Paula Byrne - Perdita - The Life of Mary Robinson

The Prince’s infatuation was the talk of the town. One night a friend of his sat next to Sir John Lade at Covent Garden. The Prince knew that Lade had ‘had an intimate connection avec mon aimable et chère séductrice ’. Lade said that he had heard a great deal of the Prince’s attachment to Mrs Robinson and that he could give an assurance that she was as much pleased with him as he could be with her. The friend asked whether, in view of his own intimacy with Mrs Robinson, Lade felt ‘not undermined by this gallant young rival’. To which he replied, ‘By God I should be very glad of it for both their sakes as they seem so perfectly attached to each other.’ Having reported this to Miss Hamilton, the Prince signs off by regaling his long-suffering correspondent with a description of his ecstatic ‘metamorphosis’ from despondent victim of unrequited love to ‘gay galent Lothario’. ‘Love, passion, and the most ardent flame,’ he writes, are ‘boiling altogether in my bosom’.

‘For the love of Heaven, Stop, O stop my friend! and do not thus headlong plunge yourself into vice,’ Miss Hamilton responded. ‘Your last note and the preceding one made every nerve of me thrill with apprehension … You listen not to the voice of reason … I conjure you, strive to conquer this unhappy infatuation.’ 17 The letter continues for several pages in this vein, imploring the Prince not to become one of the ‘votaries of vice’. A fragmentary draft chides him for comparing himself to the archetypal rake – ‘Ah! boast not the title of a Lothario lest you should end with his fate’ – and also reveals that she has been doing her own research on Mrs Robinson:

My friend, you have been deceived, Mrs Robinson lives with her Husband and they have never been separated, – the young Baronet [i.e. Lade] if, he did boast , – boasted falsely. Her husband is young, Idle, and extravagant; and they have experienced distress, but her present occupation, as an actress, enables them to live perfectly to their taste , and at their ease – They have a little Girl about 4 or 5 years old – I know their whole History, which I got at by mere chance, and from what I think, the most undoubted authority – You have been abused by some designing person – take care that you are not drawn into some snare.

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