Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  But Anne, despite her passionate personal support for the peace, was too frail to attend the ceremonies. On Christmas Eve she fell suddenly and dangerously ill. She made a recovery of sorts. But it was soon clear that she had only months, if not weeks, to live. The Tory ministers now made a secret offer of the crown to the Old Pretender, subject only to his conversion. But James III had inherited his father’s arrogance as well as his unyielding commitment to Catholicism. He now calculated that the Tories had so alienated Hanover that they would have to bring him back, conversion or no conversion, and refused point blank to change his religion.

  That was the end of the Pretender’s chances and, it turned out, of the Tories’ as well.

  IV

  On 30 July Anne suffered two violent strokes, which left her able to say only yes or no. Two days later, at the age of only forty-nine, she was dead, and Marlborough and his duchess, who had gone into ostentatious voluntary exile in disgust at the peace, returned in triumph to London.

  Anne’s reign was a paradox, between public power and popularity and personal physical weakness. The latter was unsparingly described by one of the Scottish Union commissioners in his account of an audience with the queen:

  Her Majesty was labouring under a fit of the gout, and in extreme pain and agony … Her face, which was red and spotted, was rendered something frightful by her negligent dress, and the foot affected was tied up with a poultice and some nasty bandages … Nature seems to be inverted when a poor infirm woman becomes one of the rulers of the world.

  This was possible, of course, only because of the machinery of England’s new constitutional monarchy, in which the queen was a powerful figure-head, but the actual government was left to ministers.

  Nevertheless, a woman who could resist and finally face down Marlborough and his formidable duchess was nobody’s tool. Likewise the peace with France was hers, as much as the Tories’. But her most important contribution was to remain steadfastly loyal after her own fashion to the Hanoverian succession. And so, England and Scotland were likely to get another female ruler, Sophia of Hanover. But Sophia died before she could inherit, and the heir to the British crown was her son, Georg Ludwig.

  When Anne died shortly after, the two principal claimants were both several hundred miles from London: Georg Ludwig in Hanover and the Old Pretender in Lorraine, where he had been forced to withdraw after the peace with France. If he had made a dash for it, the Old Pretender could have given the Hanoverian a run for his money. But James III did not do dashing.

  Instead, correctly confident in the machinery of the Act of Settlement, George, as he now signed himself in English, took a leisurely six weeks to arrive in England. He landed at Greenwich on 18 September at 6 p.m. Accompanied by his son, Georg August, and a great crowd of nobles, gentry and common folk, he walked through the grand colonnades and courtyards of the Royal Naval Hospital to the Queen’s House in the park, where he spent his first night in England.

  The following morning, in the Queen’s House, George held his first English court. He made plain his high regard for the leaders of the Whig Party and he administered a very public snub to the Tory leader: he allowed him to kiss his hands but said nothing to him in return. If George had anything to do with it, the sun, it was clear, would shine on the Whigs, while the Tories were destined for the wilderness.

  And George did have a lot to do with it, despite the constitutional nature of the monarchy. And royal influence, combined with distaste at the Tories’ slitheriness about the Hanoverian succession, helped win the Whigs a comfortable majority in the Commons. They now turned the Tory defeat into a rout by impeaching the former Tory ministers for their treachery in the peace negotiations at Utrecht. One was sent to the Tower; the other fled to the Old Pretender to encourage his bid for the throne.

  But at this moment, Louis XIV of France, the inveterate enemy of the new English monarchy and the principal casualty of its success, died and was succeeded by a regency that was committed to good relations with England. Deprived of French active support, a Jacobite rising conducted by northern English Catholics was easily defeated at Preston. But in Scotland, though the rebels were held back from the Lowlands by the drawn battle of Sheriffmuir, they took the Highlands and occupied Perth.

  After lengthy delays and disguised as a French bishop, the Old Pretender finally set sail for Scotland, where he landed just before Christmas 1715. At first, it was a triumphal progress: the magistrates of Aberdeen paid him homage; he made a state entry into Dundee; and proclaimed his forthcoming coronation as King James VIII and III at Scone. He then took up residence at Scone Palace and kept his court with the royal state of his ancestors.

  But, after this good start, things began to crumble. With his shy, cold public manner, James couldn’t even keep the loyalty of his existing followers, let alone recruit new ones. ‘If he found himself disappointed with us’, one of his soldiers wrote, ‘we were tenfold more so in him.’ It was no basis on which to stand and fight the government forces that were marching on them through the snow of winter.

  After retreating to Montrose the Old Pretender took ship secretly to France on 3 February 1716, abandoning his army to their fate. He never saw Britain again. The House of Hanover had seen off the Stuart dynasty.

  The arrival of George I and ensuing triumph of the House of Hanover were also commemorated in the Painted Hall at Greenwich, a few paces from where George actually landed.

  But that was the only realistic thing about the painting. Done in grisaille (or shades of grey) to imitate a Roman stone relief, it shows George arriving in a Roman triumphal chariot, while personifications of Tyrannic Power and Rebellious Despair quail before his harbinger, Liberty, with her cap.

