Speaker 1: Also media, we are back and we're thinking about George
Speaker 1: the fourth one of the I mean most of the
Speaker 1: Kings of England sucked. Yeah, he definitely did as well
Speaker 1: of all the Kings of England bottom ten percent. Are
Speaker 1: we gonna say.
Speaker 2: He's not even that iconic because at least Henry the
Speaker 2: a horrible person.
Speaker 1: But you know, oh yeah, Henry the eighth King, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was your eighth old man. He was a Henry,
Speaker 1: Henry the eighth he is he is, as I remember
Speaker 1: from the song. Yeah, I'm trying to think of who
Speaker 1: was a good King of England.
Speaker 2: I guess I guess technically, I think technically I mean kings. No,
Speaker 2: because even Richard the Lionheart was was, you know, doing
Speaker 2: crusades and those Yeah, he was.
Speaker 1: He was literally doing a crusade.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was like, that's not great, dog.
Speaker 1: It might be your best I don't know, Queen Victorious,
Speaker 1: Charles Tato Famine might be Charles. If Charles drops dead
Speaker 1: having not done anything too terrible as king, I guess
Speaker 1: he might. He might wind up being our.
Speaker 2: Best five stars.
Speaker 1: A real model of behavior for fail sons around the world,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and also proof you can always turn your your
Speaker 2: girlfriend into your wife at any point. Yeah, never give up,
Speaker 2: never surrender.
Speaker 1: You just gotta believe in yourself. You gotta believe in
Speaker 1: yourself and the fact that you're rich and famous.
Speaker 3: And who knows who he would be if he had
Speaker 3: gone to he didn't go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he didn't go. No, they would have taught him.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't want to make fun too
Speaker 1: much of his sausage fingers because I think it's a
Speaker 1: serious medical issue. But he also refuses to take modern
Speaker 1: medicine because he believes in wizards, So I guess it
Speaker 1: is his fault. He probably had there's a single pill
Speaker 1: that would fix all of his circulation problems, but he
Speaker 1: just like takes strict now made from some sort of
Speaker 1: fucking plant sap every day. God. I love it when
Speaker 1: people have all of the money in the world to
Speaker 1: be healthy aren't purely because they don't believe in medicine.
Speaker 1: It's always a lot of fun, the Steve Jobs effect
Speaker 1: we call it. Yeah, Yeah, all of your problems are
Speaker 1: entirely self generated. Anyway, what a choice, princess. Are you
Speaker 1: ready to get back to the story of Beau Brummel,
Speaker 1: who we have just gotten up to age sixteen, right,
Speaker 1: he is, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm ready, and Bo is not afraid.
Speaker 1: Unlike bosbe not afraid, he at least is good at
Speaker 1: putting on such an image of confidence and fearlessness that
Speaker 1: dozens of people wrote about it, and their writing has
Speaker 1: come down to us three hundred years later about how
Speaker 1: this guy is like a Fonsie level of cool. Three
Speaker 1: hundred years later, we have a whole library worth of
Speaker 1: just people talking about, like, man, that guy was cool,
Speaker 1: that guy was rad as shit.
Speaker 2: You know that guy fucks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he definitely fucks Henry Winkler level of fox. And
Speaker 1: you guys think about Henry Winkler as we throw to ads,
Speaker 1: we're back. He's had a great he's had a great career,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah.
Speaker 2: Great hair.
Speaker 1: Still, yeah, take that. It's because it's easy to be,
Speaker 1: you know, as a young man, he's quite handsome. It's
Speaker 1: easy to seem cool briefly when you're like young and
Speaker 1: really handsome. But he grew up into a man who
Speaker 1: looks like and I mean this is no insult to him,
Speaker 1: looks like your dad's accountant and is still really cool.
Speaker 1: Like still, you kind of want to be Henry Winkler,
Speaker 1: and that means he's always just had that kind of
Speaker 1: deep vein of cool running through it. I appreciate that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: somebody's going to point out that he killed someone in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies and then then I'll have to feel.
Speaker 2: Bad, But I don't think so. He was too busy
Speaker 2: getting killed off as principles and horror movies to really.
Speaker 1: Do any d He did do a lot of that,
Speaker 1: didn't he. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just a little bit like
Speaker 1: because there's that. I kept thinking that the man who
Speaker 1: the fellow who died recently, the leading man who passed recently. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we were just talking about it before we recorded. I
Speaker 1: had mistakenly thought he was involved in the Natalie Wood thing,
Speaker 1: and I just realized when he died, like, oh, I
Speaker 1: was just like tarring this man with a horrible brush
Speaker 1: for no reason, just because I'm bad at the keeping
Speaker 1: track of celebrities.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it made me feel men did something wrong.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it made me feel I've had a couple of
Speaker 1: weird arguments, Like I had one about Billy Joel with
Speaker 1: some lady in my mentions who was like, Okay, you
Speaker 1: like him, but he's an abuser. He's like it was
Speaker 1: an abusive husband, and I was like, I don't know
Speaker 1: where you're getting that from. No one's ever accused him
Speaker 1: of that, Like his exes seemed to speak really well
Speaker 1: of him, and he spent the last thirty years primarily
Speaker 1: raising money for like a Battered woman shelter. I actually
Speaker 1: think he's kind of fine on this. But I think
Speaker 1: it's you just half hear something and you mistakenly like
Speaker 1: blame some random famous person for something they did not do.
Speaker 1: I'm sure we've all done it at some point. It's
Speaker 1: just too many names out there to keep track of, Like, yeah.
Speaker 2: Rumors circulate about dead people, and you're just kind of like,
Speaker 2: well they like I remember, like not to defend her,
Speaker 2: but I remember people saying like, oh yeah, married tutor
Speaker 2: burn like over three hundred people, and the numbers like
Speaker 2: two seventy five. It's like, that's still not great.
Speaker 1: That's not right.
Speaker 2: I was writing more.
Speaker 1: That is like, if you think about it in murder terms,
Speaker 1: thinking someone killed twenty five more people than they did
Speaker 1: is a lot, although not a lot if they did
Speaker 1: kill two hundred and seventy five people. So I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know where you want to go on this.
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, we'll call that the Matthew Broderick conundrum. Anyway,
Speaker 1: look at Matthew Broderick dark dark I know, I know,
Speaker 1: it's dark history. Look this is this is the show
Speaker 1: that we're on.
Speaker 3: My brother used to confuse Dennis Quaid and Harrison Ford,
Speaker 3: and I feel like that is.
Speaker 1: Not because Harrison Ford never killed anybody, not that I'm
Speaker 1: aware of, except for with kindness. Anyway, we're talking about
Speaker 1: Bo so Bo's parents. You know, he is basically on
Speaker 1: his own in the world by age sixteen or so,
Speaker 1: which is not uncommon in the period in a lot
Speaker 1: of most of like the Western world, at fourteen, you're
Speaker 1: generally starting to be seen as a full adult. You're
Speaker 1: still most people see this kind of view you as
Speaker 1: very young, but you're often like working full time, right, Like,
Speaker 1: you're supporting yourself or helping to support your family by
Speaker 1: that age if you're a man, and it's not super common,
Speaker 1: especially among commoners. It's rare for girls to like, it's
Speaker 1: not the norm for girls to be like married and
Speaker 1: having kids at that time, but it's not unheard of,
Speaker 1: especially among the aristocracy.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So, the fact that Bo's childhood ends a little early
Speaker 1: has a lot to do with the fact that his
Speaker 1: parents both die when he's very young. His mom passes
Speaker 1: in seventeen ninety three, when he is fifteen years old.
Speaker 1: He doesn't write a lot about her. The evidence we
Speaker 1: have seems that maybe by the time he was kind
Speaker 1: of in his late teens, they were a little bit cold,
Speaker 1: and his dad is cold on him. He is the
Speaker 1: least favorite son of his family. His mom has said,
Speaker 1: both seem to view him as kind of a fuck
Speaker 1: around because he's this like party boy. He's loved by
Speaker 1: his classmates. He has no ambition. That is kind of
Speaker 1: a thing about bo for someone who's as famous as
Speaker 1: he was. He never wants to do anything. He doesn't
Speaker 1: want to be in government. He doesn't want a job.
Speaker 1: He just likes having fun, and his parents seem to
Speaker 1: recognize that and are sort of disgusted with him because
Speaker 1: his dad is not entirely a self made man, but
Speaker 1: makes a lot of money. His biographer suggests that his
Speaker 1: mom's death and his failure with Julia pushes him at
Speaker 1: this point away from the women who had been his
Speaker 1: primary influences and early friends into the world of rich,
Speaker 1: young assholes like the Prince of Wales in seventeen ninety four.
Speaker 1: The next year, his father dies just as George is
Speaker 1: finishing his time at Eton. I've heard wildly divergent estimates
Speaker 1: of what his family estate is worth, right the low end,
Speaker 1: and this is what is Ian Kelly says, probably around
Speaker 1: five million pounds in modern money. But also you can
Speaker 1: never get very close to accurate descriptions of what the
Speaker 1: money is worth because most people don't use money in
Speaker 1: their day to day life. An average like peasant or whatever,
Speaker 1: an average like person you know in the countryside is
Speaker 1: particularly in the countryside, if you're farming, money is not
Speaker 1: a day to day thing for you. Most of what
Speaker 1: you do, you accomplish you either grow it, you pull
Speaker 1: out of the ground, or your barter with your neighbors.
Speaker 1: Every now and then you'll get money you can pay
Speaker 1: your taxes with, like directly with the crops that you grow.
Speaker 1: People in the city use money, but even then a
Speaker 1: lot of it's on credit in script like and so
Speaker 1: when you're talking about these wealthy people who do have fortunes,
Speaker 1: even something like if you're saying something is like the
Speaker 1: equivalent of a million pounds, just based on how we
Speaker 1: calculate stuff it's usually really much more than that, because
Speaker 1: most people don't have money most of the time. Right.
Speaker 1: I've seen some astibats that the family fortune was more
Speaker 1: like fifty million dollars. Either way, his dad leaves them
Speaker 1: a lot of money, and the custom of the time,
Speaker 1: most people would have given it all to the oldest brother, William.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: A lot of this is a period of time which
Speaker 1: a lot of colonization is happening. A lot of colonization
Speaker 1: is driven by second and third sons, you know, who
Speaker 1: don't get any of the family money, losers, right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're born to be fucked with. You know, your big
Speaker 1: brother is the one who's gonna get all the money.
Speaker 1: That doesn't happen with the Brummels. Billy that their dad
Speaker 1: is kind of a forward thinking guy and he splits
Speaker 1: the estate up and to his credit, this shows you
Speaker 1: a little bit of a progressive streak in the Brummels.
Speaker 1: He has two sons and a daughter and each of
Speaker 1: them gets the same share of the family money, which
Speaker 1: is rare yeah and nice yeah, depending on how you
Speaker 1: want to calculate it. George's share of this is probably
Speaker 1: between like one and a half million to three million,
Speaker 1: pounds in modern money, it's a lot. It is enough
Speaker 1: that if he had wanted to live a modest life,
Speaker 1: he could have been comfortable and never worked. It's also
Speaker 1: enough that not enough to be comfortable and live like
Speaker 1: a rich person. Right today, if you inherit three million
Speaker 1: dollars at sixteen, if you invest that, right, you can
Speaker 1: live comfortably forever if your tastes aren't too fancy. But
Speaker 1: if you want to live in a New York high rise, right,
Speaker 1: And we're all like, you're going to run through three
Speaker 1: million dollars pretty quick.
