George I

by Tim Blanning

  Eyebrows must have been raised at such praise for a family patently more dysfunctional than illustrious, but otherwise the images and comments chimed well with the self-image of English public opinion. For in this decorative scheme at Greenwich are to be found all the ingredients of British reason of state – true religion, liberty, property, prosperity, cultural distinction and naval power. There was enough reality supporting this baroque hyperbole to save it from ridicule. Indeed, the Painted Hall became a major tourist attraction. Even before the frescoes were complete, Richard Steele made the trip downstream with a party of friends to view ‘that famous Ceiling’ and recorded ‘the whole raises in the Spectator the most lively Images of Glory and Victory, and cannot be beheld without much Passion and Emotion’.4

  Although George’s visual apotheosis was certainly more than he deserved, it did advertise how lucky he had been. Born to the youngest of four sons of a minor duke, one stroke of good fortune after another had taken him to be, first, one of the most prestigious princes in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and then the sovereign of three kingdoms and thus ruler of what was rapidly becoming the most prosperous and powerful empire in the world. Admittedly, most of the heavy lifting had been done before he reached London, and much of the subsequent achievement must be credited to the talented ministers he inherited. Yet he should not be dismissed as an accidental hero. Happily, gone are the days when he could be derided by J. H. Plumb as ‘very stupid, and lacking interest in the arts, save music’.5 Against that crude distortion can be set the judicious verdict of Jonathan Keates: ‘remote and charmless as George may have seemed in public, he was also refined, astute and politically adept, earning loyalty and admiration from his English ministers and universal respect from the various ruling princes of Europe’.6 From Hanover he brought with him a strong will, knowledge and experience of foreign and military affairs, and the kind of unexciting but solid virtues that played well with most of his English subjects. The eighteenth century was to end with most other thrones tottering or in ruins. Only the Hanoverian dynasty had progressed to stand four-square on power, prosperity, religious pluralism and liberty. George I had played a crucial role in that process, mostly for what he was not, but in part for what he was: a king who knew how to ride his luck.

  Illustrations

  1. George I in his coronation robes, by Kneller

  2. The electorate of Hanover

  3. Herrenhausen

  4. George’s father: Elector Ernst August

  5. George’s mother: Electress Sophia

  6. George in 1680, aged twenty

  7. George’s wife Sophia Dorothea with their children, Georg August, the future George II, and Sophia Dorothea, the future Queen of Prussia

  8. Hunting at Göhrde

  9. George with his son Georg August, the future George II, and daughter-in-law Caroline

  10. George and the line of succession

  11. Kensington Palace

  12. Britain as a great power: the Spanish fleet is destroyed at the Battle of Cape Passaro, Sicily, 11 August 1718

  13. Greenwich, the Upper Hall: the glorification of George I and the house of Hanover by James Thornhill

  Notes

  1. HANOVER

  1. Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin, Das Alte Reich 1648–1806, vol. 2: Kaisertradition und österreichische Großmachtpolitik (1684–1745) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997), p. 60.

  2. Georg Schnath, Rudolf Hillebrecht and Helmut Plath, Das Leineschloss: Kloster, Fürstensitz, Landtagsgebäude (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1962), p. 61.

  3. Rosenmarie Elisabeth Wallbrecht, Das Theater des Barock-Zeitalters an den welfischen Höfen Hannover und Celle (Hildesheim: Lax Verlag, 1974), pp. 46–54.

  4. Barbara Arciszewska, The Hanoverian Court and the Triumph of Palladio: The Palladian Revival, Hanover and England c.1700 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2002), p. 40.

  5. Eike Christian Hirsch, Der berühmte Herr Leibniz: Eine Biographie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007), p. 187.

  6. Wallbrecht, Das Theater des Barock-Zeitalters, p. 14.

  7. Marieanne von König (ed.), Herrenhausen: Die königlichen Gärten in Hannover (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006), pp. 23–4.

  8. Annette von Stieglitz, ‘Höfisch-barocke Feste in Herrenhausen’, in Hans-Dieter Schmid (ed.), Feste und Feiern in Hannover (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 1995), p. 109.

