George, the Prince of Wales, the eldest son of George III, was the barometer of fashion. Handsome (before he ran to fat), intelligent, charming, sensual and a brilliant mimic, his relations with his father followed the usual Hanoverian pattern of mutual loathing and contempt. He thought his father mean and puritanical; his father thought his son a wanton and a wastrel.
The prince of Wales also followed tradition by putting himself at the head of the opposition party of radical Whigs. Initially he dismissed the warnings of Edmund Burke, the Whigs' former ideologue, against the French Revolution as 'a farrago of nonsense' and the work of a turncoat. But as the killings in France multiplied, he had a change of heart. The execution of Louis XVI, he wrote to his mother Queen Charlotte, had filled him with 'a species of sentiment towards my father which surpasses all description'.
He made his peace with the king, broke with the opposition and declared his enthusiastic support for the Tory prime minister William Pitt the Younger. He even toyed with the idea of serving as a volunteer in the war against France. And where the prince led, much of the Whig party followed, joining the prime minister in a coalition to wage war 'under the standard of an hereditary monarchy' against republican France and all that it stood for.
This increasingly ideological war condemned the Whigs to the wilderness for a generation. They were irretrievably split, while the rump that persisted in opposition was tainted with republicanism and treason.
At the time of his father's final collapse into dementia, beginning in 1809, the prince of Wales (disrespectfully known as 'Prinny' to his cronies) was already 48 and, under the combined influences of drink, drugs (like many of his contemporaries, he took the opium compound laudanum) and a gargantuan appetite, his youthful good looks were fading fast and his skin had turned a deep coppery hue.
He spent gigantically too: the Pavilion he built at Brighton is perhaps the most vivid example of his taste for excess. His own treasurer declared that his debts were 'beyond all kind of calculation whatever'. But worst of all was his disastrous marriage.
It began hopefully as part of the closing of ranks within the royal family in the wake of the French Revolution. In return for the settling of his debts, the prince agreed to George III's urgent wish that he should marry and father an heir. German custom, however, dictated that his bride should be royal, too. The best of a bad bunch of available Protestant princesses seemed to be his cousin Caroline of Brunswick, but when she arrived in England, it was loathing at first sight.
After the wedding in the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace, George knocked himself out with brandy and spent the night with his head in the hearth. The following morning, he recovered sufficiently to get Caroline pregnant, and a daughter, christened Charlotte, was born in January 1796. It was the first and last time the couple slept together, and they quickly separated.
Such was the man who, in 1811, on his father's descent into permanent madness, became prince regent of the United Kingdom – with the duties but not yet the status of a king. The great cartoonists such as Gillray had a field day with his shape and his private life. And posterity, on the whole, hasn't been much kinder.
On the other hand, few more imaginative men have sat on the British throne and none has left more tangible results – in the terraces of London, the royal palaces and the strange, hybrid concept of British identity itself.
Following the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815, the French retreat turned into a rout. On 3 July, an armistice was agreed, and three days later, the Allies entered Paris. But, even in defeat, Napoleon continued to fascinate his enemies, and none more so than the prince regent. It had already begun with the contest of capitals: London versus Paris.
Napoleon, like many despots, had been a megalomaniac builder, who had started to refashion the then largely medieval warren of Paris into a capital worthy of an empire. This was to throw down the gauntlet to Britain, since London, fattened by overseas empire and trade, already dwarfed Paris in size and wealth.
'Prinny' decided that the city must look the part, and the man charged in 1811 with realising his dreams was John Nash. His brief was simple: he must outdo Napoleonic Paris. And, thanks to his unusual combination of qualities – as both visionary architect and shrewd property developer – he largely succeeded.
His scheme, which involved both landscaping and town planning on a heroic scale, created a grand processional route from the newly laid-out Regent's Park in the north, through Regent Street to the gates of the prince's London residence in the south. Nash worked in sweeping curves and artful vistas, while his buildings, which were really terraces of middle-class brick houses, were covered in stucco-plaster and painted to look like a succession of noble palaces. This was architecture as urban stage-set – as theatrical as Napoleon's coronation and as successful.
In 1820, there arrived a day for which the prince had waited almost as eagerly as for Napoleon's downfall. For almost a decade after he had become regent, his father George III had lived the life of a recluse at Windsor. Now his condition suddenly worsened and he died on 29 January. The regent was now king at last, and he was determined that everybody should know it.
George's coronation – delayed for over a year by a disastrously misjudged attempt to divorce his estranged wife Caroline – finally took place on 19 July 1821. It was, he resolved, to be the best organised and most magnificent in British history. It was certainly the most expensive, costing almost £250,000 while his father's had been done for less than £10,000.
George was literally measuring himself against Napoleon, since his tailor had been sent to Paris to copy the emperor's coronation robe. The result resembled Napoleon's but, being even more thickly embroidered and befurred, required eight pages to carry.
There was more to this than the clash of two monstrous egos. George's coronation, with its more than Napoleonic magnificence, was a triumphant reaffirmation that the British monarchy had survived two of the greatest threats to its existence – the ideological challenge of the French Revolution and the military threat of Napoleon – to emerge, once more, as the arbiter of Europe and the only world power.
In 1822, the year after the coronation, George IV decided on a visit to Scotland – the first by a reigning monarch since Charles II's coronation in 1651. The person tasked with organising it was the writer Sir Walter Scott. The resulting grand historical pageant was all nonsense, but thanks to Scott's genius as impresario, it was inspired, romantic nonsense.
The part that nationalism had played in the downfall of Napoleon's empire was second only to British arms. The pageantry of royalty helped to harness the wild horses of nationalism that had been unleashed by the French Revolution. For that, parading through the streets of Edinburgh in a kilt was a small price to pay!
However, George was unable to keep up the flurry of activity that had marked the beginning of his reign. His health and mobility declined and his self-indulgence grew, as he washed down vast amounts of food with even larger quantities of alcohol. He died, unlamented, at Windsor on 26 June 1830.
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 King George IV
www.nndb.com/people/395/000093116/
Densely written biography of the pleasure-loving prince regent/king.
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George IV by E A Smith (Yale University Press, 2000)
Deals comprehensively with the political context of George's life and reign and provides a reassessment of the monarch's character, reputation and achievements.
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The Prince of Pleasure: The Prince of Wales and the making of the Regency by Saul David (Abacus, 1999)
Biography of George IV, infamous for being overweight, overdressed, and oversexed and one of the most controversial and outrageous monarchs in British history.
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 The Royal Pavilion, Brighton
4/5 Pavilion Buildings
Brighton BN1 1EE
Tel: 01273 290 900
E-mail: royalpavilion@brighton-hove.gov.uk
Website: www.royalpavilion.org.uk
The Royal Pavilion grew over 35 years from a simple farmhouse to a spectacular palace. From 1815 to 1823, at the instigation of the prince regent, John Nash used new technology to transform it into the Indian-style building that exists today. He enlarged the structure and added the domes and minarets that characterise his design by superimposing a cast-iron framework over the original building. The pavilion's lavish interiors combine Chinese-style decorations with magnificent furniture and furnishings, mixing Asian exoticism with English eccentricity.
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