tended to follow a familiar pattern. Most were with women older than himself, a preference that was to guide his choice of partners until the very end of his life. They began with an outburst of passionate intensity on his part, accompanied by extravagant and theatrical declarations. The thrill of pursuit, and the opportunities for extreme and self-dramatising emotion that went with it, was the aspect of an affair that the prince seems most to have enjoyed. Once he had won over the object of his desire, he quickly grew bored, and sought to disentangle himself as rapidly and surgically as possible. He had no compunction in allowing others – his friends, members of his household, his brothers – to act as bearers of the inevitable bad news to the superannuated loved one. Those around him were also expected to shield him from any adverse consequences of his actions; it was they, not the prince, by now usually involved with someone new, who negotiated with angry husbands and ex-lovers, many of whom often hoped for some material compensation as a result of their intimate connection with royalty.
The prince’s affair with the wife of Count Hardenberg, a Hanoverian diplomat, was typical of the relationships he pursued as a young man. Mme Hardenberg was some years his senior, a polished veteran of European courts who caught his eye at St James’s, where he spotted her playing cards with his sisters. He thought her ‘divinely pretty’ and when she did not reject his attentions, he was smitten with a desire that, in its early stages at least, was typically intense. ‘From that moment,’ he wrote to his brother Frederick in July 1781, ‘the fateful though delightful passion arose in my bosom for her, which has made me since the most miserable and wretched of men.’ Although he ‘dropped every other connection of whatever sort and devoted myself entirely to this angelic little woman’, she would not consent to become his lover. ‘O, but did you but know how much I adore her, how I love her, how I would sacrifice every earthly thing to her. By heavens, I shall go distracted; my brain will split.’ Showing the kind of application that his father found so lacking in all his other activities, the prince diligently persevered until, finally, he achieved his goal. ‘O my beloved brother, I enjoyed beforehand the pleasures of Elysium.’ All went well for a while, until, inevitably, her husband discovered the affair. The prince panicked, wrote to the count denying everything, and begged the king to give him leave to go abroad. The letter containing the king’s firm refusal arrived at almost the same time as a note from Mme Hardenberg, ‘saying she hoped I had not forgot my vows’, and demanding that he ‘run off with her that night’.
At that moment, the prince admitted to Frederick: ‘I, in a manner lost my senses entirely.’ He expected no sympathy from the king. ‘You know our father’s severe disposition,’ he reminded his brother; ‘everything that was shocking was to be expected from him.’ Instead he threw himself upon the queen. ‘My misery was such that I went under the promise of the greatest secrecy and confessed the whole truth to her. I fainted. She cried excessively, and felt for me very much.’ In the midst of so much Sturm und Drang, Charlotte took control, sending one of the prince’s entourage to tell Mme Hardenberg that ‘an unforeseen accident’ meant her lover would not now be joining her to elope. ‘The queen only begged me to allow her to tell the king, on condition he took no part in it,’ the prince told Frederick. He did not know whether she had kept her promise; probably not, since George immediately sent for Count Hardenberg and his wife, dismissed them from the court and sent them back to Germany.53
It was there, a few months later, that Frederick met Mme Hardenberg at a masquerade. She followed him around all evening ‘in so striking a manner that everyone remarked on it’, took his arm when he was talking to someone else, and after dancing with him, ‘whispered me that if there was nobody in the next room, she would go with me there. Now,’ Frederick told his brother, ‘I think that is speaking in pretty plain terms.’ The prince, he thought, should count himself lucky to be rid of her.54
The Hardenberg episode did little to improve relations between the king and his heir. George was deeply embarrassed by his son’s conduct, angered by his refusal to reform it and frustrated by his total indifference to the impression he created. ‘It is almost certain now that some unpleasant mention of you is daily to be found in the papers,’ he had written to the prince in May 1781. This was very painful for him, but he was, he declared, prepared to overlook all if his son would agree to follow a different course of life. ‘I wish to live with you as a friend, but then, by your behaviour you must deserve it. If I did not state these things, I should not fulfil my duty either to my God or to my country.’ It was the prince’s job to set a good example in the high rank that had been allotted him, as the king himself had endeavoured to do. The title of ‘heir apparent’ did not excuse its bearer from attention to the moral duties; on the contrary, it ‘ought to be a means of restoring decency in this kingdom’ and thus required especially upright conduct. He hoped that ‘when you have read this over’ the prince would acknowledge the honesty of his intentions. He was, he assured him, ‘an affectionate father, trying to save his son from perdition’.55
