William IV Henry HANOVRE, KING OF ENGLAND HRH

                   Note: William had been, between the ages of 12 and 24, a professional sailor, not of great brilliance though he commanded three ships and emerged as a young rear-admiral. Lord Nelson, at whose wedding William presided, had to wait until he was 39 before attaining this rank. But after 1789 William never went to sea, except in his rank as sole Admiral of the Fleet, commanding it for a royal inspection. In 1790 he met Mrs. Jordan, the stage name of a popular Irish actress born Dorothy Bland, who had previously had a varied and not always secure love-life. They settled down quietly together in Bushy Park, Hampton Court, where William had the Ranger's Lodge, and Mrs. Jordan bore him ten children, all brought up in serene domesticity until they displayed the aggression of adolescence - a prsage of much deeper insolance in later life. William had an inadequate allowance from the State, and when his debts were heavy, Mrs. Jordan used to put on her grease paint again for a stage tour which, because of her talent, could bring in some thousands of pounds. Because William accepted this arrangement, it is difficult not to censure him for his final exclusion of Mrs. Jordan. But it seems to have been done because of the death of love rather than a questing lust, and William never abandoned the children. After 20 years William pensioned off Mrs. Jordan, and began to seek a rich bride in order to support their children. The search took seven years, during which Dorothy died in misery. By this time William was third in succession to the throne. The eventual bride, however, Princess Adelaide of Sachsen-Meiningen, brought no dowry save a warm heart and the assurance that she would cherish William's bastards. She loved him well, welcomed the FitzClarences, even when they were insulting, and bore her own children to William - though fewer than he conceived - she miscarried several times, and her longest surviving child lived only four months. She endured all this with sweetness. She told the Duchess of Kent, mother of the Victoria who was eventually to succeed her husband: My children are dead, but your child lives, and she is mine too. In 1827 the death of the Duke of York made William heir to the throne, and in 1830 he took it with his natural ability and lack of hypocrisy, chatting about the total game the mourners had bagged before making his obituary speech at George IV's funeral, and nodding to friends as he moved up the aisle for his coronation. He was 65 years old, and nobody asked much of him except to be different from his hated brother who had died. But, with his good sense of duty, he did one thing which created a historic and binding precedent on the future of constitutional monarchy in Great Britain. He was old-fashioned, perhaps reactionary. But when the Whig government was returned to power pledged to introduce the Great Reform Bill, he respected their mandate, jibbed at their intansigence, but ultimately consented to Lord Grey's request that he should, if necessary, create enough new Whig peers to force the measure through the Tory House of Lords if the Commons showed that they overwhelmingly desired the reform. Because he openly accepted this necessity, then persuaded the Tories not to force its use, he advanced democratic government by more than a stumble, and pointed out the course of duty to a no less diehard Sailor King, George V in 1911.
Note: George IV debased the image of British monarchy to a level never reached before, using his position merely as the instrument of living in self-indulgence. If he had had that power of political murder which he envied in Henry VIII he might well have used it, but his only positive political action was reaction, particularly the blocking of political concessions to Roman Catholics. His life provided the strongest pragmatical argument against the principle of hereditary sovereignty, and British culture could only be contaminated by his label of First Gentleman in Europe.