8 THE BRIGHTON ROAD 



II 



But hats off to the Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent 

 the King ! Never, while the Brighton Road remains 

 the road to Brighton, shall it be dissociated from George 

 the Fourth, who, as Prince, had a palace at either end, 

 and made these fifty-odd miles in a very special sense 

 a Via Regia. It was in 1782, when but twenty years 

 of age, that he first knew Brighton, and until the last — 

 for close upon forty-eight years — it retained his 

 affections. He is thus the presiding genius of the 

 way ; and because, when we speak or think of the 

 Brighton Road, we cannot help thinking of him, I 

 have appropriately placed the portrait of George the 

 Fourth, by the courtly Lawrence, in this book. 



The Prince and King was the inevitable product 

 of his times and of his upbringing : we mostly are. 

 Only the rarest and most forceful figures can mould 

 the world to their own form. 



The character of George the Fourth has been the 

 theme of writers upon history and sociology, of 

 essayists, diarists, and gossip-mongers without number, 

 and most of then have pictured him in very dark 

 colours indeed. But Horace Walpole, perhaps the 

 clearest-headed of this company, shows in his " Last 

 Journals ' that from his boyhood the Prince was 

 governed in the stupidest way — in a manner, indeed, 

 but too well fitted to spoil a spirit so high and so 

 impetuous, and impulses so generous as then were his. 



He proves what we may abundantly learn from 

 other sources, that the narrow-minded and obstinate 

 George the Third, petty and parochial in public and in 

 private, was jealous of his son's superior parts, and 

 endeavoured to hide his light beneath the bushel of 

 seclusion and inadequate training. It was impossible 

 for such a father to appreciate either the qualities or 

 the defects of such a son. " The uncommunicative 

 selfishness and pride of George the Third confined him 

 to domestic virtues," says Walpole, and adds, " Nothing 

 could equal the King's attention to seclude his son 



