The Pursuit of Pleasure

the long version

The beautiful Elizabeth Gunning, is now happily married to her second husband the Duke of Argyll. But the children of the first and second marriages are headstrong and wayward, in particular the eldest daughter, Lady Betty Hamilton, whom both Sir Joshua Reynolds and Romney have immortalised in their famous paintings. Betty's life as a society queen in the reign of George III was exceptionally brilliant, but it ended in disaster. Her brother Douglas, Duke of Hamilton, and her half-sister, Lady Augusta Campbell, were equally intransigent, and to all of them the pursuit of pleasure was the one goal in life. Elizabeth, their beautiful, unworldly mother, did her best to restrain them and to mend their shattered lives,in which she was partially successful. The story here told is a glittering pageant of life as lived in the youth of the handsome Prince of Wales, the future Prince Regent and George IV.