George IV of the United Kingdom

George IV: The King Who Bought Beauty on Credit

When he died in June 1830, *The Times* published one of the cruellest obituaries in the history of the English press: "There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king. What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow?" The paper went on to doubt whether he had ever had "a friend — a devoted friend in any rank of life." He also left behind the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, a remodelled Buckingham Palace, a rebuilt Windsor Castle and an entire period of British design that bears his name. Both verdicts survive because both are true.

An Heir and His Stables

George Augustus Frederick was born on 12 August 1762 at St James's Palace, London, the eldest son of King George III and Queen Charlotte. He was superbly educated and genuinely multilingual, quickly learning to speak French, German and Italian alongside his native English.

His spending began early and never stopped. In 1783, on turning twenty-one, Parliament granted him £60,000 a year — roughly £6.5 million today. His stables alone cost £31,000 annually. By 1795 his debts had reached £630,000, some £65.5 million in modern money. Parliament responded with the Prince of Wales Act 1795, adding £65,000 a year, and a further Act in 1803 adding £60,000 more. The pattern of his life was fixed before he was thirty: exquisite taste, financed by other people, resented by everybody.

Two Marriages, One of Them Legal

Around the age of twenty-one he became infatuated with Maria Fitzherbert — a commoner, six years older, twice widowed and Roman Catholic, which made her ineligible on every available ground. They went through a marriage ceremony at her house in Park Street, Mayfair, on 15 December 1785. Without the King's consent it was legally void, and it had to remain secret. Press allusions surfaced by spring 1786, and when his debts came before Parliament in 1787 the Whig leader Charles James Fox publicly called the marriage story "a calumny" — distressing Fitzherbert, who had to be appeased through Richard Brinsley Sheridan's more careful reframing. Parliament granted £161,000 for the debts and £60,000 for Carlton House.

His father would extend no further help unless he married his cousin, and in 1795 George gave in, marrying Caroline of Brunswick at the Chapel Royal on 8 April. They were fundamentally incompatible, separated formally after their daughter Charlotte was born in 1796, and remained estranged for life; his attachment to Fitzherbert continued. Charlotte, his only legitimate child, died in 1817 of postpartum complications after delivering a stillborn son — a dynastic catastrophe that eventually put his niece Victoria on the throne.

The Regency

George III's mental health broke down in 1788, and the constitutional argument that followed defined the era. Fox held that the Prince of Wales should automatically assume sovereign powers during his father's incapacity; William Pitt the Younger insisted Parliament alone could confer them, and proposed restrictions so tight that the Prince could neither sell royal property nor create peerages outside the King's own children. George denounced Pitt's "project for producing weakness, disorder, and insecurity in every branch of the administration of affairs." A compromise was reached and Parliament opened on 3 February 1789 through a group of Lords Commissioners of doubtful legality — then the King recovered before the Regency Bill passed.

The reprieve lasted two decades. After Princess Amelia's death the King collapsed again, and the Regency Act 1811 made George Prince Regent on 5 February 1811, his powers limited for the first year. He remained Regent until his father died on 29 January 1820, becoming king at fifty-seven — by then obese and possibly addicted to laudanum — with almost no change to his actual authority.

The Trial of the Queen

Caroline had lived abroad since 1814 but returned for the coronation to assert her rights as queen consort. George refused to recognise her, had her name struck from the Book of Common Prayer, and — wanting a divorce without exposing his own infidelities in court — asked Parliament for the Pains and Penalties Bill, which would have annulled the marriage and stripped her titles with no judicial proceeding at all. It became one of the most unpopular measures of the century and was withdrawn. He barred her from his coronation on 19 July 1821. She fell ill the same day and died on 7 August, having often said she thought she had been poisoned.

The coronation cost about £243,000, roughly £27 million today; his father's had cost around £10,000. It was magnificent, and it was popular. In 1821 he became the first reigning monarch to visit Ireland since Richard II, and in 1822 he made the first royal visit to Scotland since the mid-seventeenth century, choreographed by Sir Walter Scott — the pageant that revived Scottish tartan dress in the form it takes today.

The Builder

He was called "the first gentleman of England" for his style and culture, and the physical evidence is still standing. He commissioned John Nash to build the Royal Pavilion at Brighton and to remodel Buckingham Palace, and Jeffry Wyatville to rebuild Windsor Castle. With figures such as the dandy Beau Brummell in his circle he determined the fashion of a whole period: after his political opponents taxed wig powder he abandoned powdered wigs for natural hair; he wore dark colours to disguise his bulk, replaced knee breeches with looser pantaloons and trousers, and popularised high collars and neck cloths to hide a double chin. Regency taste is, to a striking degree, one man's personal solutions to his own vanity, adopted by a nation.

Catholic Emancipation

His politics ran the other way. Having proposed a Catholic Emancipation Bill for Ireland in 1797, he had hardened into opposition by 1813, privately canvassing against the Catholic Relief Bill and denouncing emancipation publicly by 1824 on the grounds that his coronation oath obliged him to uphold the Protestant faith. When Wellington obtained his consent for a Catholic Relief Bill on 29 January 1829, his fanatically anti-Catholic brother Ernest Augustus persuaded him to withdraw it on 4 March, triggering the resignation of the Cabinet. Under overwhelming pressure he relented the next day and gave royal assent on 13 April 1829 — the most consequential Act of his reign, passed over his own objections.

Why George Is Called a Genius

The defensible claim concerns taste, not intellect or statecraft, and it should be stated in exactly those terms. George had an unusually sure eye and the willingness — financially reckless, historically fortunate — to back it at enormous scale. He identified Nash and Wyatville and gave them the commissions that made their reputations; buildings he paid for with borrowed money are national assets two centuries later. That is a form of creative judgment, exercised as patron rather than maker, and it is rarer among monarchs than the surviving architecture makes it look.

The testimonials are genuinely split. The Duke of Wellington, who had every reason to resent him, produced the most balanced assessment anyone managed: George was "a magnificent patron of the arts ... the most extraordinary compound of talent, wit, buffoonery, obstinacy, and good feeling — in short a medley of the most opposite qualities, with a great preponderance of good — that I ever saw in any character." His eulogy in the House of Lords called him "the most accomplished man of his age."

The counter-case is brutal and was made by people who knew him. A senior aide confided to his diary that George was "A more contemptible, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling dog" than most men. He accumulated debts requiring repeated parliamentary rescue, contracted an illegal marriage and let a friend publicly deny it, tried to strip his wife of her title without trial, and opposed to the last the emancipation he was finally forced to sign. His charm and cultural accomplishment were substantially undermined by his dissolution, his family relationships and his extravagance, and the prestige of the monarchy fell measurably during his reign. Genius of connoisseurship: arguable. Genius of kingship: no serious historian has claimed it.

Legacy

His body punished him for the life. By 1797 he weighed 17 stone 7 pounds; by 1824 his corset accommodated a fifty-inch waist. Gout, arteriosclerosis, dropsy and possibly porphyria followed. By December 1828 cataracts had left him nearly blind and gout prevented him signing documents; in September 1829 he took more than a hundred drops of laudanum before state occasions. By spring 1830, at 20 stone, he was largely confined to his bedchamber and approved legislation by witnessed signature stamp. He died at Windsor Castle on 26 June 1830 of an upper gastrointestinal bleed from a ruptured stomach vessel; the autopsy found a tumour the size of an orange on his bladder and an enlarged heart with heavily calcified valves. He was buried in St George's Chapel on 15 July, and the throne passed to his brother William IV. What passed to everyone else was Brighton, Windsor, Buckingham Palace and the tartan.