Britain - Historical Biography - Rulers & Royal Families, 18th Century British History - Georgian Era (1715-1837), Britain - Historical Biography - 19th Century, Britain - Historical Biography - 18th Century
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Overview
This biography of George IV, king between 1820 and 1830, provides a full and objective reassessment of the monarch's character, reputation and achievement. Previous writers have tended to accept the unfavourable verdicts of the king's contemporaries that he was a dissolute, pleasure-loving dilettante and a feeble and ineffective ruler responsible for the decline of the power and reputation of the monarchy in the early nineteenth century. Now E.A. Smith offers a new view of George IV, one that does not minimise the king's faults but focuses on the positive qualities of his achievement in politics and in the patronage of the arts.Synopsis
This biography of George IV, king between 1820 and 1830, provides a full and objective reassessment of the monarch's character, reputation and achievement. Previous writers have tended to accept the unfavourable verdicts of the king's contemporaries that he was a dissolute, pleasure-loving dilettante and a feeble and ineffective ruler responsible for the decline of the power and reputation of the monarchy in the early nineteenth century. Now E.A. Smith offers a new view of George IV, one that does not minimise the king's faults but focuses on the positive qualities of his achievement in politics and in the patronage of the arts.
Derek Turner
A delightfully written and stimulating contribution to English royal history.
Editorials
Derek Turner
A delightfully written and stimulating contribution to English royal history.Contemporary Review
A valuable tool for future historians and a 'good read' for anyone interested in one of our most colourful and exasperating monarchs.Derek Turne
A delightfully written and stimulating contribution to English royal history.—Literary Review
Ian Gilmour
...[T]he rehabilitation of George IV is an uphill struggle, and to my mind Smith gets at the most halfway up the hill....After making a claim on behalf of George, the author's scholarly integrity occasionally leads him to undermine if by providing detailed evidence to the contrary.— London Review of Books
Kirkus Review
Smith's . . . sympathetic account portrays a king's grand indulgences as decorative flourishes of a darker political era.Kirkus Reviews
This cautious revisionist history of the youth, regency, and reign of one of the most despised English kings tries to show, in the words of a royal retainer, that George IV's "abilities were far, very far, above mediocrity." The future George IV (1762–1830) and his siblings were raised in virtual isolation. George, as prince of Wales, angered his father, George III, by falling in with the libertine, high-living, morally dissolute Whigs under Charles James Fox and the duchess of Devonshire. An overdressed, free-spending dandy, the prince cut a swath among fawning actresses and parvenus while running up enormous debts. The prince spent a fortune to transform the run-down Carlton House in London into the gaudiest domicile in the realm. To enjoy his secret marriage to the widowed Mrs. Fitzherbert, a Catholic and commoner, the prince ran up greater debts rebuilding and enlarging the Brighton Pavillion, where he also played soldier with his personal regiment. He agreed to marry Caroline of Brunswick—a woman he found so distasteful on their first meeting that he hid his face and demanded a brandy—in exchange for his father paying his debts. For the next two decades, from 1811, when the prince assumed control of the throne as regent during his father's final bout of madness, until he died in 1830 after a ten-year reign as George IV, he presided over the most stylish and flamboyant period in British history for the hundred or so aristocrats who could afford it. Smith, the author of four English histories (Wellington and the Arthbutnots, not reviewed, etc.), shows that the king's numerous political enemies used his profligate spending, as well as his cruel treatment of Queen Caroline,to blacken a legacy that also included distinctive buildings and public works, generous sponsorship of the arts and literature, and a taste for lavish display. More a historical summary than a biography, Smith's occasionally tedious if sympathetic account portrays a king's grand indulgences as decorative flourishes of a darker political era.Book Details
Published
June 1, 1999
Publisher
Yale University Press
Pages
320
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780300076851