“I was not even sent for this time. I arranged for the meeting and went to the ministers myself.
“ ‘The King is not improved,’ the Chancellor of the Exchequer said.
“ ‘Isn’t it time you began to cast about for a suitable consort?’ the Lord Chancellor asked.
“ ‘You’re Prince Royal now. You may yet be Prince Regent before you’re King,’ the PM said.
“ ‘What is your view, counselor?’ asked the Lord Privy Seal.
“ ‘Oh my view,’ he said. ‘Hi wouldn’t ’ave no proper view now, would hi? My view’s strickly the law. The law’s what hi go by. It wants a hagreement.’ This from the Custom’s Office solicitor.
“ ‘What does?’ the Prime Minister asked.
“ ‘Why the law does, your honor. It wants a hagreement. What we call a tort, a contrack.’
“ ‘But isn’t a tort…’ I started to ask.
“ ‘It’s like this, i’n’t it? Law’s a hagreement entered into voluntarily by two parties. Hi except ’ighway robbery and murder and such because that hain’t law so much has what we call broken law. Now the Prince ’ere comes to us game as you please hand wants us to push some bill through Parliament to pay off ’is debts. Now if we was to do hit hit might be what we call a favor but hit wouldn’t be law. Not proper law. Dere’s no quo for the quid, if you gavver my meanin’. It wants a hagreement. Now, if ’e was to marry…’
“They did not get their agreement.
“The creditors came. They came with bailiffs and bum-bailiffs, with beadles and tipstaffs, with sheriffs and constabulary, process servers, catchpolls and Bow Street runners. I could see the Lord Chancellor and the solicitor off by themselves in a carriage parked behind a string of removal vans.
“To give them their due, the creditors seemed almost as shy as Miss Austen and, with the removal men, went quietly about their work. Silently the delft room was dismantled. Silently the Wedgwood was collected, the furniture. Sheridan was there and tried to make me a gift of the plays I’d commissioned. There was consultation among the constabulary and process servers who then sent one of the runners out to speak to the Lord Chancellor’s carriage. When the man returned, he whispered something to a policeman who came over to Sheridan who then turned to me and shrugged helplessly.
“ ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Sheridan said.
“ ‘It’s all right, Dick,’ I told him, and handed over his manuscripts. ‘We’ve read the plays. They’re wonderful plays. We’ll remember them always.’
“ ‘Oh we will, Richard. We will,’ Maria said.
“ ‘As for the rest of you,’ I called, ‘one day I shall be King. I’ll not forget what you’ve done to us this day. You, draper, and you, cabinetmaker, can forget all about your By Appointment to His Majesty crest. All of you can.’
“For reply they looked down listlessly at their feet and seemed to shuffle apologetically.
“For some reason they didn’t enter the bedroom and left it intact.
“ ‘They’ve left us all we really need, sweetheart,’ I told Maria.
“ ‘Oh yes,’ she said and we went there and I sucked at her dry breasts and somehow they were moist now and what I sipped tasted like tears.
“Well,” King George said. “It was the following year. This would have been thirty-three years ago. It was my birthday. I wouldn’t be Regent for eighteen more years, King for another twenty-eight. It was my birthday. The house was furnished now with some of Maria’s things from Pangbourne; the rest came from her house in Richmond. There were crosses on the walls. It was my birthday. We had always exchanged gifts. Though I was still in debt—princes and good time Charlies are never out of it it seems—I was not borrowing so much now since being humiliated by the creditors. I had given her some small thing, I don’t even remember now what it was. She looked at me for a moment and went over to her writing desk, where she sat down and appeared to write something out. It couldn’t have taken her more than a minute. When she had done she handed it to me. I looked at it and laughed.
“ ‘What’s this then?’ I said.
“ ‘A check.’
“ ‘Well I see it’s a check. Is that the sort of gift you’d give me on my birthday? A check?’
“ ‘Did you read it?’
“ ‘No.’
“ ‘Read it.’
“ ‘It’s for five hundred fifteen pounds, eight shillings.’
“‘Yes.’
“ ‘What an odd sum. Five hundred fifteen pounds, eight shillings. Maria, is this the amount you think will bring me out of debt? Darling, I owe thousands.’
