An interview with Andrew Roberts
This interview with Andrew Roberts (AR) was carried out by the television production company Flashback Television (FT) for the Channel 4 programme The Badness of King George IV. The historian Andrew Roberts is the author of a number of books, including Salisbury: Victorian titan (1999), Napoleon and Wellington (2001) and Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of leadership (2003).
Epic figures
Flashback Television Just thinking about the period in which George was a young and middle-aged man, a period of huge, monumental, epic history with huge figures, can you give us a sense of what that stage and the French Revolution would have been like as a backdrop to his own personal life?
Andrew Roberts These great world-shattering events threw up massive figures, people like George Washington, Admiral Nelson, Napoleon, of course, and the duke of Wellington. In contrast, the prince of Wales seemed an even smaller figure than he was in real life.
FT Do you get a sense that he was measuring himself against people like that, particularly Napoleon, that he saw himself in the same league?
AR Unfortunately, the prince of Wales kept seeing himself in the same league as the emperor Napoleon who, of course, after he abdicated, said that George was the most generous of his enemies. George loved that and said that it was the kindest thing that had ever been written to him, far kinder than anything Louis XVIII, his own ally, had ever written to him.
Threat to the crown
FT Can you just give us an idea of what Napoleon would have meant to a ruling head? After all, he was someone who went round knocking off kings before breakfast.
AR The very existence of the man they called the 'Corsican ogre' – Napoleon Bonaparte – implied a direct threat to the British crown. He had, in his career, overthrown monarchies and replaced them with his own marshals – with, in two cases, his brothers. So there is simply no way, if Napoleon had invaded Britain successfully in 1804 or 1805, that he would have allowed the Hanoverians to stay on the throne. And so, as a result, the prince of Wales quite rightly saw Napoleon as a threat.
There's a long history in Britain of princes of Wales wanting to fight in wars to establish their legitimacy as soldiers as well as merely members of the royal family – you have it in every century. Equally, ever since the battle of Dettingen in 1743 [when George II had defeated the French], no monarch had actually commanded an army on the field of battle, and so it can't really be allowed. As a result, poor George, prince of Wales, was forced to take a series of honorary positions and was not allowed out of camp. So he held his manhood cheap.
Fantasies
FT He found more imaginative ways of fighting Napoleon, didn't he? What he wasn't able to do in reality, he fantasised about?
AR Towards the end of his life and especially when he was ill, George started to fantasise that he had, in fact, taken part in the Peninsular War. He told people that he had disguised himself as a general and led the cavalry charge at the battle of Salamanca. It's a sad and embarrassing fact. The rest of his courtiers just nodded and agreed. Indeed, when he asked Wellington if it wasn't true that he'd taken part in this battle – during which, of course, the then prime minister had been the Allied commander-in-chief – Wellington rather diplomatically answered, 'I have often heard you say so, sir.'
FT Was Napoleon aware of the prince of Wales?
AR There's no indication that Napoleon had one view or another about the prince of Wales, not until he abdicated when, of course, he made a remark in which he likened himself to a great Greek hero and threw himself on the mercy of the prince of Wales. Until then, the prince didn't really rate. If anything, Napoleon was hopeful that the Whig party was going to be put into government by the prince when he became regent, but this never happened.
No battle of Waterloo
FT So he would have been aware of the internal politics of Britain?
AR Napoleon was highly aware – especially during his exile on Elba before he came back to his 100 Days empire – that the Whig party in Britain was keen on a negotiated peace with him in the Peninsular War, and probably would be again when he came to the throne. So he hoped against hope that the prince regent would be putting the Whig party or the Radicals into power and thereby save him from having to fight the Coalition for a seventh time.
FT So he would have seen George as a potential – not an ally so much, but someone he could work with?
AR The Whigs simply didn't have the leadership at the time, and they were also considered by George to be far too radical and anti-war. But certainly, if they had been put into power at any time after 1812, the battle of Waterloo would never have taken place.
Keeping the Whigs out of government
FT Tell us about George's claims to have beaten Napoleon. Is there also a grain of truth in them?
AR Although as prince regent, he claimed, especially after the battle of Waterloo, to have been the liberator of Europe, in fact these were laughable claims. But it's true that, on one occasion in 1812, when he could have thrown the Tory ministry out and replaced it with a pro-peace Whig government, George did not do that. It was probably the most important decision of his life in terms of politics, and it was the correct one.
And so, in one sense, he has a slight claim to have been part of the war-winning Coalition. But to equate his own actions with those of Wellington himself is quite frankly laughable.
FT Do you see his keeping the Whigs out of government as a conscious decision?
AR Definitely. He gave us his reasons. The fact that the Whigs after the death of Charles James Fox, his great friend, had no impressive leaders. And also that they were not committed to a war that George did not want negotiated away. He saw Napoleon as the threat to European peace that he genuinely was, and so he wanted to stick to the war. Now it was an unpopular decision in a way because Wellington was not doing particularly well in the Peninsular War in 1812, he was on the retreat, but none the less it was something that George stuck to and should be given credit for.
