An interview with Janice Hadlow
This interview with Janice Hadlow (JH) was carried out by the television production company Flashback Television (FT) for the Channel 4 programme The Badness of King George IV. Janice Hadlow is controller of BBC Four and the co-author of The Nunnery: The six daughters of George III.
A sense of order
Flashback Television Can you give us an idea of what rules and regulations, what atmosphere prevailed in the palace in George's childhood?
Janice Hadlow Everyone who ever goes to the palace is very struck by the fact that it's fantastically ordered. Because there are so many children, quite early on the king and queen take a decision that the only way they're going to be able to manage these kids is by giving them this great sense of order.
It partially works. George and his older brothers were together in one little house in Kew. When they were about 10, the order breaks down to such degree that there are regular fights in the house and the king has to be called in to sort things out. But what they were trying to do was to give a sober, moral environment in which the children could be trained up, particularly George.
Internal discipline, external control
Right from the beginning, the king and queen are very conscious that he has a particular destiny that he's got to fulfil. And the only way they thought that was going to be achieved was by giving him a internal discipline. He had to learn to regulate himself, and in 18th century, they thought the best way to do that was to give him as much external control as possible.
So this is a place where everyone gets up very early – all the children are up at six o'clock. They have lessons before they have breakfast. They have very frugal meals. George III, in particular, who was obsessed about his weight all his life, hardly eats anything, and he thought the same regime was good for his children.
In the 18th century, vegetables were not thought to be necessarily very good for you, and fruit certainly was something to be taken very sparingly. The boys do get fruit, but the queen writes an amazing instruction to Kew saying they're allowed to have for their lunch a little clear soup, a little bit of meat, a little bit of vegetable and some fruit tart but without the crust. So it's a very basic, sombre, quite dreary existence in many ways.
All the boys' tutors are clerics, so the boys are subjected to a constant diet of sermonising, with very little entertainment. They did have toys; some survived until the end of the 19th century. They were kept at Kew and you could see some of the toys that Frederick, the younger son, and George used. They learned their letters by fitting them in the right order in a little box to make the alphabet. So it wasn't totally sombre, but it was pretty dull.
Kept away from the world
FT Is it a neurosis that George III is acting out or some plan, or is it a mixture of both?
JH Well, he certainly hadn't learned from his own childhood. His own father dies when George III is about 11, and before that, he's had a very restrained childhood. It was always noted that the prince of Wales, as he was then, knew nothing of the world. He was kept away from the world; he was hardly seen. He, too, came from a big family, and they were all kept in one palace down in Kew, and were very much restricted in the things that they were allowed to do.
He was very unhappy as a child and wanted to see more of the world. I don't think he saw the sea until he was 30. He has very little experience of life. But rather than reacting against that, he writes an extraordinary letter when he's about 16 to the earl of Bute who's his governor and preceptor, the man who looks after him. It says: 'I really understand now what it is to be a king.'
More virtuous
George thinks that it's very hard to justify the difference between king and subjects in any rational way. He comes up with the idea that kings simply have to be more virtuous than other men. That's why they're put on earth, that's the point of them, that justifies the way that they've been set above others. He arrives at this decision very early on, as a teenager, and he never loses sight of it.
In some of the letters that he writes to George IV, when the latter is prince of Wales, he's absolutely insistent about this. Being good isn't just a point in itself, although obviously that's God's will, what God wants of you. It means something different when you're born to a particular destiny, as George III called it. It's the job of a king to give a moral leadership to his subjects. And therefore the desire to make his son into a good man has a lot to do with kingship, as well as just wanting him to be good for his own sake.
Royal vegetables
FT What about the royal vegetable patch?
JH Let's imagine that the royal children have had their frugal lunch, and after that, there was a bit more classics, more rather dreary learning in the afternoon. And then, because George III and Charlotte had this very elevated idea about how good fresh air is for you, both Frederick and George were expected to cultivate their garden, in the most literal way.
It wasn't just a vegetable patch; they actually grew corn [wheat] as well. The whole point was that they should literally learn how to get their bread. So they grew a little patch of corn, just big enough to for them to deal with themselves. They sowed it, they reaped it, they had a little mill in Kew where they could go and grind it, and they actually had to bake it. They saw the whole process from an ear of corn through to eating it. That was absolutely key to George III's idea of his children getting their hands dirty and not learning to be above people, to be too pompous or full of themselves.
A sense of duty
FT The key word is always 'duty' …
JH In some ways, the key to understanding George III is that word 'duty'. All the letters that he writes as a young man are absolutely weighed under with a sense of duty. He always feels that he's falling short, that he's failing, that he can never live up to the high standards that being a king demands. And because he feels that, he tries to persuade his sons to feel it, too. But I think their personalities are far less susceptible to it. I don't think any of the boys – with the exception of perhaps the duke of Cambridge, one of the younger ones – ever have any real sense that there was a duty that they had to fulfil.
The other way that George III and Charlotte try to persuade their sons that a sense of duty is a good thing is by beating them. In later years, one of their middle sisters – Mary, I think it is – looks back and remembers the two eldest boys being 'held like dogs and beaten with a stick', which seems to have happened quite regularly. Certainly in later years, some of the younger boys remember being beaten very hard at Kew. That wasn't unusual for 18th-century children, but some of the people who pass through the nursery, who are members of the household, comment that the male royals are treated very harshly when they're boys.
