George IV

by Stella Tillyard

  None of these relations were made any easier by a return of the king’s madness at various times between 1801 and 1804, and by an accusation of adultery levelled at Princess Caroline by Lady Douglas, the wife of a soldier, Sir John Douglas, who lived near the princess in Blackheath. Rumours also flew around that the princess had been pregnant in 1802. Finally, in 1806, a Commission of Inquiry was launched to consider the allegations against her. The commission’s report exonerated the princess, more or less, but offered numerous examples of her extravagantly wounded behaviour and her lack of political savvy. George III was upset at what he called Caroline’s ‘Levity and profligacy’, and decided to cut all intimate and friendly contact with her.26 Subsequent displays of what the king called ‘outward marks of civility’, which meant that he was polite to his daughter-in-law in public but would no longer see her in private, exacerbated the princess’s loneliness and did not bode well for the future.27

  During the next four years, the king’s health declined, and took a final turn for the worse just before his youngest daughter, Amelia, died of consumption in November 1810 at the age of twenty-seven. In 1810, George III was seventy-two, a man plunged already into old age. He was frail and almost blind, unable to identify people by sight. At the end of October, familiar symptoms of his madness appeared. He began talking hurriedly, wildly and scatologically. Few around him had hopes of a permanent recovery, although no immediate steps were taken by Tory ministers to put forward a Regency Bill that might result in their dismissal and replacement with a Whig government.

  For a while at the beginning of 1811 the doctors held out hope that the king was recovering, but as the weeks passed without any change in his condition a Regency Bill could not be delayed for long. At this point the prince disappointed most of his Whig friends by declaring to the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, his ‘intention not to remove from their stations … his Majesty’s official servants’.28 In one sense the prince’s decision to keep the incumbent Tory administration was pragmatic: it allowed for continuity if the king should recover. The Act of Parliament declaring the Regency was finally passed on 5 February 1811. The Prince of Wales was formally sworn in as Regent at Carlton House the next day, when ministers and officials lined up to kiss his hand, Prime Minister Spencer Perceval chief among them. For George, the time had finally come to govern, if not to rule.

  4

  Regent of Style

  Under the terms of the act that enabled the Regency, George III was suspended from carrying out his royal functions and the Prince of Wales, as Regent, assumed their discharge on behalf of the king and in his name. The Prince Regent was vested with full royal powers, and was therefore king in all but name. As he had declared that he would before the passing of the Regency Act, the prince kept on the Tory administration, showing little inclination, even after it was clear that his father would not recover, to make any change in the government. To his old Whig allies, this inaction was dismaying confirmation that the prince’s political priorities, shaken by the French Revolution and the long subsequent wars, had shifted away from them.

  George’s lack of active involvement in government lay partly in his indolence. He continued to dislike official business, grumbling that, ‘Playing at King is no sinecure.’1 But he had also lost any taste for political change. When the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, was bizarrely assassinated by a disgruntled debtor in May 1812, the prince made it clear that he wanted an all-party administration. Both men he chose as potential prime ministers, the Tory Richard Wellesley and the Whig Earl of Moira, refused to lead a government in such circumstances. By the end of the first week in June, only four weeks after Perceval’s assassination, George reappointed all the ministers of the Perceval administration, with Lord Liverpool at their head. Whether this was shrewd politicking or pragmatic laziness was unclear; but the Whigs were left out and Tory rule continued.

  Lord Liverpool was an experienced politician; he took the issue of Catholic emancipation off the table, and succeeded in holding the administration together through the remaining years of war and the domestic crises that followed, right up until his retirement after a stroke in 1827. From the time Lord Liverpool became prime minister, until the crisis over Catholic emancipation became acute years later when he was king, George took little detailed interest in the day-to-day activities of government. He continued to follow the progress of the long wars closely, but restricted his domestic involvement to necessary meetings and signings of papers.

