York and the Regency Crisis, 1787–1789
By 1787 the king and queen had become more fond of Windsor Castle as a residence and, having crossed from Calais to Dover, Frederick drove directly there, where his mother and father and all his sisters received him with the greatest affection. Fanny Burney witnessed the event and wrote of the king’s delight in seeing his son again: ‘The joy of his excellent father. Oh! That there is no describing. It was the glee of the first youth – nay of ardent and innocent infancy – so pure it seemed, so warm, so open, so unmixed. Might he but escape the contagion of surrounding example.’1
By this she meant the Prince of Wales, who was staying in his seaside ‘pavilion’ at Brighton when the news came through of Frederick’s return. We are told that ‘without loss of time he threw himself into his carriage and proceeded to salute a brother whom he tenderly loved and from whom he had been so long separated’.2 During the period that Frederick had been in Hanover, relations between the king and his heir had deteriorated to an alarming degree. Physically, the Prince of Wales was attractive as a young man, although he soon grew to be portly and eventually grossly fat. Georgiana, the dazzling young Duchess of Devonshire – one of innumerable women with whom he eventually had an affair – wrote about him in a private memoir on their first encounter in 1782:
The Prince of Wales is rather tall and has a figure which, though striking, is not perfect. He is inclined to be too fat and looks too much like a woman in men’s clothes, 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 even to a tawdry degree, which young as he is will soon wear off. His person, his dress, and the admiration he has met with … take up his thoughts chiefly. He is good-natured and rather extravagant … but he certainly does not want for understanding and his jokes sometimes have the appearance of wit. He appears to have an inclination to meddle with politics – he loves being of consequence, and whether it is in intrigues of state or of gallantry he often thinks more is intended than really is.3
Most of these judgements proved to be correct. The prince was intelligent, cultured, possessed of exceptional artistic flair, generous, friendly and good company. Unfortunately he was also seriously lacking in any kind of common sense concerning political decisions, the assessment of other people’s characters, moderation in the consumption of food or drink, the expenditure of money in any respect, and the pursuit of women. Despite all the care George III had taken with his education, the prince had turned out to be, as far as his father was concerned, a disaster.
The prince’s first serious affair was at the age of sixteen, with Mary, niece of Sir William Hamilton, who did not encourage him, so he turned to Mary Robinson, a married actress with a baby daughter, whom he saw playing the part of ‘Perdita’ in The Winter’s Tale. Calling himself ‘Florizel’ after the prince in the same play, he wrote to her making many promises, including the payment of £20,000 when he should come of age. She kept his letters and when he lost interest in her she blackmailed the king, who paid her £5,000 for them and granted a life annuity of £600 for herself and £200 for her daughter.4
George III had two younger brothers, William, Duke of Gloucester, and Henry, Duke of Cumberland, both of whom led their young nephew astray. Cumberland had annoyed the king by marrying a commoner, Anne Horton, and the result of this had been the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 which laid down that no member of the royal family might marry without the sovereign’s permission before the age of twenty-five. Cumberland and his wife were ostracized by the king and queen and no doubt he encouraged the prince to drink, swear and whore as a way of striking back.