Speaker 2: Real quick. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a lot of money. It's not enough to
Speaker 1: be rich forever. Right. That's the amount that he inherits,
Speaker 1: So he also he's not going to immediately get access
Speaker 1: to it. It comes to him in a trust and
Speaker 1: he's going to have to beg his new guardian for
Speaker 1: any money initially that he wants to pay. And this
Speaker 1: guardian it's like he's godfather something gets some friend of
Speaker 1: the family. The guardian sends the boys to Oxford initially
Speaker 1: because he's like, well, you're done at Eton, you should
Speaker 1: all go to the best school.
Speaker 3: Of the day.
Speaker 1: And today I actually have to speak at Oxford a
Speaker 1: year or so ago. Very nice town, very pretty school.
Speaker 2: Very academically for a while.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like one of the most respected
Speaker 1: schools you can go to. It's not really a school
Speaker 1: back then in the way we think of things. There
Speaker 1: are classes, you learn some things. Most of what you learn,
Speaker 1: if you are in this social class is how to
Speaker 1: drink like a son of a bitch.
Speaker 2: Right you are again, so double drinking?
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, you learned how to drink as a boy,
Speaker 1: and now it's time to learn how to drink like
Speaker 1: a man. You know, Like that's why you go to Oxford.
Speaker 1: That's most of what you learn. And I am not
Speaker 1: making this up. So one of the most prominent Oxford
Speaker 1: graduates who went there, he goes there a bit before
Speaker 1: George's day. But I think his statement about Oxford in
Speaker 1: this period of time and Oxford is it's not a college.
Speaker 1: It's a series of colleges in one town that all
Speaker 1: kind of get wrapped up. But there's like a number
Speaker 1: of different universities. One of like a guy who goes
Speaker 1: to Oxford in the period of like basically a generation
Speaker 1: before George is Edward Gibbon, who you might not know
Speaker 1: him by name. But he is the guy who writes
Speaker 1: the history of the decline in fall of the Roman Empire. Right,
Speaker 1: he is one of the biggest names in the history
Speaker 1: of academia, right, like yeah, yeah, yeah, very yeah. And
Speaker 1: this is what he says about Oxford. In this time
Speaker 1: I spent fourteen months at Magdalene College. They proved to
Speaker 1: be the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life. Right,
Speaker 1: we didn't do shit but drink. Ian Kelly quotes a
Speaker 1: contemporary politician who preceded Georgie at Oxford by a little bit,
Speaker 1: and said, a gentleman commoner was under no restraint and
Speaker 1: never called upon to attend either lectures or chapel or hall.
Speaker 1: The set of men with whom I lived were very pleasant,
Speaker 1: but very idle fellows. Our life was an imitation of
Speaker 1: high life in London. We are learning how we are
Speaker 1: pretending to be adults, and we are learning how to
Speaker 1: be ready to be rich diletants in the city, you know.
Speaker 1: And we're not learning that because there's nothing to do.
Speaker 1: We're arning that because being a rich diletant in the
Speaker 1: city is how you get the jobs running the empire. Right.
Speaker 1: This is part of why some of the people who
Speaker 1: run it do stuff like try to hold Afghanistan not
Speaker 1: all that long after this period of time and get
Speaker 1: everybody killed.
Speaker 2: It.
Speaker 1: Also part of what you do have to accept is
Speaker 1: there's a degree to this is a very effective system
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, in creating people who
Speaker 1: are hard and cruel enough to run an empire that
Speaker 1: is extremely powerful. This is a the drinking, the the
Speaker 1: the insults, the petty bond mots, the fact that you
Speaker 1: have to be so quick witted you have to be
Speaker 1: able to keep track of who is where and who
Speaker 1: you can insult in who you shouldn't. The fact that
Speaker 1: you have to be able to drink to excess to it,
Speaker 1: but not too much because you don't want to lose
Speaker 1: track of like maintaining your path in this social structure
Speaker 1: that requires a lot of a person. And it doesn't
Speaker 1: breed people who are good at governing India, but it
Speaker 1: creates people who are good at understanding how to hold
Speaker 1: power in India. You know, right, It doesn't.
Speaker 2: Hold of like right, Yeah, they hold the line of
Speaker 2: the hierarchy. And they're also so that from the whole
Speaker 2: homo social dynamic, they're also ready to believe the person
Speaker 2: on top of them knows best, so they'll just believe
Speaker 2: whatever being told by the person above them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's this I have talked to I was
Speaker 1: not a high school girl, but I have talked to
Speaker 1: my friends who were high school girls, and they'll talk
Speaker 1: about especially when you're like, I think the show Yellowjackets
Speaker 1: gets an aspect of this pretty well. But like how
Speaker 1: brutal girls can be in like social hierarchy to each
Speaker 1: other at that age. Men have their own version of that,
Speaker 1: And you should look at the culture that produces the
Speaker 1: rulers of England as like a really gossipy high school.
Speaker 1: Everybody's fucking everybody's talking shit and gossiping about each other.
Speaker 1: And George all he wants. He doesn't want any of
Speaker 1: the jobs. He wants to sail to the top of
Speaker 1: that without actually being responsible for anything. Right, he is
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways slacker, right, Yeah, like he is.
Speaker 1: He is kind of like the patron saint of slackers,
Speaker 1: you know, which is part of why I respect.
Speaker 2: When you're a B plus student, you're like, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: be okay. Yeah, You're like, I'm a B plus student.
Speaker 2: I can pass all the classes. I'm not going to
Speaker 2: study though.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, so this segment of society was as George
Speaker 1: came of age, also deeply spooked. The culprit of this
Speaker 1: scaredness spookiness was the French Revolution, which is kind of lingering.
Speaker 1: It hits while George is at Eton. He comes home
Speaker 1: from like school for a holiday to be told that
Speaker 1: his family man are like, oh, yeah, you know, they
Speaker 1: did a revolution in France. Looks pretty nasty for people
Speaker 1: like us over there. Yeah, I killed a lot of
Speaker 1: fucking people. And so everybody doesn't hit great Britain, but
Speaker 1: a lot of refugees do. A lot of these French
Speaker 1: nobles and wealthy people who flee wind up coming to
Speaker 1: London and stuff, and the whole aristocrats. He is terrified
Speaker 1: is this shit gonna spread? Because they're not looking at
Speaker 1: it as just the French Revolution. They're also looking at
Speaker 1: what just happened in the United States, right, which did
Speaker 1: include a lot of violence towards members of the British
Speaker 1: aristocracy who stayed loyal, And they're thinking, are we about
Speaker 1: to have an uprising of the common people?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: Are we on the verge of a revolution? You know? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Part of what they are aware of is that a
Speaker 1: lot of the men and women who had faced the
Speaker 1: guillotine during this era had been identified by the crowd
Speaker 1: as aristocrats because they were dressed very well. Right, they
Speaker 1: are wearing the clothes of incredibly rich people. And this
Speaker 1: starts to accelerate a change that had already begun to
Speaker 1: sweep British fashion earlier in the seventeen eighties. Wool replaces silk,
Speaker 1: gold and silver seems the less desirable than flat colors
Speaker 1: in an age where you never know is a mob
Speaker 1: about to come for us, So this is starting to happen.
Speaker 1: And parts of this had started before the French Revolution,
Speaker 1: but that really accelerates this. Like, I don't know if
Speaker 1: I want to be wearing the equivalent of like two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars in silk at all times, and like
Speaker 1: gold braid, literal gold braid, Like I.
Speaker 2: Shouldn't carry my person this neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And one of the things I think that is
Speaker 1: an aspect of this. You know, we're dealing with this
Speaker 1: weird thing where you've got chunk of people who believe
Speaker 1: that guys like Donald Trump, literal billionaires, guys like Elon
Speaker 1: Musk are basically working class because they seem common and
Speaker 1: course in a way that like, well he's saying what
Speaker 1: I feel like, so maybe he's not one of like
Speaker 1: the ruling class, and they are. But part of what
Speaker 1: lets people get away with this is that suits are
Speaker 1: a thing that rich people wear, but also a lot
Speaker 1: of people wear. I would say ninety nine percent of
Speaker 1: people I have seen wearing tailored suits, we're not wealthy.
Speaker 1: Most of them are working class, right, because for a
Speaker 1: lot of working class people like you, just wear a
Speaker 1: suit to work, right, like, or at least a casual
Speaker 1: suit or something, and that has allowed I think it's
Speaker 1: as opposed to in this kind of pre regency period,
Speaker 1: early regency period, if you see a rich person, you
Speaker 1: immediately know by their dress that they're rich, right. And
Speaker 1: part of what's going to happen, this change in fashion
Speaker 1: is going to change that it's never again going to
Speaker 1: be as easy to tell how rich the rich are
Speaker 1: just by their clothes unless you really know your fashion
Speaker 1: shit right. Right.
Speaker 2: It's kind of like how like when the Silicon Silicon
Speaker 2: Valley tech bros came up and they weren't they were
Speaker 2: wearing like sweatpans and just really casual like at leisure
Speaker 2: but very expensive watches and so like accessories became the
Speaker 2: new indicator of stuff, not necessarily the clothes you were wearing, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's part because like those are
Speaker 1: a little easier to take off, they're a little less
Speaker 1: immediately obvious. You know, bo is going to be part
Speaker 1: of why that becomes how people look at fashion. We're
Speaker 1: getting to all that. So he only spends a couple
Speaker 1: of months at Oxford. He gives it up in like
Speaker 1: a semester as a useless waste of money. And he
Speaker 1: comes to his guardian and is like, look, I don't
Speaker 1: think Oxford's going to help me get where I want
Speaker 1: to get. I want some of my money released now
Speaker 1: because I need to buy a commission in the Royal Army.
Speaker 1: I want to pay to become an officer in the Army.
Speaker 1: If you join the army today. Number one, you never pay,
Speaker 1: because that's that would that would be very sketchy to
Speaker 1: pay to join the army. You will start. There's two tracks,
Speaker 1: and the British are actually part of why because the
Speaker 1: British helped to invent and they're kind of cribbing from
Speaker 1: the Romans. We crib apart from the Romans from the
Speaker 1: French from the British. You know how we organize our army.
Speaker 1: There's two tracks in the military, and this is true,
Speaker 1: then it's true this day there's noncommissioned officers, privates, sergeants, corporals. Right,
Speaker 1: that's not the order, it doesn't it whatever, And then
Speaker 1: there's officers. Right, that's your lieutenants, your captains, your majors,
Speaker 1: your colonels, YadA, YadA, YadA, on and up. They do
Speaker 1: slightly different things and they're different social classes. Historically, this
Speaker 1: is a little bit less the case in the United States,
Speaker 1: but not really that much, because officers have to have
Speaker 1: a college degree, right, generally, not always. My grandpa never
Speaker 1: graduated eighth grade, but he became an officer because everyone
Speaker 1: above him got shot to death in Korea, you know,
Speaker 1: does happen occasionally, but as a general rule, officers are
Speaker 1: people who have an education, right. And in this period,
Speaker 1: officers are usually the aristocracy or gentlemen commoners, right like
Speaker 1: bo And in the modern militaries, there's no way to
Speaker 1: start out as a higher rank. You start out at
Speaker 1: the bottom of your perspective wrung, usually either like a
Speaker 1: private or a second lieutenant. If you're an officer, right,
Speaker 1: because modern militaries have found that if you can bribe
Speaker 1: people for better jobs, what happens is all of your
Speaker 1: officers suck and they get everyone killed all the time.
Speaker 1: This is a problem in a lot of different militaries, right,
Speaker 1: it's always yeah, yeah, you look at a lot of
Speaker 1: these to go into kind of some contemporary history, there's
Speaker 1: been a lot written about, like you have these wars
Speaker 1: between Israel and a lot of its neighbors, and a
Speaker 1: lot of these armies, like Egypt and Syria perform really badly.
