George, Prince of Wales
The laurels won in early youth he retained all the days of his life. Expense was no object to him, and, indeed, it must be confessed he spent money in many worse ways than on his clothes. Batchelor, his valet, who entered his service after the death of the Duke of York, said that a plain coat, from its repeated alterations and the consequent journeys from London to Windsor to Davison the tailor, would often cost three hundred pounds before it met with his approbation! George had a mania for hoarding, and at his death all the coats, vests, breeches, boots, and other articles of attire which had graced his person during half-a-century were found in his wardrobe. It is said he carried the catalogue in his head, and could call for any costume he had ever worn. His executors, Lord Gifford and Sir William Knighton, discovered in the pockets of his coats, besides innumerable women’s love letters, locks of hair, and other trifles of his usually discreditable amours, no less than five hundred pocket-books, each containing small forgotten sums of money, amounting in all to ten thousand pounds! His clothes sold for fifteen thousand pounds; they cost probably ten times that amount.
Lord Petersham was a Mæcenas among the tailors, and the inventor of an overcoat called after him. He was famous for his brown carriages, horses, and liveries, all of the same shade; and his devotion to this colour was popularly supposed to be due to the love he had borne a widow of the name. He never went out before six o’clock in the evening, and had many other eccentricities. Gronow has described a visit to his apartments: “The room into which we were ushered was more like a shop than a gentleman’s sitting-room. All around the wall were shelves, upon which were placed the canisters containing congou, pekoe, souchong, bohea, gunpowder, Russian, and many other teas, all the best of their kind; on the other side of the room were beautiful jars, with names in gilt letters of innumerable kinds of snuff, and all the necessary apparatus for moistening and mixing. Lord Petersham’s mixture is still well known to all tobacconists. Other shelves and many of the tables were covered with a great number of magnificent snuff-boxes; for Lord Petersham had perhaps the finest collection in England, and was supposed to have a fresh box for every day in the year. I heard him, on the occasion of a delightful old light-blue Sèvres box he was using being admired, say in his lisping way, ‘Yes, it is a nice summer box, but it would not do for winter wear.’ ” Queen Charlotte had made snuff-taking fashionable in England, but the habit began to die out with the Regency. George IV. carried a box, but he had no liking for it; and, conveying it with a grand air between his right thumb and forefinger, he was careful to drop it before it reached his nose. He gave up the custom of offering a pinch to his neighbours, and it was recognised as a breach of good manners to dip uninvited into a man’s box. When at the Pavilion the Bishop of Winchester committed such an infringement of etiquette, Brummell told a servant to throw the rest of the snuff into the fire. When Lord Petersham died, his snuff was sold by auction. It took three men three days to weigh it, and realised three thousand pounds.
Another eccentric was Lord Dudley and Ward, sometime Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who eventually lost his reason. His absence of mind was notorious, and he had a habit of talking aloud that frequently landed him in trouble. Dining at the house of a gourmet, under the impression he was at home, he apologised for the badness of the entrées, and begged the company to excuse them on account of the illness of his cook! Similarly, when he was paying a visit he imagined himself to be the entertainer, and when his hostess had exhausted her hints concerning the duration of his call, he murmured, “A very pretty woman. But she stays a devilish long time. I wish she’d go.” Still more amusing were his remarks in the carriage of a brother peer who had volunteered to drive him from the House of Lords to Dudley House: “A deuce of a bore! This tiresome man has taken me home, and will expect me to ask him to dinner. I suppose I must do so, but it is a horrid nuisance.” This was too much for his good-natured companion, who, as if to himself, droned in the same monotonous tones, “What a bore! This good-natured fellow Dudley will think himself obliged to invite me to dinner, and I shall be forced to go. I hope he won’t ask me, for he gives d——d bad dinners.” These stories recall another related of an absent-minded royal duke, who, when during the service the parson proposed the prayer for rain, said in a voice audible throughout the church, “Yes, by all means let us pray, but it won’t be any good. We sha’n’t get rain till the moon changes.”
After Brummell left England, it was to William, Lord Alvanley that all the witty sayings of the day were attributed. The son of the famous lawyer Sir Pepper Arden,[5] he began life in the Coldstream Guards, of which the colonel was the Duke of York. He achieved his earliest success as a wit at the expense of a brother officer, Gunter, a scion of the famous catering-house. Gunter’s horse was almost beyond the control of the rider, who explained that his horse was too hot to hold. “Ice him, Gunter; ice him,” cried Alvanley. Thrown into such company, it was not perhaps unnatural that Alvanley should be extravagant; but his carelessness in money matters was notorious. He never paid ready money for anything, and never knew the extent of his indebtedness. He had no sympathy with those who devoted some time and trouble to the management of their affairs, and expressed the utmost contempt for a friend who was so weak as to “muddle away his fortune paying tradesmen’s bills.” Though very wealthy, he soon became embarrassed in his circumstances. He persuaded Charles Greville, the author of the “Journals,” to put his affairs in order. The two men spent a day over accounts, and Greville found that the task he had undertaken would not be so difficult as he had been given to understand. His relief was not long-lived, however, for on the following morning he received a note from Alvanley saying he had quite forgotten a debt of fifty thousand pounds!
