The Treasury clerk
became so useful to Lord North that he obtained several lucrative
offices; and, dying in 1794, left L65,000 in the hands of trustees for
division among his three children. The youngest of these was George
Bryan Brummell (1788-1840), the celebrated Beau.
George Brummell went from Eton to Oriel College, Oxford, where his
undergraduate career is traced in "Trebeck," a character in Lister's
'Granby' (1826). From Oxford Brummell entered the Tenth Hussars, a
favourite regiment of the Prince of Wales. Well-built and well-mannered,
possessed of admirable tact, witty and original in conversation,
inexhaustible in good temper and good stories, a master of impudence and
banter, the new cornet made himself so agreeable to the prince that, at
the latter's marriage, Brummell attended him, both at St. James's and to
Windsor, as "a kind of 'chevalier d'honneur." In 1798 Brummell left the
army with the rank of captain. A year later he came of age, and settled
at 4, Chesterfield Street, Mayfair.
On his intimacy with the Prince Regent, Brummell founded the
extraordinary position which he achieved in society. Fashion was in
those days a power; and he was its dictator--the oracle, both for men
and women, of taste, manners, and dress. His ascendency rested in some
degree on solid foundations. He was not a mere fop, but conspicuous for
the quiet neatness of his dress--for "a certain exquisite propriety," as
Byron described it to Leigh Hunt--and, at a time when the opposite was
common, for the scrupulous cleanliness of his person and his linen.
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