Prinny Remembers

Thackeray cruelly wrote of George IV as no more than a tailor’s dummy. Later verdicts have been founded on this. A more recent one states that he was ‘an undutiful son, a bad husband, and a callous father,’ without finding very much to say against his kingship.

None of the above is accurate, given the knowledge of lately revealed letters from George Augustus himself and those of his daughter, Princess Charlotte. George, better remembered as Prince Regent and often called Prinny, was in many ways a secretive man despite his outward flamboyance. Hints here and there in the Princess’s letters show him as an affectionate father in private. In public, his attitude to her had to be ambivalent because her mother, long estranged from him by her own choice, made common cause with his political enemies, and what has generally been put down to caprice can be seen, knowing the facts, as statesmanship.

This charming, gifted and intelligent man contrived, despite an appalling hereditary illness concealed with great courage, to give his name to a brilliant Regency and thereafter to reign as King for a further ten years.

  Prinny Remembers is an attempt to reconstruct the probable thoughts and memories of this secret man, dying almost alone at Windsor, old, ill and blind, in 1830, and put right the biased press usually given to him.