Follower of fashion
FT Do you think his decision to stick had anything to do with his opinion of Wellington, was based on his admiration for him?
AR The views of the prince regent towards Wellington changed with fashion unfortunately. He was a man of fashion and his opinions went backwards and forwards. Every time there was a retreat, his view of Wellington went down; every time there was a victory, it went up. In this, he was not so very far away from the feelings of the majority of Britons.
FT Was Wellington ever aware of what the prince regent thought of him, and did it impact on his campaign?
AR Wellington was made aware by his brother, the marquis of Wellesley, of the feelings that the prince regent had towards him. However, it made absolutely no difference – Wellington was out there to win his campaign. If he was recalled, then he was recalled. But he certainly didn't take any military decisions on the basis of what the prince regent thought of him.
Tremendously furious
FT Give us a sense of Wellington's character.
AR Wellington was a splendidly self-confident and assertive man, a battlefield technician and a strategist such as we never had before or possibly since. The great thing about Wellington was that he didn't really care what anybody else thought of him – he would carry on regardless. If he was the only person who actually believed a course of action was right he would take it.
He could be incredibly ruthless on his own men and officers and indeed on himself. For example, he did not have a single day's leave in the whole six years of the Peninsular campaign. Yet he could also be infuriated with those back in Britain who he called 'the croakers', who criticised his campaign.
He would sign off tremendously furious letters – never to the prince regent, of course; that would be impolitic – but to pretty much everybody else in London. He also wrote very angry letters to the War Office if they held up his supplies, and lots of very angry letters to the prime minister Lord Liverpool whenever there was any criticism of what he was doing in the Peninsular War. He was a very tough-minded man who never suffered fools gladly.
Monarchy vs monarch
FT What was Wellington's attitude towards the monarchy?
AR As a reactionary Tory, Wellington was an absolute believer in the monarchy, in the crown, in the social structure of which the crown was the apex. He, of course, was quite far up that social structure – he was the son of an earl. But he was capable of seeing the difference between the concept of monarchy and the monarch himself.
Wellington was a highly intelligent man. He knew perfectly well that you have to see the monarchy as something of a lottery, and that occasionally you're going to wind up with some pretty disastrous people in charge. This obviously was the case when George III went insane. And he also was able to see George IV for what he was. Although he had to work within the confines of the constitutional structures, he was never under any illusion about the character and personality of George IV.
He also appreciated that you could have good monarchs – William IV was a good one and he very much admired Queen Victoria. So he could distinguish between the concept of monarchy and the individuals who happened to be sitting on the throne at the time.
Asking to be sacked
FT And, in the case of George IV, that distinction was important?
AR It was tremendously important for him to be able to make the distinction between the concept of monarchy and the monarch, not least because [from January 1828] he was George IV's prime minister and so he had to work with him on a regular basis. The king occasionally had what you would call today a 'hissy fit' about his ministers. Wellington would look him in the eye and effectively ask to be sacked. As a result, the king backed down, even over the most incredibly difficult and emotional subjects like Catholic emancipation. Wellington got his way.
FT He seems to have been very good at handling George.
AR One of the important things in the complex relationship between Wellington and the king is that the king appreciated that Wellington was an utterly admirable man because of his battlefield successes – something that George himself was never allowed to get anywhere near. Although he didn't see him quite as the father figure that Queen Victoria saw, he did appreciate that Wellington was the most famous man in the world at the time and the great victor of Waterloo, and this, in the end, really weighed upon him.
Executor of the king's will
Wellington was appointed executor of the king's will, which showed how much respect the king had for him. But Wellington didn't have much respect for the king, and was able to manipulate him. He did this partly by indulging his fantasies and partly by standing up to him. And when they were working together, these two things were dynamite.
One of Wellington's duties as the king's executor was to pay the apothecary. He'd sent a rather large bill and Wellington wanted to question it. The apothecary said that, in fact, it was a rather small amount considering that one of the jobs he'd had to do was scrape the king's body all over to remove the accumulated dirt.
FT And the other, more serious duty was what Wellington did with the king's correspondence and accumulated trash and trinkets.
AR The king had asked Wellington to ensure that, when he died, his body should be laid to rest wearing everything that he had had on at the time. When Wellington checked the body over just before the lid of the coffin was nailed down, he noticed a little black velvet pouch at his neck in which there was a diamond-encrusted portrait of Maria Fitzherbert.
Another thing he did was to ensure that all the evidence of the king's marriage to Maria Fitzherbert – a legal marriage, but none the less, very controversial if it were ever to come out – was destroyed. So they went round to Mrs Fitzherbert's house and burnt so many papers and love letters from the king and various bits and pieces – 'that trash and trinkets', it was called by Wellington – that they feared her chimney was going to go up in smoke.
Wellington didn't stop at Mrs Fitzherbert. He also rooted through many of the bundles of correspondence that the king had, especially the letters to his mistresses, and destroyed them too. He said that some of the verses that he'd found were disgusting. Wellington was not a very strait-laced man – he himself had plenty of mistresses in his life – so they must have been pretty disgusting.