Speaker 1: And part of it is because if you're a dictator,
Speaker 1: if you're a strong man in power, you don't necessarily
Speaker 1: want an army that makes it easy for good officers
Speaker 1: to gain power, because that's your those are the people
Speaker 1: who might overthrow you, right, So you want toadies and
Speaker 1: stuff people are effectively buying, and that's how a lot
Speaker 1: of shit works in the British army kind of for
Speaker 1: quite a while, and especially during this period back in
Speaker 1: the late seventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds. Rank is
Speaker 1: not something a rich man earned, it was something he bought,
Speaker 1: and this practice had started in the reign of Charles.
Speaker 1: The second being able to buy a commission actually had
Speaker 1: a reasonable origin. It was trying to deal with the
Speaker 1: fact that you had a lot of rich guys who
Speaker 1: wanted to be officers. They would join, they would get
Speaker 1: everybody killed, or if a battle would go badly, they
Speaker 1: would run away and they would kind of like fuck
Speaker 1: over the army. So they were trying to establish accountability.
Speaker 1: And initially the way buying a commission worked is it
Speaker 1: was like, hey, what was like bonding out of jail?
Speaker 1: It was in order to become an officer, you give
Speaker 1: us a chunk of money and when you're done, we'll
Speaker 1: give it to you back unless you run away in
Speaker 1: battle or get everybody killed. If you fuck up, you
Speaker 1: don't get this money back. Right. So it starts from
Speaker 1: a good, an intelligent desire to like, we need to
Speaker 1: have some accountability, right, But by the time bo is there,
Speaker 1: it has turned into a way for if you're an
Speaker 1: asshole with a lot of money, you can pay to
Speaker 1: have a cool sounding rank, Like I would like it
Speaker 1: if people called me captain. I would like to be
Speaker 1: called colonel. Right, here's a pile of money, now I'm
Speaker 1: a colonel. Right. But it did lead to people who
Speaker 1: didn't know their shit being in command of military units
Speaker 1: and British defeat in the Revolutionary War is going to
Speaker 1: be blamed by a lot of people at home on
Speaker 1: these officers who have paid for their commissions. And I
Speaker 1: think historians have largely agreed that that's not that's not
Speaker 1: a primary cause. It wasn't zero percent of why things
Speaker 1: go badly for them, but it's not the main reason
Speaker 1: things do right, But a lot of people do blame
Speaker 1: that for the defeat at the time. Right. It's also
Speaker 1: worth noting that the Army does this because the Army
Speaker 1: is the second tier British military thing, the Royal Navy.
Speaker 1: You're never able to do this. It's got some corruption
Speaker 1: of its own. But that's part of why the Navy
Speaker 1: always wins, you know, as they don't do stupid shit.
Speaker 1: They're like, this is going to be sick. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: don't have any We have no flex with the Navy.
Speaker 1: The Navy's go look at us and everyone we're picking
Speaker 1: fights with, right like otherwise we're just getting We're.
Speaker 2: An island nation. We need this shit to work.
Speaker 1: We cannot fuck around with the Navy, and you shouldn't
Speaker 1: fuck around with the Navy either, which is why This
Speaker 1: podcast is sponsored entirely by the British Royal Navy Circus
Speaker 1: seventeen ninety. Was it easy to get a sponsorship from
Speaker 1: a bunch of men who have been dead for two
Speaker 1: hundred years? Actually yes, but that's because we at Cool
Speaker 1: Zone employee only the finest oracles for our ad sales team.
Speaker 1: So thank you, Oracles. We're back, Princess. Is there a
Speaker 1: dead person you'd like our oracles to get you in
Speaker 1: contact with?
Speaker 2: Oh? Man, yes, please, I want to talk to Kathain
Speaker 2: of Aragon. Oh oh yeah, just for like five minutes. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I have questions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got a couple of those. You know, honestly,
Speaker 1: it's not a person for me, but I would like
Speaker 1: to let Hitler's dog know that we don't blame him.
Speaker 2: That's good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, none of it's on you, buddy, Like it's
Speaker 1: not on you man, Like we know, unanimity choice, you're
Speaker 1: a German shepherd, Like, it's not on you man. Nobody
Speaker 1: blames you, right, we're all, we're all in agreement. I
Speaker 1: just feel like he might be holding on to some trauma.
Speaker 1: One innocent Yeah, the only person in that bunker who
Speaker 1: didn't deserve what happened to him. So by the late
Speaker 1: seventeen nineties, only some cavalry and infantry regiments let people
Speaker 1: purchase commissions, and a lot of these are show units
Speaker 1: meant for parade duty rather than like fighting Napoleon, which
Speaker 1: is happening at this time. In Napoleon pretty good at fighting.
Speaker 1: You don't want to send some asshole who had sell
Speaker 1: one thousand men like you know what, Yeah, you.
Speaker 2: Need a guy who's going to be named after a steak,
Speaker 2: you know, like that's right, right.
Speaker 1: Exactly, yes, exactly. The man who's going to have boots
Speaker 1: named after him is the one we can trust to
Speaker 1: do this shit. And of all of the fake regiments
Speaker 1: in the British Royal Army, the facus of the fake
Speaker 1: was the elite tenth Light Dragoons, which had been christened
Speaker 1: the Prince of Wales's own right. It's supposed to be
Speaker 1: an honorific you know. This is the specific unit the elite.
Speaker 1: You know, in the Tzarrest Rush you get the elite
Speaker 1: horse guards, which like the crown Prince's own or whatever,
Speaker 1: and here that equivalent is the tenth Light Dragoons. Now
Speaker 1: the Prince of Wales at this point is George Augustus
Speaker 1: Frederick born in seventeen sixty two. He is in his
Speaker 1: early thirties when sixteen year old George Brummel pays to
Speaker 1: join his unit. Now in the future, he is going
Speaker 1: to be King George, the fourth one of the shit
Speaker 1: of all of the dogshit kings Endom has ever had,
Speaker 1: near the bottom of the pile. He is famous for
Speaker 1: being a selfish asshole to everyone around him. He's famous for,
Speaker 1: like among the standards of the Kings of England, people
Speaker 1: being like, yeah, this guy was really addict to people.
Speaker 1: Just didn't seem to care about anyone else.
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially his wife. Yeah, like horrible marriage. Yeah, it's like,
Speaker 2: you're not coming to the funeral. He is his.
Speaker 1: Wife, Queen Charlotte, Princess Charlotte doesn't like George, but George
Speaker 1: actually feels sorry for her because he sees how she's treated.
Speaker 1: You know, he is. He is there for the wedding.
Speaker 1: We're getting into this. The Tenth Light Dragoons and how
Speaker 1: they worked and why they came about are a testament
Speaker 1: to the kind of lifestyle the future King lived because
Speaker 1: he was heir his dad and none of this isn't
Speaker 1: his fault. His dad won't let him do anything. He
Speaker 1: doesn't want him to have a real job because the
Speaker 1: prince the only real job that's fit for a prince
Speaker 1: is to be a soldier. And that's dangerous, right, your
Speaker 1: heir is the future of the dynasty. Dad wants you
Speaker 1: safe at home, not getting into any trouble. And so
Speaker 1: you can't actually learn to be good at anything. There's
Speaker 1: nothing for you. And so the prince he grows past
Speaker 1: his twenties to his thirties. The only thing his wife
Speaker 1: will say, the only thing he was ever good at
Speaker 1: was fashion. He knew fabric, he knew good cuts of clothing.
Speaker 1: He was even he could have been a great taylor.
Speaker 1: You know, if he had come about in a different
Speaker 1: time where he was actually allowed and needed to do something,
Speaker 1: he might have actually been a person with a skill,
Speaker 1: and it would have been better for him. Because he
Speaker 1: is miserable his whole life because he has no talent,
Speaker 1: like most people. We have these guys today, a lot
Speaker 1: of people who are not good for anything fetishize military
Speaker 1: uniforms and dressing and looking and pretending to be militant
Speaker 1: as a way to hide the fact that they have
Speaker 1: no talent. Right, he is he's like one of these
Speaker 1: guys who marches around city streets and fucking soldier get
Speaker 1: up and whatnot, wave in a flag or whatever. Like
Speaker 1: he is. He has a lot of that in him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fucking LARPers, military larkers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he is a LARPer and he is deeply insecure
Speaker 1: about it. He collected replicas of every kind of uniform
Speaker 1: in the Royal Army. When his brother, his brother goes
Speaker 1: to his brother, who his younger brother, who has a
Speaker 1: real job doing actual statesmanship, visits Berlin in seventeen ninety one,
Speaker 1: is of like, you know, they're fighting Napoleon, right, the
Speaker 1: Prussians are our allies and whatnot. So he's he's he's
Speaker 1: there for diplomatic reasons. And when he goes his eldest
Speaker 1: brother is the fallest of fail sons. He's not allowed
Speaker 1: to do anything. It's like if you go, this is
Speaker 1: what he writes in the letter, being like, I want
Speaker 1: you to bring me these back. The complete uniforms a koutramah, settle,
Speaker 1: saddle and bridle, et cetera of one of the Zatan's
Speaker 1: Hussa Hussars, as well as one of the officer's complete
Speaker 1: uniforms clothing, sword caps, saddle, bridle, chabric, pistols. In short,
Speaker 1: everything complete. I want the whole, all of the uniform,
Speaker 1: all of the bits, all of the dresses. He's like,
Speaker 1: you know that this is a guy. This today he
Speaker 1: might have wound up like in a nerdier thing, being
Speaker 1: one of those rich dudes who has like all of
Speaker 1: the fucking Imperial officer, you know, every Stormtrooper uniform, a
Speaker 1: great Darth Vader costume. He's that kind of guy, only
Speaker 1: he's not again making his brother buy it for it is.
Speaker 2: Kind of Vader costume. This is from the video game.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but he's also he's not. There's something respect
Speaker 1: if you're the kind to do especially I've known some
Speaker 1: people who like buy all the equipped to like make
Speaker 1: their own custom uniforms and shit like that's a skill
Speaker 1: you have to learn a lot about tailor and a
Speaker 1: lot of respect for that. He is the kind of
Speaker 1: guy who pays to have all that made for him.
Speaker 1: The guy. The specific thing uniform that he's most obsessed
Speaker 1: with is the uniform of the Prussian Hussars, and a
Speaker 1: hussar is a kind of cavalry. They are These guys
Speaker 1: are the Navy seals of their day. They are special forces.
Speaker 1: They are the best of the best.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Not only are these Hussars they have a pretty good
Speaker 1: combat record, but they look really cool. If you look
Speaker 1: up the Death's Head Hussars, these guys they wear these
Speaker 1: huge shakos, these like big bear skin hats that have
Speaker 1: like bear fur on them, these like huge round hats,
Speaker 1: and it has a skull and crossbones, you see the
Speaker 1: Death's head. That is where the Nazis get the Death's
Speaker 1: Head from, right, It comes from these these units, these
Speaker 1: elite units of Hussars. Now, these guys aren't Nazis. That
Speaker 1: don't exist yet, right, This is just it looks cool
Speaker 1: to have a skull and crossbones in your helmet.
Speaker 2: Right, No, no, no, for sure. It's just like Hitler
Speaker 2: is just such a like he's such a Pinterest artist
Speaker 2: of like I like this, I like this, I like this,
Speaker 2: I like this. I'm just going to ruin it retroactively.
Speaker 1: The guy who makes the SS what they are, Heinrich Himmler,
Speaker 1: is exactly the same kind of nerd about this stuff
Speaker 1: that the future King of England is going to be.
Speaker 1: And he's also obsessed with these Hussars and they're great
Speaker 1: uniforms and whatnot. So that's what the Prince of Wales wants.
Speaker 1: He wants what he covets about these guys because he
Speaker 1: is never going to see anything close to a fight.
