George I

by Tim Blanning

  Secondly, once released from the war against France by the Peace of Baden of September 1714, George could redirect the Hanoverian army of about 15,000 veterans to lend muscle to his diplomatic initiatives. Thirdly and most importantly, he could now draw on the incomparably greater resources of his new kingdom. Here he knew he had to be careful. The Act of Settlement of 1701 had expressly forbidden any use of English troops in the service of ‘any dominions or territories which do not belong to the Crown of England, without the consent of Parliament’. Luckily for George, the interests of his two dominions intersected. Not for the first time, the mercurial Charles XII had come to the assistance of his enemies. Even before George had reached England, the Council of Regency had called on him to take action to correct ‘the unfortunate condition of your subjects of Great Britain trading to the Balticke Sea, whose ships and effects are daily seized by the Swedish men of war and privateers’.22 In 1714 alone, Swedish privateers had seized 107 British ships in the Baltic.23 Just to show that this could not be explained away as freelance piracy, in February 1715 Charles helped by issuing an ‘Ordinance of Privateers’. As the British resident at Stockholm pointed out, this meant that no merchant vessel could enter the Baltic without being made a prize.24 George was both unscrupulous and skilful in exploiting this grey area. In May he took advantage of Frederick IV’s fear of a Sweden rejuvenated by the return of Charles XII to extract an agreement that both Bremen and Verden would be ceded to Hanover in return for his electorate joining the war and a substantial cash payment.25 Although no mention was made of naval assistance, Sir John Norris was sent to the Baltic with a powerful squadron of twenty warships, seven of them ships of the line.26 In the official instructions he took with him, there was mention only of escorting a convoy and breaking the Swedish blockade of the eastern Baltic ports. It is very likely, however, that Norris was given orders from King George orally by Robethon or Bernstorff, or both, to take a much more forward line against the Swedes.27

  Thus began several years of complex diplomacy and intermittent military activity. Their tortuous course was complicated by intense personal animosity. Each of the major players – George, his son-in-law Frederick William I, King of Prussia, Peter the Great and Charles XII – was a strong character with a depressing capacity for hatred. The violent antipathy the first three showed to their heirs was replicated in their relations with each other, Charles being exempted from this club of monstrous fathers only by his unwillingness or inability to procreate. The difficulty George experienced in persuading his son-in-law to honour agreements stemmed as much from mutual dislike as from a clash of interests. A massive stroke of luck for all concerned was the violent death of Charles XII on 30 November 1718. His unpredictability and sheer love of warfare meant that there could be no prospect of a durable peace so long as he was alive. Equally mercurial was the terrifying Tsar Peter, whose quixotic support for the despotic Duke of Mecklenburg, reinforced by a Russian army wintering in the duchy to the east of Hanover, caused George and the Hanoverians acute anxiety in 1716–17.

  After years of inconsequential toing and froing, it all came together for George in the summer of 1719. With Sweden weakened by domestic political instability following the death of Charles, and threatened now with an imminent Russian invasion, Queen Ulrika Eleonora and her ministers were at last receptive to George’s demands. In return for naval and diplomatic assistance and a substantial cash payment, on 29 August a treaty was signed ceding Bremen and Verden to Hanover. Decisive in closing the deal was the appearance off Stockholm of Sir John Norris and fifteen ships of the line to scare off the Russians.28 It was facilitated by the artful diplomacy of Lord Carteret, whose arguments were reinforced by hefty bribes paid to Swedish senators.29 There was more success for Carteret and his superior, Secretary of State Stanhope, in the summer of the following year, when they mediated peace between Denmark and Sweden. It was also their last, for they proved unable to make good their promise to the Swedes to force Peter the Great to disgorge at least some of the territory he had conquered. When the Great Northern War came to an end with the Peace of Nystad on 30 August 1721, Russian domination of the eastern Baltic was confirmed.30

