george iv: the prince regent (1811-1820).

When George IV died, on 26th June, 1830, The Times (founded in 1775) published a
scathing obituary saying, as Hibbert (1975) quotes: ‘There never was an individual
less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king’. This was not an
idiosyncratic view, for both as Prince Regent and later as King, George had been
roundly criticised. Although he encouraged the idea that he was ‘the first gentleman
of Europe’ and was doubtless a ‘patron of the Arts’- notwithstanding the somewhat
mercurial and superficial nature of this ‘patronage’, in some cases – his faults far
outweighed his virtues and from his own family to the general populace he was the
object of scorn and derision throughout his life. This is widely reflected in the Art and
Literature of the era, where George sat as uneasily as Humpty Dumpty atop a
mountain of creativity: not so much its head but its target.

Prince George Augustus Frederick reigned as Regent from 1811 until the
death of his father, George III, in 1820, when he ascended the throne. George III had
bouts of perceived ‘madness’ (now generally thought to have been due to porphyria,
which ironically his son inherited) and more than once his ability to rule was called
into question by the parliaments of the time. When it was finally realised that he was
unable to function sufficiently even to open Parliament, the nine year Regency began.

A time of huge political change, encompassing riots, revolution and the
abolition of slavery, and against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, the years of
the ‘Regency’ have come to be associated with an artistic renaissance in which
architects such as Nash, encouraged by the Prince, would redesign London; artists like
Reynolds and Gainsborough would significantly develop portraiture and the
powerfully influential ‘Romantic Movement’ in Literature, which encompassed the
work of poets as diverse as Blake, Byron and Wordsworth, began. Crucially, it was
also the time when the novel became widely recognised as an important genre, with
the writing of such perennially popular novelists as Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen.

Indeed, it is interesting to consider how Austen, not usually regarded as a
‘controversial’ writer, reflected the contemporary view of the Prince Regent. Austen’s
novel, Emma, was first published in 1815, and ‘given a lavish supply of three Royal
Highnesses’ in its dedication (Tomalin, 1998). However, Austen was not in favour of
this effusive wording, since she disliked the Prince Regent intensely, principally
because of his treatment of his wife. In a letter to Martha Lloyd, dated February 16th,
1813, (cited in Le Faye, 1997) she wrote:
    Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is
    a Woman, & because I hate her Husband – but I can hardly forgive
    her for calling herself ‘attached & affectionate’ to a Man whom she
    must detest – & the intimacy said to subsist between her & Lady
    Oxford is bad – I do not know what to do about it; but if I must give
    up the Princess, I am resolved at least always to think that she would
    have been respectable, if the Prince had behaved only tolerably by
    her at first.

Given that this was Austen’s profoundly held, if ‘private’, opinion of ‘His Royal
Highness’ it can only have been a source of great distress to her to accept the
‘invitation’, otherwise ‘command’, of the Prince, as an admirer of her work, to offer
any dedication at all. Austen really had no choice but to agree, as was explained by
his intermediary and librarian, John Murray. Her acquiescence is indicative of the
Regent’s power; his failure to acknowledge the work personally, when published and
sent to him as a gift, evidence of his rather superficial, vain nature, especially since he
offered the suggestion that she write an ‘historical romance’ based on his family!

Yet, more importantly, perhaps, this telling vignette reveals much of the
general opinion of the public, if we take Austen as representative of such. Clearly, the
Princess is not thought guiltless, yet she is held less culpable than the Prince: ‘she
would have been respectable’, writes Austen, surely an indictment against Regency
Society in general. Certainly, she had parodied the excesses of the Regency mores in
Mansfield Park (1814), where the Crawfords have been literally corrupted at the
home of their uncle, ‘the Admiral’. Austen simultaneously criticises the practices of
Regency Society and the Prince Regent, since he is ‘the First Gentleman’ and director
of this. Being privy to her naval officer brothers’ stories, she is able to show just how
indelicate ‘polite society’ has become, when Mary Crawford makes use of a rather
risqué double-entendre when dining with the Bertram’s. Her reference to having seen
more of ‘admirals and rears and vices’ is shocking to both the meekly pious heroine,
Fanny Price, and Fanny’s cousin, the future clergyman, Edmund Bertram. Austen also
shows the difference between city and rural life when Edmund criticises Mary’s
abrupt dismissal of the influence of the clergy by saying that, ‘We do not look in great
cities for our best morality’. The Court, at the centre of ‘City life’, with the Prince
Regent at its head is thus neatly – and obliquely – criticised. The fact that the Prince
was an ‘admirer’ of Austen’s work, notwithstanding, displays her subtlety and his
obtuseness. It also shows how wrong it is to think of Austen as uninterested in the
‘important events’ of her time. She is more than aware of the social evils of the
Regency period and in no small measure lays the blame for this at the feet of the
‘immoral’ Regent himself.

