The Age of Elegance (16 page)

man, standing erect to salute the colours, passed through the Horse Guards, the populace seized the shafts from his carriage, knocked over the sentries at the garden gates of Carlton House, and practically carried him, carriage and all, into the Palace. Lest worse should follow, the doors were flung open and the Field Marshal was swept into the Regent's presence on a Rowlandsonian wave of cheering Britons. Meanwhile the Czar, looking like a big, benign angel, was bowing to the crowds from the balcony of the Pulteney. Everyone except the Regent seemed to be thoroughly happy, and the huzzaing and trampling continued far into the night. Every building was illuminated with candles, fairy lamps and transparencies.

When the Czar and Grand Duchess sallied forth next day the crowd was waiting for them in the roadway. Before they reached their carriage they had to suffer the grasp of hundreds of hands. When, after driving a mile along the leafy, western highway, they alighted for a walk in the private gardens of Kensington Palace, they underwent a similar ordeal. Back at the hotel steps, after a sightseer's visit to the Abbey and British Museum, they had to fight their way once more through a tumult of well-dressed women who clung to their wrists and stared adoringly into Alexander's eyes. Some of them, by bribing the porter, managed to get into the hotel.

That afternoon, Joseph Farington, the artist, found Piccadilly thick with people, horses and carriages, waiting to see the Emperor and Grand Duchess leave for a banquet at Carlton House. The Regent's state chariot, with its magnificent footmen and hammer-cloth of scarlet and gold, was drawn up outside the Pulteney behind a troop of Household Cavalry. Before setting out, the Czar came to the balcony to receive the popular acclamations. Then, with his sister by his side, her hair clustered with enormous pearl-drops, he drove off in the great coach towards St. James's Street, bowing from side to side through the windows.
¹

Unlike the Czar, the Prince Regent had not risen early. His country's Constitution had not allowed him to form a soldier's habits, and his own inclined him to a luxurious indolence. So did

¹
Ann. Reg.
1814. Chron. 45; Ashton, I, 261-3, 266-7, 274-5; Broughton, I, 113, 139-40; Brownlow, 108; Farington, VII, 255-7; De Quincey, IE, 67; Nicolson, 112; Lady Shelley, I, 58-60; Pyne,
Royal Residences,
III, 12-14; Stanley, 84.

his practice of sitting up late drinking cherry brandy. Though not yet fifty-two, he was enormously fat; his great backside, tightly swaddled in bright white inexpressibles, was one of the sights of Society. The public saw it less often, for, owing to his dislike of being stared at, he divided his time between Carlton House and the exquisite seaside Pavilion he had built for himself at Brighton. His tastes, despite a talent for designing military uniforms—he had recently devised a Field Marshal's attire for himself and the Duke of Wellington
¹
—were aesthetic and epicurean rather than soldierly. He knew more about architecture, painting, books and music than any prince in Europe; he was shrewd, intelligent and witty and, when younger, had been the idol of Society, "with fascination," Byron wrote, "in his very bow:

. . . the grace too rare in every clime Of being, without alloy of fop or beau, A finish'd gentleman from top to toe."

But age and self-indulgence had not improved him; his affability had grown vinous and, though he could on occasion show an affecting dignity and courtesy, he was Prince Charming no longer. He still possessed an immense Hanoverian zest for life: could be at times a flamboyant, impulsive, overgrown baby, halloing over the supper-table, sobbing because his newest inamorata was cruel, or presiding over his private band, beating time on his thighs and accompanying himself the while at the top of his voice. But the gusto was degenerating into an irritable itch to domineer, and the surges of exuberant energy were succeeded now by long periods of torpor, bile and self-pity. A younger and less tolerant generation, which had never known the court of Prince Florizel or the enchanted days before the Bastille was stormed, took an increasingly dark view of this epicurean veteran. To the young writers of the middle-class—the men who were to have the ear of the future—he appeared not as the grotesque, flouncing spoilt playboy, Big Ben, whom his contemporaries had once known as a fairy-court prince, but as something more sinister. To them he was Swellfoot, the tyrant, who had betrayed the nascent cause of reform, imprisoned the martyrs of

¹
"How sure Ben was to make up a Field Marshal's uniform according to his own fancy. Not only the cuffs, collars and front of the coat were richly (2 inches wide) embroidered but the very seams—all the seams!"
Paget Brothers,
198-9. See
idem, 222; Creevey Papers,
I, 47, 63,147-9; Farington, VII, 89, 161; Lady Shelley, I, 35; Wynne, III, 188-9
.

