The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I (25 page)

The reunion came about not through any inclination on the part of Georg August or his father, but through the machinations and singular might of Robert Walpole’s personality. As Hatton so aptly puts it: ‘Robert Walpole opposed the king and his ministry in order to demonstrate his political power in the House of Commons and force George to restore him to office and the inner cabinet.’ By 1720 a rift within the royal family was no longer convenient, and he determined to bring the row to a close.

Walpole completely dominated the House of Commons. A contemporary noted that his speeches had ‘as much of natural eloquence and of genius . . . as had been heard by any of the
audience within those walls . . . whatever he proposes seldom fails to being pass’d’.
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Mary Cowper recorded in her diary how Walpole courted Melusine with a view to ending the rift. He used a pragmatic and willing Melusine and a reluctant Caroline to bring pressure to bear on the king and the prince – Caroline, deeply upset, felt Georg August had been bribed. In April 1720 Walpole effectively forced a reluctant Georg August to go down on his knees before his father.

A reconciliation within the family and an end, at least formally, to the split within the Whigs was equally beneficial to the ministry. In December 1719 Walpole had almost single-handedly ensured that George’s Peerage Bill (an attempt to restrict the power of the king to increase the size of the House of Lords), engineered by Stanhope and Sunderland, was thrown out, to the fury of the king’s English ministers. In what was widely reputed to be the most brilliant speech of his parliamentary career, he argued that the bill would ‘subvert the whole constitution’ by destroying the ‘due balance between the three branches of the legislature’.
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The longer Walpole stayed in opposition, the harder George would find it to pass any kind of legislation.

Walpole was tempted back to office, chiefly because he needed the money. In turn, the return to power of Walpole and Townsend was sweetened for George and his ministers by an undertaking to pay off the debt of the civil list, which stood at an astounding £600,000 at the beginning of 1720. Walpole drafted the prince’s letter of apology to his father, and as arranged, George immediately agreed to see him. In his father’s private closet he declared that:

it had been a great grief to him to have been in his displeasure so long; that he was infinitely obliged to His Majesty for this permission of waiting upon him, and that he hoped the rest of his life would be such as the king would never have cause to complain of.

A visibly distressed George ‘was much dismayed, pale, and could not speak to be heard but by broken sentences, and said several times, “Votre conduite, votre conduite [Your conduct, your conduct],” but the Prince said he could not hear distinctly anything but those words. The prince went after he had stayed about five minutes in the closet.’
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Following the uncomfortable meeting, father and son, bowing to the demands of public relations, attended the premiere of Handel’s
Radamisto
a week later.

It was a reconciliation of sorts, but emotionally stunted as it was, it was more than enough for Walpole. The courtiers, almost as one, breathed a deep sigh of relief. The days of attempting to please two rival courts were finally over. Mary Cowper recorded the reaction at Leicester House. She ‘found the guards before the door, and the square full of coaches; the rooms full of company, everything gay and laughing; nothing but kissing and wishing of joy’.

But Caroline could not share the joy, for George refused to relinquish her children. She blamed Walpole, and spat at him: ‘Mr Walpole . . . this be no jesting matter for me; you will hear of me and my complaints every day and hour, in every place, if I have not my children again.’
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Caroline was forced to endure a life without her children’s daily presence for seven years. Only after George’s death was she reunited with them.

13.
A Bubble

As fishes on each other prey
,

The great ones swallowing up the small
,

So fares it in the Southern Sea
,

The whale directors eat up all.

– Jonathan Swift,
The South Sea Project
, 1721

Although 1720 marked the year when all was harmony once more in the family – at least superficially – it was also a year of devastating loss for Melusine. In January her youngest brother, Frederick William, died, possibly of a stroke. The newspapers reported that he went to bed well, yet died in his sleep of an ‘apoplexie’. He was buried, because of his high standing with Melusine and George, at Westminster Abbey.

