George IV

by Stella Tillyard

  Not surprisingly, Rembrandt reigned supreme over the whole collection. The prince bought three Rembrandts to add to the two his father had acquired, handing over the staggering sum of 5,000 guineas in 1811 for the large double portrait The Ship Builder and his Wife of 1633. He eventually hung a very fine Rembrandt self-portrait of 1642 in his dressing room at Windsor Castle, where he must have looked at it every day during his lengthy toilette.

  Alongside Rembrandt, the prince collected landscapes, seascapes, streetscapes and interiors, and was particularly fond of scenes of merrymaking and enjoyment – music-playing, tavern-singing, skating – with multiple figures complemented by dogs, musical instruments, wine glasses and song sheets. He placed works such as Jan Steen’s Merrymakers in a Tavern, painted about 1670, with contemporary versions of the same sort of scene: David Wilkie’s Blind Man’s Buff of 1812–13 and Edward Bird’s Village Choristers of 1810, which the prince bought that year for 250 guineas, on the advice of the President of the Royal Academy, Benjamin West. Village Choristers was a homely version of the way the prince liked to think of himself: full of good cheer and conviviality. It depicted his favourite pastime, music-making with congenial companions. George’s purchases, then, reflect not just prevailing taste, but his own habits. Although he commissioned large numbers of portraits of relatives and other dignitaries, his heart remained with genre paintings such as these.

  The prince took great comfort from things, and lots of them. This need, accompanied by a good eye and some overall, if wayward, aesthetic vision, was what governed his interior decoration schemes, especially that of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. At Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, the prince was constrained by the public nature of the buildings and the uses to which they would be put. It was in Brighton that he could let his imagination run riot, and the Pavilion, with its eclectic mishmash of objects, colours and styles, turned out to have a life of its own. Of all surviving royal interiors, the hectic rooms of the Brighton Pavilion best transmit the personality of their creator. This, rather than the chestnut, cream, black and dark blue of Beau Brummel’s sartorial palette, is the prince’s design legacy. Regency style, as we tend to think of it, is Beau Brummell style. The real Regency style, the Prince Regent style, was bright and contrastingly coloured, sparkling, feverish and anything but restrained.

  Had the prince been able to travel to the continent before he inherited the throne, he would surely have been an enthusiastic consumer of Europe’s congenial spa culture, with its bathing, medicinal quaffing of mineral waters, music, walks and sociability. Forced to remain in Britain, he never bought a country estate, but instead made Brighton into his own spa, at least until his sensitivity about his bulk meant that he stopped sea-bathing in 1806. The Pavilion was his Xanadu, his stately pleasure dome.

  In 1815, before the last round of alterations to its exterior started, the Pavilion was in an unfinished state, and plain in appearance. Francophile style, both inside and out, had dominated its first incarnation, but now the prince asked the architect John Nash to expand and redesign the whole building. It is not clear where the prince and Nash got all their ideas for the ‘neo-Mughal’ exterior that was begun in 1815, though a wholesale borrowing or appropriation and reinvention of global cultural styles had been going on in Britain for some time. By 1762, the gardens at Kew were adorned with a pagoda, an ‘Alhambra’ and a ‘Mosque’, while Sezincote House in Gloucestershire, which the prince visited in 1810, offered a full-scale example of neo-Mughal style. Chinoiserie and Chinese or ‘India’ wallpaper had long been a feature of fashionable interiors, including, after 1801, that of the Pavilion itself.

  The new Pavilion, which was finally finished in 1822, kept to the neo-Mughal style on the outside. This was extraordinary enough, but on the inside, where the prince really lavished his attention, there was no pre-existing dominant aesthetic. The riotous melange of styles, glorious or horrendous according to taste, was the prince’s own. He hired the father and son decorating firm of John and Frederick Crace and the artist Robert Jones to design and execute the whole scheme, but frequently intervened himself if the results were not to his liking. An entry of 1820 in the Craces’ account book about the walls of the Music Room records the decorators ‘[r]epainting the [imitation] ribbons Lilac, instead of blue, by order of His Majesty’.15 Five years earlier, on 15 August 1815, the Craces recorded ‘[a]ttending His Royal Highness with 9 assistants putting in patterns to Small Drawing Room, arranging the pictures, India paper &c in Yellow Drawing Room; putting in patterns to Entrance Hall and Gallery and arranging Mr Jone[s]’s pictures’, one of many such entries in their accounts.16

