THE LOVES OF FLORIZEL

A prying, amorous and social biography of George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, has no room for political, international or stately concerns in its concentration on the roots of Prinny's bondage to a personality twisted by rebellion. Despised by his father, ignored by his mother, he early found romance in older women, sank himself in gluttony and drunkness, to the end that as George IV he was a wasted, incompetent leviathan. His butterfly days were taken up with Mary Hamilton, Mary Robinson, the actress known as Perdita; his marriage to Mrs. Fitzherbert was never recognized; Lady Jersey's influence was baleful and was the origin of the unhappiness in his legal marriage to Caroline. His grandmother complex led him to Lady Hertford, then Lady Conyngham who robbed, demeaned and humiliated him to the end of his days. This is the story too of Brighton, Brummell, Caroline's madness and is held to the spirit of the scandalous age by liberal quotations from contemporary letters and diaries. A private life in all its undress, this is a sad portrait of a wasted life.