George IV

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  In April 1830, the Duke of Wellington wrote down what King George IV had eaten for breakfast. There was a pigeon and beef steak pie, most of a bottle of Moselle, a glass of dry champagne, two glasses of port and a glass of brandy. A large dose of laudanum, the opium drug, followed. The man at the table had lost the sight of one eye and would be dead within a few months.

  George IV was king of the United Kingdom and of Hanover for ten years, after a long stretch as prince regent. Those who met him often described a charming, cultured man. Yet his ministers found him selfish, unreliable and irresponsible, and strongly swayed by favourites.

  How does a clever prince end up as someone his government could not trust? Why did the law refuse to recognise his first marriage, and why did his second go so badly? And what finally made a king who opposed Catholic emancipation allow it to become law?

  454850442

• 2. Early Excess

  ›

  George was born on the 12th of August 1762 at St James's Palace in London, the first child of King George III and Queen Charlotte. As the eldest son of a sovereign, he was Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay from birth. A few days later he was also created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester. He was a talented student who picked up French, German and Italian alongside his native English.

  At eighteen, Prince George was given a household of his own and threw himself into heavy drinking, numerous mistresses and constant escapades. His father was prosaic and free of scandal, so the contrast was dramatic. The prince was a witty talker, drunk or sober, and his taste in decorating was good but grossly expensive.

  When George turned 21 in 1783, Parliament gave him a grant of £60,000 and his father added £50,000 a year. It was far too little. His stables alone cost £31,000 a year. He settled at Carlton House and lived lavishly, while his father, a political conservative, grew steadily more hostile. The King also resented the prince's loyalty to Charles James Fox and other radically inclined politicians.

  In 1790, the prince's jockey Samuel Chifney and his racehorse Escape were caught in a scandal over a perceived reversal of form. The Newmarket stewards rejected Chifney's explanation. They warned the prince that no gentleman would race against him if he kept using the jockey. Rather than make an example of Chifney, the prince sold his stable and left the turf. He told Chifney he was unlikely to return to ownership, "but if I ever do, Sam Chifney, you shall train and manage them. You shall have your 200 guineas a year all the same. I cannot give it to you for your life, I can only give it to you for my own. You have been a good and honest servant to me." The Jockey Club pleaded with him, but he never went back to Newmarket.

  Soon after reaching 21, the prince became infatuated with Maria Fitzherbert. She was a commoner, though a baronet's granddaughter, six years older than him, twice widowed and a Roman Catholic. Two laws stood in his way. The Act of Settlement 1701 barred the spouse of a Catholic from the throne, and the Royal Marriages Act 1772 forbade his marrying without the King's consent. He was determined all the same.

  The couple went through a ceremony on the 15th of December 1785 at Fitzherbert's house in Park Street, Mayfair. Legally it was void, because the King's consent was never even requested. Fitzherbert held that church law outranked state law, so she believed she was the prince's true wife. For political reasons the marriage was kept secret, and she promised not to reveal it. By spring 1786, however, the press hinted at it, and satirical prints mocked the clandestine wedding.

  Debt then forced the prince out of Carlton House and into Fitzherbert's residence, because his father would not help. In 1787 his political allies proposed that Parliament pay his debts. Revealing an illegal marriage would have scandalised the nation and sunk the proposal. On the prince's authority, Charles James Fox declared the story a calumny. Fitzherbert was displeased by such vehement language and considered leaving him. He calmed her by asking Richard Brinsley Sheridan to restate Fox's denial in more careful words. Parliament, meanwhile, granted the prince £161,000 for his debts and £60,000 for improvements to Carlton House.

  43394564

• 3. The Regency Crisis

  ›

  In the summer of 1788, King George III's mental health deteriorated. He still managed some duties, and he prorogued Parliament from the 25th of September to the 20th of November. During that break he became deranged and a danger to his own life. When Parliament met again in November, he could not deliver the speech from the throne. Long-established law said no business could proceed without it.

