George IV

by Stella Tillyard

  George’s self-pitying description of Wellington as king and he himself a lowly functionary was histrionic but not completely inaccurate. As foreign affairs had for a century, domestic politics now turned on forces beyond the monarch’s control. The king gave way on Catholic emancipation, but emancipation, and the reforms that followed it, would have happened anyway. The ‘secret influence’ so feared by politicians in the eighteenth century was becoming less relevant, and a constitutional monarchy increasingly entrenched.

  The Tory government got its way on Catholic Relief by mobilizing all its supporters, including those who held seats for the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’, where there were few, if any, voters, and which were often traded for cash, since ownership of the land brought a seat in Parliament. Anti-Catholic Tories now had a reason to support a general reform of the franchise: getting rid of rotten boroughs, they argued, would increase their parliamentary power-base. Opposition to reform of the franchise was now split: the stage was set for the Great Reform Act of 1832, which would, after the death of George IV, be the first of a series of reforms of the franchise that culminated in universal male and limited female suffrage in 1918 and finally, ten years later, to votes for all men and women over the age of twenty-one.

  After the passage of the Catholic Relief Act, George took to his bed for a while. He was now suffering from a raft of ailments, including gout, rheumatism, swollen arms and legs, inflammation of the bladder and a generally disturbed peace of mind, for all of which he took large quantities of laudanum. ‘He leads a most extraordinary life,’ Greville recorded after a visit to Windsor: ‘never gets up till six in the afternoon. They come to him and open the window curtains at six or seven o’clock in the morning; he breakfasts in bed, does whatever business he can be brought to transact in bed too, he reads every newspaper quite through, dozes three or four hours, gets up in time for dinner, and goes to bed between ten and eleven. He sleeps very ill, and rings his bell forty times in the night.’15 By May 1829, however, he had perked up temporarily, had a happy visit from Princess Victoria – ‘a short, plain-looking child’ – and went up to St James’s Palace to hear the celebrated mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran sing for him.16 Lady Conyngham was still in reluctant attendance at Windsor, and even though he complained about her conduct, he seemed still to need her.

  A team of doctors and apothecaries was now stationed permanently in and around Windsor, where the king was installed in the newly renovated castle, although George only really trusted William Knighton, his adviser and financial controller, who had once been a doctor himself. By the spring of 1830, the king was suffering frequent attacks of breathlessness, and had to sleep sitting and propped up with pillows. These attacks, when he struggled for breath, terrified him, and he often clung to the hand of whoever was near to him. Most of the time, however, he was brave and optimistic, despite frequent pains in his bladder. Occasionally he was able to converse, and was as lively and witty as ever. When pain troubled him, he sipped laudanum, sometimes as much as two hundred and fifty drops in thirty-six hours. Knighton was a courageous man. He took responsibility for the king’s health and sensibly resisted several proposed operations, which allowed George to drift towards death as comfortably as possible.

  By May there was no doubt that the sixty-seven-year-old king was failing. Mrs Fitzherbert, when she heard of his illness, finally wrote him a letter expressing her sympathies, which broke the long silence between them. The king read it with evident emotion and slipped it under his pillow. He lay on a day bed that could be pushed up to the window to allow him to see across the garden. Sometimes he was still lively and even talkative. He looked forward to visits from his sisters, and was able even on 16 June to stamp four hundred official documents in lieu of signing after a ‘Signature Bill’ had given his stamp the legal status of a signature. But though he told Wellington in the middle of June that he was getting better, in the early hours of 26 June he woke up and seemed to know he was dying. ‘My dear boy!’ he said to the doctor who was with him. ‘This is death!’ And so it was: when another doctor, Sir Henry Halford, came into the room, the king held on to his hand without speaking, and, ‘with a very few short breathings, expired’.17

  In his will of 1796, written when he was thirty-four years old and still Prince of Wales, George stated that he wished to be buried with his miniature of Mrs Fitzherbert hanging round his neck. It seems that in his last illness he wore it under his shirt, and he asked Wellington, as his executor, to ensure that he was buried in his nightclothes, ‘with whatever ornaments might be upon his person at the time of his death’. Wellington assured him that this would be done, and it was. As the king’s body lay in state in Windsor Castle on 14 July, the day before his funeral, Wellington noticed a black ribbon underneath the nightshirt. Pushing aside the collar he saw a diamond locket with Mrs Fitzherbert’s portrait inside.18 George IV had kept this gesture both as the monarch and as a private man, to the last. It was heartfelt, sentimental and theatrical, the expression of his most lasting affection.