In 1781 the prince pursued Madame Hardenburg, the wife of a Hanoverian minister in England, who seems to have readily succumbed to his advances. To his dismay she urged him to elope with her and he admitted his dilemma to the queen, who told the king, who quickly despatched Hardenburg, with his wife, on a diplomatic mission to Brussels. George wrote to his brother Frederick in Hanover, asking him not to make love to the baroness when she returned there. Frederick told him that when he had first arrived in Hanover the year before, he had danced with her at a masquerade and she had offered to go alone into another room with him. He went on: ‘I desired no better fun … but unluckily the room was full … I know also other stories of her still worse than this.’ Two months later he told George 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 … You ought to rejoice at having got rid of her.’5
Frederick knew that his brother found the king very short-tempered and grumpy, as a result of his perceived misdemeanours, and he wrote from Hanover, urging that the prince should ‘do everything which 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.’6 George clearly missed the company of his brother because he told the king at Christmas 1781 that Frederick’s departure ‘was the longest twelvemonth I ever passed’, describing him as ‘his best and dearest friend’. The feeling was clearly mutual because after he had left home Frederick wrote George twenty-three letters, while George sent only eight letters in reply. Frederick complained in December 1781, ‘It is near two months that I have not received the least line from you.’7 Hearing that George had been ill, Frederick wrote in one of his early letters: ‘I hate a sermon as well as you, but my affection for you forces me to entreat you for God’s sake to take care of your health. You cannot stand this kind of life, and I am afraid it is the Windsor Lodge Duke [their Uncle Henry of Cumberland] who leads you into it. I have no doubt he means you exceedingly well, but believe me he is not the best adviser you can follow.’ The prince replied indignantly that he had not seen Cumberland for ages.8
In other letters Frederick boasted, ‘I have become one of the best shots here, so much so that I can shoot hare in their full speed with ball at a hundred yards distance.’ And again, ‘I have practised five or six times with a rifle-barrelled carabine [sic] at a butt, at which I have succeeded better than could have been conceived, as it is very difficult. Grenville and all say that I have the steadiest hand they ever saw.’ This was probably true, because he remained an outstanding marksman throughout his life. He also told George that he enjoyed shooting the stag: ‘I have often run five or six miles as hard as I could on foot with my gun on my shoulder after a stag.’9
George was much too vain to let all this pass without a riposte: ‘I am become an exceedingly good shot…. The first time I ever fired a fowling piece I fired at a sheet of paper at sixty yards distance, and covered it full of shot.’ Frederick then switched to his prowess as a dancer: ‘When I return to England I must teach you two different kinds of dances from what we have the least idea of, the quadrille and the valtzes.’ But everyone agreed that the Prince of Wales was an excellent dancer, and it is doubtful whether Frederick could compete with him on that score.10
Another of the young Prince of Wales’s mistresses was Elizabeth Armistead, a courtesan who shared her favours with, among others, Charles James Fox. This Eton-educated son of Lord Holland became the dominant force within the Whig party on account of his brilliance and ruthlessness as a political orator and debater. Yet at the same time he was one of the most debauched men in England, intent on the reckless pursuit of gambling, drinking and whoring. At other times in British history this would have made a successful political career impossible but a number of factors combined to make the period from about 1770 to 1830 one in which low standards of public behaviour and morality were in high fashion among the leaders of British society. One of the reasons for this may be that the Anglican Church had become moribund and to some degree corrupt and it had little control over public morality. Another main reason was that many members of the aristocratic and gentry classes had become enormously rich since about 1750 as a result of improved agricultural methods, as well as the mining of coal on their estates, which fed the rapidly developing ‘industrial revolution’.
The two most prominent exceptions to the often low standards of aristocratic behaviour were the king and queen, who lived a relatively modest, frugal and godly life, but even though they potentially had enormous social influence, they were not able to quell many of the excesses. The king regarded most of the Whigs as sons of the devil, partly because they were led by debauchees such as Fox and partly because they were opposed to royal methods of government. Lord North, who had been the king’s loyal prime minister for twelve years, resigned in 1782 after a major defeat in the House of Commons and the king, to his disgust, was forced to ask the Whigs to form a ministry, which included Fox.
This lasted long enough to negotiate the Treaty of Paris, which ended the War of American Independence, but it collapsed soon afterwards and to the king’s further dismay North agreed to form a coalition ministry with Fox. Outraged by this cynical arrangement, the king, in December 1783, took the remarkable step of asking William Pitt ‘the Younger’ to form an administration. He was a younger son of the famous statesman of the same name but he was only twenty-four years old and at first his appointment was greeted with derision. However, he quickly silenced his critics because he showed that, despite his youth, he was a brilliantly lucid debater in the Commons who had a mastery of detailed exposition that soon commanded the confidence and admiration of the House. Pitt was a bachelor and lived a blameless life, devoted to his work, though even he drank too much.
