William IV

1 An Impetuous Childhood

King William IV is probably more remembered today for fading into the background at a critical time rather than for any positive achievement. In 1830 he succeeded his by then unpopular elder brother, George IV. It was a perilous time, for the country was in turmoil. The thorny question of Catholic emancipation had recently been settled, but emotions surrounding it were still raw. The long-brewing problem of the reform of Parliament came to a head in the first year of the new king’s reign. Petitions with tens of thousands of signatures flowed into Parliament. Serious rioting occurred in London, Derby, Nottingham and Bristol. The economic situation was dire, marked by strikes in the north of England; in the south agricultural workers protested violently over the introduction of threshing machines. On the other side of the Channel, the French experienced another revolution, though bloodless, and the Belgians revolted against Dutch rule. Radicals talked of the establishment of a republic in Britain.

William’s father, George III, and brother George IV had between them actively resisted change for seventy years. William did not like change either, but when he came to the throne he left the politicians to govern (with one or two exceptions in lesser matters) and the government inched its way towards the Reform Bill of 1832. Yet while William was popular in the country, and certainly more so than his extravagant elder brother, who had ended his days as a recluse in Windsor Castle, the governing classes had no time for him. William’s manners were rough after his early years afloat in active naval service, and this lack of polish, combined with a natural truculence and naïvety, made him inconsistent and difficult to deal with. When the king died in 1837, the Duke of Wellington commented privately: ‘His reign was certainly a most unfortunate one for Himself, His Country and the Family. He was the most ignorant Man ever placed in a great situation.’¹

Further criticism was and can be levelled at William: he was quick-tempered, not very bright and extraordinarily tactless, often quite impervious to the impression he was making on people around him. At times he drank far too much, and for most of his life was careless with money. Yet Wellington’s judgement, as so often, was too harsh, for there was a good-natured, amiable side to William’s character. When he upset someone by his boorish behaviour he was contrite and quick to make amends, and this remained an attractive trait. Once, when he was Duke of Clarence, which he was created at the age of twenty-three, he saw a Quaker girl looking in a shop window and said teasingly to her, ‘So, I see thou art not above the vanities of the world.’ But when he saw that he had upset her, he immediately went into the shop, bought an expensive work basket and persuaded the girl’s mother to accept it on her behalf.² This generous side of his nature, which his brothers lacked, made William a favourite with his sisters, and occasionally resulted in endearing self-deprecation. In 1816 Clarence was talking to William Marsden, the much-travelled and scholarly retired Secretary of the Admiralty. Clarence said: ‘I have wished to profit by your conversation, though, God knows, you will not by mine.’³

Some of this contradictory behaviour can be traced back to William’s childhood, dominated by the formality of life in a royal family, where he made his first appearance in the ‘Drawing Room’ aged four. But he also experienced the hurly-burly of competition with five brothers. Born in 1765, he was the third child of George III and his queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. He was known as Prince William Henry, and after 1789 as the Duke of Clarence. He was born three years after the first son, George Augustus Frederick, who became the self-indulgent and fast-living Prince of Wales, Prince Regent and then George IV; William was influenced by the Prince of Wales and looked up to his oldest brother. In 1763 the second son, Frederick, was born, who became the Duke of York. Twelve further children followed William, two of whom did not survive beyond early childhood. The two sons whose lives were to be most entwined with William’s own were younger: Edward, to be Duke of Kent, born in 1767, quieter and more withdrawn that his brothers, and Ernest, to be Duke of Cumberland, in 1771, who grew to be tall, ugly, perverse and an Ultra-Tory. William was closest of all to his sister Augusta, three years younger, quiet and reflective, who never married. She cared little for her appearance and enjoyed William’s unpolished manners and stories of naval life.

For the first years William lived in close proximity to his family, much of the time at Kew. At the age of seven their lives diverged, and the education of the boys was put into the hands of governors. In 1772 Prince William Henry and Prince Edward were installed in a house on Kew Green with an unimaginative Swiss soldier in Hanoverian service, General Budé, for instruction. It was here that disagreements between the two brothers started, with William impetuous, and Edward sulky, aloof and clever. Discipline was strict and included beatings, in accordance with the custom of the age. It was not a regime that encouraged intimacy and trust with either parent, who now saw their children infrequently. The heir to the throne was to be schooled in London and Windsor in constitutional history, languages and law and it was not long before the well-established tradition of friction between Hanoverian kings and their eldest sons and heirs was reaffirmed. The lifelong strained relations between the king and the Prince of Wales had their origins in these early years.

