[1] See Lord Fitzmaurice's _Life of Shelburne_, iii. 393.
GEORGE IV. [George Augustus Frederick] (1762-1830), king of Great
Britain and Ireland, eldest son of George III., was born at St James's
Palace, London, on the 12th of August 1762. He was naturally gifted, was
well taught in the classics, learnt to speak French, Italian and German
fluently, and had considerable taste for music and the arts; and in
person he was remarkably handsome. His tutor, Bishop Richard Hurd, said
of him when fifteen years old that he would be "either the most polished
gentleman or the most accomplished blackguard in Europe--possibly both";
and the latter prediction was only too fully justified. Reaction from
the strict and parsimonious style of his parents' domestic life, which
was quite out of touch with the gaiety and extravagance of London
"society," had its natural effect in plunging the young prince of Wales,
flattered and courted as he was, into a whirl of pleasure-seeking. At
the outset his disposition was brilliant and generous, but it was
essentially unstable, and he started even before he came of age on a
career of dissipation which in later years became wholly profligate. He
had an early amour with the actress Mary ("Perdita") Robinson, and in
the choice of his friends he opposed and annoyed the king, with whom he
soon became (and always remained) on the worst of terms, by associating
himself with Fox and Sheridan and the Whig party. When in 1783 he came
of age, a compromise between the coalition ministry and the king secured
him an income of L50,000 from the Civil List, and L60,000 was voted by
parliament to pay his debts and start his separate establishment at
Carlton House. There, under the auspices of C.J. Fox and Georgiana,
duchess of Devonshire, he posed as a patron of Whig politics and a
leader in all the licence and luxury of gay society--the "First
gentleman in Europe," as his flatterers described him as years went on.
And at this early age he fell seriously in love with the famous Mrs
Fitzherbert.
His long connexion with this lady may most conveniently be summarized
here. It was indeed for some time the one redeeming and restraining
factor in his life, though her devotion and self-sacrificing conduct
were in marked contrast with his unscrupulousness and selfishness. Mary
Anne (or as she always called herself, Maria) Fitzherbert (1756-1837)
was the daughter of Walter Smythe, the second son of Sir John Smythe,
Bart., of Acton Burnell Park, Shropshire, and came of an old Roman
Catholic family. Educated at a French convent, she married first in 1775
Edward Weld, who died within the year, and secondly in 1778 Thomas
Fitzherbert, who died in 1781, leaving his widow with a comfortable
fortune. A couple of years later she became a prominent figure in London
society, and her beauty and charm at once attracted the young prince,
who wooed her with all the ardour of a violent passion. She herself was
distracted between her desire to return his love, her refusal to
contemplate becoming his mistress, and her knowledge that state reasons
made a regular marriage impossible. The Act of Settlement (1689)
entailed his forfeiture of the succession if he married a Roman
Catholic, apart from the fact that the Royal Marriage Act of 1772 made
any marriage illegal without the king's consent, which was out of the
question. But after trying for a while to escape his attentions, her
scruples were overcome. In Mrs Fitzherbert's eyes the state law was,
after all, not everything. To a Roman Catholic, and equally to any
member of the Christian church, a formal marriage ceremony would be
ecclesiastically and sacramentally binding; and after a period of
passionate importunacy on his part they were secretly married by the
Rev. R. Burt, a clergyman of the Church of England, on the 15th of
December 1785.[1] There is no doubt as to Mrs Fitzherbert's belief,
supported by ecclesiastical considerations, in her correct and binding,
though admittedly illegal, relationship to the prince as his canonical
wife; and though that relationship was not, and for political reasons
could not be, publicly admitted, it was in fact treated by their
intimates on the footing of a morganatic marriage. The position
nevertheless was inevitably a false one; Mrs Fitzherbert had promised
not to publish the evidence of the marriage (which, according to a
strict interpretation of the Act of Settlement might have barred
succession to the crown), and the rumours which soon got about led the
prince to allow it to be disavowed by his political friends. He lived in
the most extravagant way, became heavily involved in debt, and as the
king would not assist him, shut up Carlton House, and went to live with
Mrs Fitzherbert at Brighton. In 1787 a proposal was brought before the
House of Commons by Alderman Newnham for a grant in relief of his
embarrassments. It was on this occasion that Fox publicly declared in
the House of Commons, as on the prince's own authority, in answer to
allusions to the marriage, that the story was a malicious falsehood. A
little later Sheridan, in deference to Mrs Fitzherbert's pressure and to
the prince's own compunction, made a speech guardedly modifying Fox's
statement; but though in private the denial was understood, it effected
its object, the House voting a grant of L221,000 to the prince and the
king adding L10,000 to his income; and Mrs Fitzherbert, who at first
thought of severing her connexion with the prince, forgave him. Their
union--there was no child of the marriage--was brutally broken off in
June 1794 by the prince, when further pressure of debts (and the
influence of a new Egeria in Lady Jersey) made him contemplate his
official marriage with princess Caroline; in 1800, however, it was
renewed, after urgent pleading on the prince's part, and after Mrs
Fitzherbert had obtained a formal decision from the pope pronouncing her
to be his wife, and sanctioning her taking him back; her influence over
him continued till shortly before the prince became regent, when his
relations with Lady Hertford brought about a final separation. For the
best years of his life he had at least had in Mrs Fitzherbert the
nearest approach to a real wife, and this was fully recognized by the
royal family.[2] But his dissolute nature was entirely selfish, and his
various liaisons ended in the dominance of Lady Conyngham, the "Lady
Steward" of his household, from 1821 till his death.
