George IV

George IV (1762–1830), king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1820–30), and king of Hanover. Brought up under strict discipline by his parents George III and Queen Charlotte, he was a high-spirited boy and reacted against the regime they imposed in what Horace Walpole called ‘the palace of piety’. He and his brother Frederick frequently escaped in their teens to sample the pleasures of the town and their pranks became notorious. In 1780 his father had to buy back the indiscreet letters he had written to the actress Mary ‘ Perdita’ Robinson. Always susceptible to feminine charms, George then fell in love with Maria Fitzherbert, a widow six years his senior, and when she refused to be his mistress forced her to promise marriage by faking suicide. They married secretly in 1785 without his father's consent, so that the marriage was illegal under the Royal Marriage Act, and as she was a Roman catholic it would have prevented his succession to the throne. It was nevertheless valid in the eyes of the catholic and Anglican churches.

George was fascinated by the arts and had a lifelong mania for building and decorating his residences. In 1787 he applied to Parliament for additional funds to pay his debts, but to achieve success he had to authorize his friend Charles James Fox to deny in the House of Commons that he was married. His subsequent disclosure of the truth to Charles Grey resulted in a breach between him and his Whig political allies. They made up the quarrel in 1788 when his father suffered his first attack of mental illness, the Whigs proposing that George should be made regent with full use of all the royal prerogatives, hoping that he would change the government in their favour. Pitt defeated their scheme by proposing statutory limitations on the regent's powers, but the king recovered before the regency came into effect.

When the French Revolutionary War began George appealed to his father for a military command, but was refused. By this time he was again deeply in debt owing to the cost of building and furnishing Carlton House, his London residence, and the pavilion at Brighton where he disported himself in extravagant style with his cronies and Mrs Fitzherbert. In return for financial help the king insisted that he should marry a protestant princess, to secure the royal succession. The choice fell upon Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, who was brought over to be his bride in 1795. George, however, took an instant dislike to her lack of cleanliness, coarse language, and flighty manner. He had to be supported, in a state of intoxication, during the ceremony and spent the wedding night asleep on the floor. They separated permanently soon afterwards, though he had managed to father a child, Princess Charlotte, born nine months after the wedding. She was to provide a further source of contention between her parents over her upbringing, education, and marriage shortly before her premature death in 1817.

During the Napoleonic War of 1803–15 George was again unsuccessful in obtaining a military command and had to content himself with designing elaborate uniforms for himself and his forces. After Fox's death in 1806 he severed his political connection with the Whigs and in 1810, when his father's illness became permanent and he was appointed prince regent, he confirmed the existing Tory ministers in office. During the later war and post-war years he was very unpopular with his subjects, who contrasted his lavish life-style and expenditure with the distressed state of the country, and was caricatured and lampooned in the public prints, often in indecent and obscene circumstances. When he became king in 1820 his attempt to divorce his wife by a parliamentary Bill of Pains and Penalties on the grounds of her alleged immoralities aroused a public outcry against him and in favour of Caroline as an unjustly persecuted woman in view of his own infidelities. His popularity sank to its nadir during this period but Caroline's death in 1821 and recovery from the economic recession marked a turning-point. George's love of pageantry, given full rein in the magnificent coronation which he himself designed in 1821, helped to boost his popularity.

George IV attempted to exert authority over his ministers, but he lacked political skill and persistence and he could always be outmanœuvred or outfaced by determined ministers such as Liverpool and Wellington. He was compelled to accept the repeal of religious discrimination against dissenters and catholics in 1828–9 and his reign witnessed a further decline in the strength of the ‘influence of the crown’, which was eroded by financial and political reform.

George IV was a man of some dignity, was affectionate and generous towards his friends, and raised the royal patronage of the arts to greater heights than had been seen since the reign of Charles I. He could be selfish, but though The Times remarked, in a famous obituary, that ‘there never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures’, Wellington more justly declared that he possessed ‘a medley of opposite qualities with a great preponderance of good’.

E. A. Smith

Bibliography

Hibbert, C. , George IV (1972–3);
Smith, E. A. , George IV (New Haven, 1999).