George IV: The Royal Joke?
By Dr Steven Parissien
Dr Steve Parissien looks back at the life of George the Fourth whose name became a byword for
extravagance and a national joke.
Introduction
Never in modern times has a sovereign died so unlamented, nor has the person of the monarch
retained so little respect after death, as King George IV in 1830. Robert Huish's venomous
biography of 1830-1 declared of the late King that, 'with a personal income 'exceeding the national
revenue of a third-rate power, there appeared to be no limit to his desires, nor any restraint to his
profusion', and concluded that George IV contributed more 'to the demoralisation of society than
any prince recorded in the pages of history'.
George Augustus Frederick, 21st Prince of Wales, was born on 12 August 1762. Even his birth
was dogged by the sort of absurdity which was to dominate his life, as the attending courtier, the
Earl of Huntingdon, promptly pronounced the newborn heir to be a girl. And as Prince of Wales
and, after 1811, Regent for his increasingly ailing and mad father George III, George was not to
prove, as one royal apologist piously hoped at the beginning of his Regency, 'a great king - the
lover of his people - the protector of liberty and defender of the laws - as bright, if not brighter,
than any of his predecessors'. Although one of the most gifted of royal princes, his obsessive
self-interest and vast expenditure on palaces and pictures, militaria and mistresses, parties and
pageants meant that, by the time of his accession to the throne in 1820, he had become a byword
for senseless extravagance and a national joke.
'Even his birth was dogged by the sort of absurdity which was to dominate his life'
As Prince, Regent and King, George IV strove to fashion an idealised image of himself that
increasingly bore little relation to reality. His glittering art collections and over-ambitious building
programmes; the colourful, pseudo-historic pageants he devised for his coronation of 1821 and his
visit to Edinburgh of 1822; his fascination with soldiering and with the trappings and symbols of
military success (though his father never allowed him to be responsible for more than a pet
regiment stationed at home) - all these testified to his seemingly inexhaustible desire to promote
himself to a place in the nation's hearts which his dismal conduct had signally failed to win.
Depressed by his evident failure to reinvent himself, as monarch (1820-30) the ailing King simply
withdrew into a fantasy world of laudanum and alcohol.
George IV's undoubted charm, his evident wit, his innate aesthetic sense, his enthusiasm and his
imagination still left him ill-equipped to rise to the challenge of a nation daily growing in self
confidence and wealth. His self-indulgence and short attention span, together with his evident
ability to abandon political principles and to forget friendships with barely a backward glance,
won him little praise. One obituary of George IV attested that, 'At an age when generous feelings
are usually predominant, we find him absorbed by an all-engrossing selfishness; not merely
careless of the feelings of others, but indulging in wanton cruelty'. While this judgement is harsh,
George had certainly been heedless of the feelings even of those closest to him. The obituarist's
subsequent comment that 'George IV was essentially a lover of personal ease' - and that 'during the
later years of his life, a quiet indulgence of certain sensual enjoyments seemed the sole object of
his existence' - is difficult to fault.
Princely passions
George's notorious treatment of his legion of mistresses is easy to censure. His first serious affair
was at the age of 17, and by the time he came of age in 1783 he was well-known as an inveterate
ladies man who would woo his targets ardently, promise them his eternal love - and a sizeable
pension - and then brusquely drop them when he tired of their charms. The whole royal edifice of
sexual respectability and family values which George III had worked so hard to create in the
1760s and 70s was rapidly demolished by his son and heir, brick by brick. And, significantly, as he
grew older George's marked preference was not for younger, libidinous lovers but for older,
motherly mistresses who were able to offer a degree of sympathy and understanding which had
never received from his own, coldly calculating mother, Queen Charlotte.
'George was forced to agree to a proper marriage to a suitably Protestant German princess in order
to have his immense debts paid off by parliament.'
The most famous and long lasting of these older women was the twice-widowed Catholic, Maria
Fitzherbert, whom George actually married - in an illegal ceremony - in 1785. His attachment to
Maria was predictably fitful; cast aside for the scheming Countess of Jersey in 1794, she was
reconciled to the royal bosom in 1800 only to be rejected once more a decade later. In the
meantime, however, George was forced to agree to a proper marriage to a suitably Protestant
German princess in order to have his immense debts paid off by parliament - by no means the last
time that such a solution would be necessary.