  9. Heiko Lass and Margret Scharrer, ‘Selbstdarstellung und Repräsentation der Welfen’, in Jochen Meiners (ed.), Als die Royals aus Hannover kamen, 4 vols (Dresden: Katja Lembke und Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover, 2014), vol. 1: Reif für die Insel – Das Haus vom Herzogtum Braunschweig-Lüneburg auf dem Weg nach London, p. 99.

  10. Carl Möller, ‘Sophie von der Pfalz, “Madame d’Osnabruc” und Garantin der Erhöhung des Welfenhauses’, in Franz-Joachim Verspohl (ed.), Das Osnabrücker Schloss: Stadtresidenz, Villa, Verwaltungssitz (Osnabrück: Rasch, 1991), p. 119.

  11. Hirsch, Der berühmte Herr Leibniz, p. 182.

  12. Ragnhild Hatton, George I: Elector and King (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), p. 29.

  13. Andrew C. Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest 1688–1756 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), p. 49.

  14. Georg Schnath (ed.), Briefwechsel der Kurfürstin Sophie von Hannover mit dem preussischen Königshause (Berlin: K. J. Koehler, 1927), p. 11.

  15. See the correspondence between Sophia and her brother, the Elector of the Palatinate, in Eduard Bodemann (ed.), Briefwechsel der Herzogin Sophie von Hannover mit ihrem Bruder, dem Kurfürsten Karl Ludwig von der Pfalz und des letzteren mit seiner Schwägerin der Pfalzgräfin Anna (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1885), pp. 361–2.

  16. Eduard Bodemann (ed.), ‘Briefe an den kurhannoverschen Minister Albr. Phil von dem Bussche von der Herzogin [Kurfürstin] Sophie, der Erbprinzessin Sophie Dorothee [Herzogin von Ahlden], der Aebtissin von Herford: Elisabeth von der Pfalz, Leibniz und der Frau von Harling, aus den Jahren 1677–1697’, Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Niedersachsen (1882), p. 148.

  17. Hatton, George I, p. 49.

  18. Georg Schnath, ‘Der Fall Königsmarck. Leben, Ende und Nachlaß des Grafen Philipp Christoph Königsmarck im Licht neuer Funde’, in Ausgewählte Beiträge zur Landesgeschichte Niedersachsens (Hildesheim: A. Lax, 1968), pp. 53–9.

  19. Ibid., pp. 87–8. This is the most authoritative account of the affair. Schnath, archivist in Hanover, was able to show that the correspondence between Sophia Dorothea and Königsmarck discovered much later in a Swedish archive was genuine. Hatton, George I, p. 59, states that Montalban was given 150,000 talers, an improbably large sum, but this may be a misprint.

  20. The most authoritative verdict is that of Graham Gibbs: ‘Georg Ludwig seems to have played no part in the killing of Königsmarck on 1 July 1694’, G. C. Gibbs, ‘George I (1660–1727)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn May 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10538, accessed 26 October 2016].

  21. Martin Wrede, ‘The House of Brunswick-Lüneburg and the Holy Roman Empire: The making of a patriotic dynasty 1648–1714?’, in Andreas Gestrich and Michael Schaich (eds), The Hanoverian Succession: Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 50–51.

  22. Hirsch, Der berühmte Herr Leibniz, p. 172.

  23. Michael-Andreas Tänzer, Arne Homann and Jens Mastnak, ‘ “Unsere brave Leute, so geblieben, werden nirgends gedacht, noch die lebendige gerümbt” – Krieg als Mittel welfischer Politik’, in Meiners (ed.), Als die Royals aus Hannover kamen, vol. 1, p. 73.

  24. Dietmar Storch, Die Landstände des Fürstentums Calenberg-Göttingen 1680–1714 (Hildesheim: A. Lax, 1972), p. 111.

  25. Gibbs, ‘George I (1660–1727)’.

  26. Luis von Sichart, Geschichte der Königlich-Hannoverschen Armee, vol. 2 (Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1870), pp. 293–6.

  27. R. L. Arkell, Caroline of Ansbach: George the Second’s Queen (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1939), p. 42; Andrew Thompson, George II: King and Elector (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 33.

  28. Quoted in Diary of Mary, Countess Cowper, Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess of Wales (London: John Murray, 1844), p. 24 n. 7.

  29. von Aretin, Das Alte Reich, p. 150.

  30. Sichart, Geschichte der Königlich-Hannoverschen Armee, vol. 2, pp. 248–73.

  31. Characters of the Court of Hannover with A Word or Two of SOME BODY else, which NO BODY has thought on (London: J. Baker, 1714), p. 18.

