And so, with these piquant biographical remarks, they betook themselves along the road in the early morning, passing on their way many curious itinerants, whose trades have changed and decayed, and are now become nothing but a dim and misty memory; as, for instance, the sellers of warm “salop,” the forerunners of the early coffee-stalls of our own day.
II
But hats off to the Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent, the King! Never, while the Brighton Road remains the road to Brighton, shall it be dissociated from George the Fourth, who, as Prince, had a palace at either end, and made these fifty-odd miles in a very special sense a Via Regia. It was in 1782, when but twenty years of age, that he first knew Brighton, and until the last—for close upon forty-eight years—it retained his affections. He is thus the presiding genius of the way; and because, when we speak or think of the Brighton Road, we cannot help thinking of him, I have appropriately placed the portrait of George the Fourth, by the courtly Lawrence, in this book.
The Prince and King was the inevitable product of his times and of his upbringing: we mostly are. Only the rarest and most forceful figures can mould the world to their own form.
THE PRINCE
The character of George the Fourth has been the theme of writers upon history and sociology, of essayists, diarists, and gossip-mongers without number, and most of them have pictured him in very dark colours indeed. But Horace Walpole, perhaps the clearest-headed of this company, shows in his “Last Journals” that from his boyhood the Prince was governed in the stupidest way—in a manner, indeed, but too well fitted to spoil a spirit so high and so impetuous, and impulses so generous as then were his.
He proves what we may abundantly learn from other sources, that the narrow-minded and obstinate George the Third, petty and parochial in public and in private, was jealous of his son’s superior parts, and endeavoured to hide his light beneath the bushel of seclusion and inadequate training. It was impossible for such a father to appreciate either the qualities or the defects of such a son. “The uncommunicative selfishness and pride of George the Third confined him to domestic virtues,” says Walpole, and adds, “Nothing could equal the King’s attention to seclude his son and protract his nonage. It went so absurdly far that he was made to wear a shirt with a frilled collar like that of babies. He one day took hold of his collar and said to a domestic, ‘See how I am treated!’”
The Duke of Montagu, too, was charged with the education of the Prince, and “he was utterly incapable of giving him any kind of instruction.... The Prince was so good-natured, but so uninformed, that he often said, ‘I wish anybody would tell me what I ought to do; nobody gives me any instruction for my conduct.’” The absolute poverty of the instruction afforded him, the false and narrow ways of the royal household, and the evil example and low companionship of his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, did much to spoil the Prince.