  Once inside the finished Pavilion, visitors were amazed, impressed and often stupefied. It seemed to many to be an enchanted palace, with colours shifting through stained glass, and light glancing and twinkling from lanterns, mirrors, chandeliers and lacquered walls. Glittering objects filled the rooms: gilt conch-shells, silvered dragons and snakes, and gilded furniture. Everything was saturated with colour – deep reds, yellows, blues. Carpets throbbed with brightness and pattern. Perfumes suffused the air; the rooms were warmed by underfloor heating and hung with heavy silk curtains. The kitchens were ornamented with columns of cast iron in the shape of palm trees and hexagonal lanterns.

  Those who loved colour, fantasy and extravagance were carried away by the eccentric brilliance of the Pavilion. Others resisted its charm. The diarist John Wilson Croker, who visited in 1818, declared that the exterior ‘is said to be taken from the Kremlin at Moscow’, while the loquacious Princess Lieven was lost for words. ‘How can one describe such a piece of architecture [as] the King’s palace here?’ she wrote to Prince Metternich, in stunned amazement. ‘The style is a mixture of Moorish, Tartar, Gothic and Chinese, and all in stone and iron.’ Everyone speculated about the costs. ‘We were shown a chandelier which cost eleven thousand pounds sterling,’ the princess wrote, and added that the whole building had cost £700,000, while Charles Greville reported that the subterranean passage from the Pavilion to the stables had cost £3,000, if not £5,000.17

  Like the decor, the food at the Pavilion was extravagant, and could be superb. Antonin Carême, the famous French chef, ran the kitchens for eight months in 1816–17, offering the choicest of modern French dishes. Still, the parties could be dull; after his first visit in 1821, Greville wrote that he never wanted to go again and ‘be exposed to the whole weight of the bore of it without the stimulus of curiosity’, though he did, in fact, return the next year.18

  Life in Brighton became more staid as George grew older and more infirm. He sometimes trotted about on the lawns of the Pavilion, having been pulled up an inclined ramp in his chair, and then lowered on to his horse. Much of the time he spent indoors with his mistress Lady Hertford – and after her with his last mistress Lady Conyngham, whom he got to know in 1819, and who took over the arduous post of royal companion in 1820. The turbulence of his marital life briefly seemed to be receding; the Princess of Wales’s wish to live abroad had been growing stronger since the beginning of the Regency, and in the summer of 1814 she finally left. A year later, the nineteen-year-old Princess Charlotte, who had rebelled against her father’s authority, and refused to marry his choice of Prince William of Orange, was happily engaged to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, a solemn, intelligent and impecunious adventurer, who had rented rooms above a grocer’s in Marylebone High Street from which to press his suit.

  The marriage of Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold took place in May 1816, and by the following year they were expecting a child and living contentedly in Clermont Park in Surrey. On 5 November 1817, after fifty hours of labour, the princess delivered a stillborn boy. A few hours later she died herself, leaving the Prince Regent without an heir, and his younger brothers Frederick and William suddenly in line for the throne. Although the prince had never been close to his daughter, whom he regarded as too like her mother to be endearing, he was horrified by her death, and still unable to read
out a speech containing her name the following summer.

  The Duke of Wellington had disliked Princess Charlotte, and called her death ‘a blessing to the country’. The lawyer and MP Henry Brougham, however, declared that it ‘produced throughout the Kingdom feelings of the deepest sorrow and most bitter disappointment’.19 Prince Leopold was devastated; he did not believe in the Regent’s grief, and lived on in bitter retirement at Clermont Park until his surprising elevation as King of the Belgians in 1831.

