Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson. Paula Byrne

her, however in a day or two I will inform you what opinion she has conceived of my person and how she is content with it, for I have an excellent person to employ who is well acquainted with her, who will inform me of these particulars and you may depend on my informing you immediately.¹³

      He had obviously been asking around on the subject of Mrs Robinson: ‘galant’ is code for her dubious reputation, but this has not put him off. He had established that she ‘lives totally separated from her husband’, which had the advantage that an affair would not disrupt ‘family peace’. He is, of course, aware that it would disturb the peace of the royal family, but he professed himself ‘blinded by passion’.

      In response, Miss Hamilton warned him that it was already rumoured that he thought Mrs Robinson ‘a Divinity’ and that he should be wary of trusting anyone who would take on so infamous a role as that of a pander. Though the Prince did not reveal his go-between’s identity to Miss Hamilton, it was Lord Malden who paid Mrs Robinson a morning visit on his behalf.

      On arriving in her drawing room, Malden seemed embarrassed and uncomfortable, even agitated. By Mary’s account, he ‘attempted to speak – paused, hesitated, apologized’. He was, he said, in a peculiarly delicate situation; he had something to deliver that he hoped she would not mention to anyone else. Finally, he produced a letter addressed to Perdita. She smiled a little sarcastically and opened it, finding it was a love letter. It contained only a few words, but ‘those expressive of more than common civility’. The signature was FLORIZEL. Mary continues the story in her favoured form of dramatic dialogue:

      ‘Well, my Lord, and what does this mean?’ said I, half angry.

      ‘Can you not guess the writer?’ said Lord Malden.

      ‘Perhaps yourself, my Lord,’ cried I, gravely.

      ‘Upon my honour, no,’ said the Viscount. ‘I should not have dared so to address you on so short an acquaintance.’

      I pressed him to tell me from whom the letter came. – He again hesitated; he seemed confused, and sorry that he had undertaken to deliver it. ‘I hope that I shall not forfeit your good opinion,’ said he, ‘but—’

      ‘But what, my Lord?’

      ‘I could not refuse, – for the letter is from the Prince of Wales.’¹⁴

      Astonished, agitated, and sceptical, Mary ‘returned a formal and a doubtful answer’. Lord Malden then took his leave.

      She read over the ‘short but expressive letter’ a thousand times. Malden returned the next evening to Mary’s house, where she was entertaining a card party of six or seven. He praised in extravagant terms the mind, manners, and temper of the Prince, while Mary’s ‘heart beat with conscious pride’ as she thought of ‘the partial but delicately respectful letter’ she had received the day before.

      The Prince, meanwhile, was still keeping Miss Hamilton informed of developments. He told her that he was going to the theatre again, but this time to Covent Garden rather than Drury Lane – ‘Oh Mrs Robinson, Mrs Robinson, Mrs Robinson,’ he wailed.¹⁵ During the performance at Covent Garden, George appeared tired. A wag remarked that he would not have seemed so had he been at Drury Lane.

      In his next letter he shared the news, which would hardly have been a surprise to Miss Hamilton, that there was every sign that his passion was reciprocated:

      Know then my friend, that I am more than ever in love, and that the dear object of my passion, corresponds with my flame, and that our love is mutual, she was attacked the other [night] in the house for addressing every tender speech she ought to have addressed to Prince Florizel to me, you may see of what texture they are by reading them in Shakespeare.¹⁶

      Mary has, it seems, had to endure the embarrassment of heckling audience members accusing her of addressing her lines to the real Prince in the side box instead of the player prince, William Brereton, in the role of Florizel. (It is also worth remembering that Miss Hamilton would not have found all the lines in question in her Shakespeare, since some of Perdita’s ‘tender speeches’ had actually been written by Garrick.)

      The Prince’s infatuation was the talk of the town. One night a friend of his sat next to Sir John Lade at Covent Garden. The Prince knew that Lade had ‘had an intimate connection avec mon aimable et chère séductrice’. Lade said that he had heard a great deal of the Prince’s attachment to Mrs Robinson and that he could give an assurance that she was as much pleased with him as he could be with her. The friend asked whether, in view of his own intimacy with Mrs Robinson, Lade felt ‘not undermined by this gallant young rival’. To which he replied, ‘By God I should be very glad of it for both their sakes as they seem so perfectly attached to each other.’ Having reported this to Miss Hamilton, the Prince signs off by regaling his long-suffering correspondent with a description of his ecstatic ‘metamorphosis’ from despondent victim of unrequited love to ‘gay galent Lothario’. ‘Love, passion, and the most ardent flame,’ he writes, are ‘boiling altogether in my bosom’.

      ‘For the love of Heaven, Stop, O stop my friend! and do not thus headlong plunge yourself into vice,’ Miss Hamilton responded. ‘Your last note and the preceding one made every nerve of me thrill with apprehension … You listen not to the voice of reason … I conjure you, strive to conquer this unhappy infatuation.’¹⁷ The letter continues for several pages in this vein, imploring the Prince not to become one of the ‘votaries of vice’. A fragmentary draft chides him for comparing himself to the archetypal rake – ‘Ah! boast not the title of a Lothario lest you should end with his fate’ – and also reveals that she has been doing her own research on Mrs Robinson:

      My friend, you have been deceived, Mrs Robinson lives with her Husband and they have never been separated, – the young Baronet [i.e. Lade] if, he did boast, – boasted falsely. Her husband is young, Idle, and extravagant; and they have experienced distress, but her present occupation, as an actress, enables them to live perfectly to their taste, and at their ease – They have a little Girl about 4 or 5 years old – I know their whole History, which I got at by mere chance, and from what I think, the most undoubted authority – You have been abused by some designing person – take care that you are not drawn into some snare.