So an aged and incapacitated king was replaced by an ailing one. George III was eighty-one when he died at Windsor on 29 January 1820, George IV fifty-seven when he finally inherited the throne. After a lifetime of waiting, he initially had no strength to carry out his duties. Too weak to attend his father’s funeral, he spent the days before it ill and preoccupied with the question of his marriage. His hated wife Caroline was now the queen, and she had every right to return to Britain. The opposition wanted her at least to come closer, to put pressure on the government. Very soon the matter had become urgent because, somewhat to the dismay of her lawyer, the MP Henry Brougham, Caroline was back. Without official recognition, she took an ordinary passenger boat from Calais, and landed at Dover on 5 June 1820.
At once Caroline became the focus of intense emotion. ‘The discussion of the Queen’s business is now become an intolerable nuisance in society,’ Greville wrote in his diary. ‘It is an incessant matter of argument and dispute what will be done and what ought to be done. All people express themselves tired of the subject, yet none talk or think of any other.’4 The problem was not just George IV’s implacable hatred of the queen; it was that Caroline became almost overnight the channel for public anger about issues that had nothing to do with her. She immediately became the symbol of monarchical high-handedness, political intransigence and a general feeling that the government and the king were as indifferent towards the rights and needs of ordinary people as they were to the rights of the queen. A disgruntled public flocked to her cause.
Parliamentarians of all persuasions were rattled. Lord Grey, the Whig leader, future prime minister and architect of the Reform Act of 1832, declared that if something was not done to address political concerns, Britain would see ‘a Jacobin Revolution more bloody than that of France’.5 The king, however, was unequivocal. He wanted Caroline to be forbidden the title of queen, and he wanted to divorce her on the grounds of alleged adultery with her Italian companion Bartolomeo Pergami. George’s agents had tracked the queen around Europe and taken testimony from a host of witnesses about numerous incidents in inns, in villas and in the cabin of a boat on which Caroline had sailed to the Holy Land. Now the king was determined to bring his wife to trial.
The queen’s trial – technically the reading of (i.e. debate on) a Bill of Pains and Penalties brought before the House of Lords on 5 July 1820 – was both highly sensational and severely compromised by the large sums of money paid to witnesses on both sides. Henry Brougham believed his client guilty and increasingly disliked her; yet he was bound to her defence by both principle and expediency. Caroline drew strength from the king’s unpopularity. Crowds accompanied her carriage to the House every day; demonstrations filled the streets of London. Notwithstanding the weight of the evidence, many believed that the case against the queen was concocted and the witnesses merely bought for cash. When the Lords eventually voted on the bill, the majority in its favour was so small that the government knew it could never pass the House of Commons, particularly since Brougham had shrewdly got hold of a copy of George IV’s will, in which he referred to Mrs Fitzherbert as his ‘dear wife’, thus compromising his right to the throne and to any moral high ground he might have been trying to take. So in November 1820 the bill was abandoned, although the government managed quietly to sneak through clauses that meant that Caroline would not be crowned and could not live in any royal residence.
These clauses set up the story for its sad denouement. Riotous joy greeted the abandonment of the bill. Ships in the Thames were decorated with trophies, the Duke of Wellington, who was now serving as Master-General of the Ordnance in Liverpool’s administration and was seen as the figurehead of the Tory government, was loudly booed in the streets, and the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, was ‘roughly handled at Covent Garden’.6 But popular fervour was dissipating. Caroline was forbidden from attending the coronation, which went ahead without her on 19 July 1821. She set out for the ceremony in her coach, but was turned away near Westminster Hall, and had to drive back to her house. Very soon afterwards she became ill; on 7 August she died.
