George I
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Court, Country and Family Matters
The new king came from a court which boasted a magnificent garden at Herrenhausen, but not much else. The modest electoral residence in downtown Hanover could not hold a candle to the palaces of most of George’s fellow German princes. His new quarters were not so very different, except that there was no English equivalent of Herrenhausen. Indeed, the court lacked an architectural framework comparable with even a middling continental state. The main London palace, Whitehall, had been destroyed by a terrible fire in 1697, which had spared only Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House, and had not been rebuilt. Everyone recognized the need for a new royal palace in the capital and many plans were drawn up, but nothing was actually done. St James’s Palace, dating back to the reign of Henry VIII, was not an adequate replacement for Whitehall, consisting of a maze of small rooms. Daniel Defoe commented acidly: ‘so far from having one single beauty to recommend it, ’tis at once the contempt of foreign nations and the disgrace of our own’.1 Throughout George’s reign there were commercial buildings piled up against its walls. They were eventually removed during the next reign, when the stench from a ‘necessary house’ belonging to a tavern became unbearable to its royal neighbours.2
Constrained by the tight limits imposed by the civil list and temperamentally averse to grand display, George was not a great builder. Only at Kensington Palace did he leave an enduring architectural mark. He vetoed Vanbrugh’s plans for a great baroque replacement along the lines of Blenheim, ordering instead a modest reconstruction with two of the storeys completed ‘in the cheapest and plainest manner’ and ‘such repairs as shall be found absolutely necessary (and no other)’.3 With characteristic economy, to decorate the new rooms he commissioned William Kent instead of the better-known but much more expensive Sir James Thornhill. This proved to be a blessing in disguise. Thornhill already had the large spaces of the Painted Hall at Greenwich on which to display his baroque bravura, while Kent took the opportunity to move on to the more restrained classical style favoured by the circle of aesthetes led (and financed) by the Earl of Burlington from which he came. The decoration of the King’s Grand Staircase has been rightly hailed as ‘a masterpiece of mural art’. It is also unusual, presenting the portraits of forty-five court servants high and low, including such oddities as Ulrich Jorry, the Polish dwarf, and ‘Peter the Wild Boy’. Just how much input came from the royal patron cannot be known, but it is certain that George liked Kent’s creation ‘very much’ and approved ‘of everything’.4
Although anything but extravagant, at the very start of his reign George was persuaded by Townshend to spend the large sum of £6,450 to buy the library of John Moore, Bishop of Ely, the finest private collection of books in England. Even more remarkably, he at once gave it away, to the University of Cambridge, whose attachment to the Hanoverians differed sharply from the notoriously Jacobite enthusiasm of the University of Oxford. The gift inspired the following verse by the physician Sir William Browne:
The King to Oxford sent a troop of horse,
For Tories own no argument but force;
With equal care to Cambridge books he sent,
For Whigs allow no force but argument.5
Oxford did, however, also benefit from George’s establishment of Regius Professorships of History at the two English universities in 1724. Alas, many years – decades – were to pass before either recipient turned this largesse to good use. In the meantime, the posts served primarily as additional sources of patronage to help keep the Whig oligarchy running smoothly.6
That was also the function of the court. The importance of a court to the efficient running of an early modern state is not in doubt.7 It was the interface between ruler and elites. It was where the latter came for political influence, patronage, marriage partners and, last but not least, recreation. In the right hands – those of the young Louis XIV, for example – it could be a powerful weapon for the promotion of monarchical authority; in the wrong hands – those of the ageing Louis XIV and his successors, for example – it could become dysfunctional. George fell somewhere between the two. He got off to a bad start by confining his participation in court rituals to a minimum. The ceremonial start to the day – the lever – he curtailed, preferring to be dressed, washed and shaved by Mohammed and Mustapha in the privacy of his bedroom. It was there also that he took his breakfast and spent the morning, reading despatches and other government papers. It was not until midday that he moved to his private study, or ‘closet’, a small room