The younger sons were to go into the army or navy and all left home at an early age. George III wanted to ensure that they were kept from the baleful influence of the Prince of Wales. Frederick, Duke of York, was sent away to Hanover in 1780 at the age of seventeen and was destined for the army. He became a distinguished administrator as commander-in-chief of the army, although success on the battlefield eluded him. William was destined for the navy. He had grown up with a short and rebellious temper and the king reasoned that the navy would bring an unruly son to order. The discipline and order of shipboard life, administered without favour to a royal prince, would surely improve his temperament. But he was to cause the navy many problems for the next fifty years, particularly during the eleven early years when he saw active service.

The navy of William’s day was run by two boards. The Board of Admiralty, overseen by the First Lord who was a member of the Cabinet, consisted of five commissioners, usually all MPs. This board appointed officers, issued operational orders and handled relations with Parliament. It met in the Admiralty building in Whitehall, designed by Thomas Ripley and built in 1723, and was supported by a small number of clerks who constituted the Admiralty Office. However, the navy was also a very large industrial organization – the biggest in the country – and run by a separate authority, the Navy Board, which could trace its origins further back than the Admiralty to the mid fourteenth century. This board was responsible for the design and building of warships, and it administered the naval establishments, of which the largest were the royal dockyards. Its chief officer was the comptroller of the Navy, who headed a board consisting mainly of civilian technical staff, the most important of whom was the Surveyor of the Navy, responsible for warship design and building, though other civilian administrators and accountants had significant functions. When William first went to sea, the Navy Board and the clerks who made up the Navy Office were housed in Crutched Friars in the City, but in 1786 it moved to Somerset House in the Strand. Relations between William and the navy, and between the two boards, were to play a large part in his life.

Thus in June 1778, when William was to join his first ship, at the age of thirteen, the king wrote to Captain Sir Samuel Hood, at that time the Resident Commissioner at Portsmouth Dockyard and Governor of the Naval Academy there, that William was to be ‘received without the smallest marks of parade … The young man goes as a sailor, and as such, I add again, no marks of distinction are to be shown unto him; they would destroy my whole plan.’⁴ Yet it was wishful thinking to hope that a royal prince at this time could be seamlessly absorbed into a ship’s company, to learn to be a seaman officer without special treatment from the admirals and captains who were responsible for him. Those senior officers in turn depended on the king’s favour for appointments and promotion and the last thing they wanted was to offend him. The flaws in George III’s plan would soon become apparent.

Athelstan	Tom Holland
Aethelred the Unready	Richard Abels
Cnut	Ryan Lavelle
Edward the Confessor	James Campbell

William I	Marc Morris
William II	John Gillingham
Henry I	Edmund King
Stephen	Carl Watkins
Henry II	Richard Barber
Richard I	Thomas Asbridge
John	Nicholas Vincent

Henry III	Stephen Church
Edward I	Andy King
Edward II	Christopher Given-Wilson
Edward III	Jonathan Sumption
Richard II	Laura Ashe

Henry IV	Catherine Nall
Henry V	Anne Curry
Henry VI	James Ross
Edward IV	A. J. Pollard
Edward V	Thomas Penn
Richard III	Rosemary Horrox

Henry VII	Sean Cunningham
Henry VIII	John Guy
Edward VI	Stephen Alford
Mary I	John Edwards
Elizabeth I	Helen Castor

Roger Knight

WILLIAM IV

A King at Sea

ALLEN LANE

Contents

THE BEGINNING

Penguin Monarchs

1

An Impetuous Childhood

James I	Thomas Cogswell
Charles I	Mark Kishlansky
[Cromwell	David Horspool]
Charles II	Clare Jackson
James II	David Womersley
William III & Mary II	Jonathan Keates
Anne	Richard Hewlings

George I	Tim Blanning
George II	Norman Davies
George III	Amanda Foreman
George IV	Stella Tillyard
William IV	Roger Knight
Victoria	Jane Ridley

Edward VII	Richard Davenport-Hines
George V	David Cannadine
Edward VIII	Piers Brendon
George VI	Philip Ziegler
Elizabeth II	Douglas Hurd