  Not a single one of George’s surviving siblings had so far produced a legitimate child and an heir to the throne in the next generation was desperately needed. George’s unmarried brothers needed to step forward, and, summarily abandoning existing ties, they did. Both William, Duke of Clarence, who had lived for years with the actress Mrs Jordan, and Edward, Duke of Kent, who had a long-term liaison with a Madame Saint-Laurent, managed to get married in 1818. The Duke and Duchess of Clarence’s two baby daughters died shortly after birth. The Duke and Duchess of Kent were luckier. Their daughter, Princess Victoria, was born in 1819. She was, and remained, the only legitimate grandchild of George III’s huge family of sons and daughters who lived long enough to become the sovereign.

  The prince had assumed the Regency at a time when the war with France showed no signs of dying down or coming to a close. The tide finally turned in 1812, when Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia signalled the beginning of the end for the First French Empire. After the long retreat from Moscow, Napoleon was defeated in mid October 1813 at the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig in Saxony by a combined allied force of Russia, Prussia, Austria and Sweden. In 1814 the allies invaded France both from the north and from Spain. On 31 March, the allied powers occupied Paris. Napoleon abdicated on 6 April, and it seemed that the long wars were over.

  In Britain, the Prince Regent welcomed Louis XVI’s brother, the Count of Provence, now Louis XVIII (the dauphin, technically Louis XVII, having died at the age of ten in 1795) to London, from his place of exile in Buckinghamshire. A few days later, he accompanied the new king to Dover and waved him off for France from the end of the pier. With one sovereign gone, George prepared to welcome others. The victorious monarchs were gathering in Britain to celebrate their victory. Frederick William III, King of Prussia, Tsar Alexander I and Prince Metternich, as the representative of the Emperor of Austria, arrived on 7 June. Alexander was accompanied by the Cossack commander, Count Platov, Frederick William by his commander, Field Marshal Blücher. The tsar’s sister, the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg, completed the royal party.

  Celebrations and junkets did little to disguise the dislike George and the tsar soon developed for one another. The bluff King of Prussia annoyed the Prince Regent not with his elegance, vanity or superior experience on the battlefield, as the tsar did, but by his rejection of the state bed that had been made and put up for him at Clarence House in favour of a camp bed on the floor. The whole visit none the less passed off satisfactorily, though the peace and victory that the sovereigns’ visit was to celebrate were nullified the next year by Napoleon’s escape from Elba on 26 February 1815 and by the need to mobilize the allied armies all over again.

  The Prince Regent received the news of final victory at Waterloo while he was at a party in St James’s Square at the house of a Mrs Boehm. A commotion outside alerted the guests to the arrival of a dusty, exhausted Major Percy, who ran up the steps to the house with two French regimental flags, and laid them at the Regent’s feet with the words, ‘Victory, sir! victory!’ The party instantly broke up, and George took himself off to a side room to read the despatches, emerging a while later into the nearly empty ballroom. ‘It is a glorious victory, and we must rejoice at it, but the loss of life has been fearful, and I have lost many friends,’ he said, and tears ran down his cheeks.20

  In Britain, the maintenance of the Tory government under the long administration of Lord Liverpool had stabilized the day-to-day domestic political environment. Until the final defeat of Napoleon, the forces that threatened domestic stability were kept in check, though increasing poverty led to rioting and machine breaking in industrial areas in the last years of the war. Huge amounts of wealth were being transferred to Britain from imperial possessions. On the Indian subcontinent, the East India Company had continued its conquests unabated with expansion into Nepal and the Punjab. In Africa, the Cape Colony, annexed in 1806, formally became a British possession in 1814. Elsewhere during the long wars, Britain acquired Trinidad, Tobago, St Lucia, Mauritius, British Guiana and Ceylon (now Guyana and Sri Lanka).

  Despite this wealth, political and social unrest grew inexorably in Britain. After 1815, a series of poor harvests, together with continued industrialization and high unemployment, not least among returning soldiers, added to domestic turmoil. Discontent and poverty combined to force into the open the great political issues of the day: the reform of Parliament and the franchise, and Catholic emancipation. On 16 August 1819, after a series of huge meetings around the country, an immense crowd of more than sixty thousand people gathered on St Peter’s Field in Manchester to call for universal suffrage and annual parliaments. Order appeared to be threatened. As tension mounted, the Manchester Yeomanry and the 15th Regiment of Hussars attacked the crowd. Fifteen people were killed and hundreds wounded in the melee, which was immediately called the Peterloo Massacre. As its name suggested, the era of the European convulsions that culminated in Waterloo was over. The stage was set for the next century of politics, which would be dominated by the empire and by domestic concerns, particularly the need to widen the franchise.

