Kinlight · The British Royal Line

King George IV

1762 – 1830 · Generation XXXII · King of the United Kingdom (r. 1820–1830) · House of Hanover

Portrait of King George IV

George IV was born at St James’s Palace on 12 August 1762, the eldest child of George III and Queen Charlotte. He was a quick pupil who learned French, German and Italian, and he grew into a man of real taste and charm. He was also, from the moment he was given his own household at eighteen, spectacularly extravagant. At Carlton House in London he drank heavily, kept mistresses and ran up debts, kept company with the Whig politician Charles James Fox, and quarrelled with a father whose frugal habits were the opposite of his own.

In December 1785 he went through a secret marriage ceremony with Maria Fitzherbert, a twice-widowed Roman Catholic. Because the king had not consented, the marriage was void under the Royal Marriages Act, and his friends denied it in Parliament. By 1795 his debts stood at some £630,000 and his father would help only if he married his cousin Caroline of Brunswick. The wedding took place at St James’s Palace on 8 April 1795. Bride and groom took against each other at once. Their only child, Princess Charlotte, was born in 1796, and they separated soon afterwards.

George III’s final collapse into illness made the prince regent on 5 February 1811. He did not bring his old Whig friends into office but kept the Tories, and from 1812 Lord Liverpool led the government that saw the war against Napoleon through to Waterloo. The regent’s own energies went into style. His architect John Nash designed the terraces of Regent Street and Regent’s Park and turned the Pavilion at Brighton into an exotic seaside palace in an “Indian” manner, and with the dandy Beau Brummell he set the fashions of an era that still bears the name Regency. His daughter Charlotte died in 1817 after giving birth to a stillborn son, leaving him without a legitimate heir.

He became king on 29 January 1820, aged fifty-seven. Caroline came back from the Continent to assert her rights as queen, and he had the government bring in a Bill of Pains and Penalties to annul the marriage and strip her of the title. The bill was deeply unpopular and was withdrawn. At his coronation on 19 July 1821, a pageant that cost well over £200,000, she was turned away from the doors of Westminster Abbey. She died less than three weeks later. That year he visited Ireland and Hanover, and in 1822 he went to Edinburgh on a visit organised by Sir Walter Scott, the first to Scotland by a reigning monarch since the seventeenth century, which set off a revival of tartan dress.

His last years were spent largely shut away at Windsor, where Jeffry Wyatville was rebuilding the castle for him while Nash remodelled Buckingham Palace. Obese, almost blind from cataracts and heavily dosed with laudanum, he still interfered in politics, above all to resist Catholic emancipation, the lifting of the political bars on Roman Catholics. After Liverpool’s retirement in 1827 he could no longer hold the line, and in April 1829, under pressure from the Duke of Wellington’s government, he gave his assent to the Catholic Relief Act.

George IV died at Windsor Castle on 26 June 1830, aged sixty-seven, and was buried in St George’s Chapel. The Times wrote that there “never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures”. Wellington, who had called him the worst man he ever knew, also judged him “a magnificent patron of the arts”, and the buildings and collections he left behind support the second verdict as firmly as his private life supports the first. The crown passed to his brother William.

Place in the family

  • King George IV was an uncle of Queen Victoria.

Images

One of 35 people of House of Hanover (from 1700) in this archive. Called from Germany by the Act of Settlement; the Georges, then Victoria.

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → Margaret Tudor → King James V of Scotland → Mary Queen of Scots → King James I → Elizabeth Stuart → Sophia of Hanover → King George I → King George II → Frederick Prince of Wales → King George III → King George IV.

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Children

Life

  • 1762 — Born
  • 1795 — Married Caroline of Brunswick
  • 1796 — Separated from Caroline of Brunswick
  • 1820 — George IV accedes to the throne, having spent the last nine years as Prince Regent for his blind and deranged father.
  • 1820 — Trial of Queen Caroline, in which George IV attempts to divorce her for adultery. She has popular support and the divorce proceedings fail.
  • 1821 — Queen Caroline is excluded from George's coronation.
  • 1825 — Locomotion No.1, built by George Stephenson, pulls the world's first passenger train for Stockton to Darlington.
  • 1830 — Died
  • 1830 — George IV dies at Windsor, aged 67.

Sources

  1. George IV · Wikipedia
  2. George IV (r. 1820–1830) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
  3. George IV · Westminster Abbey

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