An interview with Fintan O'Toole
This interview with Fintan O'Toole (FO) was carried out by the television production company Flashback Television (FT) for the Channel 4 programme The Badness of King George IV. Fintan O'Toole, a columnist and drama critic for the Irish Times, has published A Traitor's Kiss: The life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1998) and Shakespeare Is Hard but so Is Life (2003).
Maria Fitzherbert's attraction for Prince George
Flashback Television Who is most important to the future George IV in this period? What is the story of that relationship?
Fintan O'Toole When he meets Maria Fitzherbert, he's genuinely attracted to her. She's six years older than he is – he's 22, so that's a fair gap. George is half-looking for a lover and half-looking for a mother – perhaps because of his own childhood – and she seems to fulfil both of those needs. She's a respectable woman, she's motherly, she's not the kind of woman that he's used to being with – she's not a woman of loose morals. She's a serious Catholic, which becomes, of course, a major problem. So she's not available and that also is hugely attractive to him.
A lot of his early youth is about doing the things you're not supposed to do, particularly in relation to his father who is a very seriously devout Protestant and therefore very seriously anti-Catholic, both politically and religiously. The attraction for George of a woman who is Catholic and unavailable is that she's a hugely transgressive figure, while at the same time being this quite plump, ordinary mumsie figure. She combines for him both a sense of danger and excitement and a sense of security, plus the possibility of domestic happiness. So I think he's genuinely attracted to her.
Prince George's attraction for Maria Fitzherbert
For her part, she seems quite reluctant initially about him. She doesn't need the trouble of having this wild, extravagant, ill-disciplined prince of Wales as her suitor. At 28, she's already had two husbands, so she's much more experienced than he is. She's also quite rich; she doesn't need the money. She doesn't need to batten on to him as if he's going to provide her with a lifestyle. But she also seems to be quite genuinely attracted to him, charmed by him. He's the kind of man who, when he turns his attention towards a woman, has a beautiful smile, lively eyes, wonderful conversation. If you're a woman of 28, who's already had two husbands, you're not likely to be a hugely attractive proposition on the marriage market again.
So for her it's flattering, it's attractive, but it's also hugely problematic. She knows that, because she is a Catholic, there is no possibility of either becoming his mistress, because that would be a breach of her seriously held beliefs, or of marrying him, because the prince of Wales cannot marry a Catholic.
Upsetting George III
Now from his point of view, he's already done the worst thing he could possibly do to his father, which is identify himself with the American rebels. The American war is now over, so what's the next worst thing you can do? Well, marry a Catholic. It gets at his father in two separate but quite serious ways, both personally and politically. Personally, there is a law that says that princes cannot marry without their fathers' permission, so that's a very specific part of George's relationship to his father. To marry without his father's permission gets at the king in a really serious way.
But there's another law and a much more serious one, which says that the heir to the throne cannot marry a Catholic. If he does, he ceases to be the heir to the throne. So to marry a Catholic as prince of Wales puts at risk the entire basis of the constitution, the Protestant settlement. For most people, that would mean: 'You can't do this.' But, of course, for George, at this point in his life, that's most attractive: you can attack your father, and at the same time, you can attack the constitution and have a relationship with a woman to whom you are enormously attracted. So the idea of marrying her, which seems to George's friends to be completely insane, in his terms makes absolute sense.
The prince's histrionic skills
FT What about his powers of persuasion when he was wooing Maria?
FO George was felt by a lot of people around him to be a naturally gifted actor. They often remarked on how, if he hadn't been king, he could have been a great comic actor! And in his wooing of Maria, he uses all his histrionic skills to their full. He goes to the extent of staging an attempted suicide. He writes her passionate letters, saying, 'If you won't be mine, I will kill myself, I can't live without you.'
She brushes these off so he has her summoned to his house. There he is with blood flowing, with bandages, apparently with a wound in his side. It's not at all clear whether he did, in fact, try to kill himself or tried it in a way that was meant to be seen as a dramatic intervention.
