George IV (Penguin Monarchs) by Stella Tillyard

Author:Stella Tillyard [Tillyard, Stella]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780141978864
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

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Regent of Style

Under the terms of the act that enabled the Regency, George III was suspended from carrying out his royal functions and the Prince of Wales, as Regent, assumed their discharge on behalf of the king and in his name. The Prince Regent was vested with full royal powers, and was therefore king in all but name. As he had declared that he would before the passing of the Regency Act, the prince kept on the Tory administration, showing little inclination, even after it was clear that his father would not recover, to make any change in the government. To his old Whig allies, this inaction was dismaying confirmation that the prince’s political priorities, shaken by the French Revolution and the long subsequent wars, had shifted away from them.

George’s lack of active involvement in government lay partly in his indolence. He continued to dislike official business, grumbling that, ‘Playing at King is no sinecure.’1 But he had also lost any taste for political change. When the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, was bizarrely assassinated by a disgruntled debtor in May 1812, the prince made it clear that he wanted an all-party administration. Both men he chose as potential prime ministers, the Tory Richard Wellesley and the Whig Earl of Moira, refused to lead a government in such circumstances. By the end of the first week in June, only four weeks after Perceval’s assassination, George reappointed all the ministers of the Perceval administration, with Lord Liverpool at their head. Whether this was shrewd politicking or pragmatic laziness was unclear; but the Whigs were left out and Tory rule continued.

Lord Liverpool was an experienced politician; he took the issue of Catholic emancipation off the table, and succeeded in holding the administration together through the remaining years of war and the domestic crises that followed, right up until his retirement after a stroke in 1827. From the time Lord Liverpool became prime minister, until the crisis over Catholic emancipation became acute years later when he was king, George took little detailed interest in the day-to-day activities of government. He continued to follow the progress of the long wars closely, but restricted his domestic involvement to necessary meetings and signings of papers.

In defiance of any notion that his more public role should be accompanied by a show of economy in keeping with the needs of the times, the prince started the new era of the Regency as he meant to continue. On 19 June 1811, despite the fact that his debts still amounted to over half a million pounds, he threw a grand fête at Carlton House, notionally for exiled members of the French royal family, but actually and symbolically to inaugurate his regency. Over two thousand invitations were despatched; one of the state rooms was hung with blue silk decorated with fleurs-de-lys, and the prince welcomed his French royal guests there, dressed in a newly designed uniform of a field marshal, a rank to which his father had never promoted him.

Breathless accounts of

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