George I

by Tim Blanning

  The victims included not just City financiers but the needy and the greedy from all walks of life and every part of the country. Of course they looked for guilty men to punish and they did not have far to search. Not only parliamentary palms had been greased to get the legislation through, the corruption went right to the top. The Duchess of Kendal had received £15,000 of company stock on the (correct) assumption that she would recommend the scheme to her royal bedfellow; their two younger daughters received £5,000 worth each.35 George himself had cannily quintupled his money, buying a first subscription of £20,000 and selling it for £106,400.36 None of this could be kept secret and the stories grew with the telling. The dynasty wobbled. It was not only Jacobites who believed that if the Pretender had chosen this moment to appear in England, he would have met little resistance.37

  Luckily for George, Walpole was on hand to save him. Although he did dabble in South Sea stock, not very successfully, he had played no part in the preparation of the legislation and did not join the government until after it had become law. Untainted by association with the band of knaves and fools who had inflated the Bubble, in the course of the winter of 1720–21 he devised a rescue package which drew some of the sting of angry investors and restored stability to the markets.38 Perhaps more important were his repeated interventions in Parliament to shelter the king’s servants from the wrath of the dispossessed, earning him the ironic but admiring nickname ‘The Skreen-Master General’. The directors of the South Sea Company were thrown to the wolves, their great estates confiscated and sold, but, of the politicians, only the Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Aislabie, was punished severely. A huge slice of luck for Walpole was Stanhope’s death. Not only did this put a convenient scapegoat out of reach, it also removed one of the two ministers senior to Walpole in George’s pecking order. The other was Sunderland, whom Walpole dealt with ingeniously by smothering him with kindness. It was thanks to another of his bravura performances in the House of Commons that Sunderland escaped censure. Walpole got the best of both worlds: the gratitude of the king for saving his first minister, but the removal from office of a rival too damaged to continue. The way was now clear for him gradually to become so undisputedly the leader of the ministry as to earn the sobriquet ‘the first British Prime Minister’.

  This did not happen overnight. Townshend remained an equally prominent figure in the government; indeed there is evidence that George preferred him, making his son Horatio a peer in 1723 and himself a Knight of the Garter in 1724. For this latter honour Walpole had to wait until 1726. Relations between the two men began to fray once they were back in power. The death of Dolly, Walpole’s sister and Townshend’s wife, from smallpox in March 1726 severed the last thread, although it was not until the next reign that Townshend returned to Norfolk to devote himself full-time to agricultural improvement and acquire the title ‘Turnip Townshend’.39 Walpole also saw off a challenge from the younger generation in the attractive shape of John, Lord Carteret, who commended himself to George by his charm and amazing (for an Englishman) linguistic skills, including an ability to converse in fluent German. A successful diplomatic mission to Sweden in 1719–20 (of which more below) confirmed him as the coming man and he was made Secretary of State for the Southern Department in 1721 at the age of thirty. Alas, his brilliance was not supported by the more mundane qualities necessary for survival in the Westminster jungle. As Lord Hervey commented, he was ‘marvellous … in spirit and in words’, but ‘a man that almost every body commends and no body is a friend to’.40 Outmanoeuvred by Walpole, he was sent off to be Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1724.

