THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE
By the time of his eighteenth birthday, George had become the senior member of a family of thirteen children: two more, Alfred and Amelia, born in September 1780 and August 1783, were to follow, but Alfred died in 1782. Octavius, the last brother to be born before 1780, also died young, at the age of four in 1783, and Amelia lived only until 1810. Otherwise, for the greater part of his life George was surrounded by a group of seven brothers and five sisters, with all of whom he was for most of the time on close and affectionate terms. Elizabeth, the second of his sisters, said after his death that he was ‘all heart’, but was spoilt by flatterers and the temptations of the world.1 In the family circle at any rate he showed himself to be a fond companion to whom they all at various times turned for sympathy and understanding and were rarely denied. The sisters found him a staunch ally in their troubles with their mother, and the brothers, with rare exceptions, looked up to him for support in their difficult relationships with their father.
In their younger days, George was especially close to his next brother, Frederick, who became Duke of York. They were only a year apart in age, and they shared the schoolroom, pursued the same educational programme, received joint parental admonitions as to their behaviour, and as young men embarked together on a life of dissipation which alarmed and angered their pious father. The King however always regarded Frederick as his favourite and when Frederick got into scrapes it was always George whom the King blamed, although it is altogether possible that it was sometimes the other way round. When in 1781 he sent Frederick to Hanover to study languages and to complete his military education it was largely in order to keep them apart and protect Frederick from his brother’s supposed bad influence.
The parting of the brothers was an emotional one. The Annual Register reported that George ‘was so much affected … that he stood in a state of entire insensibility, totally unable to speak’.2 They did not meet again for over six years. All the other brothers except Augustus, who was a lifelong sufferer from asthma, were sent into military or naval service away from England. The third son, William, who was in some respects the weakest in character of all, and in his youth the most disreputable of the princes, was sent into the navy at the age of thirteen, and after eighteen months with the Channel fleet was posted to North America to avoid the temptations of home. His and Frederick’s loss at about the same time deprived George of his two closest companions and left him open to the temptations of the debauchees who clustered around him in their stead. When the King deplored the company his eldest son kept it never occurred to him to think that he bore much of the responsibility. Even the younger brothers were sent in their teens to Germany, Edward to join Frederick in Hanover and to train for the army, while Ernest, Augustus and Adolphus were dispatched to Göttingen to finish their education and perfect their German. The King frowned upon their pleas to be allowed to visit England even for brief holidays. Despite these precautions, the younger princes found little difficulty in pursuing their amorous inclinations but their activities did not come so closely to their father’s notice as did George’s.
Left in England with only his sisters for company, and as the sole remaining target for his father’s moral admonitions, George not surprisingly continued to show his rebellious streak, if only for lack of constructive occupation to fill his time. Unlike Princes of Wales in later reigns, he had no constitutional role, no duties, ceremonial or charitable, to perform, and no purpose to his existence other than to wait for the King to die. Nor were princes educated to perform their future duties. The Hanoverian monarchs, like their successor Queen Victoria, refused to share any of their political or constitutional duties or experience, to allow their heirs access to state papers or other confidential information, or to discuss with them or encourage them to take an interest in public affairs. This excessive constitutional propriety was perhaps encouraged by politicians who had no desire to deal with knowledgeable or strong-minded monarchs; but even when Gladstone tried to persuade Victoria to allow her eldest son to play a role in Ireland, to show favour to the Irish as well as to keep him out of harm’s way, the Queen indignantly refused.3 George III showed the same reluctance to allow his son to play any prominent part in the government of Ireland in 1797 or in defence of his country in the French wars, or to hold any high military rank. George IV was not the only monarch who was left in ignorance of the details of his role in government until he was actually called upon to do the job as Prince Regent: he then had to be told by his ministers and officials how to carry out such elementary tasks as putting his signature in the right place when approving papers. He did at least correct one anomaly when one of his first acts as Regent was to promote himself to Field Marshal.
