King William IV - The 'Gap' Monarch

By MJ Neary

They nicknamed him "Silly Billy". A more flattering nickname was "The Sailor King". Sandwiched between such iconic monarchs as George IV, whose extravagant lifestyle defined the esthetics of the Regency Era, and his Queen Victoria, King William IV, former Duke of Clarence (1765-1837) easily gets lost. There is no label attached to his reign. One could call it either "post-Regency" or "pre-Victorian". That period is not covered in literature extensively. And yet, the time between 1830 and 1837 was a time of transition and transformation. The reforms put in place by William IV paved the road for Queen Victoria. He was the last king of the Hanoverian Dynasty and the oldest king to ascend the throne. It was a case of somewhat surprising late-in-life rise power.

Early years in the navy
William IV spent his early years in the Royal Navy, stationed in North America and the Caribbean. Apart from having a personal tutor present on board, William did not enjoy any privileges that would set him apart from the rest of the sailors. He did his share of heavy physical work. During the American War of Independence, he was stationed in New York. Allegedly, George Washington had attempted to kidnap him, knowing that the young man had a habit of walking out unescorted. Fortunately for William, the plot did not come to fruition. Decades later, William endeavored to repair the Anglo-American relations. His subsequent commanding officer, Horatio Nelson, praised him, "In his professional line, he is superior to two-thirds, I am sure, of the Naval list; and in attention to orders, and respect to his superior officer, I hardly know his equal." In 1789 William’s father, George III, made him Duke of Clarence and St. Andrews. Following an arm injury a year later, William was removed from active naval service. The Admiralty did not honor his requests for reinstatement. It must have been agonizing for William to stand on the sidelines during the Napoleonic Wars.

Domestic life
Being the third son, William assuming that his chances of becoming a king were very slim, so he did not feel the pressure to get married and produce legitimate children. So he cohabited with an Irish-born actress whose stage name was Mrs. Dorothea Jordan (1761-1816) known for her long and gorgeous legs. She was a few years older than William and had a track record of love affairs with some pretty high-profile individuals that had resulted in three out-of-wedlock births, so she did not exactly fit the image of a seduced and discarded ingenue. Their affair lasted for twenty years and produced ten children, all of whom took the surname of FitzClarence - a homage to Dorothea's Irish roots combined with William's title as the Duke of Clarence. His favorite daughter Sophia went on to marry Philip Sidney, a relative of the famous poet Percy Shelly. The rest of his daughters went on to marry lords and politicians. William and Dorothea enjoyed a surprisingly normal domestic life, but they ended up separating over financial disputes. Dorothea was given custody of her female children and a stipend on the condition that she would not return on stage. When she violated the stipulation and resumed acting in order to pay off some debt, William seized custody of the girls and withdrew his allowance. Dorothea ended up moving to France and dying in poverty - a distressing end for what had started as an illicit fairy-tale.

After parting with his long-time mistress, William embarked on a wife-hunt. After several years of looking for a suitable candidate, he married a 25-year old Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, who welcomed his illegitimate children but could not produce an heir - her own children all died in infancy. One positive thing that came out of William's marriage to Adelaide was that he became frugal and disciplined, which worked in his favor when he became monarch.

Taking the throne
Coronation was something that sneaked up on William. His older brother George IV died without leaving a legitimate heir, so William was next in line. His very coronation ceremony was marked by almost Spartan austerity. Unlike his pompous and flashy older brother, William was informal, modest and unassuming. People saw him as a definite improvement on his pretentious predecessor.

William’s relationship with his sons was strained by frequent quarrels over money and power. The boys seemed to be never satisfied with what their father bestowed on them. At the same time, his daughters proved to be real assets to the court.

Parliamentary reforms
The new monarch was keenly aware of the need to diversify the Parliament. He created 22 additional peer titles, thus reducing individual influence of each peer, and making the House of Lords easier to control. One of the first men to benefit from the policy was his own illegitimate son George FitzClarence, the 1st Earl of Munster.

Still, it was only the beginning. More changes would be made to the Parliamentary system. In 1832, the First Reform Act was passed, extending votes and redistributing Parliamentary seats on a more equitable basis.

