In Bed with the Georgians Read online

  But if the third George found wedded bliss, the same could not be said of his siblings. Take the sad case of his younger sister Caroline Matilda. Married at 15 by proxy to a man she had never met: a drunken, whoring, Danish king by the name of Christian VII, she was stuck in a foreign court where she did not speak the language and knew nothing of their customs.

  Her husband declined to stop visiting the local brothels, and in all probability gave her a nasty case of the Pox as a result. She sought treatment from a Dr Struensee who offered her rather more than just a cure. They became lovers, even though he was nearly twice her age, probably with the full knowledge and connivance of the King. She had a child by her lover, but in due course, pressure from disgruntled courtiers forced the mentally unstable King to take action against the happy pair. The ambitious but foolish doctor was tortured into making a confession, and was executed in 1772. The Queen was tried for adultery, convicted, divorced, sent into exile, caught scarlet fever, and was dead at the age of 23. And not once did her brother George III offer any sympathy or support. On hearing of her death, the King even barred her body from being returned for burial in Westminster Abbey.

  If he felt that his sister brought shame to the family, one wonders what George III must have thought of the antics of his other siblings. His brother the Duke of Gloucester went behind the King’s back and secretly married Maria Walpole, the Dowager Countess of Waldegrave. She was an illegitimate granddaughter of Sir Robert Walpole (Image 63). Even that unsuitable marriage did not deter him from having children by his mistress Lady Almeria Carpenter.

  Another brother, Henry Duke of Cumberland, was caught in flagrante with Lady Grosvenor in 1769. Lord Grosvenor was not amused, and sued the Duke for damages of £10,000 for criminal conversation – and won. Servants were brought forth to say that they had seen the bed ‘very much tumbled, but not the bolster.’ The evidence was damning, and the defence had to rely on the argument that Lord Grosvenor had been the first to break the marriage vows – a number of women (including whores from local brothels) came forward and gave evidence that he had slept with each of them ‘as man and wife.’ The case is mentioned later in relation to Lady Grosvenor, but it was the royal connection which produced the media frenzy. Evidence from royal servants revealed minute details about royal lifestyles – what time the Duke rose, where he took breakfast, what time he visited his club and so on, bringing these facts into the public domain. In many ways, this fascination with the day-to-day aspects of royal life has remained unaltered to the present day.

  The court case was manna from heaven for the gossip-mongers of the day, not least because the lovers had been so indiscreet as to write particularly revealing letters about their affair. These letters had been intercepted by the cuckolded husband, and he had the foresight to have them copied so that they could be read out, in all their salacious details, in court. All this gave the judge the chance to pontificate that he hoped that the Duke would:

  … direct himself to nobler pursuits than the seduction of the wife of a Peer, and incline him to copy from a very near relation of his [meaning His Majesty] whose conjugal attachments, abstracted from his other virtues, not only ornamented the throne he filled, but shewed a bright example to his subjects in general.

  Within weeks, the public could buy ‘Genuine copies of letters passing between His Royal Highness and Lady Grosvenor’ together with a full transcript of the trial. The book became a best-seller. The Duke subsequently went on to marry a commoner, against the express wishes of the monarch. This led directly to the passing of the 1772 Royal Marriages Act which declared any marriage by a member of the royal family, without the consent of the monarch, to be illegal. The Prince’s bride was the beautiful but far from virtuous Anne Houghton – a woman Horace Walpole described as being ‘as artful as Cleopatra.’

  But if his siblings disappointed the King with their inability to keep things buttoned up properly, nothing could have prepared him for the licentious and debauched behaviour of his own children. Later, the Duke of Wellington would describe the offspring of the king as ‘the damnedest millstones ever hung around a government’s neck’, while the poet Shelley coined the phrase ‘royal vampires’ to describe the royal brood. None could rival the excesses of the Prince of Wales, later to become George IV.

