By George! Reconcile or Else!

As we’ve seen over the last few Wednesdays, Prince George and Caroline should never have married. So how do they make the best of it? Not well.

The Prince adamantly refused to allow his wife to go anywhere, for any reason. The people in her household were the Prince’s employees, if not his partisans. When she complained to the King about this he threw up his hands. His Majesty expected reconciliation; he most certainly DID NOT want the gruesome details.

He told Caroline that the Prince’s behavior was regrettable, but he wore the pants in the family. A wife’s duty was to obey her husband. Yes, her husband was a drunken jerk, but he was still her husband. And just as all good Christians must obey Gods Will, not that His Majesty could recall an instance of God being a drunken jerk, so a good wife obeys her husband. She didn’t get any further with the Queen.

Caroline was not happy about any of this, but if the King and Queen would not side with her on this issue, she had to take her lumps. It is a curious thing though, the Prince told anyone who would listen that he found the Princess to be loathsome. He found her so repellent that the mere mention of her name put him off his feed bag.

And yet…the thought of her with another man, and, it must be said, there were several likely suspects, including George Canning, a future Prime Minister, would send him completely around the bend. The Prince behaved like a man in the thrall of sexual jealousy. He never put such restrictions on Mrs. Fitzherbert. But then, Mrs. Fitzherbert never gave him a reason to be jealous.

His Majesty did have a word with his boy about his treatment of the Princess. Much as he would have liked to ignore it, something had to be said. The reconciliation wasn’t moving forward at all. The Lord Chancellor, expressing the views of His Majesty, told the Prince that he was about as popular as the Devil and any steps taken on his part that would increase his unpopularity could not be taken without danger to “the publick safety.” It therefore was of the “utmost moment to preserve even an outward appearance of cohabitation.”

Go back to your wife or there will be rioting and civil disturbances. How many husbands get THAT thrown in their faces?

And as if His Highness didn’t have enough to worry about, he was having money troubles again. At the time of the marriage he was receiving 73,000 pounds a year. Upon marriage, this was increased to 138,000 a year plus 52,000 pounds to put the finishing touches on Carlton House.

This would have had anyone but the Prince farting through silk. The Prince, however, in anticipation of all the extra money that would come his way as a result of getting married, allowed himself to run up his tab, so to speak. And what was his tab, you ask? In the eight years since his debts had been cleared in 1787, the Prince of Pleasure went into the red to the tune of 630,000 pounds! The only place to get that kind of money was from Parliament. This, of course, meant making his debts public knowledge.

Prime Minister Pitt, no friend of the Prince’s, to be sure, proposed that the Prince’s Duchy of Cornwall income, about 13,000 a year, be set aside to cover his debts. In addition, 25,000 should be deducted from the rest of his annual income for the same purpose. At that rate, the Prince would be in the black after only twenty-seven years. Provided he didn’t incur any more debts during that time, of course.
Talk about asking for the moon.

During those previous eight years the Prince had, thanks in part to Mrs. Fitzherbert, had very little to do with politics. As a result, he had no political allies and many enemies. Pitt’s suggested settlement was shouted down in Parliament. No, no. Parliament wanted a lot more from His Royal Highness.

So bad had the situation become that the King himself had become a target. Since his recovery the King had enjoyed enormous public sympathy. Once the word was out about how much the taxpayers would have to fork over to bail out his booze soaked buffoon of a son, the sympathy disappeared.

Making his way to the House of Lords in October of 1795, the state couch was pelted with rocks while the crowd shouted, “Down with George.” The Prince himself, either out of self preservation or an exceedingly rare flash of common sense, managed to get the matter put on the backburner by volunteering the Cornwall income and 65,000 pounds a year.

It was enough to cool tempers to the point where the government was not forced to resign. Not that Pitt was about to thank him for it. He had also agreed, as if he had a choice, to the appointment of a commission whose sole job would be watching his money.

Never content to let sleeping dogs lie, the Prince found another “rankle” at this time to belabor his poor father with.

– Mr. Al