In these circumstances the pursuit of pleasure became the only outlet for his energies and talents. He was not entirely without sensible guidance as to his conduct. Lieutenant-Colonel Gerard Lake, one of his earliest and closest friends, who was appointed his first equerry in his new household, might have been a restraining influence, but he was posted to fight in the American war in 1781. ‘Our parting, as you may suppose, was a very severe trial to us both,’ George wrote to Frederick. ‘You know how much I love him & therefore will easily conceive what a loss he is to me at the present moment, more especially as I have not you, my dear brother, with me, from whom I could always meet with disinterested advice’.4 Lake perceptively wrote on his departure to warn him that ‘your great good nature is liable to be impos’d upon by people who have not the smallest pretensions to your civility or attention, & who will presume upon that goodness’, and that ‘too many there are in this world who, to gain your favor, will acquiesce & encourage you in doing things that they themselves would perhaps be the first to condemn’. As Lake pointed out, George had not been educated with others of his age at a public school and had not had the opportunity to form judgements of men and the world. A wider circle of both male and female companions might have set him a better example or at least given him a more rounded experience of human nature.5
As Lake understood, the Prince was easily susceptible to bad company and they were equally drawn to his charm and friendliness of manner. Sheridan was dazzled by him at their first meeting and remained captivated for the rest of his life, though he fell out of favour towards the end. Himself something of an expert on the matter, Sheridan noted frankly that George was frequently drunk throughout the 1780s. Among those with bad reputations who were drawn to exploit his friendship were Lord Barrymore and his two brothers (known respectively as Hellgate, Newgate and Cripplegate), as well as their foul-mouthed sister ‘Billingsgate’, and Sir John Lade, who was a famous driver and encouraged the Prince to attempt daredevil exploits with his phaeton. He could reputedly drive to Brighton and back in ten hours. In 1781 he boasted to Frederick that he drove Frederick’s phaeton four in hand for 22 miles in under two hours. ‘I am become a tolerable good whip’, he had announced in March and in October he declared he had become ‘an exceeding good shot’. Lady Lade, formerly known as Mrs Smith, who may have been for a time one of the Prince’s mistresses, was equally rackety. Her first husband had been a highwayman and was hanged for it. George later granted her a pension of £300. The Prince was taught fencing by the Angelos in their fashionable Soho studio, and boxing with others of his set. He dabbled in the ‘sporting life’ of the day, and attended the racetracks and the prize-fights – the latter came to an end when he witnessed the death in the ring at Brighton of one pugilist and swore never to watch boxing again. He showed his sensitivity when he settled an annuity on the widow.6
George’s susceptible character was never more in evidence than in his relations with women. He was not unattractive to them. Writing in 1782, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who reigned over aristocratic London society, described him as ‘rather tall’ with a ‘striking’ but not perfect figure, being
inclined to be too fat and looks too much like a woman in men’s cloaths, but the gracefulness of his manner and his height certainly make him a pleasing figure. His face is very handsome and he is fond of dress. … His person, his dress & the admiration he has met, & thinks still more that he meets, from women take up his thoughts chiefly. He is good natur’d and rather extravagant.
Georgiana read his character shrewdly: he was ‘more inclined to extravagance than generosity’, though he was capable of the latter quality, and he ‘does not want for understanding, & his jokes sometimes have an appearance of wit’. However, ‘to judge of the sense and abilities of a young man of twenty, occupied by the pleasures & [the] noisy, gay & lively, is impossible’. He was not so ‘capricious in his tastes & inclinations’ as was commonly supposed, but ‘he loves being of consequence, whether it is in intrigues of state or of gallantry, he often thinks more is intended than really is’. He had a quick intelligence and, like his father, ‘has a wonderful knack at knowing all that is going forward’.