  The reality had been very different as the painter, James Thornhill, who had been an eyewitness and shows himself as such at the edge of the composition, well knew. It was night, he noted. George’s clothes were unworthy of the event. And most of the receiving peers were Tories, which was the wrong political party. Hence, he explained, his decision to go for high-flown allegory.

  But the sober reality had been right. George was a modest man and would preside over a modest monarchy. No British king would ever again inhabit a palace as large as Greenwich or hold court in a space as splendid as the Painted Hall. And if more and more of the globe would indeed be British, it was not the king but his ministers who made it so.

  Nevertheless, Thornhill’s vast swirling allegories were not wholly disproportionate to the events they represent. For the Revolution and its aftermath in the Hanoverian Succession were glorious. By good luck, as well as good management, Britain had freed herself from political and religious absolutism and in so doing freed herself for the rapid and most significant expansion of any European power since Rome. No wonder Thornhill, like most subsequent commentators on the British monarchy, was uncertain of what language he should use to describe the limitation of the Crown and the triumph of the Nation.

  Chapter 22

  Empire

  Goerge I, George II, George III

  IN 1782, FACED WITH A COMMONS MOTION to make peace with Britain’s rebellious American colonies and recognize their independence, George III resolved to abdicate and return to his other kingdom of Hanover in Germany. He even got so far as drafting his abdication address:

  His Majesty … with much sorrow finds he can be of no further utility to his native country, which drives him to the painful step of quitting it forever.

  In consequence … his Majesty resigns the Crown of Great Britain … to his … son and lawful successor George, Prince of Wales, whose endeavours for the prosperity of the British Empire he hopes may prove more successful.

  Was the House of Hanover about to go the way of its unlucky predecessors the Stuarts? And the British to lose the empire they had only recently won? If it had been left to the Hanoverians themselves, who were the least able and attractive house to sit on the British throne, it is unlikely there would have been much to lose in the f
irst place.

  But in fact Britain in the eighteenth century witnessed an extraordinary and unprecedented political development: the rise of a second, parallel monarchy in Britain – the premiership. It was monarchs of this new kind who created the first British Empire, and the old monarchy which eventually destroyed it.

  The seeds of the premiership lay in the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89. But it was the accession of the House of Hanover in 1714, and the awkward, unattractive personalities of the first two Hanoverian kings, which accelerated its development and made it irreversible.

  I

  For most of the eighteenth century, the monarchy veered between deep unpopularity and a national joke. When George I became king in 1714 the English had, for the second time in thirty years, a foreign monarch. Indeed, George of Hanover was much more foreign than William of Orange. For William had an English mother, spoke fluent English and was married to an English princess. George, on the other hand, was resolutely, unremittingly German: he arrived with German ministers, German-speaking Turkish body-servants, and German mistresses. (Indeed, the mistresses had been a necessary part of his life since he condemned his wife to life imprisonment in a German castle following the discovery of her sensational affair with a Swedish count.) Even subsequently, he never learned more than a few words of broken English and his interests remained essentially German too, centring on the welfare of his beloved north German principality, where he went whenever he could and stayed as long as possible.

  It was all neatly symbolized by his heraldry, which showed the white horse of Hanover superimposed on the British royal coat of arms. Moreover, the German takeover of 1714 had consequences almost as momentous as those of the Dutch conquest of 1688. The conquest and the ensuing Glorious Revolution had been the work of Tories as well as Whigs and, for the following thirty years, the two parties had continued to alternate in power.

  But George saw things very differently. Passionately interested in the military glory of Hanover, he blamed the Tories for the Peace of Utrecht, which halted the Grand Alliance’s chances of a crushing victory over France and, more importantly for George, the aggrandizement of his beloved Hanover. He blamed them even more for their flirtation with his rival, the Old Pretender. The Tories, for their part, believed that the new monarch was really the puppet of the Whigs. Under the control of their opponents, they feared, the monarchy would become the powerless figurehead of a republic and the Church of England would lose its privileged status. For them, 1714 was the victory of the old parliamentary cause of the Civil Wars and the triumph of the Protestant dissenters.

  Nor was George popular with the country. On the day of his coronation banners mocking the new king were displayed throughout the country. There were riots and talk of plots to restore the Stuarts. The general election of 1715 was violent, with more banners proclaiming ‘No Hanover’ and ‘Down with the Roundheads’. And if the country seemed turbulent and dangerously polarized at the beginning of the reign, the king blamed it on the troublemaking Tories. Thus their prophecy that the new dynasty would exclude them in favour of the Whigs became self-fulfilling. After their crushing defeat in the election, Tories were deprived of office at every level, down to the gardener at Dublin Castle.

  It was a century before the Tories would win a general election again, and sixty years before a Tory held high political office. The resulting long Whig domination has been hailed as the Restoration of Political Stability. It could equally be characterized as six decades of one-party rule, with all the problems of one-party rule that our own times have familiarized us with once more. For the Whig consensus was dogged by bitter internal division and competing factions. And this struggle became linked with another poisonous dispute within the new German royal family itself.

