The Age of Elegance

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by Arthur Bryant


  And now the greatest Russian of all, the noble magnanimous Czar, was coming to London. Since dawn the streets had been filled with a great multitude, pouring into the south-eastern suburbs. The Prince Regent's gold and scarlet postilions, sent to meet the sovereigns, were submerged in the tumult. No one wanted them, anyway, for the word had gone round that the carriages were to be unhorsed and dragged in triumph over London Bridge. The route to St. James's Palace was lined with coaches and carts, wooden stands had been erected at the street corners, and the windows were black with heads. Every vehicle approaching from Kent was set upon by a joyous, perspiring mob. The noise, the sweat, the honest stink were earnest of a free-born people's welcome.

  Having been warned of the unpoliced state of the British capital and of the populace's excitement, the sovereigns scattered. The Czar, sitting back in his ambassador's carriage, left the highway for the Surrey lanes to the south, travelling through a landscape of buttercup meadows, dingly heaths and wooded hills from whose slopes, dotted with gentlemen's villas, the dome and steeples of the city could be occasionally glimpsed. Shortly after one o'clock, after passing the villages of Camberwell and Clapham, he crossed the pastoral Thames by Battersea's wooden toll-bridge. He saw the trees of Chelsea Hospital, the high-sailed barges skimming the rushes, the winding, well-wooded shores. The market-gardeners were at work

  1 Farington, VII, 253. See also Ashton, I, 155-9; Lieven Letters, 2; Havelock, 230, 233, 267; Lockhart, III, 428.

  in the fields as he drove through rustic Sloane Street and the little elm-shaded, white-brick suburb of Hans Town. Skirting the grounds of Hans Place, he reached the western highway into London at the Cannon Brewery, Knightsbridge. So, having outflanked the British capital, the Emperor entered it by the turnpike at Hyde Park Corner and, unannounced and unexpected, arrived in front of the stone pillars and bow windows of the Pulteney Hotel which the Grand Duchess, his sister, had rented for her stay. A young man named De Quincey, who happened to be walking down Piccadilly at the time, saw a plain carriage dash up to the hotel steps, and a file of waiters rush out to form a line across the pavement, before a smiling foreigner ran into the hotel, kissing his hand to a lady at a first-floor window.

  A moment later the Czar was in his sister's arms. Between this fair-haired, vivacious widow of twenty-six and her impulsive, lonely and secretly unstable brother there was a deep bond. Having lost her husband, Prince George of Oldenburg, during the Moscow campaign, the Grand Duchess had come to England to cement the Anglo-Russian alliance by a second marriage. But though impressed by Britain's material achievements—particularly the steam-engine— she had not taken to its reigning house. The Dukes of Clarence and Sussex had struck her as uncultivated boors, while for their brother, reputed to be the first gentleman in Europe, she had conceived an almost passionate dislike. "Handsome as he is," she had told the Czar, "he is a man visibly used up by dissipation. His much-boasted affability is the most licentious, I may even say obscene, strain I ever listened to."1 Finding her impervious to his charms, he had not even troubled to flatter her.

  The Grand Duchess found that many shared her dislike of the Regent. The English Whigs had never forgiven him for keeping his father's Ministers in office. Discredited during the war by their defeatism, they were now seeking an opportunity for revenge. Nineteen years before, in order to get his debts paid, the object of their hatred, then their ally, had espoused the daughter of the Duke of Brunswick who had failed at Valmy and fallen at Jena. It had been the most unhappy act in his life and deservedly so, for he had long been secretly and morganatically married to a woman who loved

  1 "With him and his brothers, I have often had not only to get stiffly on my stiffs, but not to know what to do with my eyes and ears. A brazen way of looking where eyes should not gol" Havelock, 22.

  him and to whom he afterwards returned. His Princess had retaliated by allowing herself freedoms which, though less heinous than his, had brought her under suspicion of high treason. Her habit of sitting up all night in the company of embarrassed sea-captains, her flippant, rattling and indelicate conversation,1 and her ostentatious parade of an adopted docker's child whom she called Willikin, had caused a public scandal. Among those suspected, though probably wrongly, of being her lovers were the defender of Acre, Sir Sidney Smith, the painter Lawrence, one of her own footmen, and the Tory statesman, Canning. In the year after Trafalgar the Whig Government of Fox and Grenville had been compelled by an alarmed royal family to institute an investigation into her conduct. Its findings, opposed by the Tories more out of party feeling than conviction, had exonerated her from the graver charges but stressed her persistent indecorum. Thereafter she had been banished from royal society.

