Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
Edmund Blackadder now serves the Prince Regent, George, as a butler whose intelligence far exceeds his employer’s. He has lost the aristocratic standing of earlier Blackadders but finds plenty of ways to benefit from a prince who cannot manage his money or reputation. Baldrick works below stairs, while Mrs. Miggins’s coffeehouse brings Blackadder into contact with the fashionable arguments of the day. The setting is a deliberately muddled Regency, with politics, literature and revolution supplying fresh opportunities for fraud.
When William Pitt threatens the Prince’s income, Blackadder engineers a by-election in the rotten borough of Dunny-on-the-Wold and gets Baldrick elected. That supposed solution backfires when Baldrick votes for Pitt. Literary patronage becomes another emergency after Baldrick burns Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and Blackadder faces the task of replacing it. A wager sends him looking for a French aristocrat to rescue, while a threat to the Prince’s life produces an attempt to improve his public speaking. Blackadder also tries to solve George’s financial problems through marriage to an industrialist’s daughter, only to encounter a highwayman’s interference.
George finally creates a problem money cannot easily settle when the Duke of Wellington demands a duel over his involvement with the Duke’s nieces. Blackadder and George exchange identities, and Blackadder hopes his Scottish cousin MacAdder will fight instead. With MacAdder unavailable, he faces Wellington himself and survives because a case in his pocket stops the shot. Wellington then kills the real George, believing him an insolent servant. The King accepts Blackadder as his son without noticing the substitution, leaving the butler to retain the Prince’s identity. George briefly revives, then discovers he has no protective case and dies.