Criticism of the Prince is of necessity frequently subliminal, though he was
often criticised openly, especially in the contemporary caricatures of such as George
Cruikshank and James Gillray. These anti-establishment artists contrast strongly with
the ‘official view’ evidenced in the commissioned portraits of the Prince Regent, and
later the King, in the work of portraitists like Sir Thomas Lawrence. Peter Ackroyd, in
his London: The Biography (2000) records George being referred to at his coronation
as being ‘obliged to present himself, as chief actor in a pantomime’. Since the
coronation cost a small fortune, the Regent’s ‘play-acting’ may be seen as akin to
Marie-Antoinette’s – and almost as dangerous. After all, this was uncomfortably
close, chronologically, to the French Revolution, of 1789 and the earlier ‘defection’ of
the Americas, in 1776. Indeed, there was a genuine fear of revolution in England at
this time, especially after the assassination of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, in
1812, who the Prince had, surprisingly given his previous difficulties with him,
confirmed in office.

Events such as the Luddite Riots (the backdrop to Charlotte Brontë’s novel
of 1849, Shirley) proclaim the unrest which the disparity between the rich and the
poor, nowhere more clearly displayed than in the extravagances of the Prince of
Wales, was beginning to provoke. The introduction of the Corn Laws, in 1815, made
wheat too expensive for the ordinary people whilst increasing the wealth of the
nobility via their land and they were simultaneously increasing their workers’ rents
whilst decreasing their wages. As a result, riots erupted throughout the country and
led to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester where eleven people were killed and 400
wounded; an ostentatious heir to the throne was clearly the last thing that was wanted.
The early Romantics, stressing emotion over reason, reflected this social unrest and
the initial impetus for the writing of such as Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley
was politically radical. Later, when the work of Wordsworth became so imbued in the
‘Establishment’ that he was, after Robert Southey, created Poet Laureate, he was
severely criticised by his contemporaries and earlier, in the ‘Dedication’ to his
unfinished epic poem, Don Juan (1819-1824) Byron, whose political leanings were
towards social reform (he even wrote ‘Song for the Luddites’, in 1816) lampooned
Robert Southey and, by extension, the Regent, referred to in the poem as ‘Fum the
Fourth, our royal bird’:
    Bob Southey! You’re a poet – Poet-laureate,
      And representative of all the race,
    Although’t is true that you turn’d out a Tory at
     Last, – yours has lately been a common case;
    And now, my Epic Renegade! what are ye at?
     With all the Lakers, in and out of place?
     A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye
     Like “four and twenty Blackbirds in a pye”.

Southey had mourned Robespierre as ‘the benefactor of mankind’ on his death
(Storey, 1997) but had, like Wordsworth (and even the Regent himself, once a
‘supporter’ of the French Revolution) modified his views. Byron here castigates his
erstwhile fellow reformer and puns on the word ‘pye’ to link it with the previous
Laureate, Henry James Pye, in order to emphasise the satirizing of the principal role
of the Poet Laureate i.e. to ‘flatter’ the ruler, in this case the Prince Regent. Moreover,
in the nursery rhyme, the king and queen are diverted by money and pleasure, ‘the
counting-house’ and the ‘bread and honey’, a clear link to the excesses of the
Regency court. It is worth noting that Byron’s ‘Dedication’ was never published with
the Cantos of Don Juan in his lifetime and that the original nursery rhyme is thought
to satirise an earlier King’s greed, immorality and excesses, Henry VIII, whom Byron
would use to attack the Regent in his poem, ‘Windsor Poetics’.

