Royal Babylon (21 page)

Frederick inherited his father's indiscriminate taste in women. By the age of twenty-one he had acquired a regular mistress called Anne Vane, one of his mother's maids of honor and described as a “fat and ill-shaped dwarf.” Miss Vane had already made herself useful in royal circles by having multilateral flings with courtiers, one of whom was a close friend of Frederick and almost old enough to be her grandfather. She became pregnant, and bore a son whom the Prince of Wales naively acknowledged as his own. She earned herself a pension of
£
3,000 a year, a large London house and a full livery of servants. When Frederick's lust for Miss Vane began to wane, he transferred his attentions to her chambermaid. The next mistress, Lady Archibald Hamilton, was appointed as a lady-in-waiting to his new wife, Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. By the time he met Lady Hamilton she was thirty-five but looked considerably older, having already borne ten children.

George III was a blip in the line of compulsive philanderers, the only male member of the ruling House of Hanover to have a relatively chaste private life, although there were widespread rumors about his marriage to a nineteen-year-old Quaker girl before his marriage to Charlotte. But his court was one of the dullest, the meanest and the most uncomfortable in Europe. Everyone, even the old, the seriously infirm and the heavily pregnant, was obliged to stand bolt upright in the King and Queen's presence, sometimes for hours on end. One of his courtiers, Fanny Burney, described the court regime: “You must not cough, sneeze or wince for any reason,” she wrote, “though you may privately bite the inside of your cheek for a little relief, taking care meanwhile to do it cautiously as to make no apparent dent outwardly.” The rules of etiquette
which were ruthlessly observed by both the King and Queen made normal relationships with their children impossible as not even they were allowed to sit down in their presence or speak to their parents unless spoken to first.

         

Although Britain's tacky ruling house had in four generations produced a host of shallow and often absurd debauchees and one celebrated madman, they didn't really hit their stride until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. King George III and Queen Charlotte were prolific. Their thirteen offspring who survived into adulthood included seven dysfunctional sons, described by the Duke of Wellington as “the damnedest millstones that ever hung around a government's neck.” Shelley called them the “royal vampires.”

George III's eldest son, “Prinny,” was quite unlike the other Georges: bright, witty and capable on the one hand; indolent, spoiled and neurotic on the other. He was, said the Duke of Wellington, “the most extraordinary compound of talent, wit, buffoonery, obstinacy and good feelings; in short, a medley of the most opposite qualities, with a great preponderance of good—that I ever saw in any character in my life.” As a recklessly extravagant patron of the arts, he left many artifacts to posterity. He had his father's vast book collection donated as the foundation of the British Museum Library, and his building projects inspired the Regency style of architecture. However, the Duke of Wellington's mixed, but generally favorable, opinion of Prinny was not shared by the British public. George's profligacy coincided with a time of massive social distress and misery following
the Napoleonic Wars, and tremendous changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution.

In short, George IV was the most detested of all the Hanoverian kings: he was perceived as a vain, overblown, indolent, philandering sot whose corpulent rump brought more shame to the throne than any British monarch before or since. Prinny was loathed by everyone from poets to politicians. The poor hated him because he was a debauched and scandalous spendthrift at a time when they were being starved to death by the war with France and were rioting for bread in the streets. The tax-paying middle classes couldn't stomach him because they were footing the bill for his mistresses and his debauches. Britain's writers and artists despised him because he had carelessly attacked one of their own: although he was massively obese he had the poet Leigh Hunt fined
£
500 and jailed for two years for suggesting that he was fat.

From then on, Prinny became the object of unprecedented ridicule from the very people who knew how to do it best. He kept the printing industry out of recession single-handedly. Prinny may have cursed his bad luck that he was around at the same time as some of England's most brilliant cartoonists, Gilray, Rowlandson, Cruikshank and Heath, who all made personal fortunes out of ridiculing him. At one point he was reduced to offering Cruikshank
£
100 if he would stop portraying him as a lecherous old drunk. (The more subtle form of bribery known as the Honours List had not been devised.)

