An interview with Professor Paul Langford
This interview with Professor Paul Langford (PL) was carried out by the television production company Flashback Television (FT) for the Channel 4 programme The Badness of King George IV. Professor Langford teaches the 18th-century history of Britain and Europe at Lincoln College, Oxford. He has written a number of books, including A Polite and Commercial People, 1727–1783 and Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 .
Contemporary challenges
Flashback Television Could you give us an idea of what being a king in England in the 18th century meant?
Paul Langford You had to take into account recent British history and the situation of the ruling family, which is the result of a significant revolution in the late 17th century [the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when William and Mary overthrew James II]. So that family was always conscious of its potential insecurity.
On the other hand, George IV's father had strengthened the monarchy. He'd made it stronger in terms of his capacity to get the results he wanted, and he'd made the monarchy far more acceptable than it had been under his predecessors. Here was a great opportunity for a monarch to establish quite a strong sense of personal influence while responding to contemporary challenges, which were tremendous. I don't think either George III or George IV had much sense of how extensive and potentially dangerous those challenges were.
Conscientious
FT How would you characterise George III?
PL George III had a remarkable moral integrity and a commitment to principle. He was really incapable of thinking of any political issue except as a matter of conscience, and that often got in his way and let to some quite disastrous results – for example, in the war for North American independence, when he carried his principles too far. The odd thing is that George IV had very little of that. He had his father's narrow-mindedness without any of his higher moral integrity.
FT What was George III's style as a king.
PL He was quite sensitive to other people, even though at the end of the day he would refuse to accept their views if they clashed with his own prejudices. But he was quite a good manager of people – he's been underrated in that respect by historians in the 19th century and, indeed, the 20th century. He listened very carefully to people. He wrote enormously long and beautifully reasoned letters. Altogether, he was an unbelievably conscientious monarch – it's hard to think of a king of Britain, or indeed a queen, who has been more conscientious. Where he was quite weak was in his capacity to think of the longer-term results of his actions. Once he'd decided something, that was that.
Patriotic principle
FT But he was hardworking, somebody who introduced the ethic of duty and hard work?
PL Immensely so. He got from his father, Frederick, prince of Wales, a view of the constitution and of the situation in the mid-18th century that ran something like this: The Hanoverian line has behaved irresponsibly. It has been too preoccupied with its Continental concerns. It has allowed corrupt politicians to run the show. So what is needed is a new kind of patriotic model of kingship, a king who will be a true leader of the English people, who will get rid of his German past and introduce a new era of patriotic principle.
Well, this was very high flown stuff, but it was a vision that captured a lot of support in the 1760s. But again I think George III lacked the ability to relate that to real situations in a way that a more politically astute and intelligent king would.
Personal egotism
FT In contrast to that, George, prince of Wales, writes a letter to Lord Southampton in the context of his huge debts, in which he says, in effect, that in his job he is supposed to be magnificent and that it would be immoral for him to appear less splendid than he does. Where does that notion come from?
PL It came from personal egotism. One of the interesting things about George IV as a king is how he has quite different characteristics from most of his family, but he does have some of their worst ones. So he's got his father's narrow-mindedness but not his moral integrity. He's got his grandfather's interest in politics but not his astuteness with politicians. And, frankly, he's got his great-grandfather's puerility but without his readiness to make advances.
The one positive thing that he has is a capacity for self-presentation. He's not getting that model from his own family. Their image was of quite a low-key monarchy that did not go in for pageantry compared with the great monarchies of Europe. So, to the extent that he got it from outside his own inner musings, he must have got it from somewhere else. I suppose he got it very largely from the French monarchy. That was the great and certainly the most splendiferous monarchy of the 18th century, building on a very powerful tradition of that kind of self-exhibition.
But I still come back to the belief that, at the end of the day, this was a pretty unintelligent, selfish young guy who could only think of his own way of imposing on situations through impression, which had very little to do with substance. It was all about self-presentation.
If you pressed his buttons, he would come out with things that sounded as if they might comprise a coherent model of monarchy. But they weren't really. They were just slogans that the Whigs mainly gave him.
Subject to Parliament
FT What kind of powers did a monarch have.
PL The difference between ruling and reigning in the 18th century is something that historians sometimes employ to distinguish between different people, but I frankly think that's a bit simplistic. What is true is that British monarchs in the 18th century still had significant executive powers. They were the head of the armed forces, the Church of England and the executive itself. The prime minister was directly responsible to the king.
