Alice Audrey

Those tabloids! You can’t count on them to get anything right. The carriage did indeed belong to the Duke; but it was parked in front of the house of a certain POLISH countess. Unfortunately for the Prince, the damage was done. The Count believed the papers were talking about his wife, and he was wrong. But he was also right, but for the wrong reasons.

Either way, he wrote a letter to the Prince demanding an explanation and an apology. He also had a chat with his wife. She confessed all. When he received the Counts letter, the Prince did what he would often do in these situations. He freaked out. Screaming, running around, hair pulling, fits, imploring God or anyone else to save him. While he was doing this, a wrinkle developed.

The countess seemed to have developed feelings for the impetuous lad. She sent him a note saying that True Love should conquer all. Let them fly away together, consequences be damned! Oh dear; the gilded slipper was on the other foot. Now the Prince really didn’t know what to do. Wait a minute, yes he did! He knew exactly who to run to in his moment of crisis. Mom.

The Prince dropped in on mom to, in his own words, throw himself at her feet. He told her the whole sordid tale. Wither he included the Kings brother, as inadvertent as his role was, is not known. And true to his nature, after bravely confessing all, he fainted.

Mom, according to sources, “cried excessively.” She also decided the boy needed her help. Perhaps the age difference between the Prince and the Countess convinced her that her son was as much seduced as seducer. After all, the Countess was not without reputation.

The Queen instructed Colonel Hulse, the Prince’s Private Gentleman, to go to the Countess and tell her that the Prince slipped in the tub, cracked his head and would be unconscious for the next few weeks. She then took the King aside and spilled the beans; there was nothing else she could do.

His Majesty solved the problem by ordering the Count and his wife out of the country. Mission accomplished! Said the Prince of the Countess; “She appeared to be very capricious and very singular in some things.” This I believe, is an example of the pot calling the kettle black. He went on; “In short, it was a very miserable and unhappy affair altogether.” In other words, it stopped being fun when she began to behave like him.

Fortunately, the Prince was not one to dwell on failure. Or success, or anything else for that matter. The Prince’s ability to “be in the moment” as some eastern meditation techniques teach was so pronounced it was a wonder he could function at all. This would have profound consequences for England once he became Regent, and then King.

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I would dearly love to read ahead, but alas, Mr. Al hasn’t trensposed it to the computer yet!  Why do I feel like Oliver Twist?  “Please, Sir.  More blog?”

Now I return you to Mr. Al’s take on King George IV:

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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