A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

When Pitt became Prime Minister the Prince of Wales was in Opposition, because he was opposed to his father. He imagined himself to be the friend of Fox, of Sheridan, of Burke, because Fox and Sheridan and Burke were unpopular with the King. His career had been one of debt and drunkenness, of mean amours and degrading pleasures, when the son of Chatham passed from his studious youth to the control of the destinies of England. Pitt was called upon and refused to consent to a Parliamentary appeal to the King for the payment of the Prince's debts. Pitt could feel no courtier's sympathy for the unnatural son, for the faithless Florizel of foolish Perdita Robinson, for the perjured husband of Mrs. Fitzherbert. There can be no doubt that in the December of 1785 the Prince of Wales went through a ceremony of marriage, which could not under the conditions constitute a legal marriage, with Mrs. Fitzherbert, a beautiful young woman of a little more than twenty-nine years of age, who had twice been widowed {243} and was a member of the Roman Catholic faith. The town soon rang with gossip, and what was gossip in the drawing-rooms threatened to become a matter for "delicate investigation" in the House of Commons. The denial given by Fox in Parliament on the authority of the Prince of Wales practically ended any attempt at public inquiry, and almost broke the heart of Mrs. Fitzherbert. To her the Prince of course promptly disavowed Fox, with whom she immediately broke off all friendship. Fox himself, indignant at the Prince's falsehood and at the base use which had been made of his voice, shunned the Prince's society for a long time, which might very well have been longer. The scandal slowly ebbed; a compromise was arrived at between the King and his son; the King made an appeal to Parliament; and a sum of money was voted to deal with the Prince's debts in consideration of his promises of reform in the future.

[Sidenote: 1788—Talk of a Regency]

The Prince of Wales did not forget Pitt's attitude towards him, and the time soon arrived in which the minister came near to feeling the force of the Prince's anger. The health of the King was suddenly and seriously affected. Soon after his reign began he had been afflicted by a temporary loss of reason. The same misfortune now fell upon him in the autumn of 1788. It became necessary to make arrangements for the appointment of a regent, and the necessity was the cause of a fierce Parliamentary controversy. Fox rashly insisted that the Prince of Wales had as much right to assume the reins of government as he would have had in the case of the death of the monarch. Pitt maintained the more constitutional opinion that it was the privilege of Parliament to appoint a regent and to decide what powers should be intrusted to him. However little the knowledge may have influenced his action, Pitt knew very well that with the appointment of the Prince of Wales as regent his own hold of power would, for a time, come to an end. The whole question, however, was suddenly set on one side by the unexpected recovery of the King. The King's restoration to reason was well for the minister, and undoubtedly well for the {244} kingdom. If Burke and Sheridan and Fox were avowedly the Prince's friends in Parliament, his most intimate friends, those who would be likely to prove influential in his mimic Court, were men of a very different kind. These were such men as George Hanger, the half-mad soldier, the "Paragon of Debauchery," as the caricaturists labelled the Prince's "confidential friend," who having been almost everything from captain of Hessians to coal merchant, and from recruiter for the East India Company to inmate of a debtor's prison, ended his long and unlovely career by declining to assume the title of Lord Coleraine, to which he became entitled in 1814, ten years before his death. These were such men as Charles Morris, the amiable Anacreon of Carlton House, who made better punch and rhymed better ballads than his fellows of that convivial age, and who had the grace to expiate the ignoble noonday of his existence by an honorable evening. These were such men as the queer gang of blackguards, ruffians, and rowdies who haunted Brighthelmstone, the bad and brutal Richard Barry, the "Hellgate" Lord Barrymore; the Jockey of Norfolk, with his hair grown gray in iniquities; Sir John Lade, whose wife had been the mistress of a highwayman; and the worst and basest spirit of the gang, the Duke of Queensberry. Such were the men whom the Prince delighted to make his companions; such were the men who, if the King's madness had persisted, would have hailed with satisfaction the overthrow of Mr. Pitt.

It were needless to dwell further for the present upon the adventures of the Prince of Wales, his amours, his debts, his friendships, his fantastic pavilion at Brighton, or his unhappy marriage in April, 1795, to his cousin, the Princess Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick. Twenty years were to pass away before the recurrence of the King's malady was to give his eldest son the show of power, and in those twenty years the two political rivals—one of whom was the greatest of his allies, and the other the greatest of his adversaries—had passed away.

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CHAPTER LVIII.

WARREN HASTINGS.

[Sidenote: 1732—The birth of Warren Hastings]

In the days when Clive was first winning his way to fame in India there was another young Englishman serving John Company, whose ability attracted the notice and gained the esteem of the conqueror of Dupleix. It is one of the privileges of genius to discern the genius of others. But even Clive, when he noted a young volunteer at Falta, who seemed destined for better things than the handling of a musket, cannot have dreamed that he was giving an opportunity to a man whose name was to take as high a rank in the history of India as his own, whose deeds were to be no less fiercely battled over, whose part in the creation of a great Indian Empire was to be as illustrious. All that India had been to Clive—a refuge, a battleground, a theatre of great deeds, and unfortunately also of great offences, the cause of almost unbearable triumph and almost intolerable humiliation, all that in as great a degree India was to be to Warren Hastings.

Warren Hastings was born in the December of 1732, in Churchill, Oxfordshire, near Daylesford in Worcestershire. His family had been a good as it was an old family. But it had come down in the world. It had grown poorer and poorer as the generations rolled on, and that manor of Daylesford which had been in the family in the days of the second Henry had passed in the year of Sheriffmuir into the hands of a Gloucester merchant. When Warren Hastings was born, the fortunes of the house had come to a very low ebb indeed. Pynaston Hastings, Warren Hastings's father, was, perhaps, as imbecile a man as ever yet was the means of bringing an illustrious son into the world. He seems to have been weak, foolish, shiftless, as {246} worthless as a man well could be who was not actually a criminal. He had married very young, before he was sixteen; his wife had died shortly after giving birth to Warren Hastings. Pynaston married again, entered the Church, when he was old enough to take holy orders, and drifted away into the West Indies into outer darkness and oblivion, leaving children entirely dependent upon the charity of relatives. That charity did not fail, though at first it could be but meagrely extended. Warren Hastings's grandfather was desperately poor. All he could do for his deserted grandchild was to place him at the charity school of the village. There, habited almost like a beggar, taught as a beggar, the companion of clowns and playfellow of rustics, the future peer of kings and ruler of rajahs, the coming pro-consul who was yet to make the state of England as imperial as the state of Rome, received his earliest lessons in the facts of life, and dreamed his earliest dreams. His were strange dreams. In sleep, says a Persian poet with whom young Hastings was afterwards doubtless acquainted, the beggar and the king are equal. If Warren Hastings slept as a beggar, he certainly dreamed as a king. We know, on his own statement, that when he was but a child of seven he cherished that wild ambition which was to lead him through so many glories and so many crimes. We are familiar with the picture of the boy leaning over the stream on that summer day, and looking at the old dwelling of his race, and swearing to himself his oath of Hannibal that some day he would, if the stars were propitious, win back his inheritance.