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Born in 1765, third son of King George III and Queen Charlotte, Prince William, Duke of Clarence, initially had little expectation of succeeding to the British throne. A brief career in the navy, followed by several years of semi-obscurity and a liaison with the actress Dorothea Jordan that gave them a family of ten children, came to an end with the ‘royal race for the crown’, requiring him and several of his other similarly unmarried brothers to find wives and ensure the royal succession after the unexpected death of their only legitimate niece Charlotte, daughter of the Prince Regent. William’s wife, Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, failed to produce any children who survived inf...
Sketches the life of the British king and examines his attitudes towards political reform in the early-nineteenth century.
The closest student of history would find it hard indeed to turn to the account of any other royal reign which opened under conditions so peculiar and so unpropitious as those which accompanied the succession of George the Fourth to the English throne. Even in the pages of Gibbon one might look in vain for the story of a reign thus singularly darkened in its earliest chapters. George the Fourth had hardly gone through the State ceremonials which asserted his royal position when he was seized by a sudden illness so severe that, for a while, the nerves of the country were strained by the alarm which seemed to tell that a grave would have to be dug for the new King before the body of the late s...