Babies and boys
The king absolutely adores babies; he's brilliant with little children. He loves his children when they're babies and writes about them in a very moving way. There's a moment in the diary of Fanny Burney, a member of the queen's household, when she comes into a room and is absolutely amazed to find the king, dressed in his full formal outfit with the Garter Star, playing on the floor with the small children. They are on his back and he's pretending to be a horse. She's so amazed that this usually very dignified and proper man is on the floor with his kids.
With his older children, and especially with his older boys, there's a moment when they come to adolescence when he simply finds them impossible to understand. He writes a whole series of letters, particularly to George, which are very telling. He always writes in a very strict way, about duty and moral virtue and all those things that he is fond of endlessly reiterating to George. And yet there are other lines that recur over and over again, which are: 'I want to be your friend. I would live with you in peace. I would live with you in quiet.' Especially in the early years, when he thinks that he can still win the prince over to a sense of his proper duty, he's constantly trying to persuade him that they could be friends.
Hate
FT George IV says: 'The king always hated me from the age of seven.' What reason would he have for saying that?
JH He says that quite early. He writes to one of his friends, James Harris, the earl of Malmesbury, when he's not even in middle age: 'The king has always hated me, he's hated me since I was seven, he's never liked me.' I think there's some truth to that.
I think the word 'hate' is probably too strong. Certainly, for most of George IV's life, that would probably be unjust. But there is a point in his 20s when his father becomes so exasperated with him that he feels that he can make no progress with him at all. And while he never quite washes his hands of him, this is responsible for some of the tone in the earlier letters that George III writes to his son, where he's trying to persuade him to see things from his point of view.
He's constantly writing to George in the 1780s saying, 'You have to understand how terrible my life is.' In any given government crisis, the king writes, 'I need your support. I can't go through these things without the support of my family.' That ebbs away as the prince gets older because the king just gives up on him.
Distant parents
Even earlier on, though, it's quite extraordinary the degree to which both Charlotte and George, who are quite hands-on as parents when their children are very young, become very distant. Not just to George, although he often gets the brunt of it because he's the one who's at home – he doesn't get sent away to school or to join the army like his brothers. But a lot of the other children write back to their parents, saying 'It would be good to have a letter from you. I've heard nothing from you.'
When one of the sons, Ernest, duke of Cumberland, actually loses the sight of an eye fighting in the Napoleonic wars, it's some three months before he gets a letter from his parents showing any interest in his injury. One of the younger sons gets sent away quite early on, when he's only in his mid-teens, to the south of France for his health, and nobody ever replies to his letters. He sends very pathetic ones home saying, 'Do tell me how everyone's getting on, I long to hear.' The duke of Clarence, the son who joins the navy, repeatedly writes letters saying, 'I keep writing to you to tell you how I'm getting on. I don't hear anything.'
Pique and venom
So they're quite a cool family really. They're also given to displays of pique and venom. They're great non-inviters to birthday parties. You always knew you were out in the cold when you failed to get an invitation.
In a letter that the prince of Wales writes to one of his brothers, he says that Frederick, the duke of York, would often try and keep the peace between him and the king. Frederick often writes to George saying, 'You say our father's grumpy and miserable, but you know he's got a lot to bear. You should give a bit of thought to some of the pressures on him and maybe you could just find it in your heart to be a bit more accommodating to him.' At that point, George writes back: 'When I go and see him, he cuts me, he cuts me everywhere. I go to a levée, I go to a party, he walks straight past me. He won't look me in the eye.'
The Hanoverians are also grudge-bearers, especially George III. Even as a teenager, he was known to go and sit in another room and brood resentfully. He never lost that, and I think it was very hard for his eldest son to deal with.
Brightest of all
FT Although young George had quite a difficult and uncongenial upbringing, he was a promising young boy, wasn't he? He had talents that set him apart from his other brothers.
JH When we think about the old George who's a rather extraordinary figure, a figure of fun, a rather ludicrous figure, it's hard to imagine that, when he was young, he was quite a different person. He's probably the brightest of all the brothers and sisters. By the time he's about 15 and out of the school room, he can speak fluent German – well, you'd expect him to, that was his mother's first language, and indeed George and Charlotte often spoke German among themselves. But he is also fluent in French: when he writes to his mother, he always writes to her in French. He speaks other European languages, including tolerable Italian, and he is also quite a good Hebrew scholar.
Good company
He is a very practised musician, too. He can play the cello, he can sing very well, and from an early age, he has a very well-developed aesthetic sense. That isn't just about being a critic and appreciating drawing and pictures. That is also about being able to demonstrate your expertise in things like architectural drawings, the drawing of elevations and conic sections and all the technical side of art. He is rather good at that, too.
So he's a very polished character. He's also very witty. You don't get a lot of that in his letters because he tends to write in a rather, to us in the 21st-century, high-flown and overly formal style. But he's funny and witty. When he's a younger man, before the drink and drugs get to him, he's quite good company, he's a good person to be next to at dinner. So the idea that he is this rather lumpy, sad person is simply not true when he's younger.
Getting on badly with your heir
FT To what extent is the bad blood between father and son exacerbated by the political situation?
JH I don't think any Hanoverian king ever gets on with his heir. George III himself had had appalling relations with his grandfather George II. They had argued about everything from whether George would be allowed to live with his mother through to whether he would be allowed to go into the army. And George II's relationship with George I had been even worse. So there's a very long Hanoverian tradition of getting on very badly with your heir. And by 'badly' I don't mean slight irritation, I mean really cosmically bad relations.
