Perdita's Prince: (Georgian Series)

by Jean Plaidy

  His mind went to Charlotte, perpetually pregnant Charlotte. He would lecture her about her health. Not that she needed the lecture, but he wanted her to know that he was concerned for her. And Octavius, the baby; he was fretful. His nurses said that he cried in the night and wouldn’t take his food. He would have to work out a new routine for Octavius.

  It was more pleasant thinking of the nursery than state affairs, even though all was not well there. There will always be worries with children, eh, what?

  But he must remember that he was the King and he was the last man to shirk his responsibilities. This American affair. If only it could be satisfactorily ended. North wanted to resign, but he would not let North resign. If the Government would stand firm he was sure their troubles would be over. But when had a government made up of ambitious men ever been in unison? Men like Fox … ‘I hate Fox,’ he said aloud. He imagined the fellow – apart from all his political fireworks – was remembering the King’s folly over his aunt Sarah. Perhaps Sarah had confided in the fellow. After all, although she was his aunt there was not so much difference in their ages and Sarah had lived at Holland House with her sister, who was Fox’s mother. Fox was there … to put his mischievous finger in every pie; to laugh and sneer and scatter his wit about so that all wanted to know what Fox’s latest quip was.

  He remembered Fox at the time of the Royal Marriage Bill which he had felt it urgent to bring in after the disastrous marriages of his brothers Gloucester and Cumberland. Fox had been one of those who had opposed it. ‘The Bill to propagate immorality in the descendants of George I,’ they had called it. Fox had resigned because of it. ‘Good riddance, eh, what?’ As if the Bill was not necessary – with the Prince of Wales and young Frederick showing themselves as a couple of young fools with their minds always on women. There’d be disaster from that direction if steps weren’t taken. Why even he … as a young man …

  There was Hannah coming out of the past to regard him with mournful and reproachful eyes. But Hannah had never been reproachful. She had been too fond of him. Mournful, yes. She blamed herself. He was but a child, she said, when he had first seen her sitting in the window of her uncle’s linen-draper’s shop. The follies of youth! And yet at the time they seemed inevitable. But he had lived respectably with Hannah … as respectably as an irregular union could be. And then for her sake and for the sake of his conscience he had committed that act which had haunted him for the rest of his life. The marriage ceremony … that was no true ceremony of course … and yet …

  This was dangerous thinking; this could set the voices chattering in his head even more insistently than thoughts of rebellious colonists, the slyness of Mr Fox, the pleading of Lord North to be released from office.

  He guided his thoughts to North – a safer subject. He had always been fond of him; they had played together in the nursery when they were both young children, acted in plays together – for George’s father, Frederick, Prince of Wales, had been fond of amateur theatricals – and he and North had been so much alike that his father had remarked to North’s father that one of their wives must have deceived them and either he or Lord North must be the father of both of them. Now of course they were not so much alike – or George hoped not; North was fat as the King knew he himself would be – for it was a family failing – if he did not take exercise and watch his diet; North had bulging short-sighted eyes which he appeared to be unable to control so that they rolled about aimlessly; he had a tiny nose, but a mouth too small for his tongue, and when he spoke his speech was slurred and he spat unbecomingly. His appearance was almost ridiculous, yet he was a likeable man and because they had been friends for so long the King was fond of him. Poor North, he was extravagant and could never live within his means. As Prime Minister, of course, he had great expenses, and it had been necessary for the King to help him out of financial difficulties now and then. North on the other hand would come to the King’s assistance when he needed money and would prod the Treasury into supplying it. That unfortunate matter of the Grosvenor case … Thirteen thousand pounds for those letters Cumberland had written to the woman … And now there he was sporting with a different one; the woman with the eyelashes. Mr Fox, who had raged against the Royal Marriage Act; Hannah and Sarah; Elizabeth Pembroke, who did not belong to the past but who was at Court now; she was a woman to whom his attention kept straying; American Colonies; little Octavius who wasn’t strong; the Prince of Wales. All these subjects raced round and round in the King’s mind like trapped animals in a cage.

