George I

by Tim Blanning

  In short, George’s accession proceeded as smoothly as oil and butter. Given the wild volatility of English politics during the previous quarter-century, this harmony could not be expected to last. An early indication of what was to come was the widespread rioting that erupted on coronation day, 20 October 1714. These were not Jacobite demonstrations, rather High Church attacks on Nonconformist meeting houses and the first populist shots in the election campaign for the new Parliament that by law had to be summoned within six months of Queen Anne’s death.26 In Hanover, the Estates played an important role in the financial affairs of the electorate, but all the emphasis was on firm direction from above and compliant co-operation from below.27 Nothing had prepared George for the rough and tumble of the ‘rage of parties’ that made Westminster politics so invigoratingly divisive and confrontational.

  Safe navigation around the rocks and sandbanks of this alien new world was impeded by George’s ignorance of the English language.28 As he had known for more than a decade that he would succeed to the throne, his failure to prepare himself linguistically was both foolish and irresponsible. It may also have played a part in his clumsy handling of English party politics during the first part of his reign. For years, Whigs had sought to persuade him that only they were to be trusted, because all Tories were either outright Jacobites or fellow travellers. George was all the more ready to believe this semi-demi-truth because he had been outraged by the Peace of Utrecht, concluded by the Tory ministry in 1713 to put an end to British participation in the War of the Spanish Succession. This he regarded, not unreasonably, as a traitorous desertion of the Emperor Charles VI, the Holy Roman Empire and, not least, himself. Together with the emperor, George went on fighting the French for another year and blamed what turned out to be a disastrous final campaign on the unilateral withdrawal of the British contingents.29

  On his arrival in London, George sent out a mixed message on his attitude to parties. Although Oxford and Bolingbroke, the main architects of the Peace of Utrecht, were promptly dismissed, a number of Hanoverian Tories were co-opted to the Council of Regency and one of them – the Earl of Nottingham – was made Lord President of the council. This olive branch was not accepted. When two leading Tories, William Bromley and Sir Thomas Hanmer, declined the royal offer of lucrative offices, they also seemed to indicate that there was no point in wooing a party that had gone into opposition. Now the gloves came off and a systematic purge of Tories from both central and county offices began.30 The flight of Bolingbroke to France in March 1715 and his subsequent appointment as the Pretender’s Secretary of State completed the association in George’s mind of Toryism with Jacobitism. Inherited by his son and successor, this assumption was to shape English politics until George’s great-grandson succeeded as George III in 1760.

  In the short term, it proved to be a serious mistake. It was the belief that all legal doors to advancement had been slammed shut that sent many fundamentally loyal Tories across the way to subversion. Representative was the fate of the Tory Lieutenant-General John Richmond Webb MP, who had served with distinction in the War of the Spanish Succession. Shortly after his arrival in England, George was urged to dismiss him, but in reply ‘askd if he had not done his Duty well in his several posts, wch cou’d not be denied. Then the King said he wou’d have no regard to people’s private piques, and ordered Web to be continued.’31 By the following year, George had changed his mind. Webb was dismissed from his position as Governor of the Isle of Wight and also from his regiment. With nothing to lose, he turned his loyalty across the water to the Pretender.

  Webb confined his Jacobitism to truculent opposition in the House of Commons, an example of prudence that was followed by most of the purged Tory officers. Of the few prepared to risk their necks for the cause, the most eminent was the Duke of Ormonde, Captain-General and Commander-in-Chief of the British army. Dismissed by George and impeached by Parliament for his undoubted Jacobite sympathies, he fled to France in the summer of 1715, intending to return to lead the insurrection planned for the autumn. In England this proved to be a fiasco. On 20 July 1715, on receipt of a report from the British ambassador at Versailles, the Earl of Stair, that an invasion was imminent, the government took swift action. Habeas corpus was suspended, leading Jacobites were taken into custody, key garrisons strengthened, the county militias called out, twenty-one new regiments raised and 6,000 Dutch troops summoned.32 All this proved enough to stifle the insurrection planned for the West Country. When Ormonde himself arrived in Plymouth, instead of the enthusiastic welcome he had been led to expect he found no one willing even to give him a bed for the night (or so Bolingbroke later claimed).33 He returned to France with his tail between his legs.

