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
Puckler-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 Puckler 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, Puckler set off for London. Drawing
on the daily letters sent from England to his ex-wife and other
manuscript sources in the Puckler Archive in Brandenburg, Peter
James Bowman gives blow-by-blow accounts of Puckler'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. Puckler is the most intelligent of
the overseas visitors who noted their impressions of Regency
England. 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. 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 Puckler'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.
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