  THE PRINCE OF WALES – the satirist’s dream

  It is interesting to contrast the rather flattering formal portraits of a handsome young man, painted by artists such as Sir Thomas Lawrence, with the grotesque caricature shown as Image 39 made in 1792 by the acerbic James Gillray.

  Aged 17, the Prince set his sights on seducing the young, married, but impecunious actress Mary Robinson. Negotiations were handled by Lord Malden (who also fancied her something rotten). As mentioned previously, Mary had appeared as ‘Perdita’ in A Winter’s Tale, and the Prince used his Lordship to deliver a steamy correspondence between the Prince, calling himself Florizel, and the girl he called Perdita. The equivalent of the modern red-tops (especially the Morning Post and the Morning Herald) quickly got wind of the intrigue – but were unable to work out whether Mary was having an affair with the Prince, or with Lord Malden, or even with both at the same time. Mary was showered with gifts from her royal admirer, and given a written bond in the sum of £20,000 payable when she was 21, as a sort of ‘signing-on fee’. Eventually she gave in to his princely blandishments, and embarked on a hugely visible display of extravagance, with her own liveried coach, and all the latest fashions. Images 51 and 53 give two contemporary satirical views of the relationship, with The Goats canter to Windsor (Image 51) showing the Prince and his Perdita sitting atop a high gig. Three pairs of goats pull the vehicle, with Charles James Fox (shown by a fox’s head) riding as postilion. The carriage is accompanied by three other riders on goats, the leading one being ridden (backwards) by the cuckolded husband Thomas Robinson. Florizel and Perdita (Image 53) is a composite portrait of the two lovebirds, and shows the despairing figure of George III on the left uttering the words ‘Oh! My Son, My Son.’ On the right a shelf held up by horns (the mark of the cuckold) supports the bust of Thomas Robinson, over the title ‘King of Cuckolds’.

  The Press were fascinated by her equipage – the Rambler Magazine gave a most fulsome description in its edition of 4 December 1783:

  Mrs. Robinson now sports a carriage which is the admiration of all the charioteering circles in the vicinity of St. James’s: the body Carmelite and silver, ornamented with a French mantle, and the cypher is a wreath of flowers; the carriage scarlet and silver, the seat-cloth richly ornamented with a silver fringe. Mrs. Robinson’s livery is green faced with yellow, and richly trimmed with broad silver lace; the harness ornamented with stars of silver, richly chased and elegantly finished. The inside of the carriage is lined with white silk, embellished with scarlet trimmings. The Perdita has led a very splendid example to her impure sisters in the charioteering style, which few of them will be able to follow!

  This extract clearly demonstrate that whatever she did she made news, and whatever she wore made fashion.

  But after less than two years the Prince did the equivalent of sending a text to end the relationship – he sent Lord Malden round with a message. It was a bolt from the blue, especially when the Prince made it clear that he had no intention of honouring his Bond. Mary had by then incurred debts of £7,000 and clearly faced the prospect of imprisonment since she had no way of satisfying her creditors. It was only when Mary threatened to release his love letters and demanded £25,000 to keep quiet that the Prince was persuaded to pay her a lump sum of £5,000 and a yearly payment of £500. In return she agreed to surrender the bond. She embarked on various affairs, both with Lord Malden and, it was rumoured, with Charles James Fox, before ending up in a tempestuous relationship with the dashing Colonel Banastre Tarleton, featured later.

  The Prince’s attentions had turned to Grace Dalrymple Elliott, a Scottish socialite mentioned in Chapter Four, and who had abandoned her somewhat older husb
and for a succession of wealthy and well-connected lovers. Her portrait by Thomas Gainsborough appears as Image 27. In 1782 she gave birth to a child, which she claimed was fathered by the Prince, but it is apparent that the father could have been one of a handful of suspects. Two years later, the Prince introduced Grace to the Duc d’ Orleans and they quickly became lovers, leaving the Prince free to pursue other dalliances.