The prince was unconvinced. In his father’s attitude he saw not paternal concern but anger, irritation and a desire to thwart him at every opportunity. ‘The king is excessively cross and ill-tempered and uncommonly grumpy,’ he told Frederick in September 1781, ‘snubbing everybody in everything. We are not upon the very best terms.’56 Any feelings of gratitude he had felt for his mother in helping him wriggle out of his Hardenberg difficulties had evaporated by the autumn, when he found her as hard to deal with as his father. ‘I am sorry to have to tell you,’ he wrote to Frederick in October, ‘that the unkind behaviour of Their Majesties, but in particular the queen, is such that is hardly bearable.’ They had recently had a difficult conversation which had quickly spiralled into complaint and recrimination. ‘She accused me of various high crimes and misdemeanours, all of which I answered, and, in the vulgar English phrase, gave her as good as she bought.’ He thought she had been put up to it by the king, ‘who wanted to try whether I could be intimidated or not, but when she found I was not so easily to be intimidated, she was silent’. Everything about his father annoyed him, including the king’s parsimony, which he applied to himself with as much rigour as he did to his sons. He ‘is grown so stingy with regard to himself’, the prince added in a furious postscript, ‘that he will hardly allow himself three coats in a year’.57
From Germany, Frederick urged his brother to tread carefully. ‘For God’s sake, do everything you can to keep well with him, at least upon decent terms; consider, he is vexed enough in public affairs. It is therefore your business not to make that still worse. He may poss
ibly be cross, but still, it is not your business to take that too high.’ Conscious that he perhaps crossed a line with his volatile brother, Frederick concluded by trying to conciliate. ‘I hate preaching full as much as you do, and constraint if possible more, but still, for both your sakes, I entreat you to keep as well together as possible.’58
The prince did not reply for some time. He suspected, with some justification, that Frederick was being coached by their father to try to influence his behaviour. Frederick remained his father’s favourite surviving son; safely removed from his eldest brother’s influence, the king believed he was doing well. He discounted stories that trickled out of Germany hinting at drunkenness and womanising, and concentrated on the good reports he had of him, which said he was studying hard and staying – mostly – out of trouble. The king and Frederick were in regular correspondence, as the elder brother knew very well. ‘Pray write to me soon,’ the prince upbraided Frederick, ‘or I shall begin to think you have forgotten me, especially as I hear of you writing frequent and long letters to the king. Indeed, I shall grow quite jealous of His Majesty if it goes on in this manner much longer.’ He did not, he added, appreciate hearing the voice of his father through the words of his brother, and warned him not to offer him advice again. ‘Write one of your facetious, giddy letters, and no more of your scolding ones.’59
In defiance of all Frederick’s well-meant suggestions, the prince made no attempt to temper his behaviour to allow for the king’s political difficulties and the anxieties they generated. When he failed to attend a formal levee reception at St James’s Palace in 1782, without asking leave to be absent, his father made his disappointment at the prince’s indifference very clear: ‘At a time when I am so harassed by many disagreeable events, any improper behaviour of the Prince of Wales is doubly severe to me. He must know his conduct to me in general is so different to the plan I chalked out … that I shall soon be obliged, if he does not amend it, to take steps that will certainly be disagreeable.’60
Shortly afterwards, negotiations began to agree on the terms for an independent establishment for the prince on his coming of age the following year. These opened a new theatre of opportunity for unpleasantness and disagreement between father and son that rumbled on for several years. The king was appalled when Fox’s administration offered to grant the prince an income of £100,000 a year, a vast sum by any standards, but colossal for a single man with no dependants. It was, George complained, ‘a shameful squandering of public money, besides an encouragement of extravagance’.61 The king did all he could to fight it, drawing attention to the huge debts the prince had already incurred, which grew steadily larger once he had been given Carlton House as an independent residence in 1783. After long and rancorous argument, the prince’s annual income was finally fixed at £50,000; the renovations of his new home quickly absorbed all of that and more.
The king’s mother, Augusta, had been the last royal inhabitant of Carlton House, and the prince soon erased all trace of her mild and forgettable tenure in a programme of extension and improvement that lasted for over thirty years. The house, which became home to so many extraordinary and luxurious objects, was a great work of art in itself. The prince, who possessed a genuine and appreciative eye for beauty, matured into a connoisseur of taste and discernment. He bought widely and extravagantly, sending agents to China to buy fashionable pieces in the oriental taste to furnish his drawing room, a trip which cost more than £6,000. The most skilled – and expensive – craftsmen and decorators were employed in gilding and marbling every surface. He acquired pictures and tapestries, bronzes and china, as well as the best French furniture. In the gardens, fountains bubbled; in the basement, the kitchens and pantries were of the most modern design.62 Horace Walpole thought the refurbished house was ‘the most perfect palace in Europe’.