  Charles James Fox argued in the Commons that Prince George was automatically entitled to exercise sovereignty while the King was incapable. Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger disagreed. Without a statute, he said, the choice of a regent belonged to Parliament alone. Without its authority, he declared, "the Prince of Wales had no more right... to assume the government, than any other individual subject of the country". Even so, Pitt and Fox agreed that the prince was the most convenient choice.

  The prince was offended by Pitt's boldness, but he did not back Fox's approach in full. His brother Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, announced that George would claim no power without the consent of Parliament. Pitt then outlined a plan that limited the prince's powers sharply. George could not sell the King's property, and he could not grant a peerage to anyone except a child of the King. The prince denounced it as a "project for producing weakness, disorder, and insecurity in every branch of the administration of affairs". In the national interest, both factions compromised.

  The deeper obstacle was the Great Seal of the Realm. Royal representatives called Lords Commissioners could deliver the speech in the King's place. But they needed a document bearing the Great Seal, and the seal could not legally be applied without the sovereign's authorisation. Pitt and his fellow ministers ignored that rule and told the Lord Chancellor to apply it anyway. Edmund Burke denounced the device as "forgery, fraud", a "glaring falsehood" and a "palpable absurdity". Prince Frederick called it "unconstitutional and illegal". Others felt it was necessary to keep government working.

  On the 3rd of February 1789, more than two months after Parliament had convened, an "illegal" group of Lords Commissioners finally opened it. The Regency Bill was introduced, but the King recovered before it passed. He then declared retroactively that the instrument authorising the commissioners was valid. The trick would not be forgotten, because Parliament reached for the same method when the King fell ill again in late 1810.

  413984345

• 4. An Unwanted Bride

  ›

  In 1795, with his debts still climbing, Prince George agreed to marry his cousin Princess Caroline of Brunswick. His father had refused to help him unless he did. They married on the 8th of April 1795 at the Chapel Royal, St James's Palace. Each was unsuited to the other, and the marriage was disastrous. After the birth of their only child, Princess Charlotte, in 1796, they formally separated and stayed apart. George remained attached to Maria Fitzherbert for the rest of his life, despite several periods of estrangement.

  Mary Robinson, an actress whom he paid to leave the stage, was among his mistresses. So was Grace Elliott, the divorced wife of a physician. Frances Villiers, Countess of Jersey, dominated his life for some years. In later life came Isabella Ingram-Seymour-Conway, Marchioness of Hertford, and then Elizabeth Conyngham, Marchioness Conyngham.

  Rumour credited George with several illegitimate children. James Ord, born in 1786, was reportedly his son by Fitzherbert, and he moved to the United States and became a Jesuit priest. Late in life, George told a friend he had a son who was a naval officer in the West Indies. That officer has been tentatively identified as Captain Henry A. F. Hervey, reportedly the child of the songwriter Lady Anne Lindsay. Anthony Camp, Director of Research at the Society of Genealogists, dismissed the claims about Ord, Hervey, William Hampshire and Charles "Beau" Candy as fictitious.

  By 1795, George's debts had reached the extraordinary sum of £630,000. Parliament was unwilling to make an outright grant, so it passed an act giving him an extra £65,000 each year. A further £60,000 followed in 1803. His debts as of 1795 were finally cleared in 1806, though the money he had borrowed since remained unpaid.

  In 1804, a quarrel over the custody of Princess Charlotte ended with the girl placed in the King's care. It also led to a parliamentary commission of enquiry into Caroline's conduct, after her husband accused her of having an illegitimate son. The investigation cleared her of that charge. It still revealed that her behaviour had been extraordinarily indiscreet.

  343101211

• 5. Regent and Tastemaker

  ›

  Late in 1810, the death of the King's youngest daughter, Princess Amelia, broke his mental health again. Parliament passed the Regency Act 1811, which restricted some of the prince's powers for one year. He became Prince Regent on the 5th of February 1811. Under him, ministers took full charge of government affairs, and he played a far smaller role than his father. The principle took hold that the prime minister was whoever had a majority in the House of Commons, whether or not the monarch liked him.