  The political wheel had now come full circle. King George III was mad and under restraint, the Princess's husband was Regent, and his erstwhile friends, the Whigs, had been jilted in favour of the Tories. It had now fallen to the latter as his Ministers to disapprove the Princess of Wales' doings and to support, as best they could, her husband's. It had become the function of the Whigs to champion the Princess. The Allied sovereigns' visit gave them their opportunity. For when this stout, grievously-wronged and outrageous lady announced in her comical English her intention of attending the next Drawing-Room to meet the Prussian King in whose service her father had died, she was informed by the prim, tyrannical old Queen, her mother-in-law, that she could not be received. Thereupon jubilant Whig gentlemen rose in the House to ask Ministers by whose advice the Princess of Wales was denied her constitutional right of attending the royal Drawing-Room. For the first time for years they had the public on their side. Though the Princess's indiscretions were notorious, everyone knew they had been caused by her husband's: that he had sent his mistress to receive her on her first landing, that he had spent his wedding night drunk in the fender, that he had left her as soon as her child was born. Her guilt had never been proved, his own was flagrant, and it seemed outrageous

  1 "And when I did look round at them I said to myself, *A quoi ban this dull assemblage of tiresome persons.'... Mein Gott! dat is de dullest person Gott Almighty ever did born!" Bury, II, 298; I, 158.

  that he should insult her. For weeks he had been unable to pass through the streets without being hooted and pelted.

  All this the Czar learnt from his sister as he looked out across Piccadilly on the Green Park's browsing deer and cattle, the white-stuccoed Ranger's Lodge among the trees, and the red-brick facade of Buckingham House framed by the Abbey towers and Surrey hills. Sooner than share his host's unpopularity he resolved, on the impulse of the moment, not to proceed to the State apartments prepared for him in St. James's Palace but to stay at his sister's hotel. The fact that the Lord Chamberlain, two bands, and half the great Officers of State had been waiting since dawn to receive him did not cause him a moment's concern; he was an eastern autocrat, and in Russia things were done that way. Nor did it worry him or his sister that the Regent would be placed in a position of acute embarrassment; it was what the Grand Duchess wanted. The Pulteney being outside the private reserve of his parks and palaces, he would now have to face the howls of the populace in the streets. Already a vast cheering crowd had gathered outside the hotel and was growing larger every minute. At the end of three hours the ruler of England was forced to admit his inability to wait on his guest.

  Thus it came about that at the moment to which the Prince Regent had been so eagerly looking forward, he was confronted with the hideous contrast between his own unpopularity and the people's adulation of another. Instead of receiving Alexander as a fellow-conqueror, he appeared as one afraid to show himself in his own streets. This was the more galling because, never having been allowed to lead his country's armies, he was particularly sensitive on the subject of military glory. He greeted the Czar, not with his wonted ease and affability, but in his stiffest, haughtiest vein. The latter could scarcely conceal his contempt. "A poor prince," he remarked to his ambassador as he left the Palace.1

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p; Having recovered from their morning's disappointment, which they attributed to the Regent's dislike of being hissed, the crowds were by now mobbing the other potentates as they straggled into the capital. The greatest reception of all was for Blücher. As the old

  1 On which Count Lieven, who had been contending for some weeks with a similar attitude in the Grand Duchess, murmured "who has helped your Imperial Majesty to wage a glorious war and a peace to match." Havelock, 277.

  man, standing erect to salute the colours, passed through the Horse Guards, the populace seized the shafts from his carriage, knocked over the sentries at the garden gates of Carlton House, and practically carried him, carriage and all, into the Palace. Lest worse should follow, the doors were flung open and the Field Marshal was swept into the Regent's presence on a Rowlandsonian wave of cheering Britons. Meanwhile the Czar, looking like a big, benign angel, was bowing to the crowds from the balcony of the Pulteney. Everyone except the Regent seemed to be thoroughly happy, and the huzzaing and trampling continued far into the night. Every building was illuminated with candles, fairy lamps and transparencies.

