By George! Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous

The king’s orders and admonishments were so many snowflakes in July as far as the Prince was concerned. He continued to slip out of the palace and have it off with all manner of loose women and fast friends. He also had a hard time keeping his name out of the papers. Drunken brawls at Vauxhall, reports of liaisons with the daughters of dad’s political enemies. Outrageous behavior at riotous dinner parties held in the homes of men of highly suspect character. Like the king’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester.

It was during this period that the Prince settled on his preferences as regards women. They had to be older and married. The Prince got a real thrill out of bedding other men’s wives. The higher up the social ladder they were, the more he enjoyed it. There was Lady Augusta Campbell, daughter of the fifth Duke of Argyll; Lady Melbourne, who’s forth child, George Lamb, was said to be the Prince’s. An anomaly in his otherwise regular seduction habits was Elizabeth Billington, a singer and former mistress of the Duke of Rutland. She was married to a double bass player and otherwise of no account.

There was Maria Amelia, Countess of Salisbury and the two daughters of the first Earl Spencer, Henrietta, Countess of Bessborough and Georgiana, wife of the Fifth Duke of Devonshire. All this while still living with mom and dad. The whole time he was carrying on like this he complained bitterly to anyone who would listen that living at home was cramping his style!

I would like to take a moment here to put the young Prince’s behavior in perspective. By allowing the Prince’s…um…achievements to stand alone, one might get the wrong idea about him. By the general standards of the time, the Prince’s behaviour was a horror story. By the unofficial standards of his class, it was certainly noteworthy, especially considering his age, but not all that unusual.

There was an unspoken set of rules regarding relations between men and women of the Better Sorts. Although these rules are more generally thought to have belonged to the Regency period, they came into play long before. In fact, by the time the Prince Regent became King George the IV, the dichotomy between the private behaviour of the Better Sorts and what they publically professed was becoming a hot political issue among reformers.

The fact that a reprobate like the Prince Regent came to the throne at all was fuel enough for the “Hot Gospelers” that preached a particularly aggressive form of Christianity. Not surprisingly, these preachers found their natural audience with the Lesser Sorts. Not just the laborers, miners and tenant farmers; but also the small shop owner and, increasingly, the landless agricultural workers that flocked to the burgeoning industrial centers like Birmingham and the port cities like Liverpool.

There was no universal suffrage in England at that time. If you didn’t own land, you could not vote. 90% of the private property in Georgian England was in the hands of less than 1% of the population. The House of Commons was anything but. To a growing number of the Lesser Sorts, if there were going to be change, it would have to come from the bottom up. Waiting for the landed aristocracy to reform itself was not an option.

Yes…quite…Where was I? Oh yes. These reforms would have to wait for the advent of the woman whose name graces that era. I’ll leave it to you to guess who she is. ( Hint: She was the Prince’s niece.) For our young Prince, these issues were far in the future. The rules the Prince was expected to adhere to were straightforward enough. Sleeping around was not frowned upon. Whither it be done by man or woman. Marriage was no obstacle.

As someone famous once said, “Hypocrisy is the lubricant of social intercourse.” While the rules were different for the better sorts than for the Lumpen Proletariat, there were still rules. The key word for the Better Sorts was “discretion.” Women as well as men could carry on with a nod and a wink from their peers as long as they practiced discretion.

The social price to be paid for behaving otherwise could be, and often was, complete social ostracism and the loss of everything. The offending party would be driven into the outer darkness, from which few returned. Which brings us back to the Prince. Discretion wasn’t in his vocabulary. He couldn’t behave discreetly if his life depended on it. But…he was the Prince of Wales. Which for him and him alone was a license to behave badly. And behave badly he did.

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Mr. Al, I apologize for moving your ending by one sentence, but this made such a nice place to stop, I couldn’t resist.  😀

Alice