“The feeling of awareness,” Lord Dorrington repeated slowly. “And one knows in the back of one’s mind that one is right.”

“That’s it exactly! Precisely!” the Prince of Wales approved. “It’s really a feeling one cannot describe and yet I experience it every time when a Dutch picture comes up for sale and the others tell me it is worth nothing.”

“Don’t listen to them, Sire.”

“I don’t,” the Prince of Wales answered. “Now I want to show you the pictures I have hung in the Garden Salon. I would like your opinion of them.”

Lord Dorrington followed the Prince of Wales through the magnificent and ornate rooms of Carlton House, noting the exquisite pieces of furniture from France, the girandoles, the clocks, the mirrors, and the bronzes.

There were the Gobelin tapestries, Sèvres china and countless objets d’art.

The Prince of Wales added to his treasures week after week, salerooms and dealers’ shops were scoured for cabinets and chests by Riesener and Weisweiler, marble busts by Coysevox, bronzes by Keller.

‘They are worth the mountain of debts they cost,’ Lord Dorrington said to himself.

Best of all were the pictures mostly fine English and Dutch, notably some delightful Van Dycks and others by Pater, Greuze, Le Main and Claude. All had been carefully hung under the Prince of Wales’s discerning eye.

Parliament was grumbling at the Prince of Wales’s debts and the King was horrified by them. The people sneered and the Gillray cartoons depicted the Heir to the Throne as grossly extravagant.

Only Lord Dorrington had seen and approved the Prince of Wales’s purchases as a good investment.

“I doubt if you will ever get the credit for it, Sire,” he said one day, “but posterity will benefit and certainly your Royal successors.”

“It would be more to the point if I could have a little appreciation and a little money now,” the Prince of Wales had replied sarcastically.

Then with a quick change of mood he told Lord Dorrington of a locket he was having made for Mrs. Fitzherbert containing a miniature of one of his eyes painted by Cosway.

When finally Lord Dorrington left Carlton House, he decided that it was too late for him to go on anywhere else.

He felt no inclination to join the Prince of Wales’s other guests at the White House or any of the other notorious brothels that catered for every type of amusement enjoyed by the dashing Gentlemen of Fashion.

He wanted to see Lord Grenville, the Foreign Secretary, but it was too late to call at his private house, so Lord Dorrington decided that he must visit him the next day at the Foreign Office.

He drove back to Dorrington House in Berkeley Square and, after his valet had assisted him to undress, he sat thinking for some time in a wing-backed armchair in his bedroom before finally he climbed into bed.