  The day after the king’s funeral, Charles Greville, who had spent many hours in his company, wrote laconically in his diary: ‘London, July 16th. – I returned here on the 6th of this month, and have waited these ten days to look about me and see and hear what is passing. The present King and his proceedings occupy all attention, and nobody thinks any more of the late King than if he had been dead fifty years, unless it be to abuse him and to rake up all his vices and misdeeds.’19

  George IV left his greatest mark on the country in physical form: the remodelled castle at Windsor, the dull bulk and facade of Buckingham Palace and the exuberant individualism of the Brighton Pavilion. The most that could be said about his handling of national affairs was that he did not, in the end, impede Catholic emancipation. That reform led to others that very gradually increased political representation while keeping the basic governing structures of the country the same.

  Five months after George IV’s death and the accession to the throne of his brother the Duke of Clarence as William IV, the country was thrown into political turmoil when the Duke of Wellington made an uncompromising declaration against any parliamentary reform whatsoever. His government was defeated and he resigned, leading the way for Lord Grey in 1832. A new world was coming, a world of steam trains, urban life, mass culture and greater democracy. Remarkably, though, the old world of the Tory party, of Eton and empire, would endure. By maintaining continuity with his once-hated father’s principles and politics, George IV played his part in ensuring that it did.

  1. Detail from a portrait of Queen Charlotte with her children, by Benjamin West, 1779. George stands on the left, manly and plump at seventeen, with his brother Frederick leaning on his shoulder.

  2. The Prince of Wales in a painting by George Stubbs, 1791. The gentleman of fashion in the blue and buff of the Whigs, riding in Hyde Park at the age of twenty-nine.

  3 and 4. Companion miniatures of Prince George and Mrs Fitzherbert just before their first rupture, by Richard Cosway, 1793 and 1789.

  5. Carlton House in a coloured engraving by T. Rowlandson and A. C. Pugin, 1809. The house was demolished in 1824. Later, some of its columns were reused on the front of the National Gallery.

  6. Presenting the Trophies, Rowlandson’s cheery dig at the Prince Regent’s love of military memorabilia. The print shows the interior of Carlton House and Captain Johnny Newsome presenting George with Marshal Jourdan’s baton and Joseph Bonaparte’s hat in 1815.

  7. The Peterloo Massacre in a coloured engraving published by Richard Carlile, showing the violent military response to the gathering at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, on 16 August 1819.

  8. George Cruikshank’s engraving of the Cato Street conspirators being arrested, published March 1820. The foiling of the conspirators’ plot to assassinate Cabinet ministers was a put-up job by a police informer.

  9. George IV was a talented designer and inveterate wearer of military uniforms, despite the fact that he never
served in the army or navy.

  10. The sixty-year-old king looking suspiciously youthful in Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of 1822.

  11. Detail from George Hayter’s monumental Trial of Queen Caroline, 1820. The queen sits in a armchair, while lawyers from both sides confer in the foreground and the future prime minister, Lord Grey, holds forth from the floor.

  12. The Prince of Wales’s eye from a copy of the picture he sent to Maria Fitzherbert in 1785: a spooky reminder of his devotion.

  13. Another watcher, this time looking at the prince: Rembrandt, in a self-portrait of 1642. George hung this picture in his dressing room.

  14. An Evening Landscape with Figures and Sheep by Aelbert Cuyp, 1655–9. This exquisitely tranquil scene was in the collection of Sir Thomas Baring before being bought by the Prince Regent in 1814.

  15. The exterior of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, from John Nash’s Views of the Royal Pavilion, 1826. A fantasy in neo-Mughal style, the Pavilion was likened by one critical visitor to the Kremlin in Moscow.

  16. The Chinese Gallery in another illustration from Nash’s Views. In contrast to the blinding white exterior, the interior was a riot of colour, with stained glass, statues and giant chandeliers.

  17. George IV in Highland dress, by David Wilkie, 1830. The costume was made for the king’s Scottish visit at a cost of £1,354 18s. In 2005 the jacket was discovered by experts from Sotheby’s at Schloss Marienburg, a castle still owned by the royal house of Hanover.