  Catholic emancipation, the campaign to lift political disabilities on Roman Catholics, was the great dispute of the day. Prime Minister Spencer Perceval and the Tories opposed it, while the Whigs supported it. Everyone expected the Regent to turn to the Whig leader, Lord Grenville. Instead, influenced by his mother, he claimed that dismissing the Tories would harm the King's health and destroy any chance of recovery. In 1812 he asked the Whigs to join Perceval's ministry, but they refused over Catholic emancipation.

  On the 11th of May 1812, John Bellingham assassinated Perceval. The Regent offered the leadership first to Lord Wellesley and then to Lord Moira. He doomed both attempts by forcing each man to build an all-party ministry when neither party wished to share power. Possibly using that failure as a pretext, he reappointed the Perceval administration with Lord Liverpool as prime minister.

  Liverpool's Tories wanted to keep up the vigorous war against Napoleon. An alliance of Russia, Prussia, Austria, Britain and several smaller countries defeated him in 1814. At the Congress of Vienna, the Electorate of Hanover, which had shared a monarch with Britain since 1714, was raised to a kingdom. Napoleon returned from exile in 1815 and was beaten at the Battle of Waterloo by the Duke of Wellington, brother of Lord Wellesley.

  Meanwhile the Regent's circle set the look of an age. The dandy Beau Brummell and the architect John Nash helped create the Regency style, seen in the terraces of Regent's Park and Regent Street. George took up the new fashion for the seaside spa. He had Nash turn the Royal Pavilion at Brighton into a fantastical palace in an "Indian Gothic" style, inspired loosely by the Taj Mahal, with extravagant "Indian" and "Chinese" interiors. Nash also remodelled Buckingham Palace, and Jeffry Wyatville rebuilt Windsor Castle, where George would spend most of his later reign.

  4415485046

• 6. The Coronation Quarrel

  ›

  When George III died in 1820, the Prince Regent, then aged 57, became George IV with no real change in his powers. By then he was obese and possibly addicted to laudanum. He and Caroline had lived apart since 1796, and both were having affairs. In 1814 she had left the United Kingdom for continental Europe, but she chose to return for his coronation and publicly assert her rights as queen consort.

  George refused to recognise her as queen. He commanded British ambassadors to make sure that monarchs in foreign courts did the same. By royal command, her name was cut from the Book of Common Prayer, the liturgy of the Church of England. He wanted a divorce, but his advisors warned that divorce proceedings might expose details of his own adulterous relationships.

  He therefore requested the Pains and Penalties Bill, under which Parliament could have imposed legal penalties without a trial in a court of law. The bill would have annulled the marriage and stripped Caroline of the title of queen. The public hated it, and it was withdrawn. George still excluded his wife from his coronation at Westminster Abbey on the 19th of July 1821. Caroline fell ill that day and died on the 7th of August. During her final illness she often said she thought she had been poisoned.

  The coronation cost about £243,000, a magnificent and expensive affair, and yet it proved popular. In 1821 George became the first monarch to pay a state visit to Ireland since Richard II of England. The following year he went to Edinburgh for "one and twenty daft days". Sir Walter Scott organised the trip, the first by a reigning monarch since the mid-17th century. That visit to Scotland led to the revival, if not the creation, of Scottish tartan dress as it is known today.

  4448494550

• 7. The Catholic Question

  ›

  In 1797, George had proposed a Catholic Emancipation Bill for Ireland, so many assumed he would back the cause. His real views emerged in 1813, when he privately canvassed against the Catholic Relief Bill, which was defeated. By 1824 he was denouncing emancipation in public. He argued that the oath he took on his accession bound him to uphold the Protestant faith, and he could support no pro-Catholic measure. The Crown's influence was so great, and the Tories under Liverpool so determined, that emancipation seemed hopeless.

  In 1827, Liverpool retired and was replaced by George Canning, a Tory who favoured emancipation. Until then the King had been content to instruct his ministers privately. Now he made a public declaration that his sentiments were those of his revered father, George III. The most conservative Tories, including the Duke of Wellington, disliked Canning's views. The ministry had to include Whigs. Canning died later that year, leaving Lord Goderich to lead a fragile Tory and Whig coalition.

  Goderich left office in 1828, and Wellington took over. By then the Duke had accepted that refusing Roman Catholics some measure of relief was politically untenable. George was never as friendly with Wellington as he had been with Canning. He liked to annoy the Duke by pretending that he had fought at Waterloo disguised as a German general.

