the Prince's
society for a long time, which might very well have been longer. The
scandal slowly ebbed; a compromise was arrived at between the King and
his son; the King made an appeal to Parliament; and a sum of money was
voted to deal with the Prince's debts in consideration of his promises of
reform in the future.

[Sidenote: 1788--Talk of a Regency]

The Prince of Wales did not forget Pitt's attitude towards him, and the
time soon arrived in which the minister came near to feeling the force of
the Prince's anger. The health of the King was suddenly and seriously
affected. Soon after his reign began he had been afflicted by a
temporary loss of reason. The same misfortune now fell upon him in the
autumn of 1788. It became necessary to make arrangements for the
appointment of a regent, and the necessity was the cause of a fierce
Parliamentary controversy. Fox rashly insisted that the Prince of Wales
had as much right to assume the reins of government as he would have had
in the case of the death of the monarch. Pitt maintained the more
constitutional opinion that it was the privilege of Parliament to appoint
a regent and to decide what powers should be intrusted to him. However
little the knowledge may have influenced his action, Pitt knew very well
that with the appointment of the Prince of Wales as regent his own hold
of power would, for a time, come to an end. The whole question, however,
was suddenly set on one side by the unexpected recovery of the King. The
King's restoration to reason was well for the minister, and undoubtedly
well for the {244} kingdom. If Burke and Sheridan and Fox were avowedly
the Prince's friends in Parliament, his most intimate friends, those who
would be likely to prove influential in his mimic Court, were men of a
very different kind. These were such men as George Hanger, the half-mad
soldier, the "Paragon of Debauchery," as the caricaturists labelled the
Prince's "confidential friend," who having been almost everything from
captain of Hessians to coal merchant, and from recruiter for the East
India Company to inmate of a debtor's prison, ended his long and unlovely
career by declining to assume the title of Lord Coleraine, to which he
became entitled in 1814, ten years before his death. These were such men
as Charles Morris, the amiable Anacreon of Carlton House, who made better
punch and rhymed better ballads than his fellows of that convivial age,
and who had the grace