Assessments of George IV

Steve Parissien looks at the posthumous assessments of George IV and his reign - and finds the king's historical reputation falls short of the image he sought to project

Never in modern times has a sovereign died so unlamented, nor the person of the monarch retained so little respect after death, as George IV. Robert Huish's venomous biography of 1830-31 declared of the late king, who had died in June 1830, 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'. Rejecting the argument that 'his example was too secluded to operate dangerously on the manners of the people', Huish claimed instead that George IV had contributed more 'to the demoralisation of society than any prince recorded in the pages of history'.

This is surely, however, to overrate the increasingly reclusive king's importance. George's relevance to British society and British politics had by 1830 become peripheral. The Prince Regent had clearly not, as J.B. Trotter piously hoped in 1811, metamorphosed into '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'. Nor, on the other hand, was he popularly regarded as a menace to the nation's constitutional equanimity - as was, for example, his former friend Charles X of France, ejected from his throne two months after George's demise. Instead, George IV was, by the time of his death, generally viewed by his subjects as little more than an entertaining sideshow - if a somewhat expensive one.

As prince, regent and king, George IV had striven to fashion an idealised image of himself that increasingly bore little relation to reality. His glittering collections and over-ambitious building programmes, the colourful nationalist pageants he devised for his coronation and his visit to Edinburgh of 1822, his fascination with soldiering and with the trappings and symbols of military success - all testified to his seemingly inexhaustible desire to promote himself to a place in the nation's hearts which his conduct had signally failed to win. Depressed by his failure to reinvent himself, in his later years the ailing King simply withdrew into a fantasy world of laudanum and chinoiserie.

It is sad that one of the most gifted of British monarchs was, by the time of his death, also one of the most despised. George IV's undoubted charm, his evident wit, his innate aesthetic sense, his enthusiasm and his imagination ultimately left him insufficiently 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 few encomiums after his death. One obituary in the Westminster Review 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'. 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.

To George IV, everything revolved around his own whims and desires; 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, by which time his former admiration for the King had wilted in the light of what he saw as George's feeble resistance to the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill, Charles Greville put his finger on it: He has a sort of capricious good-nature, arising however out of no good principle or good feeling, but which is of use to him, as it cancels in a moment.He concluded that 'a more contemptible, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling dog does not exist'. The artist Thomas Phillips also testified to George's tendency to forget or dismiss obligations and his inability, despite his obvious natural intelligence, to concentrate on any matter or person for a reasonable length of time: [The Prince of Wales] is influenced by caprice, and has no steadiness ... He has the power of giving a proper answer to whoever addresses him upon any subject, but nothing fixes him. The person who last spoke to him makes an apparent impression, but it is gone when another person or subject comes before him, and his Taylor, or Bootmaker will occupy his mind to the doing away any other consideration to which his attention might before have been drawn.

Revealingly, much of what George IV had striven to create was demolished or dispersed immediately after his death. In 1965 the royal historian Sir Owen Morshead observed that 'George IV had melted like a snowman: only the clothes remained - and their dispersal at public auction created a nine days' wonder'. The late King's cooks and his French servants were immediately dismissed by William IV, who would 'have none but English'. William, with scant regard for technological innovation and an innate suspicion of any of his brother's 'improvements', also ripped out all of the gaslights and gas pipes so recently and laboriously installed at Windsor Castle. The Great Park's menagerie was closed, and its animals despatched to the new London Zoo, while the park's German band was dismissed and replaced with a locally-recruited orchestra. The lavish redecoration of the new interiors at Windsor Castle was also brought to a sudden halt. And the new king opened all of the avenues in Windsor Great Park to the public - a gesture of immense symbolic significance. The Park's thoroughfares had been formerly closed so as to ensure that the increasingly reclusive monarch was not spied by any of his curious subjects; similarly, the curtilage of the sovereign's retreat, the Royal Lodge, had been planted with numerous hedges and screens to deter prying eyes from glimpsing the monarch. William IV's reversal of this policy pubicly demonstrated that he did not intend to mimic his brother's anti-social tendencies and, more importantly, that he at least had nothing to hide. Even the terrace and flower garden at Windsor Castle were thrown open to visitors. The politician and diarist Thomas Creevey was by no means the only commentator to record how popular the announcement was. 'We could hear the people saying perpetually "This is something like. What a change!"' On August 10th, 1830, Charles Greville and some of his friends drove their carriage along what had, only weeks before, been a private road bisecting the Great Park, and gleefully imagined that the ghost of George IV 'must have been indignant at seeing us ... scampering all about his most secret recesses'.

