p      7
                                  (.1   tp, 1fr,              p

        The Prince of Pleasure; i     T-;       (.
        but it was misusing language to call her, as most people did, his 
        'mistress'. They probably never went beyond a little elderly 
        dalliance. As one rude popular versifier put it:

                    'Tis pleasant at seasons to see how they sit,
                    First cracking their nuts, and then cracking their wit: 
                    Then quaffing their claret - then mingling their lips, 
                    Or tickling the fat about each other's hips.

        Society women thought her rather vulgar and not very intelligent, 
        unlike the King, who in a kind of boyish infatuation, considered 
        her 'wittier than any male or female of his acquaintance.' She was 
        apparently religious had no political ideas or oninloas (a good 
        thing), but, creating a fashion followed by the blondes of our era, 
        had 'a strong leaning to diamonds and money'. It was said later 
        that during George IV's last illness, she carted away sufficient 
        jewellery, plate, etc., to fill two wagons. She was careful to preserve 
        appearances and never stayed under the same roof as the King 
        without being accompanied by her husband, who, incidentally, 
        did very well out of his wife's influence, being advanced to several 
        well-paid offices and posts.
          That she had not always been so             is proved by a
        passage in the autobiography of de Quince y. When, years before 
        this, he and a fellow schoolboy were going over to Ireland they had 
        found, sitting in her travelling coach on deck, a beautiful lady of 
        rank and fashion, who was amused by their admiring glances and 
        invited them into her coach for some talk. That night, trying to 
        sleep on deck, not far away, they discovered that a certain colonel, 
        who had been hiding below during the day, crept into her coach •
        late at night - an arrangement 'not entirely a secret even amongst

        the lady's.. servants'. And this, of course, was Lady Conyng ham.The secret of her long hold over the King was probably - as we
        find in the Grantley-Berkeley Reminiscences - that 'invariably the 
        lady kept hi_m in good humour with the world', making it clear 
        that 'in her conviction he was a compound of Sardanapalus and 
        Louis XIV, Alexander the Great and Augustus Caesar, Alcibiades 
        and the Admirable Crichton'. Stronger-minded men than George 
        IV have found it hard to resist such flattery; and Lady Con_y_ngham 
        was not only a very handsome woman but also _possessed, we are 
        told, 'a sweetly musical voice, low and tender'.
          Even that voice, daily delivering butter and honey, could not 
        have induced the King, as 1820 went shuffling out, to forget all his 
        troubles. The Bill had failed; that dreadful woman Caroline, as 
        popular as he was unpopular, was still around; and no matter how 
        great a nuisance the Queen and her cheering mobs might be, 1821 
        would have to be the year - the truly magnificent year too - of his 
        Coronation.

        280




                       pkic-,s-TLEY