The Fortune Hunter: A German Prince in Regency England - Hardcover

The two decades after Waterloo marked the great age of foreign fortune hunters in England. Each year brought a new influx of impecunious Continental noblemen to the world s richest country, and the more brides they carried off, the more alarmed society became.

The most colourful of these men was Prince Hermann von Pueckler-Muskau (1785-1871), remembered today as Germany s finest landscape gardener. In the mid-1820s, however, his efforts to turn his estate into a magnificent park came close to bankrupting him. To save his legacy his wife Lucie devised an unusual plan: they would divorce so that Pueckler could marry an heiress who would finance further landscaping and, after a decent interval, be cajoled into accepting Lucie s continued residence. In September 1826, his marriage dissolved, Pueckler set off for London.

Drawing on the daily letters sent from England to his ex-wife and other manuscript sources in the Pueckler Archive in Brandenburg, Peter James Bowman gives blow-by-blow accounts of Pueckler s courtships with the daughters of a physician, an admiral, a Scottish baronet, an East India Company stockholder and a retail jeweller. The story is enriched with details of his social life among the resident diplomats, his gambling and money troubles, his love affairs with a French seamstress and a German opera singer, and the hours he spent with the capital s prostitutes.

Pueckler is the most intelligent of the overseas visitors who noted their impressions of Regency England. A wry observer of the balls, country house life and dining rituals of exclusive society, he is also an indefatigable tourist who seeks out the country s most beautiful sights and portrays the manners and customs of all classes in London and the provinces. His matrimonial quest brings him into contact with such luminaries as Walter Scott, George Canning, Princess Lieven, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, Beau Brummell and John Nash. Influential friends try to smooth his path, while even more powerful enemies conspire against him. The object of many rumours and caricatures, the prince sticks doggedly to his task for nearly two years. And just when it seems that he has failed, England fills his coffers in the most unexpected way, and in doing so launches him on a new career.

In telling the story of Pueckler s adventures in the context of the trend for Anglo-European marriages based on the exchange of a title for money, the Fortune Hunter writes a new chapter in the history of England s relationship with its Continental neighbours.