After 1783, then, the Whigs were firmly in opposition while Pitt commanded the support of the king and a good majority in the House. Since the Whigs were hated by the king, they naturally devoted all their efforts to winning over his heir. The Prince of Wales not only shared a mistress with Fox, but he shared his taste for drinking and wild living and they became firm friends. The year 1783 also marked two very important developments in the life of the Prince of Wales. He became the owner of Carlton House and ruined himself financially by remodelling it on a fabulous and extravagant scale and he genuinely fell in love and subsequently married illegally.
Carlton House, situated on Pall Mall, was a royal residence that had been occupied by George III’s mother until her death in 1772, after which it fell into disuse. The king granted it to his heir as his first independent home to mark his twenty-first birthday, imagining that the prince would make a number of necessary improvements and pay for them out of his parliamentary allowance of £50,000 a year plus the £12,000 he received from the Duchy of Cornwall. But George had grand plans for Carlton House and he employed the architect Henry Holland to create a veritable palace, which was decorated in the most lavish and expensive style and was readily compared in magnificence (though not size) with Versailles and St Petersburg. But it cost a huge fortune and by 1786 the prince was in debt to the tune of £269,000, with his programme of refurbishment by no means complete.11
Meanwhile George had fallen in love with a young widow, Maria Fitzherbert, who, unfortunately for him, was a Roman Catholic as well as a commoner. He could not marry a Roman Catholic without forfeiting his right to the throne, as laid down by the 1701 Act of Settlement, and he could not marry at all until he was twenty-five, according to the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. Maria fled abroad in 1784 and in July that year George contemplated giving up his right to the throne in favour of Frederick and following her into exile.12 The king, unaware of the true situation, refused him permission to go, but in 1785 Maria agreed to become the prince’s lover, although only if a secret marriage could be formalized. Seeing that this might destroy hopes of the prince’s succession to the throne, Fox urged him not to marry, but George went ahead, having persuaded a priest in a debtor’s prison to conduct a highly secret ceremony in Maria’s house. This marriage was legitimate in the eyes of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches (and of the bride) but illegal according to two Acts of Parliament.
As to the impact it might ultimately have on his claim to the throne, the prince swept this aside in the enthusiasm of the moment. When his father, still unaware of the secret marriage, ultimately suggested that he should marry some suitable princess, the prince’s stated view was ‘I will never marry. My resolution is taken on that subject. I have settled it with Frederick. No, I will never marry … Frederick will marry, and the crown will descend to his children.’13 George and Maria had to live separately, both in London and in Brighton, where the prince was also lavishing money on his seaside home, but it was generally accepted that they were together, until the prince eventually left her for a string of mistresses as well as a legitimate wife. The fact that they had been married remained a closely guarded secret until after George’s death in 1830.
So the Duke of York, aged twenty-four, returned to England in 1787 to find his brother living at Carlton House, and secretly married, while he himself lived in apartments in St James’s Palace, almost next door. Soon after his arrival home, he sat for Sir Joshua Reynolds, who painted a fine full-length portrait of him, which now hangs in Buckingham Palace. It shows him resplendent in his robes as a Knight of the Garter and looking every inch a prince. In Hanover he had been in charge of military affairs and a member of the governing council, as well as being the ruler of his prince-bishopric of Osnabrück. He had been feted at the courts of Frederick the Great and the Emperor Joseph as well as by dozens of lesser sovereigns and treated with almost exaggerated respect as a Prince of Great Britain. He had been influential in the conduct of international diplomacy and instrumental in the setting up of the League of Princes. He had been a trusted confidant of his father, who had accepted his advice on a wide range of issues, including the education and upbringing of his younger brothers. In short, while in Hanover, Frederick had been a person of real consequence in his own right.
