Royal Babylon (22 page)

In spite of the ample distractions available to him, the Prince obsessed about the unattainable Mrs. Fitzherbert. Every time she refused to sleep with him he pretended he was seriously ill. When this failed he asked Mrs. Fitzherbert to agree to marry him. If she didn't, he told her, “My brain will split.” His pathetic threat had the desired effect because she accepted his proposal but, as it transpired, only as a ploy to get rid of him. She quickly withdrew her promise and went abroad—the marriage agreement had been elicited under pressure, she informed him by letter, and she felt no obligation to keep her word. This time the Prince put his emotional-blackmail campaign into top gear and
regaled her with a series of forty-two-page suicide threats. Fearing for his sanity, she relented.

On December 15, 1785, a young curate called Reverend Burt was spirited out of the Fleet Prison, where he had been imprisoned for debt. A few hours later he found himself officiating at the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Maria Fitzherbert at her house in Park Street, Mayfair. The bride was given away by her uncle, who also acted as a witness, alongside her brother John Smythe. One of the Prince's best friends stood guard at the door. The Reverend Burt was handed
£
500 and promised promotion to bishop if he kept his mouth shut. Unfortunately it was one of the worst-kept secrets in the history of the British royal family, and within a few days half of London was talking about the secret Park Street wedding. To all but his closest friends, however, the Prince denied a ceremony had taken place. The only close friend who didn't seem to know what was going on was also his closest political ally, the politician Charles James Fox. Fox was duped into standing before Parliament to categorically deny the rumors surrounding his friend's wedding. He never forgave the Prince of Wales for making a fool of him.

Mrs. Fitzherbert's position was now a curious one. In private she milked her new status as the official Princess of Wales, acquiring well over
£
50,000 worth of jewelry, a livery of servants and a splendidly furnished house in Pall Mall where she entertained on a royal scale. The marriage was canonically valid, whether it was a secret or not: the couple were indeed man and wife. To the Prince, however, the marriage was probably no more than a ruse to get her to share his bed on a more regular basis. He knew that as she was a Catholic the Act of Settlement would never let the marriage stand, and nor would
the recently enforced Royal Marriages Act. As far as the royal family and Parliament were concerned, the marriage certificate was a worthless piece of paper.

The relationship endured for twenty-seven years, outlasting his “official” marriage to Princess Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, the separation, and hundreds of other women. It ended when Maria Fitzherbert was fifty-five years old, the King dismissing her as a “cantankerous old woman.” The split was mutual: although she had long since got over the shock of what she correctly interpreted as his treacherous and bigamous marriage to Princess Caroline, she was no longer prepared to tolerate his senile philandering. She demanded a formal separation and after a great deal of undignified haggling the Prince agreed to pay her off with a pension of
£
10,000 a year.

George's next regular belle was Lady Isabella Hertford. She was the daughter of the ninth Viscount Irvine, and as large as a stately home. “The old lady of Manchester Square,” as the vast Marchioness was known, attracted more abuse than any of his previous mistresses. One M.P. described her as an “odious character .  .  . issuing forth from the inmost recesses of the gaming house or brothel and presuming to place itself near the royal ear.”

In 1818 an angry mob of Londoners gathered around Lady Hertford's house and threw stones at her windows. If they had been paying attention they would have known that she had by that time long since been replaced in George's affections by Lady Coyningham, a large fifty-two-year-old married woman with four grown-up children. This was to be his final long-term relationship, and she came to be known to Londoners as the “Vice-Queen.” As had been the case with Lady Hertford, the cuckolded husband was also required to join in the fun: the
King was often seen quite openly kissing and groping his new mistress on the sofa while her sad spouse, Lord Coyningham, sat beside them playing gooseberry.

The Prince's hangers-on, the royal rat pack, comprised some of the most hardened reprobates in London. One of the more regular members of this gang was his own brother, Frederick the Duke of York, who divided his time equally between prostitutes and the bottle. Other members included the Earl of Clermont, “remarkable for only his profligacy”; the actor John Kemble, who swallowed wine by “pailfuls”; Richard Cosway, a famous miniaturist who augmented his income from the easel and paint palate by running a brothel from his home; and Sir John Lade and his prostitute wife, the lewd Lady Letitia.

