Unwrapping the royal mummy

Spectator, The, Apr 24, 1999 by Hensher, Philip

Poor Mrs Fitzherbert was abandoned, and an ambassador despatched to find any remotely appropriate candidate in the minor courts of Germany.

What followed has been told many times either taking the side of George or his new queen, Caroline of Brunswick. She grew up in a relaxed little court, unused to stiff formalities, and it can hardly have been pleasant for her to realise that she was only there to get her new husband out of debt. On the other hand, George's first encounter with Caroline must have been a severe shock. Even by the standards of the time, Caroline was notoriously dirty Lord Malmesbury, the man sent to get her, had to tell her bluntly that, before meeting George, she ought to take care to be `well washed all over'. She didn't take the hint, and after their first embrace, George was seen to totter back at the stink of his new bride, calling for brandy.

Things got rapidly worse; Caroline was given to making coarse jokes about her husband's mistresses from the start, and after a year and the birth of their daughter Charlotte, they never lived together. Caroline's behaviour grew steadily more of an embarrassment, culminating in her turning up uninvited at George's coronation in 1821 and battering on the door of the Abbey for admission without success. The street satirists had a field day:

Most gracious Queen, we thee implore To go away and sin no more; But, if that effort be too great, To go away, at any rate. It is said that when Napoleon died a courtier went to George and said, `Sire, your greatest enemy is dead.' He turned, and said, Is she, by God

If all this startling bad behaviour provided George's Victorian-minded biographers with a great deal to tut-tut over, they should also have acknowledged some of his more lasting achievements. Not all of his projects were admirable, of course; he single-handedly created the craze for Highland dress, for instance, by wearing an outfit which cost 1,350 18s, and comprised 61 yards of satin, 31 of velvet and 17 of cashmere. It was topped by a Glengarry bonnet set with diamonds, pearls, rubies and emeralds in a wreath of golden thistles surrounding a seagreen emerald. The sporran of soft white goatskin was ornamented with the royal arms and a thistle in gems, and accessories - powder horns and a dirk - were similarly bedecked. It was perhaps a little vulgar.

But it was not all as bad as this, and most of his aesthetic activities were perfectly serious. Almost alone among British monarchs, he took a strong interest in serious painting, and encouraged some very interesting, if now unfashionable, history painters. He sponsored the remodelling of London by Nash, from Regent's Park down to St James's Park. His lasting monument, though, is the Royal Pavilion at Brighton; its lighthearted mix of Indian, Gothic and Chinese styles has attracted ridicule ever since its construction. Sydney Smith said it looked as if St Paul's had gone down to the seaside and pupped. Its exuberant invention always remains, however, just on this side of vulgarity, and it is impossible not to love it; one starts to look at it in a spirit of amusement, and is seized by a conviction of how right John Summerson was when he said - in a different context - that George's `intolerance of projects of less than regal scale fortified the initiative of others and lent propriety to extravagance'.