Secret History of the Court of England, from the Accession of George the Third to the Death of George the Fourth, Volume 1 (of 2) Including, Among Other Important Matters — Text and Context

A Voice of Moral Indignation

The excerpts reveal a narrator who does not feign neutrality. Hamilton employs the language of a prosecutor, calling the Prince Regent’s actions “wicked” and accusing him of having “relinquished Justice, and abandoned Mercy.” She describes the royal brothers’ bonds to the Parisian firm Perigoux and Co. as a scheme where they “undertook to pay more than their means would ever permit,” and she hints at “LIVES SACRIFICED” to preserve their reputations. This moral fervor is not confined to royalty; she condemns the grant of £100,000 to Lord Wellington as payment for “legal slaughter” and contrasts it with the neglect of “perishing millions.” The reader should expect a partisan account, one that wears its outrage openly and uses court insider knowledge to indict the powerful.

Structure and the Missing Pages

The surviving text begins after page 24, which were never printed due to libel concerns. This lacuna shapes the reading experience: the narrative starts mid-stream, without the original preface or early accusations. The transcriber notes that the original used two types of blockquotes, one with smaller font and another with extra white space, suggesting a careful visual hierarchy for quoted material. Hamilton’s prose mixes parliamentary detail—such as Vansittart’s budget of over sixty-two million pounds—with dramatic apostrophes, like her address to “thy perfume” that “spreads desolation to society.” This blend of dry financial record and fiery rhetoric creates an uneven rhythm, where cold numbers suddenly give way to emotional outbursts. Readers should watch for these shifts as clues to Hamilton’s rhetorical strategy.

Recurring Targets: Debt and Deception

Two themes dominate the excerpts: royal indebtedness and the systematic deception of the public. Hamilton repeatedly returns to the bonds given by Princes George, Frederick, and William to Perigoux and Co., calling them “several hundred thousand pounds” that the princes could never repay. She reports that the Princess of Wales, in conversation with Whitbread and Perceval, claimed the princes “deserve severe exposure” and that their “action was not only wicked, but their intention also.” The second theme is the suppression of truth: the Prince Regent commands Lord Liverpool never to hint at “matters so very disagreeable to the royal ear,” and Hamilton warns that any patriot who proposed relief for the poor would be “consigned to a damp and dreary dungeon.” These patterns suggest that the full volume likely builds a case that court secrecy enabled financial and moral corruption.

The Princess of Wales as a Source

One of the most striking features of the excerpts is Hamilton’s reliance on the Princess of Wales (Caroline of Brunswick) as a direct source. The princess is quoted in “open and friendly conversation” with political figures, revealing details of the royal bonds and hinting at lives lost to protect the princes’ reputations. This positions Caroline as a whistleblower within the text, lending credibility to Hamilton’s claims. However, the excerpts do not reveal how Hamilton obtained these conversations or whether Caroline authorized their publication. Given the libel accusation that forced the book’s revision, readers should treat these reported speeches as potentially contested evidence. The princess’s own fraught history with George IV adds a layer of personal vendetta to the narrative, which Hamilton does not explicitly acknowledge but which colors every accusation.

Because the first 24 pages are missing, readers begin this volume in medias res, without the author’s original framing. It is advisable to read the preface and any surviving front matter from the second volume (also available from Project Gutenberg) to recover Hamilton’s stated intentions. Pay close attention to the footnotes and the transcriber’s notes, which document textual anomalies that may signal places where the libel accusation forced changes. This is not a dispassionate history but a polemic by a well-connected insider; its value lies less in factual accuracy than in the vivid picture it paints of court faction and the risks of speaking truth to power.