William IV was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 26 June 1830 until his death in 1837. The third son of George III, William succeeded his elder brother George IV, becoming the last king and penultimate monarch of Britain’s House of Hanover. William served in the Royal Navy in his youth, spending time in North America and the Caribbean, and was later nicknamed the “Sailor King” He was the last monarch to appoint a British prime minister contrary to the will of Parliament.
About William IV in brief
William IV was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 26 June 1830 until his death in 1837. The third son of George III, William succeeded his elder brother George IV, becoming the last king and penultimate monarch of Britain’s House of Hanover. William served in the Royal Navy in his youth, spending time in North America and the Caribbean, and was later nicknamed the “Sailor King” He was the last monarch to appoint a British prime minister contrary to the will of Parliament. He granted his German kingdom a short-lived liberal constitution. At the time of his death, William had no surviving legitimate children, but he was survived by eight of the ten illegitimate children he had by the actress Dorothea Jordan, with whom he cohabited for twenty years. Late in life, he married and apparently remained faithful to the young princess who would become Queen Adelaide. William was succeeded by his niece Queen Victoria in the United UK, and his brother King Ernest Augustus in Hanover, and he died in 1839 at the age of 64. His reign saw several reforms: the poor law was updated, child labour restricted, slavery abolished in nearly all of the British Empire, and the British electoral system refashioned by the Reform Act 1832. William threatened to stand for the British House of Commons for the constituency of Totnes in Devon in 1789, but his father George III created him the Duke of Clarence and St Andrews.
To put pressure on his father, William sought to make his son a duke like his elder brothers, and to receive a similar parliamentary grant, but George III supposedly threatened him with the prospect of making him Earl of Munster and Earl of St Andrews on May 16, 1789. He was born in the early hours of the morning on 21 August 1765 at Buckingham House, the third child and son of King George III and Queen Charlotte. His godparents were the King’s siblings: Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh; Prince Henry ; and Princess Augusta, Hereditary Duchess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. His experiences in the navy seem to have been little different from those of other midshipmen, though in contrast to other sailors he was accompanied on board ships by a tutor. He did his share of the cooking and got arrested with his shipmates after a drunken brawl in Gibraltar; he was hastily released from custody after his identity became known. He became a lieutenant in 1785 and captain of HMS Pegasus the following year. In late 1786, he was stationed in the West Indies under Horatio Nelson, who wrote of William: “In his professional line, he is superior to two-thirds, I am sure, of the list; and in attention, and in orders, and I hardly know his equal.” He was promoted to rear-miral in 1788, and given command of the frigate HMS Andromeda in 1791.
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