But in practice, what had happened in the course of the 18th century was that kings effectively became subject to parliamentary majorities. So the key thing for a British king was not so much his personal power as it would have been interpreted by Continental kings. It was more his capacity to influence Parliament. If he could work with the leading politicians and get a really strong majority in the House of Commons, he could exercise a lot of personal influence. But if he ran into real trouble in Parliament – as George III did at the end of the American War of Independence – he was almost certain to be defeated.
Kings and managers
FT But wasn't it the prime minister doing his bidding that was the key for a king to exercise power?
PL I think he wants ministers who will work closely with him, respect his views, consult him, but also act as mediators with Parliament. I don't think any of the kings of the 18th or, for that matter, the 19th century – however selfish they were – were unaware that you did need a national leader, a prime minister who could summon the full consent of Parliament and perhaps the people beyond that. These were men who had to win general elections. Lots of historians have talked about corruption and the role of influence in Parliament, but this can be massively overdone.
One of the key elements of 18th-century politics is the strength that derives from a fairly effective king and a good manager of the House of Commons. When you get those two things coming together, as happens quite frequently, you get very long-lived regimes, longer-lived ones than we've seen at any point since, even allowing for people like Mrs Thatcher.
So you have these great ministers – Walpole, Pitt, Lord North, the younger Pitt – with very strong administrations. They are hard for an opposition to bring down unless it can find some quite extraordinary issue or unless someone simply slips on a banana skin.
Friends of the heir
One of the things that an opposition can do is to look for the chinks in the court's armour, and a potential chink is often the heir to the throne. So there's a tradition under all these kings – George I, George II and George III – for the parliamentary opposition to deliberately make a play for the heir, with two things in mind: (1) that one day he will be king and (2) that he'll then put them in power. But they also have a strong sense that, merely by being friends of the heir to throne, they can impact on lots of other politicians who will have the same anxiety about the king.
Now a crucial element in this is the age of the current king. If you've got a relatively young king such as George III in the 1760s and '70s, this isn't a card you can realistically play. But as kings get older and as their sons get older, this opportunity opens up. So what we're seeing in the 1780s is a classic 18th-century pattern. It's quite amusing that the Whigs – who posed as friends of the people, and who were, on the whole, opposed to the royal prerogative – in practice behaved exactly as their predecessors had and buttered up the future king.
Irresponsibility
FT What was in it for the prince of Wales? What did he want to get out of that?
PL I don't think he had any clear ideas about what he wanted politically. Like most of the other things he did as a young man, his support for the Whigs – like sex and gambling, if you like – was the result of accident and his personal inclination.
The people he associated with in the Whig party were young men about town; their moral standards were quite different from those of the court and the prince's own father. They were amusing people to be with, and made London much more interesting in social terms than almost anyone in the court did. So they were attractive in that way. But I don't think, as a prince, he had any concrete notion of what he could do with that kind of power, and I don't think he displayed much sincerity over his lifetime as a whole in any of the causes that he worked on with them.
He had some very particular concerns as well. Plainly he wanted his debts – which he accumulated at a frightening rate – paid. But then you could argue that, in that, he had the best adviser in the country: Whig leader Charles James Fox, his mentor, built up debts at almost the same rate and showed the same irresponsibility.
FT It's a straight deal – the Whigs might get power and the prince might get his debts paid off?
PL Yes, but I don't think it was even much of deal. I think it was just an affinity, a natural coming together of political interests. George did not get on with parents very well, and it was natural to react against them. I don't think there was a thorough position or programme, and after all, it is revealing that, when he has the chance to put the Whigs in power in 1811, he doesn't.
The big mistake
FT Can you explain how George III's madness entered politics?
PL Plainly the role of accident in history is crucial in such things as the '<LINK to Janice Hadlow interview, anchored at heading 'The reversionary interest'>reversionary interest</LINK>'. It would have been very hard to predict that George III would 'go mad' as he appeared to do in 1788. That was just one of life's completely unpredictable things. But it totally transformed the situation because it potentially turned the king into a cipher, and meant that the relatively young heir to the throne might succeed. It presented an enormous opportunity to the opponents of the Tory ministry.