  ‘Careful,’ said the King aloud. ‘Eh, what?’

  But how could he stop his thoughts?

  Now his mind had switched to the riots which had broken out in Scotland and had been going on all during the year. A protest against the Catholic Relief Bill to which he had given his assent the year before. He had been glad to do it; he felt that people should be free to worship in the way they wished – as long as they worshipped; he had little patience with those atheists and agnostics or whatever they called themselves. People should go to church; they should obey the commandments; but high church, low church … that was a matter for individual conscience. But up in Scotland the low church didn’t like it at all. ‘No Popery,’ they shouted. Troublemakers. Mob mostly. Serious-minded people discussed their differences. They didn’t go about burning people’s houses because they thought differently on certain matters. Ever since he was a young man he had believed in religious tolerance. He had been lenient to all denominations. Quakers, for instance. And there he was back at Hannah.

  No, no, go away, Hannah. I must not think of you … dare not, eh, what?

  ‘Pray God the riots don’t spread below the Border,’ he said.

  Time to get up. Yes, the room was warm now … or warmer. He would devote himself to going through the state papers and then he would go to the Queen’s apartment to take breakfast with her.

  When he arrived there he found the Queen already seated at the table with Madam von Schwellenburg in attendance. The King did not like that woman. He remembered how his mother, when she was alive, had tried to get her dismissed because she felt she had too great an influence on the Queen; but Charlotte had showed herself remarkably stubborn and refused to let the woman go. It was not that she wanted her; it was simply that she clung to the right to choose her own servants. He had decided then that although Charlotte might have some sway over her own household she should have none in political affairs. No, said George, I have seen what havoc women can play in politics. Look at the late King of France, how he had allowed his women to rule him. Madame de Pompadour. Madame du Barry. And look at the state of that country! ‘Not very happy,’ murmured the King. ‘Not very happy. Would not like to see my country like that. Women ruin a country. They shall never lead me by the nose.’

  Charlotte dismissed Schwellenburg. The arrogant German woman was quite capable of remaining if she had not done so.

  ‘Your Majesty looks a little tired,’ said the Queen solicitously.

  ‘Eh? What? Not a good night.’

  ‘You have been worrying about something?’

  He did not answer that question. She was not going to worm state matters out of him that way.

  ‘Your Majesty should take more than a dish of tea.’

  ‘A dish of tea is all I want.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘A dish of tea is all I want,’ he repeated. ‘People eat too much. They get fat. All the family have a tendency to fat. Young George is too fat, eh, what?’

  Charlotte’s doting look illuminated her plain face. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. He is well formed and because he is so handsome and fairly tall he can carry a little weight gracefully.’

  ‘No one can carry too much weight with grace,’ declared the King. ‘I shall have to make sure that he is not eating too much fat on his meat. Pie crust, I’ll swear … in spite of my orders that they were not to have it.’

  ‘George is nearly eighteen now …’ began the Queen timorously.

/>   ‘Not yet. Not yet. He’s a minor. He’ll have to remember that, eh, what?’

  ‘But of course, of course,’ said the Queen hastily.

  ‘Seems to have settled down, eh? Not so much chasing the maids of honour. There hasn’t been one to take the place of that Harriot Vernon, has there?’

  ‘Schwellenburg told me that he was very, friendly with Mary Hamilton, but I discovered that it was a very good friendship. Mary is a good girl and he regarded her as his sister.’

  ‘Sister. He’s got sisters … five of them. What’s he want with another sister?’

  ‘It was a pleasant friendship, that was all. Mary Hamilton is one of the girls’ attendants and he saw her when he visited them. It meant he was visiting his sisters quite frequently and I’m sure Your Majesty will agree that is a good thing.’

  ‘Should have gone to see his own sisters … not this young woman.’