Speaker 1: Is their reputation for being deadly skilled professionals. He wants
Speaker 1: respect and people respect these men right and bo Brummles's biography,
Speaker 1: Ian Kelly writes such was the issue's importance in his
Speaker 1: mind that he wrote directly to Sir Henry Dundas Secretary
Speaker 1: for War, threatening that if he were not granted the
Speaker 1: rank and uniform of a major general, it must lead
Speaker 1: to a total separation between the King and my He
Speaker 1: put it more eloquently to his father, I have no
Speaker 1: option but to lead a life which must to the
Speaker 1: public eye, where the color of idleness, which, from the
Speaker 1: sense of it so appearing, must sit irksomely upon me.
Speaker 1: A uniform would make him appear properly royal, a soldier
Speaker 1: prince leading his people. In letters to his father, he
Speaker 1: likened himself to the Black Prince, and in the portraits
Speaker 1: he commissioned and poised himself as a man of action,
Speaker 1: a military prince. He wants to be seen as this
Speaker 1: great warrior. He's never going to get a chance to
Speaker 1: do that, right, he would have gotten killed immediately, He
Speaker 1: would have gotten the whole British would have won the
Speaker 1: shit out of this war if he would have let
Speaker 1: this son of a bish near battlefield.
Speaker 2: Absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1: And is his dad knows this the most? The princes, Yeah,
Speaker 1: these guys are so funny. His dad knows this the
Speaker 1: most The Prince is ever going to get is a
Speaker 1: single regiment created just for him in seventeen ninety three,
Speaker 1: the tenth Regiment of Light Dragoons. The Prince of Well,
Speaker 1: his own never does anything. They do not They are
Speaker 1: not a real military unit. They exist. This is today
Speaker 1: people who want to have this desire and a little
Speaker 1: bit more inside themselves. If they've got some money, they
Speaker 1: just start playing Warhammer. Right. But this is his equivalent
Speaker 1: of playing one of these like toy soldier games, right,
Speaker 1: Instead of he doesn't have to buy models and build
Speaker 1: and paint them. He just gets a body of men.
Speaker 1: He designs their uniform from the ground up. He is
Speaker 1: kind of like painting these you want some men? He's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: give him some men, some men. We don't need let
Speaker 1: him dress them up. However, he wants he can watch
Speaker 1: them around on a field and pretend he's a general.
Speaker 1: Now to give you an idea of like how little
Speaker 1: his father trusts him. He gets this unit gets made
Speaker 1: early on, and like I think the yeah, this in
Speaker 1: seventeen ninety three, he doesn't get or in seventeen eighty
Speaker 1: three or something like that, but he doesn't get command
Speaker 1: of it until seventeen nine when war with France starts.
Speaker 1: So at first other people are running this because his
Speaker 1: dad doesn't even trust him to run a fake unit
Speaker 1: designed for him to like look fancy in. But when
Speaker 1: war with France starts, they're like, we're going to need
Speaker 1: to get a lot of soldiers, and if we show
Speaker 1: the Prince Regent trotting around with his fake army, it
Speaker 1: might make the royalty look like we're more invested in
Speaker 1: this fight, and maybe more commoners will join up to
Speaker 1: die for us. Right, So he makes his son, He
Speaker 1: gives him proper command of the unit in seventeen ninety three,
Speaker 1: but he backdates his rank to seventeen eighty two. He
Speaker 1: like retcon's his son being a colonel in the army,
Speaker 1: so he's not the most junior officer because you can't
Speaker 1: have that, right, Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Right, that would be embarrassing.
Speaker 1: Now, the King doesn't make it clear to everyone involved
Speaker 1: in running the military, under no circumstances will my son
Speaker 1: ever leave the country. We are not using him or
Speaker 1: this unit for anything. So the Prince's only job is
Speaker 1: to design the uniforms, which are the most elaborate and
Speaker 1: expensive military outfits in all of Europe. George Brumble joins
Speaker 1: the tenth for two reasons. First off, the guy who
Speaker 1: stole his first girlfriend had been their old colonel, and second,
Speaker 1: it's a way to get close to the Prince. Social
Speaker 1: and professional advancement in regency England is tied entirely to
Speaker 1: who you know, and the Prince is basically the best
Speaker 1: man to know. He had met the Prince once earlier
Speaker 1: at Windsor Castle, and the future King had expressed an interest.
Speaker 1: George comes to the castle dressed differently from everyone else,
Speaker 1: dressed really down. He's kind of dressed casually, but it's
Speaker 1: sort of he looks like he just rolled out of bed,
Speaker 1: but he spent four hours setting himself up to look
Speaker 1: like he just rolled out of bed, and he looks
Speaker 1: like he's dressed down, but in the because he's wearing
Speaker 1: this outfit that's like a costume, right, that's like a
Speaker 1: casual costume. But he is perfectly tailored. He has every
Speaker 1: single measurement. He has set out to show off his
Speaker 1: body to the best degree. And the King is like, oh, dude,
Speaker 1: you look fucking dope, say a prince. Yeah, and the Prince,
Speaker 1: you know not to body shame a dead man. He
Speaker 1: is known for being corpulent, right, and so he he
Speaker 1: is insecure about this. He gets made fun of for this.
Speaker 1: And Bo is thin and muscular and handsome. Right, So
Speaker 1: the Prince is like, how can I dress like you?
Speaker 1: And he listens to everything this sixteen year old boy
Speaker 1: has to say. Right, he's desperate to be this kid.
Speaker 1: He's just because he's cool. Right. One of the criticisms
Speaker 1: I might have of Ian Kelly, he's a very good
Speaker 1: and a very serious biographer. He jumps around this fact
Speaker 1: that like because he Kelly kind of leans into this.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit of a mystery why everyone likes
Speaker 1: him so much. Some of it was this he was charming.
Speaker 1: He was like, what he doesn't because he's a little
Speaker 1: bit too I think professional to say this is like,
Speaker 1: Bo's just cool, right.
Speaker 2: Instead he looks like Timothy Shallow, like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly right, Like people just want to be like him.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and you know this, the Prince of Wales,
Speaker 1: who is thirty something, kind of falls for him. So
Speaker 1: when George applies for entry into the regiment, the Prince
Speaker 1: of Wales says yes. Now George has to pay, and
Speaker 1: he has to pay out the asks for these uniforms.
Speaker 1: But he quickly becomes one of the most popular men
Speaker 1: in in the unit, despite being a literal child. A
Speaker 1: lot of these guys are in their twenties and thirties.
Speaker 1: He is sixteen and they all look up to him.
Speaker 1: Right now, he can drink with the best of them.
Speaker 1: He's very funny, and pretty soon the Prince is dressing
Speaker 1: like him, which means everyone else starts dressing like him.
Speaker 2: Right, Oh yeah, what an influencer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he is an influencer. And to be fair, the
Speaker 1: Prince is not bad at fashion, and the tense, elaborate
Speaker 1: uniform has an influence on George and is going to
Speaker 1: play a part in the creation of the modern suit.
Speaker 1: The cavalry officers, like all cavalry officers, were these skin
Speaker 1: tight breeches. Theirs are made of wool, and they're so
Speaker 1: thin that the wearer almost looks naked or a lot
Speaker 1: of because it's a pale, kind of whitish blue color.
Speaker 1: A lot of times you look like a marble statue,
Speaker 1: like these ancient Greek statues, right, that everybody worships. Right.
Speaker 1: English writing breaches had become popular by this point in
Speaker 1: post revolutionary France, because they're they're at leisure. Right, they're
Speaker 1: almost like a little more like blue jeans. A lot
Speaker 1: of people see them as right, they're a galitarian, you know,
Speaker 1: but these were the most popular writing breaches. And the
Speaker 1: writing breeches Bow wears before he joins this unit are
Speaker 1: usually knee high because you're wearing them with cavalry boots,
Speaker 1: which go up very high the tenth just because the
Speaker 1: prince likes them. Their breeches go down low, low enough
Speaker 1: that you can actually wear them with regular shoes. They're
Speaker 1: close to trousers, right, modern slacks, you know, in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways other than how tight they are. George
Speaker 1: Brummel appreciates these pants, right, and he's going to kind
Speaker 1: of he's going to integrate them into his uniform. And
Speaker 1: these the pants that he starts wearing when he's in
Speaker 1: the tenth are seen by people as like one of
Speaker 1: the precursors to modern slacks. George Brummel appreciated these pants,
Speaker 1: but the rest of the uniform he considered a pain
Speaker 1: because it was so intricate and expensive. It cost about
Speaker 1: three hundred and fifty pounds to buy your own uniform,
Speaker 1: and yeah, right, that's not cheap today, But a housekeeper
Speaker 1: back then makes fifteen.
Speaker 2: You're already paying to play because like, you already put
Speaker 2: up money to be here in the first place. Now
Speaker 2: I have to go buy extra.
Speaker 1: Yet it's just a disaster. Like a footman is making
Speaker 1: seventeen pounds a year. A French chef, who you know
Speaker 1: they live pretty well is making sixty pounds. So this
Speaker 1: is a crazy amount of money to spend on your outfit, yea,
Speaker 1: even for a rich kid. Now, the primary occupation of
Speaker 1: the prince's own hussars, because they're not allowed to fight,
Speaker 1: is alcoholism. They did do some drills and war games,
Speaker 1: but those are mostly you spend the day writing around
Speaker 1: doing a war game, and then you spend several days
Speaker 1: drunk off your ass just.
Speaker 2: And bo is like I've been training my whole life
Speaker 2: for this all that training.
Speaker 1: Finally, I have been the kind of alcoholic that doesn't
Speaker 1: exist on the planet anymore since age thirteen. I'm ready, coach,
Speaker 1: put my ass in. And they have a lot of
Speaker 1: terms for this, Like they'll sit call certain songs like
Speaker 1: two bottle songs and three bottle songs, where like you
Speaker 1: can sing this kind of song when you've had two
Speaker 1: bottles of wine, this kind of song you're gonna need
Speaker 1: three bottles for, right. And there's also a term of
Speaker 1: like a three bottle man, a man who can easily
Speaker 1: put away three bottles of wine in the night and
Speaker 1: like still keep his head about him, be ready the
Speaker 1: next day to go ride around and do whatever gonna bullshit, right,
Speaker 1: And that's all you're doing is drinking and riding around.
Speaker 1: The Prince described as ideal soldiers as mina fashion and gentlemen,
Speaker 1: and he spent most of his time forcing bottles of
Speaker 1: wine down their throats and doing his Basically, they're all
Speaker 1: doing karaoke. That's what partying is then, as you all
Speaker 1: sing together while you get recklessly drunk. One veteran of
Speaker 1: the unit later recalled the officers of those days, were
Speaker 1: thrown headlong into a vicious school, where at times they
Speaker 1: were expected to act as if in reality they were
Speaker 1: thinking beings, and at others chastised for merely thinking. The
Speaker 1: officers were suffered to get drunk, swear, gamble, seduce, and
Speaker 1: run into debt. A pleasure. That such a school produced
Speaker 1: many scamps, many incorrigible, bad characters, is but little surprising.
Speaker 1: It is indeed truly wonderful that it produced anything else.
Speaker 2: He's like Jesus Christ, most of us.
Speaker 1: Turned into pieces of shit. But that's not what's amazing.
Speaker 1: What's amazing is that any of us didn't.
Speaker 2: Right. It's like some of us actually became friend of
Speaker 2: members of society. They died two years after because their
Speaker 2: livers were completely destroyed, but.