Byron is also scornfully derisive about ‘the Lakers’, obviously the ‘Lake
Poets’, such as Southey and Wordsworth, who Byron saw as having, in modern-day
parlance, ‘sold-out’ to the Tories, having been ‘Renegades’ in their youth. Byron thus
reflects the need for change and the corrupting nature of the Regency court which
diverted men from reform by the temptations of the gorgeous trappings of wealth with
which the Regent surrounded himself (such as the indulgent ‘Xanadu’ of the Royal
Pavilion at Brighton, largely the work of John Nash). Byron was not altogether wrong
to criticise his former ‘allies’, for it is certainly true that Wordsworth, in line with the
roots of the Romantic ideal crystallized by the ‘spirit’ of the French Revolution (i.e. to
discard an outdated way of life and of thinking when it was illegal then even to speak
or write of this) changed his ‘radical’ views ‘radically’. In ‘The Prelude’ (begun in
1805) Wordsworth exclaimed, ‘bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’, echoing the
feeling that this was the herald of a new spirit to be embraced:
    Yet in the regal sceptre, and the pomp
    Of orders and degrees, I nothing found
    Then, or had ever, even in crudest youth,
    That dazzled me, but rather what I mourned
    And ill could brook, beholding that the best
    Ruled not, and feeling that they ought to rule.

The idea clearly expressed is that ‘the pomp/ Of orders and degrees’ is empty,
vainglorious and unfair. The poet sees the injustices of the world and that ‘the
best/Ruled not’; nothing could be more critical of the Regency excesses of early
Nineteenth Century England. It was, as Byron, Shelley et al believed, a ‘U-turn’ of
epic proportions for Wordsworth, in later life, to ‘re-assess’ his work and take an
Establishment view, and the mockery of Southey in ‘Epic Renegade’ is thus largely
justified, though Byron was not wholly free of hypocrisy himself, of course, nor was
Southey alone in his ‘defection’ to an altered interpretation of the term ‘Romantic’,
placing the emphasis far more on the harmony with nature which is nowadays usually
associated with the movement.

Quite the opposite was true of the early Romantic, William Blake. Never ‘in
tune’ with any ‘movement’ per se, Blake retained a bold, idiosyncratic, reforming and
largely anarchistic line throughout his life. In his poem ‘London’, from Songs of
Experience (1794) Blake openly criticises every level of authority, even the throne:
    I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
    Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
    And mark in every face I meet
    Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
    In every cry of every Man,
    In every Infant’s cry of fear,
    In every voice, in every ban,
    The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
    How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
    Every black’ning Church appalls;
    And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
    Runs in blood down Palace walls.
    But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
    How the youthful Harlot’s curse
    Blasts the new born Infant’s tear,
    And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

T. S. Eliot’s famous remark that Blake’s poetry has ‘an honesty against which the
whole world conspires because it is unpleasant’ is clearly evidenced here. His view of
London is characterised by being taken from the level of the ordinary man and
woman. Like Dickens, later, he opted to be the ‘voice’ of the ‘common man’ not the
‘mouthpiece’ of the Establishment; his ‘sensibility’ causes him to react to the ‘blood’
on the ‘Palace walls’ and though a ‘great London visionary’ (Ackroyd, 2000, p.15)
not blind to its faults. Blake’s black ‘streets’ are ‘charter’d’, hence, governed, under
rule, and therefore intended to be protected. The fact that they are not criticises the
entire society from the throne down, encompassing the ‘black’ning church’ which
seems oblivious to the social evils embodied in ‘the Chimney-sweeper’s cry’ and ‘the
youthful Harlot’s curse’. The ‘double-standard’ of this corruptly led society is loathed
by the poet and he does not shrink from proclaiming his abhorrence. Moreover, in the
‘mind-forg’d manacles’ he sees the hand of the monarch (especially since he first
wrote ‘German forged links’). The poet exemplifies the reforming zeal which
informed early-Romanticism.