  Further north, Jacobite rebellions did break out. On 6 September the Pretender’s standard was raised in Aberdeenshire and a month later in Northumberland. Sensibly, the government decided to deal with the English insurrection first. The task was made easier by the incompetence displayed by the totally inexperienced Jacobite commander, William Forster. Linking up with a Scottish contingent, he led his volunteers west to Lancashire, counting on enlisting reinforcements from the county’s numerous Catholic recusant gentry and their tenants. In that he enjoyed some success, but when confronted by a modest government force at Preston he offered only half-hearted resistance before surrendering unconditionally on 14 November.34

  The Jacobites in Scotland turned out to be made of sterner stuff, driven by an ancient sense of grievance recently sharpened by the Act of Union of 1707. In the course of 1715–16, perhaps as many as 20,000 Scottish Jacobites were under arms. Yet they fatally failed to concentrate, being rather ‘an amoeba-like drifting together of elements’.35 Only half that number could be mustered at Sheriffmuir on 13 November 1715 when the Earl of Mar sought to move south into the Lowlands. They should have been enough, for his opponent and fellow Scottish grandee, the Duke of Argyll, had only just over 3,000 under his command. Although both sides could claim they had won the day, strategically the verdict was decisive, for, when Mar retreated back to Perth, any chance of an eventual Jacobite victory went with him.36 Over the next few months, the army fell apart and dispersed. Their morale was not improved by the belated arrival of the Pretender from France on 22 December. The disillusionment was mutual: Mar had promised to receive him with a large and victorious army; the Pretender had promised to bring with him arms, ammunition, money and a numerous staff of veterans. Neither delivered.37 The Pretender was not the man to restore a cause that was losing by the day, making but a feeble impression on his followers: ‘a tall lean blak man, loukes half dead alredy, very thine, long faced, and very ill cullored and melancholy’ was the verdict of the Countess of Lauderdale.38 By then – 14 January 1716 – he had plenty to be melancholy about. He had reached Scone, just outside Perth, but his ‘army’ had dwindled to just 4,000 and it was known that a government force was advancing from the south. On 3 February he fled to France, never to return.

  The ‘Fifteen’ was over. There were four main reasons for its failure. The most important was the unity of purpose shown by the English establishment. On the day that Stair’s dispatch reached London, announcing an imminent rebellion, George went straight to Parliament to call for urgent action. He was rewarded with loyal addresses voted through without a dissenting voice, and then backed up at once by the firm defensive actions listed earlier. Secondly, the three ministers in charge of policy during the crisis – Robert Walpole, James Stanhope and Viscount Townshend – acted decisively and sensibly.39 Thirdly, the Jacobites were badly let down by Providence, for Louis XIV, their greatest help in ages past, expired on 1 September 1715. Bolingbroke’s despairing comment was: ‘my hopes sank as he declined and died when he expired’. Louis had been on the throne for seventy-two years, so this was hardly an untimely death, but even a month or two more might have made a crucial difference, for he was deeply committed to the Jacobite cause for both personal and religious reasons. He turned out to be the last French king
to offer more than token support. As his successor, his great-grandson, was only five years old, everything now depended on the regent, the Duke of Orléans. If the infant Louis XV were to die, Orléans hoped to succeed to the French throne himself, but would face fierce competition from Louis XIV’s grandson Philip V, King of Spain. In that contest, the support of the King of England would be very welcome. Another cogent argument was supplied by France’s exhaustion after a generation of incessant and extremely expensive warfare. So orders went out to French ministers that the Jacobites were not to be assisted.40

  That was probably the kiss of death, because – and this was the fourth reason – there simply was not enough support for the Pretender’s cause in Britain to sustain a successful insurrection without French assistance. In the dream world of ‘rumour, propaganda, fantasy, and illusion’41 that made up the Jacobite mindset, ‘the King over the water’ was always on the point of making a triumphal entry to his capital, especially in the wishful thinking of two or three Tory squires when gathered together after hunting. But, if action as opposed to drinking toasts was required, wiser counsels prevailed. In the words of one despairing Jacobite: ‘they are never right hearty for the cause, till they are mellow, as they call it, over a bottle or two, but they do not care for venturing their carcases any further than the tavern’.42