  Next up was Lady Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne. In 1784 she had a son, George Lamb, who was generally assumed to be fathered by the Prince, although her husband dutifully acknowledged the child as his own. She was the inspiration for Sheridan’s character Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal. By 1785 the Prince had fallen head-over-heels for Maria Fitzherbert. They married the same year, contrary to the provisions of the Royal Marriages Act, which meant that the union had no legal validity.

  Maria is shown on the right in Image 41 in Symptoms of Lewdness with her friend Albinia, the Duchess of Buckinghamshire. Both ladies enjoyed high society parties and excursions to the opera, and the print shows them behaving with considerable indecency, breasts bared for all the world to see. Albinia was an unusual woman in the sense that she was the illegitimate daughter of an illegitimate mother, and yet ended up married to a Duke. This did not prevent her from running a crooked Faro bank, and eventually she was charged with running an illegal gaming house. Such minor matters did not preclude her being a confidante of Maria, who appears in the print wearing a miniature portrait of the Prince of Wales above her impressive décolletage.

  A number of children were later borne by Maria, but these could not be regarded as legitimate royal offspring. Despite his constant philandering, Maria lived openly with the Prince until 1811, when the Prince, by then Regent, felt compelled to enter into a legal marriage with Caroline of Brunswick. However, during those years the Prince had innumerable affairs – one with the wife of a double-bass player at Drury Lane, another with Elizabeth Armistead (featured earlier), and another with a beautiful young singer called Mrs Anna Maria Crouch, to whom he gave a bond of £10,000.

  The Press revelled in lampooning the debauched antics of the Prince and his cronies, especially as it was clear that there was no love lost between the King and his eldest child. In November 1788 the King was thought to be seriously ill and at his last gasp. This did not stop the Prince carousing with his drinking friends, Colonel George Hanger and the playwright Sheridan. Thomas Rowlandson shows the intoxicated trio bursting into the King’s bedroom, with the Prince uttering the words ‘Damme, come along, I’ll see if the old fellow is ---- [dead] or not?’ (Image 55)

  The Prince was not exactly a one-woman-at-a-time-man. If for any reason he could not find a mistress available to satisfy his whims, he would eagerly set off for the local whore-house and take his pleasures with whoever was available. If he needed extra invigoration he could always rely on a spot of flagellation at the home of Mrs Collett in Tavistock Court, off Covent Garden. It seems that this particular predilection was shared with his younger brother the Duke of Kent (father to Queen Victoria). He was widely known to get his kicks from watching men under his command being flogged almost to the point of death. He too had a succession of mistresses before he ‘settled down’ with a wife, although in his case he did manage to keep the same mistress, called Madame de Saint-Laurent (born Thérèse-Bernardine Montgenet) for twenty-eight years.

  In 1794 the Prince of Wales took up with Frances, Lady Jersey, daughter of the Bishop of Raphoe and by then an attractive 41-year-old grandmother. She helped persuade the Prince to finish with Mrs Fitzherbert (who was paid an annuity of £3,000 a year for her past loyalty) and to marry Caroline of Brunswick. Lady Jersey simply did not perceive the new Queen as being a threat to her ability to influence and control the Prince. Indeed she became one of the new Queen’s Ladies in Waiting. Gillray’s Fashionable Jockeyship appears as Image 42 and shows the Prince riding the cuckolded Earl of Jersey to the bedside of Frances Villiers, Countess of Jersey.

  Poor Caroline, she really did have a tough time with the Prince. Her alliance was engineered for political reasons – she was Protestant, she was his cousin, and by marrying her the Prince hoped to get rid of his mountainous debts by pleasing his father the King. The engagement took place before they had even met each other. Wellington later remarked that Caroline was a woman ‘of indelicate manners, indifferent character and not very inviting appearance’ and reckoned that the match was prompted by Lady Jersey ‘from a hope that disgust with a wife would secure constancy to a mistress’. If that was so, then her strategy worked. When the wedding took place on 8 April 1795 the Prince was so disgusted at the sight of his bride that he got utterly drunk and passed out at the side of the matrimonial bed. He loathed her for what he saw as her dirty, uncouth habits. It did not stop him performing his marital duties on at least one occasion, and nine months later, the Queen gave birth to a baby (the Prince’s only legitimate child, and hence second in line to the succession). Immediately afterwards the Prince made a new Will, apparently leaving his estate to the woman he described as ‘my wife’ i.e. Maria Fitzherbert. To Caroline he bequeathed one shilling.

