And it does so for better or for worse.
Chapter 23
The King is Dead, Long Live The British Monarchy!
George IV, William IV, Victoria
KING LOUIS XVI OF FRANCE was executed on 21 January 1793 on the guillotine, the revolutionary killing machine which had just been introduced to humanize and industrialize the process of execution.
The night before, Louis read David Hume’s account of the execution of Charles I. But the French king was prevented from re-creating any of the poignancy of the death of that English king. Instead, in his execution, everything was done to rob Louis of his dignity, both as a king and a human being. He was condemned as a mere errant citizen, Louis Capet; his hair was roughly cropped on the scaffold and he was ignominiously strapped to the movable plank before having his head and neck thrust into the guides for the twelve-inch, heavily weighted blade. Once severed, the bleeding head was held up to the mob before being thrown between the legs of the body, which was then buried ten feet deep in quicklime.
Not since the St Bartholomew Day Massacre had a foreign event provoked such horror in England. Audiences demanded that the curtain be brought down in theatres and performances abandoned; the whole House of Commons wore mourning dress; and crowds surrounded George III’s coach, crying ‘War with France!’ In the event, the French Republic took the initiative by declaring war on Britain on 1 February.
Nothing would be the same again. The war, with only brief respites of short-lived peace, was to last eighteen years; it cost more in men and money than any before; and it rewrote the rules of politics. Henceforward, monarchies would be measured by their ability to respond to the new, post-revolutionary world. Those that could adapt survived; those that could not died, usually bloodily. Which the British would do was by no means a foregone conclusion.
I
Only four years earlier, in 1789, when the French Revolution broke out, nothing seemed less likely than this cataclysmic struggle. Much of the English elite welcomed the Revolution, which they saw in terms of France belatedly catching up with England’s own benign and Glorious Revolution of exactly a century before in 1689. And, in any case, they took for granted that the revolutionary turmoil would cripple France as a great power for a generation.
Most confident of all was the prime minister, William Pitt. Son of the great mid-century prime minister of the same name, and known as Pitt the Younger, he had a meteoric career. Barely out of Cambridge, where he had excelled at mathematics, he became prime minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of only twenty-four in the aftermath of the American War of Independence, and quickly proved as great a peace minister as his father was a war leader.
This was because his qualities were almost the mirror-image of his manic-depressive father’s. He was an optimist, a long and deep sleeper, and excelled as a financier, a fiscal reformer and a manager of his party and cabinet. He inherited few of the volatile passions of his father – he was somewhat rigid in demeanour and dry in speech but was a relentless workhorse. Thus, under his sober guidance, Britain shrugged off the effects of the American War of Independence and even enjoyed a trade boom with her former enemies, France and America.
Pitt’s best qualities were on display in the Budget speech he made in the Commons in February 1792. ‘Unquestionably’, he told the House, ‘there never was a time in the history of this country when from the situation of Europe we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace, than we may at the present moment.’
Not even he could predict that the outbreak of the greatest war in which England had ever been involved was a year away.
One man who did not join in the cheers was Edmund Burke, MP. Of a modest, half-Catholic Irish background, Burke had forged a remarkable career for himself in London as a writer, wit and politician. His maiden speech – a furious assault on the Stamp Act – brought him instant fame and he became a leader of the extreme Whigs, attacking, in classic Whig style, royal power and the king’s influence in government. Indeed, his continued passionate defence of the American revolutionaries cost him his seat in populous Bristol, forcing him to seek re-election from a handful of compliant voters in the ‘rotten borough’ of Malton.
But despite the famous mock epitaph, which accused Burke of giving to party the talents that were intended for mankind, he never lost his original love for literature or the imaginative powers that went with it. These were now powerfully excited by the tremendous spectacle of revolutionary France.