He was only forty years old. He and Melusine were extraordinarily close, not least because he was the only one of her siblings to live with her in London. We know from his letters to Görtz that he was clever, intuitive and observant, and one of the few the discerning George trusted implicitly. Melusine relished his company amidst the often viperous court. They even took holidays together – a newsletter of November 1718 reported that ‘Baron Schulemburg with the Duchess of Munster, his sisters and his niece is returned from drinking the waters beyond the sea [probably at Bad Pyrmont] . . .’

It was also the year that Melusine’s actions did much to tarnish the image of the monarchy. The summer of 1720 saw thousands impoverished and many taking their lives in despair as England suffered the greatest financial crisis in its history – the South Sea Bubble. Melusine was at its heart.

Two other figures who would play a central part in the dramatic events that would soon unfold were Robert Walpole and Charles Townshend. They had re-entered government very much the junior partners to their adversaries Stanhope and Sunderland, despite the camaraderie that seemed to prevail. In a show of political hypocrisy the old enemies were often seen laughing and joking
with their arms around one another. Mary Cowper recorded that there was ‘great hugging and kissing between the two old & two new Ministers’ and they were observed walking ‘all four with their Arms round each other to show they are now all one’.

Walpole had the post of Paymaster General, with a promise of the Treasury when a position next arose, and Townshend became Lord President of the Council. They might have continued in these secondary positions had it not been for some timely deaths and a financial catastrophe that many believed brought England to the brink of revolution. It was in large part the madness of the fever of speculation – the South Sea Bubble – that gripped England in 1720 that cemented Walpole’s political dominance for the next two decades. He appeared – not entirely correctly – as the country’s saviour from financial ruin, and in saving England and George’s monarchy, he also saved Melusine.

We know from our own times how intoxicating financial bubbles can be, irresistible ‘get rich quick’ schemes that promise fabled riches. Entire populations seem to succumb to lunacy in the single-minded pursuit of wealth. As Charles Mackay puts it: ‘We find whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it . . .’
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Tulip Mania in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, where a single bulb could sell for lunatic amounts, was one such madness, and John Law’s Mississippi Scheme in France in 1720 was another. England’s own peculiar brand of collective insanity was the South Sea Bubble. We have seen how addicted eighteenth-century Englishmen were to betting – on anything from horse racing and cockfights, to the date of resolution of conflicts and the tamer games of cards. The South Sea Scheme was just another form of gambling, but one – so its dupes were persuaded – with far better odds. Greed sucked in many, high- and low-born, men and
women, politicians, clergymen, courtiers, the royal family, including the king – and Melusine.

Alexander Pope was hardly unique amongst contemporary commentators in writing about it, lamenting that:

At length corruption, like a general flood,

Did deluge all; and avarice creeping on,

Spread, like a low-born mist, and hid the sun.

Statesmen and patriots plied alike the stocks,

Peeress and butler shared alike the box;

And judges jobbed, and bishops bit the town.

And mighty dukes packed cards for half-a-crown:

Britain was sunk in lucre’s sordid charms.
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It was the country’s first – and, to date, largest – stock-market crash. Melusine was so integral to the events that brought so many to ruin and suicide, that it is hard to believe that she survived them.

The origins of the Bubble can be found in 1711, with the rather innocuous establishment of a joint-stock company, the South Sea Company. As a part of the Peace of Utrecht of 1713 with Spain, the company was granted exclusive trading rights to Spanish South America – ‘the South Seas’. The Company had been formed out of the imagination of the Tory Robert Harley to offset the power of the Whiggish Bank of England. It was fundamentally a finance company and by 1714 it had acquired absolute respectability.

The heart of the operation was South Sea House, in the City, at the corner of Bishopsgate and Threadneedle Street. The directors had given Queen Anne substantial shares, which became George’s property when he succeeded her. It was Georg August who took over the governorship of the company in 1714, with George only taking the position in 1718 after the breach between father and
son. The Duchess of Ormond wrote pointedly to Jonathan Swift: ‘You remember how the South Sea was said to be Lord Oxford’s brat, now the King has adopted it and called it his beloved child.’
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It was, in Hatton’s words, ‘one of the three pillars, with the Bank of England and the East India Company, of the credit structure of Britain’. But in reality the company was trading in futures, everything nebulous and nothing tangible, betting on finding gold and establishing trade in the New World.

