When George IV died in 1830, The Times opened his obituary with a line that has followed him ever since: there was never an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased king. By that point, the man who had spent more than half a million pounds on a single seaside palace had managed to marry two women, publicly despise one, and lock the other out of her own coronation. The Prince of Wales was born on August 12, 1762, the eldest son of George III and Queen Charlotte. Handsome, fluent in French and Italian, and gifted in music and drawing, he nevertheless earned a reputation early for extravagance.
By the age of 18, he was already thousands of pounds in debt to an actress he had pursued publicly. By 24, his debts stood near £250,000. His father refused to pay. Parliament was asked to intervene and demanded an accounting of the spending.
The prince refused to provide one. This pattern — indulgence, debt, denial, and the cost falling on others — defined his entire life. In 1785, the prince secretly married Maria Fitzherbert, a twice-widowed Roman Catholic, in a ceremony conducted by a clergyman released from debtor’s prison for the night. The marriage was legally void.
The Act of Settlement barred heirs to the throne from marrying Catholics, and the Royal Marriages Act required the king’s consent. The prince was 23 and had obtained neither. When Parliament considered settling his debts in 1787, his political ally Charles James Fox rose in the House of Commons and denied the marriage existed, acting on the prince’s own authority. The denial was a lie, and Maria was devastated when she read it.
Parliament granted the prince £161,000 to clear his debts. The money was effectively bought with his wife’s reputation. The Brighton connection began in 1783, when the prince visited the Sussex fishing town for the seawater cures recommended for his swollen glands. He returned repeatedly, and in 1786 he sent a confectioner to lease a small farmhouse on the Steine.
By 1787, architect Henry Holland had remade it into a cream-tiled marine villa of about a dozen rooms. The prince moved in before the paint was dry. The modest villa soon proved too small. By the end of the 1790s, Holland had extended it.
In 1807, the prince bought the freehold. The costs were rising, but the first pavilion was still respectable, and the country had barely noticed it. That changed when the prince’s political and financial situation forced him into a disastrous marriage. By 1794, his debts had reached roughly £630,000.
His father set the price for another parliamentary bailout: the prince would marry a Protestant princess and produce an heir. His bride was his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick. They met three days before the wedding. The prince took one look at her, asked for brandy, and left the room.
He had been drinking heavily on the wedding day itself, and had to be supported up the aisle of the Chapel Royal. He passed out by the fireplace at Carlton House that night. The marriage was consummated once. Princess Charlotte was born nine months later.
Within three days of the birth, the prince wrote Caroline a letter of separation. He kept his daughter, limiting Caroline to supervised weekly visits. The child grew up believing her mother was an indecent woman. The prince never saw his wife again for more than two decades.
His real obsession remained Brighton. In 1815, he commissioned architect John Nash to transform the villa into something Europe had never seen. Nash, who had been twice bankrupt, was perfectly matched to the prince’s taste for the impressive over the practical. The outside was wrapped in Indian-style domes and minarets, while the interiors were decorated in a Chinese idiom of scarlet lacquer, gilded dragons, and imitation bamboo.
The cost rose from an initial estimate of £50,000 to more than £155,000 for the building works alone. The entire pavilion estate, including the stables, gardens, and chandeliers, came to roughly £530,000. In modern value, that is between £40 and £50 million. The radical press attacked the project relentlessly.
Cartoons depicted the prince as an obese Chinese mandarin. During the same years, Britain faced food riots, mass unemployment of demobilized soldiers, and a failed harvest that pushed bread prices beyond many workers’ reach. The prince was spending tens of thousands of pounds on chandeliers while his subjects could not afford to eat. In January 1817, the prince entertained Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia with a dinner of 127 courses, prepared by the celebrated chef Marie-Antoine Carême in a state-of-the-art kitchen with a steam table and a smoke jack.
Outside the palace walls, a four-pound loaf of bread cost a third of a laborer’s daily wage. That same year, Princess Charlotte died after a 50-hour labor. She was the prince’s only legitimate child and the sole heir to the next generation. The prince was devastated.
But her death also forced his unmarried brothers into a frantic scramble to find Protestant brides and produce heirs. From that scramble came the future Queen Victoria. In 1820, George III died, and the prince became King George IV at 57. His wife Caroline returned to England to claim her place as queen.
The government, at the king’s insistence, brought a bill of pains and penalties to dissolve the marriage on grounds of adultery. The resulting trial was the most spectacular public humiliation a modern British monarch had endured. The evidence against Caroline came from paid Italian witnesses gathered by agents of the king. Her defense destroyed the credibility of nearly every witness and hinted at evidence of the king’s own adulteries.
The bill passed the House of Lords by only nine votes and was then withdrawn rather than sent to the Commons, where it would have failed. London erupted in three nights of celebration in Caroline’s honor. Caroline was still refused a place at the coronation. On July 19, 1821, she arrived at Westminster Abbey and was turned away at every door by prize fighters hired as pages.
She died 19 days later. Her last request, that her coffin be inscribed “Caroline of Brunswick, the injured Queen of England,” was refused by the government that owned her body. George IV never set foot in the pavilion again after the spring of 1824. By then he was severely obese, wracked with gout, dropsy, and other ailments, and embarrassed by his own appearance.
He retreated to Windsor, where he lived in a modest cottage with a small circle and died on June 26, 1830. The Times obituary at his funeral asked what eye had wept for him and what heart had heaved one sob of unmercenary sorrow. It concluded that if he had had a friend in any rank of life, that friend was yet to be discovered. Queen Victoria, who succeeded him, disliked the pavilion intensely.
She stripped it of its chandeliers, doors, painted ceilings, and furniture, shipping them to Buckingham Palace, Windsor, and Osborne. In 1850, the Brighton authorities bought the building for £53,000 — roughly a tenth of its construction cost. The dragon chandelier hung at Buckingham Palace for years before being returned on loan. Over more than a century, the Crown gradually sent the fittings back.
The building served as a hospital for Indian soldiers during the First World War. A fire in 1975 and a storm in 1987 damaged the music room, which was restored twice. Today, the Royal Pavilion is owned by the city of Brighton and receives about 300,000 visitors a year.
The man who built it remains one of the most hated kings in British history, but the palace he built outlived him, his critics, and even the dynasty that abandoned it.