As regards his social life, ‘He had long felt an inclination to break thro’ the strict confinement he was kept [in]’, but ‘As he only went out in secret, or with the King & Queen, he form’d very few connections with any other woman than women of the town’, though he was ‘considerably ogled’ when he rode in the Park every morning or in his box at the play or the opera. All this gave him the impression that he was much sought after by the female sex and naturally encouraged him to respond to their temptation.7
George’s first attachment at the age of sixteen was to Mary Hamilton, niece of Sir William, one of his sisters’ attendants, who was six years older than he was. He wrote her a series of sentimental letters and offered her gifts, but she was too sensible and virtuous to encourage such a youthful infatuation and he turned his attention elsewhere. He met considerably more encouragement from Mary Robinson, an actress whom he saw playing Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, and who was married with an infant daughter. Her life was a precarious one – she and her husband had seen the inside of a debtors’ prison – and she saw in the prince’s attentions a prospect of financial security for the future. He gave her a locket with his portrait, wrote her a series of passionate letters, signing himself ‘Florizel’ after the prince in the same play, and promised her in writing a sum of £20,000 when he should come of age. She carefully kept all his letters and when after a year or so George tired of the affair their existence was brought to his father’s notice. The King was furious but he bought them back for £5,000, and after further prolonged negotiation she agreed to give up the Prince’s bond in return for life annuities of £600 for herself and £200 for her daughter.8 The episode not only confirmed the King’s low opinion of his son’s self-discipline but further offended his sense of economy.
Worse was to follow. In his brothers’ absence George continued to live a rakish life, often in the company of his dissolute uncles the Dukes of Cumberland and of Gloucester, defying the King’s attempts to forbid him their society. George was particularly attached to Cumberland and his father’s prohibition merely stoked the flames. He was forbidden to attend a ball proposed in his honour by the Duke in February 1781 and even his servants were not allowed to go to one of Cumberland’s dinners.9 The Duke and Duchess were well matched: she was said to be addicted to coarse language and behaviour. A major reason why the King forbade his son their company was his anger at the Duke’s marriage, for she was a commoner. This was one of the principal circumstances which led the King to introduce the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, to forbid the marriage of any descendant of George II under the age of twenty-five without royal permission. Unfortunately, it was this Act, strictly enforced by George III, which lay at the root of most of the marital and extramarital troubles of his own family.
In Cumberland’s company, George fell into even more rakishness. Horace Walpole alleged that the Duke ‘carried the Prince to the lowest places of debauchery where they got dead drunk, and were often carried home in that condition’. ‘Dissipation is at high-water mark’, Walpole wrote in the summer of 1781, hinting that the Prince of Wales was at the centre of it. ‘He drunk hard, swore, and passed every night in [brothels]’. The Cumberlands also introduced him to gambling. They set up a faro bank in their own house for his benefit and to the King’s even greater disgust. This particular vice, however, did not establish a permanent hold on him and in later life he showed little enthusiasm for it, except on the racetrack. The Duke and Duchess also encouraged him to adopt bad language which shocked even some of his companions. However, the intimacy with the Cumberlands was not long-lasting. The Prince resented the Duke’s familiarity – he began to call him ‘Toffy’ – and after a year or so the association weakened.10
George sustained one of his vices for a much longer period than his association with the Cumberlands. All his life he was susceptible to women and his numerous liaisons became and have remained notorious, though he was hardly more profligate than most young men of his age and social position. Among those who became his mistresses, mostly for short periods of time, were Grace Dalrymple Elliot, Perdita’s immediate successor, Lady Melbourne, who was one of the most immoral women of the time and whose children – including the later Prime Minister – were of a variety of fathers11 – and a number of actresses who, then as always, had a peculiar fascination for young men of royal birth and who, at that time, were generally regarded as willingly available. Nevertheless, the scandalous stories propagated after George’s death by Robert Huish in his so-called Memoirs of George IV, which painted him as a totally unscrupulous womanizer who chased every attractive female in sight, are certainly exaggerated.