Speaker 1: Good for melting from the inside out. George Brummell does
Speaker 1: extremely well in this world. Brummell is noted as being
Speaker 1: quote the life and soul of the mess with his regiment,
Speaker 1: for his original wit and collection of good stories were inexhaustible,
Speaker 1: and at the dinner table he always kept his brother
Speaker 1: officers in roars of laughter. Every regiment in those days
Speaker 1: had a practiced and privileged jester, whose province it was
Speaker 1: to put an immediate stop to serious conversation by pun
Speaker 1: or joke and return to quote the hilarity which usually
Speaker 1: pervades our military society. So he is he has seen
Speaker 1: as the guy is like he can stop anyone from
Speaker 1: like he's making dark jokes. He's making jokes, you know,
Speaker 1: Lewde jokes about women, and his goal is to redirect
Speaker 1: conversation to keep everybody in a high spirits right, especially
Speaker 1: when they start losing money as they're all going into
Speaker 1: debt trying to afford to be in this unit. That's
Speaker 1: part of his job, and he's good at it. He
Speaker 1: does so well at this side of army life that
Speaker 1: after a year in the regiment, at age seventeen, he
Speaker 1: is picked to be the best man at the royal wedding,
Speaker 1: or at least one of a couple of them. Right,
Speaker 1: he's the best man at Charles the Fort's royal wedding.
Speaker 1: That's crazy now, the wedding itself is a disaster. The
Speaker 1: Prince and the princess know each other from paintings like
Speaker 1: that's what they have, and like letters where they describe
Speaker 1: each other and they both lie right there. Neither of
Speaker 1: them is honest, right.
Speaker 2: They were not pleased like you tinder take into its.
Speaker 1: Natcha, and the princess is like, well, he really did
Speaker 1: not accurately describe his weight, you know when he talked
Speaker 1: to me. And his issue with her is that, like
Speaker 1: this is a thing I think is common among German princesses.
Speaker 1: She doesn't bathe, and he doesn't love that nobody does.
Speaker 1: Of people try to talk to her about this about
Speaker 1: like hey, I got bath, might help you, like there's this,
Speaker 1: but uh, they don't. Really that's not the style at
Speaker 1: the time. So, because he's such a piece of shit,
Speaker 1: the Prince is going to spend their wedding night and
Speaker 1: honeymoon mostly mocking his new bride, and George is kind
Speaker 1: he tries to redirect. He feels like bad for her
Speaker 1: because he's this, Yeah, she's a little like weird and foreign,
Speaker 1: but she just like left her home to come here,
Speaker 1: and she seems really lonely and like you're being very
Speaker 1: shitty to her. The future, he does, however, get incredibly
Speaker 1: absolutely housed with the Prince. They are just drunk as shit.
Speaker 1: The Prince is too drunk to fuck right when they
Speaker 1: come in on their honeymoon. She blames bo for that, like, honestly,
Speaker 1: that might have been the best thing for everybody, but
Speaker 1: she blames bo for like you got him too drunk
Speaker 1: to even do the one thing he's supposed to do. Right,
Speaker 1: So tomorrow, tomorrow, honey. George buys a promotion to lieutenant
Speaker 1: in seventeen ninety five, and then captain in seventeen ninety six.
Speaker 1: His only injury came when he fell off a horse
Speaker 1: and broke his nose, thus ruining his profile. In seventeen
Speaker 1: ninety eight, yeah, some people say it makes him more handsome,
Speaker 1: like Harrison Ford's little chin scirt. Probably, yes, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: gonna be my guess, because he still does pretty well.
Speaker 1: In seventeen ninety eight, the regiment moves to Manchester and
Speaker 1: George is like, that's the end of my military career,
Speaker 1: and I want to go to Manchester because that's not London.
Speaker 1: London is the city that matters. And here's how his
Speaker 1: earliest biographer, William Jesse, describes him going to the Prince
Speaker 1: to talk about leaving. Why the fact is, your Royal Highness,
Speaker 1: I have heard that we are ordered to Manchester. Now
Speaker 1: you must be aware how disagreeable this would be to me.
Speaker 1: I really could not go, think your Royal Highness Manchester. Besides,
Speaker 1: you would not be there. I have, therefore, with your
Speaker 1: Royal Highness's permission, determined to sell out, Like why would
Speaker 1: I do there? You're not there? What kind of places
Speaker 1: with that.
Speaker 3: Row?
Speaker 1: And the Prince is like, well, yeah, of course, you know.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be not around you. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So Bo cashes out and he moves to London. He
Speaker 1: takes possession of his inheritance. At this point, he's a
Speaker 1: full adult. He buys a house in the most fashionable
Speaker 1: part of town. He is very close to saple Row.
Speaker 1: You might may have heard of saple Row. It's generally brobably.
Speaker 1: It's like where you get your nicest tailored suits. Today
Speaker 1: Bo is going to make saple Row. Saple Row. He
Speaker 1: is where. That's why that starts, because that's where he
Speaker 1: goes and a lot of his tailors are right. He
Speaker 1: starts buying clothes, he starts building relationships with a bunch
Speaker 1: of different tailors. He one of his things is he
Speaker 1: will talk shit about people who are like, oh, you
Speaker 1: go to the same tailor for your waistcoat and your jacket.
Speaker 1: There's no good there's no good vest man who's a
Speaker 1: good jacket. Man, you bought your house, your hat and
Speaker 1: shoes from the same tailor. Okay, they look like it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: look like the.
Speaker 2: Hats of a shoe man. Oh my god, like those
Speaker 2: mumpas who are like, look at them. Oh oh oh he.
Speaker 1: Is yeah, it just totally a yeah, that's exactly what
Speaker 1: he's doing. So he picks a different guy for each thing,
Speaker 1: and he designs a series of suits for himself. They
Speaker 1: are based off of the stripped down suit that he
Speaker 1: had started wearing. It eaten a little bit, you know.
Speaker 1: He takes the breeches kind of from his uniform in
Speaker 1: the tents and this becomes the prototype of the western suit.
Speaker 1: This is where it has its origin. Point. Bo finalizes
Speaker 1: his sartorial experiments. Just his fashion in England is hitting
Speaker 1: a turning point. The term dandy had first entered the
Speaker 1: lexicon in seventeen eighty and it means basically a person
Speaker 1: who studies, who is obsessed with fashion. Kind of right,
Speaker 1: Bo is going to be the man. He doesn't originate
Speaker 1: that term, but he defines it. When people write about
Speaker 1: dandies in this period, most of them are writing about
Speaker 1: bow Right. Most of his contemporaries see him as the
Speaker 1: first of the Dandies. In seventeen ninety five, the Prime
Speaker 1: Minister has introduced a new tax on wig powder. This
Speaker 1: is a part of the war against Napoleon, and it
Speaker 1: accelerated the demise of the old style of fashion, which
Speaker 1: had been on its way out since the French Revolution.
Speaker 1: At least Bo is going to be one of the
Speaker 1: first people and a lot of the Prince and a
Speaker 1: lot of other people follow him who stops wearing a wig,
Speaker 1: And he kind of does. If you look at the
Speaker 1: way Napoleon looked, that kind of almost Greek statue hairstyle.
Speaker 1: That's how Bo wears his hair, and it's how everybody
Speaker 1: starts to wear their hair.
Speaker 2: An improvement because I've seen those other hairstyles are not it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a step forward. We can agree on that.
Speaker 1: In National Geographic Ignacio Peiro rights the growth of a
Speaker 1: new British style, one that embraced simplicity, structure and understatement,
Speaker 1: with monochrome and military fabrics, abandoned such pre revolutionary fashions.
Speaker 1: Psychologist John Carl Flugel later dubbed this gradual process of
Speaker 1: simplification in men's dress as the Great Masculine Renunciation whereby
Speaker 1: men's fashion became inspired by social equality, it turned its
Speaker 1: back on extravagance. It accepts if grooming became regarded as
Speaker 1: a feminine trait. Right, And that's weird because in part
Speaker 1: Bo is going to advocate much more grooming than had been.
Speaker 1: He loves to groom, but his kind of grooming is
Speaker 1: you should be clean, you should wear good clothing, you
Speaker 1: should have good skin, and as a result, you won't
Speaker 1: need to wear cosmetics as much. So it is people
Speaker 1: see it as less grooming because he's saying, no, you'd
Speaker 1: actually take care of your body rather than getting obsessed
Speaker 1: with all the ways to hide the fact that you're
Speaker 1: filthy and gross. You know, that's the kind of fashionista
Speaker 1: he is now. A lot of these changes in style
Speaker 1: had started before Bow and would have happened without him.
Speaker 1: He doesn't kill the old style of fashion entirely on
Speaker 1: its own, but it dies as he comes into his
Speaker 1: own as like a popular man in high society, and
Speaker 1: he is the first person with a vision of what's
Speaker 1: going to come next, right, And that's why he's able
Speaker 1: to make this change. She's able to make it because
Speaker 1: the prince is the king of high society in London,
Speaker 1: and he is dressing like Bo. He is telling one
Speaker 1: else to everyone else to dress like Bo. Bo is
Speaker 1: going around all these tailors and when people realize this
Speaker 1: is who the king follows for fashion advice, they will
Speaker 1: go to the same tailors that Bo is and they
Speaker 1: will ask them what is he wearing? What does he
Speaker 1: say is the best fabrics? What does he say is
Speaker 1: the best way to dress? And part of why he
Speaker 1: gets credit for inventing the suit is he doesn't have
Speaker 1: one tailor. There's not one guy who makes an outfit
Speaker 1: that he wears because he picks all these tailors. It's
Speaker 1: them who are kind of coming up with these alterations
Speaker 1: and innovations on new styles, but he is the one
Speaker 1: putting them all together. So he gets all the credit
Speaker 1: for creating the suit, even though he's using a bunch.
Speaker 2: Of people for it.
Speaker 1: Right within months of arriving in London, flocks of aristocrats
Speaker 1: are following Bow around. They will come to his house
Speaker 1: in the morning, and this starts with the Prince and
Speaker 1: some of his hangers on. They will go to ce
Speaker 1: Bow in the morning and watch him dress because they
Speaker 1: want to know, like, how do you look like you
Speaker 1: just rolled out of bed, what is it you do?
Speaker 1: And it takes him hours and they will It becomes
Speaker 1: like one of the most fashionable things to do because again,
Speaker 1: part of what this guy is doing, he is living
Speaker 1: the life of a TikTok influencer. But we're like a
Speaker 1: TikTok fashion influencer. You've taken videos of you putting on
Speaker 1: your makeup, videos you.
Speaker 2: Get ready with me? Yeah, yeah, yeah, just ir They're like,
Speaker 2: we're gonna see this lively person. They're literally at.
Speaker 1: His house watching him do this, right, But it's no different,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just like it's actually in his home
Speaker 1: because that's the way it's got to be. Back then,
Speaker 1: once he has the Prince kind of acts like the algorithm,
Speaker 1: right that boosts his content into everybody's feed. Once he's
Speaker 1: got this everyone's attention because of the Prince, he keeps
Speaker 1: it because he knows, he understands how fame works. He
Speaker 1: understands how to keep his name on everybody's lip, and
Speaker 1: he does it very intentionally. Some of whyse because he's
Speaker 1: got a great eye for style. Bo is probably the
Speaker 1: first fashionable amount of influence to insist that what matters
Speaker 1: is not how vinsive your clothing looks. It's not having
Speaker 1: all these layers, it's not having all this jewelry, it's
Speaker 1: not having all this paint on your face. It's having
Speaker 1: really quality fabrics, particularly fine linen, and it's cut in
Speaker 1: a way to show off your natural attributes. Right. You
Speaker 1: don't want to wear too much. You want to show
Speaker 1: off your body because you're showing off. I have the
Speaker 1: time and money to spend all my time thinking about
Speaker 1: how I look and how I present myself, right, rather
Speaker 1: than I paid somebody to buy me the fanciest clothing,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: And that's so interesting because like how you're explaining him
Speaker 2: is not how it was from it that opening article.