In London, John Nash was removed from all further responsibility for Buckingham Palace, the new wings that he had added to the building having already been largely demolished. In 1831 William IV seriously suggested that the site be converted into barracks for 1,500 foot guards, a scheme successfully blocked by Prime Minister Grey on grounds of cost. Two years later the King proposed that the two houses of parliament be moved out of the Palace of Westminster, which in turn should be 'converted into a Residence for the Lord Chancellor, and into Courts of Law'. To William IV, the calamitous fire which razed much of the old Palace of Westminster in October 1834 seemed like heavenly intervention. Cheerfully surveying the charred ruins of the palace, the King bellowed over to the Speaker, Charles Manners-Sutton, that 'Mind, I mean Buckingham Palace as a permanent gift!' Only the subsequent revelations of the vast additional cost needed to convert the building for parliamentary use prevented William's ambitious scheme from being executed.

Meanwhile, the planned equestrian bronze of George IV destined for the summit of the entrance gateway to Buckingham Palace - now the Marble Arch - was never installed, and still languished in Sir Francis Chantrey's studio at the sculptor's death in 1841. It was hastily found a plinth in Charles Barry's new development of Trafalgar Square the following year. In perhaps the most symbolic act of all, William IV resolved that the bizarre, rustic-Gothic Windsor Great Park retreat on which the late king had spent £200,000 since 1824, and in which he had spent most of his last four years, should be largely demolished. As early as July 10th, 1830, the Windsor and Eton Express announced that 'a great part of the Cottage is to be pulled down', adding on October 2nd, that 'the adjacent buildings will now also be speedily brought under the hammer'. To add insult to injury, furniture from the Royal Lodge and nearby Cumberland Lodge was not redirected to other royal residences, but was sold at auction.

Over the next two decades most Britons - including the royal family - did their best to forget the excesses and embarrassments of George IV's regency and reign. When Barry and Pugin's new Palace of Westminster arose on the ashes of the old, it contained numerous references to the great British monarchs of the past as well as to Victoria. George IV, however, was noticeable by his absence from the building's iconography.

Queen Victoria, who came to the throne in 1837 as the only surviving heir of all of George III's fifteen children, was even more careful than her uncle William IV had been to distance the monarchy from the symbols of George IV's expenditure. Disposing of Brighton Pavilion to the local corporation (while quietly spiriting most of the fixtures and furniture away to Buckingham Palace), she publicly evinced no interest either in George IV's palaces or his art. Victoria and Melbourne agreed that George's much-loved collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings of the seventeenth century constituted nothing more than 'a low style'. Having inherited the opulent, gilded interiors of Nash's Buckingham Palace and the cold gothic corridors of Windsor, Victoria eagerly supported her husband's desire to create two wholly new royal residences, Osborne and Balmoral, which were far more suited to a healthy family life.

Victoria was by no means alone in her prejudices. John Britton told the Queen that, 'excepting Windsor Castle', George IV's royal palaces were 'a reproach to the monarchy, and to the nation'. Yet Sir Walter Scott, who had personally devised the spectacular pageantry for George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822, still maintained that the late king had been 'in many respects the model of a British Monarch'. Among his virtues, he claimed, was 'little inclination to try experiments on government otherwise than through his Ministers' - a generous way of excusing George's preference for agreeing with his last strong-willed interlocutor and for abandoning both the professed Whig principles of his youth and the attested conservatism of his dotage. Scott's other encomiums were similarly defensive, notably his assertion that George was notably fitter 'than one who would long to lead armies, or be perpetually intermeddling with la grande politique'.

