He was clever, well read, and possessed of exquisite taste in art and decoration, but he was wholly deficient in self-knowledge. Following the King’s orders the Prince had been isolated from companions of his own age and tutored by dry old men who saw to it that his life was one long regime of worthy activities. But instead of creating a paragon of virtue, the Prince’s strict and joyless upbringing had made him vain, petulant and attention-seeking. As soon as he could he rebelled against everything he had been taught. The King relaxed the cordon sanitaire around the Prince when he turned eighteen only to the extent of holding a few private balls for him, ‘from which I and many others were banished,’ wrote Georgiana, ‘as no opposition person was asked’ – which only increased his desire to mix with people who did not meet with his parents’ approval.
‘As he only went out in secret, or with the King and Queen,’ she also recorded, ‘he formed very few connections with any other woman other than women of the town.’ On his first trip to Drury Lane in 1779 he saw The Winter’s Tale, and immediately fell in love with the twenty-one-year-old actress Mary Robinson, a protégé of Georgiana’s. She was delighted to conduct a very public affair with him, and even went so far as to emblazon a simulacrum of his crest – three feathers – on her carriage. The Prince foolishly wrote her explicit letters, in which he called her ‘Perdita’ – her role in the play – and signed himself ‘Florize’. Like any astute woman on the make, she kept his adolescent declarations – he promised her a fortune as soon as he came of age – and blackmailed him when he grew tired of her.
It was during the Prince’s visits to Drury Lane that he first came into contact with the Devonshire House Circle, and in particular with Georgiana and Fox. George III blamed Fox for deliberately and calculatingly debauching his son, but he had no malicious intent. The Prince had already started to drink and gamble before he met Fox, who simply showed him how to do it in a more refined way. The Prince worshipped Fox who, for his part, genuinely liked the boy, despite the thirteen-year age gap, seeing in him, perhaps, something of his younger, reckless self. The two made an unlikely pair, one of them dressed in exquisite finery, the other unwashed, unshaven, his clothes askew and his linen soiled. On most nights they could be found either at Brooks’s or Devonshire House, playing faro until they fell asleep at the table.
The Prince’s marked attentions to Georgiana, the fact that he constantly sought her advice on every matter – from his clothes to his relations with his father – fanned rumours that they were having an affair. Nathaniel Wraxall was loath to characterize it definitely, and ventured no further than saying, ‘of what nature was that attachment, and what limits were affixed to it by the Duchess, must remain a matter of conjecture’.57 The Prince was almost certainly in love with Georgiana, but she never reciprocated his feelings. Throughout their lives they always addressed each other as ‘my dearest brother’ and ‘sister’, although the Prince was often madly jealous of rivals.58 It was his lack of success with Georgiana, when every other woman in Whig society (including, it was rumoured, Harriet) was his for the asking, that made her so irresistible to him.
The Prince shared with Fox, Lord Cholmondeley and Lord George Cavendish a round robin of the three most famous courtesans of the era: Perdita, Grace Dalrymple and Mrs Armistead. Georgiana heard that Lord George had paid a drunken visit to Mrs Armistead one night only to find the Prince hiding behind a door. Luckily, rather than take offence he burst out laughing, made him a low bow and left. The Prince also pursued Lady Melbourne and Lady Jersey, or perhaps it was the other way round. Less well-informed people speculated that Georgiana was in competition with her friends for the Prince’s affection, but a letter from Lady Melbourne suggests collusion rather than rivalry:
The Duke of Richmond has been here, and told me you and I were two rival queens, and I believe, if there had not been some people in the room, who might have thought it odd, that I should have slapped his face for having such an idea; and he wished me joy of having the Prince to myself. How odious people are, upon my life, I have no patience with them. I believe you and I are very different from all the rest of the world – as from their ideas they do such strange things in certain situations or they never could suspect us in the way they do.59
The Whigs continued their onslaught against the government. On 3 June 1780 the Duke of Richmond, then a radical on the extreme left of the party, moved a resolution that the constitution should be rewritten to allow annual parliaments and universal suffrage. His plan was based on the proposals drawn up by the Westminster Association, an offshoot of Christopher Wyvil’s Association Movement which had led the petitions for parliamentary reform. By an unlucky chance, while the Lords were debating the Duke of Richmond’s proposals, Lord George Gordon, a mentally unbalanced Protestant fanatic, chose to march on parliament at the head of a large mob. He carried with him a petition from the Protestant Association, a sectarian body which opposed giving legal rights to Catholics.
Eighteenth-century society was rarely bothered by the occasional eruptions of the lower orders; the establishment ignored them and the fracas would die down of its own accord. But this mob, intoxicated by drink and whipped up by a crazed demagogue, was more dangerous than the usual over-excited rabble. The crowd blocked all the entrances to parliament while Lord George Gordon stormed into the Commons. The MPs fell silent at his entrance and sat spellbound as he harangued them on the evils of popery. He then rushed out to do the same in the Lords. In between speeches he ran to a window to shout at the crowd outside. Fearing for their lives, MPs made a dash for the stairs and as they tried to leave the House they were punched and kicked by the marchers. The Lords followed suit, ignominiously leaving older peers such as the eighty-year-old Lord Mansfield to fend for themselves. The Duke of Devonshire’s carriage was stopped by the mob until he agreed to shout ‘No Popery’. By nightfall the protest had turned into a riot. Thieves and looters joined in as bands of club-wielding rioters burned down foreign chapels and attacked the shops and houses of known Catholics.
At first Georgiana did not realize the danger facing the capital. Her friend Miss Lloyd, she joked, was dreaming about enraged Protestants hammering on her door.
Lord George Gordon’s people continued to make a great fracas, there is a violent mob in Moorfields, and I have learnt that five hundred guards are gone down there. I could not go to the Birthday – my gown was beautiful, a pale blue, with the drapery etc., of an embroider’d gauze in paillons. I am a little comforted for not going by the two messages I have received from Lady Melbourne and the Duke from the Prince of Wales to express his disappointment at having missed dancing with me for the 3rd time.60
But by the next day, 6 June, the mob was on the point of taking over the city. Ministers and opposition alike hurriedly sent their wives and children out of town and prepared to mount a defence of the streets. But the magistrates were nowhere to be seen and, following a misunderstanding over which authority had the power to mandate the use of firearms against civilians, there were no troops in place. The rioting continued unchecked. The mob sacked Newgate Prison and burned down the King’s Bench. They exploded the distilleries at Holborn so that the streets were flooded with spirits and the water supply to Lincoln’s Inn Fields became alcoholic. Lord John Cavendish condemned the Lord Mayor’s cowardice in standing by while London burned to the ground. He had good reason; the mob targeted the houses of prominent Whigs because of the party’s support for religious toleration. Edmund Burke’s house