Unlike his great-grandfather George II, an unusually sensitive man who sacked one of the Lords of the Bedchamber when he casually inquired after the King's piles and anal fistulas, George IV was often oblivious to criticism. Most of the time his fortunately thick skin and fantastically overblown ego
allowed him to ignore the most stinging of personal attacks, but there were limits to even his royal powers of self-delusion. There were two words guaranteed to reduce him to a quivering royal jelly—“French Revolution.” By the 1790s even he began to recognize that his own unpopularity was so great that it could inspire revolt in England, and from then on he lived in perpetual dread that the horrifying events he had heard about in France would be repeated on his side of the Channel.

His fears were well grounded. Throughout his Regency, his subjects bombarded him with death-threat letters. When George became King, the manager of the Theatre Royal at Brighton scrapped the traditional singing of the national anthem in case it started a riot. Wherever George went, he was verbally abused and his carriage pelted with mud. In 1812, starving Londoners took to the streets with cries of “Bread or blood” and his home, Carlton House, had to be protected by troops. By that time, however, he had almost completely abandoned his London residence and was cowering full time in his precursor to Gracelands, the Brighton Pavilion.

Although Prinny had kept his head well below the parapet throughout the war with France, he claimed Napoleon's defeat as a great personal victory. In 1815 he broke cover to invite all of Britain's allies to join him in a great celebration party in London. Yet, as hard as he tried, even the reflected glory of victory at Waterloo didn't rub off on him. Anyone who even associated with George risked unpopularity, as England's greatest national hero, the Duke of Wellington, discovered when he was booed on the streets of London because he had declared his loyalty to the King.

George IV was a scandalously irresponsible spendthrift all of his life. By 1786, while still Prince of Wales, he was a quarter
of a million pounds in debt, and within six years the debts had almost doubled. He was once threatened by bailiffs who surrounded the house he had holed himself up in with his mistress, Mrs. Fitzherbert, and gave him twenty-four hours to pay a
£
2,000 bill. As he'd already pawned most of his own jewelry, he paid off his creditors by pawning Mrs. Fitzherbert's.

The Prince overreached himself with Carlton House, which was a gift from his father on his twenty-first birthday. He decided to make it into one of the finest palaces in Europe, one which would stand comparison with Versailles in its heyday or the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. His new house became a bottomless pit into which the Prince poured taxpayers' money. Without regard to cost, he hired the best craftsmen in Europe to make lavish alterations, filling it with the most fantastic bric-a-brac. Carlton House existed in a perpetual state of refurbishment: in a single year he spent over
£
250,000 on new furniture; in another year the bill for new upholstery alone was
£
49,000. Robert Walpole was invited to see it at firsthand; was staggered by the display of ostentation and afterward wondered aloud how the country was going to pick up the tab: “All the tin mines in Cornwall,” he told friends, “would not pay a quarter.”

The public who paid through the nose for its upkeep never got to see inside this monument to greed and extravagance because, when George grew tired of it in 1826, he simply had it demolished. All that remains today from this spectacular act of royal vandalism are the columns from the original entrance, which were reused in the portico of the National Gallery overlooking Trafalgar Square.

George IV was conservative and infrequent in his political
involvement, but neither conservative nor infrequent in his personal life. Short of rape, George IV pulled every trick known to man in order to persuade women to go to bed with him. If he couldn't get his own way he would whine, sulk or throw temper tantrums. If no amount of money or tears could buy their sexual favors he would pretend he was terminally ill or would threaten to kill himself. Prinny had a system for recording the number of women he slept with: he would ask for a lock of hair from his lover and then placed it in an envelope and labeled it. When he died his brothers went through his personal belongings and found 7,000 envelopes containing enough hair to stuff a sofa, plus hundreds of women's gloves and reams of love letters.

