The Late Regency
The Late Regency
The association of the Regency Era with national stagnation - and, depending on who you ask, decline - in British historiography is, of course, quite understandable. The period roughly coincides with the last twenty-five years of King George III's reign, including the regency of his son George starting in 1811 after the King was declared mentally unfit to rule, and then the ten-year reign of George IV from 1820-30, concluding with his daughter Queen Charlotte's ascension to the throne and the start of the Charlottean Era. The circumstances of this time in British goes beyond mere regnal periodism, however. George III had always been mentally feeble but by the end of the Napoleonic Wars was outright delusional and insane, but his son was perhaps even more unpopular - fond of a lavish and fashionable lifestyle, constantly embroiled in public scandal, and held in contempt as much by the British street as he was by his own government's ministers.
It came to be, then, that the monarchy's prestige ebbed to perhaps its historical nadir just in time to coincide with the humiliating end of nearly a quarter-century of wars with France and the concurrent economic depression that defined British life for most of the 1810s. [1] Many British intellectuals, particularly diplomats and others who had spent a great deal of time overseas, openly mused whether or not a revolution such as that which overthrew the French Bourbons could occur in London next, and the constant riots, protests, and grassroots movements in 1815-17 seemed for a moment likelier than not to do so. The prices of British goods had already been depressed by a lack of markets to sell them to during much of the war era (and attempts to impose mercantilist policies on the United States had resulted in the Americans responding with protectionist measures of their own and two war scares that had threatened British North America) and a commercial reorganization and boom on the Continent further lowered prices, giving the British minimal opportunity to restock their spent coffers despite new trade avenues opening up, while the Spanish overseas colonies were close to British goods almost entirely despite the Peace of Aix. The result was a time of tremendous hardship, in which hundreds of thousands of Britons in the last years of George III's reign and much of George IV's decamped for opportunities in the culturally similar United States or North American colonies.
Britain did have one boon in that time, however, and that was the integration of the East Indies as a new colony. The East India Company was unexcited about direct rule over Batavia by London when it had enjoyed such a free hand in the western and southern subcontinent and a political feud erupted between Company officials in Calcutta, overwhelmed British colonial administrators in the Malayas, and the Colonial Office in London which crucially enjoyed the robust support of the Prime Minister Bathurst. In later years, Britain's focus on bringing the BEI under its control was recognized as a missed opportunity to crush the Maratha Confederacy and bring the whole of India under its suzerainty; [2] by the time the East India Company attempted to put down the Marathas in the late 1820s, the Marathas enjoyed French and Italian support and were able to keep Britain out of western India entirely. By 1818-20, however, trade with the East Indies and locales beyond began to flourish and return London to its energy of cosmopolitanism that had seemed to be lost in previous years. More ships passed to Canton every year, Royal Navy vessels camped out in Macau's harbor to defend Rio de Janeiro's claim on all "territories of the House of Braganca" and British control of the Straits of Malacca gave them a key strategic and commercial advantage.
This modest revival in British colonial and mercantile fortunes coincided with a slow return to normalcy in Continental and trans-Atlantic trade. The new American President inaugurated in March of 1817, William Crawford, was somewhat less hostile to British interests than his predecessors Jefferson and Madison and focused rather on Washington's interests in Spanish Florida; the Foreign Office under the Tory grandee Castlereagh, first solely as Foreign Secretary and, after he conspired to nudge out Bathurst in 1818, also as Prime Minister, continued London's longstanding Austrophilic line and reinvigorated British trade with the Habsburg realms as well as the Ottomans, hoping to reestablish her influence in southern and eastern Europe. Castlereagh of course was perhaps one of the most reactionary and repressive Prime Ministers of 19th century Britain; by the time he committed suicide in 1822, he was perhaps one of the most unpopular figures in the history of the United Kingdom, barring only Cromwell.
Of course, it was not trade or political machinations that reinvigorated fickle public support for the monarchy so much as the intrigue in 1816 around the marriage of Princess Charlotte of Wales, the Prince Regent's 20-year old daughter. Charlotte was a curious figure even by the standards of Regency Era ladyhood; her education was poorer than that of most aristocratic women her age and she had lived in various spurts of public isolation at different country manors, hidden away by her strict and controlling father and largely ignored by her mother. This worked to her advantage in the public eye, however; Charlotte even as a young woman was rumored to have strong Whiggish sympathies, and her and her mother's treatment at the hands of her tremendously despised father engendered a great deal of sympathy with the average Briton. As the war wound down and Aix was negotiated by Castlereagh, the question of who would take Charlotte's hand became live. The Prince Regent's choice was William of Orange, the deposed Dutch prince who had spent much of the wars fighting in various British units and who had been wounded at Walcheren. William, however, was regarded as a "bore" and the public was unenthusiastic about the marriage of a strict, gruff Dutchman to popular princess; instead, Charlotte's preference of her father's cousin William Frederick, the Duke of Gloucester, won out.
Gloucester was an even stranger choice from a modern perspective. He was forty years old and had remained single his entire adulthood on the off-chance that he may have to "do his duty" and marry his cousin's daughter. The choice of an Englishman as Charlotte's husband was more popular with the British public, however, and so they were married in late 1816 in a grand affair at Westminster Abbey; the Royal Wedding of Princess Charlotte and Prince William Frederick was widely publicized and celebrated in British newspapers and was seen as an event that revitalized British interest in the monarchy and enhanced its prestige. Charlotte and William Frederick were not particularly in love and regarded their marriage as one of convenience; after Charlotte gave birth to three sons - George (1818), William (1820) and Edward (1823) - they had no more children and largely lived separately until William Frederick died in 1834, aged only 58. Nonetheless, three royal heirs was enough to get the British public excited about their monarchs again, and what a future - hopefully sooner than later - that had Charlotte and her children in it rather than the Prince Regent, might look like...
[1] That gap of fighting from 1809-14 on the continent means there was quite a bit of commercial and agrarian recovery on the Continent, so British goods are not there to fill the gap in the same way, and they still have the trade restrictions thanks to the Rome Decrees
[2] Anglo-Maratha War of 1818-19 butterflied here
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