Notorious as the prince of Wales had become by 1788, it was in that year
that his father's first attack of insanity made his position in the
state one of peculiar importance. Fox maintained and Pitt denied that
the prince of Wales, as the heir-apparent, had a right to assume the
regency independently of any parliamentary vote. Pitt, with the support
of both Houses, proposed to confer upon him the regency with certain
restrictions. The recovery of the king in February 1789 put an end,
however, to the prince's hopes. In 1794 the prince consented to a
marriage with a German Protestant princess, because his father would not
pay his debts on any other terms, and his cousin, Princess Caroline of
Brunswick, was brought over from Germany and married to him in 1795. Her
behaviour was light and flippant, and he was brutal and unloving. The
ill-assorted pair soon parted, and soon after the birth of their only
child, the princess Charlotte, they were formally separated. With great
unwillingness the House of Commons voted fresh sums of money to pay the
prince's debts.
In 1811 he at last became prince regent in consequence of his father's
definite insanity. No one doubted at that time that it was in his power
to change the ministry at his pleasure. He had always lived in close
connexion with the Whig opposition, and he now empowered Lord Grenville
to form a ministry. There soon arose differences of opinion between them
on the answer to be returned to the address of the Houses, and the
prince regent then informed the prime minister, Mr Perceval, that he
should continue the existing ministry in office. The ground alleged by
him for this desertion of his friends was the fear lest his father's
recovery might be rendered impossible if he should come to hear of the
advent of the opposition to power. Lord Wellesley's resignation in
February 1812 made the reconstruction of the ministry inevitable. As
there was no longer any hope of the king's recovery, the former
objection to a Whig administration no longer existed. Instead of taking
the course of inviting the Whigs to take office, he asked them to join
the existing administration. The Whig leaders, however, refused to join,
on the ground that the question of the Catholic disabilities was too
important to be shelved, and that their difference of opinion with Mr
Perceval was too glaring to be ignored. The prince regent was
excessively angry, and continued Perceval in office till that minister's
assassination on the 11th of May, when he was succeeded by Lord
Liverpool, after a negotiation in which the proposition of entering the
cabinet was again made to the Whigs and rejected by them. In the
military glories of the following years the prince regent had no share.
When the allied sovereigns visited England in 1814, he played the part
of host to perfection. So great was his unpopularity at home that hisses
were heard in the streets as he accompanied his guests into the city.
The disgust which his profligate and luxurious life caused amongst a
people suffering from almost universal distress after the conclusion of
the war rapidly increased. In 1817 the windows of the prince regent's
carriage were broken as he was on his way to open parliament.
The death of George III. on the 29th of January 1820, gave to his son
the title of king without in any way altering the position which he had
now held for nine years. Indirectly, however, this change brought out a
manifestation of popular feeling such as his father had never been
subjected to even in the early days of his reign, when mobs were burning
jack-boots and petticoats. The relations between the new king and his
wife unavoidably became the subject of public discussion. In 1806 a
charge against the princess of having given birth to an illegitimate
child had been conclusively disproved, and the old king had consequently
refused to withdraw her daughter, the princess Charlotte, from her
custody. When in the regency the prince was able to interfere, and
prohibited his wife from seeing her daughter more than once a fortnight.
On this, in 1813, the princess addressed to her husband a letter setting
forth her complaints, and receiving no answer published it in the
_Morning Chronicle_. The prince regent then referred the letter,
together with all papers relating to the inquiry of 1806, to a body of
twenty-three privy councillors for an opinion whether it was fit that
the restrictions on the intercourse between the princess Charlotte and
her mother should continue in force. All except two answered as the
regent wished them to answer. But if the official leaning was towards
the husband, the leaning of the general public was towards the wife of a
man whose own life had not been such as to justify him in complaining of
her whom he had thrust from him without a charge of any kind. Addresses
of sympathy were sent up to the princess from the city of London and
other public bodies. The discord again broke out in 1814 in consequence
of the exclusion of the princess from court during the visit of the
allied sovereigns. In August in that year she left England, and after a
little time took up her abode in Italy. The accession of George IV.