I don't think he ever seriously intended to die. He was bled fairly frequently for his hysterical illnesses, as people were in those days, so he certainly would have had lots of bandages around with lots of blood on them and, and perhaps even wounds that had been opened for him to be bled. It may have been a pure piece of theatre, but it certainly worked.
The secret wedding
Maria was deeply upset by it, and he used that occasion – her shock at seeing him in this condition, hysterical, bleeding – to get the duchess of Devonshire, who had gone with her, to give him her ring, and then he gave it to Maria as an engagement ring, as a promise that she would marry him. Under those circumstances, she accepted the ring and therefore felt herself bound to do this.
But, of course, the marriage couldn't be a marriage in the normal sense that you expect with a marriage of a prince of Wales. He couldn't get married in Westminster Abbey. If it was going to happen, it had to happen secretly. That also had a certain kind of attraction. This is the era when romantic novels are coming into circulation, with their ideas of elopement, secret marriages, running away to get married, escaping from the family. So for George and perhaps for Maria to some extent, the idea of having a secret wedding is quite enticing.
The retired gentleman
FT What happens to, to George's passion for Maria subsequently?
FO The first two years of the marriage were actually relatively successful. Nobody – and certainly not George and I don't even think Maria – ever expected that he was going to be an entirely faithful husband. It was accepted, in those circles, that husbands, after a couple of years, were not particularly faithful, and neither usually were their wives. So that wasn't a particular problem.
They do seem to have had a kind of domestic bliss. They retired to Brighton. During this period, he was in phenomenal debt and had to withdraw to some extent from London society – he simply couldn't afford to keep Carlton House open any more. So he enjoyed playing for a while at being a retired country gentleman. People who saw the two of them together in Brighton at that time felt that he was behaving like a man in his 60s … a retired gentleman who had made his money and then had gone to live by the seaside. He seems to have been genuinely quite content for a while.
The need to pay his debts
Of course, that was never going to satisfy him for long. There were personal and political factors at play here – he was bored with Maria personally, but also politically, as he got older, as his debts got worse, he needed some kind of political connection. The embarrassment that he had married a Catholic, that he had broken the law in the most serious way became more obvious to him, I think. So she was shunted aside for a time.
One of the major reasons for this was because he wanted to get married. He didn't want to get married in any kind of sexual sense, because he felt he already was married. But he needed to get married to relieve his debts. The only way he was going to get the king to give him a substantial increase in money, and Parliament to give him a larger annual income, was through marrying. Clearly the fact that he already had wife was a slight embarrassment in attempting to construct a dynastic marriage of the old style.
After the crisis in his marriage to Caroline of Brunswick, he moved back to Maria Fitzherbert, and they had a number of years together again, which suggests that she always remained very attractive to him.
The pleasure of revenge
FT What impact did having a 'mad dad' have on George? Did he find it distressing or upsetting or destabilising?
FO The king's madness was enormously embarrassing to George and to the family. It also undermined the prince. George saw his own role to be that of the prodigal son, the wild one, the extravagant one, as compared to his staid, boring father. And you can imagine the horror when the father becomes much wilder, starts talking at an incredibly promiscuous rate, chasing women around the palace, using obscene language that comes from his innermost, buried self. His father suddenly becoming this mad sexual being was very distressing and very disturbing to George.
At the same time, there was a sense in which his father's madness was an opportunity. It raised the very real and very immediate prospect that the prince was going to get his hands on power, that he was going to become the regent. He could then pay off his debts, put his friends into office and get out from under his father. There was a certain pleasure to be had in the notion that his father would be carried off in a strait jacket and beaten by his keepers. If you want revenge, that's about as good as it gets.
Royal family fracture
The regency crisis does cause a huge fracture within the family. Suddenly the institution of the royal family is put into a position where all bets are off, where nobody quite knows what the order of hierarchy is. It's never quite clear to George whether he, a Whig supporter, is going to be the regent if his father is locked up, or if one of his brothers will start manoeuvring to take that position in alliance with the Tories who want to hold on to power.
There are all sorts of machinations opening up. Everybody is plotting – the opposition, the government. Everyone is trying to discover what will happen to their own positions if this extraordinary event comes to pass and the king is effectively deposed.