  ‘They were just friends.’

  ‘You’re keeping your eye on him?’

  ‘I wish I saw more of him.’ The Queen sighed.

  ‘Send for him then. Send for him.’

  ‘I would like him to come of his own accord. But when he does come, all the time he seems to be thinking of getting away.’ The King frowned and the Queen went on hastily: ‘Of course he is so young and full of high spirits. I hear that he only has to appear to set the people cheering. In Hyde Park the people nearly went wild with joy when your brother stopped his coach to speak to them. They were cheering George … not Cumberland.’

  ‘Cumberland had no right …’ The King’s eyes bulged. ‘I’ve forbidden him to the Court.’

  ‘This wasn’t the Court. It was the Park. After all they are uncle and nephew. They could scarcely pass by.’

  ‘Family quarrels,’ said the King. ‘I hate them. They’ve always been. I thought we’d avoid them. But I never could get along with Cumberland. It was different with Gloucester. I’m sorry he had to make a fool of himself. But Cumberland … I don’t want the fellow at Court, brother of mine though he may be.’

  ‘I must say he lives … scandalous …’

  The King spoke bitterly: ‘So even eyelashes a yard long can’t satisfy him.’

  ‘I’ve heard some of the women talking about the house he keeps … the people who go there. Fox is a frequent visitor. Do you think because you won’t have him at Court he’s trying to build up a little court of his own?’

  The King looked at his wife sharply. This sounded remarkably like interference. Any conversation which brought in Mr Fox could be highly political. He was not going to have Charlotte interfering. He’d tell her so; he’d make it plain to her. But for a few moments he gave himself up to imagining the sort of ‘court’ there would be at the Cumberlands. Men like Fox … Fox was a lecher … Fox had all the vices and none of the virtues; but he was a brilliant politician, and if he was a habitué of Cumberland’s court that could be very dangerous. For where Fox was other men of affairs gathered.

  The King looked distastefully at the Queen. She was not really an old woman … thirty-five or so … but having spent some nineteen years in almost continuous child-bearing this had naturally aged her. Compared with women like Elizabeth Pembroke she was old and ugly. And she was the woman with whom he was expected to be content while his brother sported on sofas with Grosvenor’s wife and before that matter was settled was doing the same with a timber merchant’s wife and before very long marrying the woman he had made his Duchess. Not that he was faithful to her. He was living dissolutely … frequenting gaming clubs, hanging about the theatres in the hope of seducing every little actress that took his fancy. Disgusting! The King could not bear to think about it … yet he could not stop himself thinking about it … and when he looked at Charlotte … plain, fertile Charlotte sitting there, smug and so obviously with child … he felt bitter against a fate which had made him a king with a high moral standard who had forced himself to be a faithful husband all these years to a woman who did not attract him at all.

  ‘I will deal with this affair of Cumberland,’ he said sternly.

  ‘Do you mean you will summon him to an audience?’

  ‘I will deal with him,’ said the King finally.

  Charlotte looked disappointed. It was humiliating never to be able to voice an opinion. She would not have believed all those years ago when she had come here from Mecklenburg-Strelitz that she could have been relegated to such a position. She had been quite a spirited young woman when she arrived. But of course she came from a very humble state to be the queen of a great country and that had overawed her a little, and just as she was growing accustomed to that she had become pregnant – and she had been pregnant ever since.

  So she accepted the snub as she had so many others, and, sighing, thought: It is no use trying to change it now. If she attempted to it would anger the King; it would upset him; and the most important thing to her now was not to upset the King. At the back of her mind was a terrible fear concerning him. At times he was a little strange. That quick method of speech, the continual ‘eh’s’ and ‘what’s’. He had not been like that before his illness … that vague mysterious illness, the truth of which his mother and Lord Bute had tried to keep from her. But she had known. During it George’s mind had become affected. It had passed but he had never been the same again; and always she was conscious of the shadow hanging over him. Sometimes … and this worried her most … she thought he was haunted by it too.