  The Liverpool government was well aware of the potential for massive unrest after Peterloo. Parliament was recalled to debate the issue. The Prince Regent, who had been sensitive to any perceived threat to the monarchy ever since the French Revolution, declared in his opening speech that ‘the seditious practices so long prevalent in some of the manufacturing districts of the country have … led to proceedings incompatible with the public tranquillity, and with the peaceful habits of the industrious classes of the community; and a spirit is now fully manifested, utterly hostile to the constitution of this kingdom.’21

  Parliament passed a series of acts in December 1819 to curb outdoor gatherings and limit seditious publications, and the threat of more violence was averted. Although, in February 1820, several men from a revolutionary organization, which had already been involved in riots in Spa Fields on the edge of the City of London a few years earlier, were arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate the Cabinet and provoke a revolution, the tide had turned against violent agitation. Infiltrated and set up by a police spy, the Cato Street conspirators, as they were called, were found guilty, and their five leaders hanged. Republican sentiment and revolutionary zeal were thereafter dissipated.

  In the cultural sphere, too, literary and philosophical radicalism was on the wane. It had been declining since the death of the publisher Joseph Johnson in 1809 and the dissolution of his circle by death, old age and emigration. Mary Wollstonecraft, Johnson’s friend and protégée, had died in 1797; her husband William Godwin turned to writing and publishing children’s books soon after the turn of the century, in an effort to shore up his finances. Joseph Priestley had died in 1804 in Pennsylvania. Lord Byron, whose maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812 championed destitute weavers, was drummed out of the country in 1816. He died in 1824, still in exile and fighting for Greek independence. His fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote The Mask of Anarchy, his famous 1819 exhortation to the ‘Men of England’ to rise up after the Peterloo Massacre (‘Ye are many – they are few’), also in exile, on the Tuscan coast. He himself died in 1822. William Wordsworth had gone into rural reaction in the Lake District. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was lowered by depression and addiction. The presiding genius of the times was Prince George’s favourite, Sir Walter Scott, for whom 1819 was a peak year for sales. This cultural shift was, as so often, in advance of wider change. Peterloo signalled to those in power that
they would have to use the powers of Parliament, both carrot and stick, to take the heat out of radical demands; the wider shift in sentiment meant that reform could be delayed for some time, and, when it came, could be offered piecemeal.

  5

  King at Last

  The Tory politician George Canning, who later said that ‘there was not a man of property who did not tremble for his possessions’, felt confident enough to declare in March 1820 that November 1819 and January 1820 effectively belonged to two different epochs in the nation’s history. By the end of January, Canning declared, political stability, property rights, ‘domestic tranquillity’ and the ‘moral and religious sense’ of the nation had been restored.1 If some men of property breathed sighs of relief, many others had barely registered the threat to their peace and prosperity. Indeed, for many, good times seemed never to have gone away. Charles Greville, man about town, gossip merchant and clerk to the Privy Council, used his diary not only to record day-to-day events but also to capture the tone of ruling-class life. In 1818, when he was twenty-four, the days seemed indolent and good; he and his fellow guests at a house party were ‘trifl[ing] life away’. In 1819 Peterloo came and went, barely disturbing him.

  At the end of January 1820, Greville was again in luxurious surroundings, at Woburn House, where he ‘shot the whole week and killed an immense quantity of game; the last two days we killed 245 and 296 pheasants’.2 Important news did not stop the carnage. ‘On Sunday last arrived the news of the King’s death,’ Greville wrote simply, before adding: ‘The new King has been desperately ill. He had a bad cold at Brighton, for which he lost eighty ounces of blood; yet he afterwards had a severe oppression, amounting almost to suffocation, on his chest.’3