  Notes

  1. FATHER AND SON

  1. James Greig (ed.), The Diaries of a Duchess: Extracts from the Diaries of the First Duchess of Northumberland (1716–1776) (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1926), p. 48.

  2. The Times, 16 July 1830.

  3. Charles Lamb, ‘Triumph of the Whale’, Examiner, 15 March 1812.

  4. Crown Prince Frederick to his father, Frederick William I of Prussia, quoted in Janice Hadlow, The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians (London: William Collins, 2014), p. 136.

  5. Ibid., p. 138.

  6. Queen Charlotte to her brother Prince Charles of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, 17 October 1778, quoted in ibid., p. 224.

  7. Queen Charlotte to Prince Charles of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, 6 September 1780, quoted in ibid., p. 223.

  8. Greig (ed.), Diaries of a Duchess, p. 63.

  9. George III to the Duke of Gloucester, Royal Archives, GEO/15939–40.

  10. George III to Prince of Wales and Prince Frederick, 3 May 1778, in A. Aspinall (ed.), The Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales 1770–1812, 8 vols (London: Cassell, 1963–71), vol. 1, p. 26.

  11. Charlotte Papendiek, lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte, quoted in Saul David, Prince of Pleasure: The Prince of Wales and the Making of the Regency (London: Little, Brown, 1998), p. 17.

  12. Prince of Wales to Mary Hamilton, 22 August 1779, quoted in Elizabeth and Florence Anson, eds, Mary Hamilton (London: John Murray, 1925), pp. 83–4.

  13. George III to Prince of Wales, in ibid., p. 34; Prince of Wales to James Harris, later Earl of Malmesbury, in Third Earl of Malmesbury (ed.), Diaries and Correspondence of James Harris, First Earl of Malmesbury, 4 vols (London: R. Bentley, 1844), vol. 2, p. 125.

  14. Henry Reeve (ed.), The Greville Memoirs: A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV by the Late Charles C. F. Greville, Esq., 3 vols (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1875), vol. 1, p. 221.

  15. Earl of Ilchester (ed.), Elizabeth, Lady Holland, to Her Son, 1821–1845 (London: John Murray, 1946), p. 77.

  16. Aspinall (ed.), Correspondence of Prince of Wales, vol. 1, p. 76.

  17. Ibid., p. 61.

  18. Ibid., p. 148.

  2. GROWING AND LIVING

  1. Prince of Wales to Mary Robinson, quoted in Christopher Hibbert, George IV: Prince of Wales, 1762–1811 (London: Longman, 1972), p. 18.

  2. Nathaniel Wraxall, The Historical and the Posthumous Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, 1772–1784, ed. Henry B. Wheatley, 5 vols (London: Bickers & Son, 1884), vol. 5, p. 364.

  3. Prince of Wales to Dr John Turton, quoted in Hibbert, Prince of Wales, p. 249.

  4. Lord Holland, quoted in David, Prince of Pleasure, p. 257.

  5. George III to Prince of Wales, in Aspinall (ed.), Correspondence of Prince of Wales, vol. 1, p. 156.

  6. Prince of Wales to Mrs Fitzherbert, in ibid., p. 201.

  7. George III to Prince of Wales, in ibid., p. 231.

  8. Charles James Fox in the House of Commons, 30 April 1787, in William Cobbett (ed.), The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, vol. 26 (London: Longman et al., 1816), cols 1067–70.

  9. George III, quoted in Thomas Moore, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan, vol. 2 (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1825), p. 83.

  10. Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad-Business (London: Allen Lane, 1969).

  11. Official medical bulletin on the king’s health, quoted in Hibbert, Prince of Wales, p. 97.

  12. Edmund Burke to Captain J. W. Payne, 24 September 1789, in Aspinall (ed.), Correspondence of Prince of Wales, vol. 2, p. 35.

  13. The Times, quoted in ibid., p. 31, n. 2.

  14. Charles James Fox to Richard Fitzpatrick, 30 July 1798, quoted in John Drinkwater, Charles James Fox (London: Ernest Benn, 1928), p. 289.

  15. Prince of Wales to the Duke of York, 14 April 1793, in Aspinall (ed.), Correspondence of Prince of Wales, vol. 2, p. 348.