  So the last thing she wanted to do was disturb the King.

  The King changed the subject to the Prince of Wales.

  ‘I think the people liked to see the Prince with us at the theatre.’

  ‘I am sure they did,’ replied the Queen, glad to see him more easy in his mind again. ‘It was a splendid evening. I thought the players very good. That actress who played Perdita was very pretty.’

  ‘H’m,’ said the King. Very pretty, he thought. Too pretty for comfort. He had seen a young man flirting with her in the wings when she was waiting to go on stage and he believed the fellow was attached to the Prince’s entourage. He didn’t want young profligates who flirted in public with actresses about his son.

  He went on: ‘The Prince should be seen more often in public with us.’

  ‘I am sure that is so.’

  ‘But I am not sure that I like to see those play actresses parading themselves before young men. I would prefer something more serious. Some good music.’

  ‘I am sure,’ said the Queen, ‘that would be an excellent idea and far more suitable than a play.’

  Now the King was happier. He could settle down cosily to arrange an occasion when it would be most suitable for the King, Queen and Prince of Wales to appear in public.

  The Queen smiled contentedly. After all, she had accepted the subservient role all these years, why complain about it now?

  She folded her hands in her lap; she would never complain, she vowed, if only all the children remained in good health, her firstborn did nothing to offend his father and the King remained … himself.

  *

  The King had sent for the Prince of Wales and when young George faced his father the latter thought: He is handsome. Looks healthy too. A little arrogant. But perhaps we all are when we know that one day we will wear a crown.

  The King cleared his throat. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘I hear you’ve been meeting your uncle Cumberland in the Park.’

  ‘We passed while taking the air, Sir.’

  ‘H’m. And your uncle stopped and behaved very affectionately, I hear.’

  ‘He behaved as one would expect an uncle to.’ Just faintly insolent … as insolent as he dared be. Resentful too. No doubt imagined he was a man already. Well, he was not. His eighteenth birthday was months away – and even then he was not fully of age. The King started to wonder as he often did in his eldest son’s presence why there was always this tension between them, as though they were enemies rather than father and son. When had he ceased to regard the Prince as one of
the greatest blessings in his life and seen him as one of his greatest burdens? He kept thinking of the pink chubby baby who, everyone declared, was a bold young rascal. Spoilt from his birth, thought the King. The lord of the nursery, charming everyone with his good looks and his laughter and his arrogance … yes arrogance even in those days. But how they had doted on him – he as well as Charlotte. This Prince who, he thought then, had made marriage to Charlotte worthwhile. He had been almost as foolish about the child as Charlotte, gloating over that wax image she had had made of him and which she still kept under a glass case on her dressing table. In the Park people had crowded round to look at him, to adore him; and he had accepted all this with a cool disdainful gaze of those blue eyes as the homage due to him but of which he had such a surfeit that it bored him.

  And then the others had come along and they had begun to realize that the Prince of Wales was headstrong, liked his own way, screamed for it, cajoled for it – and, the King thought grimly, invariably got it.

  The result: the handsome dandy who now stood before him, seeking to discountenance him because he was young and handsome and George was old and looked his age … because he was a prince who would one day be King and perhaps resented the fact that he was not already.

  There he was working up a hatred of the boy before he had done anything to aggravate him, except to stand there with insolence in every line of his – the King noted – slightly too fat body.

  ‘Your Uncle Cumberland is not received at my Court,’ said the King. ‘Therefore I find it unfitting that he should stop to speak to you in the Park.’

  ‘The people seemed pleased that he did.’

  ‘I have refused to receive him at Court.’

  ‘Yes,’ repeated the Prince, ‘the people were pleased. They are not fond of family quarrels.’

  ‘Your uncle Cumberland has shocked the whole country by his behaviour.’

  ‘I don’t think they hold it against him. Perhaps they were amused.’