Queen Caroline lived out, in her own particular way, the terrible hand dealt to royal princesses, who were married off and sent away, or brought in, as pawns in grand diplomatic games. Without power or choice, they were unable to have a fulfilling personal life of any kind if they were neglected by their spouses or did not love them. They were furthermore forced into complete passivity at a time when even aristocratic women had some choice over whom they married. Caroline’s unfitness for this unpalatable role was obvious from the beginning. Warnings, both of the price of rebellion and the price of compliance, were all around her. Her aunt, Caroline Matilda, had been callously married at fifteen to the King of Denmark, whom British diplomats knew already to have been suffering from a complex psychosexual disorder. She rebelled, and her defiant attempt to find love and meaning in her life ended in exile and early death. Obedience was little better. Queen Charlotte, Caroline’s mother-in-law, acted out her loneliness and powerlessness by isolating and terrorizing her six daughters and trying to forbid them marrying and having lives of their own. Caroline herself lived her mother’s role, sidelined by a husband who was able to pursue a romantic life with a series of other women. Being a royal prince was for the most part to live a useless life; being a royal princess more likely an unhappy and powerless one.
On the day Queen Caroline died, the king arrived at Holyhead in his yacht the Royal George, ‘in the best health and spirits’.7 He was on his way to Ireland, taking belated advantage of his freedom to travel wherever he wished. A few days after this, the queen’s coffin arrived in Harwich, where a great crowd watched it being lowered into the hold of a ship to be taken to Brunswick.
With the removal of the queen’s corpse from Britain, her haunting of the king was over. On his fifty-ninth birthday, George crossed the Irish Sea in a steamboat, carousing all the way and arriving at Howth in a very merry state. He was the first king to come to Ireland since James II and William III had fought for the English throne on Irish soil in 1690, a fact that it would have been impolitic to mention. Ireland, subdued after the failure of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the abolition of its parliament, and the union with Great Britain, was once again in a state of turmoil. Demands for independence would soon boil up if palliative measures for Catholics were not taken. In 1811 the brilliant lawyer Daniel O’Connell had founded the Catholic Board to campaign for emancipation.
George IV may have thought that his visit would calm the country’s social unease and political grievance; but he saw little of Ireland outside Dublin and the grandest houses, cosseted by the Protestant political class and by the enthusiasm of those who did turn out to see him. His Irish subjects appeared to be loyal everywhere he went, and he himself declared that his heart had always been Irish and that he loved the country. After a round of ritual and ceremony in Dublin, he left for Slane Castle in County Meath, where his mistress Lady Conyngham was waiting for him with her complaisant husband by her side, any embarrassment on his part tempered by his promotion to the British peerage and the Privy Council, as well as to the offices of Lord Steward of the Household and Constable and Governor of Windsor Castle.
When George left Ireland, after a visit of just over three weeks, it appeared to his entourage that differences between Catholics and Protestants had been smoothed over. Daniel O’Connell presented the king with a laurel crown before he got on the boat. Yet the victory was not the king’s. Two years later, O’Connell would found the Catholic Association to press not just for emancipation, which would have allowed Catholics to hold public office, but for the franchise, which would allow them, or some of them, to vote.
Only a few weeks after he arrived back from Ireland, George set off on his travels again, this time to the kingdom of Hanover, to which he had also acceded on his father’s death. On the way, he stopped in Brussels, where the Duke of Wellington was waiting to receive him. A grand banquet was given for him by
the King and Queen of the Netherlands at their palace at Laeken, an event that he enjoyed immensely, entertaining his hosts with a cruel and accurate imitation of a member of their family and being generally ‘very blackguard and entertaining’, as the Duke of Wellington put it.8
After a short stay in Brussels, the king visited the site of the Battle of Waterloo. The Duke of Wellington conducted the party over the battlefield, explaining the course of the battle as rain poured down. The king ‘took it all very coolly’, Wellington reported, and rummaged about hoping to unearth some bones. He didn’t ask any questions, or even say a word, Wellington went on, ‘till I showed him where Lord Anglesey’s leg was buried, and then he burst into tears’.9
From Waterloo the party proceeded to Hanover. George entered the town on horseback, and proceeded to a hasty coronation, which was followed by parties, royal levees, when he received guests, and other junkets that exhausted him. Revived by a few days of rest, he went to the university town of Göttingen, where a fulsome address by the town’s devoted citizens reduced him once more to tears.
