William IV., the 'sailor-king,' was born at Buckingham Palace on 21st August 1765. The third son of George III., till 1771 he remained, along with the Prince of Wales and Prince Frederick, under the care of Dr Majendie, and then was sent to Kew, where, with Prince Edward, afterwards Duke of Kent, he was under the guardianship of Colonel Budé. He entered the navy as a midshipman in 1779, and, having seen some service off the coast of America and in the West Indies (he was the first English prince that visited the New World), in 1785 was promoted to lieutenant, and in 1786 to captain. In June 1789, having a year and a half before returned from Halifax to England without leave, he was created Duke of Clarence and St Andrews and Earl of Munster, with an allowance from parliament of £12,000 a year; but his professional career was at an end, although he was formally promoted through the successive ranks to that of Admiral of the Fleet (1801), and although during 1827-28 he held the revived office of Lord High Admiral. From 1790 to 1811 he lived with the actress Mrs Jordan (q.v., 1762-1816), who bore him five sons and five daughters; on 13th July 1818 he married Adelaide (1792-1849), eldest daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. Of the two daughters born of this marriage in 1819 and 1820, one lived but a few hours, and the other only three months. By the Duke of York's death in 1827 the Duke of Clarence became heir-presumptive to the throne, to which he succeeded at the death of his eldest brother, George IV., on 26th June 1830. A steady Whig up to his accession, he then naturally turned Tory, and did much to obstruct the passing of the great Liberal measure of his reign, the first Reform Act (1832). The abolition of colonial slavery (1833), the reform of the poor-laws (1834), and the Municipal Reform Act (1835) were immediate results of that great constitutional change. The plain, bluff king, whose eccentricity it was at one time feared would end in insanity, died at Windsor, after a short illness, on 20th June 1837, and was succeeded by his niece, Queen Victoria.
See (besides the articles on his premiers, GREY, MELBOURNE, and PEEL, with works there cited) the Duke of Buckingham's Courts and Cabinets of William IV. and Victoria (2 vols. 1861); the Greville Memoirs; and Percy Fitzgerald's Life and Times of William IV. (2 vols. 1884).