4) George IV (1820-30)

Few british monarchs have been so strongly criticised and carticatured in their own time as the king who came to the throne in 1820, King George IV. As Prince Regent during the years of his father's illness, the pleasure-loving 'Prinney' was thought by many to compare disfavourably with the dutiful, responsible and highly moral George III; and when he was king, The Times once summed him up as ‘a hard-drinking, swearing man who at all times would prefer a girl and a bottle to politics and a sermon’. The great cartoonists of the time, such as Gillray and Rowlandson, added their own scathing attacks, depicting Prinney in the midst of his extravagant debaucheries. Yet the truth was, as the Duke of Wellington commented after George IV's death, that he was 'a medley of the most opposite qualities, with a great preponderance of good'.

George Augustus Frederick, first child of King George III and Queen Charlotte, was born on 12 August 1762. He grew into an attractive and promising boy, but despite – or perhaps because of - a heavily moral upbringing, he showed early signs of an excessive fondness for food and pretty women. By the time he was 20 years old he was tall, golden-haired and plumply charming, and in education and artistic tastes he was to be one of the most sophisticated kings in British history. Though no poet or politician himself, he admired ability in others, and in his youth he counted among his closest friends the radical Charles James Fox and the great arbiter of style, George 'Beau' Brummell. It was Brummel who persuaded the prince to abandon his favourite gaudy satins for a severely elegant style of dress, thereby setting a fashion for masculine society.

Prinney's natural taste ran to exuberance, however, and he gave it free reign when creating his palaces - whether redesigning Royal Lodge, Windsor, in a riot of rustic charm, or building a unique Oriental pavilion for himself in the newly-fashionable seaside resort of Brighthelmstone, or Brighton. At the Brighton Pavilion, 'Prinney’s fancy for the exotic was translated by the architect John Nash into a magical palace of domes, minarets and cupolas, with furnishings to match the eastern theme and dragons in profusion. It was a startling but successful concept, and the Brighton Pavilion remains one of the oddest and most delightful examples of early 19th-century English architecture.

Love-letters found after George IV's death bear witness to 'the most furious passion' which he had felt for numerous ladies. He tended to fall overwhelmingly in love, only to end the affair curtly once he had tired of the mistress, but in 1784, when he was 22 years old, one of his relationships had had a very different outcome. The object of his desires was a Roman Catholic widow named Maria Fitzherbert, who refused to yield to him; the upshot was a secret marriage. Though valid in canon law, the marriage had been contracted without the King's consent and was null and void under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. However, it remained a serious source of potential embarrassment for the Prince – and particularly after he was officially married, in 1795, to his cousin Caroline of Brunswick.

This suitable royal alliance was contracted by the Prince as a means of writing off his enormous debts, but he was to pay a high price for the financial relief. His bride turned out to be a foolish, charmless, badly-behaved young woman who did not wash enough; she was entirely unsuited to be a future Queen of England. For her part, Caroline was most disappointed in her husband, who made no secret of his distaste for her, and flaunted his current mistress, Lady Jersey, before her. The marriage was a failure from the beginning, and after the birth of an 'immense girl,' their daughter Charlotte, on 7 January 1796, the couple lived apart.

Princess Caroline went abroad for some time, and followed her husband's example of openly committing adultery; but in 1820, on the death of George III, she returned to England to claim her rights as queen. The scandal that followed rocked the kingdom. George IV sought to have a Bill passed by Parliament which would deprive Caroline of her rank and rights and 'dissolve the marriage between His Majesty and the said Queen'; But Caroline vigorously contested the action, and though she was becoming a stout, rouged figure of fun, the press and the public championed her cause against the unpopular King. Much of the evidence concerning the Queen was extremely salacious, and for a time nothing else seemed to be talked of. Eventually the Bill was dropped but Caroline proceeded to make a scene at the King's Coronation by turning up at Westminster Abbey and demanding admission, and it was an inexpressible relief to George IV when, on 8 August 1821, she became ill and died. Her last wish, to have 'Caroline of Brunswick, the injured Queen of England', inscribed on her coffin, was not granted.