  In defiance of any notion that his more public role should be accompanied by a show of economy in keeping with the needs of the times, the prince started the new era of the Regency as he meant to continue. On 19 June 1811, despite the fact that his debts still amounted to over half a million pounds, he threw a grand fête at Carlton House, notionally for exiled members of the French royal family, but actually and symbolically to inaugurate his regency. Over two thousand invitations were despatched; one of the state rooms was hung with blue silk decorated with fleurs-de-lys, and the prince welcomed his French royal guests there, dressed in a newly designed uniform of a field marshal, a rank to which his father had never promoted him.

  Breathless accounts of the banquet that night spoke of a fountain springing from the middle of the prince’s table and goldfish swimming in specially constructed silver troughs embanked with mossy plants and flowers, but in fact the splendour was as much a matter of adaptation and embellishment as of new construction. The plan of the dinner tables in the fan-vaulted neo-Gothic conservatory drawn up for that night shows that the water feature did not sprout from the prince’s table as report had it, but from a pond or fountain that probably already existed there.2 This did not stop the poet Shelley claiming that the fête cost £120,000, and nothing could staunch more general criticism of the prince’s profligacy and cavalier attitude to the public purse at a time when many were suffering poverty and hardship.

  The contrast with George III, both in the present and the past, could not have been greater, and since the cause of the prince’s extravagance lay partly in his father’s parsimony, he was unlikely ever to change. He was never able and never really felt the need to keep within his income. George was generous as well as extravagant, as fond of giving pensions as he was parties and presents. Mrs Fitzherbert, now finally removed from his affections and supplanted by Lady Hertford, was pensioned off in 1811. George gave her £10,000 a year and he went on adding to his pension bill with other generous rewards for service. At his death, his annual pension bill stood at £20,000. Though his personal debts were paid off by his private estate, the pensions he had granted would have to be defrayed by the taxpayer.

  From the time he had his own household, George was an expansive patron, an inveterate buyer and commissioner, and a builder who took a personal and genuine interest in the details of interior decoration in particular. Since he also hated to be alone, his interests centred on places, spaces, pastimes and occasions that allowed him to be in congenial company. As a young man, he had seized every opportunity for jaunts and visits: to the races, to the drawing rooms of his Whig friends, to clubs and dinners, to the play and the opera, bare-knuckle fights and boxing matches. He watched the first manned balloon flight in England take off from the Royal Artillery Ground on the edge of the City of London in September 1784, Signor Lunardi aboard, accompanied by a dog, a cat and a pigeon in a cage. He often attended lectures at the Royal Institution and especially enjoyed the annual dinners at the Royal Academy.

  Children who came to visit the prince found stacks of toys that he had bought for them to play with, and he was always happy to join in their fun or, later, if he was at Windsor, take them in his phaeton to the menagerie in the park, a private zoo stocked with exotic creatures and birds. He could write tenderly to children he was fond of, and often gave them presents to take away.

  The prince’s favourite pastime was always music. He liked nothing better than an evening at the piano, when he would sing opera favourites and popular so
ngs in his light and pleasant tenor voice. He also showed admiration for musicians, a quality that demanded humility in himself. When Gioachino Rossini visited London and Buckingham Palace in 1823, George accompanied him on the piano while he sang, and apologized for failing to keep good time. Rossini was suitably impressed, telling his host that ‘[t]here are few in your Royal Highness’s position who could play so well’, and then swiftly asked for ‘God Save the King’ to be played.3

  Literature was a less sociable pastime than music, although shortly after he became king, George agreed to sponsor a new Royal Society of Literature to ‘reward literary merit and patronage; to excite literary talent by premiums’, as the Literary Gazette put it in its announcement of the society’s foundation.4 Yet here too the prince showed skill, especially if he wasn’t penning his interminable love letters. He had a polished writing style, and could turn an elegant phrase when he wished to. When the Duke of Wellington – a man he admired and disliked in equal measure – sent a letter resigning as commander-in-chief of the army in 1827, George replied with cutting brevity: ‘The King assures the Duke of Wellington that the King receives the Duke’s resignation of the offices of Commander-in-Chief and Master-General of the Ordnance with the same sentiments of deep regret with which the Duke states himself to offer it. The King abstains from any further expression of his feelings.’5