You might think that George III would have learned from this, but he learns nothing. Partly that is because of personality clashes, and partly because what George III was looking for was simply something that his son could probably never supply. But it is given a framework by the whole system of politics that exists in the 18th century.
The reversionary interest
Put simply, 18th-century politicians used to call it the 'reversionary interest', which is quite a posh way of saying that you placed your bet on the heir to see whether, in the long term, you would be better off aligning yourself with the rising star rather than with the setting sun. As soon as your son comes of age, it's quite clear, if you're a Hanoverian king, that there are always going to be politicians who will align themselves quite deliberately with him.
This hadn't mattered terribly under the Stuarts or the Tudors because there was no political opposition to speak of. But in the 18th century, the idea that you could have an opposition that was not in itself treasonous has developed to quite a degree, and continues to develop under George III. So once you have the idea that you can have a political opposition, it becomes natural that that will congregate around your heir. So with any issue of political importance, you can be sure that your eldest son is likely to take a difficult, a different or an opposite point of view to you.
That brings into the father/son relationship the whole issue of political contentiousness to a huge degree. And as politics become more charged throughout George III's reign, it's clearly more of an issue after the French Revolution than it is in 1760. The issues simply become far more charged, and as that happens, it inevitably makes the relationship between father and son even more poisonous.
The king's madness
FT And the added complication in the case of George III and George IV is the father's madness ...
JH All of this fantastically tense and difficult situation becomes far more complicated when the king goes mad. What you essentially have is a king who is still alive but unable to operate the levers of politics. There are three occasions when George III goes mad. The final madness, which begins in 1810, is when the prince of Wales becomes regent.
But in the previous bouts, the same thing always happens: a reluctance on the part of the king to accept what is happening; a gradual realisation that he is losing control; and then a panic among the established politicians. It's only at that point – when political business simply can't carry on because George III can't sign things any longer – that the politicians realise something's got to be done.
Bad press
George IV has had a very bad press because his actions, whenever his father descended into madness, have usually been thought fantastically disloyal. He was caricatured at the time standing by the bedside of his sick father waiting to take the crown away from him. He was certainly treated as though he just couldn't wait to get his hands on power.
It's certainly true that there was an aspect of that, given the very curtailed life that the prince of Wales had led with his father. He would have had to have been superhuman not to have felt some satisfaction that, at last, he might have some freedom.
But I do think that, in many ways, George has had quite a bad press about the whole Regency issue. On every occasion when the king goes mad, he is of age, he is the heir, it was not totally unreasonable for him to expect to be given some restricted Regency powers. What happens is that, on every occasion, he is seen to be just that bit too eager, and his bad handling of what was already a very sensitive situation meant that he ended up with the worst of both worlds.
A lose–lose situation
He was very unlucky in his timing. In the first Regency crisis, when he's a young man in the 1780s, it looks as though he's about to get what he wants, which is to get his hands on political power. Then the king recovers. The prince does terribly badly out of that because the queen and the family immediately tell the king how badly his eldest son has behaved. That poisons the relationship between the two of them for the next 20 years. And the prince has gained absolutely nothing out of it.
So, in some ways, he is in a lose–lose situation, and that makes him very tentative and nervous when the next crisis comes around. He hasn't really learned enough to manage it properly in 1804. And he again gains little out of it. By then he is middle-aged and you would have expected that he naturally would have been the prime candidate to take up the reins of power. So all of this makes his experience very difficult.
A gruesome night
It's also worth saying that George III is very frightening when he's mad. All the accounts that we have tell us this – particularly Fanny Burney, who was in the royal household at the time of the king's first madness. She writes very strikingly about how terrified the family were of what George might do next.
His madness makes him extremely loud, extremely unpredictable and, in some cases, very violent. He's big, strong and fit. Despite the madness, he lives to a greater age than any of his children. So, right to the end, he's a rather terrifying figure.
But what is clear is his feeling that his son is trying to betray him, or that he's disappointed in him. The prince is often the focus of the rages that come with his father's madness. There's a one particularly gruesome night in the 1780s, at the time of the king's first attack of madness. The queen and her daughters organise a music party in an attempt, not exactly to deny that the king is mad, but to try and see whether life can't go on a bit normally. As the evening goes on, the king is more and more distressed, he's talking very fast, he can't sit still. Everyone knows that this is going to end in tears, but it isn't until his eldest son George walks into the room with his brother Frederick that the king's fury becomes focused on him.
He rushes across to his son, takes him by the lapels and bangs him against a wall. Certainly that's how the prince of Wales remembered it. It terrifies everybody. The whole room erupts into hysteria. The queen and her daughters are crying; everyone is tense. I think that experience – coming from somebody who was so controlled and such an authority figure in his life – was very frightening for George.
The colours of liberty
FT The Regency crisis happens, and the following year there's a revolution in France. It just goes to show how on a knife-edge things are. Therefore to have a mad king, at that time, is not a great idea ...
JH The year after the Regency crisis, the great defining event of the 18th-century world occurs: the French Revolution of 1789. When it happens, I don't think anybody, certainly not in England, quite realises what a momentous occasion this is. Most of the Whigs – and particularly Charles James Fox – think that it is a repetition of what happened in England in 1688 [the 'Glorious Revolution', when William and Mary relatively non-violently dethroned James II]. And they all think, 'Great, now we're seeing a democracy on the British model spreading on to the Continent, where it is much overdue.'