Politically, George IV steered a changeable course. His youthful friendship with Charles James Fox, and support for the Whigs, had served the satisfying purpose of baiting his father, but as he grew older he became increasingly Tory in his views. On coming to the throne he announced that he intended to leave his father's Tory ministers in office, to the disappointment of his Whig friends; and he seemed to undergo a similar change of heart on the subject of Catholic Emancipation. Having appeared to accept it, he was later to change his mind. The truth was that George IV could not think deeply on any subject for very long.

Where George was undoubtedly successful as a monarch was in the exercise of his talent for the spectacular, and sense of royal pomp. 'There was something about him', the novelist Sir Walter Scott observed, 'which independently of the prestige, the divinity, which hedges a king, marked him standing by himself.' His coronation – possibly the most lavish in British history – was a dazzlingly theatrical occasion. According to Beau Brummell, Prinney was a clever mimic, and there was undoubtedly something of the actor in his personality. On a state visit to Scotland in 1821 he won the hearts of the crowds, in spite of making appearance dressed in a kilt and flesh-coloured tights; and even in Ireland, which he visited in the previous year, he was received with joy by those who had usually little love for the British crown. 'I was a rebel to old King George in '98', one old Irishman was heard to say, 'but by God I would die a thousand deaths for his son!'

Although King George IV and Queen Charlotte had produced 15 children, among their sons and daughters there was a marked lack of legitimate offspring. With the death of the only child of George IV's disastrous marriage, his daughter Charlotte in November 1817, the succession to the throne began to look precarious. The eldest of George IV's brothers, the Duke of York was already married, but childless; on Princess Charlotte's death, the next brothers hastily found themselves suitable wives. The sole surviving offspring of their marriages was a daughter, Alexandra Victoria, born to the Duke and Duchess of Kent in 1819. As George IV's reign drew towards its close, it became apparent this little princess would one day be queen and one of Victoria's earliest memories of meeting her uncle, the King – a vast bulk with a shining, grease-painted face. Who told her kindly, 'Give me your little paw'.

There was no sign of great public grief when George IV died, on 26 June 1830. The Times, always his bitter opponent, declared 'There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king'. Yet there were many friends who mourned Prinney: and when Mrs Fitzherbert was informed that he had been buried with her picture about his neck, 'some large tears fell from her eyes.'(J.Ross)

The 1820s began and ended with George IV on the throne. It was a decade of change, a decade of four prime ministers: Liverpool, Сanning, very briefly Lord Goderich, and the Duke of Wellington. This was the decade of the opening of rhe Stockton and Darlington Railway, of the bridge over the Menal Strait, of the death of Lord Byron who had gone to fight in the Greek War of Independence. It was a period in which the term 'reform' was being taken more seriously.

The Reform Acts were three nineteenth-century Bills designed to allow more people to vote, and to change the voting method. The First Reform Act was in 1832, the second in 1867, and the third in 1884. But back in the 1820s there were other reforms: reforms of laws that allowed freer trade and tariffs; reforms that moved towards active trades unions and changed attitudes to the way, and the conditions in which, people worked. For example, in 1823, the Combination Acts were repealed: These Acts made it illegal for two or more people to combine in trying to get better conditions at work and more money. Without the Combination Laws the passage towards active trades unionism is clear – at least with the benefit of hindsight. And there actually was an attempt – an unsuccessful one – to establish something called the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union.

The interests of the Europeans in the early nineteenth century turned to Latin America. The Spanish had colonies, the Portuguese were in Brazil and the British traded there. While the Spanish had been distracted by the Napoleonic Wars, many of their South American colonies had gone their own ways – or tried to. The Spanish were now keen to re-establish control. There was chance of a series of colonial wars. Canning wanted the Americans to help Britain oppose European intervention. This was in the American interest: it didn't want wars on its continent, no matter how far south they were fought. But the then President, James Monroe, was persuaded not to involve America in unworkable alliances. On 2 December 1823, The fifth President of the United States addressed Congress. His speech has become known as the Monroe Doctrine and remains the basis of American foreign policy. A summary of what he said might be that the United States would see any European attempt to politically influence the 'Western hemisphere' as ‘dangerous to our peace and safety’. In 1917, it was Wilson who, during the First World War, declared, ‘I am prposing that the nations should adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its policy over any other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to determine its own policy, its own way.’