Somewhat inevitably, the subsequent marriage to Princess Caroline of Brunswick was an
unmitigated disaster.The Prince was blind drunk at his wedding, and the couple only cohabited
long enough to beget an heir: the ill-fated Princess Charlotte, who tragically died in childbirth in
1817. When, in his letter to Queen Caroline of 30 April 1796, the Prince of Wales piously
expressed the hope that 'the rest of our lives will be passed in uninterrupted tranquillity', he
actually had no intention of fulfilling this lofty aim, and had indeed already parted from her.
Almost from the moment that Princess Charlotte was born, the Prince exaggerated or simply
invented slights perpetrated by his wife against himself, and as the years progressed his demands
and complaints became increasingly unreasonable and hysterical. The climax came with his
attempted divorce of 1820 - an act which only served to unite the whole nation against him, which
as quickly dropped by the government, and which provided even further ammunition for the
scurrilous satires of the day.
Women were not George's only passion. Flamboyant and extravagant costumes were another
significant and lifelong preoccupation. From his earliest years he enjoyed the feel, colour and
sheer thrill of expensive and well-cut new outfits. As early as 1782 George's friend the Duchess of
Devonshire admitted that the Prince of Wales 'is fond of dress even to a tawdry degree' and that
'his person, his dress and the admiration he has met... from women take up his thoughts chiefly'.
Her prediction, however, that his fascination with clothes, 'young as he is, will soon wear off', was
to prove very optimistic. Indeed, as he grew older, the images which fashion could create whether of the 'First Gentleman of Europe', an Admiral of the Fleet or an Elizabethan sovereign became one of George's primary obsessions. Guided by the arbiter of fashion George 'Beau'
Brummell, the Prince's day-to-day wear did indeed become an important standard for British and
continental contemporaries. The memory of the subtlety and exemplary tailoring of such outfits
was, however, soon erased by George's increasing girth - his waist measured 50 inches on his
death - and by his growing penchant for outrageous, pseudo-historical fancy dress.
Majestic self-delusion
To George IV, everything revolved around his own whims and caprices; if these altered, so the
attitudes and actions of his friends, his household and his government were expected to follow suit.
Notwithstanding the King's incontrovertible charm, this major failing was to exasperate even his
political supporters. In 1829 Charles Greville put his finger on it: 'He has a sort of capricious
good-nature, arising however out of no good principles or good feeling, but which is of use to him,
as it cancels in a moment'.
This fascinating combination of talents and insecurities can, unsurprisingly, be traced directly to
his relationship with his parents. Much of his aesthetic sense appears to have been inherited from
his father, who was in many ways as accomplished a connoisseur as his eldest son. However,
George IV's subsequent collecting policy and building programmes were guided by an
overwhelming desire to shock his parents and to reject his father's values. This reaction to the
stifling morality of George III's court was perhaps inevitable. It was certainly in the tradition of his
family; and in George IV's own case, he had good reason to feel aggrieved at an unnecessarily
strict, austere upbringing that was notably deficient in terms of both academic achievement and
emotional support.
'The example of Emperor Napoleon was one which George was constantly trying both to emulate.'
George spent his early years not at the royal stronghold of Windsor Castle, the home of the Order
of the Garter, but in the modest Surrey villas which his father seemed to prefer to the many castles
and palaces at his disposal. The Prince's subsequent preference for vast and elaborately-decorated
new homes must surely have been a direct reaction to the relatively cramped and sober
environments provided by these undersized and unpretentious early residences. The astonishingly
colourful, glittering and eclectic interiors he created at Brighton Pavilion, Buckingham Palace,
Windsor Castle and Carlton House all set new standards of lavishness, taste, connoisseurship and
ostentation. And they survived - all save Carlton House, demolished on George IV's orders in
1826 - as the key royal residences of the 19th and century.
