George Villiers (1759–1827)

The youngest son of the diplomat Lord Hyde (later Earl of Clarendon), he was an intimate of Princess Amelia and personal supporter of her father, George III.

This exposure touched off a public scandal; Villiers promptly surrendered all his property to the Crown and threw himself on the king's mercy.

[6] On 19 March 1792, shortly after his entry into Parliament, Villiers was appointed to the office of Paymaster of Marines, a sinecure which would ultimately prove his undoing.

Though a friend of Pitt's government, he rarely attended the House; George Rose commented in a letter that Villiers's loss would have no impact on the Tories.

He was allowed to hold simultaneous office as a groom of the bedchamber and paymaster, and the king determined to place him in charge of his farms at Windsor as bailiff.

Villiers and his wife were particularly intimate with Princess Amelia, the king's favourite daughter, accounting in part for the Royal favour shown him.

[2] In 1809, upon the death of John Fordyce, Surveyor General of the Land Revenues of the Crown, Portland proposed to replace that office and that of the Surveyor General of Woods, Forests, Parks, and Chases, then held by Lord Glenbervie, with a three-man commission (the Commissioners of Woods and Forests), and to make Villiers one of the junior commissioners.

for "reasons...which can never be publicly alluded to"[2] and had received a promise from Portland to replace Fordyce as Surveyor General of the Land Revenues (a post worth £2,000 p.a.

On the advice of his brother-in-law Boringdon, Villiers offered up all his property to the Crown, although he could not hope to pay off the entire sum found wanting by this means.

He was to some degree protected by the joint efforts of Boringdon's friends and the Whig George Tierney, as well as his own quick action in surrendering his property through writs of extent; and the delinquency of Joseph Hunt, Treasurer of the Ordnance attracted attention and saved Villiers from the full wrath of the finance committee.

Their report on the matter noted that the writ of extent had been to the amount of £264,000, but only £91,000 had been raised from the sale of his property, and about £30,000 from securities and the bond posted for him when he took office.

After his resignation, Villiers had been replaced by Lord Mulgrave's brother, Edmund Phipps,[18] as paymaster and lost his prospective place as a commissioner of woods and forests.

Then, he was informed on 4 May 1810, after the release of the finance committee's report, that the king had removed from him the supervision of the farms at Windsor (he also lost the rangership).

The news threw him into a state of great mental distress; he wrote to the king begging him to suspend judgement on the points raised by the committee's report.

After her death, Villiers and his wife attempted to blackmail the Royal Family by threatening (in a letter to her doctor, Sir Henry Halford) to release some of her correspondence, much to the shock of her sister, Princess Mary.