The consequences of the Napoleonic Wars, the ideas of a British foreign secretary and the consequent reservations of a young United States, produced a doctrine that survived into the twentieth century and perhaps beyond.

C+Monroe's famous message conveyed a warning to Britain as well as to the authoritarian Powers. Canning understood the risks of competition and dispute with the United States upon the continent in which the Americans aimed predominance. He was determined to avert all conflicts which might embarrass Britain and harm her own proper interests. Soon afterwards Britain officially recognized the independence of the South American states. King George IV, who bore no love for republics, and many of Canning's colleagues in the Government, had strenuously opposed this step. Even now the King refused to read the Royal Speech containing the announcement. It was read for him by a reluctant Lord Chancellor. So Canning's view prevailed. His stroke over South America may probably be judged his greatest triumph tn foreign policy.

Apart from the Hanoverian aversion to republics, George IV had never much trusted Canning. And Canning didn't trust the King. He didn't accept the way in which he interfered in foreign policy. In a letter to his wife after a Cabinet meeting, Canning gives some idea of the way in which foreign ambassadors, especially Lievan the Russian and the Austrian Prince Esterhazy, had direct access to the King and tried to persuade him to countermand the policy over South America. Canning was ready to resign over the worrying interference, or tracasserie. as he called it.

*January 28, 1825

I shall talk to Lievan and Esterhazy when I next see them, in a manner that will check their meddling in future. I told Cabinet that I knew the whole of this tracasserie to be the work of foreign interference, of which (as Liverpool would vouch) I had warned him six weeks ago that it was concocted in Vienna and that the object was to force the King to change his policy by changing part of his Government.

C+Canning’s Ministry signalled the coming dissolution of the eighteenth-century political system. The Opposition Tories and the die-hard Whigs harassed the new Government. Had Canning been granted a longer spell of life the group he led might have founded a new political allegiance. But on August 8, after a short illness, Canning died. He was killed, like Castlereagh, by overwork.

Canning had played a decisive part in the shaping of the new century. In war and peace he had proved himself a man of large views and active determination. His quick mind and hasty temper made him an uneasy colleague. As his friend Sir Walter Scott said of him, he wanted prudence. Through Canning, however, the better side of the Pitt tradition was hand on to the future. In many ways he was in sympathy with the new movements stirring in English life. He was also in he close touch with the press and knew how to use publicity in the conduct of Government. As with Chatham [Pitt me Elder], his political power was largely based on public opinion and on a popular foreign policy. Belief in Catholic Emancipation marked him as more advanced in view than most of his Tory colleagues. His opposition to Parliamentary Reform was part of the curse which lay upon all English politicians who had had contact with the French Revolution. On this perhaps he might have changed his mind. At any rate, after his death his followers amid the ruins of the Tory Parry were converted to the course. Disraeli bore witness to this striking man. ‘I never saw Canning but once. I remember as if it were but yesterday the tumult of that ethereal brow. Still lingers in my ear the melody of that voice.’

The twentieth-century differences between Turkey and Greece are not of recent origin. For 2000 years Greece had been passed from one ruler to another. From the fifteenth century she had been ruled by Turkey. In 1821, inspired by the French Revolution, the Greeks rebelled. The Russians joined in against the Turks because the Greek Catholic Church was also the Russian State Church, and the Russians assumed the role of Defender of the Greek Christian faith. The Greek War of Independence from Turkey became a nineteenth-century Crusade, France and Britain joined the Russians, and modern Crusaders from Britain, among them the poet Byron, sailed to fight and die for the cause, in much the same way that, a century later, the Spanish Civil War attracted volunteers. The British wanted to see the Greeks freed, but didn't want to see Turks beaten by the Russians. In other words, British foreign policy was, to say the least, ambivalent. Goderich tried and failed to make something of the political mess.

C+More than half the Tory Party, under Peel and Wellington, was in opposition. Quarrels among Whig and Tory members of the Government ruptured its unity. There had been a hitch in carrying out Canning's policy of non-intervention in Greece. Admiral Codrington, one of Nelson's captains, who had fought at Trafalgar and was now in command of the Allied squadron in Greek waters, had on his own initiative destroyed the entire Turkish fleet in the Bay of Navarino.

That was in October 1827. Navarino was the last full-scale naval battle under sail.

