I now pass to a character very different from Creevey’s, to the man who ruled the fashionable world with an authority even more undisputed than that of the Prince of Wales, Beau Brummell, the prince of the dandies. The Beau had no advantages of birth and only a moderate fortune. It is often the custom to regard him as a mere coxcomb, the outcome of a frivolous society fitted only to point a moral and adorn a tale. I venture to take a more charitable view of him and to give my opinion that he owed his ascendancy to something more than extravagance of dress and unbounded impudence.
To take but a single example: Everybody knows the story of Brummell walking with Lord Alvanley in the Park being cut by the Prince Regent and enquiring in an audible voice, “Who is your fat friend?” There is very little point in the remark except its offensiveness. But the biographer of Brummell, Captain Jesse, got the true version from a friend who witnessed the incident. It was not in the Park, but at a ball given by Brummell, Lord Alvanley, and two others. The Prince was not invited, because of his quarrel with Brummell; but, as everybody was going, he signified his pleasure to be present. When he arrived he greeted Lord Alvanley and his other two hosts, cutting Brummell pointedly, thereby insulting one of his entertainers. The Prince had by a gross breach of good taste placed himself in an impossible position. If he did not know his host, his host had a right to regard him as an uninvited intruder; therefore the question was a snub, unanswerable even by the Regent. The life of Brummell is the record of much folly and frivolity, ending with a long exile in Calais, which terminated in imbecility and death in an almshouse. Nevertheless this famous dandy, fop though he was, is one of those butterflies whose useless lives at least add to the beauty of the scene. Nor is it for the recorder of his time to point the finger of scorn at him. Absurd as his ideal was, it was not wholly contemptible. His vanity was not malicious, he was at least no sycophant, he held his own among aristocrats, who were as vulgar as they were arrogant. He shamed his associates into decent manners, at a period when social polish was hardly skin deep. He insisted on personal cleanliness in days when it was disregarded by the highest in the land. He had the art of making friends who stood by him in his hours of poverty and distress. The Duke of York, with all his faults the best liked son of George III, the Duchess, one of the most amiable ladies of the day, the Duke of Beaufort, and many others remained staunch to him as long as he lived. He was a sharer in the follies of his day, but so far as I know he was not so heartless in his vices as many a greater man; nor did he pander to the vices of others. We can laugh at his absurdities, without having that feeling of disgust with which we regard many of the faults of his august rival, the Prince Regent. How delightful, for example, is his criticism of the Duke of Bedford’s coat! On one occasion his Grace asked the Beau his opinion of his new clothes. “Turn round,” said Brummell, “now stand still.” Then taking the garment by the lapel, he exclaimed, “Oh, Bedford, do you call this a coat?”
The thing which strikes us most in connection with the halcyon period of the dandies, with its follies and lavish expenditure, is that it coincided with some of the most anxious days through which England ever passed, and with the age when distress and poverty were most keenly felt. Fashionable life was indeed fast and furious and characterised by its reckless extravagance. Everybody gambled: every possible event was made the subject of a bet. The turf was, as it is to-day, crowded with blacklegs; and the issue of a great fight in the prize ring was watched with more trembling anxiety than that of a battle in Spain or Flanders. The prevalence of drunkenness was universal; every memoir of the time records drinking-bouts innumerable. The fine gentleman garnished every sentence with an oath and even used bad language in his letters to his friends. Duelling was universal. Pitt, the Duke of Wellington, Castlereagh, nearly all the leading statesmen, had to fight. Even the Duke of York, though very near the throne, ‘met’ the Duke of Richmond. But with all its failings the men of fashion had one merit: though they were almost incredibly coarse, brutal, and selfish, no one could reproach them with softness. They may have been bad, but they were men. If they went to see prize-fighters beat each other into a jelly, they were ready enough to use their fists themselves. If they gambled the cards and the dice, they did so at the risk of ending their days in a debtor’s prison. Many of them died ruined in purse and bankrupt even of honour. If they pursued their amours unscrupulously, there was always the risk of facing an outraged relative’s pistol. The spice of danger was never absent from their lives. One alone could share in all their pursuits, and be exempt from peril. He could drink himself drunk without danger of his words being called in question; he could ruin wives and daughters and no one would raise a hand against him; he could engage in shady transactions on the turf, and men made it a point of honour to shield his fair fame. If others were extravagant, they dissipated their own patrimony; and when that was gone, there was nothing for it but to starve. But he had only to fall back on national resources, and the taxpayer extricated him from his difficulties. It is because of its immunity, that the profligacy of George, as Prince, as Regent, and as King is so detestable.
It has been customary, I think, to underrate his abilities. Thackeray has a most misleading passage about his relation with the Whigs. “At first he made a pretence of having Burke and Fox and Sheridan for his friends. But how could such men be serious before such an empty scapegrace as this lad...; what had these men of genius in common with their tawdry young host of Carlton House? That fribble the leader of such men as Fox and Burke! That man’s opinions about the constitution—about any question graver than the button of a waistcoat or the sauce of a partridge worth anything! The friendship between the Prince and the Whig Chiefs was impossible. They were hypocrites in pretending to respect him, and if he broke the hollow compact between them, who shall blame him?” But if we turn to Creevey, we shall see that George played the game with the Whigs with consummate skill. Not that he cared a straw for the constitution or political matters. He wanted leisure, comfort, influence,—above all, money. He used the Whigs for his purposes in the question of the Regency, and in order to extort money from the nation. They were ready enough to serve him in defeating Pitt and their other opponents; but he, once he was Regent in 1812, with his father, the old King, hopelessly insane, flung them aside as no longer useful and made the Tory government uphold the two things now to his interest to conserve,—the status quo and the power of the Crown.