George’s reputation has always been tarnished by allegations of debauchery, gluttony and drunkenness, as if he were a monster of depravity from whom no female was safe. His brothers acquired similar reputations. It was a licentious age, when young and adolescent sprigs of nobility sowed wild oats with reckless abandon. Drunkenness was the vice of the age among all classes. The Younger Pitt was no more of a drunkard than most members of the fashionable world and he was accustomed to drink two or more bottles of wine at a meal. He once entered the House of Commons for an important debate leaning on his drinking companion Henry Dundas and seeing double: he retired behind the Speaker’s chair to be sick. Sheridan, Grey and Fox were renowned for their excessive drinking and the Duke of Norfolk who was averse to soap and water was said to be washed and have a change of linen only when he was so dead drunk that his servants could remove his clothes without his knowledge.
Sexually too, men of the upper classes since the time of Charles II, when the repressive Puritanism of the mid-seventeenth century was swept away, expected to behave promiscuously, and wives were expected to tolerate their husbands’ amours with indifference. The keeping of mistresses, or casual sexual affairs, was seen as normal behaviour. As the historian of sexual behaviour in early modern England has remarked, ‘during the middle years of the eighteenth century attitudes towards sex in England, especially in London, were unusually relaxed’. This applied to both sexes. Women were frequently as free in their social and sexual behaviour as men: an author of 1739 remarked that female adultery in high circles was considered ‘a fashionable vice rather than a crime’. Lady Oxford’s large brood was nicknamed ‘the Harleian miscellany’ after the fifth Earl’s manuscript collection. Lady Elizabeth Foster bore two children by the Duke of Devonshire while being the close friend of his wife, Georgiana, who in turn had a daughter by Charles Grey. Extramarital affairs, discreetly conducted, could be ignored at least in public among the fashionable set.12 While aristocratic marriages were arranged for dynastic reasons, to preserve property and estates or to promote political alliances, women might have to seek sexual gratification elsewhere than in the marriage bed, and their husbands were by convention free to keep mistresses or seduce their housemaids and servants or other men’s wives. Young aristocratic women were carefully kept in seclusion until they were suitably married and had produced a son and heir of unblemished legitimacy to inherit the title and estate. Until then they were not available to young men of their own social level who had to look elsewhere. After they had performed their dynastic duty they might consider themselves, as Lady Melbourne advised the Duchess of Devonshire, free to seek pleasure where they wished.13
George’s pursuit of pleasure was no more remarkable: his opportunities were greater because he was a royal prince and a liaison with him, however brief, might lead to social and financial benefits, while the easy availability of all but the most virtuous women accustomed him to being able to take his pleasures as and when he could. When in 1785 he was admitted to the exclusive Beef-steak Club, its numbers being enlarged by one to accommodate him, The Times sardonically commented that he was known to be remarkably fond of rump steaks. At least he was handsome and well-mannered, and capable of giving pleasure in return. In the Vanity Fair of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century society pleasure was king, and for a time George was its prince.
One of his earliest escapades, with overtones of comedy if not farce, was his seduction (or possibly hers of him) in the early summer of 1781 of Madame Hardenburg, wife of the Hanoverian Minister in England. He described in detail to Frederick how after meeting her at a card party in the Queen’s apartments he was struck by a ‘fatal tho’ delightful passion … in my bosom … for her.… O did you but know how 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.’ She resisted his advances at first but probably only to increase his ardour. When he made himself ill with his longing for her – ‘I have spit blood & am so much emaciated you would hardly know me again’ – she, as he put it, completed his happiness. ‘O my beloved brother,’ he wrote, ‘I enjoyed beforehand the pleasures of Elyssium’. Unfortunately the press got hold of rumours about the affair and the lady’s husband faced her with the accusation that she had cuckolded him. She was forced to admit that the Prince had ‘made proposals’ to her and Hardenburg wrote an angry letter to him. George ‘almost fell into fits’ on receiving it, thinking that she must have confessed, and therefore was guilty of ‘ye blackest ingratitude & cruelty’. Nevertheless he wrote to assure Hardenburg that he was the only person to blame for the affair and that she had treated him ‘with ye utmost coolness’ – at the same time writing her ‘ye most passionate of letters’.