brought matters to a crisis. He ordered that no prayer for his wife as
queen should be admitted into the Prayer Book. She at once challenged
the accusation which was implied in this omission by returning to
England. On the 7th of June she arrived in London. Before she left the
continent she had been informed that proceedings would be taken against
her for adultery if she landed in England. Two years before, in 1818,
commissioners had been sent to Milan to investigate charges against her,
and their report, laid before the cabinet in 1819, was made the basis of
the prosecution. On the day on which she arrived in London a message was
laid before both Houses recommending the criminating evidence to
parliament. A secret committee in the House of Lords after considering
this evidence brought in a report on which the prime minister founded a
Bill of Pains and Penalties to divorce the queen and to deprive her of
her royal title. The bill passed the three readings with diminished
majorities, and when on the third reading it obtained only a majority of
nine, it was abandoned by the Government. The king's unpopularity, great
as it had been before, was now greater than ever. Public opinion,
without troubling itself to ask whether the queen was guilty or not, was
roused to indignation by the spectacle of such a charge being brought by
a husband who had thrust away his wife to fight the battle of life
alone, without protection or support, and who, whilst surrounding her
with spies to detect, perhaps to invent, her acts of infidelity, was
himself notorious for his adulterous life. In the following year (1821)
she attempted to force her way into Westminster Abbey to take her place
at the coronation. On this occasion the popular support failed her; and
her death in August relieved the king from further annoyance.
Immediately after the death of the queen, the king set out for Ireland.
He remained there but a short time, and his effusive declaration that
rank, station, honours were nothing compared with the exalted happiness
of living in the hearts of his Irish subjects gained him a momentary
popularity which was beyond his attainment in a country where he was
better known. His reception in Dublin encouraged him to attempt a visit
to Edinburgh in the following year (August 1822). Since Charles II. had
come to play the sorry part of a covenanting king in 1650 no sovereign
of the country had set foot on Scottish soil. Sir Walter Scott took the
leading part in organizing his reception. The enthusiasm with which he
was received equalled, if it did not surpass, the enthusiasm with which
he had been received in Dublin. But the qualities which enabled him to
fix the fleeting sympathies of the moment were not such as would enable
him to exercise the influence in the government which had been
indubitably possessed by his father. He returned from Edinburgh to face
the question of the appointment of a secretary of state which had been
raised by the death of Lord Londonderry (Castlereagh). It was upon the
question of the appointment of ministers that the battle between the
Whigs and the king had been fought in the reign of George III. George
IV. had neither the firmness nor the moral weight to hold the reins
which his father had grasped. He disliked Canning for having taken his
wife's side very much as his father had disliked Fox for taking his own.
But Lord Liverpool insisted on Canning's admission to office, and the
king gave way. Tacitly and without a struggle the constitutional victory
of the last reign was surrendered. But it was not surrendered to the
same foe as that from which it had been won. The coalition ministry in
1784 rested on the great landowners and the proprietors of rotten
boroughs. Lord Liverpool's ministry had hitherto not been very
enlightened, and it supported itself to a great extent upon a narrow
constituency. But it did appeal to public opinion in a way that the
coalition did not, and what it wanted itself in popular support would be
supplied by its successors. What one king had gained from a clique
another gave up to the nation. Once more, on Lord Liverpool's death in
1827, the same question was tried with the same result. The king not
only disliked Canning personally, but he was opposed to Canning's
policy. Yet after some hesitation he accepted Canning as prime minister;
and when, after Canning's death and the short ministry of Lord Goderich,
the king in 1828 authorized the duke of Wellington to form a ministry,
he was content to lay down the principle that the members of it were not
expected to be unanimous on the Catholic question. When in 1829 the
Wellington ministry unexpectedly proposed to introduce a Bill to remove
the disabilities of the Catholics, he feebly strove against the proposal
and quickly withdrew his opposition. The worn-out debauchee had neither
the merit of acquiescing in the change nor the courage to resist it.
George IV. died on the 26th of June 1830, and was succeeded by his
brother, the duke of Clarence, as William IV. His only child by Queen
Caroline, the princess Charlotte Augusta, was married in 1816 to Leopold
of Saxe-Coburg, afterwards king of the Belgians, and died in childbirth
on the 6th of November 1817.
George IV. was a bad king, and his reign did much to disgust the
country with the Georgian type of monarchy; but libertine and
profligate as he became, the abuse which has been lavished on his
personal character has hardly taken into sufficient consideration the
loose morals of contemporary society, the political position of the
Whig party, and his own ebullient temperament. Thackeray, in his _Four
Georges_, is frequently unfair in this respect. The just condemnation
of the moralist and satirist requires some qualification in the light
of the picture of the period handed down in the memoirs and diaries of
the time, such as Greville's, Croker's, Creevey's, Lord Holland's,
Lord Malmesbury's, &c. Among later works see _The First Gentleman of
Europe_, by Lewis Melville (1906), a book for the general reader.
(S. R. G.; H. Ch.)