Robert Huish's scathing biography of the late monarch took a very different view. Having begun his account with the ominous statement that 'there is scarcely a monarch ... whose private and public life abounds with more extraordinary and interesting incidents than that of George IV', Huish subsequently judged that George IV's regency and reign had been a tragically missed opportunity. While the Prince could have 'exhibit[ed] himself at one time a Colossus of virtue, standing upon an eminence which few would essay to reach' and as 'sovereign of the greatest and most civilised nation of the world', he was more generally perceived to be a figure happy to 'sink into an abyss of profligacy characteristic of the most degenerate reprobate'. George's palaces - principally Carlton House, Brighton Pavilion, Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace - had, Huish insisted, been erected 'at the expense of a people already overwhelmed by a severe, unjust and unequal taxation'. To those who pointed to the architectural achievement represented by George's eclectic array of royal residences, Huish had a stinging rebuke:
The reign of George IV has been called a splendid reign - and justly so, if the Pimlico Palace, the [castle] of Windsor, the nicknacks of the Pavilion, the fleet on Virginia Water, the elegant jumble of the royal cottage, and the soi-disant great public improvements, had either been promoted or encouraged by the King for the happiness of the people. Equally dismaying for Huish was the elderly George IV's admiration for the absolutism of 'continental systems' - a trait which many Whigs were also to discern in his brother in 1834. Huish's grim conclusion was that the late king would never 'demand honour from mankind ... neither as a public nor private individual', and that 'If posterity award approbation to his memory, the task of discovering the grounds on which it is to rest may be well left to their labour and ingenuity'.

Huish's great contemporary William Cobbett was much of the same opinion. His biography of George IV warned future parliaments against sanctioning such self-centred and wanton excesses as George had been allowed to perpetrate:

When we behold such mighty and fatal effects, arising ... from the mortification, the caprice, or the antipathy, from the mere selfish passions, and, almost, from the animal feelings and propensities of one single man ... must we not be senseless indeed, must we not be something approaching to brutes, if we do not seek for some means of protecting ourselves against the like in future?

Cobbett's proto-republicanism climaxed in his magisterial conclusion: 'England never appeared little in the eyes of the world', he declaimed, 'till the time of this Big sovereign'. Although her conclusions were not as damning as Cobbett's, the diarist Princess Lieven found George's character similarly wanting. 'Full of vanity' and able to be 'flattered at will', the late king was, in her opinion, ultimately 'Weary of all the joys of life, having only taste, and not one true sentiment'. The Princess was by no means alone in her judgement. Junior minister (and future prime minister) Lord Aberdeen acknowledged sadly in 1829 that his sovereign had 'no idea of what a King of England ought to do'. And Charles Greville was far more vehement in his appraisal of the king's 'littleness of ... character'. His vices and weaknesses were, Greville adjudged after close inspection of the sovereign, 'of the lowest and most contemptible order'; his court was fuelled by 'every base, low and unmanly propensity, with selfishness, avarice, and a life of petty intrigue and mystery'.

Officialdom preferred to avoid the open criticism of authors such as Huish and Cobbett by taking refuge in modest praise of George's achievements in the visual arts. Another future Tory prime minister, Robert Peel, studiously avoiding any comment on the deceased monarch's character, instead declared after George IV's death that the king was 'universally admitted to be the greatest patron the arts had ever had in this country'. The Times, however, refused to equivocate, and after his death castigated not only George IV's 'most reckless, unceasing and unbounded prodigality' but in particular his construction of 'the tawdry childishness of Carlton House and the mountebank Pavilion'.

Sterner mid-Victorian critics such as William Thackeray tended to reflect Huish and Cobbett's sentiments, shuddering with remembrance of the royal profligacy of the 'Regency' era. To Thackeray himself, writing in 1879, George IV was a complete irrelevance: 'nothing but a coat and a wig and a mask smiling below it - nothing but a great simulacrum' and 'but a bow and a grin'.