It's ironic that, very early in the 1790s, the prince of Wales is actually quite Fox-like in his views. He, too, welcomes the French Revolution. Before that, he was often to be seen wandering round London dressed in blue and buff, the colours of the Whig party, who had taken them from the ones worn by the American rebels in their War of Independence. At that point, the prince of Wales quite likes to identify himself on the side of British liberty.
Crusade against kingship
But it soon becomes clear that what is happening in France is not what happened in England in 1688 – certainly after 1793, when war is declared with France, after the king of France's head has been cut off. What is happening is a revolution against, not just the king of France, but against kings in general. This becomes a crusade against kingship.
Now having a king on the throne of Britain who is not in full control of his faculties is simply unthinkable. The stakes are so high that to have somebody with such a fragile hold on politics is terribly worrying.
The prince of Wales changes his colours pretty swiftly. I doubt very much if, at any time after 1795 or 1796, he would ever have been heard voicing the kinds of opinions that he did earlier on. From then on, ironically, he actually ends up in a place not that far from his own father's beliefs: a properly constituted monarchy, a system of laws, an established order of the Church. All of these things are to be protected. And indeed, in later life, George sees himself as the person who has stood for these values, for these qualities, against Napoleon, who is seen to be the most effective destroyer of them throughout Europe.
Morally debauched
But it's hard to know, finally, what George's politics are. He's quite a thoughtful man in some areas such as the arts, architecture, beauty, aesthetics. He's completely uninterested in any area of politics. In his early days, he is a follower of Charles James Fox, the leader of the Whig party, which by the 1770s has become a moderate reforming body. He may have even chosen Fox simply because, if there was one man in parliamentary politics whom George III loathed with a deep passion, it was Charles James Fox. At one point, the king regarded it as a matter of personal honour never to allow Fox to serve in a government again.
So having endlessly wound up his father, the prince didn't just support Fox, he virtually lived with him for quite a lot of the time. They went to each other's parties, they went to gambling clubs together, they shared a mistress. George III always believed that Fox had morally debauched his son – yet another reason for him to hate him so much.
Support for Wilkes
But if there was one way to go that was even more objectionable to his father, it was the support that the prince tendered to John Wilkes. Wilkes is a strange, maverick character. He's a an MP, but of a kind that only the 18th-century Parliament could have produced. He's a fantastically charismatic man at the same time as being remarkably plain. He was a great womaniser and had numerous affairs – people used to say to him, 'How on earth do you manage, looking like you do?' Pictures show that he was quite grim to look at.
Wilkes said: 'Give me 10 minutes. I can talk my face away.' He was a fantastic talker and raconteur, who managed to get into deep trouble with the establishment, and particularly with the king. After a career in various branches of reforming politics, he urges the reforming of the House of Commons, saying that the relationship between the king and Parliament needed to be looked at again.
Libelling the king
FT In the eyes of George III, what did Wilkes stand for?
JH In politics, Wilkes sits well to the left of any conventional parliamentarian of any kind. Certainly before the French Revolution, he's about as far left as it's possible to be in English politics. He stands for reform, for making friends with the mob, encouraging the activities of ordinary people, both on the streets and, as far as possible, in the ballot box. He stands for a level of popular demagoguery that was very unpopular with people like the king.
But in particular, he wrote a famous document, in The North Briton , that was widely regarded as a libel on the king himself. It was in issue number 45 of this periodical in which Wilkes famously described everything that he thought was wrong with the current constitution and, particularly, what was wrong with the king's role.
This creates a political scandal of a kind that is almost impossible to imagine today. There is an attempt to arrest Wilkes, which throws up the whole issue of freedom of speech and the ability of government to persecute people it doesn't like. George III feels personally insulted and threatened.
So if there was one person in British politics who was a bête noire for someone like George III, it was Wilkes. The moment the prince of Wales pokes his head round the door and shouts at his father, 'Wilkes and liberty for ever!' – which was the cry resounding around the streets of Westminster – would have been the most insulting and provocative thing that a boy could do to his father, if his father were king.
The war with the French
FT Let's fast forward to the French Revolution and Napoleon. It's the defining event for everyone in that period.
JH When war breaks out in 1793, it is the beginning of what we might seriously call the First World War. This is a war that lasts for a whole generation – it's not over until 1815 – so huge numbers of 18th-century people grow up knowing no other existence. This is a war of ideas, this is a war of economies, it's on a huge scale. Everybody in the middle class probably knew somebody who was in the navy, and further down the social scale, people are fighting in armies across Europe.
So this war isn't just something that is happening off stage. It touches the hearts and minds and, indeed, incomes of people across Britain and Europe. It also has a major impact on where you can go. For quite a large part of the war, it is simply impossible to travel. There is only a brief moment – March 1802 to May 1803 – after the Peace of Amiens when it's possible to go to France.
The reality of fighting
FT What does the prince of Wales feel about the war?
JH George feels that this is his moment. When war is declared, he feels that a lot of the uncertainties of his life are going to be resolved, because it's quite clear what his role is – he is going to be fighting at the head of a British army. That's the one thing that he wants to do. It's certainly what all his brothers do. The duke of York, his brother Frederick, is made commander-in-chief of the British army. He fights a series of campaigns, some of them more successful than others. The one thing that George writes to his father endlessly is: 'Please give me a role, even if it's just that I become an active colonel of my own regiment. Let me do something.'