In England, however, as he quickly realized, he had no significant role. He was a lieutenant general in a peacetime army and he was Colonel of the Coldstream Guards, which was largely an honorary position. He was not the heir to the throne, and though a son of the king, there were plenty of those at the time. Nor was he even married, with a growing family to occupy his time and energies. During Frederick’s childhood George III had set aside some of the revenues from Osnabrück, which by 1786 were enough to buy him an estate of about 4,500 acres at Allerton Mauleverer in Yorkshire, for which Frederick was now responsible.
Situated about five miles from Knaresborough, the estate, owned by the Mauleverer family soon after 1066, passed to several subsequent families and was bought by Frederick from the fourth Viscount Galway. At its centre was a large Georgian mansion, built in the 1740s and remodelled in the 1790s. Frederick took the Prince of Wales with him to stay in the house in October 1787 but clearly George did not think much of it, because shortly afterwards Frederick commissioned Henry Holland (his brother’s favoured architect) to rebuild it. The London journal The World reported in March 1787 that ‘Henry Holland is at present in Yorkshire superintending the improvements now in progress at HRH’s house at Allerton in the county’, and subsequently it was reported that ‘HRH entirely rebuilt the large and substantial residence, erecting commodious stables, and [laying] out the beautiful gardens’. A striking feature of these gardens was (and still is) a ‘Temple of Victory’ standing on top of a 200-foot hill, and there is a picturesque local tradition that this was indeed the very hill on which the ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ deployed his 10,000 men – presumably construction workers, toiling ant-like up and down. It is not a plausible story, however, because the temple and hill appear on a map of Yorkshire dated 1771, well before York bought the estate.14
When Frederick was appointed Duke of York he was given a parliamentary grant of £12,000 a year and he still received some revenue from Osnabrück.15 So he had an income, although it was small compared with that of the Prince of Wales. But it would have been enough had he not gambled so much. He was elected to Brooks’s Club, where many members of the aristocracy who were far richer than he cheerfully lost thousands in a single game of cards. Some might have made money this way, but not Frederick. During his lifetime he was well known for being not a very smart player, as well as being unlucky.
Inevitably Frederick became drawn into the fascinating circle of his brother, the Prince of Wales: he was a constant guest at Carlton House and soon became part of the petty intrigues, gossip and frolics that made up life there. He could have his pick of the women at court and he was frequently at dinner-parties where vast quantities of wine were consumed. He became less and less in touch with his father and mother, partly because it was George III’s avowed policy, like the Hanoverian kings before him, to exclude all his sons, even his heir, from any participation in state affairs or the business of government. The king was still only forty-nine: the future for his elder sons seemed lacking in any real purpose.
A good deal of Frederick’s life was centred on Brooks’s Club, and in 1828 (a year after his death) a history of the London Clubs was published, ‘with anecdotes of their members, sketches of character and conversation’. It contained two passages concerning the youthful Duke of York, though the episodes are not dated and they probably rely heavily on club gossip. The first extract reads:
Several of the Princes, sons to George III, became members of Brooks’s Club soon after coming of age. The two eldest sons were of course great favourites with everybody; but this partiality was not so much the consequence of their high rank as of their great good-nature and affability, their convivial habits, and their uniformly genteel deportment. They shared largely, likewise, in the admiration of the fair sex, at whose tea and card tables it was often a matter of serious dispute as to which was the handsomest fellow … two finer-looking young men than the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York were not to be seen in a day’s march.