C+There was alarm in England in case the Russians should take undue advantage of this victory. The battle, which meant much to the Greeks, was disapprovingly described in the King’s Speech as an 'untoward incident', and the victor narrowly escaped court-martial. The Government, rent by Whig intrigues, abruptly disappeared. Wellington and Peel were instructed to form an administration. This they did. Wellington became Prime Minister, with Peel as Home Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons.

Now attention was focused on the new Prime Minister, a man with an immense sense of duty, the hero of Waterloo, Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington.

It was January 1828 when the Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister of Great Britain. In theory he was another Tory leader but Wellington had little notion of party politics. His political conviction was that of duty, of public service, and he became Prime Minister, perhaps reluctantly, and largely because he saw it as his duty to carry on the Government of the monarch. His Cabinet colleagues did not share this philosophy, and the mixture was soon to boil over. Someone said that the first Cabinet meeting had a sense of gentlemen who had just fought a duel. Wellington complained that too much of his time was taken with smoothing feelings.

In its first year, the Cabinet was forced to accept the repeal of the Test Act - the law by which anyone wanting to hold public office had to demonstrate his allegiance to the Church of England and the monarch's leadership of that Church. Peel, Palmerston and Huskisson opposed the repeal, but changed their minds when they saw that the Commons would have it anyway. Dissenters and Non-Conformists had for ages been able to claim indemnity from the Act's punishments, but for many it was an important symbol of something else: Catholic Emancipation.

But the first serious Cabinet split came when two boroughs - Penryn and East Retford - were found guilty of corruption. The High Tories wanted to merge the towns into adjoining constituencies. Huskisson wanted the seats transferred to unenfranchised towns; he said it was a resigning matter. Welling­ton, probably to Huskisson's surprise, accepted Huskisson's resignation al­though the Duke could not have imagined the result. With another Canningite gone, the old Tory party began to crumble, and what happened in Ireland hastened their decline.

C+The greatest failure of British Government was in Ireland. The social and political monopoly of a Protestant minority, which had oppressed Irish life since the days of Cromwell, would not be tolerated indefinitely. British governments were perpetually threatened with revolution in Ireland. A main dividing line in politics after 1815 was upon this issue of Catholic Emancipation. A decision had been postponed from year to year by 'gentlemen's agreements' among the English politicians. But the patience of the Irish was coming to its end. They were organizing under Daniel O'Connell for vehement agitation against England. O'Connell was a landlord and a lawyer. He believed in what later came to be called Home Rule for Ireland under the British Crown.

At that time, anyone appointed to a government office had to go through a by-election. The man who was now given one of the vacant government jobs, at the Board of Trade, was an Irish Protestant called Vesey Fitzgerald. The election was to be in County Clare. Daniel O'Connell, who five years earlier had formed the Catholic Association in Ireland, decided to stand in the by-election. But the law said that as a Catholic he couldn't hold office, couldn't be an MP. But he won the election.C+Here was a test case. If the English Government refused to enfranchise the Catholics there would be revolution in Ireland, and political disaster at home.

Peel, whose political career bad been built up in Ireland, had long been the symbol of opposition to any concessions to the Catholics. His attitude in the growing crisis was unavoidably delicate. Wellington's position was happier. He was less committed and more able to take without qualm the line of expediency. The position in Ireland was simple. An independent association of the Irish people had sabotaged the official administration. The choice was either Catholic Emancipation or the systematic reconquest of Ireland.

As a general, Wellington knew the hopelessness of attempting to repress a national rising. He had seen civil war at close quarters in Spain. He himself came from an Irish family and was familiar with the turbulent island.

The only opponents of Emancipation were the English Bishops, the old-fashioned Tories, and the King. The Bishops and the Tories could be outvoted; but the King was a more serious obstacle.

It is very possible that Peel would have resigned from the Cabinet if Wellington had not made it clear that he was absolutely vital to the administration's survival. And so Peel left the safety of High-Tory Oxford and bought himself a seat in Wiltshire. It was this act of loyalty to Wellington, together with the King's horrоr of the Whigs in power, that persuaded George to agree to a Bill for Catholic Emancipation. And Peel steered it through the House the following year, in April 1829, what this meant practically for Irish Catholics was that all the Irish offices, other than the posts of Viceroy and Chancellor, could now be held by Catholics. For those in Ireland who wanted to repeal the union with

England, there was a long way to go. Any agitation for Home Rule was viewed with great suspicion, even by some of the senior clergy of the Roman Catholic church. And not all Irishmen who wanted a degree of autonomy fancied the idea of an Irish parliament dominated by O'Connell. The differences within the island itself were stark - of a kind recognizable today.

