I trust in God that my life may be spared for nine months longer, after which period, in the event of my death, no regency would take place.
William IV at his birthday dinner, August 1836, with the Duchess of Kent at the table
William IV
parents: George III and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz
date and place of birth: 21 August 1765 at Buckingham House, London
wife: Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen
date of marriage: 11 July 1818 at Kew Palace
children: two daughters with Adelaide, Charlotte and Elizabeth, who both died in infancy; ten illegitimate children with Dorothea Jordan, surnamed FitzClarence
years of reign: 1830-1837
date of coronation: 8 September 1831 at Westminster Abbey
date and place of death: 20 June 1837 at Windsor Castle
place of burial: St George's Chapel, Windsor
William Henry was the third son of George III, and for most of his life nobody expected him to be king. At thirteen his father sent him to sea as a midshipman, and he served in the Royal Navy through the American War of Independence. He was at the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1780, and he was the first member of the royal family to visit America, turning up in New York during the British occupation in 1781. A plan to kidnap him there, approved by George Washington, came to nothing. In the West Indies he became a friend of the young captain Horatio Nelson, and in 1787 he gave away the bride at Nelson's wedding on the island of Nevis.
He rose to command his own ships, but he was a poor captain: a strict disciplinarian who ignored orders when it suited him. The Admiralty found it convenient to bring him ashore. In 1789 his father made him Duke of Clarence, and he never held another active command, though he was promoted through the ranks to Admiral of the Fleet. He kept the sailor's manner all his life: loud, blunt, cheerful, profane and prone to spit.
Mrs Jordan
In 1791 the duke set up home with Dorothea Jordan, one of the most celebrated comic actresses of the London stage. They lived together at Bushy House, near Hampton Court, for twenty years and had ten children, five sons and five daughters, all given the surname FitzClarence. Mrs Jordan kept acting throughout, and her earnings helped support the household. In 1811, short of money and looking for a rich wife, William left her. She was given an allowance on condition she gave up the stage, went back to it to help pay a son-in-law's debts, lost the allowance, and died poor near Paris in 1816.
The Race for an Heir
The death of Princess Charlotte, George IV's only child, in November 1817 left George III with no legitimate grandchild in the next generation. His unmarried sons hurried to find wives. William, by then fifty-two, married Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, twenty-seven years his junior, at Kew on 11 July 1818, in a double ceremony with his brother the Duke of Kent. Adelaide was kind and devout, took his FitzClarence children into her home, and made him a devoted wife. Their two daughters both died as babies, and she suffered several miscarriages and stillbirths. The Duke of Kent's daughter, Victoria, born in 1819, became the heir after William.
When William's elder brother Frederick, Duke of York, died in 1827, William became heir to the throne. That year the government revived the office of Lord High Admiral for him. He took it too seriously, sailed off with the fleet without telling anyone, and in 1828 the Duke of Wellington made him resign.
The Sailor King
George IV died on 26 June 1830, and William became king at sixty-four, the oldest person to take the throne until Charles III in 2022. He made a refreshing change from his reclusive brother. He walked the streets of London alone, gave lifts to people in his carriage, and threw open the gardens of the royal palaces. He found the coronation ceremony absurd and wanted to skip it; when persuaded, he insisted on a cut-price version, which cost a fraction of his brother's and which the wits called the "Half-Crownation." He disliked the new Buckingham Palace, and when the old Houses of Parliament burned down in October 1834 he offered it to Parliament as a replacement. Parliament declined.
The Reform Act
William's reign is remembered for one great political crisis. The House of Commons had not been reformed for centuries. Ancient boroughs with a handful of voters, such as Old Sarum, a deserted hill in Wiltshire, sent two members to Parliament, while Manchester and Birmingham sent none. In November 1830 the Whigs under Earl Grey came to power pledged to reform. The Commons passed a reform bill in 1831, and the House of Lords threw it out. Riots followed: in Bristol crowds burned the Mansion House, the bishop's palace and the gaol, and in Nottingham they set fire to the castle.
Grey asked the king to create enough new Whig peers to force the bill through the Lords. William, who had supported moderate reform, refused to create as many as Grey wanted, and in May 1832 Grey resigned. Wellington tried to form a government and failed, and the country came close to revolution. Radicals urged people to withdraw their savings with the slogan "To stop the Duke, go for gold." William recalled Grey and gave him a written promise to create as many peers as necessary. The threat was enough. The opposition peers stayed away, and the Great Reform Act passed the Lords on 4 June 1832. It abolished the rotten boroughs, gave seats to the new industrial towns, and widened the vote to about one in five adult men in England and Wales.
Reforms and Last Clashes
The reformed Parliament got to work quickly. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 ended slavery in most of the British Empire, and William, who had spoken against abolition in the Lords as a young man, gave it his assent. The Factory Act of 1833 limited child labour in textile mills, and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 set up the workhouse system. In 1834 six farm labourers from Tolpuddle in Dorset were sentenced to transportation to Australia for swearing a secret oath when forming a trade union; the Tolpuddle Martyrs were pardoned after public protest.
William had grown alarmed at the pace of change. In November 1834 he dismissed the Whig prime minister, Lord Melbourne, and appointed the Tory Sir Robert Peel. Peel called an election, published his Tamworth Manifesto, and gained seats but not a majority, and in April 1835 the king had to take Melbourne back. No British monarch has since dismissed a prime minister who had the confidence of the Commons.
The Duchess of Kent
William's last years were soured by his feud with his sister-in-law, the Duchess of Kent, Victoria's mother. She kept Victoria away from his court, where the FitzClarences were a fixture, and took her on "royal progresses" around the country, as if she were already queen. At his birthday dinner in August 1836, with the duchess sitting beside him and a hundred guests listening, William made a speech saying he hoped to live another nine months, until Victoria turned eighteen, so that the duchess, whom he called "a person now near me, who is surrounded by evil advisers," would never become regent. Victoria burst into tears.
He got his wish. Victoria turned eighteen on 24 May 1837. William died at Windsor in the early hours of 20 June, with Adelaide at his side. Victoria succeeded him in Britain, but under Hanover's law a woman could not inherit, so the kingdom of Hanover passed to his brother Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, ending the union of the two crowns that had begun with George I in 1714. The city of Adelaide in South Australia, founded in 1836, is named after his queen.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "William IV, the Sailor King" https://englishhistory.net/house-of-hanover/william-iv/, September 30, 2026