George IV Read online

  Stella Tillyard

  * * *

  GEORGE IV

  King in Waiting

  Contents

  Picture Credits

  Genealogical Table

  GEORGE IV

  1. Father and Son

  2. Growing and Living

  3. Loving and Hating

  4. Regent of Style

  5. King at Last

  Illustrations

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  About the Author

  Stella Tillyard is one of Britain’s bestselling historians, notably Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740–1832, winner of the History Today Prize and the Fawcett Prize, which became a BBC/WGBH series, A Royal Affair: George III and His Troublesome Siblings, Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald, 1763–98, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, and two novels, Tides of War, which was longlisted for The Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Great Level. She is Visiting Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and lives in London and Florence.

  Penguin Monarchs

  THE HOUSES OF WESSEX AND DENMARK

  Athelstan* Tom Holland

  Aethelred the Unready Richard Abels

  Cnut Ryan Lavelle

  Edward the Confessor David Woodman

  THE HOUSES OF NORMANDY, BLOIS AND ANJOU

  William I* Marc Morris

  William II John Gillingham

  Henry I Edmund King

  Stephen Carl Watkins

  Henry II* Richard Barber

  Richard I Thomas Asbridge

  John Nicholas Vincent

  THE HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET

  Henry III Stephen Church

  Edward I* Andy King

  Edward II Christopher Given-Wilson

  Edward III* Jonathan Sumption

  Richard II* Laura Ashe

  THE HOUSES OF LANCASTER AND YORK

  Henry IV Catherine Nall

  Henry V* Anne Curry

  Henry VI James Ross

  Edward IV A. J. Pollard

  Edward V Thomas Penn

  Richard III Rosemary Horrox

  THE HOUSE OF TUDOR

  Henry VII Sean Cunningham

  Henry VIII* John Guy

  Edward VI* Stephen Alford

  Mary I* John Edwards

  Elizabeth I Helen Castor

  THE HOUSE OF STUART

  James I Thomas Cogswell

  Charles I* Mark Kishlansky

  [Cromwell* David Horspool]

  Charles II* Clare Jackson

  James II David Womersley

  William III & Mary II* Jonathan Keates

  Anne Richard Hewlings

  THE HOUSE OF HANOVER

  George I Tim Blanning

  George II Norman Davies

  George III Amanda Foreman

  George IV Stella Tillyard

  William IV Roger Knight

  Victoria* Jane Ridley

  THE HOUSES OF SAXE-COBURG & GOTHA AND WINDSOR

  Edward VII* Richard Davenport-Hines

  George V* David Cannadine

  Edward VIII* Piers Brendon

  George VI* Philip Ziegler

  Elizabeth II* Douglas Hurd

  * Now in paperback

  Picture Credits

  1. Benjamin West, Queen Charlotte with her Children, detail, 1779 (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2019/Bridgeman Images)

  2. George Stubbs, George, Prince of Wales, 1791 (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2019/Bridgeman Images)

  3. Richard Cosway, George, Prince of Wales, c.1793 (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2019/Bridgeman Images)

  4. Richard Cosway, Maria Fitzherbert, c.1789 (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2019/Bridgeman Images)

  5. Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Charles Pugin, Carlton House, 1809 (Chronicle/Alamy)

  6. Thomas Rowlandson, Presenting the Trophies, 1815 (Florilegius/Alamy)

  7. Richard Carlile (publisher), The Peterloo Massacre, 1819 (Classic Image/Alamy)

  8. George Cruikshank, The Cato Street Conspirators, 1820 (Pictorial Press/Alamy)

  9. Charles Williams, How Happy I Could Be With Either!!, 1820 (© Trustees of the British Museum)

  10. Circle of Thomas Lawrence, George IV, 1822 (Private Collection, © Philip Mould Ltd, London/Bridgeman Images)

  11. George Hayter, The Trial of Queen Caroline, detail, 1820 (National Portrait Gallery, London, © NPG)

  12. Richard Cosway, The Eye of the Prince of Wales, early 1790s (Private Collection, © Oxford Film and Television Ltd)

  13. Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Self-portrait, 1642 (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2019/Bridgeman Images)

  14. Aelbert Cuyp, Evening Landscape with Figures and Sheep, 1655–9 (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2019/Bridgeman Images)

  15. John Nash, A View of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, 1826, published 1827 (British Library, London. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images)

  16. John Nash, The Chinese Gallery in the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, 1826 (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/Alamy)

  17. David Wilkie, George IV in Highland Dress, 1830 (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2019/Bridgeman Images)

  1

  Father and Son

  When he was told by a harassed courtier that his wife had successfully delivered their first child, a girl, on the evening of 12 August 1762, the young King George III was overcome with relief. He was ‘but little anxious as to the sex of the Child’, he said. The important thing was that Queen Charlotte was safe. Running into the queen’s bedchamber in St James’s Palace, he was greeted with a surprise. He found that his daughter was in fact a son and heir, a ‘strong, large, pretty Boy’.1 The king and his eighteen-year-old wife were delighted. Relations between the monarch and his son were never as equable or as good again.