She responded by pleading with him to elope with her that night. This put rather a different complexion on the matter. The thought of ‘Ye noise my flight would cause in ye world’ and the likely reaction of his father with his ‘severe disposition’ were enough to make him pause: he at first consented to her demand but rapidly changed his mind when he considered that the consequence might be a life of poverty. He decided to make a full confession to his mother, and fainted or affected to do so in the course of it: his mother wept and consented to his going, but his father was quicker off the mark. He sent Hardenburg immediately to Brussels ‘with my little angel’, leaving George to ‘all ye agonies of misery & despair’. He wrote to his brother to beseech him not to make love to her himself ‘(supposing her to [be] capable of allowing it, wh. I believe impossible …)’. Frederick unkindly, or perhaps with the best intentions, replied that he had already been invited to do so. On his arrival in Hanover he had attended a masquerade at which he had danced with Madame Hardenburg and she offered to go alone into another room with him. ‘I desired no better fun’, he wrote, ‘but unluckily the room was full … I know also other stories of her still worse than this’. Two months later Frederick assured him that ‘she has abused you so terribly by all accounts here that I am thoroughly persuaded she is completely cured of her love for you, if she ever had any … [and] if one may judge by her behaviour here, she cannot have had much. … You ought to rejoice at having got rid of her’.14
George’s ardour rapidly cooled. He confessed to always having had doubts about her, but he had been carried away by his passion: ‘In short it was a very miserable and unhappy affair alltogether’. Nevertheless, six months later he was still asking for news of her: no one had yet replaced her in his affections. As for the King, not surprisingly he was ‘excessively cross & ill-tempered & uncommonly grumpy, snubbing everybody, in everything. We are not upon ye very best terms.’ George had requested leave to go abroad when the Hardenburgs left in order to recover his composure, but had received in reply a lecture on his conduct.
It is now allmost certain that some unpleasant mention of you is daily to be found in the papers. … Examine yourself … and then draw your conclusion whether you must not give me many an uneasy moment. 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 fulfill my duty either to my God or to my country.
The King subscribed himself ‘an affectionate father trying to save his son from perdition’ so that he might ‘become worthy of the situation that Divine Providence probably intends for you’.15
Frederick from the safe distance of Hanover begged his brother to try to set matters right, ‘as it only plagues both of you without answering the least end in the world’, but George assured him that the King and Queen abused them both and that he had had a blazing quarrel with his mother, none of which did any good. In March 1782 the King reprimanded him for being absent from the levee and threatened to take ‘disagreeable’ steps if he did not obey the rules set out for him in 1780. George rudely and defiantly replied that he had ‘inconsiderately acquiesced’ in that plan because of his ‘youth and inexperience’ and claimed that his present conduct did not reflect ‘the smallest discredit either upon yourself or upon me’. He signed himself ‘your Majesty’s most dutiful son and subject’.16
George’s defiance of his father reflected his resentment at Frederick’s enforced absence. His departure, George assured him at Christmas in 1781, was ‘ye longest twelvemonth I ever passed’ without his ‘best & dearest friend’.17 His dissipations and adventures might not have been much lessened if his brother had been there, but the way he threw himself into the vain pursuit of pleasure at all costs suggests that his separation from the brother he loved most left an emotional blank in his life that no pleasure could ever fill, and left him even more vulnerable to sycophants and adventurers who exploited his loneliness for their own purposes.