  ‘The Hanoverians’, it has been cruelly said, ‘like pigs, trample their young.’ The dictum was exemplified by the very public mutual loathing of fathers and eldest sons. There was good reason for this in 1714. At first sight, George’s eldest son, George Augustus, prince of Wales, was a much more attractive character than his father. He was married to a vivacious, intelligent wife, Caroline. He was as fond of public pomp and circumstance as his reclusive father detested it. He had displayed conspicuous bravery at the battle of Oudenarde, where he fought on the English side under Marlborough and had his horse killed under him in the thick of the fighting. He spoke voluble, if heavily accented, English and had thoroughly acquainted himself with English affairs. Indeed, he played the English card shamelessly and proclaimed, rather unconvincingly, ‘I have not one drop of blood in my veins dat is not English.’

  Matters between father and son came to a head in 1716, when the king, who had been pining for Germany, returned to Hanover for a six-month visit. Custom dictated that the prince should have been left as regent; instead, an obscure precedent was dug out from the Middle Ages and he was created ‘guardian and lieutenant of the realm’ with severely restricted powers. All important decisions would be referred to the king in Hanover, as if his son were simply incapable of any kind of responsibility. The prince was left feeling humiliated and sidelined.

  But still the prince was the figurehead of government and he and Caroline determined to exploit the fact for all it was worth. On 25 July the prince and princess and their daughters moved to Hampton Court, where, with a short interval, they remained for four months. Many people were angry that the new king had so little respect for his new people that he had left the kingdom as soon as he could. As was said, George ‘is already become the Jest, the Contempt and Aversion of the Nation’. He had been cuckolded by his wife, whom he had been forced to lock up; he had two ugly mistresses nicknamed ‘the elephant and the maypole’ for their mismatched appearance; and he was stiff and humourless. All this was ripe for jokes and innuendo. But George’s ill-disguised dislike for England was also offensive. His son and daughter-in-law, on the other hand, made great effort to show that they at least were pleased to be in England. And the young couple won popularity and loyalty for it.

  Hampton Court Palace had lain unfinished and largely neglected since William III’s death. But now it burst into life as George and Caroline moved into the state apartments, which had been specially refurbished for them, and kept the kind of splendid open court that had not been seen in England since the days of Charles II. It attracted the aristocracy and politicians, poets such as Alexander Pope, the writer Joseph Addison and scientists including Isaac Newton and Edward Halley. Once again, there was a flourishing court culture and a popular prince. The royal couple dined in public, held balls, fêtes and picnics; they also went on a successful tour of the south-east.

  George I reacted to his son’s public favour with jealous rage and, when he returned to England, entered against all his instincts and preferences into a public-relations war with the prince. So in the following summer of 1717, the king himself took up residence at Hampton Court, alongside the prince and princess. In uncomfortable proximity in the same building, the two adjacent but rival courts continued to maintain different styles: the king’s studiously informal, the Waleses’ preserving something of the traditional formality of the English court, with the consequent need for grand state apartments, such as the Guard Chamber and, beyond it, the Presence Chamber, which were designed for them by Sir John Vanbrugh. It was a war of style and culture, and the prince and princess seemed to be winning it.

  But King George had his own genius with whom to strike back: George Frederic Handel. On 17 July, just before his departure for Hampton Court, the king bade farewell to the capital in fine style with a grand water party to Chelsea and back. Accompanying the royal party was a barge with a large band of fifty musicians, who played the music that Handel had composed for the occasion. The king liked it so much that he had it ‘played over three times in going and returning’. And no wonder, for it was Handel’s Water Music. Let the prince of Wales try to beat that!

  In November the royal family returned from Hampton Court to London for the winter seaso
n. Within a few weeks the quarrel between father and son became an open breach, and the king ordered the Waleses in writing to leave St James’s Palace. In the new year they took up residence at Leicester House, in what is now Leicester Square. There were now two rival courts in London; Tories and dissident Whigs flocked to Leicester House in the expectation that when Prince George came to the throne they would be the favoured few. And the Jacobites rejoiced at the family feud, which, they hoped and prayed, presaged the fall of the House of Hanover.

  II

  One of the leading members of the Leicester House Set, as the followers of the prince of Wales were known, was the up-and-coming Whig politician Sir Robert Walpole. Walpole, the son of a middling Norfolk squire, was a mountain of a man, with a gigantic appetite: for food and drink, sex, money, power and work. He was shrewd, affable (when it suited him) and knew the price of everything and everyone. But, despite his coarseness and corpulence, he was attractive to women and understood them thoroughly.

  What he understood most of all, however, was the House of Commons, of which he was the long-time undisputed master. For such a man, opposition, even when sanctioned by the prince of Wales, was of limited appeal. For one thing, George I showed no signs of dying any time soon and no man could gain power without access to the patronage that was the gift of the monarch, even if he had Parliament on his side. So in 1720 Walpole brokered a general reconciliation of sorts: between the king and the prince and within the fractured Whig Party. But what propelled him to undisputed power was his handling of the financial crisis known as the South Sea Bubble.

  For the Glorious Revolution not only brought in modern public finance, with the Bank of England and the national debt, it also introduced other, less obviously desirable features of capitalist modernity such as the stock market, speculation and boom and bust. And the South Sea Bubble was the mother of all busts.