Smelling assaults
From Pamela Hill
Sir: ‘The corpulent lecher George IV’ could not have asked anybody to become his mistress (Books, 27 August). Even by 1814, when Dorothea Lieven sat on one side of the Prince Regent at a banquet he gave for the Tsar’s visiting sister, he was past it, and not yet George IV. Moreover, whatever Metternich and the rest preferred, he would have been unlikely to want to further what did indeed remain a pleasant friendship. He is known to have been fastidious — one of the reasons why his disastrous Protestant marriage had failed — and Dorothea Lieven suffered from profound body odour at least by the time she got to bed. The 6th Duke of Devonshire records in his memoirs that his servants made haste to open the windows of her room first thing at Chatsworth, in order to dispel ‘the noxious odours arising from her person’.
Pamela Hill
Radlett, Hertfordshire
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