Blake was a consummate uncompromising artist, whose written work was
always accompanied by a painstakingly created engraving on bronze, colour washed,
then printed. However, his art was as different from his contemporaries’ as his
writing. The Regency saw the development of detailed Landscapes expressing
profound emotional depth. This was very much encouraged by the Prince Regent,
who developed his own collection and urged the government to do likewise, inspiring
the later foundation of ‘The National Gallery’. Samuel Palmer’s simplicity of style
combines with the visionary religious feeling derived from Blake; John Constable’s
peacefully, idyllic rural landscapes, innovatively created in the open air, evoked an
England already felt to be slipping away and to be the more so with the coming of the
Industrial Revolution.

Indeed, much Victorian Literature, written in the mid-nineteenth century, is set
in the time of the Regency. For example, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights,
published in 1847, begins in 1801, with ‘flashbacks’ in the dual narrative to the late
eighteenth century and Lockwood, the ‘intruder’ from London, and portrayed as a
snobbish ‘dandy’, represents the Regency idea that ‘the City’ was ‘the centre of the
Universe’. (Interestingly, the Brontë sisters almost certainly took their models for the
‘wild, untamed’ heroes of their novels from the writing of this era, too, being
‘Byronic’ in nature; they were also influenced by their admiration of the Duke of
Wellington, a critic of the Prince Regent.) This was quite widespread in the mid
nineteenth century, to be found in the works of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy
amongst others.

Turner’s wild and deliberately indistinct ‘seascapes’ influenced later authors
as well as artists and the Regent’s sensitivity to the importance of Art is evidenced in
his patronage of it throughout his life. Like Kenneth Grahame’s ‘Toad’, he often
became obsessed with fads only to drop them without further thought but it is a
testimony to its importance to him that this was not the case with Art, to which he
remained devoted in his support and appreciation despite the many deprecating
caricatures which satirised his life and reign, calling him, in later life, ‘the Prince of
Whales’ (Le Faye, p. 44) due to his corpulent build; Keats even referred to him as ‘fat
George'(Gittings, 1970). Indeed, to some extent, he lampooned himself more
successfully, albeit unwittingly, by commissioning ridiculously flattering ‘official’
portraits by such as Sir Thomas Lawrence (1816).

‘Prinny’, as he was known by his inner circle, was equally interested in
architecture, commissioning John Nash to renovate Windsor Castle and Buckingham
Palace, as well as to reshape London. In the course of this, the eponymous Regent’s
Park was developed, initially for private use only, from the former Royal Hunting
Grounds (Ackroyd, 2000); this, however, was unlikely to endear him to the starving
populace of whom he seemed largely oblivious. Even his brother, William IV, later
remarked that the Prince Regent had, ‘damned expensive tastes’ in ‘knicknackery’
(Brown & Cunliffe, 1982, p. 148) but given his uneasy relationship with his family, it
was inevitable that any aspect of his life that could be criticised, would be, especially
since acknowledgement of George’s defects could only add to the popularity of his
successors; the moral and sober replacing the immoral and facile. (This would
culminate in the extravagantly ‘wholesome and respectable’, Queen Victoria, who is
recorded as having disliked being near ‘Uncle King’, as she called George IV, saying
it was: ‘too disgusting because his face was covered with greasepaint’.)

Nowhere was this more evident than in the Prince’s private life, which both as
Regent and King, was always ‘very vulnerable’; so much so that most of his
correspondence was destroyed on his death (Aspinall, 1963). His ‘first love’, Mary
Robinson, an actress whose stage name was ‘Perdita’, received passionate love letters
from him in his youth signed ‘Florizel’ (probably a reference to Shakespeare’s A
Winter’s Tale where characters so named fall in love: Florizel is a prince, Perdita a
royal brought up by a shepherd). Cannily, given the Prince’s relative penury in later
life, she extracted a financial ‘bond’ from him to be redeemed on his coming of age;
surprisingly, the Regent honoured this but then, he was usually generous to his
mistresses rather than his wives.