The second extract is less flattering to York, and sees him in something of a Bullingdon Club mood (founded at Oxford University around 1780):
The Duke of York, Colonel St Leger, Tom Stepney and two others, one morning about three o’clock, came reeling along Pall Mall, highly charged with the juice of the grape, and ripe for a row. They banged on the door of Brooks’s so loudly as to wake up all the servants, who let them in, whereupon in the darkness they blundered about, damaging the furniture. One of the waiters produced a blunderbuss and was about to shoot when the housekeeper, who with no other covering than her chemise and flannel-petticoat was fast approaching with a light, which no sooner flashed upon the faces of these midnight disturbers than she exclaimed ‘For Heaven’s Sake, Tom, don’t fire! It is only the Duke of York!’16
When the king apparently went mad in the autumn of 1788, a far more sober attitude to life was required from his sons. The king became very agitated and even violent and the queen, afraid for her safety, moved to separate apartments. This made him even worse, and on one occasion he seized the Prince of Wales by the throat and pinned him to a wall. Dr Warren, his physician, shaved the king’s head and applied hot blisters to it, but by 5 November he was declared to be totally deranged, raving and gesticulating wildly and howling like a dog. On 8 November York, who had just come out of the king’s room, told a courtier that his ‘situation is every moment becoming worse. His pulse is weaker and weaker; and the doctors say it is impossible to survive it long, if his situation does not take some extraordinary change in a few hours’.17 The king subsequently fell into a coma. He did not die but his physicians were completely at a loss to know the cause or correct treatment of his condition, or how long it might last.
Clearly a regent was needed to carry out the king’s executive functions. The obvious candidate was the Prince of Wales but this was a disastrous prospect for Pitt and his ministers, who might well be sacked and replaced by Fox and the Whigs if the prince came to power. So Pitt at first advanced the claim of the queen to be regent, thereby causing a major family and political quarrel. In fact, Fox was on holiday in Italy and did not return, utterly exhausted, until 24 November. By then Pitt had accepted that the prince should be regent but only with restricted powers, a notion that infuriated the Whigs. In December Pitt’s Regency Bill made its way through Parliament and it is reported that on the 15th the Duke of York spoke very fluently in the House of Lords on behalf of his brother against any restrictions on the powers of the regent:
No claim of right, he said, had been set up by the Prince of Wales; and he was perfectly assured that his brother too well understood the sacred principles which seated the House of Brunswick on the British throne, ever to assume or attempt to exercise any power, let his claim be what it might, that was not derived from the will of the people, as conveyed through the constitutional voice of their legal representatives. This declaration, delivered in a manly and bathetic tone, made a deep impression upon the whole house, which remained silent for some minutes.18
Subsequently, York took quite an active part in the proceedings in the Lords, formulating amendments against any attempt to reduce the regent’s authority, but he was outvoted and formally disassociated himself from the final proposals. These were that the regent would not be able to create peers or make appointments for life and that the control of the royal household and the person and property of the king should be given to the queen and not to the prince. This undoubtedly caused a breakdown of good relations between the queen and her two eldest sons. Apparently, she and York had a serious row in January 1789 when the duke, in a temper, suggested to her that she was as mad as her husband.19
It seemed likely that the Bill would become law before the end of February 1789 and that the glittering prizes of executive power and political office, even if somewhat restricted, would fall into the hands of the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York and the Whig opposition. With only days to go, the king suddenly recovered on 20 February and two days later the prince and York were allowed to see him. We are told that the king ‘embraced them both with the greatest tenderness, and shed tears on their faces, and both the Princes were much touched by the scene … The Queen was present, and walking to and fro in the room with a countenance and manner of great dissatisfaction.’20
But the founding editor of The Times newspaper, John Walter, chose to describe this tender reconciliation in terms that were certainly libellous, because they were untrue as well as being grossly disparaging to York. Walter’s article on the following day said: ‘It argues infinite wisdom in certain persons to have prevented the Duke of York from rushing into the king’s apartments on Wednesday. The rashness, the Germanic severity and insensibility of this young man might have proved ruinous to the hopes and joys of a whole nation.’ York swiftly brought a libel action against Walter, who was given a stiff sentence – a year in Newgate prison, standing once in the pillory at Charing Cross and a fine of fifty pounds. He paid the fine and went to prison but was let off the pillory, perhaps at the suggestion of the duke. However, Walter continued to edit his paper in prison and was in trouble again the following year for libelling the prince and the duke once more and also their brother the Duke of Clarence, for good measure.21 It is quite possible that Walter received secret service money from the treasury to support the government and undermine the opposition, which of course included the two princes.22