  Sixty-seven years later, on 26 June 1830, King George IV, that same large and pretty boy, died at Windsor Castle, a sick recluse unmourned by the nation. The Times leader, published a day after his funeral, declared that ‘there never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased King’. ‘What eye has wept for him?’ it asked rhetorically. ‘What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow? … If George IV ever had a friend – a devoted friend – in any rank of life,’ the paper concluded, ‘we protest that the name of him or her has not yet reached us.’2

  As Prince of Wales and then as Regent, George’s place in the world was defined first by his being heir to the throne, but second, and more importantly, by the personality and presence of his father. There had been plenty of scapegrace princes before George, plenty of young men who defied their fathers and rebelled against the rules they laid down. The future George II had hated, and been hated by, his father, George I, and then reproduced that hostile relationship with his own son Frederick, Prince of Wales, the father of George III. Frederick died in 1751 when his own heir was only twelve years old, too young to have any sort of independent life. Yet despite having avoided the Hanoverian pattern of a combative relationship with his own father, George III was particularly strict and unforgiving himself. While he was able to do so, he laid down stringent rules about what his heir could and could not do, and effectively condemned his son to a regal half-life. First and foremost, Prince George was to be the Prince of Wales, the next king; but in the meantime, while neither a private gentleman nor a monarch, he was circumscribed by his father’s diktats, unable to decide where to go, whom to marry or, in theory, what to spend.

  The prince’s life was also defined by the ubiquity and
boldness of the mid-eighteenth-century press, which never hesitated to print every scrap of news and gossip about him that it could find. Though the law of libel was increasingly used to gag criticism, it was still weak enough for satirists and cartoonists to wreak merry havoc with the royal family in a way that would be unthinkable in today’s more deferential age. In 1812, at the beginning of the Regency, the essayist Charles Lamb could lampoon the portly Regent as the ‘Prince of Whales’ in a long poem in the Examiner that was half joke, half satire. Some of the kinder lines ran:

  Not a mightier whale than this

  In the vast Atlantic is;

  Not a fatter fish than he

  Flounders round the polar sea.3

  Real privacy for a member of the royal family was impossible in an era of such press freedom. With no occupation, as Prince of Wales, George was forced to live as a semi-private gentleman, yet without the protections that a respectful or cowed press might afford. Moreover, as if a rampant press wasn’t enough, George’s maturity coincided with the beginnings of a golden age of memoir and biography. He was surrounded day and night by people who knew the value, in both fame and money, of their observations and recollections. Courtiers, servants and all kinds of visitors: no one hesitated to make the most of their gleanings. As a consequence, we probably know more about the prince’s private habits, at least as they were observed by others, than those of any other monarch.

  George’s great quest as Prince of Wales was to find something to do that could give him a purpose while he waited for his father to die. The story of his life from birth until the advent of the Regency in 1811 was his failure to find anything that matched his talents, engrossed his attention and could be pursued with the dignity that his situation demanded. Watched by anxious nurses, tutors and parents and never unattended as a child, George was unable to learn how to be at peace with himself. Much of his behaviour was conditioned by his horror of solitude, his inability to tolerate the boredom that came with his role and his impatience with the constraints this situation laid upon him.

  It all started as well as possible. Though George III preferred girls to boys, he was a fond father to all his babies. A great line of children followed the Prince of Wales into the world – eight boys and six girls – so that no worry about providing an heir ever hung over the royal household. The king dearly wished for a warm domestic life of the sort that he himself had lacked after the death of his father, when he had been removed from his mother to endure an adolescence of awkward seclusion. As soon as he inherited the throne ten years later in 1760, George set about finding a suitable woman to marry. Though constrained by having to look outside Britain into Protestant Europe, so that his bride would arrive unencumbered by any family ambitions, he and his mother quickly settled on seventeen-year-old Charlotte, a younger daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Strelitz was a tiny agricultural duchy in northern Germany, where Charlotte was growing up in rural isolation, in the midst of a loving family and far away from the intrigues of a large court. The Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, according to a visitor in the mid 1730s, liked nothing better than a bit of sewing, and had perfected the art of embroidering his own dressing gowns, while his wife and daughters cheerfully darned stockings at the dinner table.4 Despite this modest eccentricity, Princess Charlotte received a conventional, thoroughly Protestant education, from which she emerged with a smattering of French and Latin, a good deal of theology and a lifelong love of music and botany. She grew up bookish but not questioning, once returning a volume of Voltaire to its owner with the comment: ‘I do not want anything more of his.’5

  This conventionality, together with the untainted provincialism of Charlotte’s upbringing, was just what George III was looking for in a wife and companion. It did not matter that Charlotte was regarded as thin and extremely plain. Far more important were her lack of pretension and her acceptance of his authority. George wanted a wife who would not meddle, as he put it, and, from the moment she arrived in London, Charlotte never did. She had much to endure, but rarely dared to show any regret for the life she had lost, except in letters to her elder brother Charles, safely distant in Strelitz, and to whom she wrote despairingly at a low point in 1778: ‘ah, my dear brother, how many thorns a great rank has! There are many bitter pills to swallow; the very fact of being surrounded by people to whom one cannot become attached, even if one wanted to, is enough to repel a soul as sensitive as mine.’6

