A few years back, Harper’s & Queen magazine asked me to write an article in a series entitled ‘Something I have never done before’. (No, it was not: Write a short book review.) The piece that appeared in the month before mine was Norman Lamont on falconry — a hard pterodact to follow. I decided I would stand on a soapbox at Speakers’ Corner in London (well, actually it was a plastic milk-crate pinched from my milkman) and hold forth.
I thought religion and royalty were two subjects that would get the crowd going, and launched into religion first. People began to cluster round me. I had not been speaking for more than two minutes when a little man shouted out, ‘Do you believe in the Ten Commandments?’ I answered carefully, ‘I think they are quite a good prescription for how to live your life.’ Now the man shouted, ‘Do you believe “Thou shalt not steal?” ’ I felt on safe ground here. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Then wot you doing standing on that milk-crate?’ he demanded, and the crowd fell about. Others of the hecklers were equally adroit.
Having exhausted what I wanted to say about religion, I turned to royalty. I advanced the arguments in favour of our royal family: that they are a great tourist attraction; that the Queen, as they say, ‘has never put a foot wrong’; above all, that they are ‘living history’, descended directly from Victoria and less directly from centuries of other monarchs. I knew the weaknesses of my argument, though I felt they were outweighed by its strengths. One was the indecent wealth in royal hands — all those palaces and castles. I remembered something Lord St John once said on television: ‘I can see the point of a magnificent monarchy; I can see no point in a penny-pinching one.’ That was unlikely to wash with the hecklers; and I knew there was a much more powerful objection they could hurl at me: the vagaries of heredity. As somebody once said of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords, ‘You might as well choose a group of men because they were born under Sagittarius.’ Supposing my Ten Commandments tormentor were to step forward and bellow, ‘What abaht George the Fourf?’ What riposte could I possibly make?
I don’t think he’d have been satisfied with the Sir Roy Strong defence. Not long ago Strong (who, I recall, dressed as the Regent at a fancy-dress party of his that I attended in 1970), was swanning through the state rooms of Buckingham Palace — or was it Windsor? — in a television programme, and commented, ‘George IV was the greatest interior decorator the royal family ever produced.’ It is absolutely true. (I’m not forgetting Lord Snowdon, but he’s not of the blood royal.) The only trouble was that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries a little more was required of a prince of Wales, a regent and a king than knowing whether beige was the optimum background for a Mortlake tapestry or Strawberry Hill Gothic the best style for an alcove.
As regent and king, George wielded a lot of power, though, much as he might have liked to, he was not able to apply Henry VIII’s short way with wives to his obstreperous, coarse and serially unfaithful spouse, his first cousin Caroline of Brunswick. It was up to George whether a Whig or a Tory was invited to form a ministry. Having been a Foxite Whig in his youth, he became progressively more reactionary. (The French Revolution was a literally sharp warning of what could happen to a royal family if left-wingism were carried too far.) When George became king in 1820, he did not dismiss Lord Liverpool, who had been prime minister for eight years of his regency, but (Lord Baker records) was so openly critical of him behind his back that Wellington once bluntly asked, ‘If you do not like us, why do you not turn us out?’ The King merely bowed: he was smart enough to realise it was not politic to give Liverpool his congé. But the point is, Wellington knew he could dismiss him if he had a mind to.
Because Kenneth Baker’s book comes from Thames & Hudson, best known for art books, I assumed it was going to be a book about cartoons of George IV, with some background infill about his life. Or perhaps it would be in the nature of a ‘life in pictures’ (as the title rather suggests). I have compiled one of John Betjeman; excellent examples have been devoted to Proust and Colette; Malcolm Muggeridge issued an autobiography in pictures as well as his two-volume memoirs. Baker’s book is something much more ambitious — virtually a biography of George, copiously and splendidly illustrated by the cartoons. Most of George’s biographers, from Robert Huish in 1831 to Steven Parissien in 2001, have roasted him. By contrast, Baker puts forward as good a case for him as can be mounted for a spendthrift voluptuary on a throne.
The effect is contrapuntal. As you read, you begin to like and admire George; but all the time you are being pulled up short by some wickedly ‘anti’ cartoon by the likes of Gillray, Rowlandson and Isaac and George Cruikshank. As Baker observes, George IV ‘had the great misfortune to live right through the golden age of English caricature from 1780 to 1830 when the high and mighty were not spared’.