"

liberty, persecuted his wife and impounded her child. The radical poet, Leigh Hunt, described him in his weekly, the
Examiner,
as "a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.
^,,I
And Charles Lamb, the punning East India clerk, made him the subject of a lampoon called "The Triumph of the Whale":

"By his bulk and by his size,

By his oily qualities,

This (or else my eyesight fails)

This should be the Prince of Whales."
²

"What a fellow Prinny is!" wrote one of his old Whig cronies. He was at once a national scandal, a national disaster, a national achievement and national entertainment. He was the representative —the not very decorous but full-blooded one—of England in the last age in which men of all classes felt at liberty to let themselves go. And he happened by the accident of birth to be heir to and, for all practical purposes, occupant of the throne. In the new, more restrained, more decorous age into which England was moving, this made things very difficult for his Ministers. But for those who could afford to see the jest—and peril—of the situation, the fun while it lasted was uproarious.

Yet, though Society, which once had idolised him, passed him by, and the holy place of the highest fashion was no longer Carlton House but Almack's assembly rooms, the Regent had been the ornament of a far more cultivated and polished circle than any known to the Lady Patronesses of that haughty, dull and exclusive establishment. When he chose, he could talk with judgment and taste on almost any subject. He knew how to be gracious and caressing, to set his auditors at ease by his exquisite manners, and send them away convinced of his personal interest.
¹
With such gifts he might have made himself as popular as Charles II or Henry VIII.

¹
A freedom which cost him two years' imprisonment for seditious libel.

2
"Who is there," wrote "Monk" Lewis, "that may not be caricatured when the most avowedly graceful man of his time, or perhaps of any time, can thus be personally ridiculed!" Bury, I, 77.

³
That sharp observer, Captain Harry Smith of the Rifles, bearing dispatches from America, recorded that his interview with him was "the most gentlemanlike and affable" he could possibly Imagine. Smith, I, 215. See also D'Arblay. Ill, 243, 300; Colchester, II, 272; Bury,
i,
283; Lockhart, IV, 371; Havelock, 278.

But, while he loved to impress, he suffered from a fatal dread of ridicule. Any threat to his vanity aroused in him a ruthless, almost hysterical self-protectiveness. It was his wife's unforgivable offence that, in her rattling, missish way, she had quizzed him on his growing belly. He could not even endure the casual glance of housemaids: any servant who stared at him was threatened with instant dismissal. Nor could he tolerate boredom. He would break the most important engagement because it irked him, and kept his dependants in constant uncertainty by his eleventh-hour changes of plan. Nothing in his disorderly life was ever decided until the last moment.
¹

Being, for all his impulsive generosity and tender-heartedness, utterly inconsiderate where his own feelings were concerned, he was a lonely man. Most of his intimates were women. Of these, having enjoyed the society of the liveliest and most cultivated of the age, he was a fastidious judge. For years he had oscillated mainly between Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Countess of Jersey—both women of over fifty when he parted with them. His latest
confidante
was the Marchioness of Hertford, an imperceptibly fading grandmother of the most exquisite fashion. When first he fell for her, regardless of their years he behaved like a lovesick boy, weeping continuously, not speaking and even at times refusing nourishment. Since then, despite a spasmodic attempt to transfer his affections to Lady Bess-borough
¹
—another fascinating grandmother—he had been ruled with a rod of iron. According to the Marchioness's account, their relationship was entirely platonic: they even, she averred, read the Bible to one another. But she enjoyed the traditional fruits of her office: her husband became Lord Chamberlain and her rather disreputable son, Lord Yarmouth, Vice-Chamberlain.

Of one activity the Regent never tired. He would have made, it was said, a splendid upholsterer. He filled Army Orders with

¹
See Farington, VIII, 142-4 for a curious example of this, describing how his architect, Nash, had been compelled at the last minute to ask a hundred and twenty neighbours to eat the dinner he had prepared for him, and how a few days later the local yeomanry were vainly called away from the harvest in the expectation—again disappointed—of welcoming him.

²
"He threw himself on his knees and, clasping me round, kissed my neck before I was aware of what he was doing; I screamed with vexation and fright; he continued, sometimes struggling with me, sometimes sobbing, and crying . . . vows of eternal love, entreaties and promises of what he would do—he would break with Mrs. Fitzherbert and Lady Hertford, I should make my own terms, I should be his sole
confidante,
sole adviser
...
I should guide his politics, Mr. Canning should be Prime Minister
...;
then over and over again the same round of complaint, despair, entreaties and promises
...
that immense, grotesque figure flouncing about, half on the couch, half on the ground." Lady Bessborough to Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, Dec. 1809. Granville, II, 349.

