The Elder Sons of George III: Kings, Princes, and a Grand Old Duke by Catherine Curzon

Author:Catherine Curzon [Curzon, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Royalty
ISBN: 9781473872479
Google: __C9zQEACAAJ
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books Limited
Published: 2020-11-15T23:52:37.314768+00:00

The Marriage That Wasn’t

When William reached England, he discovered that the threatened catastrophe had passed, and his father was recovering. With nothing else to occupy his time, William decided that the time had come for him to be a duke, a rank which the Prince of Wales had begun moves to secure for him. Frederick was already a duke, William noted, and he believed that to deny him the same honour was an unforgiveable oversight as well as clear evidence of favouritism. Previously, the Prince of Wales had encountered the resistance of William Pitt when it came to giving a dukedom to William, and the king was no keener to see it done, believing his third son had not yet earned such a distinction. However, William had an ace up his sleeve. He simply declared that if he couldn’t serve his country in the Lords, he would do so in the Commons instead and threatened to stand for Parliament in the constituency of Totnes. Faced with this potential new source of embarrassment, the king acquiesced.

In 1789 George III agreed that William would henceforth be known as Duke of Clarence and St Andrews and Earl of Munster. As he signed the papers, the Tory sovereign bitterly commented that, ‘I well know that it is another vote added to the Opposition,’23 and well he might, for his Whig sons were his natural political foes. From now on, William would be entitled to an allowance of £12,000 per year and apartments in St James’s Palace. With his title secured, William made his presence felt in the House of Lords, speaking on a variety of issues.

He became a familiar sight in Westminster, where he liked to make his voice heard, sometimes to the embarrassment of his family. When he spoke at the debate on a proposed Adultery Bill in 1800, William furiously branded those who committed adultery as ‘an insidious and designing villain, who would ever be held in disgrace and abhorrence by an enlightened and civilised society’, completely ignoring the fact that his own brothers were well known for their enthusiastic embracing of all things adulterous. Though this was certainly eccentric, his views on slavery were unswerving and concrete. William was very much a product of his class and would have known many slave owners; as such, he opposed abolition with every fibre of his being and argued that taking people from their homelands to sell them into a life of grinding labour was actually a blessing. Even in the eighteenth century his opinions shocked some members of the Lords and the public, but there were plenty of people who were happy to agree with him.

On the matter of slavery, as on so many others, William was given to rambling speeches that left many of his fellow peers confused. He argued that the key to saving the slave trade was to ensure that slaves were ‘immersed in illiterate stupidity’ rather than educated and that ‘the trade and the slavery must stand together.’ In

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