Speaker 2: So because because it's so specific and it's so funny,
Speaker 2: because we talk so much about the downsiad of like
Speaker 2: fast fashion and bo would have been the first one
Speaker 2: been like, yeah, we don't buy from sham. We get
Speaker 2: ourselves passivate and like spend the actual money and instead
Speaker 2: of like so in a lot of ways, it is
Speaker 2: like this revolution of like because even though macaroni thing,
Speaker 2: it just sells me a bunch of like kids that
Speaker 2: went to the continent, like went to Abiza for a
Speaker 2: weekend and We're like, this is my personality.
Speaker 1: Now, he's my personality. I paid I paid a servant
Speaker 1: to buy whatever they wear over there, and I just
Speaker 1: put on what they bring me, right, But I was like, no, no, No,
Speaker 1: Your entire life is about thinking about how you what
Speaker 1: you're wearing, and how you look. That's that's all you spend,
Speaker 1: and that's what means you're a You're an actual fashionable gentleman. Now,
Speaker 1: part of what helps Bo in this. Another thing that
Speaker 1: helps is that he's gorgeous. He is like six ft
Speaker 1: five and one hundred and ninety pounds. He's built like
Speaker 1: a Greek statue.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: Part of like bo is one of the men, like
Speaker 1: that phrase, the turning like turning of the leg or
Speaker 1: something like that, comes from the fact that he wore
Speaker 1: these very tight pants over his extremely muscular legs, and
Speaker 1: he looks like a statue. Right, he looks like a
Speaker 1: Greek statue. He's deliberately cultivating that look. He wants people
Speaker 1: to see him as a piece of meat. You know.
Speaker 1: Part of the point of these pants is you can
Speaker 1: see the outline of his dick. You know, he's got
Speaker 1: those like gray fucking gray us look right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this becomes he's probably around Yeah, we don't know exactly.
Speaker 1: Weirdly enough, Ian Kelly is the one who calculates how
Speaker 1: tall he probably was because his wine merchants kept track
Speaker 1: of his weight and we know some of his measurements,
Speaker 1: so you can kind of triangulate about But he's tall,
Speaker 1: and he's reasonably muscular, and then right like, he's got
Speaker 1: that kind of that kind of build, you know. The
Speaker 1: last ingredient to BOE's success was that he had a
Speaker 1: modern understanding of how to manage and cultivate celebrity. He
Speaker 1: kind of invents Western celebrity in a very real way.
Speaker 1: Part of it is that he's very witty, he's very funny.
Speaker 1: People copy him and quote him right, which spreads his fame.
Speaker 1: He also he develops an affectation of carrying around it's
Speaker 1: basically like a magnifying glass that he will look at
Speaker 1: people as they walk in at parties and judge their
Speaker 1: outfits and be like, oh, you must have gotten your
Speaker 1: boots from a shirt man like that, and he's being
Speaker 1: a bitch, but he's also he's really funny with it,
Speaker 1: and that's part of the entertainment. Is Bo's going and
Speaker 1: he's gonna talk some shit at you, but in the
Speaker 1: way that like a stand up comedian, it's gonna maybe
Speaker 1: pick random people from the audience and give him some shit,
Speaker 1: and like you, you come into the experience knowing that's
Speaker 1: gonna happen. Part of what he's doing is he's like
Speaker 1: he's part stand up comedy. Right.
Speaker 2: You would have loved fashion poems, been like I want
Speaker 2: to one he would. Yeah, Bravo is his favorite.
Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely, His jokes become reported on in newspapers and magazines.
Speaker 1: There's going to be at least one newspaper at the
Speaker 1: time that's devoted just to Bow. His name is in
Speaker 1: the title. It's not just about him, but it's like
Speaker 1: it's following fashion and he's fashion. Right. Yeah, he's got
Speaker 1: his own He's got a fanzine, you know.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's fan cams of him, but they're just all texts. Uh.
Speaker 1: His first biographer, William Jesse, gives one example of this
Speaker 1: from when the Duke of Bedford came calling to ask
Speaker 1: Bo's opinion on his new coats. This Duke comes in
Speaker 1: and is like, I've I've got a fine new character,
Speaker 1: and I want you to I want you to tell me,
Speaker 1: is this is this a fit? Does this work? Should
Speaker 1: I go to the party in this? And Bo quote
Speaker 1: Bo examined him from head to toe with as much
Speaker 1: attention as an adjutant of the lifeguards, with the sentries
Speaker 1: on a drawing room day. Turn round, said the bow,
Speaker 1: His grace did so, and the examination was continued in front.
Speaker 1: When it was concluded, Brummel stepped forward and, feeling the
Speaker 1: lapel delicately with his thumb and fingers, said, in the
Speaker 1: most earnest and amusing manner, Bedford, do you call this
Speaker 1: thing a coat? This is really a coat? Is a coat?
Speaker 2: Huh?
Speaker 1: You think this is a coat? This is a quote
Speaker 1: to you? Huh?
Speaker 2: So you came out and this is it. This is
Speaker 2: what he literally is doing like.
Speaker 4: Water the yeah, yeah, And this is I get why.
Speaker 1: Like Alexandra, like we quote started with, I get what
Speaker 1: she says, like, oh, he's just being cruel, He's just
Speaker 1: being mean to people. This is bitchy. You can take
Speaker 1: that from this. It is a bit bitchy. But what
Speaker 1: I get from that quote, when you have to interpret,
Speaker 1: is that it's not about what he's saying. Part of
Speaker 1: it is about there's a bunch of people around. Everyone's
Speaker 1: crowded into his salon to watch him dress. This guy
Speaker 1: comes in, this duke ask for his dress, and Bo
Speaker 1: is he's putting on a show. He's pantomime. He's going
Speaker 1: up and up to him with a spyglass and looking around.
Speaker 1: People are not just laughing at the duke who's getting
Speaker 1: a little bit of shit talked about his fashion, since
Speaker 1: they're laughing at BO being this parody of himself. This
Speaker 1: really like obsessive, like like ridiculous fashion. I like that's
Speaker 1: part of the joke. The joke is on him. And
Speaker 1: that's why no one ever gets too angry at Bo,
Speaker 1: because part of it is that, like he's funny, you know,
Speaker 1: like he's and this.
Speaker 2: Is what he knows how to do, Like this is
Speaker 2: how he's always diffuse situation. It's like, I'm just gonna
Speaker 2: be funny and cute. That's going to carry me throughout life.
Speaker 1: So far, so good, and it's you know what's happening.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna talk shit about you. I'm also gonna like
Speaker 1: make a little fun of myself and by making but
Speaker 1: that by taking the piss out of both of us,
Speaker 1: we can all relax a little. I made a joke
Speaker 1: about the Prince. I made a joke about the Duke.
Speaker 1: I made a joke about me. Everybody can kind of
Speaker 1: be okay now, right, Like we're all a little bit
Speaker 1: in a more casual air now, so bo is you know? Yeah,
Speaker 1: interesting fella. He leans into the absurdity of his reputation,
Speaker 1: his reputation for incredible excess, usually by lying. He spreads
Speaker 1: myths about himself. He starts telling everyone. They ask him, wow,
Speaker 1: you have the shiniest, the blackest boots. How do you
Speaker 1: black your boots? And he's like, oh, I only shine
Speaker 1: them with fine champagne. I use champagne to shine my
Speaker 1: boot champagne. It's not a great way to chase boots.
Speaker 1: This is a lie. He's poking fun at his image.
Speaker 1: He's like, obviously, I the bow, I wax my boots,
Speaker 1: which fine champagne. Of course, you know, and people know
Speaker 1: this is a bit right In modern era, a lot
Speaker 1: of people are like, wow, this guy was like such
Speaker 1: a wasteful rich ass while he's whacked. No, no, people
Speaker 1: at the time know he's fucking around, right, he claims,
Speaker 1: because it's again a sign of wealth to be able
Speaker 1: to eat meat for every meal. He claims he doesn't
Speaker 1: even eat vegetables. When one high born lady at a
Speaker 1: party is like, do you really not eat vegetables, He's like, well, madam,
Speaker 1: one side eate a p you know, I had a
Speaker 1: single pee once? Right again he's fucking around, you know.
Speaker 2: I could just see like if he think, god, he
Speaker 2: didn't have a microphone, because his podcast would be so
Speaker 2: oh my.
Speaker 1: God, this guy, he would have been a great podcaster. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The only thing is he would he would have had
Speaker 1: to be focused on YouTube because a podcast is I
Speaker 1: think he would have said, would have denied everyone looking
Speaker 1: at me, right, they can't see me? What's at the point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he would do the Joe and do both just
Speaker 2: you know, film have his little like his pee, his
Speaker 2: one p that was just sitting there.
Speaker 1: His female friends, who get closer to him than most
Speaker 1: of the men, are able to get glimpses of the
Speaker 1: real man carefully weaving an illusion to keep himself protected
Speaker 1: in the object of desire. One of his good friends,
Speaker 1: one of the few people he's able to be himself around,
Speaker 1: is Lady hester Stanhope, and she writes memoirs of her
Speaker 1: time as a woman in high society and She says
Speaker 1: that he once admitted to her, quote, my dear Lady Hester,
Speaker 1: it is my folly that is the making of me.
Speaker 1: If I did not impertinently stare at duchesses out of
Speaker 1: countenance and over my shoulder to a prince, I should
Speaker 1: be forgotten in a week. And if the world is
Speaker 1: so silly as to admire my absurdities, you and I
Speaker 1: may know better, But what's that signify? Right? Look, if
Speaker 1: the world wants me to be this ridiculous parody of
Speaker 1: a rich man and they're going to reward me for that,
Speaker 1: you and I may know. I'm more than that, I
Speaker 1: could be better than that, but why bother right now?
Speaker 2: And it's like this has been him from childhood. So
Speaker 2: it's like there's like one of those first shah posing
Speaker 2: for that cute little pig that we talked about in
Speaker 2: part one.
Speaker 1: Like we are in this deeply shallow, image obsessed, cruel culture.
Speaker 1: I can succeed around you amongst you know, some of
Speaker 1: the people that I could be a person around. You know,
Speaker 1: there's more to me than that. You know that this
Speaker 1: is an act, but the act is good enough for
Speaker 1: these people that like, why should we respect them? We
Speaker 1: just need to get bought, We need to survive among them,
Speaker 1: and that's what I'm doing. You know, I have found
Speaker 1: a way to protect myself exactly. It's TikTok and Instagram
Speaker 1: didn't exist then Bo was a poster, but he had
Speaker 1: to do his posting analog style. And the way he
Speaker 1: did this since he can't make a bunch of different videos,
Speaker 1: he goes one on one to every tailor in the city.
Speaker 1: He tells them his thoughts on the different dresses and
Speaker 1: fabrica of the day, and they tell everyone what he thinks.
Speaker 1: You go around, you follow the Bow route on Savile
Speaker 1: Row in these other fashionable streets, and everybody's quoting him
Speaker 1: right his presence, and they give him a lot of
Speaker 1: shit for free and shit on credit because the fact
Speaker 1: that Bo's shops somewhere will get out and then you
Speaker 1: can use as you can just tell people that Bo
Speaker 1: says you should buy this or that, right, and that'll
Speaker 1: sell it.
Speaker 2: Time is a flat circah. Like that's just so like
Speaker 2: he like just like Keith Lee, Like I'm outside the
Speaker 2: Tanna and he doesn't know I'm coming, but my waistcoats
Speaker 2: got a little tear in it. So we're gonna see
Speaker 2: if he can fix it up today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, that's exactly it. That's exactly it. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: through this method he spent years as the most viral
Speaker 1: man in the London scene. Jane Austin is again very
Speaker 1: likely to have based a number of characters partly on him,
Speaker 1: and so did Catherine Gore, a Regency satire author who
Speaker 1: described a dandy in the image of Bo as a
Speaker 1: nobody who made himself somebody and gave the law to everybody.
