• DOI:10.1086/383599
• Corpus ID: 145614284

Princely Debt, Public Credit, and Commercial Values in Late Georgian Britain

@article{Morris2004PrincelyDP,
  title={Princely Debt, Public Credit, and Commercial Values in Late Georgian Britain},
  author={M. Michelle Jarrett Morris},
  journal={Journal of British Studies},
  year={2004},
  volume={43},
  pages={339 - 365}
}

• M. Morris
• Published 1 July 2004
• History, Economics
• Journal of British Studies

In its infamous obituary, The Times summed up the legacy of the reign that ended on 26 June 1830: ‘‘Nothingmore remains to be said or done about GEORGE IV., but to pay—as pay we must—for his profusion; and to turn his bad example to some account, by tying up the hands of those who come after him, in what concerns the public money.’’ Considering that the cost of the British monarchy continues to provoke anger and disgust, as vividly displayed in the outcry over the prospect of the public bearing restoration expenses after the Windsor Castle fire in 1992, this was easier said than done. George IV’s obituary, furthermore, treated his fantastic extravagance as aberrant. It pronounced the late king ‘‘an inveterate voluptuary’’ whose dominant passion was selfishness, ‘‘the true repellant of human sympathy . . . the charnel-house of the affections.’’ The Times represented the odium that this behavior provoked as universal; the paper declared ‘‘that there never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures’’ and defied its readers to find a single tear shed for him, to name one true friend. An investigation into the attempts made to staunch the flow of George’s prodigality suggests his behavior to have been less an aberration than an extreme case of late eighteenth-century society’s conflicting expectations respecting honor, credit, spending, and debt, as well as the monarchy itself. The long evolution from an agrarian to commercial economy had affected all segments of society, including the royal household. The