  When the Czar and Grand Duchess sallied forth next day the crowd was waiting for them in the roadway. Before they reached their carriage they had to suffer the grasp of hundreds of hands. When, after driving a mile along the leafy, western highway, they alighted for a walk in the private gardens of Kensington Palace, they underwent a similar ordeal. Back at the hotel steps, after a sightseer's visit to the Abbey and British Museum, they had to fight their way once more through a tumult of well-dressed women who clung to their wrists and stared adoringly into Alexander's eyes. Some of them, by bribing the porter, managed to get into the hotel.

  That afternoon, Joseph Farington, the artist, found Piccadilly thick with people, horses and carriages, waiting to see the Emperor and Grand Duchess leave for a banquet at Carlton House. The Regent's state chariot, with its magnificent footmen and hammer-cloth of scarlet and gold, was drawn up outside the Pulteney behind a troop of Household Cavalry. Before setting out, the Czar came to the balcony to receive the popular acclamations. Then, with his sister by his side, her hair clustered with enormous pearl-drops, he drove off in the great coach towards St. James's Street, bowing from side to side through the windows.1

  Unlike the Czar, the Prince Regent had not risen early. His country's Constitution had not allowed him to form a soldier's habits, and his own inclined him to a luxurious indolence. So did

  1 Ann. Reg. 1814. Chron. 45; Ashton, I, 261-3, 266-7, 274-5; Broughton, I, 113, 139-40; Brownlow, 108; Farington, VII, 255-7; De Quincey, IE, 67; Nicolson, 112; Lady Shelley, I, 58-60; Pyne, Royal Residences, III, 12-14; Stanley, 84.

  his practice of sitting up late drinking cherry brandy. Though not yet fifty-two, he was enormously fat; his great backside, tightly swaddled in bright white inexpressibles, was one of the sights of Society. The public saw it less often, for, owing to his dislike of being stared at, he divided his time between Carlton House and the exquisite seaside Pavilion he had built for himself at Brighton. His tastes, despite a talent for designing military uniforms—he had recently devised a Field Marshal's attire for himself and the Duke of Wellington1—were aesthetic and epicurean rather than soldierly. He knew more about architecture, painting, books and music than any prince in Europe; he was shrewd, intelligent and witty and, when younger, had been the idol of Society, "with fascination," Byron wrote, "in his very bow:

  . . . the grace too rare in every clime Of being, without alloy of fop or beau, A finish'd gentleman from top to toe."

  But age and self-indulgence had not improved him; his affability had grown vinous and, though he could on occasion show an affecting dignity and courtesy, he was Prince Charming no longer. He still possessed an immense Hanoverian zest for life: could be at times a flamboyant, impulsive, overgrown baby, halloing over the supper-table, sobbing because his newest inamorata was cruel, or presiding over his private band, beating time on his thighs and accompanying himself the while at the top of his voice. But the gusto was degenerating into an irritable itch to domineer, and the surges of exuberant energy were succeeded now by long periods of torpor, bile and self-pity. A younger and less tolerant generation, which had never known the court of Prince Florizel or the enchanted days before the Bastille was stormed, took an increasingly dark view of this epicurean veteran. To the young writers of the middle-class—the men who were to have the ear of the future—he appeared not as the grotesque, flouncing spoilt playboy, Big Ben, whom his contemporaries had once known as a fairy-court prince, but as something more sinister. To them he was Swellfoot, the tyrant, who had betrayed the nascent cause of reform, imprisoned the martyrs of

  1 "How sure Ben was to make up a Field Marshal's uniform according to his own fancy. Not only the cuffs, collars and front of the coat were richly (2 inches wide) embroidered but the very seams—all the seams!" Paget Brothers, 198-9. See idem, 222; Creevey Papers, I, 47, 63,147-9; Farington, VII, 89, 161; Lady Shelley, I, 35; Wynne, III, 188-9.