  The depth of George’s private reading as an adult is uncertain, but he was certainly well educated and an efficient skimmer, and in his last years was reported to have read a good deal. He remembered his reading well enough to engage Lord Byron in half an hour’s conversation about poets and poetry in 1812.6 He declared that he had read deeply in French literature of the seventeenth century, citing Madame de Sévigné, Madame de La Fayette and Madame de Bavière, whom his sceptical listener Dorothea Lieven did not try to identify, but who was almost certainly the Princess Palatine, Elizabeth Charlotte of Bavaria.7 He became obsessed with Napoleon, and bought every book he could find about him, adding them to his library in Carlton House. Through his librarian, James Stanier Clarke, he made it known to Jane Austen, when she visited the library in 1815, that she might, if she wished, dedicate her novel Emma, to him, though it was, as Clarke put it, ‘certainly not incumbent on you’ to do so.8 She did.

  Though he certainly read and enjoyed Jane Austen, Walter Scott was George’s favourite among living writers. Scott was the most popular author in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, and largely responsible for the cult of Romantic Scotland that caught up not only a huge reading audience, but the theatre, opera and music, as well as any Scots themselves. A self-consciously archaizing creation of tradition was Scott’s hallmark, and it appealed to the prince just as much as the plundering of global styles that went on in his creation of the Pavilion at Brighton. He could quote extensively from Scott’s works, and recite reams of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and other poems.

  It was perhaps in this archaizing spirit that George encouraged the publication of the surviving papers of the Stuart kings and a biography of James II. In 1823, moreover, he gave his father’s entire collection of books, maps and pamphlets to the British Museum, which had been founded in 1753. The donation of the King’s Library prompted the demolition of the existing museum and its replacement with a new building that would house both library and museum.

  In the creation of a public gallery for the enjoyment of painting and sculpture, however, the British royal family lagged behind other European monarchs and governments. The Habsburgs had opened the Vienna Picture Gallery in the Belvedere Palace in 1781 and the Louvre had been transformed into a public museum in 1791. The National Gallery was finally established in 1824, though not with a starting point in the Royal Collection, as so many European national galleries had either by design or when monarchies were downgraded or abolished.9

  If the prince was nothing like the great collector of books that his father had been, he made up for it in the enthusiastic acquisition, and often design, of robes, clothes and ceremonial garb of all kinds. As a young man setting out to oppose the simple habits of his father, he cultivated a fastidious and knowledgeable appreciation of cloth, fashion and fine dress. He demanded the highest standards of his tailors. Button placings, fabrics, linings and trimmings: all had frequently to be replaced or altered. Repeated alterations meant that one particular coat cost £600.

  In his youth, the prince was a leader of fashion and style. He insisted that envelopes addressed to him be folded in a particular, and complicated, ‘French fashion’.10 He took similar care with his clothes. For his first address to Parliament, he wore a black velvet suit, embroidered with gold thread and lined in pink satin, with pink heels to his shoes and his hair frizzed and curled. He ordered not just quality but also quantity. By the time of the Regency, he owned hundreds of dress suits and, between 1811 and 1820, bought at least five hundred shirts. He was very fond of military uniforms, both to design and wear and to collect. When he wanted distraction in 1829 from duties that distressed him, he amused himself ‘devising a new dress for the Guards’, and he had eight field marshals’ full-dress uniforms in his wardrobe by the time he died.11

  After the age of thirty-five, much of George’s tailoring was carefully crafted to hide his enormous bulk, about which he was extremely sensitive. His morning gowns were cut extra-wide and very long, and he usually wore ‘a huge white neckcloth of many folds, out of which his chin seemed to be always struggling to emerge’, as one visitor put it.12 For a long time he resisted the fashion for trousers, which had the triple disadvantage of having been taken up in post-Revolutionary France, of being introduced into Britain by his erstwhile friend Beau Brummel, and of being best suited to the dandy elegance and slim form that Brummel made fashionable. But he wore them in the end, covered with a long jacket or coat. Although he clung to the embroidery and bright colours of his youth, he also gradually adopted even the buff, chestnut, dark blue and black of Brummell’s outfits, and kept gaudy attire for ceremonial and theatrical moments, such as official levees or his trip to Scotland in 1822.