  2. THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION IN ENGLAND

  1. Quoted in Wallbrecht, Das Theater des Barock-Zeitalters, pp. 15–16.

  2. E. Neville Williams, The Eighteenth-Century Constitution 1688–1715: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 58.

  3. Hatton, George I, pp. 75–7.

  4. R. Pauli, ‘Aktenstücke zur Thronbesteigung des Welfenhauses in England’, Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Niedersachsen (1883), pp. 69–74.

  5. Joseph Hunter (ed.), The diary of Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S, author of The Topography of Leeds (1677–1724), 2 vols (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830), vol. 2, pp. 260–61.

  6. F. Salomon, Geschichte des letzten Ministeriums Königin Annas von England (1710–1714) und der englischen Thronfolgefrage (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Berthes, 1894), p. 66; Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1984), p. 363. Anne was the daughter of James II and his first wife, Anne Hyde; James the Pretender was the son of James II and his second wife, Mary of Modena.

  7. H. T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke (London: Constable, 1970), pp. 117–18.

  8. Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill, The Atterbury Plot (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 6; Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), p. 42.

  9. Henry Hallam, The Constitutional History of England (London: Ward, Lock, Bowde, 1893), p. 739; G. M. Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne, vol. 1: Blenheim (London: Longmans Green, 1965), p. 185.

  10. Graham C. Gibbs, ‘Union Hanover/England. Accession to the throne and change of rulers: determining factors in the establishment and continuation of the personal union’, in Rex Rexheuser (ed.), Die Personalunionen von Sachsen-Polen 1697–1763 und Hannover-England 1714–1837: Ein Vergleich (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), p. 249.

  11. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud 1573–1645, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 71.

  12. Louis-Charles Fougeret de Montbron, Préservatif contre l’anglomanie (‘À Minorque’, 1757), p. 52.

  13. Quoted in David Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 484.

  14. James Gutheridge, The Church of England’s, or the Plain Man’s Advice to the Jacobites with a True Account of His Imperial Majesty, King George’s Pedigree, His High and Noble Qualifications, and of His Royal Highness George Prince of Wales. With some Remarks on the Church of Rome (London, 1716), pp. 10–11.

  15. James Drake, The history of the last Parliament. Began at Westminster, the tenth day of February, in the twelfth year of the reign of King William, An. Dom. 1700, 2nd edn (London, 1702), p. 29. On the similarity of transubstantiation and consubstantiation, see Francis Atterbury’s incendiary pamphlet English advice to the freeholders of England (London, 1714), p. 20.

  16. Gibbs, ‘Union Hanover/England’, p. 251.

  17. Adrian Lashmore-Davies (ed.), The Unpublished Letters of Henry St John, First Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vols (London: Taylor and Francis, 2013), vol. 1, p. xi.

  18. Dickinson, Bolingbroke, p. 123.

  19. Ibid., p. 131.

  20. Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 393.

  21. As Lord Stanhope observed, it was Bolingbroke’s ambition to become ‘the modern Alcibiades’. Voltaire claimed that the most famous prostitute in London had exclaimed, when she heard that Bolingbroke had been appointed Secretary of State: ‘7,000 guineas a year my sisters and all for us!’ – Philip Henry Stanhope Earl Stanhope [Lord Mahon], History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, 5th edn, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1858), p. 68.

  22. William Coxe, Memoirs of the life and administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, new edn, vol. 2 (London: Longman, 1816), p. 78.

  23. Quoted in Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 384.

  24. Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, rev. edn (London: A. & C. Black, 1987), p. 283.

  25. Geoffrey Holmes and Daniel Szechi, The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-industrial Britain 1722–1783 (London: Longman, 1993), p. 48; Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 334.

  26. Gibbs, ‘George I (1660–1727)’.

  27. Storch, Die Landstände des Fürstentums Calenberg-Göttingen, pp. 16, 108–9, 115–16, 141–6.

  28. Ragnhild Hatton believed that she could show that George had a much better grasp of English than had been previously assumed, but her evidence was challenged effectively in a review by W. A. Speck in The English Historical Review, 94, 373 (October 1979), pp. 866–8.

  29. Gibbs, ‘George I (1660–1727)’.

  30. W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England 1714–1760 (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 171.

