I have added a new post, Robbery With Respect. It is taken from the Memoirs of Charles Greville, first published in 1874, ten years after his death. Despite the mixture of outrage and anxiety with which it was met by public figures from Queen Victoria to Benjamin Disraeli, serious historians value the diary highly because Greville did not seek to spread scurrilous gossip, but to explore the undercurrents of contemporary events and thus shed light on the age in which he lived.
This extract is an anecdote that King William IV told to Lord Duncannon, a friend of Greville, about the King’s great-grandfather, George II. It is really an extraordinary story, a tale of two men for whom their word was their bond — though one of them was a King, and the other a common criminal.