Speaker 1: Right in the making of himself, he creates rules that
Speaker 1: others begin to follow, you know, And that's where a
Speaker 1: lot of the ship to Bo gets because he does
Speaker 1: he locks down men's fashion. For some would argue centuries
Speaker 1: because of how dominant he is, but he doesn't do
Speaker 1: that because he's against men expressing themselves. He is expressing
Speaker 1: himself as a man and how he thinks he likes
Speaker 1: to look. It's it's this culture that he understands how
Speaker 1: fucked up it is that takes that to an extreme
Speaker 1: right because it becomes law. I don't know how much
Speaker 1: you want to blame him for that, because he is
Speaker 1: just trying to get.
Speaker 2: No one said it takes to shop wearing your wear
Speaker 2: done hats, but like I'm gonna do me over heahep
Speaker 2: with my dick.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm dicks out over here, and like I
Speaker 1: can't be blamed if everybody nobody has a good idea
Speaker 1: after I'm gone. And his chief innovation involved the cravat,
Speaker 1: which is a net garment that is a precursor to
Speaker 1: the modern tie. And bo is if not the father,
Speaker 1: then the grandfather of the tie. Cravats had existed before him,
Speaker 1: but he makes them because he crafts a way of
Speaker 1: tying them that is meant to look haphazard if someone
Speaker 1: had rolled out of bed hung over and tossed it on.
Speaker 1: He could sometimes hours getting it right right, and again
Speaker 1: everyone's watching him. He'll cut during the day and he
Speaker 1: has it's an act too. He's got his man servant.
Speaker 1: When people are like waiting in the salon having their
Speaker 1: tea or whatnot, waiting for him to be ready to
Speaker 1: come out, his man servant walk back and forth with
Speaker 1: these boty baskets with dozens of crumpled cravats in them,
Speaker 1: and he'll be like, these are all failures today. We've
Speaker 1: been trying for hours to get it just right, you know.
Speaker 1: But he might be ready for you now he's close. Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly right. We know a lot about his daily routine
Speaker 1: because it's the number one show in town. The Prince
Speaker 1: of Wales will show up a lot of the time
Speaker 1: because he wants some of Bow's pool to rub off
Speaker 1: on him. High born men come by every day just
Speaker 1: to watch Bow dress. Ian Kelly writes, once his friend,
Speaker 1: the Prince of Wales adopted both the style and habit
Speaker 1: of attending the Chesterfield Street that's where he lives. Levies
Speaker 1: Brummell's position in fashion history became assured he had the
Speaker 1: required arrogance, poise, and connections, but also understood that the
Speaker 1: rules were intimidating to many. The father of modern costume,
Speaker 1: as Max Beerbohm titled, Brummel had as styled. It was
Speaker 1: uniquely his, but perfect to the spirit of the age. Quiet,
Speaker 1: reasonable and beautiful, free from folly or affection, yet susceptible
Speaker 1: to exquisite ordering, plastic, austere, economical. It appeared post revolutionary, neoclassical,
Speaker 1: ordered and enlightened, and in this it did seem democratic.
Speaker 1: It did not shout wealth or privilege. It quietly insisted
Speaker 1: the point it celebrated, not at least in the sheer
Speaker 1: time it took to achieve the look wealth, privilege and
Speaker 1: elegant indolence. Brummelell's revolutionary fetishizing of detail was labored later
Speaker 1: described by Baudelaire as defining the man who is rich
Speaker 1: in idol and who has no other occupation than the
Speaker 1: perpetual pursuit of hea happiness, whose solitary vice is elegance.
Speaker 2: Mm. Yeah, sounds like a hater than me.
Speaker 1: Mm hm Oh, Bodolaira was a famous hater. Yeah, speaking
Speaker 1: of the pursuit of elegance, our sponsors elegant as health.
Speaker 1: We're back now. The author of that Esquire piece was
Speaker 1: correct in that Bo's dominance in fashion leads to a
Speaker 1: growing homogeneity of men's dress in London, which spreads through
Speaker 1: the Western world. His proto suit becomes the norm and
Speaker 1: men's fashion with shocking speed, maybe faster than any other
Speaker 1: fashion so influential had ever been before, thanks to the
Speaker 1: new mass media of the day. In Bo's modern molding
Speaker 1: of his own celebrity, he largely gets credit for this
Speaker 1: development despite not making any of the clothes himself. And
Speaker 1: you know this also stops the fact that he uses
Speaker 1: all these tailors no one else shares credit with him.
Speaker 1: He gets the nickname Bo around seventeen ninety nine, and
Speaker 1: it had previously ad meant like beautiful. It's like calling
Speaker 1: a boy, you know, a pretty little, pretty little man,
Speaker 1: or something like that. It's initially it becomes with him.
Speaker 1: It goes from being an insult to actually like a compliment, right,
Speaker 1: because it means that you were beautiful.
Speaker 2: He's gonna reclaim it. Yeah, He's like, yes, I.
Speaker 1: Am Ian Kelly continues. People copied what he wore, how
Speaker 1: he spoke, even how he shaved. Tobacconists sold out of
Speaker 1: his favorite ranges of snuff, and clubs and dances were
Speaker 1: judged on his attendance or participation. Tailors gave him their
Speaker 1: goods simply for the honor or publicity if he's wearing
Speaker 1: them in a manner immediately familiar in our own celebrity
Speaker 1: and fashion obsessed aged. The decimation of the beaver population
Speaker 1: of North America in the nineteenth century was set in
Speaker 1: motion by his sudden taste for beaver skin top hats
Speaker 1: like he carries it. He causes inadvertently a beaver genocide
Speaker 1: because he wears a hat one day that's made out
Speaker 1: of beaver skin and people just wipe them out. Oh
Speaker 1: my gosh, we're still dealing with the part of our
Speaker 1: wildfire problem comes from this, to be honest. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like the destruction of beaver populations in North America is
Speaker 1: actually still catastrophic to this day, and bo Brummel has
Speaker 1: a lot to do with it. Now he could he
Speaker 1: have yeah, right, yeah, yeah, you know, although I will
Speaker 1: say he's not innocent here too, because he is. He's
Speaker 1: not a fast fashion guy, but he is a disposable
Speaker 1: fashion guy. Part of it is because he loves white.
Speaker 1: He insists on the thinnest gloves, the whitest shirts, the
Speaker 1: whitest thin often leather pants, right, and these will if
Speaker 1: thin white things don't last, you know, they get stand,
Speaker 1: they get holes in them. So he is throwing shit
Speaker 1: out constantly, which and so he inaugurates the cycle of
Speaker 1: like you are replacing everything rapidly, right, You are having
Speaker 1: it tailored every day, and you are having it cleaned
Speaker 1: every day, and you are running through your clothes. It's expensive.
Speaker 1: It builds an industry for fashion, but it is deeply waste, right,
Speaker 1: And that is on him, right, that is something he
Speaker 1: has a major factor in right, and he is also
Speaker 1: he's an avatar of conspicuous consumption, right, and he's an
Speaker 1: avatar of it in a way that is democratic. Conspicuous
Speaker 1: consumption had been limited in part because there were only
Speaker 1: so many rich people, but in part because only rich
Speaker 1: people could afford it. And he makes he makes looking
Speaker 1: good more affordable, which makes more people spend money to
Speaker 1: do it, So he increases the number of people who
Speaker 1: are focused on fashion as a luxury as a result
Speaker 1: of making it a little more democratic. He also lays
Speaker 1: down his fashion dict tots in a way that does
Speaker 1: not brook disagreement, because that's kind of the humor of
Speaker 1: the time. Fashion historian Anne Hollander argues it is possible
Speaker 1: to make the case that masculine formal address of today
Speaker 1: is directly Brummell's responsibility. He's a little bit of a
Speaker 1: cult leader at his height, and that he will make
Speaker 1: things that are kind of seen as jokes and people
Speaker 1: will follow them to the letter. One of his bits
Speaker 1: was he would say, if John Bull, which is like Joshmo, right,
Speaker 1: turns around to look at you, you are not well dressed,
Speaker 1: but either too stiff, too tight, or too fashionable. Right,
Speaker 1: you don't want to be noticed by the commoners. Only Richmond,
Speaker 1: who understand the quality of your cut should notice you
Speaker 1: common people. You should blend into the crowd. You know.
Speaker 1: It's the same. It's like with Silicon Valley fashion of
Speaker 1: the day. And again, how much you want to blame
Speaker 1: him morally for that right, But one thing that is
Speaker 1: interesting to me is that he is not interested in
Speaker 1: gaining power. Giving his given his standing with the Prince
Speaker 1: and his status in culture, he should have been a
Speaker 1: powerful man. He should have wound up in government, and
Speaker 1: he had the opportunity, but he never tries. He has
Speaker 1: no ambition. Maybe it's he was just lazy. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: that he recognized doing that you're going to have to
Speaker 1: do awful things and did. He really didn't want to.
Speaker 1: His life was fine as it was. He was happy
Speaker 1: with the things that he had. I don't know, but
Speaker 1: this is part of the problem it's going to cost
Speaker 1: for him, is that he rapidly runs out of money.
Speaker 1: Everything he has is on credit. The Prince is able
Speaker 1: to keep his creditors at bay by saying, hey, man,
Speaker 1: I'm going to be the king. This guy is my friend.
Speaker 1: Don't call in his debts and a lot of people
Speaker 1: are willing to extend him credit because they're like, he's
Speaker 1: going to be running the empire pretty soon, right, He's
Speaker 1: gonna have some kind of jobs, right, yeah, Yeah, But
Speaker 1: he never quite does, like and so this is eventually
Speaker 1: going to create an unsustainable situation. But before it does,
Speaker 1: he launches one more trend among the high society in London.
Speaker 1: When we're all grateful for he gets them to stop
Speaker 1: smelling like shit.
Speaker 2: He is an.
Speaker 1: Advocate of daily baths. He is an advocate uniquely people
Speaker 1: who do shower and bathe regularly. It's often cold, because
Speaker 1: that's viewed as being healthier, right that you want a
Speaker 1: bracing cold plunge or whatnot. He likes hot baths because he.
Speaker 2: Love that.
Speaker 1: He makes it a luxury, right, and he also the
Speaker 1: wisdom of the day is that sweating and like chafing
Speaker 1: a walnot is it gets out the toxins. It's good
Speaker 1: for you. And he's like, nah, man, I'd rather just
Speaker 1: like get and clean myself off in a bath and
Speaker 1: get rid of the gross stuff that way. That's a
Speaker 1: lot nicer to me, amen. Yeah. And he also avoids
Speaker 1: a lot of the cosmetics of the day, which is
Speaker 1: good for everyone's health because most of them are like
Speaker 1: made out of poison. Yeah yeah, so he helps out
Speaker 1: with the health of the upper class to a significant degree.
Speaker 1: In that manner, he spends more than a decade as
Speaker 1: the it person in London society, which is a long
Speaker 1: time to be that kind of guy. In addition to
Speaker 1: the prototypical suit, he also starts the tradition of rich
Speaker 1: people dressing like farmers. Like he wears hunting jackets and
Speaker 1: like outdoor clothing that's not actually meant to be worn outdoors.
Speaker 1: It's meant to walk around the parking, but it imitates
Speaker 1: outdoor clothing.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: So we have like car fashionable car hearts thanks to
Speaker 1: Bo Brummel too, he helps start that. His downfall comes
Speaker 1: in part due to his refusal to get a real job. Well,
Speaker 1: Bo Pioneer's modern celebrity. He doesn't know how to make it,
Speaker 1: can't make money off it, there's no there's no like
Speaker 1: Patreon right monetization, and he gets some stuff for free
Speaker 1: and credit, but nobody's like paying you to advertise really
Speaker 1: at this point. And he's also gambling starting in his
Speaker 1: late twenties and early thirties, which quickly focks him over.
