Jean Plaidy - Perdita's Prince

And why shouldn’t a king be a virtuous husband? What was there to sneer at in virtue? It seemed to George that whatever a king did he displeased his subjects if he were no longer young. Everywhere that young rascal, the Prince of Wales went he was cheered. What will become of him I cannot think, mused the King uneasily. Ideas chased themselves round and round in his head; like mice, he thought of them … fighting each other for his attention and when he tried to look closely at them they disappeared; they turned into mocking voices that reminded him of that dreadful time when he had been ill and had lost control of his mind. Pleasant things like his model farm at Kew, his buttons, his gardens, his baby daughters represented safety. If he could have escaped from all his troubles and lived quietly, the voices might be stilled. He glanced at Charlotte … good Queen Charlotte, unexciting but safe. Sometimes he was tormented by erotic dreams of women. Hannah Lightfoot, the Quaker girl with whom he had gone through a form of marriage when he had been very young and foolishly romantic, long since dead – for which ironically he must be grateful; for while she lived she represented a threat to his marriage with Charlotte, and that was a matter to shake the whole foundations of the monarchy, for if his sons were bastards … well, it did not bear thinking of and set the voices in his head working faster than ever. And then there was Sarah Lennox – Sarah Bunbury as she had become – whom he had wanted to marry, for whom he had as he had told Lord Bute ‘burned’; but he had been obliged to marry his plain German princess because all Hanoverian Kings married German princesses; it was a duty they must observe and when the time came young George would have to do the same. So instead of his dear Hannah Lightfoot whom he had so dangerously loved in his extreme youth, in spite of flighty Sarah Lennox for whom he had so burned, he was married to Charlotte.

He was a faithful husband, but there were times when his senses were in revolt. Why, he would demand of himself, should he be the one member of the family who observed a strict moral code? His brothers … his sister Caroline Matilda … He shuddered at the memory of them. Poor Caroline Matilda whom he had dearly loved and longed to protect was now dead – and he could not be sure that her death had been a natural one – after being involved in a storm of intrigue. Married to a near imbecile she had taken a lover and with him had been accused of treason. The lover had died barbarously and she, the Queen of Denmark, had come very near to the same fate, and would have succumbed to it but for the intervention of her affectionate brother – himself, the King of England. He had been deeply disturbed by the death of Caroline Matilda. Such events haunted him in nightmares. Poor Caroline Matilda had paid a high price for her follies.

With his brothers it was a very different matter.

William, Duke of Gloucester and Henry, Duke of Cumberland, had defiantly made their scandals and brazenly shown their indifference to disgrace. Yet they did not arouse half the resentment and mocking scorn which was poured on the King for being a good husband.

Cumberland had been involved in a most disgraceful affair with the Grosvenors because he had seduced Lady Grosvenor and had – young fool! – written letters to the woman which gave no doubt of the relationship between them. George remembered phrases from those letters which made his face burn with shame – and something like envy – even now. Accounts of intimate details when they had lain together ‘on the couch ten thousand times’. His brother, who had been brought up so carefully by their mother, watched over, never allowed to meet anyone but the immediate family in case he should be contaminated, had written those words! And as soon as they escaped from Mamma’s apron strings, there they were running wild, getting into scandals like that of Cumberland and the Grosvenors. And Lord Grosvenor had had the effrontery to sue a royal duke and to win his case. The jury had brought in a verdict of £10 000 plus costs of £3000 against the Duke of Cumberland which George had had to find with the help of Lord North … out of the King’s household expenses.

And as if that were not enough, Cumberland had tired of Lady Grosvenor by the time the scandal broke and was having an intrigue with the wife of a timber merchant – a very wealthy one it was true and fortunately for the royal purse, the timber merchant was too flattered by the royal Duke’s attentions to his wife to make trouble; but no sooner had that affair been freely discussed in the coffee and chocolate houses than Cumberland had a new love and this had turned out to be the most serious matter of all, for Mrs Anne Horton, who was the daughter of Lord Irnham, was intent on marriage, and as she had according to that gossip, Horace Walpole, ‘the most amorous eyes in the world and eyelashes a yard long’, Cumberland was fool enough to marry her.

This had caused the King so much anxiety that he had done what his mother had urged him to do before her death; he had set about bringing into force the Royal Marriage Act which forbade members of the royal family to marry without the King’s consent. Too late for Cumberland … and for Gloucester it seemed, for no sooner was the Marriage Act passed than Gloucester came forward to announce that for some years he had been secretly married to Lord Waldegrave’s widow – a mésalliance if ever there was one, for the lady was not only the illegitimate daughter of Sir Edward Walpole but her mother was said to have been a milliner!

‘Banish them from Court!’ George had cried. And Charlotte had declared that she would receive no daughters of milliners. So there was an unsatisfactory state of affairs with his brothers; and since his sons were so wild, the King did wonder what trouble would come through them.

Worry, worry, worry! thought the King, whichever way one turned. Oh, if only life were just living at Kew with Charlotte and the little ones, what a happy man he would be! Well perhaps not happy; he would always think of women like Hannah and Sarah and Elizabeth Pembroke with longing, but while he remained a faithful husband and lived according to his code of honour he could be serene .

The Queen was not listening to Mr Handel’s excellent music; she was thinking how handsome her eldest son was looking in his frogged coat and hoping the King would not notice how elegant he was and question the price of his garments. Charlotte was alarmed when she saw the lights of resentment against his father flare up in her son’s eyes. She had to face the fact that the relationship between them was scarcely harmonious. She had adored the Prince of Wales from the first time she had first held him in her arms – ‘A perfect specimen of a Royal Highness, your Majesty …’ Oh yes, indeed. He had bawled lustily, this wonder infant, and his health had always been of the best – except of course for the customary childish ailments. At the age of four it was true he had given her a great scare by contracting the smallpox. But he was such a healthy little rascal, he had even shrugged that aside. She liked to tell her attendants how when he was kept in bed someone asked if he were not tired of lying abed so long and he had replied: ‘Not at all. I lie and make reflections.’ The brilliance of the child! There was no doubt that he was a genius. He was clever at his lessons. He spoke and wrote several languages, French, German and Italian, fluently; he was familiar with Horace and delighted in Tacitus. He learned with ease and had a command of English which astounded his mother and dumbfounded his father on those occasions, which were becoming more frequent, when they were involved in verbal battles. The Queen was a little anxious about this beloved son and his relationship with his father. Oh dear, she sighed, I hope they are not going to follow the family custom and yet another Prince of Wales is going to quarrel with the King. Not George, she assured herself, not her handsome son George.