  "

  liberty, persecuted his wife and impounded her child. The radical poet, Leigh Hunt, described him in his weekly, the Examiner, as "a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.,,I And Charles Lamb, the punning East India clerk, made him the subject of a lampoon called "The Triumph of the Whale":

  "By his bulk and by his size,

  By his oily qualities,

  This (or else my eyesight fails)

  This should be the Prince of Whales."2

  "What a fellow Prinny is!" wrote one of his old Whig cronies. He was at once a national scandal, a national disaster, a national achievement and national entertainment. He was the representative —the not very decorous but full-blooded one—of England in the last age in which men of all classes felt at liberty to let themselves go. And he happened by the accident of birth to be heir to and, for all practical purposes, occupant of the throne. In the new, more restrained, more decorous age into which England was moving, this made things very difficult for his Ministers. But for those who could afford to see the jest—and peril—of the situation, the fun while it lasted was uproarious.

  Yet, though Society, which once had idolised him, passed him by, and the holy place of the highest fashion was no longer Carlton House but Almack's assembly rooms, the Regent had been the ornament of a far more cultivated and polished circle than any known to the Lady Patronesses of that haughty, dull and exclusive establishment. When he chose, he could talk with judgment and taste on almost any subject. He knew how to be gracious and caressing, to set his auditors at ease by his exquisite manners, and send them away convinced of his personal interest.1 With such gifts he might have made himself as popular as Charles II or Henry VIII.

  1 A freedom which cost him two years' imprisonment for seditious libel.

  2 "Who is there," wrote "Monk" Lewis, "that may not be caricatured when the most avowedly graceful man of his time, or perhaps of any time, can thus be personally ridiculed!" Bury, I, 77.

  3 That sharp observer, Captain Harry Smith of the Rifles, bearing dispatches from America, recorded that his interview with him was "the most gentlemanlike and affable" he could possibly Imagine. Smith, I, 215. See also D'Arblay. Ill, 243, 300; Colchester, II, 272; Bury, I, 283; Lockhart, IV, 371; Havelock, 278.

  But, while he loved to impress, he suffered from a fatal dread of ridicule. Any threat to his vanity aroused in him a ruthless, almost hysterical self-protectiveness. It was his wife's unforgivable offence that, in her rattling, missish way, she had quizzed him on his growing belly. He could not even endure the casual glance of housemaids: any servant who stared at him was threatened with instant dismissal. Nor could he tolerate boredom. He would break the most important engagement because it irked him, and kept his dependants in constant uncertainty by his eleventh-hour changes of plan. N
othing in his disorderly life was ever decided until the last moment.1

  Being, for all his impulsive generosity and tender-heartedness, utterly inconsiderate where his own feelings were concerned, he was a lonely man. Most of his intimates were women. Of these, having enjoyed the society of the liveliest and most cultivated of the age, he was a fastidious judge. For years he had oscillated mainly between Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Countess of Jersey—both women of over fifty when he parted with them. His latest confidante was the Marchioness of Hertford, an imperceptibly fading grandmother of the most exquisite fashion. When first he fell for her, regardless of their years he behaved like a lovesick boy, weeping continuously, not speaking and even at times refusing nourishment. Since then, despite a spasmodic attempt to transfer his affections to Lady Bess-borough1—another fascinating grandmother—he had been ruled with a rod of iron. According to the Marchioness's account, their relationship was entirely platonic: they even, she averred, read the Bible to one another. But she enjoyed the traditional fruits of her office: her husband became Lord Chamberlain and her rather disreputable son, Lord Yarmouth, Vice-Chamberlain.

 

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