For some years he remained in the Foot Guards, where he was very popular with his brother officers; but in 1776 he threw up his commission in anger at someone being promoted over his head, unjustly, as he thought. His early love of soldiering, however, was not yet abated, and he sought and obtained a captaincy in the Hessian Jäger corps, which had been hired by the British Government to go to America. He was delighted with his new uniform—a short, blue coat with gold frogs, and a very broad sword-belt—and, thus attired, swaggered about the town in great spirits, to the accompaniment of his friends’ laughter. During the siege of Charlestown he was aide-de-camp to Sir Henry Clinton; he was wounded in an action at Charlottetown in 1780, and two years later was appointed Major in Tarleton’s Light Dragoons, which regiment, however, was disbanded in 1783, when Hanger was given the brevet rank of Colonel, and placed on half pay.
At the close of the war Hanger left America for England, but his affairs were in such an unsettled state that he thought it advisable to go direct to Calais, where he remained until his friend, Richard Tattersall, could arrange his affairs. Hanger attributed his insolvency at this time to the fact that the lawyer to whom he had given a power of attorney having died, his estate was sold for the benefit of the mortgagee at half its value. This is probably true, but it is certainly only a half-truth, for his embarrassment was mainly caused by his extravagance when he was in the Foot Guards. He did not often play cards, but he was passionately fond of the turf, kept a stable at Newmarket, and bet heavily on all occasions, though it is said that on the whole he was a considerable winner, and it is recorded that he won no less than seven thousand pounds on the race between Shark and Leviathan. His pay in the Foot Guards of four shillings a day did not, of course, suffice even for his mess-bills, and he wasted much money on dissipation, and more on his clothes. “I was extremely extravagant in my dress,” he admitted. “For one winter’s dress-clothes only it cost me nine hundred pounds. I was always handsomely dressed at every birthday; but for one in particular I put myself to a very great expense, having two suits for that day. My morning vestments cost me near eighty pounds, and those for the ball above one hundred and eighty. It was a satin coat brodé en plain et sur les coutures, and the first satin coat that had ever made its appearance in this country. Shortly after, satin dress-clothes became common among well-dressed men.”[2]
On his return to England, Hanger stayed with Tattersall for a year, and then was engaged in the recruiting service of the Honourable East India Company at a salary which, with commission, never amounted to less than six hundred pounds a year; and he was also appointed, with a further three hundred pounds a year, an equerry to the Prince of Wales, with whom he was on very intimate terms.
The next few years were the happiest of his life, but misfortune soon overcame him. His employment under the East India Company came to an abrupt end owing to a dispute between the Board of Control and the Company, relative to the building of a barrack in this country to receive the East India recruits prior to embarkation, which ended in a change of the whole system of recruiting, when Hanger’s services were no longer required. This was bad enough, but worse was to come, for when he had served as equerry for four years, the Prince of Wales’s embarrassed affairs were arranged by Parliament, which, making the essential economies, dismissed Hanger.
When this happened, having no means whatever with which to meet some comparatively trifling debts, he surrendered to the Court of King’s Bench, and was imprisoned within the Rules from June 1798 until April in the following year, when the successful issue of a lawsuit enabled him to compound with his creditors. “Twice have I begun the world anew; I trust the present century will be more favourable to me than the past,” he wrote in his “Memoirs”; and it is much to his credit that instead of whining and sponging on his friends, having only a capital of forty pounds, he started in the business—he called it the profession—of coal-merchant.
According to Cyrus Redding, who used to meet him at the house of Dr Wolcot (“Peter Pindar”), Hanger had fallen out of favour with the Prince by administering a severe reproof to that personage and to the Duke of York for their use of abominable language, and was no longer invited to Carlton House. This, however, does not ring true, for Hanger’s language was none of the choicest, and if there was any disagreement, this can scarcely have been the cause. Indeed, if at this time there was a quarrel, it must soon have been made up; and undoubtedly the twain were on friendly terms long after, for when Hanger was dealing in coal, the Prince, riding on horseback, stopped and made friendly inquiry: “Well, George, how go coals now?” to which Hanger, who had a pretty wit, replied with a twinkle, “Black as ever, please your Royal Highness.” Certainly Hanger felt no grievance concerning the alleged quarrel, for in his “Memoirs” he spoke in high terms of the heir-apparent in a passage that deserves to be read, as one of the few sincere tributes ever paid to the merits of that deservedly much-abused person.
Whether through the influence of the Prince of Wales or another, Hanger was in 1806 appointed captain commissary of the Royal Artillery Drivers, from which he was allowed to retire on full pay two years later, a proceeding which drew some observations from the Commissioners of Military Inquiry in their seventeenth report, to which Hanger published an answer. As the years passed, however, the free manners and the coarse outspokenness of the Colonel jarred on the Prince, and slowly the men drifted more and more apart, after which the former moved in less distinguished and probably less vicious company.
The first Lord Coleraine had long since been dead; Hanger’s eldest brother, the second Baron, had followed his father to the grave, and the title was now enjoyed by his second brother, William, popularly known as “Blue” Hanger, from the colour of the clothes he wore in his youth. Charles Marsh declared him to be “perhaps the best-dressed man of his age,” which is an ambitious claim for any person in the days when clothes were more regarded in fashionable society than anything else in the world; but that there was some ground for the statement cannot be doubted, since “Tom” Raikes reiterates it. “He was a beau of the first water, always beautifully powdered, in a light green coat, with a rose in his buttonhole. He had not much wit or talent, but affected the vieille cour and the manners of the French Court; he had lived a good deal in Paris before the Revolution, and used always to say that the English were a very good nation, but they positively knew not how to make anything but a kitchen poker. I remember many years ago, the Duchess of York made a party to go by water to Richmond, in which Coleraine was included. We all met at a given hour at Whitehall Stairs, and found the Admiralty barge, with the Royal Standard, ready to receive us, but by some miscalculation of the tide, it was not possible to embark for near half-an-hour, and one of the watermen said to the Duchess, ‘Your Royal Highness must wait for the tide.’ Upon which Coleraine, with a very profound bow, remarked, ‘If I had been the tide I should have waited for your Royal Highness.’ Nothing could have been more stupid, but there was something in the manner in which it was said that made everyone burst out laughing.” “Blue” Hanger, it will be seen, was as remarkable for his politeness as for his satire!
Heavy losses at the card-table forced William Hanger to go abroad to avoid his creditors, and he remained in France until the death of his elder brother in 1794, when, able to settle his affairs, he returned, completely transformed in manners and appearance into a Frenchman. Thereby hangs the story that, shortly after he arrived in England, he went to Drury Lane, when, next to him in the dress circle sat a stranger wearing top-boots. This would have been regarded as a gross breach of etiquette in France, and Lord Coleraine was not inclined to brook this affront to the company because he was in England.