  Two questions remain. Firstly, could George have secured Bremen and Verden for Hanover if he had not been King of England? The answer to that must be an emphatic no. Without the formidable combination of British diplomacy and the Royal Navy, Sweden could not have been coerced, Prussia could not have been brought on side, and a Russian veto could not have been excluded. Secondly, were British interests sacrificed to Hanover? The answer here is less unequivocal. Given Swedish attacks on British commerce, it was clearly advantageous for Bremen and Verden to be transferred to Hanoverian ownership, at least in the short term. Charles XII had demonstrated his hostility to Britain in general and George in particular by his encouragement of privateering and support for the Jacobites. This Anglophobia may well have been structural as well as personal, for Sweden had long been a traditional ally of France, and was to remain so. It was less obvious that Russian hegemony in the Baltic was preferable to Swedish. That the importance of the Baltic as a source of naval stores increased rapidly with the expansion of the navy and merchant marine, and that British trade with the region boomed throughout the following century, does not prove very much, for this might have happened anyway.

  More generally, it can be argued plausibly that Tory complaints that the Hanoverian lands acted as an incubus, sucking Britain into costly continental wars, were misplaced. Quite apart from the substantial human and material resources offered by the electorate in wartime, the need to safeguard its interests prevented that instinctive isolationism that is never glorious and often very dangerous. As Brendan Simms has concluded, ‘the Hanoverian connection not only enabled Britain to defeat the continental hegemons but was actually essential to the defence of her overseas empire’.31 William Pitt the Elder was right to claim, following the victories of the Seven Years War, that ‘had the armies of France not been employed in Germany, they would have been transported to America … America had been conquered in Germany’.32

  Away from the Baltic, Hanoverian interests were less influential. Perhaps surprisingly, the Great Northern War and the War of the Spanish Succession had run on parallel tracks that rarely threatened to converge. The latter had come to a messy end, leaving a messy peace that needed to be tidied up. The Habsburg Emperor Charles VI had refused to accept the separate peace made by Britain and the Dutch Republic, insisting on fighting a further fruitless year before succumbing to reality at the Peace of Rastatt in March 1714.33 Symptomatic of its inconclusive nature was the refusal of Charles to recognize Philip V as King of Spain, referring to him instead as the ‘Duke of Anjou’, and the reciprocal insult offered by Philip when referring to Charles as ‘Archduke’. After a generation of immensely destructive wars, it was in everyone’s interest to promote formal peace into actual pacification. To the fore were King George and his British ministers, determined to establish long-term stability, if necessary by active intervention in continental affairs.

  Their watchword was the ‘balance of power’, a protean but popular concept that had just appeared for the first time in an international treaty when the Peace of Utrecht proclaimed that its aim was ‘to settle and establish the peace and tranquillity of Christendom by an equal balance of power (which is the best and most solid foundation of a mutual friendship, and of a concord which will be lasting on all sides)’.34 It was underpinned by the belief that a change in one part of Europe affected the whole, and so the whole must be monitored by all. More specifically, it meant that any threat of that great bugbear ‘universal monarchy’ must be countered by a coalition of the threatened. In Trevelyan’s succinct definition, it was ‘the need to secure the safety of our small island by preventing the predominance of any one state on the Continent’.35 As practised by William III, that meant organizing armed resistance to the overweening power of Louis XIV. It was an activist policy graphically advocated by
the Whig polemicist John Toland: ‘as for the Balance we must undoubtedly do our best to preserve it steddy, or if the rest of Europe falls into one Scale, we must soon be deprest by the irresistible Weight; and if we stand by, as unconcern’d Spectators, till this work is done, the greatest favor we must expect from our Neutrality, will be, like Ulysses in the Cave of Polyphemus, to be the last devour’d, which is but a miserable and unmanly Consolation’.36 It was a belief shared by Tories, for example by Bolingbroke, who in 1727 lauded the balance of power as one of ‘the original, everlasting principles of British politics’.37

