George IV

I

Introduction

George IV (1762-1830), King of Great Britain and Ireland (1820-1830) and King of Hanover (1820-1830). He was the eldest son of King George III of Great Britain and Ireland and Queen Charlotte. Much condemned and satirized in his own lifetime, a great age of political literature and cartoons, he left behind him the worst of reputations both as a person and as a monarch—lazy, irresponsible, profligate.

II

Prince of Wales

As a spendthrift Prince of Wales, George was treated with contempt by his father long before he married in 1785, secretly and against the law, Mary Fitzherbert (1756-1837), a virtuous Roman Catholic, who had refused to become his mistress. Many mistresses followed, and another wife. In order to persuade Parliament to help pay off his heavy debts, he entered into an open but loveless marriage in 1795 with his cousin Princess Caroline of Brunswick. A few weeks after the birth of a daughter, Charlotte, heiress to the throne—she died in 1817—the couple separated, living far apart, seldom without domestic scandals. Politics played its part, for George, like previous Princes of Wales, was drawn into politics, attaching himself to the opposition Whigs, who were bitterly opposed to the government of William Pitt “the Younger”. There were, however, complications for him that were unknown to previous Princes of Wales. In 1788, when George III suffered a serious mental breakdown, creating a “Regency crisis”, the Whigs, led by Charles James Fox, convinced of the king’s “madness”, probably a faulty diagnosis, tried to have the Prince of Wales made Prince Regent. They failed, for the king recovered, but long afterwards, in 1811, when the king, after further attacks, was judged, without any crisis, to be permanently and irrevocably insane, the Prince was made regent by Act of Parliament.

III

Regent

Both Fox and Pitt were then dead, and at this crucial point in his life the new Prince Regent, who gave his name to a “Regency style”, abandoned the Whigs and some of his own friends, a kind of party in themselves, and retained his father’s old ministers, led first by Spencer Perceval and second, after Perceval’s murder in 1812, by the 2nd Earl of Liverpool. This line of action, not based on one clear-cut decision, left the Whigs out of power until after George’s death in 1830. Liverpool, who remained in office until 1827, saw through the long wars against revolutionary France and Napoleon, which ended at Waterloo in 1815, and in a disturbed peacetime had to cope with the political consequences of the important industrial changes in Britain, which were later thought to constitute in themselves an “industrial revolution”. Unable to separate economics and politics, his government introduced repressive measures between 1817 and 1819 to check what they considered radical subversion. After Waterloo came Peterloo. The now corpulent Prince Regent was himself a political target. Indeed, he became the major target when his father died in 1820 and he became King George IV.

IV

King

As king, George immediately ran into the worst crisis on his life when Caroline returned from Italy to claim her place as queen consort. Despite the scandals in her own life, which had been under official scrutiny, she won substantial radical support, and only her death in 1821 resolved the crisis. During the following four years the country enjoyed what Liverpool called “unprecedented and unparalleled prosperity”, and Liverpool, often harassed by the king, was able to reduce repression and introduce reforms. On one issue, however, that of granting civil rights to Roman Catholics, “Catholic emancipation”, he confronted divisions in his Cabinet and was warned by the king that he, like his father, could never approve of Catholic emancipation because he had sworn a coronation oath. Liverpool’s foreign secretary since 1822, George Canning, brilliant but restless, supported Catholic emancipation, but took pains to win the esteem of the king through his witty conversation and, more importantly, by securing financial support for the king’s friends and their relatives. As a result, he was made prime minister in 1827 when an exhausted Liverpool had a debilitating stroke and left office. There were further twists and turns to come, for Canning had only a hundred days in power, dying before the end of the year. The biggest twist came when his successor as prime minister in 1828, the Duke of Wellington, who had not been on good terms with him or the king, carried Catholic emancipation in 1829 (see Catholic Emancipation Act).

Further political divisions followed, with much publicized signs of renewed economic “distress” in the country and with the king himself sick and incapable. The outcome was that when George died in June 1830, Wellington had lost his hold over Parliament, and later in the year the Whigs under Earl Grey, Fox’s successor, at last returned to power. The way was prepared for the Great Reform Bill (see Reform Bills).