When we left off last week George III had begun his slow decline into insanity while his boy, George IV, went on a bender. The government is up in arms, and the Queen is not pleased with her wayward children.
The Prince and his brother were convinced that mom was motivated more by her hatred of them than by her concern for dad. It was true that the Queen seemed ready to believe almost any negative story concerning her boys. It was also true that she was willing to give the lads a piece of her mind when the mood was on her. Which was more or less all the time when they were around.
Relations between the Queen and her boys took on an almost pathological tone. At least on her part. It was her burden that she had to deal with the Prince and the Duke. They were in England and she couldn’t get rid of them if she wanted to. At least the other sons, her opinion of which was uniformly low, were left to rot on the continent.
These boisterous lads could, and did, engage in disgraceful behavior. Drinking, gambling, affairs of the heart, and groin, mostly the latter. The parental response to these things, once they made the papers, was to ship them off to ever more remote and desolate places. Like Gibraltar and Canada. All the boys were in the military, so it was a fairly easy matter to punish them in this way. That did not, however, keep them out of trouble.
It was in November that Prime Minister Pitt realized that he would probably have to give in to the Prince becoming Regent. He was not going to say so publicly, of course. The bitter truth was, there was no viable alternative. The Tories would need more than unseemly gossip in the newspapers to deny the Prince the Regency.
The Prince, for his part, was keeping everyone guessing as to what he intended to do if and when he became Regent. The Tories feared the worst, and for good reason. Pitt resigned himself to the probable loss of the Prime Ministership and was ready to resume his private law practice. If the Tories were worried about the loss of all they held dear; the Whigs were in a vicious fight over who would take it away from them.
Not even party leaders like Fox were guaranteed posts in the Regency government. It all boiled down to the Prince’s whim. This was the very thing Fox had always railed against, government by Royal Whim. And now, because the Prince’s sorta, kinda, wife had been poisoning the well against him, he might very well find himself odd man out. And for no other reason than the Prince didn’t wish to made to sleep on the couch because he gave Fox a nice job!
The jockeying for posts within the Prince’s Regency cabinet was becoming a spectator sport. The London papers reported on who was dining with whom, and speculated as to why. Some Tories were hedging their bets by making nice with their probable Whig successors. Some Whigs were hedging THEIR bets, should His Majesty recover, by making nice with the Tories.
No one knew what would happen next. The whole of the British government, the growing British empire, hinged on two people; one, an irascible, ill-educated, reactionary old coot who was, at the moment, a complete nutter; and the other, an emotionally stunted, but highly educated, alcoholic hedonist with no sense of responsibility to anyone but himself.
And then, on February 10, 1789, the impasse was broken.
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