Crucial was Burke’s interest in the ‘Sublime’. This he had defined as a young man, in a notable, pioneering essay, which is the turning point in the whole history of the taste of eighteenth-century Europe, as ‘a sort of delightful horror, … a tranquillity tinged with terror’, which we get from the contemplation of darkness, danger and death. It was this insight which enabled him to perceive, long before anyone else, the enormity of the passions unleashed by the French Revolution. In doing so, it turned him from a mere politician into a prophet whose words echo down the generations.
Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. The Revolution, though he already called it ‘the most astonishing [thing] that has … happened in the world’, was then barely a year old. Absolutism and feudalism had been abolished; Church property confiscated; the Bastille had fallen; the new constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man had been promulgated; and the king and queen marched from Versailles to Paris.
But the Terror, the abolition of the monarchy and the execution of the king, the revolutionary wars that convulsed Europe for more than a decade and a half and led to the deaths of millions, still lay in the future. Burke, however, prophesied them all.
Burke did so because he correctly identified from the beginning that the operating principle of the Revolution was inhuman, abstract Reason, which thought that it could and should remodel politics, society and humanity itself from scratch. This levelling Reason saw history, habit and tradition as mere obstacles to progress that like any human opposition were to be destroyed in the joyous, all-consuming bonfire of the vanities: ‘The Year One’ of human history.
For Burke, on the other hand, history and tradition were the foundation of civilization and habit – the things that made us human. From time to time, they might need reform. But reform should preserve, not destroy, their essence. Monarchy, as the supreme embodiment of history and tradition, thus became a test case. Was it the key obstacle to the new world, as the French quickly came to see? Or was it the guarantor of stability and freedom, as the British had decided (on Burke’s reading) in 1689, and would again, Burke predicted, once more?
Yet again, Burke was to be proved right. When he wrote the Reflections in 1790, his was a voice crying in the wilderness. But, over the next few years, public opinion swung, increasingly strongly, in his direction.
As in everything else, George, prince of Wales, the king’s eldest son, was the barometer of fashion – handsome (before he ran to fat), intelligent, charming, sensual and a brilliant mimic. His relations with his father followed the normal Hanoverian pattern of mutual loathing and contempt. He thought his father mean and puritanical; his father thought his son a wanton and a wastrel. The prince of Wales also followed the traditions of his dynasty by putting himself at the head of the opposition party of radical Whigs, of which the pre-Revolutionary Burke had been the leading ideologue.
The prince’s first reaction to the Refl ections was thus, to Burke’s immense hurt, to dismiss it as ‘a farrago of nonsense’ and the work of a turncoat. But, with the Terror, he changed his mind. The execution of Louis XVI, he wrote to his mother, Queen Charlotte, had filled him with ‘a species of sentiment towards my father which surpasses all description’. He made his peace with the king (though it didn’t last long); broke with the opposition and declared his enthusiastic support for Prime Minister Pitt. He even toyed with the idea of serving as a volunteer in the war against France.
And where the prince led, much o
f the Whig Party followed, joining Pitt in a coalition to wage war ‘under the standard of an hereditary monarchy’ against Republican France and all that she stood for. This increasingly ideological war irretrievably split the Whigs, and condemned them to the wilderness for a generation. The more conservative members, who believed that opposition to the war and calls for constitutional reform would culminate in the destruction of the constitution and the monarchy, as they had in France, soon followed the logic of their position and joined the government. This left only a rump of radicals in opposition, who were not only easily outvoted but were also tainted with republicanism and treason.
Once it was Jacobitism which had done for the Tories and left them in the cold; now it was Jacobinism (as the creed of the French ultra-Republicans was known) which dished the Whigs.
The great beneficiary was the monarchy. For much of his reign, as radicalism flourished in the cities and his American subjects rejected his authority, George III could do no right. Now he could do no wrong. Indeed, the less he did the better, as he turned (in the popular imagination at least) from a meddlesome would-be absolutist into the benign father of his people: uxorious, modest, moral, frugal and the very embodiment of a modern, eighteenth-century king. He liked to live simply, far removed from the formal ceremonies of monarchy, as an ordinary country squire. Those subjects who encountered him on his frequent walks found a man who conversed with them as equals. He enjoyed pleasant holidays in English seaside resorts, and when he was in Weymouth a year before Louis XVI was put to death, a lady of that town remarked on how wonderful it was to have George in their town, ‘not so much because he was a King, but because they said he was such a worthy gentleman, and that the like of him was never known in this realm before’.