Did he actually want to fight? I'm not sure how real that was to George. Although it should have been because some of his brothers did actually fight. His brother Ernest lost an eye; a number of his other brothers were also wounded.
I think, with George, the reality of fighting is not something that he actually gave much thought to. What he did want was to be seen in a martial role, at the head of the army. Here is a man who spent his whole life designing army uniforms. About the last thing he does before he dies is design a new one. His picture of military life is pretty much governed by pomp and circumstance rather than blood and guts. But having said that, I do think that he does have quite a deep desire to be seen doing the right thing.
A more difficult role
FT And what does his father allow him to do?
JH His father allows him to do one thing, which is to be colonel-in-chief of one regiment. He writes a letter that George receives on his wedding day: 'You mustn't expect any further promotion. This is as far as you will go.' And he makes it very clear to George that the job he has been given is purely ceremonial. He will never be allowed to fight outside England; he will never be allowed to go where any real conflict is. He won't even be allowed to go to Ireland or anywhere that he might have a slightly more exposed role.
George writes back: 'It's amazing that you take this view, when you think of how many sons you have. Surely this puts me in a rather different position. You can afford to lose one of us – maybe you can afford to lose me. You've got all these other sons.' And the king replies: 'No, you are cast for a more difficult role. Your job is to stay at home.'
Now the king was right. There is no example of a prince of Wales fighting in battle after Charles II. George III had begged George II repeatedly in the 1750s, 'Please let me go and fight in Europe. This is what will make me a man.' And he repeats to his own son exactly what George II had said to him: 'This is not right for you. You can't do it.'
However, the refusal of that role was made worse for the future George IV by the fact that all his brothers were fighting. And although he was the heir to the throne, he was nominally junior in rank to virtually all his brothers, who had quite senior military posts. That rankled with him terribly.
A personal struggle
FT George's struggle with Napoleon was almost a personal one. He was right in a sense, that Napoleon was going round knocking off the crown princes of Europe, his relations. And therefore, Napoleon posed a direct threat to him.
JH Well, Napoleon is there to get rid of the ancien régimes , old kingships. And many of these are actually occupied by George's relations. They fall like ninepins as Napoleon marches across Europe, especially through Germany. So it would be very hard for George not to see this as a personal struggle.
But, again, it's not entirely unsurprising that he should eventually see himself as the focus for the resistance to Napoleon, given that Britain is the principal enemy. Britain is the focus of the struggles against Napoleon. Its economy is paying for the war even though it's not happening in Britain. It is the source of a lot of the cash that is actually funding opposition to Napoleon across Europe. So for the ruler of Britain to identify himself as a major symbolic figure of opposition to Napoleon isn't as mad as it might sound.
When it does become crazy is when, in later years, George clearly believes that he fought at Waterloo, that he actually fought on the Peninsula with Wellington. Wellington records sitting at the dinner table with George and the latter saying, 'Do you remember that time when we were scrambling down that bank? It was very steep, wasn't it?' And Wellington just replies laconically, 'Very steep, sir.' So he translates the symbolic role that he occupied into something quite real. That tells you something about his psychology as an older man.
The greatest enemy
FT But who was his greatest enemy?
JH There's a moment in 1821 when a messenger comes to George and says, 'Sir, your greatest enemy is dead.' He puts his drink down and says, 'Is she, by God?' For George, his greatest enemy was never Napoleon; it was his wife, Queen Caroline.
Maria Fitzherbert
FT Let's talk about Mrs Fitzherbert. Do you think that George had a personal reason to have a woman who was different?
JH His first great love is Maria Fitzherbert, who may be chosen, as so many other things are in George's life, to annoy his father. She's older than him; she's been married twice before. All of that might not be so bad, but she is also a Roman Catholic. In theory, George can't marry her, even if he wants to – Catholics can't marry heirs to the throne.
In fact, George does marry her. He finds a complacent clergyman to do the deed, to whom he promises preferment (but the man never gets a penny, in typical George fashion). And George and Maria actually live together as man and wife in Brighton for some years. He later looks back on that time and thinks that those were some of the happiest years of his life.
Theatrical demonstrations
Maria understood him in a way that few of his later mistresses did, and she was out to fleece him far less than some of them. She had a temper – everyone talks about that – but she also genuinely felt something for him. And certainly although the king and queen would never countenance their relationship, George's brothers continue to visit her regularly after he deserts her. So she remains a member of the family in a way that none of his other mistresses do.
When he dies, he asks to be buried with a miniature of her around his neck. And he also asked to be buried in an open-sided coffin so that they could be buried next to each other and their remains would mingle. It's quite a histrionic George thing to say. He was keen on those sorts of theatrical demonstrations.
But in the intervening years, between marrying her and wanting to be buried with her, he actually treats her quite badly. There's one point when he humiliates her in Brighton by placing her well down the table in terms of precedence. He snubs her and does all the things that George does to people who he's got tired of. But in as far as he ever really loved anybody apart from himself, I think Maria has quite a good claim on that title.
Completely hysterical
FT How was he persuaded to marry her?
JH Well, she won't sleep with him. In the time-honoured Ann Boleyn/Henry VIII way, she just says, 'I'm too good for that.' He eventually does what he does endlessly in relationships of the heart: becomes completely hysterical. He bombards her with letters pages and pages long, all written in the same hysterical tone: 'You've got to love me, you've got to marry me, you've got to be mine, or you do not know what I'll do.'