The Whigs blew their chance quite badly, but one shouldn't blame them necessarily for that – one accident can be reversed by another: George III's first illness proved to be quite short-lived. In retrospect, one can say that whatever the opposition might have done wouldn't have made much difference. Even so, the big mistake they made was very important because it affected the reputation both of the future George IV and of his political friends.
Powers of the regent
It was necessary to create a regency, and there were two ways of doing it. One was to use a parliamentary statute as the basis for its creation, something for which there was good precedence. It involves giving Parliament quite a bit of say in the powers that a regent might have. The other way to do it was simply to determine that, because the king had lost his reason, the heir to the throne would take over all the powers of the crown regardless of Parliament.
Now it was plainly in the interests of William Pitt, prime minister at the time, that the first route should be taken. He effectively had a large majority in Parliament and so was in a position to place significant limits on the powers of the regent. Charles James Fox and the Whigs concluded that it was in their interest to take the second route because that would give them complete power through the future regent.
Gross hypocrisy and corruption
But the latter was a very bad mistake in terms of public perception. The Whigs had been arguing systematically and, at times, almost libellously against the way George III exercised his powers and against the principle of the royal prerogative. Suddenly they turn themselves into defenders of the royal prerogative. This notion that Parliament couldn't determine what powers the regent might have was quite contrary to the line that might have been expected from them.
This was particularly damaging because Charles James Fox had, more than once in his career, been accused of gross hypocrisy, if not corruption, and the Whigs' stance now looked like both those things. It appeared as if Fox's personal interests were taking precedence over his patriotic principles.
FT So Fox asserts the principle that the prince of Wales is right for the Regency …
PL The position that the Whigs take is that they do not need Parliament to define the powers of the regent. It is sufficient for him to announce that he has assumed the reins of power. That makes them manifestly defenders of what would be called 'high prerogative'. And that sense of monarchy, in terms of high prerogative, is completely incompatible with the positions they had previously advanced about the role of the monarchy in the constitution. So they are revealed as men certainly of great inconsistency and arguably of great hypocrisy.
Sudden and extravagant
FT One of the tactical mistakes they made is not to assert that pro-monarch stance sooner because, in the interim, the king got better. Did Prince George hold back from declaring his rights?
PL From the standpoint of the future regent, this was quite a tricky situation to play. He might have acted more decisively, but I think he would have encountered certain difficulties.
Any sudden and apparently extravagant act of political power would probably have alienated opinion in the House of Commons and might have resulted in a frontal collision between the prince and Parliament, which really wasn't in George's interest. In a sense, he had time on his side anyway. He wasn't to know that the king would recover his reason so quickly. So he could afford to take things step by step, and I'm sure that was the advice even of those Whigs who wanted him to act without the basis of parliamentary power. No one could have foreseen that the king would recover so rapidly.
The white knight
FT So, in a way, Prince George is quite passive in this?
PL The prince himself takes virtually no role in dictating the course of events. I think what we're talking about here is his essential character. Only very rarely in his lifetime does he take a very strong position on a political issue. He takes strong positions only on things that affect him very personally. In his own reign, Queen Caroline's trial – his attempt to divorce his wife – would have been an outstanding example of that. But he very rarely takes a stance on a matter of political judgement.
There's very little evidence in 1788/9 that he had thought through a systematic course of action. He listened to lots of people, of course. That's one of the problems that individuals in that situation have. They get advice from all kinds of different politicians and have to take a lot from the press – and the political excitement in 1788 and '89 was pretty intense.
So I don't think it was necessarily wariness that made him apparently supine. It was really a lack of any strong sense of what the right course of action was.
FT Did he want to be regent?
PL Oh, yes. There's no doubt about that. I think he saw this as the great opportunity to mount his horse and be the white knight of British history. I think it was a real opportunity for him, and he would have grasped it with both hands.
FT But he wasn't prepared to do more …
PL I don't think he was going to take great risks or any very remarkable stand. And most of all, I think he was advised by Fox to play it very carefully. When the prince and the Whigs did take a strong line, they rather made fools of themselves. That was in Dublin, where they got the Irish Parliament to back their view and effectively declare the George regent right away. Now that looked very stupid indeed when the king recovered.
Ideological battle
FT The following year saw revolution in France ...