Thus, during the tumult of revolution and the recurring threats of French invasion, George III stood out as a reassuring symbol of stability who represented British virtues of simplicity, sincerity and good old-fashioned common sense. Indeed, he was the exact opposite of hot-headed Continental rulers or luxurious despots surrounded by the flummery of ceremony. He had the common touch without doubt. ‘The English people were pleased to see in him a crowning specimen of themselves – a royal John Bull’, in the words of the poet and journalist Leigh Hunt. The result was the astonishing popular success of his Golden Jubilee on 25 October 1809. There were illuminations, fireworks, dancing in the streets and celebratory verse:
From Thames’ to Ganges’ common shores rejoice,
A People, happy, great, and free;
That People with one common voice,
From Thames’ to Ganges’ common shores rejoice,
In universal jubilee.
A year later to the day, George, who had already had two mysterious episodes of apparent mental illness, began his permanent and irreversible descent into a twilight world of madness, blindness and senility.
II
At the time of his father’s collapse in 1810, the prince of Wales (disrespectfully known as ‘Prinny’ to his cronies) was already forty-eight and, under the combined influences of drink, drugs (like many of his contemporaries he took an opium compound known as laudanum) and a gargantuan appetite, his youthful good looks were fading fast and his skin had turned a deep coppery hue.
He spent gigantically too, and his own treasurer declared that his debts were ‘beyond all kind of calculation whatever’. The contrast with his prudent and down-to-earth father could not have been greater and his profligacy and debauched antics had made him as deeply unpopular as the king was loved and respected. But worst of all was his disastrous marriage.
The marriage began hopefully as part of the closing of ranks within the royal family in the wake of the French Revolution. In return for the payment of his debts, the prince agreed to his father’s urgent wish that he should marry and father an heir. German custom, however, dictated that his bride should be royal too. Best of a bad bunch of available Protestant princesses seemed to be his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick.
But when she arrived in England it was loathing at first sight. She was coarse, ill educated and none too clean. After his marriage in the Chapel Royal in St James’s, George knocked himself out with brandy and spent his wedding night passed out on the bedroom floor with his head in the hearth. The following morning he recovered sufficiently to get Caroline pregnant, but only after he had steeled himself with more alcohol ‘to conquer my person and overcome the disgust of her person’. A daughter, christened Charlotte, was born in January 1796. It was the first and last time the couple slept together, and they soon separated.
Such was the man who became prince regent of the United Kingdom. He got a bad press at the time, particularly from the great cartoonists like Gillray and Cruikshank, who had a field day with his shape and his private life. And posterity, on the whole, hasn’t been much kinder.
But there’s another side to the story. The prince regent wasn’t much good at the business side of monarchy, which he found altogether too much like hard work. ‘Playing at king’, as he sighed shortly after becoming regent, ‘is no sinecure.’ On the other hand, few more imaginative men have sat on the British throne, and none has left more tangible results: in London, the royal palaces and the strange, hybrid concept of British identity itself.
Once again, it all goes back to the French Revolution. Burke’s final prophecy and warning to the French had been that ‘some popular general’ would arise and become ‘the master of your whole Republic’. This prediction too was fulfilled by the meteoric rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the young, impoverished Corsican nobleman who became in quick succession France’s most successful general, First Consul and finally, in 1804, self-proclaimed Emperor of the French.
Napoleon was self-crowned too in an extraordinary ceremony held in the hastily patched-up cathedral of Notre-Dame. Drawing on a range of royal and imperial symbolism, Napoleon and his stage designers came up with new rituals and regalia, a new imperial court, thickly populated with ‘Grand’-this and ‘Arch’-that, each in his own lavish new uniform, and a new imperial family, quarrelling as bitterly as any ancient dynasty.
