Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill

I polished off Jean Plaidy's Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill today. It's a vast improvement over Diane Haeger's The Secret Wife of King George IV, and also an improvement over Plaidy's The Third George. Like the Haeger book, this tells the story of Maria Fitzherbert's marriage to Prince George--or part of the story, anyway, as the novel ends immediately before George's marriage to Caroline. Though the viewpoint shifts between various characters, the focus is mainly on George and his misadventures, at least until the last third or so of the book, when it shifts to the dysfunctional royal family as a whole. (So dysfunctional and featherbrained is this bunch, in fact, that I found myself longing for the Plantagenets, who seem like a breath of sanity by comparison.) Plaidy's prose is a little less stiff than usual, perhaps because with George III talking to trees, a Madam von Schwellenburg talking to her pet toads ("'Herr Prince vos up to no goot'"), and everyone taking snuff, it's hard not to have a little authorial fun. My only real complaint, in fact, was with the abrupt ending. I'll have to wait until the next book in the series, Indiscretions of the Queen, to see whether George ever comes back to Maria and whether Queen Charlotte ever throws her snuffbox at Prince George.

George IV, when he is Prince of Wales, falls in love with Maria FitzHerbert. Unlike the other women he's fallen in love with, this one refuses to become his mistress. Why doesn't he marry her? There is a slight problem. It is illegal for an heir to the throne of England to marry a Catholic. If he does marry her, he will give up his right. He secretly marries her, and after a few years of happiness, he realized his mistake. But when he realizes it wasn't a mistake, he had already left her. What follows is a lifetime of even more heartbreak for the poor Prince.If you've read The Secret Wife of King George IV, you may be cautious about reading this one. Don't worry! It is much more respectable and accurate, as are all of Jean Plaidy's works. It is wonderfully and beautifully written, with a haunting historical lesson.

Jean Plaidy (Victoria Holt) does a service to readers that writers of historical biographies seem unable to do. She tells a good story and makes the people seem real. Biographies of royalty tend to be stilted, heavily burdened with the intricacies of politics and remote from the person and character of the royal. They are not fun to read. Plaidy's novels are fairly close to historical fact without being tediously so.The Sweet Lass of Richmond not only is fun to read, it brings to mind an interesting parallel between George IV and his great-great-great nephew, The Duke of Windsor. Both men were the brilliant centers of fashionable society, on bad terms with their fathers, and both fell heedlessly in love with unacceptable, older women. Where Wallis Simpson was a twice-divorced woman, Maria Fitzherbert was a twice-widowed woman. Where Wallis did not mind welcoming her prince into her bedchamber outside of marriage, devotely Catholic Maria Fitzherbert would have nothing less than marriage before she'd consent to give in to her prince. This drove George IV into a secret marriage, a device that allowed him to keep his place in the succession while enjoying the marital favors of the woman he loved. Had this marriage been open, he not only would have been at odds with his father for marrying without the King's consent, he would be barred from the succession for marrying a Catholic. George IV wanted Maria, his crown and his debts paid. George ended up choosing money and the Crown over Maria, his good wife--a choice he regretted for the rest of his life.