Playful Prince

BRIGHTON--Osbert Sitwell and Margaret Barton--Houghton Mifflin ($4).

It was Thackeray--"with his warped, middle-class outlook, poor, frightened little mid-nineteenth-century Thackeray"--who gave George IV and his Brighton days their bad reputation in Victorian England. To that novelist George was everything that an English monarch should not be: a bigamist, a liar and a lecher who played practical jokes, gambled, drank heavily, and, as Prince of Wales, with an income of -L-70,000, managed to accumulate -L-250,000 of debts in three years. Brighton, despite its quaint, un-English charm, its surface respectability, had been the scene of his historic revels, remained so charged with memories of the great, bawdy days of the Regency that it seemed faintly disreputable even after Victoria's death.

Sharing none of Thackeray's prejudices, Osbert Sitwell and Margaret Barton, in their new history of Brighton, find George IV, while not exactly an ornament to Britain, at least no unmixed Victorian monster. His streak of family insanity "had softened down to a curious, harmless and most effective eccentricity." He was frequently drunk, but no more so than most English aristocrats of that period. His delusions, that he had defeated many butchers and bakers in fistfights, that he had commanded at many a battle, including Waterloo, were merely symptoms of the same madness that had made his old father a raving lunatic. His relations with women, his financial dealings, were truly abominable, but he had been brought up in a harsh school, and the sudden release to such license as the age permitted would have strained better-balanced characters than his. Taking a broad view of the mental and moral infirmities that outraged the Victorians, Authors Sitwell and Barton discover that George possessed one distinction to which Thackeray attached little importance. He was one of the few English kings who was also a patron of the arts. Gay and entertaining, with considerable taste in painting and architecture, he was principally responsible for the creation of Brighton as a superb pleasure resort.

Brighton was merely a small health resort when George of Wales made it his summer court. Eighteenth Century physicians commonly prescribed large quantities of mineral water for all ailments; at Brighton invalids dosed themselves accordingly and discovered the pleasures of bathing almost by accident. By the time Prince George arrived, bathing had become popular, although noblemen were still usually so dirty that no sensitive person could stay long in a crowd of them. At Brighton the young prince found congenial companions--most of them enemies of his father--and with them raced horses, chased girls, picked quarrels, went shooting at chimney-pots. He fell violently in love with Mrs. Fitzherbert, twice widowed at the age of 25. A gentle, reserved woman and a devout Catholic, she did not approve of his wild behavior. In 1785, to prove his sincerity, he married her secretly, thus establishing a royal mystery which was not solved until the discovery of the official marriage documents in 1905. The rumor of his marriage spread at a time when anti-Catholic feeling was strong. Through a spokesman in the House of Lords, he publicly denied his marriage. Debts of -L-600,000 made him desperate. Mrs. Fitzherbert's rival, Lady Jersey, intrigued to break their relationship. Suddenly the prince abandoned Mrs. Fitzherbert and officially took to wife Princess Caroline of Brunswick in order to raise money quickly. The Princess of Wales was ugly, slovenly, insane "in a humdrum though crazy way" and suffered one of the most wretched married careers in royal history. Lady Jersey, appointed lady of the bedchamber, intercepted her letters, lied to her and about her, put Epsom Salts in her supper on her wedding night, humiliated her in public with the Prince, and continued "these delightful and delicate attentions" throughout the first year of her married life.

Such domestic affairs soon drove the Prince back to Brighton and his first wife, while the Princess and Lady Jersey were both neglected. His growing unpopularity, just as refugees of the French Revolution began flooding England with harrowing tales of violence, worried him constantly, and during his ten-year reign fears of assassination made him miserable. Only at Brighton could he find contentment. The great Pavilion he built there, with its full-blown domes, tall pagodas of porcelain, panels of lacquer, and strange Indo-Chinese style, was his unconscious assertion of his belief in the dignity of kings, of their right to live extravagantly, romantically, disregarding practical considerations of expense.

But he sowed his architectural wild oats at a time when the power of monarchs was everywhere being curbed, and did not live long enough to experience regrets for their cost. Although Sitwell and Barton write long and authoritatively on the beauties of the romantic architecture he sponsored, a taint of snobbishness and affectation is discernible in their accounts. Despite Brighton and its patron's love of art, Thackeray was probably more nearly right about George IV than Osbert Sitwell and Margaret Barton.

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