No one has ever doubted the power of fascination exercised by George, which was due not less to his clever adaptability, than to his high position. What reader of Lockhart’s “Life of Scott” can forget the dinner party when the King and Sir Walter exchanged mutual badinage in the freest manner? We find the same in Creevey regarding the extreme affability with which he treated him and the Whig leaders at Brighton, when Prince Regent. George’s charm of manner and the ease with which he could adapt himself to his company and forget to all appearance his royal dignity in social intercourse was one of his most powerful political assets which he used to the fullest advantage.
The influence exercised by him was almost wholly evil. Head of the state in the days of its greatest military glory, when the moral and political influence of England was paramount in Europe; living in the days of great industrial and mechanical triumph, in which his country had the fullest share; confronted as King with some of the gravest social problems, which its poets and philosophers were taxing their utmost to expose and remove,—the marvel is that any man could have occupied such a position, and yet interested himself almost exclusively in frivolous pleasures and sensual amours.
I do not think that it is too harsh a verdict to say that George IV’s example acted like a poison to the social life of several generations. Vice was rampant enough in English society before he came to manhood; but his father had done much to set an example to his nobility of a pure domestic life, and to encourage simple tastes and pleasures. Gambling and profligacy went on despite the King; but his son led the orgies of extravagance. His taste was atrocious. What can be more monstrous than the Pavilion at Brighton? Read Thackeray’s description of his coming of age fête at Carlton House, quoted from the European Magazine, 1784: “The saloon may be styled the chef-d’œuvre, and in every ornament discovers great invention. It is hung with a figured plush.... The window curtains, sofas, and chairs are of the same colour. The ceiling is ornamented with emblematical paintings, representing the Graces and Muses, together with Jupiter, Mercury, and Apollo and Paris. Two ormolu chandeliers are placed here, etc., etc.”[26] The coronation was a monstrous exhibition of extravagance. For the feast in Westminster Hall, where the Champion of England, “mounted on a horse, borrowed from Astley’s theatre, rode into the Hall,” more than eight hundred dozen of wine and one hundred gallons of punch were provided. Vulgarity distinguished the period of the ‘First Gentleman in Europe.’ Countless families were brought to ruin by association with him, and at no time that I can call did more eminent people die by their own hands. As Thackeray says: “There is no greater satire on that proud society ... than that it admired George!”
One episode which perhaps throws as much light as anything upon the manners and morals of the time is the trial of Caroline of Brunswick, the unhappy, if indiscreet, consort of George IV. Before making the attempt I am afraid I must go back to 1795, when the Prince of Wales, on the report of his not too refined sailor brother, decided to offer his hand to that princess. He got very well paid by the country for the sacrifice. His income was raised from £60,000 ($300,000) to £125,000 ($625,000); for the preparations for the wedding he got £27,000 ($135,000); a further grant of jewels and plate, or cash to buy them, £28,000 ($140,000). Then came £15,000 ($130,000) to complete Carlton House; and the Princess, his wife, was in addition offered an allowance of £50,000 ($250,000) a year. For some reason—I should say she was the only princess who ever did so—Caroline accepted less than was offered as income; namely, £35,000 ($175,000).
It is true George also wanted his debts, amounting to a trifle of £600,000 ($3,000,000) odd, paid, and failed to get it; still, considering the value of money in those days, and that times in England were worse than had been known,—wars, taxes, bad seasons, the poor in abject distress, Pitt distracted how to raise money, sedition rampant, and no very glorious period for the British arms,—he certainly did not sell himself cheap. Of the miserable marriage which ensued little need be said. From the time the Prince raised his bride, when she tried to kneel, and said to Lord Malmesbury, “Harris, I am not well; get me a glass of brandy,” to her death twenty-six years later, it is one long discreditable story. But I allude to it for a personal reason. I have myself seen two of the counsels of the Queen in the celebrated trial. Dr. Lushington was a friend of my family’s, and I was at a school in Brighton which Lord Brougham used to visit; and—I believe I am correct in saying this—I actually received one of the prizes when he gave them away. I certainly have a book on my shelves which, I fancy, I got on that occasion. It assuredly does not make a man feel young when he realises that he has seen and can remember men who not only witnessed but took a very prominent part in a trial which was held ninety-six years ago.
Let me, however, recapitulate the events which led up to the great scene in the House of Lords. George as Prince of Wales hated his wife from the first, and after the birth of the Princess Charlotte refused to have anything to do with her. On April 30, 1796, the Prince wrote a letter to the Princess in which he said: “Our inclinations are not in our power, nor should either of us be held answerable to the other, because nature has not made us suitable to each other.... I shall now finally close this disagreeable correspondence, trusting that, as we have completely explained ourselves to each other, the rest of our lives will be passed in uninterrupted tranquillity.”