Political xenophobia
Despite being worldly and well-traveled, William was wary of outsiders, particularly the French. His philosophy was isolationism. He was not comfortable in his role as a politician, especially when it came to foreign policy. He was a naval officer through and through.

Human rights legacy
William’s view of slavery changed over the years. As a young man, he actually opposed the abolitionist movement, claiming that the living standard among freemen in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland was worse than that among slaves in the West Indies. His colleagues in the Parliament were shocked by his conservative, almost cynical views, “The proponents of the abolition are either fanatics or hypocrites.” His views changed eventually. The Abolition Act was passed, banning slavery in the British colonies.

As England was entering the Industrial Revolution phase, William IV made considerable efforts to raise the standard of living for the working class. In 1833, the Factory Act was passed prohibiting children aged less than nine from work in factories, and reducing the working hours of women and older children. The Poor Law Act created a system of workhouses for the poor. A few years later Charles Dickens published Oliver Twist, drawing public attention to the poor. Dickens is considered an iconic Victorian author, yet his early experiences  took place under the reign of William IV, from whose reforms he benefit. In addition to his endeavors to alleviate the plight of the less fortunate subjects of the crown, William also worked hard to repair the Anglo-American relations. His experience in New York during the American War of Independence gave him a poignant insight into the relations between England and a former colony.

William in 1837 - by his favourite daughter Sofia

Conclusion
A drastic contrast to his predecessors, William IV knew when to exercise caution and when to show tenacity and firmness of character. Born into the same unfathomable privilege as the rest of the Hanover men, he had weathered many self-destructive temptations that devoured his father and older siblings.  Hopefully, the last Hanover monarch will receive due attention from historical novelists.


Illustrations are all in the Public domain


Marina Julia Neary spent her early years in Eastern Europe and came to the US at the age of thirteen. Her literary career revolves around depicting military and social disasters, from the Charge of the Light Brigade, to the Irish Famine, to the Easter Rising in Dublin, to the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl some thirty miles away from her home town.

Her debut thriller Wynfield's Kingdom was featured on the cover of the First Edition Magazine in the UK and earned the praise of the Neo-Victorian Studies Journal. After writing a series of novels dealing with the Anglo-Irish conflict, her recent releases include Trench Coat Pal (Crossroad Press) and The Gate of Dawn (Penmore Press)

All this week, until Sunday at midnight, Marina is giving away an e-book copy of her novel The Gate of Dawn. For a chance to win, leave a comment HERE

Vagrants and Vagabonds in Tudor England

by Deborah Swift

Jacques Bellange (c. 1575–1616)
The Beggar Looking Through his Hat 

Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark!
The beggars are coming to town:
Some in rags, some in jags*
And one in a velvet gown 

Some gave them white bread,
And some gave them brown,
And some gave them a horse-whip,
And sent them out of town.

Tudor London attracted vagrants and beggars from all over England, who were in search of the rich pickings of the city. The Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536 led to an increase in the number of vagrants, as the monasteries had been the chief source of charity, and had also provided employment for vast numbers of people who worked for them as agricultural labourers. The nursery rhyme above is attributed to this time. Because travel by horsepower was so slow, it was unusual for people to reside outside their birth town, and so all migrant travellers were treated with a degree of suspicion, especially if they were poor. This is why travelling actors had to procure a licence.

Sites of the Monasteries

There was of course, no police force, so crime was an enormous problem, tackled by extreme punishments designed to act as a deterrent. More than 70,000 people were executed during the reign of Henry VIII, many for what we would consider minor offences. Stealing was a hanging offence, and begging outside your home area was punishable by being tied to a cart and flogged, or locked in the stocks to be pelted by passers-by.

Village Stocks in Beetham Lancashire

There were so many beggars that a law was passed in 1547 which stated that anyone who was homeless could be made to be a slave for a period of two years. Should they run away from their master, they would then be branded with a 'V' and committed to slavery for life. This law was, unsurprisingly, extremely unpopular, and was revoked three years later in 1550. The 1563 Act reaffirmed the policy of whipping able-bodied beggars, but to prevent offenders from persistent begging a further Act stated that vagabonds should be burned through the right ear and, if they were arrested again, they could be imprisoned and executed. These policies of ear-boring and hanging remained the law until 1593.