Two of the Prince's most constant drinking companions were considerably older than he was. Both had made their names as upper-class drunks when George was still in his cot. One, a titled wino known as the “Dirty Duke” of Norfolk, was considered to be quite literally one of the filthiest men in the kingdom. His reputation for never bathing went before him, especially when he stood upwind. When his servants could no longer bear his personal stench they would wait until he had passed out in a drunken stupor, then wash him while he was still unconscious. Norfolk complained one day to a friend, Dudley North, that he suffered from rheumatism and had tried everything to relieve the pain without effect. “Did you ever try a clean shirt?” suggested North. In old age the Duke's astonishing capacity for alcohol rendered him so obese that he was unable to get through a standard door frame. The venal Duke of Queensbury—“old Q” or “degenerate Douglas” to his friends—was a tiny man, thirty-eight years older than the Prince. He was particularly reviled at Windsor for
getting permanently drunk on George III's champagne throughout the Regency crisis when the old King lay terminally ill.

The Prince's most frequent guests at Carlton House were the Barrymore family, notorious for their wild lifestyles and colorful nicknames. The young seventh Earl of Barrymore blew an inheritance of
£
20,000 a year on alcohol, and was known as “Hellgate.” His brother Augustus was a clergyman, also a compulsive gambler perpetually on the verge of being thrown into debtors prison, and was therefore known as “Newgate.” The youngest Barrymore brother had a clubfoot and was known as “Cripplegate.” The family picture was completed by their little sister, who for reasons unconnected with the sale of fish was known as “Billingsgate.”

Decades of bibulous excess left George IV trapped inside a bloated, broken body which was in an alarmingly advanced state of physical degeneration. He spent a fortune on oils, ointments, creams, pastes, rosewater, eau de cologne, vanilla and oil of jasmine to try to hide the damage. His hair was colored with vegetable dye; his halitosis disguised with myrrh; his hands whitened with enamel. He wore so much makeup that his skin looked permanently glazed. The young Princess Victoria almost threw up when she was required to kiss her oily uncle on the cheek and found it thick with greasepaint.

He had high blood pressure and often had himself bled before he appeared in public to make his florid, broken-veined complexion appear a lighter shade of purple. He also suffered from unsightly swollen glands in his throat, a problem that upset him considerably. He went to great lengths to hide his affliction and thus accidentally started a fashion for high neckcloths. His bloated body was crammed into corsets and stays; his pendulous gut drawn in by a great belt. When he opened Waterloo
Bridge to celebrate the second anniversary of Napoleon's defeat, George made a rare appearance without his gravity-defying girdle and his stomach swung around his knees. William Cobbett observed the “uncommonly huge mass” and speculated that George weighed “perhaps a quarter of a ton.”

For the last eight years of his life, George IV suffered from arteriosclerosis, which could have finished him off at any moment, cirrhosis of the liver and dropsy. In his final months he suffered terribly, swollen with booze and gout like a poisoned dog, unable to walk or sleep or even to lie down because of respiratory problems. Although he drugged himself daily with a potentially lethal cocktail of opium, hemlock, brandy and eau de cologne, he was in so much pain that the guards outside Windsor Castle could hear his screams.

When George IV died, his already bloated hulk was so poorly embalmed that it became even more swollen and threatened to burst through the lead lining in his coffin, until someone drilled a hole in it to let out some of the putrid air. An eyewitness, Mrs. Arbuthnot, recorded that his funeral had been in many ways like his reign—altogether an unpleasant experience. The press, who had consistently condemned him throughout his life, abandoned the usual obsequiously crafted posthumous tributes that they were obliged to bestow on even the most ghastly of royals. “There never was an individual,”
The Times
noted, “less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king.”

