When George IV arrived in Dublin in August, 1821, he was the first British monarch to visit this country since Richard II more than four centuries earlier. It was, therefore, somewhat regrettable that the king should have stepped - or rather stumbled - onto Irish soil hopelessly drunk, and that he remained in much the same condition for the entire duration of his time here. As a result of his infatuation with Lady Conyngham - whose ample charms were the delight of contemporary caricaturists - much of his fortnight's stay in Ireland was passed at Slane Castle, to the disappointment both of the citizenry of Dublin and of various peers who had spent large sums of money creating state bedrooms in anticipation of a regal call.
The king's fickle behaviour during the Irish visit, his inability to conform to plans carefully arranged to suit his wishes and his complete disregard for the interests, or concerns of anyone else, should have come as no surprise. He was, without question, a monstrously capricious and self-indulgent creature, devoid of any understanding of loyalty and capable only of pandering to his ever-changing whims. His life and career, as depicted with waspish amusement by Steven Parissien, were a "grand entertainment" in retrospect, but must have been completely intolerable at the time.
Parissien adopts a benevolent tone when writing of George IV's follies, and appears anxious, in the rather tedious manner of an amateur psychologist, to place as much blame as possible for his subject's behaviour on the king's upbringing. It is true that George's uxorious parents, George III and Queen Charlotte, were a parsimonious and puritanical couple who found sufficient contentment in each other not to require endless material gratification. However, this scarcely explains their eldest son's ridiculous behaviour and his infantile need for novelty.
Two instances cited by Parissien perfectly illustrate this grotesque characteristic. The first is George's behaviour towards Maria Fitzherbert, the twice-widowed Roman Catholic he secretly married while Prince of Wales (in direct contravention of legislation introduced by his father 13 years earlier). He remained infatuated with Fitzherbert - a charming but, at least in regard to her inamorato, obviously naive woman - for several years after the wedding ceremony, despite consistently denying that such an event had ever taken place. His "wife" had to endure being usurped by a succession of other women, beginning with the venal Lady Jersey, who was, in turn, abandoned for an equally greedy Lady Hertford. However, periodically, George would allow himself the indulgence of recalling Maria Fitzherbert until, having suffered one humiliation too many, she walked out of a dinner at Carlton House in 1811 and had no more to do with the man who had once signed himself "not only your most affectionate of Lovers, but the tenderest of Husbands." It is indicative of the king's general attitude towards women that when informed, in May 1821, of the death of his "greatest enemy" - Napoleon Bonaparte - he presumed the reference was to his estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick, and responded gleefully: "Is she, by God!"
The fate of Carlton House is just as meticulously detailed by Parissien and serves to demonstrate the falsity of claims that George IV possessed a sense of discernment in matters of art. As first reconstructed for him by Henry Holland, the building appears to have been an elegant masterpiece of neo-classicism which made the fashionable work of Robert Adam look overblown and even vulgar. The elderly Horace Walpole - whose own Strawberry Hill in Twickenham remains an example of silly and self-indulgent architecture - rapturously described Carlton House as a "chaste palace august simplicity . . . taste and propriety" and among such royal properties "the most perfect in Europe". Its owner, however, could not resist constant tinkering with his perfect home, engaging a succession of second-rate architects to redesign elements of Carlton House, on which literally millions of pounds of state money were squandered before the entire edifice was demolished, at the request of George IV, in 1826.
THE treatment meted out to Mrs Fitzherbert and to Carlton House was by no means exceptional. Parissien's biography, while describing George's exploits in a wry fashion, leaves the reader feeling incapable of a kindly thought towards a king who, having spent the years of the Napoleonic Wars spending government funds which might have been better directed in the struggle against the French, even attempted to claim credit for Bonaparte's eventual defeat. Self-deluding, self-aggrandising, selfobsessed, as delineated by Steven Parissien, George IV looks like one of the least attractive or impressive monarchs ever to have rested his grotesquely obese form on the British throne.
Robert O'Byrne is an author and an Irish Times journalist