rs. The daughter of an Irish nobleman played to
perfection her new and exalted _role_ of Princess. "No woman of her
time," says Lord Hervey, "performed the honours of her drawing-room with
such grace, affability, and dignity." And, in spite of George's frowns,
the only real thorn in her bed of roses was the knowledge that the
Duchess of Gloucester, who, as the daughter of a Piccadilly sempstress,
was infinitely her inferior by birth, and not even her superior in
beauty, was received with open arms at the Castle, and drew to her court
all the greatest in the land.

She even made overtures to her rival and enemy, and proposed that they
should appear together in the same box at the opera--an overture to
which the Duchess of Gloucester retorted contemptuously: "Never! I would
not smell at the same nosegay with her in public!"

By sheer effrontery Duchess Anne at last forced her way into the Royal
Court and public recognition as a member of George's family; and the
fact that both the King and the Queen snubbed her mercilessly for her
pains, detracted little from her triumph and gratification. What her
Grace of Gloucester had won by submission and ingratiating arts, she had
won by brazen defiance and importunity. But the goal, though so
differently reached, was the same. Her triumph was complete.

To her last day, however, she never forgave the King and Queen. While
they had smiled on the sempstress's daughter, who had been guilty of
precisely the same offence as herself--that of wedding a Royal Prince
without the King's sanction--they had scorned her, a Luttrell, the
daughter of a noble house; and terrible was the revenge she took. She
deliberately set herself to debase the Prince of Wales--a youth whose
natural tendencies made him a pliant tool in her hands. She enmeshed him
in the web of her beauty and charms; she pandered to his vanity and his
passions; while her husband initiated him into the vices of which he
himself was a past-master--drinking, gambling, and lust. Notorious
profligate as George IV. became, there is little doubt that he would
have been a much better man if he had not fallen thus early into the
hands of a revengeful and unprincipled woman. Thus infamously the
Duchess of Cumberland repaid George and his Consort for their slights;
and her shameless reward was when she witnessed their grief at the moral
degradation of their eldest son.

But even in the hour of her greatest triumph and splendour Anne Lutt