King George III, who had suffered a mysterious outbreak of madness in 1788, experienced a relapse in 1810, from which there was to be no recovery. On February 5, 1811, the British Parliament passed a bill that allowed the royal heir, George, the Prince of Wales, to rule England as Prince Regent in his father’s stead.
Overall the Regency was a period of social and political extremes. The Industrial and French Revolutions had each left their mark on the age. In the eighteenth century the Industrial Revolution led to the construction of mills and factories, and the growth of a new laboring population whose members migrated to the city from rural areas in search of work. As the century drew to a close, the effects of the French Revolution manifested themselves in harsh, repressive measures. Unnerved by the savagery of the 1793-94 Reign of Terror (in which thousands of suspected anti-revolutionaries were executed in France) and fearful of similar developments in England, the British government legally prohibited public meetings and suspended habeas corpus—a citizen’s right to obtain a common-law writ to appear before a court as protection against being illegally imprisoned.
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