King William IV of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, as well as the King of Hanover, was born the third son of King George III and Queen Charlotte just before dawn on 21 August 1765 at Buckingham House. He only came to the throne due to the deaths of his second oldest brother, Frederick, and his niece, Princess Charlotte, the daughter and heir of his eldest brother, King George IV.
When he was thirteen he joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman, and in the true spirit of the British military, was treated mostly like any other upper-class teen who enlisted, except for the fact he had to have his tutor with him to continue his education. William performed well, and didn’t try to throw his royal weight around. He accepting his duties in rotation like all the other midshipman, and he “even got arrested with his shipmates after a drunken brawl in Gibraltar”. His service wasn’t prefunctionary either. He participated in the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1780 served in New York during the American War of Independence, where George Washington actually planned to kidnap him in an attempt to strong-arm Britain.
As could be expected for someone of his birth and connections, William became a captain by 1786, given command of HMS Pegasus. He was sent to serve in the West Indies under Horatio Nelson. The prince and Nelson became good friends, and Nelson wrote that William, “In his professional line, he is superior to two-thirds, I am sure, of the [Naval] list; and in attention to orders, and respect to his superior officer, I hardly know his equal.” The two men grew so close that William was even the one who gave the bride away at Nelson’s wedding.
Just two years after becoming a captain, William was given command of the frigate HMS Andromeda, and in 1789 the prince was further promoted to rear-admiral. William’s given the HMS Valiant along with his admiralty, but he couldn’t enjoy his position long since he was called back from active duty in 1790. He had been made the Duke of Clarence and St Andrews and Earl of Munster on 16 May 1789, and once back on land he fulfilled the expectations of him that he would serve in the House of Lords. William was nominally a Whig, but that was mostly to get on his dad’s nerves. There were some areas, however, where he was in sympathy with the liberal Whigs. For example, he was in favour of removing the penal laws against dissenting Christians and against the attempt to keep those found guilty of adultery in a divorce from remarrying legally.
He differed most sharply from the majority of Whigs on the issue of slavery. He had been fed a load of tripe by the slave-owning gentlefolk of the West Indies while in the Navy and he had swallowed it whole. His arguments against abolishing slavery were that 1) “the living standard among freemen in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland was worse than that among slaves”, and 2) freedom “would do the slaves little good” since the poor mites probably were smart enough to take care of themselves the way their nice owners did. While the first argument had (alas) some truth to it, the point it should have made was that the English should have stopped treating the Highland Scots that badly. The second argument was simply a pile of rankest bullshit based on the myth of black inferiority and the ignorance of the rapes, beatings, and inhumanity of actual slavery. Nonetheless, the arguments impressed conservatives who were unsure about the abolishing of slavery.
William, who loved serving in the navy, hoped to be given another ship and return to duty when Britain declared war on France in 1793. It was not to be. In spite of the fact he begged the king to let him go back to sea, the prince remained landlocked and shipless. William was bitterly disappointed that he could not return to service, and maintained his devotion to Royal Navy throughout his life.
In his personal life, Prince William formed an attachment with one of the leading actresses of his age, an Irish woman named Dorothea Bland, who went by the stage name of Mrs. Dorothea Jordan.
Ten children — and equal numbers of sons and daughters — were born to the pair, and they were all given the surname “FitzClarence“. These children have several famous descendants, including former Prime Minister David Cameron, TV presenter Adam Hart-Davis, author and statesman Duff Cooper, and the first Duke of Fife, “who married Princess Louise, herself a granddaughter of William’s niece, Queen Victoria.” King George III, a (mostly) doting father who loved his grandchildren even if they were born on the wrong side of the blanket, made the prince the Ranger of Bushy Park in 1797, thereby ensuring that William and Dorothea and their happy brood of children could live in comfort and relative seclusion in manor of Bushy House.
Alas for love, after 20 years of blissful cohabitation, the couple split up in 1811 because William was head over ears in debt and decided he needed to marry a heiress to make his fortune. Dorothea was actually sorry for him. She wrote to a friend that the want of money had, “I am convinced made HIM at this moment the most wretched of men … With all his excellent qualities, his domestic virtues, his love for his lovely children, what must he not at this moment suffer?”
In fairness to William, he provided his pseudo-wife with an excellent settlement of £4,400 (roughly £287,900 in modern money) per year and “custody of her daughters on condition that she did not resume the stage. When she resumed acting in an effort to repay debts incurred by the husband of one of her daughters from a previous relationship, William took custody of the daughters and stopped paying the £1,500 (equivalent to £94,600 today) designated for their maintenance.” Sadly, when her career on stage began to falter Dorothea moved to France in an effort to outrun her debts, and died in poverty near Paris in 1816.