  16. Prince of Wales to Queen Charlotte, 24 January 1793, in ibid., p. 334.

  17. Prince of Wales, in ibid., p. 349.

  18. Wraxall, Memoirs, vol. 5, p. 36

  19. Prince of Wales to Mrs Fitzherbert, quoted in Aspinall (ed.), Correspondence of Prince of Wales, vol. 2, p. 443, n. 1.

  20. Prince of Wales to Captain J. W. Payne, July 1794, in ibid., p. 442.

  21. George III to William Pitt, 24 August 1794, quoted in Earl Stanhope, Life of the Right Honourable William Pitt, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1861), Appendix, p. xx.

  3. LOVING AND HATING

  1. Prince of Wales to the Duke of York, 24 July 1791, in Aspinall (ed.), Correspondence of Prince of Wales, vol. 2, pp. 174–5.

  2. Prince of Wales to the Duke of York, 29 August 1794, in ibid., p. 433.

  3. Queen Charlotte to Duke Charles of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, August 1794, in ibid., vol. 3, p. 9.

  4. Malmesbury (ed.), Diaries and Correspondence of James Harris, vol. 3, pp. 165, 168.

  5. Ibid., p. 168.

  6. Ibid., p. 196.

  7. Ibid., p. 208.

  8. Ibid., p. 218.

  9. James Harris, quoted in David, Prince of Pleasure, p. 169.

  10. Queen Victoria’s journal, entries for 2 September and 13 November 1838, quoted in Hibbert, Prince of Wales, p. 160.

  11. Prince of Wales to William Pitt, in Aspinall (ed.), Correspondence of Prince of Wales, vol. 3, p. 315.

  12. Prince of Wales to William Pitt, in ibid., p. 315.

  13. William Pitt, in ibid., p. 320.

  14. Prince of Wales to Queen Charlotte, 7 January 1796, in ibid., p. 126.

  15. George III to the Prince of Wales, 7 January 1796, in A. Aspinall (ed.), The Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 451.

  16. Prince of Wales to the Princess of Wales, quoted in Doris Leslie, The Great Corinthian: A Portrait of the Prince Regent (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1952), pp. 125–6.

  17. George III to Prince of Wales, 31 May 1796, in Aspinall (ed.), Correspondence of the Prince of Wales, vol. 3, p. 194.

  18. Prince of Wales’s will, written on 10 January 1796, in Aspinall (ed.), Correspondence of Prince of Wales, vol. 3, p. 135.

  19. Prince of Wales to Lady Rutland, quoted in Hibbert, Prince of Wales, p. 171.

  20. Prince of Wales, recorded by Baron Glenbervie; quoted in ibid., p. 299.

  21. The Times, 18 June 1800.

  22.
Prince of Wales to Lord Moira, quoted in Hibbert, Prince of Wales, p. 229.

  23. Affidavit by the Prince of Wales, quoted in Hibbert, Prince of Wales, p. 240.

  24. Princess Elizabeth to the Prince of Wales, 2 August 1797, and Lord Minto to Lady Minto, 1798, in Aspinall (ed.), Correspondence of Prince of Wales, vol. 3, pp. 357, 385.

  25. Princess of Wales to Lady Townshend, quoted in Joanna Richardson, The Disastrous Marriage: A Study of George IV and Caroline of Brunswick (London: Jonathan Cape, 1960), p. 66.

  26. Lady Bessborough to Granville Leveson Gower, in Castalia, Countess Granville (ed.), Lord Granville Leveson Gower (First Earl Granville): Private Correspondence, 1781 to 1821, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1916), pp. 203–4.

  27. Quoted in Hibbert, Prince of Wales, vol. 1, p. 219.

  28. Prince of Wales to Spencer Perceval, 4 February 1811, quoted in Hibbert, Prince of Wales, p. 279.

  4. REGENT OF STYLE

  1. James Greig (ed.), The Farington Diary, vol. 7 (London: Hutchinson, 1927), p. 22.

  2. ‘Drawn Plan of the Tables in the Temporary Room, Carlton House, for the Grand Fête in 1811’, in Frederick Crace, A Catalogue of Maps, Plans, and Views of London, Westminster and Southwark, Collected and Arranged by Frederick Crace (London: 1878), p. 83.

  3. Gioachino Rossini, quoted in Christopher Hibbert, George IV: Regent and King, 1811–1830 (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 266.

  4. The Literary Gazette; and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, etc., 19 February 1821, p. 316.