  As we have seen, George was very lucky to find so many able politicians to do his work. Not surprisingly, it took him some time to adjust to the very different pace of political life in London. The lesson he learned was that, although he undoubtedly had the right to choose his ministers, he could not keep them in office if they lost control of the House of Commons. That was how Walpole came to the top of the heap, and that was why he refused promotion to the House of Lords – at least until he eventually fell from power in 1742. There was more to this, however, than his wonderful ability to work the patronage system and dazzle the country members with his oratory. In an exceptionally penetrating passage in his great work The Financial Revolution in England, Peter Dickson identified Walpole’s essential contribution to the success of the reign of George I (and of the Hanoverians who followed him). Walpole saw that England’s victory in the wars of 1688–1713 stemmed from a de facto alliance between the landed and the monied interests. Through Parliament, the former voted the huge taxes and loans needed for military and naval success. Through the City of London, the latter provided the expertise necessary to sustain a war effort out of all proportion to the country’s relatively modest population. Each resented the other, but each needed the other. It was Walpole’s insight that he must allow all to feel that the government fundamentally represented their interest, however much they might criticize individual measures. So he kept the land tax low and did not pursue Stanhope’s more ambitious schemes for Nonconformist emancipation, but he also passed acts of indemnity to protect religious dissenters and cultivated good relations with the great merchants and financiers of the City.41 Against this judicious alliance, even Tories as eloquent as Bolingbroke railed in vain. In any case, their assumption of a radical division between old and new forms of wealth was increasingly out of date, as monied men bought land and landowners invested in commerce. Nor could Parliament be accused of being representative only of land, for over a hundred parliamentary boroughs were ports or fishing towns.42

  5

  The Sinews of Power and Foreign Policy

  George came from an electorate whose economy was modestly prosperous but torpid. In England he encountered a dynamic kingdom well on the way to becoming the workshop and counting-house of the world. When Daniel Defoe made his tour through England and Scotland, beginning in 1722, he was aware that he was travelling through a single national economy. Unlike in almost every other European country, there were no internal customs barriers. The tax imposed on coal brought to London from the north-east to finance the building of St Paul’s Cathedral was the exception that proved the rule. On leaving London in 1706, the Venetian ambassador gave this customs union the credit for putting English industry in advance of the rest of Europe.1 It was also an economy united by excellent communications, for no part of Great Britain is more than 70 miles from the coast, a natural asset supplemented by more than 1,000 miles of navigable rivers. The fact that none of the cereal-growing regions were more than two days’ journey away from access to water transport made local agricultural and horticultural specialization possible, with corresponding benefits for productivity.2 If most roads turned into glutinous mud pits when it rained, the rapid expansion after 1695 of turnpikes (which upgraded road services in return for a toll), to reach a network of about 11,000 miles by the middle of the next century, made travel and transport quicker and cheaper.3 In short, man and nature combined to create a national market, in marked contrast to England’s nearest neighbour and chief rival France, memorably described by David Landes as ‘a mosaic of semi-autarkic cells’.4

  The population of England, Wales and Scotland was just short of 7,000,000 in 1714, a total that could easily be fed from local resources. England in particular had been a grain-exporting country since the 1670s and became a heavy exporter after 1714.5 Although there were good years and bad years, all the economic indicators pointed upwards, revealing increases in productivity, income, life expectancy and both physical and social mobility. Between 1700 and 1731 exports went up by 17 per cent and imports by 27 per cent. An involuntary contribution to this growing prosperity was made by the very large numbers of slaves transported across the Atlantic in British ships. In the course of the 1720s alone 211,000 were delivered, to which terrible total another 32,000 who died en route must be added. During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the industrial economy expanded by 15
per cent, agriculture by about the same amount, overseas trade by 30 per cent, but population by only 9 per cent. A visible increase in prosperity was the result, expressed in many complacent observations. Even before the War of the Spanish Succession had set the seal on British expansion, Defoe had hailed England as the most ‘Diligent Nation in the World, vast Trade, Rich Manufactures, mighty Wealth, universal Correspondence and happy Success has been constant Companions of England, and given us the Title of an Industrious People, and so in general we are’. In A General Treatise of Husbandry and Gardening, published in 1724, Richard Bradley proclaimed: ‘The Improvement of Land, and the Study of Agriculture, have greatly contributed to render our Nation famous above all other Countries.’6 In short, this relatively favourable economic background made a major contribution to the success of the new dynasty.7

