Born on August 12, 1762, the future King George IV grew up showing signs of a kind personality and gifted with abundant talents. However, as he enjoyed a very well covered pocket, he was excessive in his appetites. At the same time, he lacked independence of action, since the king forbade him to engage in politics. With such restrictions, the prince should have looked for a complementary role that did not present rivalry with that of his father.
Perhaps the harshest of the restrictions imposed on the future monarch was the Royal Marriages Act (1772), which prevented the prince from marrying without royal permission until the age of 25, and even then only with the consent of Parliament and never with a Catholic woman. union in any case already prohibited by the Law of Establishment of 1701.
The prince's youthful years were characterized by a life without restraint. A spendthrift, he spent his nights partying around the gaming table, getting drunk with nobles and accompanied by women of liberal habits.
Such behavior was normal in English high society at the time, very different from that which, in the following century, would be imposed by the severe court of Queen Victoria. The beneficiaries of the commercial expansion of the British Empire spent lavishly. The prince lived in a world of wasteful people and a society of great lightness of customs, and his happy life soon became the talk of the press and caricaturists.
The future king fell madly in love with a widow, Mary Fitzherbert, a Catholic, so marrying her was clearly illegal. However, on December 15, 1785 they married. They did it before a priest to whom the prince had given about five hundred pounds to be released from prison, where he was for not paying his debts. Furthermore, George promised him a bishopric when he acceded to the throne.
Without heeding the warnings of his friends, Jorge was unreasonable and unconscious about the consequences of his wedding. But, from a religious point of view – not from a political one – they were, without any doubt, husband and wife.
For the rest, the prince continued to worry his father about his endless spending. His debts reached 630,000 pounds. He spent immense amounts on his London palace, Carlton House, as well as on the parties, balls and dinners he hosted.
Also, from 1786, in the house he bought in Brighthelmstone, then a beach town and now the city of Brighton, the development of which was due to the medical theory that bathing in sea water was healthy. That residence was the palace, or “pavilion”, in the style of a Hindu temple, which today can be visited an hour by train from London.
The prince's unpopularity in high places is reflected in The Times newspaper, which thundered against him because "he always preferred a girl and a bottle to politics or a sermon." He got drunk in the most aristocratic club in London, and, for his bad behavior, he was expelled from Ranelagh Gardens, the capital's famous entertainment venue. Likewise, they criticized his links with dissolute people, especially at the Newmarket horse races.
In 1792, the famous engraving by James Gillray entitled A Voluptuous Man Suffers the Horrors of Digestion began to be sold, where the prince is portrayed sprawled, with his stomach swollen after eating excessively, his vest unbuttoned, while he cleans his teeth with a fork. Unpaid bills, a spittoon and empty bottles scattered on the floor complete this caricature of a future monarch totally unworthy of reigning.
Bored of Mary Fitzherbert, George turned his attentions to the Countess of Jersey, who was said to possess great powers of seduction. It was the influence of this mature woman, mother of nine children, that possibly persuaded the prince to abandon Fitzherbert and declare to his father, in 1795, that he wished to marry his cousin, the German princess Caroline of Brunswick.
At 33 years old, Jorge was worried about the beginning of his father's serious illness and parliamentary opposition to his being named regent. Since 1789, when the French Revolution began, and probably more so since 1793, when Louis XVI was guillotined, the succession and his own life were also at stake.
According to the memoirs of a diplomat sent to ask for the hand of the German princess, the impulsive Caroline was not suitable to be queen. She lacked decorum, and even indulged in a certain tendency toward indecency in her conversations.
Arriving in England on April 5, 1795, she was received by Lady Jersey, George's current mistress, as the German princess well knew. When he saw his fiancée, witnesses say that the princess's unpleasant physical appearance had such an effect on him that he turned white and drank several glasses of cognac, while she complained to her maids that the prince was fatter and smaller. beautiful than the portrait she had received indicated.
The crisis came when Jorge and Carolina got married on April 8. He was so drunk that he had to be helped into the royal chapel at Windsor Castle. According to rumors, he spent his wedding night in a state of drunkenness that prevented him from even going to bed in the marriage bed.
According to Jorge, the princess's intimate hygiene left much to be desired. However, she managed to fulfill her marital duties, and Carolina became pregnant. From then on, relations between husband and wife went from bad to worse.
On January 9, 1796, Carolina gave birth to a girl. The princes of Wales did not sleep together again. Sometime later, she separated from the prince and George resumed his contact with Mary Fitzherbert and became intimate with various women, with whom he had several children. He spent a lot of time outside London, at his Brighton palace.
Meanwhile, George III's illness, which today is identified with porphyria, reappeared. At more than seventy years old, the king suffered from stomach pains, urinary discoloration, mental disturbances, uncontrollable verbosity, hallucinations and depression. On February 5, 1811, the prince was appointed regent.
The following decade – the Regency period for the history of fashion (very light women's clothing with great cleavage) and literature (embodied by Jane Austen's novels) – saw England's almost permanent war with France, which It concluded with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the imposing expansion of the British Empire and rapid industrial development.
As for politics, the atmosphere after 1815 was counterrevolutionary. His most remembered event was the Peterloo massacre, the armed charge against a protest rally in Manchester, one of the country's great industrial cities.
The regent hardly participated in political affairs, although he gave his support to administrations that represented the interests of the aristocracy, large landowners and the upper classes, and therefore opposed to social reforms. Jorge continued with his habits of waste and debauchery, celebrating great parties and giving pensions to his favorites.
His interests included the architectural development of London. Where Carlton House once stood, today lies the imposing Regent Street, which, passing through Oxford Circus, reaches Regent's Park. It is a magnificent avenue, designed by John Nash with the approval of the regent, who was also interested in literature (Jane Austen dedicated her novel Emma to him) and gave the royal collection of books to the British Museum.
After George III died on January 29, 1820, the prince acceded to the throne. Carolina, installed outside of England, immediately showed up, expecting to receive the Crown. But the new sovereign took legal action against her for infidelity and refused to let her hold the title of his queen. On her coronation day, July 19, 1821, Caroline was banned from Westminster Abbey. She died three weeks later.
George IV reigned for almost nine more years, his health broken by excesses in food and drink. Selfish, a womanizer, and a prudish man, he was treated cruelly by Victorian historians, for whom his virtues—kindness, generosity, and support of the arts—did not outweigh his vices.