  That was not the end of the Jacobites, of course. They lived on as a threat, not least because it was in the interest of the Whigs to exaggerate their menace and to tar every Tory with the brush of treason. A Jacobite subculture continued to thrive in the clandestine press and clubs of London and in High Church rectories and manor houses across the country. It found public expression in the noisy celebrations mounted to mark certain anniversaries, especially 30 January (the execution of Charles I), 29 May (the restoration of Charles II) and 10 June (the Pretender’s birthday). In 1718–19 the tragedy of 1715 was reprised as a farce, with a bizarre scheme initiated by Cardinal Alberoni, the Spanish first minister, in conjunction with the mercurial Charles XII of Sweden. Once again, it seemed that Providence was a Hanoverian Protestant. Firstly, King Charles was killed while besieging a Norwegian fortress (probably by one of his own side) and then, in March 1719, the Spanish invasion squadron, commanded by the ever-luckless Duke of Ormonde, was dispersed by a storm in the Bay of Biscay. Only around a thousand would-be insurgents eventually made it to Kintail on the north-west coast of Scotland, where the Spaniards surrendered and the Highlanders faded away into their inaccessible mountains and glens.43

  It was on the Celtic periphery of the British Isles that resistance to the new monarch was naturally fiercest. Scotland was very different from England. It was much more rural, with only just over 5 per cent of the population living in towns of more than 10,000 (even Edinburgh had only 30,000 inhabitants); it was much poorer, its exports limited to raw materials; and it had no credible naval forces.44 What prompted enough Scottish decision-makers to accept union with England in 1707 was the prospect of unfettered access to English domestic and colonial markets, this powerful economic argument strengthened by the liberal distribution of bribes and other favours. As the Act of Union incorporated the succession provisions of the Act of Settlement, it also guaranteed English assistance in preventing a Stuart restoration.45 The Scots were given generous representation in Parliament, especially in the House of Commons, were allowed to keep their own legal system and laws and – most important of all for the great majority – the dominance of the Presbyterian Church was guaranteed.46 Many agreed with William Carstares, Principal of Edinburgh University, that ‘The desire I have to see our Church secured makes me in love with the Union as the most probable means to preserve it.’47 Yet the union took a very long time to gain acceptance outside the charmed circle of its immediate beneficiaries. As Stanhope put it: ‘Never did a treaty produce more ultimate advantage to a nation; never was any received with such general and thorough hatred.’48 George was fortunate that the number of Scots appreciating the benefits of the union increased with every year that passed. Semiotic evidence of the Lowlands rallying to the new dynasty could be seen later in the century in street names – Hanover Street, George Street, Queen Street, Frederick Street.49 There were enough unreconciled Catholics and Episcopalians to keep the threat of sedition alive, but – as the failed Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1719 showed – there were not enough of them to pose a serious threat. George appears to have taken little interest in his northern kingdom. He never went there and abolished the post of Secretary of State for Scotland established by the Act of Union. He did, however, direct that £20,000 of the income he derived from confiscated Jacobite estates should be spent on providing schools in the Highlands.50

  Nor did Ireland engage his attention, his low opinion revealed by his ranking an English knighthood above an Irish peerage.51 Like most of his English subjects, he appears to have regarded the country as a colony to be exploited: for example, he gave his German mistress Melusine the Irish coinage concession, which she promptly sold on to an unscrupulous entrepreneur, making a profit of £10,000 in the process.52 In 1720 George gave his royal assent to the ‘Declaratory Act’, which both strengthened and made explicit English ascendancy. Entitled ‘An Act for the better securing the dependency of the Kingdom of Ireland on the Crown of Great Britain’, it asserted the right of the Westminster Parliament to legislate for Ireland ‘in all cases whatever’ and abolished the appellate jurisdiction of the Irish House of Lords in Irish matters. Even the English-born Protestant Bishop of Derry found this ‘somewhat hard of digestion’ and reported that ‘a seditious spirit is arisen and grown rampant amongst us which is daily animating the populace to assert their Irish liberties’.53 One brief flash of responsible rule came when George rejected as ‘ridiculous’ a proposal that Catholic priests caught proselytizing should be castrated.54 In the event, there was no serious disturbance in Ireland during his reign, although the discrimination against Catholics, who made up 75 per cent of the population but owned only 14 per cent of the land, allowed a running sore to go on festering.