PL The French Revolution is just as much a key moment in British history as it is in French history. Initially, it has a good deal of support in Britain from all kinds of people, some of them by no means on the extreme left in politics. But situation changes very rapidly, particularly after the Terror and with the declaration of war between Britain and France, and this has all kinds of consequences for the line-up of the political parties.
The Foxite Whigs commit themselves pretty thoroughly to the view that the French Revolution is a good thing, that it is undesirable to have a war with the French republic and that the sooner it is brought to an end the better. Plainly a very large body of British opinion agreed with the government and George III that the revolution should be reversed at all costs, but if not, certainly rendered incapable of threatening Britain. This turned what was an ideological battle into a battle about British patriotism.
Prince George was very much a supporter of the line that the Foxites took. He saw himself as a kind of liberal monarch who could do the sorts of things in Britain that people were talking about in France and which, to some extent, had been done in Britain in the past anyway.
But once war had been declared, he found himself in an increasingly difficult position. I don't detect much commitment in him to these liberal Whig principles by the mid-1790s. From then on, he's driven primarily by expedient, as most other people are. But again this is one of the things that damages the standing of the prince with a lot of people. He's not seen as taking a consistent or decisive line. He seems to be driven from pillar to post.
The benefits of revolution
FT Did the fact that there was a revolution in a neighbouring country emphasise that it was not a good time to have a mad king on the throne?
PL One of the worries that people had during the French Revolution was that instability in Britain would create a revolutionary situation of the sort that had occurred in France, and if George III became ill again, there might well have been such instability. There was quite a lot of discussion about the prospects of a regency in the middle of a war. But people had other things to think about, and to all intents and purposes, George III appeared fully recovered.
There were, of course, all kinds of personal crises for him. There were attempts, if not to assassinate him, at least to make life very difficult for him, plus one or two cases when the intent was actually to assassinate him. On the whole, though, the monarchy under George III benefited from the French Revolution.
Here was a king whose moral principles were undoubted and whose domestic circumstances were such that ordinary middle-class people could identify with his kind of family feeling, his rather strongly held religious views and so on. These were things that made the crown the focus of national loyalty. The conflict between British arms and increasingly naked French self-aggrandisement made it all the easier to make the link.
So, on balance, I would have thought that the 1790s favoured the monarchy under George III, and rather frustratingly deprived the prince of any purchase point in political terms.
World of illusions
FT Did Prince George see the war as a personal challenge to his future?
PL One of the most intriguing things about Prince George is his capacity to see himself in terms that no one else saw him in. In particular, he identified with very grand figures, the overwhelmingly obvious case being Napoleon. It is almost incredible that he saw himself as having any of the French emperor's attributes. He had almost nothing in common with him, and yet so exciting was the image of Napoleon, the famous portraits painted by David and the kind of image that Napoleon cultivated, of a new emperor who was taking the world by storm – all these were so intrinsically attractive to this really rather pathetic character that he made the leap and believed that he could be something like that.
But this was a world of illusions; it had nothing to do with reality. What it did do was to affect the way the prince behaved with other people to some extent. He was quite capable of presenting himself as a military leader, as a political genius, as a future imperial ruler of a great British empire. All this was absolute nonsense, but it was something that went on his head, and to that extent, it had historical consequences.
Ambivalence
There was one positive thing about this fantasy in terms of his relationship with the British public, who felt a degree of ambivalence about Napoleon. On the one hand, he seemed to be the great ogre – leader of Britain's enemies and threatening Britain with invasion. On the other hand, he had a certain magnetic attractiveness.
We're not talking here about an adult Hitler-type character. We're talking about someone who could be seen as very human, very astute, colourful and really rather interesting and attractive. A lot of this had to do with Napoleon's capacity to project an image that made him very popular in all kinds of places.
Now I'm not saying that people seriously weighed this in the balance against the military threat, but it did mean they had a sneaking regard for Napoleon. So when the prince played up to that, it was somewhat to his advantage.
A long shot
FT How was it to his advantage?
PL Mainly because it gave them a sense that here was someone who reflected the interests of the times. By this stage, George III regarded Napoleon merely as an upstart and an outrage to the royal tradition, as well as a great enemy to European peace. But this was also a time when people were getting quite new ideas about the relationship between rulers and subjects.