This is an immensely enjoyable and stunningly produced book. It is a little early to be talking about Christmas, but I think it would be a welcome present for anybody interested in art, politics, satire and sex. As the author of such a book, Baker has three outstanding advantages. First, he is well-known as a collector of caricatures: his George IV hoard must only be rivalled (as a collection in private hands) by the marshalling of caricatures of Queen Caroline by the theatre producer Michael Codron. George IV himself made a big collection of caricatures of himself, but these were absurdly sold off to the Library of Congress in Washington, in 1921, for a miserable sum which went towards buying more items for George V’s stamp collection.
Baker’s second advantage — as we learn from his 1993 autobiography, The Turbulent Years — is that he read history at Magdalen College, Oxford, with the great K. B. McFarlane among his tutors. It shows. He is acutely analytical. His style is that of a good lecturer: he knows how to divide his subject into palatable morsels. For example, near the beginning of the book he warns us that we are going to encounter four major crises in George’s life on each of which the caricaturists seized. The first was in 1811 when he became regent and thought he would dismiss the Tory prime minister and bring in the Whigs; the second, in 1821 after his government had failed to pass the Bill that would have granted him a divorce from Caroline; the third, in 1827, when Lord Liverpool had a paralytic stroke and George delayed five weeks before appointing as prime minister George Canning (he disliked him intensely at first, but later came round to him); and the fourth, after Canning’s death in 1827, when Welling- ton’s government passed a Catholic Relief Act. (Very reluctantly consenting to it in 1829, George said Wellington was now ‘King Arthur’. In an age of punsters, George was fond of punning. When his architect Jeffry Wyatt, who remodelled Windsor Castle for him, asked if he might change his name to Wyatville, George replied, ‘Ville or mutton, call yourself what you like.’)
Baker’s third recommendation is that he was himself a pretty successful politician. So he knows the way politicians think, and he is often ready with an apt 20th-century parallel to what happened in George’s reign. For instance, when explaining why certain statesmen would not serve in a Canning ministry he writes:
The strongest case that can be made for George is as art connoisseur and collector, builder and town planner, and Baker makes it eloquently. Perhaps he is over-charitable when he describes George’s taste as ‘exquisite’. That suggests preciousness, while George’s taste was flamboyant, daring, full of brio, bravura and panache. Take the Royal Pavilion, Brighton — Indian outside, Chinese within. As Baker notes, Victoria ‘never forgave’ George for the excesses of the Pavilion, which she sold to Brighton council. (In the 1930s, as Baker does not note, the council at one point wanted to pull down the fantastical edifice as a ‘white elephant’.) George made the royal collection of paintings one of the finest in the world, acquiring, among other masterpieces, Van Dyck’s triple portrait of Charles I. George’s Carlton House, where he held parties for 1,000 guests, was demolished in 1827; but even the finicky Horace Walpole had admired it. George transformed Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace. Then there were Regent’s Park and Regent Street, and a ‘Chinese fishing temple’ at Virginia Water. George was known for a time as ‘the Kingfisher’, ho-ho. Even the architectural historian Sir John Summerson, so habitually disdainful that he was said to keep his lip in curlers, praised him:Too many Tories had been wounded by Canning’s witty sarcasm and there was a feeling among the Tory aristocrats that he was being ‘too clever by half’ (a similar fate befell Iain Macleod in the 1960s).
George, Baker considers, was a ‘truly cultivated’ man. He thinks that was one reason why, when he was young, he got on so well with Charles James Fox — ‘Fox was well educated, being a Classical scholar, and he was able to talk about Italian artists with knowledge and feeling just as discriminating as the Prince’s.’ Their rakehell habits — gormandising, gambling and womanising — were also in synch. George loved the novels of Jane Austen so much that he had a set in each royal palace; and in 1816 Emma was dedicated to him. He spoke French and German fluently. George Cruikshank’s cartoon of 1814 shows him with the Prussian Marshal BlIt was George IV’s superb breadth of view, his intolerance of projects of less than regal scale, that fortified the initiative of others and lent propriety to extravagance.
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