None of this was likely to appeal to the king, especially as he knew how little of it had been paid for. Although he was himself a buyer of beautiful things, his tastes ran to books, clocks and pictures rather than imported exotica – and his purchases never exceeded his income. ‘With thirteen children, I can but with the greatest care make ends meet, and am not in a situation to be paying their debts, if they contract any,’ he wrote to his son William, whom he also suspected of thoughtless extravagance. Indebtedness, he insisted, was not an excusable shortcoming habitual to inhabitants of the fashionable world; it was a shameful vice that any honourable man would seek to avoid. ‘To anyone that has either the sentiments of common honesty or delicacy … the situation of not paying what is due is a very unpleasant sensation.’63 It is hard not to conclude that George had his eldest son in mind as he wrote those admonitory lines.
By 1784, the gulf between the king and the Prince of Wales seemed unbridgeable. In the celebrations that followed Fox’s hard-fought victory at the Westminster election of that year, the prince’s true allegiance could not have been made clearer. His prominent endorsement of an opposition victory would have been galling enough to his father; the news that, at the party which followed, his son ‘was so far overcome with wine as to fall flat on his face in the middle of a dance, and, upon being raised from the floor, to throw the load from his stomach into the midst of the circle’, must surely have added an extra dimension of distaste and humiliation to the king’s bitterness.64
There was, however, another side to the prince, although it was one his father seldom witnessed. His appeal was legendary, when he could be bothered to exert it, and, like Fox, he had a winning, disarming smile. William Beckford thought that he was ‘brighter than sunshine’ and ‘cast a brilliant gleam wherever he moved’.65 Unlike many habitués of his father’s court, he made people laugh. He was an accomplished mimic who possessed, the Duke of Wellington recalled in later years, ‘a most extraordinary talent for imitating the manner, gestures and voices of other people, so much that he could give the most exact idea of anyone, no matter how unlike they were to him’.66 He was well read, with a sophisticated appreciation of the fine arts, music and literature. The lawyer Henry Brougham, who was proud of his own intellect, and no friend of princes, conceded he was indeed ‘a very clever person’. Charles Burney, father of the novelist Fanny, was equally impressed. ‘I was astonished to find him, amidst such constant dissipation, possessed of so much learning, with knowledge of books in general, discrimination of character, as well as original humour.’67 Almost everyone who met him speculated what he might have been if his abilities had been properly directed. ‘He was a man occupied in trifles, because he had no opportunity of displaying his talents in the conduct of great concerns,’ reflected one observer.68
The prince himself was said to have excused his obsessive interest in the minutiae of dress and manners, his late nights and long mornings spent idly in bed, by declaring that he found the days were ‘long enough for doing nothing’.69 He certainly did little to encourage his father to entrust him with any real responsibility; he was a talker rather than a doer, a starter not a finisher, someone who habitually avoided anything difficult or onerous. He was essentially a selfish man, his rather lazy good nature faltering at the first challenge to his own interest. The perpetual air of disapproval and disappointment in which he was so deeply immersed gave him no great incentive to rouse up his dormant powers. He had spent much of his youth and early twenties without a true friend or companion who might have acted either as a spur to his ambition or as a reminder of what disinterested affection looked like. His brother Frederick was by far the best candidate for the latter role, and their enforced separation continued to affect the Prince of Wales deeply for years afterwards. ‘Good God, what would I give either to have you here with me, or to be with you for some little time,’ he wrote plaintively in 1781; ‘I literally … lost half my self in being separated from you.’70
Whether Frederick, always calmer and more sensible than his tempestuous sibling, would have proved a steadying influence on the prince is debatable; certainly, when they were reunited after six years apart,
the prince’s dissipation quickly trumped Frederick’s discipline, the elder brother introducing the younger to all his practised indulgences. But it is hard not to see the king’s deliberate policy of isolating his heir as, in the end, counterproductive. Marooned at court whilst all his brothers went out into the world, the prince cut a lonely figure, vulnerable to the very flattery and seduction from which his father had been determined to protect him. That his personality was not in the end powerful or confident enough to withstand either was the prince’s tragedy; but it was also in part the responsibility of his father. Neither the king nor his son could have been satisfied with their relationship, as described by the prince to Frederick in the summer of 1784: ‘I think his behaviour is so excessively unkind that there are moments when I can hardly ever put up with it. Sometimes not speaking to me for three weeks together, and hardly ever at court, speaking to people on one side of me and then missing me, and then if he does honour me with a word, ’tis merely, “’Tis very cold, or very hot” … and then sometimes, when I go to his house, never taking any notice of me at all, as if I was not there.’71 The king had decided that the best way he could deal with the disappointments, insults and humiliations heaped upon his head by his delinquent eldest son in his time of greatest trial was simply to edit him out of his life.
The Strangest Family Page 40
