Kinlight · The British Royal Line

King William IV

1765 – 1837 · Generation XXXII · King of the United Kingdom (r. 1830–1837) · House of Hanover

Portrait of King William IV

William IV, the “Sailor King”, was born at Buckingham House in London on 21 August 1765, the third son of George III and Queen Charlotte. With two elder brothers ahead of him nobody expected him to reign, and at thirteen he was sent to sea as a midshipman. He was present at the battle of Cape St Vincent in 1780 and served at New York during the American war, where George Washington approved a plan to kidnap him that was never carried out. In the West Indies in 1786 he served under Horatio Nelson, became his friend and gave away the bride at Nelson’s wedding. He was created Duke of Clarence in 1789 and left active service the following year as a rear-admiral. Despite repeated requests he was given no command in the long wars with France.

From 1791 he lived with the Irish actress Dorothea Jordan, from 1797 at Bushy House, and they had ten children, who took the surname FitzClarence. The couple parted in 1811. In the House of Lords during these years he spoke against the abolition of slavery, a cause that would triumph in his own reign.

The death in 1817 of Princess Charlotte, George III’s only legitimate grandchild, sent the king’s middle-aged sons in search of wives. William married Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen at Kew on 11 July 1818. Their two daughters died in infancy, but the marriage was a happy one and Adelaide brought order to his finances. When his brother Frederick, Duke of York, died in January 1827, William became heir to the throne. That year he was made Lord High Admiral, an office no individual had held since 1709, and he resigned it in 1828 after taking a squadron to sea for ten days without telling anyone where he was going.

He succeeded George IV on 26 June 1830, aged sixty-four, and was at first very popular. He walked about London and Brighton unattended and insisted on a coronation that cost a fraction of his brother’s. Within months, parliamentary reform had pushed every other question aside. The Duke of Wellington’s Tory government fell in November 1830 and Earl Grey’s Whigs took office pledged to redraw an electoral system in which great towns such as Manchester had no members of their own while decayed boroughs with a handful of voters returned two. In 1831 the king went down to Westminster in person to dissolve Parliament so that Grey could seek a majority. When the House of Lords still rejected the bill there were riots, Grey resigned, and Wellington found he could not form a ministry. William then reluctantly promised to create enough new peers to carry the measure. The threat was enough, and the Reform Act became law in 1832.

Other reforms followed in quick succession. The Factory Act of 1833 restricted child labour, the Slavery Abolition Act of the same year freed the slaves in most of the British Empire, and the Poor Law was overhauled in 1834. William’s own instincts were more cautious than his ministers’. In November 1834 he dismissed Lord Melbourne’s Whig government and installed Sir Robert Peel, the last time a British sovereign appointed a prime minister against the wishes of Parliament. Peel could not win a majority and Melbourne was soon back. As King of Hanover, William approved a liberal constitution in 1833, which his successor there revoked.

In his last year he was preoccupied with living long enough to see his niece Victoria come of age, so that her mother, the Duchess of Kent, with whom he was on bad terms, would never be regent. He said as much in the duchess’s hearing at his birthday banquet in August 1836. He managed it by a month. William IV died at Windsor Castle on 20 June 1837 and was buried in St George’s Chapel. Britain passed to Victoria. Hanover, which could not be inherited by a woman, went to his brother Ernest Augustus, ending a union of the two crowns that had lasted since 1714.

Place in the family

  • King William 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 William IV.

Read more on Wikipedia

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Life

  • 1765 — Born
  • 1818 — Married Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen
  • 1830 — William IV succeeds his brother, George IV, at the age of 64
  • 1833 — Abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire following a campaign by Quakers and William Wilberforce.
  • 1837 — Died
  • 1837 — William IV dies at Windsor Castle.

Sources

  1. William IV · Wikipedia
  2. William IV (r. 1830–1837) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
  3. William IV (1765–1837) · BBC History

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