The first open scandal about the Prince was his intrigue with the unfortunate “Perdita” Robinson, who turned many a head beside his by her acting in The Winter’s Tale. We know very little about that episode except what the lady thinks fit to tell us in her Memoirs. The boy lover, not yet eighteen, was so closely kept at Kew that for some time he had to content himself with ardent letters. At length an interview was arranged under circumstances which suggest that the tutorial turnkeys must have been in the way of nodding over their port. Lord Malden, who played Leporello in this amour, brought Perdita to an inn on the island between Kew and Brentford, to await the signal that should invite them to cross.
The handkerchief was waved on the opposite shore; but the signal was, by the dusk of the evening, rendered almost imperceptible. Lord Malden took my hand, I stepped into the boat, and in a few minutes we landed before the iron gates of old Kew Palace. The interview was but of a moment. The Prince of Wales and the Duke of York (then Bishop of Osnaburg) were walking down the avenue. A few words, and those scarcely articulate, were uttered by the Prince, when a noise of people approaching from the palace startled us. The moon was now rising; and the idea of being overheard, or of his Royal Highness being seen out at so unusual an hour, terrified the whole group. After a few more words of a most affectionate nature uttered by the Prince, we parted, and Lord Malden and myself returned to the island. The Prince never quitted the avenue, nor the presence of the Duke of York, during the whole of this short meeting. Alas! my friend, if my mind was before influenced by esteem, it was now awakened to the most enthusiastic admiration. The rank of the Prince no longer chilled into awe that being who now considered him as the lover and the friend. The graces of his person, the irresistible sweetness of his smile, the tenderness of his melodious yet manly voice, will be remembered by me till every vision of this changing scene shall be forgotten.
LOOKING UP THE THAMES
Repeated assignations, she says, followed “at this romantic spot,” where now the party took courage to continue their walks till past midnight. Prince Frederick and Lord Malden, we are to know, were always there to play gooseberry. The lady wore a dark-coloured dress, and the gentlemen were disguised in greatcoats, except that harum-scarum Bishop, who would make his companions uneasy by showing himself in an unclerical buff coat, “the most conspicuous colour he could have selected for an adventure of this nature.” The tutors having got into their nightcaps by midnight, one supposes, these moonlight ramblers even ventured on a little music as the food of love, Frederick being the minstrel whose tones, “breaking on the silence of the night, have often appeared to my entranced senses like more than mortal melody.” It is clear that Perdita does not tell the whole story. Mrs. Papendiek, well up in the gossip of the backstairs, roundly asserts that two officials who had been about these princes from childhood, “privately overlooked the domestic vices and irregularities of their young charge,” and that they smuggled Mrs. Robinson through a back gate to the Prince of Wales’s apartments.
The beautiful actress, who was a poetess, too, à ses heures, might well be dazzled by those shining personalities. The Prince vowed unalterable love till death; and the most convincing of his billets-doux was a bond promising to pay Perdita £20,000 at his majority. Perhaps he was sincere for the moment; but we know what such callow vows come to. When, at eighteen, he became to some extent his own master, this unhappily married woman was taken into keeping, and for a time cut a notorious dash before the footlights of society. After Florizel grew tired of her, Perdita’s gushing sentimentality did not overlook businesslike considerations. She let the King buy up the Prince’s letters for £5000; and his bond was commuted for a pension of £400. But, these profits swallowed up by debts and extravagant habits, the poor creature fell into bad health and hasty authorship. Paralysed and harassed, she died in 1800, buried by her own desire, “for a particular reason,” in Old Windsor Churchyard, where her tomb may be seen fenced in with spiked railings to defend it from the body-snatchers that infested those river-side graveyards; and on it may be read an oft-quoted epitaph idealising the painful facts of her career.
At Richmond lived Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Prince of Wales’s more lasting flame, to whom he appears to have been honestly, if illegally, married. When this Prince was launched upon the wicked world, and the Bishop in partibus had been sent off to finish his education abroad, the royal pair still had their quiver full of youngsters, who for twenty years came so fast as to be cue for Horace Walpole’s jesting prophecy that “London will be like the senate of old Rome, an assembly of princes.” Besides others who died young, there were the princes afterwards known as Dukes of Clarence, Kent, Cumberland, Sussex, and Cambridge, and the Princesses Charlotte, Augusta, Mary, Elizabeth, Sophia, and little Amelia, the darling of her father. Where all these children were stowed away, one cannot always make out clearly: we hear of the Princes William and Edward living with their tutors in what is now Cambridge Cottage, and two of the younger boys in a house at the top of the Green. Lady Charlotte Finch, governess to the princesses, had a separate house near the river; then another is spoken of as the “Princess Elizabeth’s house.” Kew House itself was a scrimply inconvenient mansion, for which the royal household made a tight fit even in its state of reduced ceremony. Pictures of it when it was the Princess Dowager’s villa, show a square, plain front with two one-storied wings, from which in all thirty-two windows look straight out upon the lawn. At that time it bore the alias of “The White House.” Miss Burney describes it as a labyrinth of stairs and passages, where at first she continually lost herself among the “small, dark, and old-fashioned” rooms.
It is in 1786 that a search-light comes to be turned upon this semi-private life by the diary of a then most popular novelist. At the end of the year before, Fanny Burney had been staying with her venerable friend, Mrs. Delaney, at Windsor, when one afternoon into the drawing-room walked, unannounced, a burly man in black with a star on his breast. Even the short-sighted visitor hardly needed to be told who he was. As every one in the room drew back out of the way, she was for slipping off; but the King asked in a loud whisper, “Is that Miss Burney?” and after good-naturedly giving her time to recover from her modest confusion, entered upon a conversation of questions, punctuated with what, whats, in which he showed himself very inquisitive as to how she had come to write and print Evelina. The Queen soon followed, to whom George introduced her by repeating their conversation; and Miss Burney went to bed enraptured with her new acquaintances. Further interviews followed, which only increased her admiration, though the satirist rather than the courtier peeps out in her account of directions given her for behaviour in the presence of royalty.
Her demeanour certainly gave satisfaction in the royal circle, for a few months afterwards she was offered the post of one of the Queen’s dressers, which she accepted after some modest misgiving. We remember Macaulay’s indignation, “That with talents which had instructed and delighted the highest living minds, she should now be employed only in mixing snuff and in sticking pins; that she should be summoned by a waiting-woman’s bell to a waiting-woman’s duties; that she should pass her whole life under the restraints of a paltry etiquette, should sometimes fast till she was ready to swoon for hunger, should sometimes stand till her knees gave way with fatigue, that she should not dare to speak or move without considering how her mistress might like her words and gestures.”