Among the women with whom the Prince enjoyed sexual associations was Elizabeth Armistead, a noted courtesan, who later settled into a permanent relationship with Charles Fox and eventually became his wife, to the astonishment of his friends when, several years after the wedding, he made the fact public. George’s involvement with Charles Fox went beyond sharing a mistress, and its repercussions were profound. Fox’s habits exceeded the Prince’s in licence, extravagance and depravity. From his early youth, even at Eton, Fox had been indulged in every whim by his doting father, Lord Holland, and had sampled most of the available vices, becoming addicted to gambling, drink and women. His reckless conduct and his powerful personality attracted a circle of devoted friends and admirers who shared or adopted his tastes, and George became one of his foremost companions. Through Fox the Prince was introduced to Whig society, led by Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, whose town house became the centre of a fashionable and glittering if shallow circle, both social and political. George was introduced to its delights in 1779 and was immediately captivated.18 Georgiana resisted his importunities to become his mistress, but they struck up a close relationship, calling each other brother and sister. Georgiana was to become his ally in the pursuit of Mrs Fitzherbert, while the Prince in later years was her constant resource for funds to help finance her enormous gambling debts, or at any rate to stave off the bailiffs.
The King could hardly approve of these associations, and not only for moral reasons. The later 1770s and early 1780s were a period of crisis for the Empire, with the American War of Independence, and of consequent political extremism at home. The American cause was espoused by the Rockingham Whigs, an opposition party closely associated with the Devonshires and led in the House of Commons by Fox himself. George III believed that they were abetters of treason in America and disloyalty at home. In their turn the Rockingham Whigs stood for the reduction of the royal influence in politics and the supremacy of Parliament over the King. Knowing that they could never attain office under George III with his consent, they sought to achieve it through Parliamentary pressure and to subject George III to their control. The Prince of Wales had no interest in the political doctrines of whiggery or their ‘Revolution principles’ – a reference to England’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1689, to which the Americans in the 1770s also appealed. His association with the Whigs was social and selfish. Like previous Hanoverian princes of Wales, he sought to increase his political weight by association with politicans opposed to his father’s ministers, and they in turn hoped for future favours in the next reign to compensate for exclusion in the present. This ‘reversionary interest’, as it was called, was a recurrent feature of eighteenth-century political life, and disappeared from the political scene only with the death of Princess Charlotte in 1817.
The Prince’s involvement with Whig politics was therefore personal rather than politically motivated, but it added another dimension to his quarrels with his father. The King suspected that if his eldest son was provided with a generous income he would contribute to the Whigs’ electoral and other political expenses, in opposition to his own ministers and government, as well as using his funds for immoral and extravagant expenditure. It made him all the more determined to resist George’s request for a large settlement when he came of age in 1783, at which point, by coincidence, the government had fallen into the hands of the Whigs because of the collapse of Lord North’s ministry after the loss of the American war. The King was conscious of the burdens of taxation and economic dislocation under which his subjects suffered because of war expenditure, and was determined to enforce economy in every possible way. When the Whigs proposed that the Prince should have an annual income of £100,000 – double what George III had had when he was heir to the throne – the King blankly refused to condone what he termed ‘a shameful squandering of public money … to the wishes of an ill-advised young man’. He offered instead an annual income of £50,000 from the existing Civil List, to avoid any new taxes, which together with the proceeds of the Duchy of Cornwall which would go to the Prince at the age of twenty-one, would give him £62,000. The furthest he would go was to ask Parliament for a capital sum of £30,000 to pay the Prince’s debts and a similar sum to pay for his outfit, and this on condition that George would promise to incur no more debts. The Prince was angry, but was forced to submit when even Fox admitted that the government could go no further than the King would allow. He got something of his own back when he made his first appearance in the Lords at the end of the year to speak and vote in favour of Fox’s India Bill, which George III saw as a blatant attempt to place India and its vast patronage under the control of ‘Charles Fox, in or out of office’.19 Fox’s schemes however came to nothing when the King dismissed his Whig ministers and Pitt came to his King’s rescue. George unrepentantly flaunted his political sympathies by allowing Fox to use Carlton House as his election headquarters in 1784 and adopting the Whig colours of ‘blue and buff’ for his uniform – which enraged the King still further because they were the colours of George Washington’s rebel Americans.