nearby reached by the back stairs, to receive by appointment ministers and other dignitaries.8 However, he did condescend to appear regularly at ‘Drawing Rooms’, evening gatherings of the great and the good, where he played cards or stood at one end of the room conversing with anyone able to speak French.9 His preferred form of relaxation, however, was private suppers with Melusine von der Schulenburg and their children, or visits to the theatre, also with his family, where he watched from a private box. Both formal occasions at court and appearances in public he avoided as much as possible.10 On his return from Hanover in 1723, for example, orders were issued ‘that there may be as little concourse of noisy attendants at his landing, or on the road to London as possible’.11
George had neither the means nor the wish to unfold grandiose representational displays of the kind favoured by so many of his fellow German princes. Back in Hanover, he had closed down the electoral opera company as soon as he succeeded his spendthrift father in 1698, although that was mainly due to the loss of the revenues from the bishopric of Osnabrück which had financed opera in the past.12 In London, he was a frequent attender of the opera performances given by Johann Jakob Heidegger’s company, contributing by paying a premium over and above the regular price of admission. It was not enough to save the enterprise, which collapsed in 1717. George was more forthcoming when its successor was established with the grand title ‘The Royal Academy of Music’, although his support was confined to a royal charter and an annual subsidy of £1,000. Despite its title, it was quite different from the continental court operas, being organized as a joint-stock company with the intention of making a profit. George continued as a regular attender for the rest of his life. The fact that during the first four months of 1727 he saw Handel’s Admeto nineteen times allowed Donald Burrows to conclude that he ‘was either a genuine lover of opera or a masochist’. In the course of his reign, and despite his six lengthy absences in Hanover, George attended fully half of all opera performances given in the capital. By advertising his enthusiasm, George probably did more to promote Handel’s success than by his relatively modest financial support. In 1717 he was directly responsible for one of the most durable of all the composer’s works. The Daily Courant reported that on 17 July George had enjoyed a river outing, travelling from Whitehall upriver to Chelsea in an open barge, accompanied by a second barge in which fifty instrumentalists ‘of all sorts’ played ‘the finest Symphonies, compos’d express for this Occasion by Mr Handel; which his Majesty liked so well, that he caus’d it to be plaid over three times in going and returning’.13 This became known as the Water Music.14
In only one other area that brought him into contact with his elites did George show real enthusiasm. That was hunting. To record that hunting was his ‘passion’ is to understate the case. Since time out of mind it had played a central role in the life of his Guelph ancestors, consuming huge amounts of time and money. Less than a year before her death, George’s eighty-three-year-old mother wrote to her daughter, the Queen of Prussia, that she had just got back from ‘a very fine hunt’ at which she had been in at the death.15 The Hanoverians were fortunate that their lands included some of the best hunting grounds in Europe. Especially in the great oak and beech forests to the west of the River Elbe, game of all kinds teemed on a reserve covering more than 5,000 hectares.16 At Göhrde, its centre, George transformed the existing hunting lodge into a true palace, his most ambitious and expensive building project. It was here that his
court came for two or three months every autumn.17 By the time he had finished in 1712, topping off his work with a splendid theatre, the complex comprised twenty-three buildings with stables for more than 150 horses and kennels for more than 400 hounds (most of them English-bred stag hounds and greyhounds).18 When he reached England, he must have been relieved to find that his enthusiasm was shared by most peers and landed gentry and that an extensive hunting establishment was at his disposal. He made full use of the opportunities offered by the forests around Hampton Court and Windsor, combining a day in the field with visits to the country seats of the local Whig grandees.19 Nor was hunting confined to its traditional supporters, for the royal buckhounds were also followed by City merchants and financiers, professional men and even Anglican prelates.20 Just how much their common pursuit of the stag helped to bond the king with his elites cannot be assessed, but may have helped to demonstrate that when it came to the really important things in life, he was not so alien after all.