In the South West of Ireland, the Catholics wanted more freedom from England. In the most northerly of the five ancient Kingdoms of Ireland, the people of Ulster (descended from English settlers) had little desire to seek independence – even though it had been the Protestant community who attempted to get Home Rule in the eighteenth century, long before Catholics were powerful enough to try.

And in England itself there was little political satisfaction at the outcome of the Bill. The Tories were split three ways into what today is called the right, who had voted against the Bill; the followers of the late George Canning, who were no longer in Government; and, in the middle, the supporters of Wellington and Peel. The Whigs were also divided because some of them had been Canning's supporters, and had therefore voted for the legislation; other Whigs had opposed it.

Another complication arose when some Tories started campaigning for Parliamentary Reform precisely because they thought a more balanced Parlia­ment would not have let the Bill through. This impossible political confusion encouraged a writer in the Quarterly Review to suggest that the time had come to forget the political labels Whig and Tory. He believed that the political conflict was not between two parties trying to control government, 'but between the mob and the government ... the conservative and subversive principles'.

Meanwhile Robert Peel had other matters on his mind - law and order. He wanted to organize the 'thief takers' who had existed since the first half of the 1500s into a police force. Thief-taking was a business, and the money came from the reward for every thief. In the countryside, local villains were known and the system worked. In the towns and cities, unpaid constables and thief-takers might work for a parish or a ward.

But many people, law-abiding people, didn't want an organized police force. There was a very real fear that it could, and would, be used to usurp public liberty. The Parliamentary view at the start of the nineteenth century was that public morality was the best form of protection. However, in London, although constables and watchmen were commonplace, they did most of their work in the daytime. They were often reluctant to seek out footpads and muggers once it was dark. Peel, as Home Secretary, decided to change all this. Here's part of a letter he wrote to the MP Henry Hobhouse.

*December 12, 1828

I have under my consideration at present very extensive changes in the Police of the metropolis. My plan is shortly this- to appoint some authority which shall take charge of the night police of the metropolis, connecting the force employed by night with the existing police establishments now under the Home Office and Bow Street, to act under the immediate superintendence of the Home Office, and in daily communication with it. I propose that charge of the night police should be taken gradually. I mean that my system of police should be substituted for the parochial system, not by a single leap, but by degrees I will first organize a force which shall be sufficient to take charge of a district surrounding Charing Cross, composed, we will say, of four or five parishes.

And so here are the beginnings of the Metropolitan Police Force, which, in 1829, Robert Peel set up with a Commissioner of Police and his Assistant Commissioner, in an office in Scotland Yard. The policemen became known as Peelers, or Bobbies.

Peel's recognition that thieves would simply cross boundaries was well founded. Ten years later a Royal Commission said there should be wider police areas, but many people didn't want to pay a national tax for policemen. Others insisted that policing was an entirely local matter. And so county justices were allowed to appoint men who would organize local forces; these men were to be known as Chief Constables.

The need to protect society reflected the social and economic changes in Britain. But they were nothing to those about to take place in France where, in 1830, the July Revolution would bring Louis Philippe to the throne. In the same year Britain too had a new monarch. In June 1830, George IV died with a miniature of Mrs Fitzherbert round his neck. Maria Fitzherbert, the Roman Catholic widow whom the King had married illegally, was his first love.

С+ ‘Тhе first gentleman of Europe’ was not long mourned by his people. During his last illness his mistress, Lady Conyngham, was busy collecting her perquisites. This once handsome man had grown so gross and corpulent that he was ashamed to show himself in public. [His nickname was the Prince of Whales.] His extravagance had become a mania, and his natural abilities were clouded by years of self-indulgence. No tyrant by nature, he yet enjoyed fancying himself as an autocrat. But with thrones tottering on the Continent he realized that the less said on this subject the better.(Lee)