Napoleon had come to power mainly through force but also as a result of a revolution that had established – for a while, at any rate – something that could be regarded as a local democracy. So, particularly for the younger generations in Britain, the idea of a leader who saw himself genuinely as being of the people was an interesting one. Someone who could marry that to royal descent potentially had an interesting line to play. It was pretty exotic and a long shot in the circumstances, but it did strike a bit of a resonance with people.
What if …?
FT Did Napoleon think of George as a political foe?
PL Napoleon didn't take very much interest in the future of the British monarchy in terms of the actual personnel. He had his own kind of megalomania, which made him pretty confident that he could defeat Britain and make it part of the French empire. After all, most of the rest of western Europe had become part of it. So the object was conquest.
I don't think anyone knows whether he had a clear view about trying to establish one of the royal family other then George III on the throne in the event of the French army getting to London, but it's an interesting line to pursue, isn't it? What would Prince George have done if French troops had landed and they defeated what were not necessarily very effective British forces. It would have been a very interesting conjuncture. I suspect he would have fled with the rest of the court and established a government-in-exile, but one never knows ...
National crisis
FT Why is George so diminished in comparison with Napoleon and other heroes of the time?
PL One of Prince George's great difficulties, in attempting to carry out any of the fantasies he has about his own role, is that, not only is he without power himself, but the kinds of people who are remaking the world are very strong, heroic figures, just the sort he'd like to be, but who elbow him out of any sort of public prominence. So Napoleon and Nelson and Pitt and Wellington, and even Canning and Castlereagh – all these men acquire a gigantic significance in a time of warfare and national crisis that is very hard for the prince to engage with personally.
Bear in mind that he is genuinely deprived of a role by his father. There's a real problem that every ruling king or queen has to think about: how much of a role should they give the heir to the throne? In the 20th century, the modern British monarchs thought about that quite a lot, and whether they got it right is a matter for judgement. But George III had a very clear view that the prince was there to rule after him.
Personality defect
He would not allow him a military career. He didn't consult him in political matters; he didn't give him any particular political responsibilities. I don't think people expected him to, but it might have been more imaginative if he had found some sort of precise role for the prince. All this made the prince even more obsessively preoccupied with his own selfish views than he might have been. But at the end of the day, you have to say that every prince in history, and probably every king, ultimately finds it hard to distinguish between personal, selfish ambitions and public ambitions, and they regularly confuse the two and the one often corrupts the other.
But at least many of them attempt to make the connection. It's very hard to think of any episode in Prince George's career when he makes that connection. He always seems to be driven by purely personal interest or is narrowly defiant. He doesn't seem interested in or able to promote a view about public policy, about measures that can really engage other people. This is a very serious personality defect, which is pretty catastrophic because it doesn't bring him much happiness.
Disconnection
FT Let's turn to when the Regency is finally established and he gets full powers. You see a real kind of disconnection between reality and the prince regent in his fantasy palace. What is the contrast between those two worlds?
PL We often speak of the Regency as an important period of history and we have an image of what constitutes it. Most of that relates to art and culture in a fairly broad sense, and a good deal of that has to do with the prince. But a lot of people use the term 'the Regency' to describe what was going on in Britain in the early 19th century, the kind of society that was emerging.
When the Regency starts in 1811, the prince shows some regard for the political situation. He decides not to bring in his own friends. He's aware that he's in the middle of a great war, and that that war is being conducted efficiently on the whole, though with great difficulty, by an administration that he allows to stay in power. But beyond that, he has almost no sense of the bigger challenges confronting himself and his political friends and supporters in the years ahead.
The big picture
It's obvious how badly adrift he is in that respect. The big picture in the early 19th century, apart from the war, is very rapid economic change – the Industrial Revolution. It's a major leap forward on the part of industrial capitalism. It's transforming individuals' lives, it's transforming communities, it's transforming whole regions. It's changing people's wealth and their sense of where they are in society, and creating all kinds of new social problems to do with poverty and deprivation. There is no evidence whatever that Prince George, or George IV as he became, had any real awareness of that. If he knew about it at any level, he largely disregarded it.
The other part of the big picture that he ignored was the very powerful feeling of moral change that was going on in the early 19th century. This was the generation that rediscovered a Protestant evangelicalism that looked back to the Reformation and wanted to reinvent true religious conviction. These evangelicals took a very unfair view of the 18th-century Church, but it was one that materially affected the way they behaved.
