By George! Let's Play King!

The first thing Prince George did on his appointment as Regent was to throw a party. But
what does he do once the party is over?

After the party, the Prince opened Carlton House to the public for three days. God only knows what he was thinking in doing so, The Public couldn’t wait to see what His Sorta Majesty had been pissing away taxpayer gold on for all those years. They got an eyeful. “There was not a spot without some finery on it. Gold upon gold.” Said one visitor. On the third day 30,000 people pushed in for this once in a lifetime glimpse of how the other one ten thousandth of one percent lived.

Even with the Duke of Clarence standing atop the garden wall, screaming directions at the crowd, there were incidents. A number of women were so pushed about that they lost

most of their clothing. They were found wandering in the garden, stunned, half naked, their hair hanging loose. Some wags suggested they had had a “private audience” with the Prince. Ha ha.

Said Percy Bysshe Shelley, “What think you of the bubbling brooks and mossy banks of Carlton House? It is said that this entertainment will cost 120,000 pounds. Nor will it be the last bauble which the nation must buy to amuse this overgrown bantling of Regency.”

Sounds like sour grapes from someone who didn’t get an invitation. Alas for the new Prince Regent, the party was over and everyone expected him to attend to business. Silly them. According to George Tierney, “The Prince is very nervous, as well he may be at the prospect before him. And frequent in the course of the day in the applications to the liquor chest. I much doubt, however, Whether all the alcohol, as they call it, in the world under whatever name
administered, will be able to brace his nerves up to the mark of facing the difficulties he will soon have to encounter.”

You know the old saying, “You can’t make a silk Prince out of a sour beer.” Or something like that. In the first year of his Regency the Prince had his hands full just trying to get rid of his brother, the Duke of Cumberland. Princess Charlotte referred to her detested uncle as “Prince Whiskerandos.” “Prince Barnacle” would have been a better description. Cumberland got it into his head that if he left his brother alone for even a moment, he’d turn the whole government over to the Vatican, invite Nappy to make himself at home in St James Palace and put the entire family on bread and water.

The Duke had long ago worn out his welcome at Carlton House. The bastard wouldn’t leave the Prince alone! Ranting about Catholics, Whigs, reformers of ANY stripe, according to Lady Holland “The Duke’s society is becoming excessively irksome to him. But it denotes a lamentable lack of energy that he can only get rid of a troublesome inmate by flying his own home.”

If the Duke had been his only problem, The Prince would have counted himself a happy man. Facing him now was the problem of who to keep, or not keep in government. Sure, he had told Percival that he would keep the Tories on, but as any Whig would have been happy to point out, the Prince couldn’t be trusted any further than His Prime Ministerness could throw a hogshead of ale. It wasn’t that the Prince was deliberately deceitful, he just didn’t think about anyone except himself. As time went on it became a source of tension within the Tory party as to how long, exactly, the Prince would allow them to stick around.

For the Whigs, the problem was, even if he made room for them, how long would he let them stay there? He had already expressed his annoyance with the Whigs because he asked some of them to serve under Tory ministers. They refused to do so, of course. The Prince took it personally. He really didn’t get it.

It didn’t all go the Tories way. The Prince Regent went on a preferment bender, despite the Regency Bill, handing out pensions to drinking buddies without consulting Prime Minister Perceval. Well, why would he? Perceval would just say “no” and the Prince would have to go behind his back and do it anyway. To the Prince’s way of thinking, all he was doing was cutting out the middleman.

When The Prince informed Perceval that he expected the brother of his favorite tutor, Dr Cyril Jackson, to be appointed to the then vacant bishopric of Oxford, according to the Prince, “Perceval then put on one of his little cynical smiles and observed, “Your Royal Highness perhaps does not know Dr William Jackson’s character. He is a notorious bon vivant.”

“Oh, as to that, replied the Prince, ‘I know him very well. I have known him all my life. He has drunk a bottle of port in this house before now and I hope that, when he has got his miter ( really
tall bishop’s hat type-thingie) on, that he will drink another.”

As far as the Prince Regent was concerned, it was Perceval who just didn’t get it.

– Mr. Al