  George’s good fortune extended to the exploitation of these burgeoning riches. By 1714 Britain boasted a sophisticated system of public credit and an efficient tax-gathering system. Although the origins of what has rightly been called a ‘financial revolution’ stretched back deep into the seventeenth century, it was the arrival of William III in 1688 that initiated the decisive phase. He brought with him Dutch ideas and a Dutch war. The cost of the first two phases of this ‘Second Hundred Years War’ – the Nine Years War of 1688–97 and the War of the Spanish Succession of 1701–13 – was on a scale never before experienced in English history. The first cost three times as much as Charles II’s war against the Dutch of the 1660s, the second five times as much.8 The national debt stood at zero in 1688; ten years of war ran it up to £17,300,000; and by 1714 it had reached £36,200,000. To manage borrowing on this unprecedented scale, the Bank of England was established in 1694, modelled on the Bank of Amsterdam. That it would be a success was signalled right from the start when the original subscription was filled ‘with almost contemptuous ease’ in ten days, the king and queen heading the lists.9 In 1706 the Lord Treasurer, Godolphin, observed smugly that, while England could borrow all the money it needed at 4–5 per cent, Louis XIV had to pay five times that rate.10 It was a comparison which revealed the superior viability of a parliamentary monarchy: a loan to the English Treasury was guaranteed by Parliament, whose collateral was the total landed wealth of the kingdom; a loan to the King of France was a loan to an individual without any comparable institutional backing, an act of faith rather than a rational investment. By 1712 his credit was exhausted and French finances were ‘on the verge of complete and utter collapse’.11

  As important as loans were taxes. Here too the superior legitimacy conveyed by a parliamentary regime made for efficiency. It was Parliament which approved taxation and it was Parliament’s Commissioners of Public Accounts who scrutinized public income and expenditure. Out in the shires, it was the MPs and their country gentry colleagues who sat on the county land tax commissions to ensure fair play.12 In fact it was often unfair, as the actual as opposed to the nominal rate varied appreciably from one part of the country to another, but it was transparent and ‘exemplified the engagement of key social groups in the country in the fiscal and political process’.13 Moreover, as it had to be voted anew every year, it also guaranteed regular meetings of Parliament. As Martin Daunton has convincingly argued, the secret of an efficient taxation system is trust: ‘taxpayers have little incentive to pay their taxes in the absence of a high degree of “trust” that other taxpayers and the government were fulfilling their obligations’.14 Unlike in France, there were no aristocratic or clerical exemptions and no grandiloquent court culture to destroy trust. On the other hand, there was a real and growing problem of corruption in public life. Everyone knew, or pretended to know, that the wheels of government were lubricated by favours, bribes, perks and kickbacks. A central question, especially for those out of office, was: is parliamentary sovereignty possible without parliamentary corruption?15 Once Walpole and the Whig oligarchs had consolidated their hold on power, this was to become a major issue, fuelling the ‘patriot’ opposition that was to cause George II so many problems. For the time being, despite the malodorous South Sea Bubble affair, parliamentary control seemed to be a sufficient safeguard.

  Direct taxation on land was popular with parliamentarians because it was Parliament that controlled it. Beyond their reach but increasingly important was the revenue generated by customs and excise, whose share rose from two-thirds to three-quarters during the first half of the eighteenth century. The advantages of these forms of indirect taxation were twofold. Firstly, although they were ‘socially regressive’, bearing heaviest on the poor because they were taxes on consumption, the fact that they were paid at the port of entry or in the manufactory and were included in the price meant that they were relatively ‘invisible’. Secondly, they allowed the state to benefit from the expansion of commerce, through customs dues, and from the consumer revolution that was passing excisable commodities such as tea, sugar and tobacco down the social scale to become the necessities of the masses rather than the luxuries of the rich. After 1660 the outsourcing of collection to tax farmers was gradually abandoned. Instead, there developed a network of professionally trained and centrally supervised state employees, whose numbers rapidly increased as the demands of warfare increased. By the time George reached England, there were 1,750 customs officers (a rise of a third since 1690) and 2,247 excise men (up 85 per cent).16 To use a term made popular by John Brewer, this represented the creation of a ‘fiscal-military state’: ‘dependent upon a complex system of measurement and book-keeping, organised as a rigorous hierarchy based on experience and ability, and subject to strict discipline from its central office, the English Excise more closely approximated to Max Weber’s idea of bureaucracy than any other government agency in eighteenth-century Europe’.17