After 1918, however, royal apologists preferred to follow Peel's example, commending George's aesthetic sensibilities while glossing over his unsavoury personal habits and inexcusable excesses. Between the two world wars, George IV's reputation was rebuilt along these lines by a series of historians well-connected to the court of his descendant George V. Faced with the outrageous expense and failed vision of Buckingham Palace, in 1931 courtier-historian Clifford Smith still felt impelled to rush to Prinny's defence, declaring that, 'Despite the conventional view of King George IV's reign, there can be no doubt that he considerably enhanced the dignity of the Crown'. Smith saw George as the creator of Regency London rather than as the shabby recluse or the neglectful friend:
Possessed of much taste, a fine intelligence, practical abilities and immense energy, he proceeded with a despotic determination to provide the English capital with a harmonious and beautiful appearance.

In common with many historians of architecture and the decorative arts before and since, Clifford Smith believed that George IV's innate good taste had been undermined and betrayed by the new values of the industrial age:
It was his misfortune to reign at an epoch when the middle class was emerging into power, so that his activities were immediately misrepresented by a class to which 'taste' and 'art' were apt to be synonymous with waste and licentiousness.

Historian Sir Shane Leslie, the biographer of Maria Fitzherbert, similarly blamed George IV's own subjects for the failure of his over-inflated vision - revealing in the process as much about his own prejudices as about the monarch's character. 'The middle classes', he astonishingly asserted in the General Strike year of 1926, 'hated the artist in him as they hated Shelley and Byron'. Royal biographer Roger Fulford also excused the Prince many of his worst excesses by pointing the finger at his subjects, whose necessarily more pragmatic priorities were contrasted unfavourably with the vision of their connoisseur-king. While reprimanding the Prince Regent for his orgy of expenditure, Fulford's 1935 biography of George IV judged that 'we can feel thankful that the money was spent by a Prince who, from our point of view, used it far more generously and effectively than if it had been left to fructify in the pockets of the middle classes, and swallowed up in the great maw of commercial England'.

Smith, Leslie and Fulford all displayed a horror of the middle classes which said more about their own patrician backgrounds and aspirations than about the relationship between the social strata in Regency England. Fulford was at least careful not to overstate his case. 'No reign can ever have begun more dismally than George IV's', he admitted, careful to preface his account by disassociating the interminably dull current monarch from his more notorious namesake: 'the reader will almost feel that the Monarchy of George IV is a different institution from the Monarchy of George V'.

A year after the publication of Fulford's biography, the accession of George V's eldest son put his comments into a newly-relevant context. Edward VIII did seem to have inherited more of George IV's character than any of the subsequent members of the royal family. Both Edward VIII and George IV enjoyed toying with the idea of radical politics in their youth, and both turned increasingly reactionary in middle age. Both worked hard to create a dashing public image; both were undeniably vain; and both were exemplars of fashion in their earlier years. Both were products of a stultifyingly dull court, over which presided dour and humourless parents. Both were enamoured of older women. And Edward VIII was indeed fortunate not to have suffered from the bitter satires of a Gillray or a Cruikshank. The image of George IV as 'First Gentleman of England' - if not of Europe - and as an unsurpassed royal patron of the arts, however, has been a particularly enduring one. Until the 1960s, most twentieth-century writers seemed to concur with Antonio Canova's estimation of a 'Sovereign in whose address were ... combined, the suavity of the amiable man, and the dignity of the great Monarch'. Max Beerbohm depicted the former king as little more than 'a splendid patron [who]... inspired society with a love of something more than mere pleasures, a love of the "humaner delights"', concluding that he was 'a giver of tone'. A remarkably restrained Peter Ustinov certainly played him in this vein in Curtis Bernhardt's 1954 film Beau Brummell, and he was similarly described in Joanna Richardson's biography of 1966. ('George IV', Richardson subsequently declared, in a presumably conscious echo of Clifford Smith and Roger Fulford, 'has always suffered from the philistines'.) In 1969 Sir Oliver Millar, then Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, not only lauded George IV for his eclectic collection - 'No other Prince or King in the history of the royal collection has ever assembled such a distinguished portrait-gallery' - but also depicted him 'at the heart of ... a galaxy of talent, charm and high spirits'.