Above all, the event, carefully recorded on canvas and in print, set new standards both for pomp and precision which the established monarchies rushed to copy. Not only, it seemed, could Napoleon beat kings and tsars on the battlefield, he could beat them at ‘playing at king’ as well.
The Republic had been bad enough for the prince of Wales. But this upstart emperor was worse, and doing him down and outdoing him became – insofar as his easy-going personality allowed – an obsession. The prince regent had over a decade to wait. But at last the day arrived, and on 18 June 1815, at Waterloo, to the south of Brussels, Napoleon engaged with a British army commanded by Arthur Wellesley, duke of Wellington. Each side played to their strengths: the French attacked with brio; the British doggedly resisted in defensive formations. ‘Let’s see who can pound longest,’ said Wellington. In the event, the British did and held out until the arrival of the Prussian allied army gave them an overwhelming advantage.
The French retreat turned into a rout. On 3 July an armistice was agreed; on the 6th the allies entered Paris and on the 13th Napoleon wrote the most remarkable letter of his life. It was addressed to the prince regent. ‘Altesse Royale [Royal Highness],’ it began, ‘I have terminated my political career … I put myself under the protection of British laws, which I entreat of Your Royal Highness as from the most powerful, the most constant, and the most generous of my foes.’ In this contest of the imperial eagle against the royal popinjay, the popinjay, it seemed, had won.
But even in defeat and exiled to the British possession of St Helena – a tiny, remote Atlantic island – Napoleon continued to fascinate his enemies. And none more so than the prince regent. It began with the contest of capitals: London versus Paris.
Napoleon, like many despots, was a megalomaniac builder, who started to refashion the then largely medieval warren of Paris into the worthy capital of an empire which, at its h
eight, stretched from the Bay of Biscay to the gates of Moscow. This was to throw down the gauntlet to Britain, since London, fattened by overseas empire and trade, already dwarfed Paris in size and wealth. But it was a rather dingy world capital, shrouded in fog and coal smoke and traversable only by rutted and narrow streets and lanes. St James’s Palace, it was said by sophisticated European visitors, looked like a workhouse and Parliament like a coffee house.
Now, ‘Prinny’ decided, the City must look like the capital of a victorious empire. The man charged with realizing his dreams was John Nash. Nash’s brief was simple: he must outdo Napoleonic Paris. And, thanks to his unusual combination of qualities as both visionary architect and shrewd property developer, he largely succeeded.
His scheme, which involved both landscaping and town planning on a heroic scale, created a grand processional route from the newly laid-out Regent’s Park in the north, through Regent Street, to Pall Mall and the gates of the prince’s then London residence in the south. Nash worked in sweeping curves and artful vistas; while his buildings, which were really terraces of middle-class brick houses, were covered in stucco plaster and painted to look like a succession of noble palaces. This was architecture as urban stage set: as theatrical as Napoleon’s coronation and as successful.
Then, in 1820, there arrived a day for which the prince had waited almost as eagerly as he had Napoleon’s downfall. For almost a decade after he became regent, his father, George III, had lived the life of a recluse in a little three-room apartment at Windsor. Dead to the world, he spent hours thumping an old harpsichord. But his condition suddenly deteriorated and he died on 29 June.
The regent was king at last. And he was determined that everybody should know it. But there was unfinished business with an enemy who stood equal in his eyes with Napoleon. One of his first decisions as king was to order his government to pass a Bill in Parliament dissolving his marriage to his hated wife, who now exulted in her position as Queen Caroline. She had been in voluntary exile in southern Europe, where she had enjoyed herself to the utmost with a succession of male admirers. It was the government’s duty to present evidence of the queen’s outrageous behaviour to the House of Lords, and secure a divorce for the new king. The ministry, on the other hand, saw that depriving a queen of her rights was politically impossible and attempted to make George see reason. But the king would not be deterred.
Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Page 53