  31. Quoted in Hannah Smith, ‘The Hanoverian Succession and the Politicisation of the British Army’, in Gestrich and Schaich (eds), The Hanoverian Succession, p. 222.

  32. Basil Williams, Stanhope: A Study in Eighteenth-Century War and Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), pp. 175–83.

  33. Stanhope, History of England, vol. 1, p. 159.

  34. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?, p. 396.

  35. Christopher Duffy, ‘The Jacobite wars 1708–1746’, in Edward M. Spiers, Jeremy Crang and Matthew Strickland (eds), A Military History of Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), p. 353.

  36. Daniel Szechi, The Jacobites (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 78.

  37. Stanhope, History of England, vol. 1, p. 183.

  38. Edward Gregg, ‘James Francis Edward (1688–1766)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edn May 2012 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14594, accessed 3 October 2016].

  39. ‘Never was the wisdom of this ministry more clearly demonstrated than in the way in which it handled the Jacobite rebellion’, J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, vol. 1: The Making of a Statesman (London: Cresset, 1956), p. 217.

  40. J. H. Shennan, Philippe, Duke of Orléans, Regent of France 1715–23 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), p. 54.

  41. H. T. Dickinson, ‘The Jacobite challenge’, in Michael Lynch (ed.), Jacobitism and the ’45 (London: Historical Association, 1995), p. 8.

  42. Quoted in Speck, Stability and Strife, p. 152. As Speck concludes, ‘For all the talk of popular Jacobitism, there is precious little evidence for it’ (p. 166).

  43. Williams, Stanhope, pp. 325–7.

  44. T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700–2000 (London: Allen Lane, 1999), pp. xx–xxi.

  45. Howard Nenner, The Right to be King: The Succession to the Crown of England 1603–1714 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 240.

  46. T. C. Smout, ‘The road to union’, in Geoffrey Holmes (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 192.

  47. Gabriel Glickman, ‘Jacobitism and the Hanoverian monarchy’, in Gestrich and Schaich (eds), The Hanoverian Succession, p. 241.

  48. Stanhope, History of England, vol. 1, p. 62.

  49. Devine, The Scottish Nation, p. 29.

  50. Hatton, George I, p. 116, 179 n.

  51. Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 153.

  52. Hatton, George I, p. 154.

  53. T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan (eds), A New History of Ireland, vol. 4: Eighteenth-Century Ireland 1691–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 111.

  54. Hatton, George I, p. 290 n.

  55. Quoted in Speck, Stability and Strife, p. 1
74.

  56. Lucy Worsley, Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace (London: Faber, 2010), pp. 30, 83, 125, 130; Hatton, George I, p. 132.

  57. Strangely, this old canard was repeated by J. H. Plumb – Sir Robert Walpole, vol. 1, p. 198 – which suggests that, not only did he know nothing of the German literature on George I, but he had not read all of the English-language material either. For an accurate biography see Matthew Kilburn, ‘Kielmansegg, Sophia Charlotte von, suo jure countess of Darlington and suo jure countess of Leinster (1675–1725)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edn January 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/76310, accessed 4 October 2016].

  58. Hatton, George I, pp. 148, 155.

  59. Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne, vol. 1, p. 80.

  60. Gibbs, ‘Union Hanover/England’, p. 272.

  61. Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, pp. 96–8.

  62. Jeremy Black, ‘The Catholic Threat and the British Press in the 1720s and 1730s’, Journal of Religious History, 12 (1983), p. 371.

  3. COURT, COUNTRY AND FAMILY MATTERS

  1. Quoted in John M. Beattie, The English Court in the Reign of George I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 9.

  2. Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture 1714–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 70.

  3. Ibid., p. 68; H. M. Colvin and John Newman, ‘The royal palaces, 1660–1782’, in H. M. Colvin, J. Mordaunt Crook, Kerry Downes and John Newman, The History of the King’s Works, vol. 5 (London: HMSO, 1976), p. 195.

  4. Worsley, Courtiers, pp. 57, 77, 80–100.

  5. David McKitterick, Cambridge University Library: A History, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 17, 151.

  6. Victor Morgan, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. 2: 1546–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 249; L. S. Sutherland, ‘The Curriculum’, in L. G. Mitchell and L. S. Sutherland (eds), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 5: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 474.