By George! Can You Spare Some Change?

It seems George IV never made it a day without some sort of money trouble. Let’s see how close he can come to the national debt.

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The Duke of York’s solution was to get married. While my loyal readers know that The Prince had already gotten married, they also know that it wasn’t the kind of marriage that anyone other that The Prince, his sorta-wife and their intimate circle of drunken reprobates would approve of. I take some of that back. It was The Prince’s intimate circle of drunken reprobates. Mrs. Fitzherbert may have been delusional as far as her …um…husband was concerned, but she did NOT share The Princes taste for antisocial “Lifestyle Choices.”

The Duke had married Princess Frederica of Prussia. This was a positive development as far as Their Majesties were concerned. A marriage alliance with Prussia could pay dividends some day; in the meantime, the princess’s dowry was going to pay dividends to The Duke right away! And that was on top of his big allowance increase because he was married. The Duke was in sore need of it.

Oh yeah… The Princess… what was she like? Well, according to one observer she was “small, not at all pretty and had bad teeth.” Be that as it may, she was also a gold mine. Besides, The Duke was in no position to look a gift princess in the mouth. I’m sorry I had to write that after that quote about her teeth. And how much more did The Duke receive? An additional 18,000 pounds on top of what he already received directly from the Civil List and rent and revenues from various landholdings. Dowry not included, The Duke was looking at 70,000 pounds a year. He needed every shilling.

These were numbers that made The Prince sit up and take notice. He would be entitled to more than that as Prince of Wales. Maybe a lot more. Lord knows he had his expenses. His “racing establishment” alone cost 30,000 a year. And this was after promising representatives from Parliament that he would steer clear of the ponies from now till hell froze over. The denizens of Hades could be heard singing “jingle bells.”

Then there was Carlton House. The costs of turning it into something fit for sybaritic layabout like the prince had truly become astronomical. The situation had become even worse because the Prince had used up nearly every source of capital available to him. No London banker would touch him with a pair of tongs.

Lenders in Europe were equally unobliging; particularly after the dukes of York and Clarence borrowed 350,000 Dutch guilders from a Jewish firm in Amsterdam, then drove it into ruin by refusing to make even interest payments on the loan. Whattyagonnado with kids like that?

The Prince came up with one brainstorm for the Duke of York after he had married. Why not hit up his new father-in-law for some pocket change? Not much, maybe, say, 150,000 pounds? Wrote the Prince to his brother; “Pray do you think your beau-pere would do a little something in the loan way?…. My dearest Frederick you must for all our sakes strain every nerve…. I hope you will not lose sight of this as it is of too much consequence to be neglected and that you will prove yourself to be an able negotiator.”

There are times when reading about the Prince, especially when he is quoted, that I think of Bertie Wooster from P.G.Wodehouse’s “Jeeves” series. Wither the Duke had failed to strain every nerve or the King of Prussia had already heard about the Prince is not known. The Prince never received any money from that quarter.

The fact that no one would loan him money didn’t stop the Prince from spending it. His tailors alone were owed 31,919 pounds. The guys who made only his pants were owed 1,875 pounds. And this at a time when a country squire would be considered well in the chips if he had an annual income of 700 pounds.

Creditors from all sides beset the Prince. He had to raise a lot of money fast. There was the Whig party. If he could get Fox and others to approach dad about a subsidy… Alas, the Whig party was in turmoil over the French revolution. There were those who thought that England would be better off it the Prince got a “Republican Haircut.”

The moderate wing of the party, the wing the Prince hoped to appeal to, was closed to him because of the rift between the Prince and Fox. A rift Mrs. Fitzherbert was “straining every nerve” to keep as wide as possible. And what of Mrs. Fitzherbert? What was she up to while the Prince was romping about in his splendid new uniform? Reaching the end of her rope it would seem.

This blog was written by Mr. Al