Royal Georges
Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd
Blood Royal Christopher SinclairStevenson (Cape £6.95) When the dead hand of the academic is so Prevalent in modern historical books, this light-hearted social history of the 'IIlus tnous House of Hanover' by an amateur is to be welcomed, especially as the author is himself a publisher. Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson is the Managing Director of Hamish Hamilton, the publishers of Nancy Mitford's The Sun King which Mr Sinclair-Stevenson took as his model for Blood Royal. Whereas The Sun King was one of the original 'coffee-table books' — Perhaps a Spectator competition could Come up with a new term after all these Years — Blood Royal is an agreeably oldfashioned production of high quality, though perhaps the numerous contemporary extracts which the author quotes could have been printed in a smaller tYPeface so as to differentiate them more Clearly from the text.
Mr Sinclair-Stevenson and his publishers are at pains to disarm criticism: the blurb says that Blood Royal 'makes no claims to being comprehensive' and in his Introduction the author emphasises that it is 'not work of scholarship', rather 'a highly impressionistic book'.
He sets out to reassess the paradox Whereby the first four Georges seem fixed in history as absurd and unattractive, while they nevertheless presided over one of the Most remarkable periods in British history. lie defends the Hanoverians from the Charge of philistinism: 'George II patronized Handel at a crucial stage in his Career, George III was a great collector, and George IV was arguably the most intelligent and artistic monarch ever to sit upon the English throne.'
On the whole, the author eschews politics and the heavier side of history, preferring to concentrate on those matters — family relationships, ceremonial occasions, fashion, gambling, dandies, architecture — that intrigue and interest' him. He obviously enjoyed writing the book and has a good eye for the amusing detail. At the Coronation of George III, the Bishop of Salisbury droned on in the Abbey, 'becoming so muddled that he alluded to the extraordinary number of years the King had already sat on the throne'; and, at the banquet, the King's Champion's horse 'proceeded to back into the Hall and to present Its rump to the startled King'.
Mr Sinclair-Stevenson has fun with the 'execrable verse' and 'deplorable rhyming rubbish' written to celebrate various royal events. He writes sympathetically about George II's son 'Poor Fred', while making good use of the vicious Hervey's acid descriptions. Here he is on the birth of Poor Fred's first child: 'Notwithstanding all the handkerchiefs that had been thrust one after another up Her Royal Highness's petticoats in the coach, her clothes were in such a condition with the filthy inundations which attend these circumstances that when the coach stopped at St James's the Prince ordered all the lights to be put out that the people might not have the nasty ocular evidence which would otherwise have been exhibited to them of his folly and distress . . . Her Royal Highness was put to bed between two table-cloths. At a quarter before eleven she was delivered of a little rat of a girl, about the bigness of a good large toothpick case.'
The bluff sailorly Duke of Clarence (later William IV) 'swore like a deckhand, was arrested for brawling, ran up debts, fell in and out of love with alarming rapidity, caught venereal disease in the West Indies'; his lengthy and fruitful liaison with Mrs Jordan, the actress, was described as 'bathing in the river Jordan'. Prince Frederick of Hesse-Homburg, known as 'Humbug', was said to bathe infrequently and smell of garlic and tobacco; at one royal levee he split his trousers. The incident in Windsor Great Park when George III shook hands with the branch of an oak and spoke to the tree under the impression it was the King of Prussia is enhanced by the Royal Page's assurance that 'His Majesty, though under a momentary dereliction of reason, evinced the most cordial attachment to freedom and the Protestant faith.' One of the physicians who attended the wretched king was Richard Warren, a society doctor of whom it was said that when he inspected his own tongue every morning, he automatically transferred a guinea from one pocket to another.
The account of George IV's visit to Scotland is one ofthe most enjoyable chapters in the book. After a ceremony at Edinburgh Castle, 'George was damp but impressed, a combination which may have induced unsteadiness on the staircase at Holyrood when he was saved from a nasty fall by the shoulders of a stout baronet'. In the same chapter, Mr Sinclair-Stevenson refers to the flamboyant monarch as being 'tired and over-emotional' — a hackneyed Fleet Street euphemism for inebriation that Private Eye has now made its own.
The author's style is sometimes not all that it might be. Words like 'commence' and 'confrontation', which appear all too many times, are particularly grating. Some of the 'matters of social relevance' to which the author devotes lengthy passages seem rather irrelevant red herrings. Mr SinclairStevenson expresses the hope that Blood Royal is 'entertaining': he can be granted that, but in the words that were used for Poor Fred's epitaph, 'There's no more to be said'.
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