In the end, he says he's cut his wrists. There's certainly blood, he's certainly on the floor, he's certainly in a very dramatic posture. But whether he'd really tried to kill himself is extremely unlikely. It was the dramatic gesture that was intended to say to her: 'If you don't marry me, you've simply got to answer for consequences like this.'
So he wins the lover. He does it time and time again by this hysterical possessiveness, which lasts for a short while and then, when he's tired of them, he will throw them off with the same childish quality.
Twice as fat
FT Contrast that with when he decides to get married properly?
JH Well, for somebody whose extramarital affairs are marked by that level of drama, when he realises that he's going to have to get married, he does it almost as a business proposition. He agrees to marry his father's choice, simply to get his debts paid by Parliament. His father says, 'If you get married, you can have a proper establishment and we'll sort out your debts.'
George doesn't go to Germany to see the prospective bride. He sends his friend James Harris, the earl of Malmesbury. He never sets eyes on Caroline of Brunswick until she literally arrives off the boat. George goes in disguise, thinking this is the romantic thing to do – to stand among the gentlemen so that he can check out his prospective wife before anyone knows who he is.
Horrified by what he sees, he says: 'I am unwell, Harris. Get me a glass of brandy'. He swigs down the brandy, takes another look at Princess Caroline, doesn't say a word to her, turns on his heel and leaves the room. 'I am going to see the queen,' he says as he disappears. He's going to talk to his mother about what a bad bargain he's agreed to.
As George walks out, Caroline turns to Harris and says, 'Was that the prince of Wales? He's not half as beautiful as his picture and twice as fat.' So the signs aren't really very good right from the beginning. It's a marriage that starts badly and goes on worse.
Bigamist
FT His treatment of her is bad at all times. Could you give us a couple of examples of his extreme behaviour towards her?
JH George is repulsed by her right from the very beginning. He has dinner with her the night before they get married, at which he just sits there and looks at her as she rattles on. She becomes more and more nervous under his gaze and, according to him, more and more indecent in her conversation. He finds her increasingly repulsive.
As a result, he decides to behave towards her in a very cruel and unpleasant way. He installs his current mistress, Lady Jersey, as one of her principal ladies-in-waiting. She has to deal with having Lady Jersey sitting next to her at every hour of the day. At their wedding, he's drunk and continually looking up into the gallery, making eyes at Lady Jersey. And there's a terrible moment when the clergyman who's marrying them – who, of course, has heard the rumours that the prince is already married to Maria Fitzherbert – says, 'If any of you know cause or just impediment why these two persons should not be joined together in holy matrimony …' A huge silence follows while everyone waits for someone to say what everybody knows to be the case – that, effectively, the prince is a bigamist.
Repulsion
After a disastrous ceremony, the couple spend only three days together in their entire married life. Their wedding night is a complete disaster. George spends the whole night with his friends, drinking himself into oblivion. When he finally arrives in Caroline's bedroom, she says he went to sleep in the fireplace without touching her. Sometime towards dawn, he finally gets his act together and stumbles into bed with her. It's probably that night that they actually conceive their daughter, Princess Charlotte.
George is repulsed by the whole experience of having sex with Caroline. He writes to Malmesbury about how dirty she was, that her linen was 'filthy behind and in front', and in later years, he tries to suggest that Caroline wasn't a virgin, that she took liberties with him of the grossest kind, and some of the things she said indicated that she'd known men before. For example, in a rather self-aggrandising way, he says that she'd said to him – in French, of course –'How big it is!', the suggestion being that she shouldn't really have been in any position to make a judgment.
So right from the start, their sex lives are a disaster and they've got nothing to say to one another. But the passion and hatred that George feels for her from early on in their relationship has to have something to do with the fact that he feels he's been forced into this marriage by his father. I don't think it is entirely to do with what he thinks of Caroline at all.
Caricature
FT What effect does his behaviour towards Caroline have on his public image?
JH There's a very early caricature – published just after Caroline has given birth – of George coming into a room and kicking over a table. Cowering behind the table is Caroline, holding their little daughter Charlotte.
That's quite a good example of the way, quite early on, he was regarded as a bully, somebody whose attitude to his wife was completely indefensible. He's a known philanderer by this point, and he's thought to have treated her appallingly right from the very beginning. And she has sympathy, both from within some parts of the royal family, particularly from George III, and from the nation as a whole. The prince is definitely cast as the villain in this marriage.
A succession of lovers
FT George is seen as the one doing wrong, but isn't Caroline's behaviour fairly reckless?
JH The prince of Wales writes a letter to Caroline saying basically, 'We should part. I think it's better that we don't live together,' and they have separate establishments for quite a long time. Caroline goes to live in Blackheath, which at that time is on the edge of London, a bit out of the way, slightly exotic. What goes on in Caroline's house becomes the subject of gossip from a very early stage.
She is thought to have had a succession of lovers, everybody from the painter Thomas Lawrence to naval officers and politicians, including George Canning. She keeps an extraordinarily eccentric household. There are accounts of her sitting on the floor eating raw onions – she likes things like that because she thinks they make you healthy. She takes in children – in particular, a child called William Austen who, it's thought, might be her son. (It later turns out that he probably wasn't.)
