OUTLINES OF THE LATE KING'S PERSONAL LIFE.

The personal history of William the Fourth, unconnected with the great political events of his reign already noticed in this paper, presents few points of interest. Prince William Henry was the third son of George the Third, and born on the 21st of August 1765. As a child, be was small-sized, but a bold and manly fellow, well adapted for the profession in which his father placed him.

" At the age of thirteen, (says the Morning Chronicle, in a well compiled memoir, which accompanied the news of the Royal demise on Tuesday morn- kg,) the Prince was entered as a midshipman on board the Prince George, a ainety-eight gun ship, commanded by Admiral Dighy. The King declared that his son should win his way to promotion in the same manner us the most friendless young Man in the feet; and the Prince was accordingly placed on the same footing, in every respect, wills his fellow youngsters. He had soon an opportunity of seeing service. An armament, commanded by Rodney, and of which the Prince George formed a part, sailed from Spithead in De- cember 1779; and, on the 8th of the following month, captured the whole of a Spanish convoy, consisting of a sixty-four gun ship, (afterwards named the

Prince William, iu compliment to his Royal Highness,) and a great number of armed vessels and transports. Eight days afterwaids, the memorable engage-

ment took phree tl.s. ,,,,, !hes leingara a conflict which ended in the captute or destruction of the whole of the enemy's ships, and tendered abortive the expedition which the 'Preach and Spaniards

bad jointly projected against our West India settlements. When the Spanish Admiral was brought on banal! the Prince George as a prisoner, and was told that one of the midshipmen whom be saw actively engaged in dis duty, was an English prince of the blood, he exclaimed—' Well may England be mistress of the sea, when the sou of her King is thus employed iu her service!' "

Some anecdotes illustrative of the kind disposition of Prince Wil- liam have been preserved, during his service in the West Indies, and off the coast of Canada and Nova Scotia.

" Having had sonic words with a brother midshipmen of the name of Start, the young man said to him, If you were not the King's son, Sir, I would

teach you better manners. ! ' said the Prince, ' don't let that be any hindrance ; ' and offered to fight his adversary in the nautical fashion, over a sea-chest. Sturt, however, declined the contest ; which, he said, would be unfair, he being the elder and stronger of the two. The Prince was struck by the young mates generosity (qu. prudence?) offered him his hand, and be- came his cordial friend. When the Prince was at Port Royal, in 1783, a mid- shipman named Lee was condemned to be shot for insubordination. The whole body of midshipmen were deeply afficted at this sentence, but knew not low to obtain a mitigation of it, as Mr. Lee bad been ordered for execution; while they had no time for an application to the Admiralty, and considered an application to Admiral Rowley (the commander on the station) useless. In this emergency, Prince William Henry came forward, and drew up a petition, to which hewas the first to affix his name, and got the rest of the midshipmen in port to follow his example. He then went himself to the Admiral with the petition, and begged his comrade's life with such earnestness that he succeeded so saving him."

We have beard another anecdote, not mentioned in the newspapers, but which strikes us as being not less characteristic of the parties than those above mentioned. During his service off the coast of Canada, the Prince made an incursion into Upper Canada, and crossed over into the state of Vermont. He went into a tailor's shop, and saw his wife, a very pretty woman ; the husband being in a back room. The Prince, sans ceremonie, ravished a kiss from the lady ; and said, " There! now tell your countrywomen that the son of the King of England has kissed a Yankee tailor's wife." Unhappily, the tailor himself made his appearance at that moment ; and, being an athletic fellow, gave the scion of royalty a tremendous kick : " There !" said he, " now go and tell your countrywomen that a Yankee tailor has kicked the son of the King of England." According to the story, which is still current and firmly credited in Vermont, the young Prince was glad to get off on these terms. George the Third, we have seen, was resolved "that his son should win his way to promotion in the same manner as the most friendless young man in the fleet:" how well that resolution was kept, the follow- ing history of Prince William's progress will tell. In 1786, he was appointed third Lieutenant of the Pegasus ; on the 10th of April 1788, passing over the rank of Commander, he was made Captain of the Pegasus; in 1790, he was appointed to the command of the Valiant, seventy-four ; and in December of the same year, he became an Ad- miral—he was then twenty-four years of age. Such was the fashion in which this " friendless" young man "won his way to promotion." While on tl e Leeward Islam d s'c'ion as Captain of the Pegasus, he

was under the command of Nelson, who seems to have thought well of him.