Since Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America in the fifteenth century, that continent had become linked in the minds of Europeans with an abundance of riches as they saw gold and jewels travelling back to the Old World. Even the most cautious of early eighteenth-century speculators believed they could grab a share of the wealth, and astonishing numbers bought into the scheme. In return for their monopoly, the South Sea Company undertook, in April 1720, to pay off a large portion of the national debt – £31 million – which proved irresistible to the ministry, not least because the company agreed to charge only a modest interest rate of 5 per cent. John Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had such confidence in the scheme that he guaranteed that the national debt would be paid off within twenty-five years.

The company did not deal only in the promise of riches in gold. It also dealt in human traffic, and transported Africans to the Americas through the notorious ‘middle passage’, a route westwards across the Atlantic that claimed the lives of thousands of people. As early as 1712 Queen Anne told parliament: ‘I have insisted and obtained that the
asiento
or contract for furnishing the Spanish West Indies with negroes shall be made with us for thirty years.’
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The South Sea Company undertook to deliver 4,800 slaves every year for thirty years. The historian Hugh Thomas describes the company’s complicity:

The South Sea Company agreed to buy in Africa the slaves required from the old RAC [Royal Africa Company]; take them to Jamaica, where the weakest, the ‘refuse’ slaves, would be eliminated (left to die uncared for on the dock, in many cases); and then carry the prime slaves to Spanish markets.

The ministers had been influenced by contemporary events in France, by the huge and similar success of John Law’s Mississippi Scheme. As Charles Mackay eloquently put it:

It was while Law’s plan was at its greatest height of popularity, while people were crowding in thousands to the Rue Quincampoix, and ruining themselves with frantic eagerness, that the South-Sea directors laid before parliament their famous plan for paying off the national debt . . . The English commenced their career of extravagance somewhat later than the French; but as soon as the delirium seized upon them, they were determined not to be outdone . . .
⁵

To obtain their monopoly the Company had bribed heavily, encouraged by James Craggs, Secretary of State for the South. Melusine and Sophia Charlotte, both perceived by the Company’s directors to be highly influential with the king, each received £15,000 worth of stock, for which £120 would be paid for each point the stock price rose above £154. Contemporaries believed that Craggs was Sophia Charlotte’s lover, and if it is true, this may be why she received the stock. She had not nearly as much influence with George as Melusine, but Craggs may have exaggerated to get her a cash gift. Young Melusine and Trudchen received £5,000 each, and George was elected governor of the Company in 1718. Contemporaries believed that he too had received a cash bribe, but his biographer, Ragnhild Hatton, has disproved this. The politicians also received enormous gifts of stock. Stanhope got £60,000,
Sunderland £50,000, James Craggs the elder, the Postmaster General and father of James Craggs, £30,000, and Aislabie £20,000.

The extravagance of the heady days of early summer before the Bubble burst was reflected in an especially profligate London season. Ridiculous amounts of money were spent; the governors of the South Sea Company were socially the most sought-after guests in London, more so than the king’s ministers. One director was reputed to have made £3 million in three months and Georg August presented another director, said to be worth half a million, with a diamond ring.
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And the South Sea was the major topic of conversation amongst the cognoscenti. At the end of March Oxford’s daughter Abigail, Countess of Kinnoull, wrote to her father: ‘The town [London] is quite mad about the South Sea . . . one can hear nothing else talked of . . . It is very unfashionable not to be in the South Sea.’
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Edward Harley junior reported to his sister: ‘I find that there are few in London that mind anything but the rising and falling of the stocks, upon which all the news and talk of the town turns, so that unless I bring South Sea, African Bank, cert. per cent., par, etc, and such stuff into my letter I shall neither be fashionable nor fill it up . . .’
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