Alvanley was famous for his dinners, and indulged in the expensive taste of having an apricot tart on his table every day throughout the year. His dinners were generally acclaimed as the best in England; certainly he spared no expense in the endeavour to secure the blue ribbon of the table. Even Abraham Hayward commented on his extravagance. “He had his suprême de volaille made of the oysters, or les sots, les-laissent of fowls, instead of the fillet from the breast,” he noted in “The Art of Dining,” “so that it took a score of birds to complete a moderate dish.” It was Alvanley who organised a wonderful freak dinner at White’s Club, at which the inventor of the most costly dish should dine at the cost of the others; and he won easily. His contribution to the feast was a fricassée made of the noix, or small pieces at each side of the back, taken from thirteen different kinds of birds, among them being a hundred snipe, forty woodcocks, twenty pheasants—in all some three hundred birds. The cost of this dish exceeded one hundred pounds.
As he was beloved by his friends and vastly popular, society was enraged when O’Connell in the House of Commons spoke of him as “a bloated buffoon.” A challenge was sent at once, but the Liberator refused to go out. He had been on the ground once, had killed his man, and had vowed never to fight another duel. Alvanley would not forgive the insult, however, and threatened to thrash the aggressor; whereupon Morgan O’Connell met him in place of his father, when several shots were exchanged without result. “What a clumsy fellow O’Connell must be, to miss such a fat fellow as I!” said Alvanley calmly. “He ought to practise at a haystack to get his hand in.” Driven back to London, he gave the hackney-coachman a sovereign. “It’s a great deal,” said the man gratefully, “for having taken your lordship to Wimbledon.” “No, my good fellow,” the peer laughed; “I give it you, not for taking me, but for bringing me back.”
Beyond all question the greatest dandy of his day was George Bryan Brummell, generally called Beau Brummell. This famous personage dominated all his rivals, and even the Prince of Wales accepted him at least as an equal. It is not known with any certainty how his acquaintance began with the heir-apparent. Brummell’s aunt, Mrs Searle, who had a little cottage with stables for cows at the entrance, opposite Clarges Street, of the Green Park, in which she had been installed by George III., related that it was one day when the Prince of Wales, accompanied by the beautiful Marchioness of Salisbury, stopped to see the cows milked that he first met her nephew, was attracted by him, and, hearing he was intended for the army, offered him a commission in his own regiment. Gronow gives another story, which on the face of it is more probable. Brummell made many friends among the scions of good family while he was at Eton, where he seems to have been regarded as an Admirable Crichton: “the best scholar, the best boatman, the best cricketer.” He was invited to a ball at Devonshire House, became a great favourite, and was asked everywhere. The Prince sent for him, and, pleased by his manner and appearance, gave him a commission. In his seventeenth year he was gazetted to a cornetcy in the Tenth Light Dragoons. He resigned soon after because the regiment was ordered to Manchester![6]
Brummell threw himself heart and soul into the social life of the metropolis, and soon his reputation extended far and wide, until no party was complete without him, and his presence was regarded as the hall-mark of fashion. He was the very man for the part he had set himself. Tall, well made, with a good figure, he affected an old-world air of courtesy, picked up probably from the French refugees, as he had never been out of England until he left it for good. His affectation of vieille cour showed itself in the use of powder, which distinguished him in the days when the custom was dying out among civilians. His grandfather was a tradesman, and let lodgings in Bury Street, St James’s. His father, by the influence of a lodger, was presented to a clerkship in the Treasury, became private secretary to Lord North, made money by speculation, settled down at Donnington, and became High Sheriff of Berkshire, where he was visited by Fox and Sheridan. Though of no rank, Brummell lived with the highest in the land on terms of equality. His acquaintance was sought, his intimacy desired; and, so far from requiring a patron, it was he who patronised. His influence was unbounded, his fascination undeniable, his indifference to public opinion reckless. He was good-natured and rarely out of humour; neither a drunkard nor a profligate. He had bright and amusing conversation, some wit, and a considerable power of persiflage, which, while it enabled him to laugh some people out of bad habits, only too frequently was exerted to laugh others out of good principles.