In general, however, George made little attempt to adjust from absolutist elector to parliamentary monarch. Aloof, taciturn, perhaps shy, he simply lacked the personality to make his court work as it should. This reticence was not sensible. In a parliamentary monarchy such as the British, with a large and rapidly growing public sphere, the sovereign who neglected public relations made life more difficult than it needed to be. Ironically, it took a vicious family quarrel to persuade George to become sociable. There is no way of knowing when he began to take exception to his eldest son and heir, Georg August, whom he was obliged to make the Prince of Wales on his arrival in England. Against the attractive notion that he had always hated him as the child of his detested ex-wife is the knowledge that he treated the daughter of that ill-starred marriage with patently genuine affection.21 Perhaps it was having to live in such close proximity in the cramped quarters of St James’s Palace that set his teeth on edge. Perhaps it was the knowledge that, as he was an elderly man by the standards of the day, it would probably not be long before the grim reaper forced him to make way for his impatient heir apparent. Relations between rulers and their eldest sons were notoriously fraught. At least George did not follow the example of Peter the Great of Russia, who had the Tsarevich Alexei tortured to death, or the rather less extreme example of Frederick William I of Prussia, who systematically abused Crown Prince Frederick both physically and psychologically.
What was probably long-incubating mutual hostility came into the open in 1716 when George returned to Hanover. As the Jacobite rebellion had only just been suppressed, the English ministers tried to persuade him not to go. He was adamant, his eagerness to return to the land of his birth (and the hunting at Göhrde) not exactly flattering to his new subjects. He was also adamant that the Prince of Wales should not act as a fully fledged viceroy in his absence and forbade him to make appointments or take policy decisions.22 Also offensive was his insistence that the prince’s senior aide, the Duke of Argyll, be dismissed from his service. As the duke was already nursing a grievance over being removed from his military command, this guaranteed that one of the most influential Whig grandees would go into opposition. The Prince of Wales retaliated in two ways. Firstly, in his father’s absence he organized lavish court festivities, entertained on a grand scale, dined in public, went on a royal progress through the home counties to Portsmouth, paraded his knowledge of the English language and generally showed how a king of England ought to behave towards his elites. That he was always accompanied by his intelligent, comely and congenial wife Caroline only served to emphasize the contrast with the gloomy ambience of his father’s entourage.23 Secondly, he encouraged – or at least did nothing to prevent – the formation of a ‘reversionary interest’, that is to say the alternative centre of political identity that always developed around an heir apparent, especially when the incumbent was elderly. As the Victorian Whig historian Henry Hallam sagely observed: ‘from unknown princes men are prone to hope much’.24
King George was in no hurry to return from his electorate, staying on beyond the end of the hunting season and into the winter of 1716–17. Needless to say, there was no shortage of courtiers encouraging him to think the worst of what was going on back in London. They were led by the ambitious and unscrupulous Earl of Sunderland, who insinuated to George that his son and daughter-in-law were ingratiating themselves with the British public at his expense and building their own political party.25 When George got back to England in January 1717, battle commenced. By May, the Prince of Wales was being referred to as ‘the leader of the opposition’, as he gathered around him dissident Whigs and even Tories. His father responded by preventing him from dining in public but also excluding him and his wife from the royal table.26 More subtly, by raising his game at court he showed that a king had the resources to outshine a mere Prince of Wales. The surly recluse metamorphosed into a gorgeous baroque peacock. During the three summer months at Hampton Court, on every Thursday and Sunday there were lavish dinners for up to fifty of those he wished to woo. Every day he made himself available to his courtiers, dining with them, walking with them, playing cards with them. There were special ‘ladies’ days’ and a reception every evening. In short, he was now behaving in the regal manner expected by his subjects.27 When he learned in the autumn that his detested son proposed to go to Newmarket for the racing, he ‘took the sudden resolution of being present at the diversions of that place’, as the Secretary of State, Joseph Addison, recorded.28 The boating expedition which yielded Handel’s Water Music may well have been part of this campaign.
