You're listening to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion advised.

Just a few years ago, in 2017, the esteemed British auction house Christie's put up for sale a

golden pendant encrusted with diamonds, with a tiny portrait of George IV inside.

It was George IV's bad luck to have lived during the peak of British political cartooning.

He didn't actually become king until he was nearly 60.

And in his years as a print in waiting and then as regent,

satirical papers became ubiquitous depicting him as a grotesquely overweight and heavy-drinking

clown wearing a military costume that never actually saw a battlefield.

But the portrait in the locket that Christie's put up for auction looked very different.

It was unrecognizable from the buffoon that George would come to be seen as.

This George IV is young and gallant almost night-like. His light brown hair is swept across

his forehead. His lips are faintly red and his blue eyes are clear and bright.

The locket had been passed down through descendant of Maria Fetterberg, the strikingly beautiful

woman who captivated George IV so completely that even though it risked his position in the line

of succession, he married her in secret. It's ironic that the period of history that bears George

IV's name, the Regency, is synonymous with refinement and social constraint when George himself

was such a figure of gluttony and excess. He was a drinker, a gambler, a womanizer, and when he

finally ate himself to death by rupturing his stomach, his subjects had little sympathy for him.

But it is love story with Maria Fetterberg that maybe comes the closest to anything in George's

life to resembling a Jane Austen romance. The problem with Jane Austen novels, though, is they end

with a wedding. They don't tell you about what happens afterward when Prince Charming's nation,

...