         

George III's second eldest son, Frederick the Duke of York, was one year younger than the Prince of Wales and the first of
the royal Dukes to die, at the age of sixty-three, officially from dropsy. This was the brother immortalized in the nursery rhyme as “The Grand Old Duke of York,” a piece of doggerel that summed up his contemporaries' faith in his competence as Commander-in-Chief of the British army. He was very tall, bald and—although he had skinny, underdeveloped arms and legs—had an enormous gut, perfectly counterbalanced by a huge backside. “One was always afraid that he would tumble over backward,” observed Baron Stockmar. As one of the Prince of Wales's regular cronies, he took his wastrel older brother as a role model and settled down to an existence of general debauchery.

Frederick's was not the most normal of childhoods, even for a member of the British royal family, as he became a bishop at six months old. As soon as he was able to hold a glass he decided that drinking himself to death was an obviously more attractive lifestyle than anything the Church could offer. The Duke had two “wives,” an official one he hardly ever saw and an unofficial one he lived with in Gloucester Place, London. His real wife was the Prussian Princess Frederica, a strange woman badly marked by smallpox. She was an insomniac and spent most nights in her smelly garden grotto where she kept forty dogs, and several kangaroos, monkeys and parrots. In thirty years of wedlock the Duke and Duchess spent barely more than a couple of nights under the same roof.

When the Duke of York was forty he set up home with a Mrs. Clarke, the daughter of a London stonemason. She was an exceptionally corrupt woman who had made her reputation in the beds of some of London's wealthiest socialites. She destroyed what little was left of the Duke's reputation by selling army commissions while he was Commander-in-Chief. He
was charged in the House of Commons with “personal corruption and connivance,” but by a vote of 278 to 196 was found not guilty. It was a hollow victory and he was forced to resign his army post in disgrace. Even more embarrassment was heaped on the royal family by the explicit evidence given during the trial. At one point the entire House of Commons sat laughing as excerpts of his love letters to Mrs. Clarke were read aloud, details of which became widely available in the popular press.

         

The king's fifth son, Ernest the Duke of Cumberland, was an extraordinarily sinister figure. He was disliked by his father, feared by his own mother and sisters and shunned even by his debauched brothers. His sister-in-law Princess Caroline of Brunswick simply described him as “very odious.” If there had been a popularity poll between Cumberland and Napoleon in Britain in 1810, it would have been too close to call. In appearance he was quite different from the other members of his dynasty. Whereas most of the Hanoverians were short and portly, Cumberland was very Prussian-looking—tall, lean, his face alarmingly disfigured by a deep saber cut above his right eye. His looks did much to encourage the popular view that he was some sort of royal monster—many people were even convinced that he was somehow involved in the deaths of his niece Princess Charlotte, who died in childbirth, and her baby. The Georgian press was happy to Satanize him at every opportunity.

In the early 1800s the Duke of Cumberland was embroiled in two sensational royal scandals. The Prince of Wales often
warned his sisters against being alone in a room with Cumberland, with good reason, as the Duke was widely suspected of having incestuously raped and impregnated their young sister Sophia. In August 1800, when the unmarried Princess Sophia was twenty-two years old, she secretly gave birth to a baby at Weybridge. Everyone in the family knew about the pregnancy except King George III. Throughout her pregnancy he was told that she was bloated with dropsy, but at Weybridge had taken a mysterious cure comprising a roast-beef diet. The King thought it was “an odd business” but accepted the explanation. He had not, at that time, taken leave of his senses, but he did have eleven other children to keep tabs on and by this time his vision was seriously impaired.

The royal rape story originated with the court diarist Charles Greville, a man usually considered by historians to be a reliable source. He reported that he had seen letters, written by the Princess to an equerry, which stated that her brother the Duke of Cumberland had sexually abused her. Although the Palace never officially acknowledged that the child existed, the approved version was that the real father of the child was the equerry himself, General Thomas Garth.

Garth was an unlikely scapegoat, to put it mildly. This man with whom Princess Sophia was supposed to have had an affair was ugly, dwarfish, his face badly disfigured by a large purple birthmark, and thirty-three years older than her. General Garth retained his prestigious job in the royal household and was still there when he died, aged eighty-five. His continued service, it was noted, was an odd way to treat an alleged rapist. The Prince of Wales and Edward the Duke of Kent were privately convinced that Cumberland was the child's father, and that the loyal Garth had been nominated to take the blame.