" He supp irted Nelson in his measures for correcting the abuses which ex- isted in the dock-yard at Antigua, and also in the transactions of contractors, prize-agents, &c. A strong and lasting friendship sprang up between them. The King his declared that his mind took its first decided naval turn from his familiar inter course with Nelson when they served together ; and the high opi- nion which that great commander entertained of his junior officer is expressed In a letter to his early friend, Captain Locker, in which he says—' You must have beard, long before this reaches you, that Prince William is under my com- mand. I shall endeavour to take care that he is not a loser by that circum• stance. He has his foibles, as well as private men, but they are far overbalanced by his virtues. In his professional line he is superior to near two-thirds, 1 am sure, of the list ; and in attention to orders, and in respect to his superior officer, I hardly know his equal. This is what I have found him.' In a sub- set:rent letter. Nelson says—' His Royal Highness keeps up the strictest disci- pline in his ,skip; and, without paying him any compliment, she is one of the finest• ordered frigates I have seen.'" It was perhaps the measures he took to keep up the " strictest disci- pline," which gained him the character of being a flogging captain. In 1794, when the Jacobin spirit, as it was called, ran high in England, the Duke of Clarence was nicknamed Prince William Henry " Flog- ster ; " and it was proposed, in an incendiary placard, that he should " dance on the tight-rope from a lamp-post with Master Billy Pitt."

Iii 1811, the Duke of Clarence was made Admiral of the Fleet; and in April 1814 he conveyed Louis the Eighteenth to France on his restoration to the throne of that country : and there, we believe, ends the record of the late King's naval services. His connexion with Mrs. Jordan was the most remarkable feature in the private life of the late King. Dora Jordan, whose real name, Mr. Boaden her biographer tells us, was Dorothy Bland, bad had three children, two of them by a Mr. Ford, (the father of the third is not known,) when the Duke of Clarence made his proposals to her to become his mistress. Mr. Boaden, says-

" The declared attachment of the Prince weighed at first no more with her than to induce her to take the opportunity of ascertaining whether Mr. Ford . was sincere in his devotion to her, in which cage she thought herself every way entitled to his hand; and in fact, even upon a mere worldly estimate of the matter, a desirable match, in possession of a positive and progressive fortune,

the honourable result of superior, indeed unequalled, talents. She at length required from Mr. Ford a definitive answer to the proposal of marriage; and

finding that he shrunk from the test, she told him distinctly that her mind was made up at least to one point,—that if she must choose between offers of pro- tection, she would certainly choose those which promised the fairest ; but that

if lie could think her worthy of being his wife, no temptation could be strong enough to detach her from him and her duties. Mr. Ford resigned her, I be- lieve, with legal composure; and she accepted the terms held out by the Duke, and devoted herself to his interests and habits, his taste and domestic pleisures.

Whoever has had the happiness of seeing them together at Bushey, saw them surrounded by a family rarely equalled in personal and mental grace : they saw their happy mother an honoured wife in every thing but the legal title, and uni- formly spoke of the establishment at Bushey as one of the must enviable that had ever presented itseif to their scrutiny."

This Vanoexion commenced 1790, and lasted till 1810; when a se- paration te,,k place.`! 'here `:_lere appears to Mire been rut quarrel ; but the Duk.n diNe,irthal her b. cause he wanted to aley, and had no other way of getting it except by marrying a rids wile. Indeed, nit this time, the Duke of Clarence seas looked upon as little better than a fortune- hunter. This cause of their semi: ation scents to be bunted at in the following letter of Mrs. Jordan to st fliend- " My mind is beginning to feel somewhat reconciled to the shock and sur- prise it has lately received; for, could you or the world believe that we never had, for twenty years, the semblance of a quarrel. But this is so well known in our domestic (Aide that the astonishment is the greater. Money, money, my good friend, or the want of it, has, I am convinced, made him at this mo- ment the most wretched of men ; but haring done wrong, he does not like to retract. But with all his excellent qualities, his domestic virtues, his love for his lovely children, what must he not at this moment suffer ! His distresses should have been relieved before, but this entre nuts. . . . . And now, my dear friend, do not hear the Duke of Clarence unfairly abused. He has done wrong, and he is suffering from it. But as far as he has it left in his own power, lie is doing every thing kind and noble, even to distressing himself." Poor Mrs. Jordan returned to the stage. She was enthusiastically welcomed by the public, and the reward of her exertions enabled her still to live in splendour. We remember to have seen her travelling in a handsome carriage and four, with several servants, on a professional tour. It appears, however, that she gave blank acceptances—probably for Ford, and became so much embarrassed, that she was compelled to retire to France ; where she died in distress. The conduct of the Duke of Clarence in allowing Mrs. Jordan, who had been all that a wife could have been to him for twenty years, and who was the mother of ten children reared and acknowledged as his own, has been the sub- ject of much animadversion ; and, notwithstanding the attempts to ex- culpate him, we think that he comes shabbily out of the affair. The Duke was freed from his engagements to maintain her, uy her return to the stage ; but he might have sought her out, and saved her from absolute poverty. Mr. Barton, who was for many years in the Duke's service, and was afterwards Treasurer of Queen Adelaide's household, gives this account of the money transaction- " I take upon myself to submit the following statement to the public ; ac- quainting them, in the first place, that it was through my hands the whole transaction upon the separation of the Duke and Mrs. Jordan passed that it