  Paradoxically, whether dormant in Ireland or active in Scotland, the Jacobites had done lucky George a good turn. Had there been no Catholic threat, his reception would have been even cooler than it actually was. A fifty-four-year-old German, physically unimpressive, without a trace of charisma, accompanied by an equally alien retinue, and with very little or no English was never going to find it easy to endear himself to his new subjects. Journalists of all stripes had a field day. One verse from The Blessings attending George’s accession neatly sums up some of the more popular charges laid against him:

  Hither he brought the dear Illustrious House;

  That is, himself, his pipe, close stool and louse;

  Two Turks, three Whores, and half a dozen nurses,

  Five hundred Germans, all with empty purses.55

  The ‘two Turks’ were Mohammed and Mustapha (spellings vary), originally prisoners of war. They were more like personal assistants than valets, for their duties went well beyond attending to his wardrobe and hygiene. Mohammed also looked after his personal accounts and acted as his gatekeeper. George clearly had a high opinion of them, preserving their images for posterity on the staircase fresco in Kensington Palace and securing a title of nobility for Mohammed from the Emperor Charles VI (as Georg Ludwig Maximilian Mohammed von Königstreu, which can be translated as ‘Loyal to the King’). Such an unusual arrangement had tongues wagging about them being kept ‘for abominable uses’.56

  On the other hand, there was much malicious gossip about the two most prominent ladies in George’s entourage – Melusine von der Schulenburg, nicknamed ‘the Maypole’ because she was tall and slim; and Sophia Charlotte von Kielmansegg, nicknamed ‘the Elephant’ because she was short and stout. The former had been George’s mistress for more than two decades by the time she arrived in England, bearing him three daughters, all of whom accompanied their parents and were lodged at St James’s Palace. Sophia Charlotte, however, was
not George’s mistress, as was generally asserted, but his half-sister, the illegitimate offspring of his father, Elector Ernst August.57 George put her husband, Johann Adolf Baron von Kielmansegg, in charge of the royal stables, although he was barred from an official post by the Act of Settlement. The new arrivals benefited in other ways. Melusine became successively Duchess of Munster and Duchess of Kendal; Sophia Charlotte became Countess of Leinster and Countess of Darlington. They were also undoubtedly – and notoriously – venal, accepting bribes from all and sundry to influence George.58 Given that George had divorced and then locked up his own wife for adultery, his seedy private life did nothing to burnish his image with a public that increasingly disapproved of sexual impropriety. This was the era of the Society for the Reformation of Manners (founded 1691), the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (1698) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (1701). The dread ‘English Sunday’ antedated the Victorians by a century and more. As one caustic German observer remarked in 1710, sabbatarian observance provided the only indication that England was a Christian nation.59

  In short, very few of George’s new subjects were devoted to his person. They did not need to be. It was not what he was, but what he was not that mattered. He was not a Stuart, he was not a Catholic, and he was not a French puppet. So anyone contemplating the admittedly imperfect sovereign could reflect that he might be a lot worse. It is a point well made by Graham Gibbs: ‘Whatever the blemishes of the Hanoverians, and they seemed numerous at the beginning of George I’s reign, and continued to seem numerous under his successors, they seemed as dust in the balance compared with the awfulness of the Stuart alternative.’60 So every Jacobite riot served to remind every British Protestant of the dangers of allowing disaffection to tip over into sedition. Well-publicized (and exaggerated) reports of Catholic oppression on the continent – the Heidelberg crisis of 1719 or the ‘Thorn Massacre’ in 1724, for example – helped to keep anti-papist paranoia alive.61 Government-friendly newspapers made sure that George’s credentials as Defender of the (Protestant) Faith were reinforced: ‘His Majesty being determined to take all imaginable measures to redress the grievances of the oppress’d Protestants in the Empire, holds a Privy Council twice a week during his residence in Germany.’62