Prince of Pleasure: The Prince of Wales and the Making of the Regency by Saul David

Author:Saul David
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press Ltd.
Published: 2014-07-09T04:00:00+00:00

9 The Delicate Investigation

The advent of the Fox-Grenville government presented the Prince with the opportunity to settle a few scores; not least with his estranged wife, Princess Caroline, whose behaviour in recent years had become increasingly scandalous.

In 1799, by then living almost exclusively at Montague House in Blackheath, she had spent much time flirting with her father-in-law's ministers, including William Pitt himself, William Windham (Secretary at War), Henry Dundas (Treasurer of the Navy) and Charles Long (a Secretary to the Treasury), While she was not averse to irritating her husband, these senior Tories were keen to cultivate a woman who could conceivably become, in the event of her husband's untimely death, Regent for her daughter Charlotte.

Caroline's particular favourite was George Canning, 29, the talented member of the Board of Control who would one day become Prime Minister. Having met Caroline for the first time in June, he became a regular visitor to Blackheath during the summer of 1799. In August, he wrote to his friend Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, informing him that he had just arrived back from visiting an unnamed lady. 'The keeper [of the Privy Purse, Miss Hayman] left us for a few minutes and the thing is too clear to be doubted. What am I to do? I am perfectly bewildered.'

He wrote again a few weeks later, referring to 'those which I know not-what feelings - vanity, perhaps, and romance, and a certain sort of lively and grateful interest (but not love)'. Had he not just met Miss Joan Scott (the heiress whom he would marry the following year), he added, 'I know not how I should have resisted, as I ought to do, the abundant and overpowering temptation to the indulgence of passion which must have been dangerous, perhaps ruinous, to her who was the cause of it, and myself.'

In a subsequent letter, however, he admitted that 'the day of the last dinner was not quite so blameless as I promised you it should be.' Also, Canning later told the Duke of Wellington that the Princess had shown him her husband's letter of 30 April 1796, in which he had agreed not to resume 'a connexion of a more particular nature'. Asked how she should interpret the letter, Canning replied that it gave 'her permission to do as they liked, and they took advantage of it on the spot'.

The following February, having discovered that Mrs Crewe had informed the Princess about his passion for Miss Scott, Canning decided to come clean. His explanation, he told friends, 'was received - it is impossible to say how kindly! Never, never shall I forget or cease to be grateful for the generous, amiable, disinterested affection, which was shown on that occasion.' The true nature of the Princess's relationship with Canning is difficult to assess. Her most recent biographer thinks that they probably only 'indulged in the prophylactic sport of heavy petting'. But when one takes into account the Princess's hearty sexual appetite - a fact amply borne out by future

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