Scandalous behaviour
In the eyes of his own family, George's personal behaviour is quite scandalous. While his father is so ill and there is a huge crisis, George is drinking as much as ever, whoring as much as ever, carrying on with members of the opposition, being seen very publicly in festive mode – going to parties, dancing, drinking, singing, playing music. He does not looking like someone who is in terrible distress at the unfortunate state of his father.
That creates enormous resentment in his mother and, to some extent, in his sisters and, in particular, in the general public. He loses the PR battle by being seen as someone who is taking a certain delight in his father's distress.
Power with few restrictions
FT The way in which his allies, the Whigs, seem to be working with him – tell us how that appeared?
FO Once the chance of a Regency appears, everybody starts manoeuvring. George's political allies among the Whigs clearly see the prospect of George becoming regent as their passport to power. So they start plotting among themselves to make sure that, first of all, George does become the regent. The Whigs do not have control of Parliament, so they need him to get this office in his own right as the prince of Wales.
And they also insist that he becomes regent with very few restrictions on his powers. What they are afraid of is that he'll become regent but the prime minister will have attached so many conditions that the prince won't be able to hand out offices, pensions and sinecures and do all the things that you need to do to consolidate your political power – this is a political system in which people are loyal if they're paid to be loyal. If George does become the regent but doesn't have the power to do all this, he would be a lame duck ruler.
So George's Whig friends find themselves in the rather invidious and embarrassing position of having to argue for relatively unrestricted royal power as their way of trying to get into office.
The king's doctors
The cockpit of this political struggle becomes the testimony of the doctors who are treating George III. His madness and the definition of his madness becomes the pivotal political issue. If the doctors say he has gone mad and he's not going to recover and needs to be carted off to an asylum, then his son becomes regent and his son's friends get political power. If, on the other hand, the doctors say, 'Well, no, it's only a temporary illness, it will pass,' then you don't need a regency. Or if you're going to have one, it will be a very limited and very temporary one.
So you get this extraordinary moment when political power in Britain is effectively held by the doctors who are arguing about whether or not the king is absolutely mad. You get Whig doctors who say, 'Well, we're treating the king and he's completely stark, staring bonkers.' And you get Tory doctors who say, 'No, no, it's a just a temporary little illness and he'll be OK.'
Pushing the prince
FT Are the prince's Whig allies pushing him to assert himself and so getting him into trouble?
FO George was a very naïve young man who didn't have a great deal of political experience; he wasn't astute. He needed advisers to urge caution, who would play a very subtle game and manoeuvre him into power in quite a slow and careful way. Unfortunately for him, the people around him couldn't afford to be too subtle; they needed to seize this opportunity and push him forward and urge him onwards to assert his own claims in the strongest possible way.
They actually push him too far in terms of public opinion and in terms of what the political system can sustain. By making him seem too anxious for the regency, they make him seem cold-hearted, unfeeling, a cynic who is simply using his father's illness to assert his own claims. That doesn't play well.
Fox and Sheridan
FT It's Fox, isn't it, who is one of the main people who leaves George in that exposed position?
FO Charles James Fox, the leader of the radical Whigs and the kind of political paragon to whom George would have looked for leadership, had been out of the country for quite a while, in Italy. He'd come back into this crisis and was perhaps a little out of tune with the feeling of the country. He wasn't quite as subtle as he normally would have been.
[The Irish dramatist and MP] Richard Brinsley Sheridan was the sort of younger, ambitious figure who was personally closer to George at this time. A great playwright, Sheridan understood the theatre. He knew how plots had to be unfolded in a much more careful way, and he was continually urging George to play a more clever game, to understate his ambitions, to seem a lot more upset about the condition of his father.
But largely it was Fox's influence politically that was driving things forward and which ultimately meant that the Whigs looked too greedy for power. This allowed [Prime Minister William] Pitt, a very wily operator, to turn their own ambitions back on them and make them seem to be the ones who were anxious for power, whereas he, Pitt, was representing the country and the monarchy.
Exposed
FT And when his father recovers, that leaves George in a very exposed position …?