“ ‘I know that.’
“ ‘Maria, I don’t want your money for a gift.’
“ ‘It isn’t a gift. I did not get you a gift.’
“‘What is it then?’
“ ‘The price you paid to have this house built.’
“ ‘You’re giving me my own house? Oh, darling, that’s very sweet but really I can’t…’
“ ‘He said I’d have to ask you for the title. He said if you don’t have it or it’s not handy you could write something down on a paper making it over to me.’
“ ‘He said? Who?’
“ ‘That solicitor,’ she said, and began to cry.
“I went to him that afternoon. He was not at the offices in Parliament, where all our other meetings had taken place. The Lord Chancellor told me I might look for him at the Customs House.
“It was a dirty, dingy building smelling of brine and brackish water, of filthy contraband and sodden wood. I found him shirt-sleeved in some petty clerk’s office.
“ ‘What’s this then?’ I demanded, waving the check at him.
“ ‘Ahh,’ he said, ‘did you sign hover the deed then, my prince?’
“ ‘No I didn’t sign over the deed. I’m trying to get some explana—’
“ ‘Well no matter,’ he said. ‘You’ve haccepted the money and in law that’s a principle that shows your hintent to make a hagreement.’
“ ‘What are you talking about?’
“ ‘Your own good, sir, your own good. You built that house in Putney in the year of our Lord 17 hand 86. This is 17 hand 92. That’s six years, Prince George.’
“ ‘Say what you’re talking about or I’ll kill you.’
“ ‘That wouldn’t be law, sir.’
“I went for his throat.
“ ‘Law, sir,’ he gasped. ‘Common law, sir. Common law marriage.’
“I took my hands from about his neck. ‘Common law marriage?’
“Because there is no law finally, there are only arrangements. They had used the Settlement Act to arrange my bachelorhood, a sort of biding, buttoned spinstership of standby, wait-list eligibility. And repossessed our household goods to arrange, or so I thought at the time, simple, hobbled, clip-wing, rub-and-bottleneck let and hindrance.
“ ‘Oh no, sir,’ the solicitor explained later, ‘that would have been vitchious. The law his not vitchious. We done that for the presumption. The law wants a hagreement hand a presumption. What reasonable men might hinfer has to da troof of your and Mrs. Fitz’s situation based on probable reasoning hin da absence huv, or prior to, hactual proof or disproof. If we’d let you ’ang on to the furniture, all them pricey, pretty penny harticles and hinventory what you’d put togevver, dere might be some reasonable man or huvver oo’d ’ave taken it into ’is ’ead that you’d hactually hintended to make ha ‘ome togevver hafter the fashion of a ’usband and wife.’
“ ‘You left the bedchamber undisturbed.’
“ ‘We did, sir. Hafter the fashion of a man wif a maid.’
“Maria’s check had been written to neutralize one more presumption. The solicitor explained that since I had paid for the house and lived with her in it I had seemed to imply that I regarded her as my wife. If they had not acted before the sabbatical year, our arrangement, under English common law, might have been considered a bona fide marriage. By getting her to pay for the house…
“ ‘I’ll tear u
p the check,’ I said, and did so, in a dozen dozen bits and pieces before the solicitor’s eyes.
“ ‘Oh, sir,’ he said sadly, ‘Hi’m afraid dat were not wise. You see, sir, you’re a debtor, and, hunder law, debtors are wiffout certain rights. Dey may not muterlate monies due deir creditors. ‘Hif a penny come deir way dat penny must be paid.’ Dat his de law, sir, so noble has your action was, befitting a sweet and noble prince like yourself, may I say, sir, it was not wise? Dough Hi ’ope an’ pray dat if Hi ’ad de honor, sir, to be hin your position Hi would ’ave done de same——if Hi was has hig’orant of de law as you are, Prince.’
“So we were undivorced and unannulled for the third time.
“We continued to meet for a time, but both of us could see that what all official England had contrived to turn into an affair was finally and effectively doomed. For one thing, now that Maria owned the house she wanted to redecorate the bedroom.
