This engrossing biography of George IV, king of Great Britain between 1820 and 1830, provides a full and objective reassessment of the monarch's character, reputation and achievement. Previous writers have tended to accept the unfavourable verdicts of the king's contemporaries that he was a dissolute, pleasure-loving dilettante and a feeble and ineffective ruler who was responsible for the decline of the power and reputation of the monarchy in the early nineteenth century. Now E. A. Smith offers a new view of George IV, one that does not minimise the king's faults but focuses on the positive...