George IV - Regent and King by Christptoher Hibbert

George IV

Regent and King

by Christopher Hibbert

ISBN 0713904879

The first highly praised volume of this important biography ended with the Prince of Wales being sworn in as Regent in 1811. This second volume covers the brilliant years of the Regency, inaugurated with a characteristically magnificent fete in the gardens of Carlton House, and the eventful years of the Prince's reign as George IV - a reign which opened with the noisy excitement of Queen Caroline's trial in the House of Lords and closed with the King's extraordinary last days, in the secrecy of his overheated, scented rooms at Windsor Castle.

As in the first volume, the Royal Archives at Windsor, which have not been available to previous biographers, have provided Christopher Hibbert with most of his original material. But although the Royal Archives contain by far the most vital and abundant sources, the author has extended his researches far beyond Windsor. He has travelled all over England to consult unpublished material in numerous public and private collections, and has thus been enabled to present the most original, detailed and authoritative life of George IV yet published. In it will be found many new and fascinating facts not only about the King himself, about his uneasy relations with his Ministers -notably Wellington and Canning - about his behaviour and record as a monarch and his importance as a builder, patron and art-collector ; but also about his tiresome brothers and beloved sisters, his eccentric, unbalanced wife, his difficult daughter and disliked son-in-law, and that strange entourage, including the rapacious Lady Conyngham and the mysterious Sir William Knighton, with whom his last secluded years were spent. Never before has the King appeared in so revealing a light, with his virtues acknowledged but with his faults undisguised. Commending the 'vivid, sympathetic' portrait of the Prince which Christopher Hibbert drew in the earlier volume, Peter Quennell wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, 'We can look forward to the second volume of this scholarly, well-written and well-balanced work.' The hope then expressed is here impressively fulfilled.

Publisher Allen Lane, size 6.25" x 9.5", 430 pages

Condition  is Very good, minor edge wear to the DJ. An owners name to the flyleaf.

Hanselled ref 013857