  Given this objective, George was lucky to come to the throne at a time when the War of the Spanish Succession had just denied hegemony to both Habsburgs and Bourbons. He could step forward as the ‘rejoicing third’ (tertius gaudens), holding the balance between the two. The mission he chose to accept was to reconcile the two former combatants by dealing with the unresolved issues and thus make the world, especially the Mediterranean, safe for British merchants. Unfortunately, he was confronted by two exceptionally intractable rulers. Charles VI had reigned in Spain for six years and could not accept the loss, symbolically imposing the gloomy Spanish etiquette on his new court in Vienna, to which he moved on the death of his brother Joseph in 1711. The priapic new King of Spain, Philip V, was in thrall to his lusty second wife Elizabeth Farnese of Parma, whom he married in 1714. Using sex to dominate her husband to a degree achieved by very few consorts, she exploited the resources of her new country to carve out a patrimony for the two sons she bore him – Don Carlos in 1716 and Don Philip in 1720. Neither seemed likely to succeed to the Spanish throne, as Philip already had two surviving sons by his first marriage, so she turned her attention to Italy.38 On the credit side, George could draw on the support of the French regent, the Duke of Orléans, ever anxious to protect his chance of succeeding to the throne if the infant Louis XV should die.

  A first success for British diplomacy was the ‘Barrier Treaty’ of November 1715, an agreement between Charles VI and the Dutch Republic to assign to the latter a number of fortresses in the Austrian Netherlands to serve as a bulwark against any future French invasion (when it came, in 1745, they proved to be useless). Extended negotiations with France followed, resulting in a treaty of November 1716, by which the French agreed to renounce any further support for the Jacobites, send the Pretender across the Alps to Rome and co-operate with the British in resolving international disputes. An early bonus for George was assistance in the Baltic for the assertion of Hanoverian interests against Russia.39 The two new allies, intermittently supported by the Dutch, now turned their attention to banging Habsburg and Bourbon heads together. Charles VI proved the more amenable, not least because from early 1716 he was at war with the Turks. In August 1718, he joined the so-called ‘Quadruple Alliance’ with France and Britain to impose a settlement on the recalcitrant Spanish.40 In the previous year, the latter had taken advantage of Austrian preoccupation with the Balkans to invade and occupy Sardinia. In 1718 they repeated the exercise in Sicily.

  The arrival of Nemesis was not long delayed. Her first appearance came on 11 August 1718, when a British squadron commanded by Admiral Byng destroyed the Spanish fleet off Cape Passaro, capturing seven ships of the line in open waters and then destroying the remaining seven that sought refuge inshore. Two years of horror followed for Sicily, both for the marooned Spanish army and their involuntary hosts, until the inevitable surrender was signed. Meanwhile, in 1719 a British expeditionary force landed in Galicia, taking Vigo and Pontevedra, and a French army invaded the Basque country, taking San Sebastian. Very reluctantly, Philip V and his queen capitulated. The long-delayed adjustments to the Utrecht-Rastatt-Baden treaties now followed. Philip V renounced any claims to Italy or the southern Netherlands, but the succession to the duchies of Parma and Tuscany was assigned to Don Carlos; Charles VI finally abandoned his claim to the Spanish throne but received Sicily; Victor Amadeus II of Savoy had to give up the latter but received Sardinia in exchange and kept his royal title. Given the long-standing hostility between the two peace-makers, this imposition of a pax franco-britannica on Europe was nothing less than remarkable and showed what could be achieved when the ‘natural and necessary enemies’ (as Lord Stair described France and Britain in 1717) co-operated.41

  By 1721 there was peace in the north and peace in the south, but implementing the small print of the agreements proved problematic. An international congress planned to assemble at Cambrai in 1722 did not actually start until 1724 and then got nowhere.42 Part of the problem was the growing reluctance of Spain to trust the peace-makers and a corresponding willingness to try direct negotiations with Vienna. This process was accelerated in 1725 by an episode exemplifying the fairy-tale character of dynastic diplomacy. In 1721 the eleven-year-old Louis XV had been engaged to the four-year-old Spanish Infanta Mariana Victoria, daughter of Philip V and Elizabeth Farnese. This had been an initiative of Regent Orléans, who was eager to keep his royal charge from procreating for as long as possible. Following his death in 1723, King Louis’s new chief minister, the Duke of Bourbon, was just as keen to see a royal heir produced as soon as possible, so the engagement was cancelled and the Infanta returned to Spain. Not unreasonably, the Spanish took violent exception to this insult. Charles VI responded to their advances promptly and a treaty of alliance was agreed at the end of April 1725.

