However, in 1784 the prince sent down his chief cook to make arrangements for the next royal visit.  The cook engaged a house on the spot where the Pavilion now stands, and from that time Brighton began to be an extremely fashionable place.  The court doctors, giving advice that was agreeable, recommended their royal patient to take sea-bathing at Brighton.  At once the place sprang into popularity.

At first the gentry were crowded into lodging-houses and the accommodations were primitive to a degree.  But soon handsome villas arose on every side; hotels appeared; places of amusement were opened.  The prince himself began to build a tasteless but showy structure, partly Chinese and partly Indian in style, on the fashionable promenade of the Steyne.

During his life with Mrs. Fitzherbert at Brighton the prince held what was practically a court.  Hundreds of the aristocracy came down from London and made their temporary dwellings there; while thousands who were by no means of the court made the place what is now popularly called “London by the Sea.”  There were the Duc de Chartres, of France; statesmen and rakes, like Fox, Sheridan, and the Earl of Barrymore; a very beautiful woman, named Mrs. Couch, a favorite singer at the opera, to whom the prince gave at one time jewels worth ten thousand pounds; and a sister of the Earl of Barrymore, who was as notorious as her brother.  She often took the president’s chair at a club which George’s friends had organized and which she had christened the Hell Fire Club.

Such persons were not the only visitors at Brighton.  Men of much more serious demeanor came down to visit the prince and brought with them quieter society.  Nevertheless, for a considerable time the place was most noted for its wild scenes of revelry, into which George frequently entered, though his home life with Mrs. Fitzherbert at the Pavilion was a decorous one.

No one felt any doubt as to the marriage of the two persons, who seemed so much like a prince and a princess.  Some of the people of the place addressed Mrs. Fitzherbert as “Mrs. Prince.”  The old king and his wife, however, much deplored their son’s relation with her.  This was partly due to the fact that Mrs. Fitzherbert was a Catholic and that she had received a number of French nuns who had been driven out of France at the time of the Revolution.  But no less displeasure was caused by the prince’s racing and dicing, which swelled his debts to almost a million pounds, so that Parliament and, indeed, the sober part of England were set against him.

Of course, his marriage to Mrs. Fitzherbert had no legal status; nor is there any reason for believing that she ever became a mother.  She had no children by her former two husbands, and Lord Stourton testified positively that she never had either son or daughter by Prince George.  Nevertheless, more than one American claimant has risen to advance some utterly visionary claim to the English throne by reason of alleged descent from Prince George and Mrs. Fitzherbert.