  Despite his German wife and a court at which German and French were frequently spoken, George III was determined to make the monarchy British and provincial. At a time when British aristocrats, especially in the households of the dominant Whigs, were revelling in sentiment and extravagance of all sorts, followed French taste and fashion and travelled extensively on the continent, where they bought every luxury in sight, the king was moving the other way. He prized restraint and demanded moderation in all things, especially in the consumption and display of strong feeling. Family life and rituals – and later the pastimes of the countryside – set the tone and hours in his household. As the children increased in numbers, it soon resembled that of his widowed mother much more closely than that of his card-playing grandfather George II, who had lived with his mistress Lady Yarmouth in Kensington Palace amid all the old-fashioned ritual of a continental court.

  George III wanted a family household sequestered from the corrupting influence of the city and the court, and selected Buckingham House at the end of Pall Mall in which to make it. Then, as his family grew, he moved it each summer to various houses in and around the Green at Kew, where he himself had lived until his father died. With these decisions, as with all others, the queen was expected to comply; and she did, never openly defying her husband in almost sixty years of marriage. There was a stultifying atmosphere in all these households, and courtiers were often driven to distraction with boredom. Despite the king’s best intentions, the warmth that he had so much wanted proved elusive. Queen Charlotte was an exemplary mother and wife, but never a relaxed or happy person. In 1780, after eighteen years of pregnancy and childbirth, she confided to her brother that ‘I have need of all my religion to support myself in this situation’, but the effort of self-control ‘has a strange effect on me, and prevents me from enjoying even the small amount of pleasure I have. For God knows, there is a small amount at present, and it gets less day by day.’7

  During the first nine years of his life, Prince George was burdened more with the weight of his many names and titles than with a strict education. He quickly grew into a good-looking child, with a mass of light brown hair and fine grey-blue eyes. He was looked after by a crew of wet-nurses and female courtiers and servants and given plenty of physical affection, especially by his father, who loved to get down on the carpet and play with his children when they were young. Early on, the young prince was notable for his good memory, imagination and intelligence. At the age of three and a half, when he was asked if he was bored by having to stay in bed after his smallpox inoculation, he replied, ‘Not at all, I lye and make Reflections.’8 By the time he was five he had started lessons in reading, writing and grammar. At six he wrote his first letter.

  Reading and writing were balanced by the kinds of activities advocated by the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his best-selling educational tract Émile, ou De l’éducation, published in 1762. These included plenty of contact with nature and learning through fashionable games, such as Madame de Beaumont’s jigsaw puzzle maps, which could be assembled into countries and continents. The royal teachers, in particular Lady Charlotte Finch, were devoted to their charges. George was petted, loved and praised. Surrounded by an ever-growing tribe of brothers and sisters, he maintained an easy superiority by virtue not just of his talents but also his rank, which predisposed those around him in his favour.

  The early 1770s were very difficult years for the king and the monarchy of which he was the head. His restless American subjects were testing the bonds that tied them to the mother country.
In December 1773, their grievances exploded in the spectacle of the Boston Tea Party, when a group of Bostonians dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded tea ships in the port of Boston and tipped their cargos into the harbour in protest at the imposition of import duty. George III regarded himself as the father of all his subjects, and so he saw American assertiveness as both a familial and a political failure.

  This colonial insubordination was accompanied by a series of blows from the king’s own wayward siblings. First came the shame and ridicule that followed the court action for criminal conversation taken out by Earl Grosvenor against Prince Henry in spring 1770, after the prince had been discovered in flagrante with the earl’s wife in a bedroom of the White Hart Inn at St Albans. In 1771, Prince Henry compounded this embarrassment, during which the public were delighted by the printing of his ludicrous and badly spelled love letters, with a hasty and secret marriage to a commoner. This enraged the king, who saw it as his duty to direct both the public and private lives of all his siblings as well as his children. Anticipating by several years Prince Henry’s misconduct, the king’s favourite brother, Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, had concealed his own secret marriage, but had to make it public the following year, in 1772, when his wife became pregnant. Worst of all, the king’s youngest sister, Caroline Matilda, Queen of Denmark, was arrested in the Royal Palace at Copenhagen in January 1772, accused of adultery with a German doctor. She was imprisoned in Kronborg Castle in Helsingør – the grim fortress of Elsinore in Shakespeare’s Hamlet – and it took months of diplomatic wrangling and threats of war to get her out.

  The king was mortified and disgusted by his siblings’ behaviour. Their refusal to recognize his familial authority would give licence to other members of the family and all his subjects to defy him in the same way. In the heat of the affair of Prince Henry, the king declared that he could offer no leniency and must show his resentment. He himself had children, he explained, ‘who must know what they have to expect if they could follow so infamous an example’.9