These trips, accompanied as they were by gratifying cheers from his loyal subjects, and grand receptions, had given the king a taste for travel. The next year he was off again, this time to Scotland, travelling north by sea and landing at Leith on 15 August 1822. He had chosen his friend Sir Walter Scott to plan the outlines of the trip and be the master of ceremonies, while he himself concentrated on acquiring suitably grandiose costumes. His outfits for the whole tour cost well over a thousand pounds, made from fabric that included sixty-one yards of satin, thirty-one yards of velvet and seventeen and a half yards of cashmere, each woven in a different tartan pattern.
Scott did not disappoint him. The king was delighted with the tartan vision of Scotland that Scott served up, from a command performance of a dramatized version of his recent novel Rob Roy, published in 1817, to a procession through the streets of Edinburgh and a Caledonian ball where any guests who were competent accompanied paid dancers in Scottish reels.10 When he got back to London, George summoned the Scottish painter David Wilkie to paint him in Highland dress. The king looked astonishingly sylph-like and young in the finished picture, on which Wilkie laboured until 1829.
In fact, George was prematurely aged, his body breaking apart after decades of overindulgence and lack of activity. Released from its corsets, the king’s stomach now hung to his knees. After 1820 his face was usually covered in make-up when he appeared in public and his once fine brown hair was obscured or replaced with a wig. He weighed a great deal more than the seventeen stone and eight pounds recorded in 1797, when he had stood on the weighing scales at the wine merchant’s Berry Bros at the age of thirty-five, but as late as the early 1820s, he was still capable of putting away three bottles of claret at dinner.
The visit to Scotland was the last long trip the king took. Henceforward he lived most of the time at the Royal Lodge at Windsor, preferring it to the Pavilion, where he was exposed much more to the public gaze. Though he continued to take a notional interest in political and public affairs, infirmity was beginning to define his life. His eyesight was failing and he was often frail and in pain. Hugely swollen legs and feet meant he was unable to move easily. Stairs defeated him, and he was often carried up and down, and pushed about in a wheeled chair. State business had to come to him since he was rarely now in London, where he had no finished residence after the demolition of Carlton House in 1826 (its columns being reused on the front of the National Gallery) to make room for the development of Carlton House Terrace and while Buckingham Palace was being rebuilt.
George Greville visited Windsor for a session of the Privy Council in June 1827, and reported that the Royal Lodge, which the king had taken over because the castle was also undergoing very extensive renovation and remodelling, ‘is a delightful place to live in, but the rooms are too low and too small for very large parties. Nothing can exceed the luxury of the internal arrangements.’ The king, he wrote, ‘was very well and in excellent spirits, but very weak in his knees and could not walk without difficulty’.11 By this time, the king’s love for Lady Conyngham had cooled, but he remained fond of her family and still needed her company.
As Greville noted, spending, both on upkeep of the royal buildings, and on renovations, continued unabated. Even after the demolition of Carlton House, which must have cut his expenses a little, the king was paying for the Brighton Pavilion, the Royal George and Prince Regent yachts, a house at Ascot Heath, St James’s Palace, Stud Lodge, Buckingham and Kensington Palaces, Cumberland Lodge, the new Royal Mews built in 1825 in the grounds of Buckingham Palace after the old mews at Charing Cross had been demolished to make way for Trafalgar Square, the Ranger’s Cottage in Bushy Park, Kew Palace and Windsor Castle and its various dependencies. His income from all sources, now efficiently managed by William Knighton, Keeper of the Privy Purse, was around £90,000 a year, but even this was never enough.
The decorative pageant of the king’s Irish visit had not dampened calls for Catholic emancipation, and since Catholic emancipation was inevitably connected with a more general reform of the franchise, an ominous political storm was now gathering. It was precipitated by the illness of Lord Liverpool, who had a stroke in February 1827. Pretty soon it was obvious that he would not be able to continue as prime minister and his incapacity threw the Tory government into disarray. The three senior politicians in the party, the Duke of Wellington, the home secretary Robert Peel and the foreign secretary George Canning, could not see eye to eye, especially on the Catholic question. The king was unable to decide on whom to call after Lord Liverpool announced that he would resign, and a period of chaos ensued.