  Caricaturists revelled at the hostility between the new queen and Maria Fitzherbert, with The Rage showing the pair squaring up to each other (see Image 54).

  Image 46 shows Isaac Cruikshank’s Future Prospects, with the Prince of Wales kicking over a tea table at which his wife Caroline sits with their baby Princess Charlotte. In the Prince’s pocket there is a map of Jersey (a reference to his affair with the Countess) while the Earl of Jersey, sporting the cuckold’s horns, is saying ‘My wife is waiting for you in the next room.’

  Within months of the royal wedding it was apparent to all that the union was doomed, and the gossip was not helped when Caroline started to be portrayed as the ‘wronged woman’, making her extremely popular with the public. The public had had enough of the philandering and grossly extravagant Prince. This was at a time when he was ostentatiously spending vast sums of money on refurbishing and furnishing Carlton House. During a time of national shortages, and war with France, the Prince appeared to have no semblance of sensitivity. His drunkenness, his whoring, his gambling and his excesses gave the Press and the Print Shops every opportunity to vilify him.

  The Royal couple separated in 1795 and for ten years Caroline was rumoured to have had a succession of affairs. Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, Captain Thomas Manby, the politician George Canning and the artist Thomas Lawrence were all rumoured to have been lovers. Image 48 shows Queen Caroline accompanying Alderman Wood in a print entitled A wooden substitute – any Port in a Storm. Cavorting in the fields are rabbits and goats, both of which were regarded as symbols of carnal appetites.

  In 1806 a ‘secret’ commission known as the ‘Delicate Investigation’ was set up to investigate the rumours of her adultery, but the ‘secret’ was soon revealed by the Press. The commission decided that there was insufficient evidence to show that Caroline had gone beyond being merely flirtatious. However, she was increasingly ostracized by high society, who preferred to side with the Prince, although the general public were far more inclined towards the hard-done-by Caroline. Her position became untenable and in 1814 she agreed to leave the country in return for an annual payment of a hefty £35,000.

  By then the Prince had moved on to the good-looking but somewhat stout Isabella, Lady Hertford. She was the Prince’s mistress from 1807 to 1819, and was then succeeded to the Prince’s favours by Elizabeth, Marchioness Conyngham (see Image 52). The print shows the rotund George IV, dressed as his royal forbear Henry IV, about to be kissed by the well-rounded Marchioness.

  Elizabeth was by then a voluptuous 48-year-old – a shrewd, calculating and greedy woman with a penchant for collecting jewels. Her behaviour led the public to award her the nick-name ‘the Vice Queen’. The Prince was perfectly willing to indulge her, and showered her with gifts – he seemed childishly besotted with her. But she was never popular at court, being considered common and
vulgar. She was the one by the Prince’s side, and in his bed, when the Prince succeeded to the throne in 1820 on the death of his father George III. It cannot have been an easy time for her, because the new King was immediately embroiled in a fresh show-down with his estranged wife, the unloved and unlovely Caroline. While she was in exile she had entered a relationship with an Italian by the name of Bartolomeo Pergami – they were rumoured to be living openly together. They were an unlikely pair – she somewhat short and dumpy, Pergami tall and rather hairy. In Dignity (Image 49) the singularly unattractive Queen sits next to her bearded friend. A young man declines to sit at their table, with the words ‘I shall not degrade myself and the service by sitting at the table with such a fellow as that.’ The pair also appear in Image 56 in a print entitled Installation of a Knight Companion of the Bath showing the naked Queen in a scandalous bathroom scene, watched by servants who are peeping in through a partly-open door.