Maria Fitzherbert, a twice-widowed Roman Catholic and the love of his life
was much less successful financially. Indeed, the Prince frequently borrowed from her
and hid from his creditors at her house. Her religion forbade their marriage, but
George married her in secret, in 1785, without the consent of the King, thus rendering
the union illegal. Nevertheless, he remained close to her to the end of his life and after
his death, Wellington, not an admirer of the Prince but keen to preserve the dignity of
the monarchy, made it his personal task as executor to burn his correspondence with
Mrs. Fitzherbert. This was an exercise in retroactive ‘damage-limitation’, because
much of the criticism of George had surrounded his ‘marriages’ and liaisons. His
indiscretions made it even easier for the popular press to lampoon him and continue to
hold him in very low-esteem, although much of what he achieved was conveniently
overlooked or regarded as ‘frivolous’. The Times wrote of him that he preferred ‘a girl
and a bottle to politics and a sermon’ but overlooked the fact that he had this, at least,
in common, with most of his contemporaries.

George had been compelled by the King, for financial reasons, to marry his
cousin, Caroline of Brunswick, in 1795. Caroline, it appears, was popular with
everyone but the Prince despite her indiscretions, for which many, like Jane Austen,
blamed George (when the Prince first saw Caroline, he supposedly called frantically
for brandy). They were separated immediately after the birth of their daughter and
George banned her from his elaborate coronation. Caroline, not easily deterred,
attempted to force her way in but was repelled by the boxers George had hired as
pages (Brown & Cunliffe, p.234). Nevertheless, she remained very popular with the
general public.

George was apparently incapable of achieving similar ‘popularity’; indeed, he
appears to remain largely indifferent to it, even though his coach was physically
attacked in 1817. Instead of reacting positively to the unrest, he chose instead to ‘set
styles’, taking up Regency ‘dandies’ like ‘Beau’ Brummell and using them as his
‘model’ then dropping them in response to trivial quarrels. (Brummell famously
retaliated by responding to a royal snub with the question: ‘Who’s your fat friend?’
but paid for it.) George abandoned the use of wig powder when it was taxed, is largely
credited with having spread (on Brummell’s advice) the adoption of the dark
simplicity in male attire which replaced the more elaborate and colourful silks and
satins of earlier times and he inspired the wearing of ‘tartan’. However, in a time of
revolution, war and social upheaval, with his people starving, it is, perhaps, easy to
see how ‘accomplished tastes’ could not be accepted as any kind of serious substitute
for strong, moral leadership. Therefore, although much of the criticism of the
Regent’s appearance was itself superficial, behind it lay a deep disquiet about the
future monarch which was in no way dispelled when it became a reality.

Byron wrote, in ‘Windsor Poetics’, of seeing the Regent standing between the
coffins of Henry VIII and Charles I, in the royal vault at Windsor (Byron, Poetical
Works, p. 73):
    Famed for contemptuous breach of sacred ties,
    By headless Charles see heartless Henry lies;
    Between them stands another sceptred thing –
    It moves, it reigns – in all but name, a king:
    Charles to his people, Henry to his wife,
    – In him the double tyrant starts to life:
    Justice and death have mix’d their dust in vain,
    Each royal vampire wakes to life again,
    Ah, what can tombs avail! – since these disgorge
    The blood and dust of both – to mould a George.

Byron traces an unhappy lineage to its present ‘sceptred thing’: a combination of the
arrogance of Charles I, ruling, he thought, by ‘Divine Right’, and the corrupt, immoral
and headstrong, Henry VIII, who tore the country apart for his own vain fulfilment.
These ‘royal vampires’, feeding in the style of contemporary Gothic horror from the
‘blood’ of their people, find a hideous reincarnation in the Regent, ‘the double tyrant’,
George. Byron does not paint a pretty picture but seems, overall, to reflect a common
belief. As The Times printed on his death:
    What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of
    unmercenary sorrow? … If he ever had a friend – a devoted friend in
    any rank of life – we protest that the name of him or her never reached us.

The birth of the future King George IV, initially announced as that of a girl to
his disappointed parents, culminated in a more widespread disappointment.
Wellington, George’s polar opposite in most things, called him ‘the worst man I ever
fell in with in my whole life’ but later referred to him more appropriately, perhaps, as
a ‘medley’ of a man. Certainly, both as Regent and King, George presided over a
period whose influence is still much in evidence but little of this was due to its ruler.