Eventually the king asked Canning to form a government, choosing to believe, against the evidence, that Canning would not press the Catholic question. Canning tried to do what the king wanted, but Peel, Wellington and many other Tories refused to join any administration he would lead. Canning was forced to turn to the moderate Whigs for support and form a kind of cross-party administration. In April 1827, he became prime minister, only to die of pneumonia four months later, expiring in the same room at Chiswick where Charles James Fox had died twenty-one years before. With Canning’s death and his own increasing infirmity, the king’s influence fell away, despite the fact that the political problems that had been gathering through the years of his regency and reign were now coming to a point of crisis. He had alienated many Tories by his appointment of Canning and had never regained the trust of the Whigs after his failure to bring them into government both in 1788 and at the beginning of the Regency.
After Canning died, Lord Goderich headed a short and incompetent ministry, which collapsed after a few months. Finally, in January 1828, the Duke of Wellington became prime minister, knowing that his chief task was to produce a successful resolution to the Irish question. Ireland was at boiling point, and tensions rose when Daniel O’Connell was elected MP for County Clare in July 1828 with a huge majority. As a Catholic, O’Connell could not serve in Westminster without emancipation. County Clare was therefore without representation. Unrest was sure to spread, and more elections of Catholics bound to follow. The problem would soon undermine the stability of Ireland, and therefore of all of the United Kingdom.
The Duke of Wellington was a very reluctant reformer; but he was also an Irish Protestant and a Tory. He realized that for things to stay the same – for Ireland to remain under British, and Protestant, control – things would have to change. Wellington’s goal was to change them as little as possible, choosing to ignore the fact that emancipation of Catholics would soon lead to the same demand by all other non-Anglicans in the polity. Moreover, as was widely recognized, Catholic emancipation in Ireland was only the beginning. It would embolden those demanding a more general reform of the franchise in the rest of the United Kingdom. The Whigs, who had long championed such reform, were waiting in the wings.
Before Wellington could even begin to contemplate any legislation, he had the unen
viable task of persuading the king that reform was inevitable. George might have been sympathetic to Whig demands for reform in his youth, but he was now more than ever opposed to it. Wellington persisted; the king was extraordinarily ingenious in turning the conversation from any subject that he didn’t like, and threatened to retire to Hanover when Wellington cornered him. By January 1829 he had agreed that the Cabinet should discuss the problem, only to be stiffened against change by his brother Augustus, who arrived from Germany loudly proclaiming his devotion to the Protestant cause. The king’s avoidance behaviour was by now driving Wellington and other ministers to distraction. George pretended he had fought at the Battle of Waterloo, declared that he had helped turn the tide at the Battle of Salamanca during the Peninsular War, ‘when things were looking very black indeed’, and vividly described how he had won the Goodwood Cup riding ‘Fleur-de-Lis’.12
Many of his exasperated ministers were half convinced that the king was insane, especially after one Cabinet meeting on 4 March, when he sipped brandy and water throughout, talked more or less continuously for five and a half hours and then asked them to resign. They did so, and left. By the following evening, the king had recovered his senses, given in and asked Wellington to come back. ‘My Dear Friend,’ he wrote with his customary opening, ‘As I find the country would be left without an administration, I have decided to yield my opinion to that which is considered by the Cabinet to be for the immediate interests of the country.’ Turning the knife at the end he wrote: ‘God knows what pain it cost me to write these words. G.R.’13
Wellington was furious, but hurried to introduce the bill. This time he had won. The duke was ‘[King] Arthur’ now, George said, he himself merely ‘Canon of Windsor’.14 He signed the Roman Catholic Relief Act on 10 April 1829. The act took away with one hand what it gave with the other. Catholics could henceforth hold public office and sit in Parliament. Few of them, however, could now vote: the act disenfranchised the forty-shilling freeholders, modest property-holders many of whom were Catholics, by raising the property qualification to £10.
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