The concept of George IV as a latter-day Sun King, the inspiration and epicentre of a glittering court motivated by taste and instinctive discernment, was first punctured by Christopher Hibbert's masterly two-volume biography published in 1971-72. During the preceding three decades, Sir Arthur Aspinall had examined and catalogued those late Georgian royal papers which had survived Sir William Knighton's bonfire of 1830, and had published successive instalments of George IV's correspondence. (Aspinall himself was not unaware of George's shortcomings, nor unafraid to express his distaste for the less attractive elements of the king's character. By 1970, for example, he remarked on the Prince's 'characteristic irresolution, manifested wherever unpleasant decisions had to be made'.) Hibbert used Aspinall's irreplaceable volumes to produce the first properly balanced study of George IV. His was the first biography not to let George IV evade criticism through his talent for collecting and building, and the first to castigate him for his costly whims and damaging delusions.

Clifford Smith's optimistic interpretation of George's legacy was revived in 1999 by his namesake, the late historian E.A. Smith. While acknowledging many of the monarch's personal failings, E.A. Smith saw George IV's reign as a crucial episode in the development of Britain's constitutional monarchy, 'midway between the "personal rule" of George III and the monarchy of Queen Victoria as defined by Walter Bagehot in the 1860s as a consultative and not executive body'. However, it requires a considerable leap of faith to equate the ruminations of the 'Cottage coterie' with the Liverpool government's direction of policy. Most of George's feeble attempts to intervene in politics during the 1820s ended in ignominious failure. Pressed by Lady Conyngham to obstruct Canning's predisposition to recognise the new South American republics, George got nowhere; as Smith himself admits, 'Faced by a unanimous Cabinet he backed down'. E.A. Smith was eager not to cast George IV's subsequent friendship with Canning as an instance of 'the surrender of a weak man to a stronger personality' - even though the ageing King simultaneously appeared increasingly reliant on the opinion of his lover and his advisors. However, his attempts to portray George as a skilful politician may seem unduly optimistic.

Interpreting what Arthur Aspinall called the King's 'masterly inactivity' as evidence of George IV's political wisdom, rather than his accustomed indolence, Smith bravely tried to decipher a consistent plan in the monarch's laudanum-and-cherry-brandy-fuelled protestations, seeing in George's fluctuating opinions a conscious aim of pragmatically playing off one side against the other. Yet having announced in March 1827 that he would not appoint 'a Roman Catholic premier', the following month the King asked the pro-Catholic Canning to form an administration after all. Most damningly, on April 13th 1829, George IV cravenly signed Wellington's Catholic Relief Act. Smith attempts to put a favourable gloss on this last betrayal, declaring that it showed 'he was sensible to accept the limits beyond which he could not safely go' and concluding that 'George's willingness to bow to what was politically inevitable saved the country from a confrontation between monarchy and what might be called democracy'. This, however, is surely crediting the King with far too much political adroitness, foresight and concern. For George IV's principles were barely even skin-deep, while his political will was a straw which bent to the advice of his most recent advisor. He himself may not have been 'a bigoted anti-Catholic on principle'; however, after consulting with staunch 'Protestants' such as the Duke of Cumberland, he certainly sounded remarkably like one. Smith quotes Lord Binning as saying 'that the King has "immense power" when he chose to exert himself', but over the Catholic question - the issue which dominated politics in the late 1820s and on which the sovereign was said to have 'strong opinions' - George IV's machinations had little effect. In truth, George IV cared little for anything except his building projects and his collections, and possibly his current paramour. E.A. Smith confidently concluded that 'It was George IV, rather than his niece Victoria, who took the decisive role in creating the constitutional monarchy of the age of Gladstone and Asquith'. Yet apart from purchasing pieces of furniture, works of art or new uniforms, or resolving to build yet another residence, it is difficult to see how George IV was ever 'decisive'. Rather than representing a crucial link in constitutional evolution, George merely succeeded in making the monarchy increasingly superfluous to the process of government and the life of the nation. George IV certainly left a glittering legacy of stunning homes and collections. 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 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 late twentieth century Britain, and foreshadowed the attempts during the last four decades to market and repackage the British monarchy.

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George IV