When George couldn't find an available aristocratic lady friend he would fornicate with his servants. His first recorded sexual experience was the seduction of one of his mother's maids of honor when he was sixteen years old. Twelve months later he seduced an actress, Mary Robinson, who was four years older than him. She turned out to be one of his costlier conquests. Although his affair with her lasted only a few months, the Prince had been so desperate to bed her that she was able to extract a promise from him that in return for sex he would pay her
£
20,000 as soon as he was twenty-one. Although she gave him a baby daughter, the Prince had no intention of keeping his end of the bargain, until his mistress reminded him that she had a sackload of his love letters which she wouldn't hesitate to use. King George III paid her off with a lump sum of
£
5,000 and an annual pension of
£
500.

The women Prinny chose to sleep with were usually very stout and nearly always older than him. The Prince's “usual circle of old tabbies,” as his brother Frederick called them,
included Lady Augusta Campbell, Lady Melbourne, who probably bore his child, a singer called Elizabeth Billington who was married to a double-bass player in the Drury Lane Orchestra, and Maria Amelia, who was twelve years older than him. He also had an unfortunately conspicuous affair with the Countess von Hardenburg, wife of the Hanoverian officer and statesman Karl August von Hardenburg. The Countess was shipped back to Germany to avoid a court scandal. When he found himself unable to lay his hands on a convenient mistress or even a servant, he frequented London's brothels. He was a regular customer of one that specialized in flagellation and was run by a Mrs. Collett of Tavistock Court, Covent Garden. She ran a successful whipping establishment at those premises for many years before moving to Portland Place.

George IV was a drunk for most of his adult life. Charles Lamb wrote a poem about the Prince of Wales which began:

         

Not a fatter fish than he

Flounders round the polar sea

See his blubbers at his gills

What a world of drink he swills

         

George swigged anything he could lay his hands on, including liqueurs of every description, particularly cherry brandy, which he knocked back “in quantities not to be believed.” At dinner he would demolish at least three bottles of wine, chased by maraschino punch and Eau de Garouche. He celebrated every special event by drinking himself insensible, and his guests were expected to do the same. He made a spectacle of himself all over London and there were almost daily
reports of brawls involving George and his friends. At a party he threw for the politician Charles Fox, George fell flat on his face in the middle of a quadrille and threw up over the floor. In January 1814 he turned up to stand as godfather to the Duke of Rutland's son and drank himself legless from a fifty-gallon cistern of punch. Several times he was seen obviously drunk riding his horse “like a madman” through Hyde Park.

After every marathon drinking spree he would take to his bed for a few days and have a vein opened. His physician, Sir Henry Halford, was sure that the cycle of bingeing and bleeding would kill him, but when Halford told him he had been bled enough George took to opening his veins himself. The cures he took for his appalling hangovers included opium, and laudanum taken in doses of up to a hundred drops at a time. His family warned him repeatedly that he was killing himself, but as soon as he recovered he carried on drinking as hard as ever.

The court diarist Charles Greville described the King's routine in 1829:

         

He lives a most extraordinary life—never gets up till six in the afternoon. They come to him and open the window curtains at six or seven o'clock in the morning; he breakfasts in bed, does whatever business he can be brought to transact in bed too; he reads every paper quite through, dozes three or four hours, gets up in time for dinner, and goes to bed between ten and eleven. He sleeps very ill and rings his bell forty times in the night; if he wants to know the hour, though a watch hangs close to him, he will have his valet de chambre down rather than turn his head to look at it.
The same thing if he wants a glass of water; he won't stretch out his hand to get it. His valets are nearly destroyed .  .  . they cannot take off their clothes at night and hardly lie down.

         

Although he was very sexually experienced, the Prince had a weakness for women who wouldn't immediately climb into bed with him. Maria Fitzherbert was typical of the type he found appealing: big, matronly and looking older than her years. A contemporary description records her as having a long pointed nose and a mouth misshapen by badly fitting false teeth. The Prince was twenty-two when he met her; she was twenty-eight, twice widowed and a Roman Catholic. Maria Fitzherbert flatly refused to get involved in an adulterous relationship. When she rejected his advances, the fat Prince sulked and began to drink even more heavily than usual, but found solace in the bed of Lady Bamfylde, wife of Sir Charles. A courtier commented, “She is fat, old and ugly, but his Royal Highness is not noted for his taste in females.”