Moral reform
So we see the enormous growth of the Methodist church, and all the Dissenting churches benefit from this new flavour in public and private life and the preoccupation with moral reform almost more then political reform. Nowadays people talk endlessly about the significance of parliamentary reform and political change, but the reforms that interested people at that time were such things as the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, as well as Sunday schools and education – all the things that would, in the 1840s, be called the 'condition of the people' question.
Do we have any evidence that Prince George had the remotest understanding of this or took any real interest in it? None whatever. If he had been a great patriotic king of the sort he said he wanted to be, he might have picked those sorts of causes. Instead he turns to Brighton and to his fascination with uniforms. We're back to self-presentation and the construction of a personal image that had no engagement with the major problems of the day.
A damaging irrelevance
FT So he misses out …
PL Not only is the prince effectively an irrelevance, he's a damaging irrelevance. To the extent that he takes a view about politics, it's usually on the side least appealing to a broader mass of opinion.
It's true that, in the case of Catholic emancipation, there was initially quite a strong flow of opinion in support of the line that both George and his father had taken – that is, that Catholics should not be given the same religious and political rights as other people. But the direction that opinion took in the second and third decades of the 19th century was away from that. As usual, the prince had backed the wrong side. He also took a regressive view of parliamentary reform.
If he was going to be a patriotic king, what was he going to be patriotic about? He'd ruled out the great moral and social crusades, and he'd ruled out any significant change to the political establishment. There was nothing to identify him with that would have had a broader patriotic appeal.
The first gentleman of Europe
FT … apart from this ability to run a good show.
PL He was very good at putting on a good show. He was a wonderfully ostentatious king – he had a certain talent for it. One needs to recognise the role of things that are very hard for historians to get from documentary evidence – that is, the chemistry that goes on between the public and rulers or other important people.
A lot of people were quite affected by a meeting with Prince George. On a good day, if he was in a good mood and showing off his finery and having fun and feeling comfortable with himself, he could be very gracious, very affable, not too condescending. This was the 'first gentleman of Europe', a phrase that had a certain resonance.
Provided he had people who could paper over the cracks and spin everything in the way that was appropriate, he could be very affecting. Some of his personal appearances, for example, were not wholly about spin either. When he went to Scotland, that was a considerable success – of theatrical effect, if you like. So there is a personal side to the prince that can be effective in that way. But it's very rarely used for anything other than to reassure himself of his own self-importance.
A growing sense of Britishness
FT He's not creating a bigger idea or strategy?
PL He doesn't consciously connect his success in presenting himself to a great moral or political project. But in one very important respect, he achieved a major change. He was the first Hanoverian ruler to travel beyond the south of England. Even George III had only got to the West Country – Dorset, Worcester and so on. But George IV went beyond England, and that did a good deal for the growing sense of what historians have called 'Britishness' that was vitally important in the early 19th century as a patriotic weapon against France, and for all kinds of other reasons.
I think he went to Scotland mainly because he liked showing off, and he liked a new audience, and he loved the colourfulness of Scottish pageantry. He help reinvent it, of course, but it was there waiting to be reinvented. He enjoyed it enormously, but one would like to think that he also genuinely believed that this was unifying his peoples in a way that his predecessors hadn't been able to do.
There is one snag with that argument: why did he never go to Manchester or Leeds? Why did he never take a close interest in the other communities that were springing up among his people at this time? So this kind of self-presentation is pretty superficial and paper-thin.
Disastrous queen
FT What was the first order of business following his accession in 1820?
PL When he becomes king, the big issues that he seems to regard as crucial are, yet again, purely personal. Getting rid of his disastrous queen is very high on the list.
It's catastrophically managed, and of course, it was a mistake to do it at all. He could have afforded to allow her to languish in the background. She wouldn't have enjoyed that, she would have been an embarrassment, but on balance, it would have been better to play it that way. By forcing his ministers to attempt to get him a divorce by what was effectively a trial, he exposed himself to enormous public criticism.
I don't think many people were necessarily very attracted to his queen either, but by persecuting her, he made her a much more interesting and important figure. It also conflicted with the image he wanted to project. The 'first gentleman of Europe' divorces his wife, the queen of England, in this rather despicable and squalid way – that's not the way kings should behave. So it's a big political error, and it doesn't work anyway. However, I don't think it does much lasting damage because the enthusiasm that there is for the queen quickly subsides.