Speaker 1: You know, all this might have been survival if he
Speaker 1: had stayed in the King's good graces, but Bo nursed
Speaker 1: to contempt for the prince. He never thinks he's a
Speaker 1: good man. He doesn't like the way he treats his wife,
Speaker 1: he doesn't like the way he treats anyone, and he
Speaker 1: loves making fun of him. This story's probably not true,
Speaker 1: but it gives you a hint of the kind of
Speaker 1: shit he would talk about. Their prince. Their story they're
Speaker 1: all hung over. He's at the palace one day with
Speaker 1: the prince and he's being like, hey, hey, princey, go
Speaker 1: fetch mission champagne. Go give me some champagne. King, you know,
Speaker 1: future king, pick me up a fucking bottle. Get your
Speaker 1: man servant to bring me a bottle. And it gets
Speaker 1: like kicked out. That probably didn't literally happen, but stuff
Speaker 1: like it did, because we have a lot of stories
Speaker 1: about them having fights, and it's often because Bo he's
Speaker 1: usually good at taking the piss out of people and
Speaker 1: not making them angry, but the Prince is really fragile
Speaker 1: and doesn't like it's Sometimes Bogo's too far for him,
Speaker 1: and when he's in his late thirties. He's going to
Speaker 1: blow up their relationship entirely. And I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: the New York Times here. A version of the story
Speaker 1: goes that one afternoon, after another of Brummels in the
Speaker 1: air to the Throne's frequent fallouts, he bumped into the
Speaker 1: Prince while strugling with his fellow dandy lord Alvinley. When
Speaker 1: the Prince warmly acknowledged Alvinlee but ignored him, Brumble is
Speaker 1: said to have coolly inquired Alvinley, who's your fat friend.
Speaker 1: The Prince never spoke to him again.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's you, bud, That's that's not nice. Buyeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And like I don't got much sympathy for the
Speaker 1: friend for the prince here, but like, yeah, you're not
Speaker 1: going to keep his friendship there. He is never going
Speaker 1: to forgive this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he sensits him about his shit, you know.
Speaker 1: And he originates another great phrase during this because people
Speaker 1: are like, when the French the Prince drops him, people
Speaker 1: are like, are you worried that you're gonna like fall
Speaker 1: out of your standing in society? And Brummel says, I
Speaker 1: made him what he is. I can unmake him. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's that guy, that guy. Unfortunately he has gone a
Speaker 1: little too far here, some of them. Maybe he is
Speaker 1: in his thirties. He is no longer as handsome as
Speaker 1: he used to be. He is no longer as thin
Speaker 1: and muscular as he used to be. He's pushing forty now, right.
Speaker 1: You know, they just like a body.
Speaker 2: Anymore.
Speaker 1: They don't have those zembit they don't have the really
Speaker 1: good He can't do that, kind of like modern Hollywood steroids.
Speaker 1: You know, they just don't have it yet. Right, So
Speaker 1: by middle aged he is age. He is flat broke.
Speaker 1: He's worse because he's a horrible debt and once the
Speaker 1: Prince withdraws his protection, his creditors are like, well, this
Speaker 1: guy's never actually going to be powerful. We should try
Speaker 1: to get some money out of him. Right, So his
Speaker 1: life falls apart in eighteen sixteen, after a horrible losing
Speaker 1: streak at one of the clubs where he kept a
Speaker 1: permanent table, he flees permanently from London to Calais on
Speaker 1: the French coast because his creditors won't follow him there.
Speaker 1: He has some investments, he's got some minuities, and Calais
Speaker 1: is a frances A war torn country at this point,
Speaker 1: so it's like the third world the people in London,
Speaker 1: and he can live off of what he's got there
Speaker 1: reasonably well. He spends the rest of his life as
Speaker 1: a tourist attraction, still famous, and in the years after
Speaker 1: he flees London, a lot of famous people will continue
Speaker 1: to write about him. Authors like Benjamin Disraeli and Oscar
Speaker 1: Wilde feature him in their writing. Oscar Wilde is said
Speaker 1: to have patterned a lot of his life and personality,
Speaker 1: especially early on on both Yeah, yeah, very similar guys
Speaker 1: for sure. The Duke of Wellington, the Destroyer of Napoleon,
Speaker 1: also worships his style right like he dresses based on
Speaker 1: how Bo dressed, and the playwright Lord Byron intentionally is
Speaker 1: also he is one of these guys who's dressing in
Speaker 1: the image, and these guys are. You shouldn't give it
Speaker 1: as copying him as much as the way that like
Speaker 1: men today, if you want to look good, you can
Speaker 1: still look at pictures of how Carrie Grant dressed and
Speaker 1: go like, well shit, that guy knew how to put
Speaker 1: together an outfit, right, You do a lot worse than
Speaker 1: trying to dress like Carry Granted, Right, Like that's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing. He's just this immortal icon of cool
Speaker 1: for people who glow up anywhere near that era. But
Speaker 1: his older life is not going to be a happy one.
Speaker 1: One by one his good friends died, and he grows
Speaker 1: lonelier and lonelier, And as he grows lonelier and lonelier,
Speaker 1: something grows inside him. Syphilis.
Speaker 4: He is, of course, of course he's got syphilis. Yeah,
Speaker 4: there's no way this man. All of his friends are
Speaker 4: high class prostitutes. There's no way this man isn't more
Speaker 4: syphilis than human by the time he's sixty, right, like
Speaker 4: he is, he is eighty percent syphilis by body weight.
Speaker 1: You know you are catching the box if you're in
Speaker 1: a room with Beau Brummel. Over the course of like
Speaker 1: twenty or thirty years, it reaches the tertiary stages, which
Speaker 1: brings about hallucinations, madness, you go crazy, there's a worm
Speaker 1: eating holes in your brain. Basically, his last friend and
Speaker 1: fan in his dying years is a young man named Fishe,
Speaker 1: who is the son of the owner of the hotel,
Speaker 1: and Fischet wants to be a valet, and Brummel's like,
Speaker 1: if you follow me around, I'll teach you how to
Speaker 1: introduce royalty. I'll teach you how to be a high
Speaker 1: society man, and he does, and in return, Fichet spends
Speaker 1: Beau's final years humoring him. And because bo is losing
Speaker 1: his mind, his primary occupation in his last years is
Speaker 1: he he has Fichet escort him to balls and galas
Speaker 1: that exist only in his head. Right, Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: a it's bleak. I'm going to quote from Ian Kelly
Speaker 1: here because he writes very evocatively about this end period
Speaker 1: in Beau's life. Rummel had taught him how to announce
Speaker 1: royalty and how much obeisance was expected by the Victor
Speaker 1: of Waterloo, and Monsieur Brummel taught Fichet about clothes. It
Speaker 1: was Fichet also who acted as valet to the hotel,
Speaker 1: celebrated Dandy in Witt, helping him into his evening coat
Speaker 1: and handing him the whitest of cravats with the reverence
Speaker 1: of a sacristan. Yet these soires would end suddenly, and
Speaker 1: in the same way. One moment, Rummel would hold out
Speaker 1: his arm to escort the Duchess of d Evans across
Speaker 1: the room. The next his eyes were open to the
Speaker 1: reality around him, the room was empty. There was nothing
Speaker 1: in front of him but the candles, the flowers, and
Speaker 1: the young frenchman with pity in his eyes. Fouchet eventually
Speaker 1: became inured, he said, to the dark pantomime of announcing
Speaker 1: Brummel's ghosts, the long dead duchesses and Cortizans, the regency
Speaker 1: celebrities who had been Moucheaux's friends. But he dreaded the
Speaker 1: moment when Brummell woke from his masquerade and saw the
Speaker 1: reality around him, the ruination of his fame and fortune
Speaker 1: and of his mind. Babylon and all its desolation, as
Speaker 1: one friend of Brummel said, was a sight less awful.
Speaker 1: The Frenchman would then blow out the candles, shut the windows,
Speaker 1: and leave Beau Brummel, the most sociable man in London,
Speaker 1: for the complete privacy and utter silence of his ruined mind.
Speaker 2: Damn. Yeah, that's so sad.
Speaker 1: That's a fucking story book ending like a sad one.
Speaker 2: But wow, right, that's so gig so. But like none
Speaker 2: I know about him. I'm like, I like, I just
Speaker 2: want to put it in the other day, like that's
Speaker 2: all his fashion. Yes, like he did that.
Speaker 1: She's just the making One thing I've read in that
Speaker 1: Jane Austen Society article is that he of the in
Speaker 1: the Regency era Bo Brummele created the style and Jane
Speaker 1: Austin created the substance, right, And I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot to that. Yeah, people who are Regency nerds say that,
Speaker 1: and I'm not so who am I to argue with them?
Speaker 2: For sure?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he dies at age sixty two in an insane asylum,
Speaker 1: destitute and reduced to incoherence, which is a bummer.
Speaker 2: That's sad. He wasn't a He wasn't a bastard, little
Speaker 2: little little capitalist troll, but like a.
Speaker 1: Little capitalist troll. But hard to blame him. What options
Speaker 1: did he have in the culture he was born into?
Speaker 2: You know, and you see what happens when you mommy
Speaker 2: blog your children in portraits. You see what happens.
Speaker 1: Now, don't don't put your kids in your YouTube videos, right,
Speaker 1: They'll grow up sypolitic and insane. That's how they'll die.
Speaker 1: H l and a Madden House.
Speaker 2: He was a bastard.
Speaker 3: I definitely think he bred bad culture.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, he bred bad culture. Bastard y grew in
Speaker 1: his image, but he was I think fundamentally a sensitive
Speaker 1: and intelligent and basically attempted to be a decent soul
Speaker 1: most of the time living in an evil culture.
Speaker 3: And they got to a roast a King's.
Speaker 1: And he got a roastick king right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's how you get your downfall. That's pretty
Speaker 2: damn good. And also, like, from what I've heard is
Speaker 2: like they didn't like the reason why they also preserved
Speaker 2: that fashion because it was seen as less feminine. I
Speaker 2: don't feel like that's what both thought about it anyway.
Speaker 2: I don't think of him as thinking like there's anything
Speaker 2: wrong if it was feminine. He just was kind of
Speaker 2: not as he was just not as rich. So he's like,
Speaker 2: I can't AISA and bring back big ass.
Speaker 1: I can't afford to dress like that crazy, but I
Speaker 1: can't afford to spend all of my time thinking about
Speaker 1: how I look, And so I'll beat you that way
Speaker 1: and then you'll become me. Right. Yeah, anyway, that's bo baby, Princess.
Speaker 1: You've got any pluggables to plug before we roll out here?
Speaker 2: Yeah? First of all, this thank you so much for
Speaker 2: having me. It's been literally a pleasure. You can find
Speaker 2: me on YouTube as Princess Weeks. I'm still technically on
Speaker 2: x as Week's Princess and then I'm also on TikTok
Speaker 2: as Princess Pendulum, where I cannot wait to talk about
Speaker 2: House is the Dragon every sing there we go.
Speaker 1: Well, you can find me on Twitter too much, but
Speaker 1: that's about it. Also in a million podcasts, so just listen,
Speaker 1: keep listening to the podcast you're listening to, you'll keep
Speaker 1: getting me. I have a novel. It's called After the Revolution.
Speaker 1: Just type that and Robert Evans into Google. You'll find
Speaker 1: places to buy it. It's for a k Press. You
Speaker 1: can also just buy it from them anyway. Episode's done.
Speaker 3: That's it. Babies Behind the Bastards is a production of
Speaker 3: cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media our
Speaker 3: website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on
Speaker 3: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3: M