But hats off to the Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent, the King! Never, while the Brighton Road remains the road to Brighton, shall it be dissociated from George the Fourth, who, as Prince, had a palace at either end, and made these fifty-odd miles in a very special sense a Via Regia. It was in 1782, when but twenty years of age, that he first knew Brighton, and until the last—for close upon forty-eight years—it retained his affections. He is thus the presiding genius of the way; and because, when we speak or think of the Brighton Road, we cannot help thinking of him, I have appropriately placed the portrait of George the Fourth, by the courtly Lawrence, in this book.

The Prince and King was the inevitable product of his times and of his upbringing: we mostly are. Only the rarest and most forceful figures can mould the world to their own form.

The character of George the Fourth has been the theme of writers upon history and sociology, of essayists, diarists, and gossip-mongers without number, and most of them have pictured him in very dark colours indeed. But Horace Walpole, perhaps the clearest-headed of this company, shows in his “Last Journals” that from his boyhood the Prince was governed in the stupidest way—in a manner, indeed, but too well fitted to spoil a spirit so high and so impetuous, and impulses so generous as then were his.

He proves what we may abundantly learn from other sources, that the narrow-minded and obstinate George the Third, petty and parochial in public and in private, was jealous of his son’s superior parts, and endeavoured to hide his light beneath the bushel of seclusion and inadequate training. It was impossible for such a father to appreciate either the qualities or the defects of such a son. “The uncommunicative selfishness and pride of George the Third confined him to domestic virtues,” says Walpole, and adds, “Nothing could equal the King’s attention to seclude his son and protract his nonage. It went so absurdly far that he was made to wear a shirt with a frilled collar like that of babies. He one day took hold of his collar and said to a domestic, ‘See how I am treated!’”

The Duke of Montagu, too, was charged with the education of the Prince, and “he was utterly incapable of giving him any kind of instruction.... The Prince was so good-natured, but so uninformed, that he often said, ‘I wish anybody would tell me what I ought to do; nobody gives me any instruction for my conduct.’” The absolute poverty of the instruction afforded him, the false and narrow ways of the royal household, and the evil example and low companionship of his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, did much to spoil the Prince.

To quote Walpole again: “It made men smile to find that in the palace of piety and pride his Royal Highness had learnt nothing but the dialect of footmen and grooms.... He drunk hard, swore, and passed every night in[3] ...; such were the fruits of his being locked up in the palace of piety.”

He proved, too, an intractable and undutiful son; but that was the result to be expected, and we cannot join Thackeray in his sentimental snivel over George the Third.

He was a faithless husband, but his wife was impossible, and even the mob who supported her quailed when the Marquis of Anglesey, baited in front of his house and compelled to drink her health, did so with the bitter rider, “And may all your wives be like her!”

All high-spirited young England flocked to the side of the Prince of Wales. He was the Grand Master of Corinthianism and Tom-and-Jerryism. It was he who peopled these roads with a numerous and brilliant concourse of whirling travellers, where before had been only infrequent plodders amidst the Sussex sloughs. To his princely presence, radiant by the Old Steyne, hasted all manner of people; prince and prizefighter, statesman and nobleman; beauties noble and ignoble, and all who lived their lives. There he made incautious guests helplessly drunk on the potent old brandy he called “Diabolino,” and then exposed them in embarrassing situations; and there—let us remember it—he entertained, and was the beneficent patron of, the foremost artists and literary men of his age. The Zeitgeist (the Spirit of the Time) resided in, was personified in, and radiated from him. He was the First Gentleman in Europe, but is to us, in the perspective of a hundred years or so, something more: the type and exemplar of an age.

He should have been endowed with perennial youth, but even his splendid vitality faded at last, and he grew stout. Leigh Hunt called him a “fat Adonis of fifty,” and was flung into prison for it; and prison is a fitting place for a satirist who is stupid enough to see a misdemeanour in those misfortunes. No one who could help it would be fat, or fifty. Besides, to accuse one royal personage of being fat is to reflect upon all: it is an accompaniment of royalty.

Thackeray denounced his wig; but there is a prejudice in favour of flowing locks, and the King gracefully acknowledged it. One is not damned for being fat, fifty, and wearing a wig; and it seems a curious code of morality that would have it so; for although we may not all lose our hair nor grow fat, we must all, if we are not to die young, grow old and pass the grand climacteric.

There has been too much abuse of the Regency times. Where modern moralists, folded within their little sheep-walks from observation of the real world, mistake is in comparing those times with these, to the disadvantage of the past. They know nothing of life in the round, and seeing it only in the flat, cannot predicate what exists on the other side. To them there is, indeed, no other side, and things, despite the poet, are what they seem, and nothing else.

They lash the manners of the Regency, and think they are dealing out punishment to a bygone state of things; but human nature is the same in all centuries. The fact is so obvious that one is ashamed to state it. The Regency was a terrible time for gambling; but Tranby Croft had a similar repute when Edward the Seventh was Prince of Wales. Bridge is a fine game, and what, think you, supports the evening newspapers? The news? Certainly: the Betting News. Cock-fighting was a brutal sport, and is now illegal, but is it dead? Oh dear, no. Virtue was not general in the picturesque times of George the Fourth. Is it now? Study the Cause Lists of the Divorce Courts. Worse offences are still punished by law, but are later condoned or explained by Society as an eccentricity. Society a hundred years ago did not plumb such depths.

In short, behind the surface of things, the Regency riot not only exists, but is outdone, and Tom and Jerry, could they return, would find themselves very dull dogs indeed. It is all the doing of the middle classes, that the veil is thrown over these things. In times when the middle class and the Nonconformist Conscience traditionally lived at Clapham, it mattered comparatively little what excesses were committed; but that class has so increased that it has to be subdivided into Upper and Lower, and has Claphams of its own everywhere. It is—or they are—more wealthy than before, and they read things, you know, and are a power in Parliament, and are something in the dominie sort to those other classes above and below.