One of the principal reasons why the Prince Regent was so eager to build, augment and redecorate
his magnificent palaces was so he would be judged by posterity to be a more munificent patron
than his great rival across the Channel. His overblown view of his own self-importance made it
inevitable that George, a perennial francophile, would seek to measure himself against the one
man who, during his lifetime, really did dominate Europe: Napoleon Bonaparte. To all but George
IV, any comparison between the two rulers was laughable. However, the example of the Corsican
emperor was one which George was constantly trying both to emulate and surpass.
Newly equipped with the financial resources of the Regency in 1811, George announced that
henceforth he and his court would 'quite eclipse Napoleon'. By the time of the Emperor's fall in
1815, this understandable aim had been converted into blatant self-promotion. For the rest of his
life George persisted in the fiction that he alone had been Napoleon's nemesis. That the decaying
King should in his dotage begin to believe that he had played a key role at the Battle of Waterloo
itself was, given his daily consumption of prodigious amounts of drugs and and of cherry brandy,
a predictable progression.
Re-inventing the monarchy?
What is perhaps most astonishing about George's life and achievements is that the British
monarchy survived his appalling neglect of his office and its responsibilities. During the late 18th
and 19th century that institution suffered successively from George III's ostensible insanity,
George IV's self-obsession, William IV's cavalier attitude to parliament and, after 1861, the
reclusive Victoria's blank refusal to fulfil her constitutional role. Yet by the beginning of the 20th
century the monarchy was once again in rude health.
The explanation for this lies in the events and circumstances of George IV's adulthood, when what
Linda Colley and others have defined as a growing sense of national identity, of a genuine
'Britishness' which encompassed the basic concept of constitutional monarchy while relegating the
actual incumbent of the throne to a marginal role. The sovereign was celebrated in abstract as head
of state, whose limited powers were unlike those of any other European power and who, crucially,
was answerable to parliament. This apparently successful constitutional balance was indeed one of
the key factors that helped many Britons to define their own sense of place and worth. It is
interesting that the royal family survived the years of George IV's adulthood to emerge re-branded
and reformed - diminished, perhaps, but still buoyant. Prince Albert, and not George IV, must
surely be credited with enabling the British monarchy to weather the changing circumstances of
the industrial age, ensuring that by 1900 this ancient institution was once again able to play a
significant part in the life of everyday Britons.
'In many ways he was a strikingly modern monarch'
George IV was, by the time of his death, largely an irrelevance to Britain's constitutional equation.
He undoubtedly left to his successors and their subjects a shimmering legacy of stunning - though
at the same time highly eclectic and diverse - homes and collections. And many of the pageants
and settings he had devised for his own pleasure and amusement were subsequently adapted to
serve as key symbols in the iconography of 19th and 20th century monarchy. But he also
bequeathed to future generations, and particularly to the sovereigns who were to follow him, an
object lesson in how, and how not, to conduct oneself.
In many ways he was a strikingly modern monarch - not in the constitutional sense, but in the way
in which he intrinsically recognised how an attractive, manufactured image could be used to hide
or divert attention from the less impressive aspects of the life of a key public figure. In this context,
George IV's obsessive desire to be taken for something which he plainly was not anticipated the
celebrity culture of present-day Britain and, more pertinently, foreshadowed the attempts during
the last four decades to market and repackage the British monarchy. George IV's crucial mistake
was to actually believe in the image he had carefully manufactured, rather than in the less edifying
reality. For most of his subjects, whatever he did George remained as the cartoonist George
Cruikshank had defined him in 1814: The Grand Entertainment.
Find out more
Books
King George IV, The Grand Entertainment by Steve Parissien (John Murray, 2001)
George IV by Steve Parissien, (John Murray, 2001)
George IV by Christopher Hibbert (Penguin, 1998)
George IV by E.A.Smith (YUP, 2000)
The Secret Wife of King George IV by Diane Haeger (Saint Martin's Press)
About the author
Dr Steve Parissien, Assistant Director of Yale University's Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in
British Art. Dr Parissien has written extensively on architectural history and building conservation.
His second book, Adam Style (Phaidon Press, 1992), was voted Apollo magazine's Book of the
Year for 1992 and the American Institute of Architecture's Book of the Year Choice for 1993. His
biography of King George IV, The Grand Entertainment, was published by John Murray in March
2001.