was at my suggestion Mrs. Jordan adopted the resolution of leaving this country for France, to enable her the more readily and honourably to extricate

herself from the troubles into which she had fallen through a misplaced confi- dence ; and that I possess a correspondence with Mrs. Jordan, subsequent to her leaving England, which corroborates my statement in the minutest pointer Upon the separation which took place between Mrs. Jordan and the Duke, s the year 1811, it was agreed that she should have the care, until a certain age of her four youngest daughters ; and a settlement was made by the Duke for th payment, by him, of the following amounts-

" For the maintenance of his four daughters For a house and carriage for their use Fur Mrs. Jordan's own use 1,500 And to enable Mrs. Jordan to make a provision for her

married daughters, children of a former connexion 800 In all "This settlement was carried into effect ; a trustee was appointed;

and the £1,500 600 se■

monies under such trust were paid quarterly to the respective accounts, at the banking-house of Messrs. Coutts and Co. It was a stipulation in the said set- tlements, that, in the event of Mrs. Jordan resuming her profession, the care of the Duke's four daughters, together with the 1,500/. per annum for their maintenance, should revert to his Royal Highness; and this event actually did take place in the course of a few months, in consequence of Mrs. Jordan's desire to accept certain proposals made to her to perform."

The marriage of the Duke took place on the 11th of July 1818, when the death of the Princess Charlotte put all the brothers of George the Fourth on the look-out for wives.

'1 He married Adelaide Louisa Theresa Caroline Amelia, daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Meinengen ; who had been strongly recommended to him by hie mother, Queen Charlotte, on account of her amiable qualities and domestic virtues. Parliament having on this occasion granted an addition of only 6,0001. to the Duke's income, the Royal pair, thinking that their allowance was too limited to enable them to support the dignity of their station in this country, went to reside at Hanover. They returned to England in the end of the year 1819. In the end of the following year, the Dutchess became the mother of a seven months' child, the Princess hlizabeth ; who died in her in- fancy. On three other occasions—twice in 1819 and again in 1821—the Dutchess had the misfortune to be prematurely confined."

On the death of the Duke of York, in 1827, the Duke of Clarence, then Heir Presumptive to the Crown, received an additional Parlia- mentary grant, which raised his income r.o 40,0001. per annum. In the same year, he became Mr. Canning's Lord High Admiral ; but the next Premier, the Duke of Wellington, removed him,—because, as it was said, the Royal Duke wished to send out fleets and conduct the affairs of the Navy independently of the responsible Minister.

On two occasions the Duke of Clarence distinguished himself in Parliament. Once against poor Queen Caroline, who had not a more

bitter assailant on the Tory bench : than her brother-in-law ; indeed, so marked, and, for a judge, so indecent was his animus against the

accused, that upon one occasion he provoked a severe and memorable reproof from the Queen's counsel. The second Parliamentary ex- hibition was during the discussion of the Catholic Relief Bill ; when he gave that measure strenuous, and, from his position as Heir Pre- sumptive to the Crown, not inefficient support.

On the 26th June 1830, George the Fourth died, and the Duke of Clarence ascended the throne. From that period, he could scarcely be said to have enjoyed any thing like privacy—a certain degree of public and political importance being attached to all that the Sove- reign says or does. The King selected his private friends chiefly from among the Tories. His wife's household was Tory ; and his parties were generally made up of Tory lords and military and naval officers of the same political opinions. He gave frequent entertainments, oral was very regular in the performance of courtly duties. Speechifying after dinner was his delight ; and he occasionally made remarks which, repeated at the clubs by some of his silly guests, revived the hopes of the Opposition, but which led to nothing. He was uniformly kind to his wife, and to his natural children,—though some of the latter tried their old father's patience severely.