Fantastically indiscreet
So she's having a fantastically indiscreet, louche time there. George just bides his time, waiting and collecting information about her. At one point, this general collecting of gossip becomes a semi-official inquiry called 'The Delicate Investigation'. George basically gets his people to find out from witnesses exactly what is going on at Blackheath. And this lasts until the end of the Napoleonic wars when, at last, it becomes possible to travel in Europe again.
By then, things are so bad between the prince and his wife that she simply decides that she's not going to live in England any more. She goes to live in Italy, where she takes up with the rather dubious Baron Pergami. Was he an aristocrat? Probably not, or at least, if he was, he was a very low-ranking one. But he quickly becomes Caroline's lover, and they travel around Europe in the most extraordinary eccentric dresses and clothes, and do weird and wonderful things. But what they're mostly doing is living together as man and wife.
This is another occasion when George can investigate and start gathering evidence against his wife. Because at this point, he's decided that separation is not enough. What he really wants is to divorce her.
Regent and king
FT What happens in 1810?
JH Finally in 1810, George III suffers his third bout of madness. It's quite clear from the symptoms that this is the most severe illness that he's had. After about six months, it's also quite clear that he's never going to come out of it. It was at this point that George finally gets what's he's been hoping for since the 1780s – he is finally made prince regent.
FT After about 10 years as a regent, in 1820 he becomes king. What shape is he in?
JH When it becomes clear that George III is actually dying, one of the prince's brothers writes to him: 'Our father is now so emaciated that he can't possibly have long to live.' However, it's not clear who's going to die first – George the father or George the son – because by now George the regent is probably himself suffering quite severely from porphyria [the genetic disease that his father had].
Laudanum and brandy
The son called it gout, and he writes endlessly about it and the pain that it causes him. He doesn't breathe very well; he's fantastically overweight. He can't move properly; he hasn't sat on a horse for years. Most of his rooms are now on the ground floor because he can't walk upstairs, and he spends most of his time in bed. He takes a huge amount of laudanum, and when he's not taking laudanum, he's drinking maraschino cherry brandy. He's hardly conscious for parts of the day and sometimes partially blind.
So he's a long way removed from the svelte, athletic young man that he'd been in the 1780s. It really was not certain that, if he did outlive his father, he would outlive him for very long.
For somebody who had been obsessed with the imagery of kingship, with striking the right figure, someone who has had himself painted in many of the different guises of heroic kingship, he is simply not the figure that he must have hoped he would be when he finally inherited the crown.
Bill of pains and penalties
FT One of his first pieces of business when he does become king is to instigate another investigation against Caroline …
JH Almost the first thing that George decides to do when he becomes king is to stop Caroline becoming queen. She has been living abroad, and the government had tried to persuade her not to come back. They offered her a deal whereby she could stay living in Italy or wherever she wanted to be on the Continent, and they would give her a pension. But she wouldn't agree to that, and as soon as she hears that George III is dead, she sets out for London. George can think of nothing but how he can prevent her from being crowned with him.
There's only one way that he can achieve that – through divorce. But it's soon clear that any divorce is going to be fraught because it will have to be fought on the grounds of adultery – her adultery – despite the attempts of government advisers to persuade George that for someone like him to start throwing charges of adultery around will only rebound to his discredit. He wouldn't listen to them; his rational mind is completely closed. He finally persuades the government, which is very reluctant, to introduce a 'bill of pains and penalties' in the House of Lords, which will be allowed to examine Caroline's conduct.
The queen's trial
FT Can you tell us about that process?
JH When what is effectively the trial of the queen begins, it's quite clear that the prince has been collecting evidence against her for years, some of it going right back to her years in Blackheath. But most of it was actually accumulated while she was living in Italy with Pergami. The prince had sent agents out to Milan where they set up a government office to take evidence from all the people they could find who had had anything to do with Caroline and her entourage.
The evidence they took was amazingly explicit and straightforward. They would interview serving maids and house maids. They tried to establish whether or not Pergami and Caroline slept together regularly, so they called the woman who was in charge of changing their bed and asked her: 'What did you see on the bed?'
And she said 'Well, I saw stains.'
'What stains?'
'Well, stains – white stains.'
'And what did you deduce from that?'
'Well, what would you deduce?'
These were very extraordinary findings. There was nothing that they flinched from in terms of looking for anything that would diss Caroline, basically. It took a long time to do this, and after they'd gathered together the statements of every servant and household member, they put all the evidence into green government bags. These were then presented to the House of Lords and placed on a table – and endlessly caricatured in cartoons. Collectively they were the smoking gun, by which the king was hoping to get rid of his wife.
A defeat
FT So really what happens in the House of Lords?
JH Caroline is very lucky in that her cause gets taken up by the greatest radical lawyer of his day – Lord Brougham. He is a very cynical but fantastically efficient Scottish barrister, and he defends her brilliantly as the case goes through the Lords.
Caroline's cause is taken up by all the radical MPs in the House of Commons, and also by the people of Britain, particularly the women. There are endless petitions that come into the House from women from all over Britain saying, 'If you let the king divorce his wife, none of us is safe.'
Brougham manages, on the back of this great upsurge of feeling, to push the government bill to such a degree that it goes through by only nine votes. This is such a narrow majority that it's really a defeat. It never goes to the House of Commons and is subsequently withdrawn
A wild streak
FT She obviously had the sympathy of a large number of people, but it was not based on any intimate knowledge of her as a person. What sort of person was she?