To reward him for ‘doing the right thing’ by separating from Jordan and looking to breed legal heirs, William was given the honorary title of Admiral of the Fleet in 1811. He was still kept mostly on land and far away from conflict, but in 1813 he inadvertently came under fire while watching the bombardment of Antwerp from a church steeple. A bullet came within an inch of hitting him, much to the consternation of the royal family.
William spent the first five years after separating from Mrs Jordan trying and failing to marry a heiress. His most notable rebuff was mega-heiress Catherine Tylney-Long, who chose to marry William Wesley-Pole instead of a duke. She made the wrong choice, because William would turn out to be a good husband when he married but the more handsome and charming William Wesley-Pole proved to be a cad who beat her and spent all her money.
Marriage became an even more pressing issue when the heir to the throne, Princess Charlotte of Wales, died in childbirth in 1817. Now at least one of George III’s unmarried sons had to wed and produce a new heir. It was a reproductive race, and William was the leading contender. Yet although William was ready and willing to wed, his family and cupid seemed to be determined to stymie him. Every woman he considered good wife material either turned down his proposal or was ruled out by the disapproval of William’s eldest brother. The prince asked his younger brother Adolphus, the Duke of Cambridge, to go to Germany and find him a nice princess to marry, but the father of the lady he found — Princess Augusta of Hesse-Kassel — denied her permission to marry William. Augusta’s father didn’t want her to have to raise William’s brood of nine illegitimate children. Her father liked Adolphus though, and just two months later allowed him to marry Augusta instead.
Finally a match was made for William with 25 year old Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, the daughter of George I, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. The princess was half William’s age, but she was sweet-tempered, maternally inclined, and not bothered about marrying an older man. William and Adelaide wed in the Drawing Room of Kew Palace on 11 July 1818, with the approbation and good wishes of the royals and the general public.
The couple, in spite of their age difference, were surprisingly happy together. Adelaide kept his spending in check and got him out of debt, as well as making him exercise and stop drinking. In turn, William was both faithful and kind to her. The only dark spot on their marital sun was the fact they were unable to have children. Tragically, they had two daughters who died in infancy and three known miscarriages. Adelaide, however, was a loving and kind stepmother to William’s children and seems to have been in love with her husband as well.
When the his elder brother Frederick died in 1827, William became the heir presumptive to the British throne. In acknowledgement of William’s new importance, the incoming Prime Minister, George Canning, “appointed him to the office of Lord High Admiral, which had been in commission (that is, exercised by a board rather than by a single individual) since 1709.” William was only Lord High Admiral for a year, but he did and excellent job of it. He ended whippings with a cat o’ nine tails as a punishment except in the case of mutiny, worked to improve naval gunnery, required “regular reports of the condition and preparedness of each ship”, and fought to get the first steam warship in the navy. He correctly saw steam powered ships as the future of naval warfare, much to the disgust and disagreement of his councillors. The Naval Council was so distraught and angry about the steamships that the king was pressured to ask William for his resignation. An officer and a gentleman, William complied.
King George IV died on 26 June 1830 and the 64 year old William succeeded him as King William IV.
Due to his time in the Navy, William was known as the “Sailor King” during his reign, and was initially a popular monarch because he was a hard worker with little love of pomp. William got rid of the former king’s French chefs and replaced them with English cooks, and his first Prime Minister Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, said that “he had done more business with King William in ten minutes than he had with George IV in as many days.” As he had done in the admiralty, King William wanted to improve and modernise things. His efforts to shore up the economy led even Lord Brougham, a liberal who disagreed with the Sailor King on almost everything else, to call William “an excellent man of business.”
As king, William did his best for his surviving illegitimate children, but as was the Hanoverian tradition, his sons were all a pain in their father’s ass. Although he made his eldest son the Earl of Munster and gave all his other kids “the precedence of a younger son (or daughter) of a marquess”, his younger sons all griped and whined for more. The irrational demands of his sons irked the public, agreeing that the “impudence and rapacity of the FitzJordans is unexampled”. His daughters, however, were all well-liked since they were, “pretty and lively,” and could move in “society in a way that real princesses could not.”
The general election of 1830 saw an increase of Whiggish MPs under Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey. The Tories still had the largest number of seats, but they were so divided that Wellington was defeated in the House of Commons, which allowed Lord Grey to form a government. Grey had pledged to reform the electoral system, especially the problem of rotten or pocket boroughs, and to address several systemic inequalities, such as Catholic emancipation and the abolition of slavery.