FO For the whole thing to have worked, George actually needed to get power. If he'd got power, he would have been surrounded by sycophants who would have conveniently forgotten that he had pushed too hard. But when the king recovers, George is left in a completely exposed situation, in a kind of a no-man's-land, looking like this cynical, heartless, cold figure who exalted in his father's distress and illness and tried to use this terrible national crisis to get himself into a position of power so he could pay off his debts.
The great Whig hope
FT What happens to the alliance between the Whigs and George in subsequent years, post-French Revolution? George actually does have a chance to fulfil some of his promises, doesn't he?
FO George was the great hope of liberals in Britain. They always thought he would come to power sooner or later. And, of course, the king's madness wasn't one event – it was continually recurring – so there was always potential crisis. There were times, right up until the 1810s, when the prospect of George coming to power seemed alive. So people like Sheridan and Fox and the radicals always believed that he was going to get into power and bring them into power. Then they would be able to bring in some quite serious democratic reforms.
Betrayal
The problem for them is that, as George gets older, he loses his useful Romanticism, his radical chic. He becomes a more staid, more reactionary figure. By the time he actually does come into power, when the Regency becomes a reality, he's increasingly uninterested in the idea of upsetting the apple cart, of bringing in major constitutional change. Effectively he betrays them. He keeps the Tory ministers in place; he becomes a lot more sympathetic to the idea of order, of discipline, of the old constitution, about not changing things.
In particular, he betrays what would have been one of the great popular hopes for him – that he was going to be the man who would emancipate the Catholics, who would end the second-class-citizen status of Catholics, particularly in Ireland, which was an immense issue at the time. When he gets power, he decides that emancipating Catholics might be upsetting.
Spur to democracy
In the Regency, he could use the excuse of: 'Well, my father is still the king, my father was opposed to this, I'm acting in the name of my father and therefore it would be wrong to push ahead with this.' But he becomes an enormously disillusioning figure for radicals who had thought that the way to get political change was to get control of the monarchy. In many ways, he was the last figure through whom it seemed possible that the monarchy could be a vehicle for radical political change. After George, nobody believes it any more.
In some ways, George becomes a great spur to the democratic movement. He destroys the illusion that there is an élitist way to create democratic change – that by worming your way into the élite, by getting influence with the prince of Wales, who becomes the regent, who becomes the king, you could effect radical, physical change. By betraying all of those hopes, by turning on the people who supported him and helped get him into this position, he shatters that illusion.
He sent out the message very clearly that, if you want radical, political change, you have to organise, you have to invent what we would now think of as modern democracy, by looking for popular support, influencing public opinion, campaigning on the streets. George, without meaning to, ushers in a whole new era of mass politics because he destroys the idea that élite politics is ever going to produce any kind of fundamental political change.
Theatrical nature of monarchy
FT Is George literally in his element performing on a stage of his own design?
FO One of his long-term influences, I think, is that he understands the theatrical nature of the monarchy. Compared to his father and his grandfather, George actually understands that it is about spectacle, that his own interests in and talents for the arts can actually feed back into the creation of the monarchy as a kind of travelling show.
When he goes to Scotland, he invents the pageantry of what we now think of as traditional Highland dress – it was completely made up by him and his tailors and Sir Walter Scott for the occasion. When he goes to Ireland, he invents the idea of how a king can wear Irish clothes and be Irish and tell everybody that he is an Irishman. And when he goes to Hanover, he can tell everybody that he is a Hanoverian.
The illusion of power
He has this actor's ability to tell people what they want to hear, to play the roles that an audience expects him to play and to do it with an apparent sincerity. It's quite probable that, when he was telling Irish audiences that he was at heart an Irishman, he genuinely felt that at that moment. When he was telling audiences in Scotland that he was really a Scot, he felt that too.
And he did have a very profound influence on the public expectation of what a monarchy could be. Although he saw himself as a protector of royal privilege, he also opened up the possibility that the monarchy could survive in a more democratic era by not being about real power, but by being about the illusion of power. This public show of what the state meant and how it could be embodied in an individual we owe to George – the conception of a constitutional monarchy as a kind of theatrical event, an arm of show business.