The king had been declared deranged for three-and-a-half months and during this time the prince and his brother experienced a number of emotions. At first they were undoubtedly seriously shocked and genuinely upset by their father’s unexpected illness, although as time wore on they perhaps became more cynical about it. ‘Madness’ was not a condition that was sympathetically understood at the time and the princes doubtless felt that their father had been almost dehumanized by his ravings and physical assaults: this was not the father they had known and respected. It was said that after several drinks in Brooks’s Club they were both seen imitating their father’s wild gesticulations and behaviour, which was not in the best of taste.23 When it seemed possible that the king would not recover, the important issue became the political one of who should wield his power and to what extent, and here the princes found themselves battling against a majority in Parliament, led by the wily Pitt and his ally, the queen. Given that Frederick was so close to his brother, it would have been personally treacherous and tactically unwise for him to have abandoned the prince’s cause and to have supported Pitt. Indeed, in the opinion of Edmund Burke, the influential political philosopher, ‘The Duke of York’s whole conduct has been such, with regard to spirit, judgement and correctness of honour, as … every friend of his could wish.’24
George III was very popular with the great majority of his subjects and there was heartfelt rejoicing at his recovery. Political opponents of the Whigs portrayed them as a party which had attempted to seize power during the crisis, abetted by the Prince of Wales and Duke of York. The prince, in particular, was lampooned by popular caricaturists as a dissolute wastrel, greedy for power and influence, who had been disloyal and disrespectful to his father and mother, while The Times (still under the influence of Walter) went so far as to say that ‘Gluttony, drunkenness and gambling were [both brothers’] habitual occupations.’ As for the prince and the duke, they largely blamed the queen, who, they felt, had made an unconstitutional bid for power. Only the Irish seemed to be strongly on the prince’s side. Early in March (when it was too late), deputies from the Irish Parliament in Dublin came to offer the prince an unrestricted regency in Ireland. Instead the prince and the Duke of York gave them dinner at Carlton House, and the prince entertained them by using his excellent singing voice to render ‘a sea-song extremely well’.25
On 10 March there were lavish illuminations and displays in the West End of London to celebrate the king’s recovery, and so great was the patriotic enthusiasm of the mob that the Whigs had no alternative but to join in or have the windows of their houses smashed. The prince and the duke went to the opera but on the way their coach was held up in a traffic jam and the crowd demanded that they shout ‘God Save the King’, which they were happy to do and then ‘Pitt for Ever’, which they refused. When a man threatened to enter the royal coach, the prince was ready to fight but York pulled him back, hit the stranger on the head and told the coachman to drive on. The queen’s continued hostility was made apparent in April when the two brothers were told that a concert which the king and queen were putting on at Windsor ‘was intended only for those who have supported us through the late business, and therefore you may possibly choose not to be present’. They did attend, all the same, and the king greeted them warmly, though the queen looked ‘dowdy and glum’. Finally, there was a five-hour service of thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral on 23 April, a magnificent affair attended by enormous crowds, including 6,000 children from the city’s charity schools. Critical observers claimed that during the service the prince and the duke chatted to each other and laughed at jokes, and they ate biscuits during the sermon.26
There has been much debate about the nature of the king’s illness. At the time it was put down to stress caused either by the need to remain faithful to a somewhat unattractive wife, or by the loss of the American colonies, or by the disgraceful behaviour of his eldest son. In the late twentieth century it was suggested by psychiatric experts that the king in fact suffered from a disease called acute intermittent porphyria, which today can be treated relatively simply and successfully. The tragedy is that the king suffered agonies, not only from the disease but even more so from the hardly less than sadistic regime imposed upon him by his physicians, based upon the notion that he might be cured if he were punished for his outbursts by being confined in a straitjacket, among many other indignities.27