“Are you too uncomfortable on that bare floor? The remainder is quickly told.
“Now I had reason to borrow again. I had not realized how much money I had not been spending while Maria had been taking up so much of my time. Unattached, I began to resume some of my old pursuits. I was gambling again. There were fine new race horses to buy for my neglected stables. My appetites became again as grand as they’d been in my fledgling good time Charlie days. My wardrobe once more took on its old princely significance. And there was Brighton. There’d always been Brighton of course, but now I had begun once again to host the magnificent feasts and balls that had so distracted me when I was younger, affairs which for the most part Maria and I had attended as guests during the period of our closest alliance. So there were debts. And reason enough to seek out assistance.
“ ‘There’s that girl in Italy,’ the Chancellor of the Exchequer said.
“ ‘His cousin?’ the Lord Privy Seal said.
“ ‘Caroline,’ said the solicitor.
“This would have been thirty years ago. The marriage was contracted and I got my money.
“ ‘They’re forcing me to marry a woman I cannot care for.’
“ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Maria said. ‘It’s death Catholics recognize, not divorce.’
“ ‘Don’t you see?’ I told the ministers. ‘You’ve made me a bigamist.’
“ ‘You’re Prince huv Wales, sir,’ the solicitor said. ‘Take has many mistresses has pleases you.’
“ ‘Caroline’s the mistress,’ I muttered.
“ ‘Queen Caroline his your consort, sir,’ the solicitor said. ‘When she comes to term England will ’ave han heir.’
“Heiress he should have said. Princess Charlotte was born the following year. I asked the queen to taste her milk, which otherwise would have just gone begging anyway. She quite refused. It couldn’t have been very good milk.
“ ‘One thing,’ I asked Maria when Caroline returned to Rome the year the Princess was born. ‘What pressures did they apply? Did they threaten the Catholics? How did they get you to do it?’
“‘Write the check?’
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘That solicitor explained it. It had been a prince’s house. The home of the man who would be King of England. He pointed out what a good investment it was.’
“ ‘Oh Maria,’ I cried.
“ ‘Oh George,’ she said, ‘it’s divorce Catholics don’t recognize, not reality.’
“This would have been almost twenty-nine years ago. The Young Pretender would have been dead eight years by this time. Did you say something, Mills? No? I thought you said something. Stuart eight years gone. Still, she would not have been entirely lonely in Italy, would she? Would she, Mills?
“Now what’s all this about some damned squire’s letter you claim to carry about with you under your blouse?!”
Which was when the man who could claim—for himself and for everyone in his family who had come before—never to have signed a neighbor’s petition or written a letter to the editor or raised the mildest embarrassing question in public, let alone seen his name in the papers or done anything at all to make anyone nervous, produced from his very person, as the King of Great Britain, Ireland and Hanover warily watched, a document, character reference, personality sketch, which at once testified to his, Mills’s, rude ambitions and to his squire’s (“squire” because the man was merely a modestly prosperous small freeholder in Mills’s district, some younger son of some younger family) cheerful disdain of, and sniffy scorn for, George Mills and George Mills’s curious goals. The letter was not a hoax. (The man to whom it was addressed was actually known to the writer, and had actually lived in London, though now, three years dead, was no longer in a position to do anything for the young aspirant. And anyway, the directions he had given Mills, though careful and precise, were quite inaccurate, based both upon a lightly liquored memory and a flaw peculiar to the writer which caused him, whenever he was in the capital—occasions rare enough to strike him as occasions—not only to become overly excited but to lose, if not all sense of direction, at least that part of it which oriented him as to the side of the river he actually stood on at any given moment. Here was the fluky fortuity: that he had somehow managed to describe to Mills, even providing him with a hand-drawn map, which not only replicated the area to which George had come—with the exception of the house itself which was considerably smaller and in a different style than the one he’d described, a discrepancy George, who understood him, put down to the squire’s sense of his own importance—but which was correct in all particulars save this: that the place George wanted was on the other side of the river in Fulham and not on this side in Putney.)