It's also overtaken a bit by George's coronation, which is a very grand affair and is meant to be. It may be that, because it was such a grand coronation, it did something to fulfil the sense that this was an important moment in the history of monarchy and that a new and interesting king was on the throne. On the other hand, there was a lot of criticism over the extravagance at a time of fairly acute economic difficulty and social distress, not to mention political problems. So on balance, that, too, was a mistake. It certainly influenced what happened at the later coronations of William IV and Queen Victoria.
National scrutiny
FT Surely, at the time, Caroline's trial in the House of Lords was a big event? It was quite theatrical, wasn't it?
PL One of the features of the king's persecution of his wife was that he was unintentionally creating a grand theatrical effect of exactly the sort that he didn't want. But bear in mind the enormous increase in public interest – and not just in the monarchy – as reflected by a media that was expanding very rapidly in the early 19th century. So any coronation, any trial, anything that the king got up to that had public consequences would be exposed to far more national scrutiny than would have been the case in, say, 1727 or 1760 when the previous two kings came to the throne. The sheer scale of public interest was relatively new.
But the fact that the king did it this way shows how the British monarchy is being brought under political control. His ancestor, George I, had had the same problem with an allegedly unfaithful wife. What he had done was shut her up in a castle in north Germany; she never came to England even though she was its queen. But in 1820, there was no way for George IV to get rid of his wife without going through Parliament, and once you did that, you were into a media show.
It's an interesting conjuncture, not just in terms of the way the king and the people interact with each other, but in the fact that he has to do it by this route.
A squalid Italian affair
FT What kind of evidence did they have?
PL The evidence that was used against the queen was mainly from people she'd known in Italy. It was of varying quality, and because it came largely from foreigners, it looked less respectable. That sounds an absurd thing to say, but people were longing for a good stout kind of English witness who would say exactly what happened and why it mattered to the English people. This just looked like a squalid Italian affair. The facts might well be what they were alleged to be, but somehow they were part of something that morally superior British people wouldn't even want to know about.
It was also virtually a parliamentary trial, conducted in unusual circumstances. It's not the only case of that kind. There were other great parliamentary trials in the 18th century, including the one involving the duchess of Kingston and the impeachment of Warren Hastings. It's much easier for large numbers of people to attend these sorts of trials in that kind of setting, and that leads to interest that would have been more difficult to create within a court of law.
Pathetic and domesticated
FT After Caroline's death, George writes a letter saying, 'Now, at last I'm free and I have a fair prospect of happiness.' Yet he doesn't seem to have a particularly happy life and becomes a virtual recluse. How would you picture him in the last couple of years of his life?
PL George IV is plainly greatly cheered by the death of his wife in 1821, but one has to bear in mind the years that followed when he suffered from various disadvantages. One was that he came to the throne relatively late. He had been the king-in-waiting for so long that, when it came, he was already not particularly healthy and somewhat debilitated. He'd also lost the joie de vivre that had informed his social circle. Even his sexual liaisons and loves had somehow become rather pathetic and domesticated and not very interesting.
If he had had any kind of vision about the political role that a king could play, we ought to see it at work in the early 1820s. But it's pretty plain that he didn't have one. There were some really big challenges at that time. There were major collisions between different elements in the Tory party – as well as between the Tories and the Whigs – about parliamentary reform, about free trade, about the banking system, all of which could have some impact on the condition of the people at large. All these things were bubbling up to the surface in Parliament and changing the political landscape.
Reactionary
All that George IV could do was ring his hands from time to time, and express opinions that were always on the reactionary side – they were certainly not based on any very clear or consistent analysis – and which didn't even evince much interest in what was going on.
He becomes even more self-absorbed in his last years and even more pathetic. Although he's still interested in presenting himself, the effort of doing so becomes more and more difficult, and he needs more and more artificial presentation. It was an implosion of a personality that had always been quite brittle.
FT No one pays much attention to him any more – that sums up George in his final years?
PL It's one of the great sadnesses of the last years of George IV's life that the politicians came to regard him with complete contempt. They saw him as someone who needed manipulating. Almost no one speaks up for him in those last years, and when he dies, The Times says there wasn't a wet eye in Europe.