George III’s intentions were public spirited as well as those of a parent wishing to instil sensible habits into a wayward son, but without co-operation from the Prince the result was to be financial disaster. The main cause was the Prince’s favourite project to refurbish Carlton House as a fit palace for the heir to the British dominions and in accordance with all the latest styles and fashions in architecture, furniture and decorations. The enormous expenses already incurred were only a foretaste of what was to come: George’s refusal to modify his plans and his total indifference to money opened the path to ruin again.
1 D.M. Stuart, Daughters of George III, 193.
2 Annual Register, 1781 (Chronicle), 161.
3 Roy Jenkins, Gladstone, 350–1.
4 George to Frederick, 31 Jan. 1781: CGPW, i, 43 (misdated 20th).
5 Lake to George, 23 Jan. 1781: ibid., 44–6.
6 Villiers, 33; Sichel, i, 110, 141, 34; George to Frederick, 11 May, 30 March, 22 Oct. 1781: CGPW, i, 326n, 62, 55, 75; Shane Leslie, George the Fourth, 23.
7 Anecdotes concerning HRH the Prince of Wales (1782): Bessborough, Georgiana, 289–92.
8 Richardson, 13. ‘Perdita’ Robinson was a fashionable beauty and an acclaimed actress at Drury Lane. She was painted by Romney, Reynolds and Gainsborough. She became a celebrated authoress, published a volume of sentimental verses in 1775, and went on to produce seven novels and a tract on women’s rights. A further volume of poems was published in 1791, the Prince of Wales heading the list of subscribers. Despite the notice of celebrities such as Fox, Sheridan and the Duchess of Devonshire, she was always in financial straits, through her extravagance and the gambling debts of her wastrel lover, Banastre Tarleton. She developed a painful rheumatic or arthritic condition and died in poverty in 1800. Among her patronesses was Lady Hertford, who later became George’s mistress. Three of her portraits still hang in the Wallace Collection at Hertford House in Manchester Square: J. Ingamells, Mrs Robinson and her Portraits, The Wallace Collection (1978).
9 Walpole, Last Journals, ii, 347. Both Cumberland and Gloucester had married commoners, to the disgust of George III.
10 Ibid., 349–50, 353, 384, 405–6; Walpole to Lord Harcourt, 18 May 1781: Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Cunningham, viii, 41–2; Sichel, ii, 32.
11 Lady Sarah Napier wrote in March 1783 that George ‘is desperately in love with Lady Melbourne & when she don’t sit next to him at supper he is not commonly civil to his neighbours’: Countess of Ilchester and Lord Stavordale (eds), Life & Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox, ii. 36.
12 Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, 328–31; Jane Aiken Hodge, Passion and Principle, 5.
13 A. Calder Marshall, The Two Duchesses, 25.
14 George to Frederick, 17 July 1781; Frederick to George, 28 Aug. and 8 Nov. 1781: CGPW, i, 66–9, 72, 76.
15 Same to same, 25 March 1782; King to George, 6 May: ibid., 84, 60–2.
16 Frederick to George, 12 Oct. 1781; King to George, 30 March 1782 and reply: ibid., 74, 86–7.
17 George to Frederick, 24 Dec.: 1781 ibid., 78. The pain of separation was mutual. In the twelve months after their parting Frederick wrote him twenty-three letters, but George managed only eight in reply. On 30 Dec. 1781 Frederick begged him ‘Pray write often; it is near two months that I have not received the least line from you’: ibid., 79.
18 Villiers, 32.
19 Corresp. between Portland and King, 15–17 June, King and North, 16–17 June, Fox to George 16, 18 and 20 June, Portland to George 16, 17, 18 June 1783: CGPW, i, 114–24, 126–8; E.A. Smith, Whig Principles, 42–5.