So the letter was no hoax. George Mills, fearing one, had even tampered the crude seal and read it, understanding well enough its heavy sarcasm and the dubious light in which he was portrayed, but putting it in this light, figuring it this way:
His sort don’t mean my sort harm. They’re afraid. As they might be afraid of Vandals or Visigoths. As they might be afraid of trained bears doing comic turns on the high street. They’ve heard things. Stuff about rough ways, muck about manners. They fear for their game, for their gardens and daughters. They misdoubt our religion, and put it about our condition is our character. They think we drink too much and dance makes us crazy.
His jokes are just nervous. All to the good in the end. Serving my purpose. ’Cause he don’t mean me harm, not real harm. One toff to another.
Now the King will read it. Who to the fellow what wrote it is like me to some dog dead in the road. He’ll know. And discount the jokes and mark down the leg pull, all that lively pokebanter, all that scoff-merry and scoldbutt. He’ll know. He’s a king.
King George IV took the greasy letter his subject handed him and, when he saw to whom it was addressed, began to read the letter of introduction as if it were some document intercepted by agents and delivered by urgent and pressing couriers.
He read:
Forgive if you can my blatant impertinence in addressing you in this way about a matter of absolutely no importance and of no small irrelevance, it being the very rule of scientific displacement that that which is of no weight, which is no thing, saving of course our souls, which at all events are, if not by the laws of God then, to our shame, to our shame, at the very indiscreet least by the practices of men, more than we are inconvenienced to believe is good for us, “matters” of substance delayed, due bills to which, through the best grace of that same Divine Agency, accrue no interest, compound or even simple, though admittedly such “small” matters being the exception—the exception, nota bene—while that to which I now direct your offhand attention still participates in that aforementioned phylum or category relating to the antichronistic, metachronous and just plain out of date, and distracts in almost inverse mathematical degree to the extraneous pressures it puts upon us and has, for weightiness, no more power to signal fish than a sinker of soap bubble.
The damned thing’s in code, the King thought. And read on.
Thus the stone in our shoe. Thus idle, vagrant worries which turn us from all true and dutiful concerns to peripheral speculation, random and curious as sudden unexampled messages from the villagers, their puny command-performance performances, shoddy balls, recitals, bumpkin dramatic entertainments and mystery plays, all those abrupt summonses at which our attendance is owed more to custom than obligation. Thus, in brief, all subtly finessed attentions to the self. Welcome enough, and noble enough too, Laird knows, when such attentions are diverted to God and Country, but disconcerting as a fly on your face when all that’s at stake are the caterwaulings of silly young boys whose voices have not yet changed. Thus then this.
Laird? the King thought. Laird knows?
Which I cannot continue without first making certain courteous and proper, albeit, I do assure you, good fellow, entirely sincere inquiries regarding the healths and happinesses of your lovely lady and your remarkable bairn. It has of course been some time since I have been in your wonderful city. After the current reignant first brought Johnny Nash up from Brighton to do his royal imperial his Regent Street for him, but not since it was completed. Completed not, I’m relieved to hear, in the hybrid rajah cum emir cum mehtar cum, I-don’t-know, chinoiseried cacique so many of us had at first feared (after the expensive vulgarity of Brighton itself), but a toned-down and at least vaguely European architecture. I’m even told by some who have actually seen it that it reminds them of a sort of classical Greece, Athens say, if Time hadn’t trashed it. I’ve seen prints of course. Athens indeed! We’ve lost a toned-down Oriental fantasy to a tarted-up Mediterranean one. At least the street appears broad enough. Which must be welcome to one in your profession.
Thus then this.
Bairn? he thought. Remarkable bairn?
The piece of work you see before you calls itself George Mills. I must tell you at the outset that while he is not entirely native to our neighborhood, he has been in residence hereabouts four years, since 1821 I believe, doing agriculture, the sowing, mowing, tilling, gleaning, threshing, reaping and picking so peculiarly designated to his race and class of stoopers and benders. Though he claims in his more defensive moments family—or, rather more particularly, genealogy. It is a long and sometimes tedious story and if you would hear it you will have to hear it from him. If you regard it as his command performance, recital or dramatic entertainment, as, in short, your own capital call to custom, you will have discharged something so close to obligation that only a talmudic philosophe might tell you the difference.
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