  In short, George entered into a kingdom whose growing riches could be tapped by the state. It was also a kingdom that had just emerged victorious from more than a decade of warfare. The Whigs – and George with them – might whine about ‘the unsuitable conclusion of a war … attended with such unparalleled successes’,18 but the fact was that most war aims had been achieved, along with some unplanned bonuses. The danger of the Spanish and French thrones being united under one sovereign had been averted; the Protestant succession in Britain had been given international recognition; the Pretender had been banished from France; the former ‘Spanish Netherlands’ had been turned into an Austrian-ruled buffer against French expansion and further protected by Dutch-garrisoned fortresses; the conquest of Minorca and Gibraltar had secured naval domination of the western Mediterranean; recognition of British control of the Hudson Bay territory and the return of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland encouraged the belief that all North America could soon be wrested from the French; in the Caribbean the acquisition of the island of St Kitts pointed the way to further expansion; the transfer from France of the right to export African slaves to Spanish colonies (the Asiento de negros) symbolized the defeat of the threat that Spain would become a French satellite. Following naval victories at Vigo Bay in northern Spain in October 1702 and off Malaga in August 1704, Britannia ruled the waves.

  With western and southern Europe now at peace, great-power attention switched to the north and east, where the ‘Great Northern War’ had been raging since 1700 and was showing no signs of abating. No one looked on with keener interest than the Elector of Hanover. Trying to provide a coherent narrative of a conflict whose theatre sprawled from Norway to the Black Sea has defeated generations of historians, yielding only some of the great unreadables of European historiography.19 Using very broad brush-strokes, the war can be summarized as a struggle for the domination of the Baltic Sea between Sweden, whose empire in 1700 covered most of the territory around its eastern and southern shores, and a number of predators led by Peter the Great of Russia. What turned out to be the decisive moment came on 27 June 1709, when the latter inflicted a crushing defeat on Charles XII of Sweden at Poltava in Ukraine. When the news reached Hanover, Leibniz observed: �
�you can imagine how the great revolution in the north has astounded people. It is being said that the Tsar will be formidable to the whole of Europe, that he will be a sort of Turk of the North.’20 That status was delayed, for two years later Peter only narrowly escaped disaster at the hands of the Turks on the River Prut in Moldavia. Fortunately, George’s role in this protracted conflict can be outlined concisely. It should be stressed at the outset that the policies pursued were very much his own. He arrived equipped not only with far more knowledge of the region than his English ministers but with the determination to make use of it. When Townshend tried to take an independent initiative, he was promptly demoted.21

  His main aim was to gain from the wreckage of the Swedish Empire the duchies of Bremen and Verden, two secularized prince-bishoprics assigned to Sweden at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Situated between the Weser and Elbe rivers, whose mouths they commanded, immediately to the north of the main Hanoverian lands, they were extensive, fertile, prosperous and strategically important. In 1712, Frederick IV of Denmark had occupied Bremen and part of Verden, prompting Elector Georg Ludwig to send troops into what was left of the latter. To help him secure both duchies, he could draw on three important assets. Firstly, Hanover was much less vulnerable to Swedish retaliation than was Denmark. Following his defeat at Poltava, Charles XII had taken refuge in the Ottoman Empire, leaving Sweden to manage as best it could without him. But in the very same month that George arrived in England – September 1714 – Charles set out on an amazing return journey, taking just fifteen days to cross Europe from Constantinople to Stralsund on the Baltic. This was bad news for George, but far worse news for Frederick IV.