  With great difficulty, Wellington won the King's consent to introduce a Catholic Relief Bill on the 29th of January 1829. Then Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, the King's fanatically anti-Catholic brother, applied pressure. George withdrew his approval, and on the 4th of March the Cabinet resigned en masse in protest. The next day, under intense political pressure, the King reluctantly gave way and the ministry stayed in power. The Catholic Relief Act received royal assent on the 13th of April.

  4445485040

• 8. Death and Verdicts

  ›

  By 1797, the Prince of Wales weighed 17 st 7 lb, and by 1824 his corset was made for a waist of 50 in. Huge banquets and heavy drinking had made him a target of ridicule on the rare occasions he appeared in public. He also had gout, arteriosclerosis, peripheral edema, then called dropsy, and possibly porphyria.

  A senior aide confided to his diary that "a more contemptible, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling dog does not exist". By December 1828, like his father, George was almost completely blind from cataracts. Gout in his right hand and arm was so severe that he could no longer sign documents. In mid-1829, David Wilkie reported that the King was wasting away and looked "like a great sausage stuffed into the covering". Severe bladder pains led George to take laudanum, which left him drugged and mentally impaired for days. He had surgery to remove a cataract in September 1829, and he regularly took over 100 drops of laudanum before state occasions.

  By the spring of 1830, he was largely confined to his bedchambers and described himself as "as blind as a beetle". He approved legislation with a stamp of his signature, in front of witnesses. His weight was recorded as 20 st. Breathlessness from dropsy forced him to sleep upright in a chair, and doctors frequently tapped his abdomen to drain fluid. His physician, Sir Henry Halford, wrote to Maria Fitzherbert in June that "His Majesty's constitution is a gigantic one". Yet The Lancet called Halford's bulletins "utterly and entirely destitute of information" and said his treatment, which used both opium and laudanum as sedatives, seemed to lack sense or direction.

  George dictated his will in May and grew very devout. He confessed to an archdeacon that he repented of his dissolute life, but hoped for mercy because he had always tried to do his best for his subjects. By June he could not lie down. He received the Sacrament on the 14th of June in the presence of Lady Conyngham, Halford and a clergyman. Halford told the Cabinet on the 24th of June only that the King's cough continued. Privately he told his wife, "I shall be released about Monday."

  At about three in the morning on the 26th of June 1830, George woke at Windsor Castle with a bloody evacuation. He sent for Halford, allegedly crying "Sir Henry! Sir Henry! Fetch him; this is death!" Accounts of his last words differ. One has him saying "Surely, this must be death". Another has him calling out "Good God, what is this?" and telling his page, "my boy, this is death". He died at 3:15 am. The autopsy found that a ruptured blood vessel in his stomach had caused fatal upper gastrointestinal bleeding. A tumour "the size of an orange" was attached to his bladder, and his heart was enlarged. He was buried in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, on the 15th of July.

  His only legitimate child, Charlotte, had died in 1817 from post-partum complications after delivering a stillborn son. His brother Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, had died childless in 1827. The throne therefore passed to another brother, William, Duke of Clarence, who reigned as William IV.

  The label "First Gentleman of England" came from George's style and manners. He was bright, clever and knowledgeable, but laziness and gluttony made him squander much of his talent. The Times said he would always prefer "a girl and a bottle to politics and a sermon". Wellington, in the middle of the Catholic crisis, called him the most selfish and most false man he had ever met. Yet Wellington's eulogy in the House of Lords praised him as "the most accomplished man of his age". Wellington later settled on a fairer picture of "a medley of the most opposite qualities, with a great preponderance of good".

  The Times was harsher at his death. "There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king. What eye has wept for him?" it asked. Yet statues of him stand across the country, many raised during his reign, including Sir Francis Chantrey's bronze of him on horseback in Trafalgar Square. In Edinburgh, George IV Bridge was designed by Thomas Hamilton in 1829 and completed in 1835. And King's Cross in north London takes its name from a short-lived monument to George IV, put up in the early 1830s.

  4445481721