Grey ascendance and reforms lead to a major crisis for the new king. After the House of Commons defeated the First Reform Bill in 1831, Lord Grey and his ministers pleased with King William “to go in person to the House of Lords and prorogue Parliament. The monarch’s arrival would stop all debate and prevent passage of the Address.” William agreed, and when he was told that the royal coach would need more time to prepare for his transport, he supposedly snapped, “Then I will go in a hackney cab!” With the monarch breathing down their necks, his coachmen were able to prepare the horses quickly and William was able to go forthwith to Parliament. When he got there, King William “hastily put on the crown, entered the Chamber, and dissolved Parliament. This forced new elections for the House of Commons, which yielded a great victory for the reformers.”
This made William very popular with the people, but the peers in the House of Lords were livid at what they saw as his betrayal of his social class. In an attempt to punish William for his interference and his demands for a modest coronation, the conservative Tories in the House of Lords threatened to boycott what they sneeringly called the “Half Crown-nation”. William, notoriously blunt, told them they were welcome to do so because it would mean a “greater convenience of room and less heat” at the ceremony. Notwithstanding the Tory threats, the King’s Coronation on 8 September 1831 was well attended.
The Tory nobles continued to prove difficult in parliament, however, much to the distress of William and the nation. The House of Lords rejected the Second Reform Bill in October 1831, sparking d”Reform Riots” across the country. With the groundswell of popularism behind him, Lord Grey re-introduced the Bill and asked the king to create a enough new peers who would be in favour of the Bill to ensure that it would finally pass. This scared the crap out of the nobility, and the Lords — hoping to stave off the creation of new members — began preparing to pass the Reform Bill but only after altering “its basic character through amendments. Grey and his fellow ministers decided to resign if the King did not agree to an immediate and large creation to force the bill through in its entirety.” William, not particularly liberal in nature and disliking ultimatums, let Grey and his ministers resign. However, when the king “attempted to restore the Duke of Wellington to office … the King’s popularity sank to an all-time low. Mud was slung at his carriage and he was publicly hissed.”
King William had no real choice but to reappoint Grey’s ministry, and promise to create new peers if the House of Lords didn’t pass the Reform Bill his subjects were asking for. Cowed by the popular support for the bill and by the threat of up-jumped peers flooding the House, most of the bill’s opponents refrained from voting and the Reform Act 1832 was passed. Grey was furthermore able to push through the Factory Act of 1833 (outlawing child labour), the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (freeing the remaining slaves in the British colonies), and the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 (which standardised government assistance for the desperately impoverished). That’s why he’s one of my all-time favourite politicians in history. Seriously, drink some of the tea named after him and wish his departed shade well; he’s earned our eternal admiration.
King William would actively intervene in politics just once more, in 1834, when he forced a Prime Minister on Parliament. Lord Grey had retired and the Home Secretary, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, had replaced him. Lord Melbourne retained most of the same Cabinet members from the Grey administration, and his ministry still had an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons. Regardless of the will of the majority and the public, the leftist polices of the Whigs scared William. He was especially worried about the potential actions of Lamb’s ally, Lord John Russell, whom the King called “a dangerous little Radical.” In November 1834, the Leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Charles Spencer, Viscount Althorp, became a peer and moved from the House of Commons to the Lords. Melbourne was set to replace Spencer with Russell, but William used a flimsy excuse to name a Tory, Sir Robert Peel, Leader of the House of Commons. Peel couldn’t rule the rowdy and angry Whigs, so William dissolved Parliament to force fresh elections, hoping to put the Tories back in power. Unfortunately for the king, the Tories lost again, and William had to learn to live with both Melbourne and Russell for the rest of his reign.
With no legitimate children of his own, the king’s heir was Princess Victoria of Kent, the only child of his next younger brother, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn. The king and queen were both very fond of little Victoria, but they disliked her mother, the Duchess of Kent. To prevent the Duchess of Kent from ever becoming Regent, the king was determined to survive until Victoria’s 18th birthday — 24 May 1837.
Poor William almost almost didn’t make it. He nearly died of grief when his eldest daughter, Sophia, Lady de L’Isle and Dudley, died in childbirth that April. The king, already frail, was prostrate with grief. Only sheer force of will kept him alive for the next two months, and his health went into a rapid decline shortly after Victoria’s birthday. As the king lay dying, Queen Adelaide attended him with unshakeable devotion, staying by his bedside without rest for more than ten days.
King William IV died in the early hours of the morning of 20 June 1837 at Windsor Castle, and was buried simply, as he had wished. With the death of the last Georgian monarch, the Regency Period was officially over, and the Victorian Era had now begun.