CARLTON
HOUSE

III

instructions about epaulettes, gold lace and feathers, sent the 23 rd Dragoons to Spain so arrayed that they could not be distinguished from the French, and rigged out his own Regiment of Hussars like padded monkeys in crimson breeches and yellow boots. "His whole soul," a friend wrote, "is wrapped up in Hussar saddles, caps, cuirasses and sword belts!" The Whig bard, Tom Moore, suggested—with prophetic insight—that the next victims of his sartorial enthusiasm would be his political advisers:

" 'Let's see,' said the Regent, like Titus, perplex'd With the duties of empire, 'whom shall I dress next?' So what's to be done? There's the Ministers, bless 'em! As he
made
the puppets, why should not he
dress
them?"

Yet wonderful as were the costumes he designed, they were surpassed by the settings he chose for them. His guests complained that the splendour of his rooms made their clothes insignificant. There was no Umit—except the faith of money-lenders in the patience of British taxpayers—to his adventures in interior decoration. His palaces were continually being rebuilt. The oriental fantasy he made of the Pavilion at Brighton, with its Kremlin domes and pagodas, "looking," as Sydney Smith remarked, "as if St. Paul's had gone to the sea and pupped," was one of the wonders of the age, its walls decorated with mandarins and fluted yellow draperies to resemble the tents of the Chinese, its peach-blossom ceilings and canopies of tassels and bells, its imperial, five-clawed dragons darting from every chandelier and overmantel.
Outre
and grotesque, it was yet informed by its creator's exquisite taste. On its statuary, carpets, pictures—he was an early collector of Dutch masters—china and ormolu he lavished an inexhaustible care. Scarcely a day passed without some new artist or craftsman being ushered into his presence. In three years he spent .£160,000 on furniture alone.

The crown of this royal impresario's achievement was Carlton House. Here, under the successive supervision of Henry Holland, James Wyatt and John Nash, he had transformed a modest two-storied mansion into a palace worthy of the ruler of an eastern empire. Its armoury contained the sceptre of the King of Candy, the dagger of Ghengis Khan, and the palanquin of Tippoo Sahib. Taxpayers regarded it with jaundiced eyes; it struck them, like its occupant, as extravagant and un-English. But though its portico in

Pall Mall was too large for its facade,
¹
and its Ionic screen out of keeping with the homely red brick houses between which it was wedged, once inside the marble entrance hall the effect was overwhelming. When, after Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, foreign ambassadors began to return to London, they were astounded and pronounced it not only the finest house in England, but the rival of Versailles and St. Cloud.

When the foreign potentates dined with the Prince Regent on the evening of June 8 th Carlton House was at the height of its glory. Its pillars were hung with thousands of lanterns and its screen was silhouetted by topaz and scarlet flares set between palm trees. One after another its great rooms, lit by magnificent chandeliers, revealed their owner's taste and splendour: the Entrance Hall with porphyry columns and cornices adorned by Etruscan griffins; the Throne-Room with its canopy of helmets and ostrich-plumes and its fender supporting the eagle of Jupiter subduing prostrate dragons; the Circular Dining-Room whose walls were lined with silver and whose pier-glasses reflected forests of Ionic columns with silver capitals; the Crimson Drawing-Room with the blue velvet carpet adorned with the insignia of the Garter and the lovely chandelier, whose three circles of lights surrounded a cascade of glass which played for ever in mirrored vistas; the Vestibule, Ante-Room, Rose-Satin Drawing-Room, Blue Velvet Room, and Closet. From the ground floor the Regent led his guests in procession down the circular double staircase, past the giant bronzes of Chronos with his clock and Atlas bearing the map of Europe, to a still more wonderful set of apartments below. From a vestibule whose windows looked on to a quiet garden where nightingales sang, they swept left to Library, Golden Drawing-Room and Gothic Dining-Room, and right to Ante-Room, Dining-Room and Conservatory. The open double doors between made a continuous chamber three hundred and fifty feet long. Its ceilings were spandrelled and traceried in the Gothic taste, its walls panelled with golden mouldings and shields emblazoned with the quarterings of England, its windows curtained with crimson, its fairy-like chandeliers suspended from carved monastic heads. The climax of this fantastic splendour—the Regent's

¹
To-day the portico of the National Gallery. Ackermann,
Microcosm,
I, 113. See also Acker
mann,
Repository,
I, 398; VII, 29; XIV, 189; Pyne,
Royal Residences,
III
(Carlton House);
L.C.C.
Survey
of
London,
XX, 73-6; Hughson, II, 231; Gronow, II, 255; Plumer Ward, 399-400;
Paget Brothers,
195, 197.