With draconian punishment the order of the day, many turned to crime. A book published in 1552, 'A Manifest Detection of Diceplay' gives the first written evidence of the criminal underworld operating in Tudor London, and says that 'sleight and crafty deceit ... is common in every corner.' There were five prisons in London, to house the burgeoning number of petty criminals: The Clink, The Compter, The Marhalsea, The King's Bench and the White Lyon. The underworld looked to its own, however, and specific areas, such as Alsatia, and Southwark, became known as places where those on the run from the law could find refuge. And of course they were also the places where any rich man needed to guard his purse.

Beggar being whipped through town

The Poor Relief Act of 1576 was supposed to be the solution, but in fact it divided the poor into two categories:

The Deserving Poor This category was for those people who wanted to work but were unable to find suitable employment. The first category included the old, the sick, and widows, who were provided accommodation in almshouses and orphanages with a productive but sedentary activity such as spinning or weaving, by which they earned their Poor Relief, which was provided by each parish through taxation.
The Undeserving Poor Also called 'sturdy beggars', this category was for those who were physically able to work but chose not to. They gained no sympathy and were to be whipped through the town until they learnt the error of their ways. Many poor workers were harried from town to town as they sought work, and many feigned sickness in order to fall into the category where they would qualify for Poor Relief. The alternative for these people was the 'house of correction', where the able-bodied but persistently unemployed or in debt could be punished.

The first house of correction was Bridewell in London, and many other such institutions were called 'bridewells' after it. Bridewell was opened in 1533 in a former royal palace on the banks of the Fleet River and also housed homeless children. Because of this, it also became the first major charitable institution. The picture below shows it in Tudor times - after the Great Fire of London in 1666, it had to be rebuilt.

Bridewell 

However, the main purpose of a house of correction was to punish offenders, so they would correct their behaviour, and not just to be a depriver of liberty. Punishment was usually either hard labour, or whipping which could be observed as entertainment from the public gallery. The most common charges against prisoners were prostitution, petty theft, and something called 'loose, idle and disorderly conduct'. More than two-thirds of the prisoners were female, and many were recent migrants to London. These women, often widows trying to support their families, were also put to hard labour, and a common task for female offenders was beating hemp to make linen. 

The 1597 Act required each town to provide a prison, such as Bridewell, for vagrants and thieves, and paid for by local taxes. In the Tudor mind, there was barely a distinction between a beggar and a thief. Beggars caught offending were punished and then returned to their native parish.This system caused a great burden on parishes where harvests had failed, and whole populations were condemned to one area, unable to seek sustenance elsewhere. Surprisingly, most prisoners in houses of correction were released within a week of their imprisonment, so they could return home and to make room for others who needed this short, sharp shock of a punishment. 

Matters were made worse by a series of bad harvests in the 1590s, and the fact that during the reign of Elizabeth I, the population grew by a third - from three to four million people. By now, London was the biggest city in Europe with a population of somewhere between 130,000 and 150,000. To deal with this, The 1601 Poor Law consolidated all these various acts and laws to form one cohesive whole. It remained largely in place until the 18th-century workhouse movement began at the end of the 17th century. 

Giacomo Ceruti 1720  Little Beggar Girl and Woman Spinning

* Jags - Slashes or slits exposing material of a different colour, and popular during the Tudor period.

Sources:

The Elizabethan Underworld by Gamini Salgado

Everything You Wanted to Know about The Tudors, But Were Afraid to Ask by Terry Breverton
Life in Tudor England by Penry Williams 

BBC The Tudors
Pictures from Wikpedia, or my own unless otherwise linked.

Deborah Swift is an ex-costume designer for the BBC, and the author of four historical novels, and three more for young adults. She lives in the north of England in a 17th century village, with her husband and lucky black cat. Find out more on her website www.deborahswift.com , where she has a historical fiction blog or follow her on Twitter @swiftstory

You might also like Lowlifes of Elizabethan London, also on this blog.