2 - Prince George reclaims the heroic? Transition, ambition and domesticity

Summary

‘See the King's Champion riding bold,

With shining armour dec't with gold.

Proclaims great George our rightful King:

Whilst the large space with plaudits ring.’

Although Prince George had a tumultuous relationship with his father George iii, they shared a love of the medieval. While George iii used the Black Prince and Edward iii as part of his programme to reinvent the monarchy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Prince George simultaneously sought to reclaim this heroic time by offering his own images of the Black Prince to express his power as prince of Wales, and, later, as Regent. Scholars have pointed to George iv's coronation as the realisation of his medievalist inclinations. It was a grand medieval-themed affair involving an elaborate coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey followed by a lengthy procession where guests in full regalia with ‘feudal’ costumes and knights of chivalric orders arrived at Westminster Hall with its newly installed ‘Gothic’ features. During the later banquet there, the King's Champion, fully armed and on horseback, entered with his herald to throw down the gauntlet as a challenge to those who might oppose the king. After his coronation, the king was even rumoured to have had the artist Thomas Lawrence make a sketch of him ‘in the armour of the Black Prince’ though the writer John Timbs wryly wrote the artist ‘had the good sense not to carry the matter further than a sketch’.

Yet the coronation was only part of a long process whereby George IV reclaimed the heroic Middle Ages. This chapter will turn to George's earlier focus on the fourteenth century and the Black Prince's image to expose competing royal uses of the period from the 1780s. At the same time, it will explore how playwrights, politicians and writers responded to these reinventions, using Edward's image to offer their own commentaries on royal relationships and power.

In 1776 Alexander Bicknell employed Edward's image to model ideal princely behaviour to the future George IV in his History of Edward, prince of Wales. Bicknell, a loyal subject, used Edward's image both to legitimise the current rule of the Hanoverian monarchs by tying them to their predecessors and to instruct them on appropriate conduct for future success.