This ‘battle of the courts’ proved to be just the prelude for the major eruption that occurred on 28 November 1717. The occasion was the christening of the Wales’s newborn son. The parents had wanted George’s brother, Ernst August, the Prince Bishop of Osnabrück, to stand as godfather, but the British ministers persuaded the king that tradition required the Lord Chamberlain, the Duke of Newcastle, to serve. Although the Prince of Wales complied with a royal directive to this effect, when leaving the ceremony he turned to Newcastle and hissed, ‘Rascal, I find you out!’ Unfortunately, what Newcastle thought he said was ‘Rascal, I fight you out!’ Naturally timorous, he rushed off to seek royal protection against the prospect of a duel with the heir to the throne. George now exploded, as months and possibly years of hatred boiled over, and he at once ordered his son’s arrest. He called off the yeomen of the guard only when reminded that under English law a writ of habeas corpus prevented arbitrary imprisonment, even when commanded by the sovereign.29
The royal family was now at war, setting a pattern that was to be followed by each succeeding generation of Hanoverians, at least until the twentieth century. The Prince of Wales was banished from St James’s Palace, moving first to rented accommodation in Albemarle Street and then to Leicester House in the eponymous square. His wife Caroline followed him into exile, although George had wanted her to stay at the palace, her charm and beauty more than compensating for her sharp tongue and intimidating intellect. But their three little daughters, aged seven, five and three, were not allowed to go with their parents, nor was their baby brother, the unwitting cause of the rupture. Although the death of the infant prince three months later could not have been prevented, George’s breaking up of the family is difficult to excuse. It does not seem to have been dictated by a grandparent’s doting devotion, for when the eldest of the three girls, Princess Anne, was asked whether the king ever came to visit them, she replied, ‘Oh no, he does not love us enough for that.’30 On learning that the parents had been making clandestine visits to the royal nursery, George at once intervened.31 It was a sad reprise of the cruelty he had shown back in 1694 when he directed that his divorced wife should never be allowed to see their children (then aged seven and ten) again.
For the next three years, this unedifying spectacle continued. At least it kept the king up to the mark at court and the ill wind blew money to those who served its manifold needs. In August 1718, for example, the rumour that the Pri
nce of Wales was about to open a theatre at his summer residence at Richmond and was recruiting a company of actors prompted George to order at once that a rival stage be erected in the Great Hall at Hampton Court and a leading troupe (Steele’s) be summoned to perform on it.32 A more permanent social weapon were the ‘Drawing Rooms’ held three times a week, with George doing his best to be affable. In addition, more ambitious events involving music and dancing were held on a regular basis at Kensington Palace, to which the court moved in the summer. According to one report from there, ‘the ladies say they never see so much company and every body fine, the King very obliging and in great good humour … all the garden illuminated and music and dancing in the Green House and the long Gallery’.33
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Whigs and Tories
Overlapping the family altercation – and helping to intensify it – was a party-political clash, or rather an intra-party-political clash, for George’s accession had turned the country into something approaching a one-party state. As we have seen, on arrival he had signalled a willingness to accommodate the Tories but had been rebuffed. The subsequent treason of Bolingbroke and Ormonde misled him into believing those Whigs who were assuring him that all Tories were Jacobites.1 In reality, most were either supporters of the Hanoverian succession or fence-sitters, getting off on the Hanoverian side when the abject failure of the ‘Fifteen’ made it clear that George had come to stay. It was a bad time to be a Tory. Intense government pressure had ensured that the general election of 1715 turned a very large Tory majority into a rather less large Whig majority.2 Dismissed from their lucrative positions in central government, purged from the localities, abandoned by their leaders, they could only wail and gnash their teeth in the wilderness. Bolingbroke wrote to Jonathan Swift from his French exile in October 1716: ‘they are got into a dark hole, where they grope about after blind guides, stumble from mistake to mistake, jostle against one another and dash their heads against the wall, and all this to no purpose. For assure yourself, that there is no returning to light.’3