JH Caroline has always been a very tempestuous, very extraordinary eccentric character who spoke before she thought. She always had a wild streak in her, but as she gets older, what had started off as eccentricity becomes something far crazier. In her later days, her behaviour does get more and more and more bizarre.
She's pulled through the streets of Jerusalem on an ass, trying to found a religious order, the order of St Caroline. When she's well into her 40s, she's seen driving through Italy in a coach wearing a silver gauze dress that exposes her breasts. She's a figure of such fun that British expats who come across her in Europe are always horrified to consider that this woman might one day be queen of England.
So while George's behaviour to her can't be justified, she was not at all the easiest person to live with and probably got worse as she got older.
The last laugh
The king is forced to realise that he is never going to be able to divorce Caroline. He simply doesn't have the grounds to do it. But he does have the last laugh – he refuses have her admitted to the coronation.
There's a terrible last scene for Caroline, half tragedy, half farce. She and her supporters turn up at the doors of Westminster Abbey, where the king is being crowned, demanding to be let in. They're asked by the doorman: 'Where's your ticket?' And she says, 'I don't need a ticket. I'm queen of England!' The doorman says: 'Well, without a ticket, you can't come in,' and she's left wandering round outside the abbey.
Almost immediately after that, she falls very ill, probably with a stomach tumour, and she dies very soon afterwards [8 August 1821]. So the problem that could not be solved for George in the House of Lords is actually solved for him by her death.
Physical deterioration
FT Let's reflect on the last 10 years of his life …
JH Once Caroline is dead, George believes that everything will be better now, that the irritation, the nightmare of his marriage, which has gone on since 1796, is finally over and that he can start again. The other terrible thing in his life – the feeling of powerlessness, of never knowing when he was going to inherit the crown – that's gone, too. So from 1821 onwards, his life will be different. Now he will be able to do everything that he's always planned on doing.
In practice, it doesn't turn out like that, and that's largely due to his physical deterioration. By the early 1820s, he is increasingly reclusive. Whatever else he was when he was younger, he was very sociable, always out hunting, dancing, doing all the things his father disapproved of. But as every year goes by in the 1820s, he withdraws further and further.
He doesn't want to see new people; he says new faces disturb him. In 1826, he demolishes Carlton House, the great architectural achievement that he'd had built as a young man. One of the reasons he gives for doing this is: 'It's too near the street. People can see me, I don't want to be there.'
He retreats into Windsor Great Park. He has a lodge built for himself, with special roads constructed that only he can ride on, so nobody can actually encounter him. So when he becomes king, all his great ambitions for being an extraordinary new vision of kingship shrink into an increasingly small world populated by a succession of older, rather matronly mistresses and a few trusted servants.
Fantasy world
FT Wellington was George IV's last prime minister. Did the king, who had achieved very little, compare himself with this man of achievement?
JH In many ways, Wellington is everything that George had always wanted to be. He's an effortless womaniser, a man of the world, somebody who is as at home at the dinner table as in battle. He holds himself brilliantly, he's thin, he wears a uniform wonderfully. But most of all, he is the great military hero of his age. There was simply no one who George would have wanted to be more than Wellington.
It was George's great misfortune that he spent quite a lot of his latter years having to deal with Wellington. It became ever clearer as George had more and more to do with him that the king was not a Wellington and never would be. And so their relationship is a difficult one. It makes George ever-conscious of his failings, of what he hasn't done, and that's why he begins to live in a fantasy world.
He is very reluctant to involve himself in any of the great political issues that Wellington has to deal with. Wellington is consistently exasperated by him, finds him a man of great parts, but also somebody who never concentrates, thinks or does anything. Had this relationship been described to George as a young man – 'One day you will be king and your prime minister will be the greatest military hero in Europe' – he would have thought: 'Wonderful.' But it actually turns out to be incredibly frustrating and difficult for both of them.
Millstones
FT Do you think Wellington saw good things in George?
JH Wellington is ultra-conservative. He has come into politics to protect the status quo. It is very hard for him to see the established order of things literally embodied in a king whom he found very difficult to respect personally. He once said that the prince and the royal brothers were 'the damnedest set of millstones ever hanged round the neck of any prime minister'!
He is able to separate, to some degree, the personal and the political. Personally, he has very little regard for any of them, thinks they are a waste of space. Politically, of course, they are what he is in politics to defend and uphold. So it is a hard call for him, too.
FT What role does Wellington perform on George's death?
JH Perhaps the most meaningful gesture that Wellington could make for the institution of kingship occurs when George dies. Wellington goes through his correspondence, and as he writes to his dear friend Harriet Arbuthnot, having personally gone through the letters, he has destroyed anything that he felt would not reflect well on the king after his death. So although he found George tedious to be with, and was sometimes impatient with him, he had a very clear sense of where his duty lay, which was basically excising as much as he could of the things that would reflect badly on the king.
Damning verdict
FT Can you sum up George's reputation at the end of his life?
JH We don't know what Wellington burnt, so it may be that there were stories in the letters that would have added to what was already quite a black reputation. It's fair to say that, on his death, George is probably the most unpopular king in Britain for 400 or 500 years! Virtually no one has anything good to say about him.
The level of invective, of bitterness, of – what George would have found even more hurtful – sardonic humour directed at him at the moment of his death is quite extraordinary. For somebody who had always wanted to be a impressive figurehead actually to be remembered as a laughing stock for so many years after he died was perhaps the most damning verdict that could have been delivered on him.