  This was very bad news for George. Not only did the Austro-Spanish rapprochement show that his days as arbiter of Europe were over, it also brought the Jacobite spectre back to life. Even more serious was the commercial threat posed by the ‘Ostend Company’, founded by the Austrians in 1722 as a rival to the British East India Company. Already showing signs of promise, the opening of Spanish markets in South America to its ships prompted a declaration by the House of Commons that it was aimed at ‘the entire destruction of the British trade’ and calls from the press to George to ‘destroy this cockatrice whilst young’.43 His response was the ‘Hanover Alliance’, formed in September 1725 by Britain, France, Hanover and Prussia and later joined by the Dutch Republic, Denmark and Sweden. To give it bite, 12,000 Hessian troops were hired for British service.44 When Parliament assembled in January 1726, in his speech from the throne George presented the alliance as promoting both the national interest and the balance of power: ‘by your Support and Assistance, I trust in God, I shall be able not only to secure to My own Subjects the Enjoyment of many valuable Rights and Privileges, long since acquired for them by the most solemn Treaties; but effectually to preserve the Peace and Balance of Europe, the only View and End of all My Endeavours’.45

  Two disappointments in 1726 indicated an uphill struggle. In August, Charles VI secured an alliance with Russia, now ruled by Peter the Great’s widow as Catherine I. In October, Frederick William I of Prussia defected from the Hanover Alliance, lured by Austrian promises of support for his claims to the German duchies of Jülich and Berg. In the longer run, however, more important was the support George received from the French, concerned about the threat to their own East India Company. Together they imposed their will. With Austrian military preparations in chaos, denied support by the Holy Roman Empire and afraid that his Russian alliance was about to collapse following the death of the tsarina, Charles VI ran up the white flag. On 31 May 1727 he agreed to ‘suspend’ the Ostend Company for seven years and to cancel his commercial agreements with the Spanish. A desultory attempt by the latter to besiege Gibraltar was abandoned on 12 June.46 George had died the previous day.

  6

  Conclusion

  As a two-centre sovereign, it was fitting that George should have died in transit. Still apparently hale and hearty at the age of sixty-seven, he had reached Delden in the Dutch Republic on his way back to Hanover when he began to feel unwell. Insisting on proceeding, he was then felled by a stroke, from which he recovered consciousness only long enough to mutter his last words – ‘It’s all up with me’ (C’est fait de moi). He died less than two days l
ater, on 11 June, at Osnabrück. Taking the body back to London for a state funeral does not seem to have been considered. His heart had always been in Hanover figuratively, and that was where it was left physically, buried next to his mother in the family vault of the chapel of the Leine Palace.1

  Also in 1727, Sir James Thornhill completed his great cycle of frescoes in the Painted Hall at Greenwich, on which he had been working for the past twenty years. With good reason this has been hailed as ‘the most effective piece of Baroque decorative painting in England’.2 There are three major frescoes – the ceiling of the Lower Hall depicting William and Mary, the ceiling of the Upper Hall depicting Queen Anne and her consort Prince George of Denmark, and – as a visual climax – the west wall of the Upper Hall depicting George I and his family. Luckily, Thornhill spelled out in some detail exactly what he was representing in a pamphlet entitled An explanation of the painting in the Royal-Hospital at Greenwich. On the side wall of the Upper Hall, Thornhill wrote, he depicted the ‘ACCESSION or Landing of King GEORGE at Greenwich; on his Right-hand is PEACE, on his Left-hand HAPPINESS; he is led on by TRUTH and JUSTICE, RELIGION, and LIBERTY; before him falls REBELLION’. The main fresco depicts Providence presenting George with the sceptre and the goddess Astrea ‘alluding to JUSTICE and the Golden Age restored, who is on her Right-hand pouring forth Riches, etc. from a Cornucopia’, while ‘PEACE and PLENTY are offering at his Majesty’s Feet: the little GENII of PAINTING, POETRY AND MUSICK, represented by the Three young princesses: round the Cornucopia are Prince William and his other Sisters playing with a Dove, shewing the Love and Harmony in this illustrious Family’.3