King George IV (born 12 August, 1762; ascended the thrones of the United Kingdom and of Hanover 29 January, 1820; died 26 June, 1830).

Born at Saint James Palace, best known in history for his dissipated life style as “Prinny,” when Prince of Wales, he did not live in Kensington Palace, but his abused wife, the unfortunate Caroline, Princess of Wales, did live in there from 1810 to 1814, when she removed to Connaught Place. Here she held her rival court, and kept up a kind of triangular duel with her husband, and her wayward child, the Princess Charlotte, those around her were obliged to feel that, injured as she undoubtedly was by one who had sworn to love and cherish her, she did but little to win the respect and regard of either the Court or the nation at large. The hangers-on of the Princess would seem to have been of the ordinary type of “summer friends.” At all events, one of her ladies in waiting wrote, “These noblemen and their wives continued to visit her royal highness the Princess of Wales till the old king was declared too ill to reign, and the Prince became in fact regent; then those ladies disappeared that moment from Kensington, and were never seen there more. It was the besom of expediency which swept them all away.” It appears the Princess of Wales was well aware of the nature of her hangers-on, she wrote, “Unless I do show them the knife and fork, no company has come to Kensington or Blackheath, and neither my purse nor my spirits can always afford (that).”

One of the ladies of the Princess Caroline wrote, “The Princess often does the most extraordinary things, apparently for no other purpose than to make her attendants stare. Very frequently she will take one of her ladies with her to walk in Kensington Gardens, who are dressed in a costume very unsuited to the public highway; and, all of a sudden, she will bolt out at one of the smaller gates, and walk all over Bayswater, and along the Paddington Canal, at the risk of being insulted, or, if known, mobbed, enjoying the terror of the unfortunate attendant who may be destined to walk after her.

Their only child, Princess Charlotte married Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who later was Leopold I of Belgium. Charlotte died after giving birth to a stillborn eighteen months later at the age of 21. Had she outlived her father and her grandfather, King George III, she would have become Queen of the United Kingdom. The next in line to the throne after George had been Frederick, Duke of York, but he died in 1827, and the throne passed to William.