  Dress and all its associated pleasures of jewels and trinkets allowed the prince to indulge his compulsive need not just to spend, but collect and keep. Like many people who have lacked consistent affection in childhood, George seems to have found it impossible to throw anything away. He acquired the habit of accumulation early and it never left him. A huge quantity of stuff was cleared out and auctioned off after his death, and we will never know the scope and size of this strange collection, or what it might have told us about the man who made it. Writing in her self-conscious and priggish diary after the king’s death in 1830, the Duke of Wellington’s friend Mrs Arbuthnot recorded the duke’s horror at finding ‘trinkets of all sorts, quantities of women’s gloves, dirty snuffy pocket handkerchiefs with old faded nosegays tied up in them’. The fastidious Wellington was disgusted. ‘[S]uch a collection of trash he had never seen before,’ he declared, and ‘said he thought the best thing wd be to burn them all.’13 This is what seems to have happened; no trace of this stuff is left in the Royal Collection.

  One record survives of what the less public spaces of the prince’s residences might have contained. A whole attic storey of Carlton House, three large apartments run together, contained the prince’s ‘Armory’. This huge collection of weaponry and other military dress and objects from all over the world was arranged for display, if not freely available for visits. Some of it was imperial spoil, including the ‘chair of state, the footstool, and sceptre of the King of Candy’ and a ‘suit of horse-armour and costume belong[ing] to the late Tippoo Saib’. Elsewhere there were ‘caps, turbans, shields, bows, arrows, and other missiles of the Eastern nations; bows, arrows, spears, shields, battle-axes and other implements military and domestic, also various dresses, of the inhabitants of the southern hemisphere’ and spurs and boots worn by particular generals. Some things, such as the ‘dagger of Gengis Khan’, had, in the definiteness of their attribution, a
strong hint of fakery about them.14

  While he waited to inherit the throne, George amassed his vast collections without the space to put much on display. Eventually, as king, he moved much of his art collection to the new state rooms of the enlarged Buckingham Palace and the series of state rooms and the grand corridor at Windsor Castle, the design, construction and hanging of which he oversaw very closely. Other pieces and collections were sent to various royal residences; many of the things he wanted to see and enjoy for himself went to the Brighton Pavilion and his private rooms at Windsor.

  As history painting declined at the end of the eighteenth century, fineness of execution took over from the idea of fineness of representation as a way of judging and valuing a painting. In upholding this new standard, which extolled exquisite brushwork and accuracy of depiction, the prince was typical of his time. The representation of grand ideas or historical events held no attraction for him. He bought no history painting at all and almost completely eschewed the mid to late eighteenth-century taste in mythic and neoclassical fable, landscape and figuration. Of the British artists who championed history painting, he was interested only in Sir Joshua Reynolds, buying several of Reynolds’s paintings after the artist’s death.

  In common with other collectors of his time and in keeping with this new standard, George focused on genre painting and landscape, with a particular emphasis on seventeenth-century paintings from the Low Countries: the Dutch Golden Age. His collection of Dutch painting, the core of which was acquired from Sir Thomas Baring in 1814, and first hung in Carlton House and then divided between Buckingham Palace and Windsor, was of the highest standard. The prized qualities of freshness of touch, skill in handling paint and in depicting light, shade and detail were everywhere on display. By 1819 over seventy-five Dutch and Flemish paintings hung in Carlton House, displayed in groups.