The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (53 page)

George I was fifty-four years old when he became King of Great Britain. Inevitably he was always more interested in Hanover in northern Germany, where he had lived all his life and ruled as an absolute autocrat, than in Britain, where he was constantly troubled by the vociferous House of Commons. Hanover, which was smaller than Wales, had only very recently been admitted to the first rank of German states when its ruler became one of the electors of the Holy Roman Empire. As such, it was considered somewhere of no importance by the English, whose country for three centuries at least had been one of the leading players on the European stage and was now poised for imperial grandeur. But the new king was Hanovercentric in the extreme. He saw everything from a Hanoverian point of view and thus considered it a great honour for Great Britain to be united to Hanover. This would also be the attitude of his son George II. The far sighted warned that England would be dragged into continental wars for Hanover’s aggrandizement which were none of her business, that Hanover and her separate foreign policy might become the tail that wagged the dog. Nevertheless these were problems which had to be set aside as lesser evils than having a Catholic on the throne.

The English in 1714 were therefore forced to behave as if they had buried their xenophobic tendencies. A large turnout of the aristocracy in the Painted Hall at Greenwich welcomed the new king and his strange retinue of Turkish body servants captured at the siege of Vienna. With him were his very many Hanoverian ministers gabbling away in a foreign language. Those who spoke English had made it known in their slightly crude way that they were all looking forward to increasing their fortunes at the wealthy English court. For their part the English courtiers made jokes behind their hands about the very long, unpronounceable names of the Germans, which were generally held to sound like bad fits of coughing.

Though outwardly polite, the English political classes were fairly contemptuous of the German king–for he was a king not by Divine Right or by the Grace of God as the old phrase had it, but most definitely by act of Parliament and on Whig revolutionary principles. George I had been called to the throne by Parliament; if he failed to do his job right–for the moment at least, when he had no support in the country–he could equally be returned to Hanover. Furthermore the new king had no personal qualities to capture his volatile subjects’ hearts and minds. He had inherited nothing of the Stuart charisma that had periodically shown itself through the generations, whether in Mary Queen of Scots or Charles II. It was hard to believe that he was the nephew of the legendary Prince Rupert of the Rhine.

George I was a German Brunswick through and through. He was small, pop-eyed and jowly, and his methodical German ways extended even to his dealings with his mistresses. There were two of them, both Hanoverian. One was hugely fat, the other thin and superstitious. The English rapidly christened them the Elephant and the Maypole. Both passed every other night with the king, on a strictly rotating basis. Whichever mistress it was, the evening always passed in exactly the same way. A frugal supper having been consumed by just the two of them, they would play cards and listen to music. Then the king would begin his interminable cutting out of little silhouettes made of paper. The English thought he was insufferably dull, and his mistresses so ugly that they could see no point in his having them.

Furthermore George I had a monstrously vindictive side. He shut up his wife Sophia Dorothea of Celle for thirty years in virtually solitary confinement to teach her a terrible lesson for having an affair with the dashing Count Königsmark. It was said that he had had Königsmark killed and his body cut up and buried beneath the floorboards of his wife’s dressing room for daring to make love to her. What is known for sure is that Königsmark was never seen again after he left his mistress one morning. The next day Sophia Dorothea found herself locked up in the castle of Ahlden, with only the swans on the surrounding grey waters for amusement. Her terrified ladies-in-waiting were informed that she was never to leave the castle until the day she was carried out in a coffin. Her little son, the future George II, was only nine when Sophia Dorothea was wrenched from the bosom of her family for daring to do what her husband openly did himself. When George was older, he tried to swim the moat to see his mother, but he was fished out by guards before he got very far. As a result the Prince of Wales regarded his father with loathing.

The new king could not be faulted for extravagance. He spent no money on public buildings or on living in great state, unlike his Whig ministers who built palaces for themselves, decorated by the finest craftsmen of the day. And though he famously said, ‘I hate all Boets and Bainters,’ he did not hate musicians. He brought Handel to this country from Hanover, where he was Kapellmeister, to become the royal court musician. In London Handel wrote much of his most celebrated work, including his
Water Music
, which was first performed at a concert on the Thames in front of George I’s royal barge, and the
Messiah
.

George was too interested in Hanoverian affairs to address himself to English politics. He was unable to understand much English and having to discuss government business in Cabinet with his ministers in poor French and worse Latin was an effort he did not care to repeat very often. Frequently absent in the beloved homeland for up to half the year, he left the country to be ruled by the Cabinet. As a result Cabinet government, or government by ministers rather than by the monarch, which had been developing very fast under Anne, rushed forward in leaps and bounds under George I and George II. George I did not realize that into the deft hands of the Whig chiefs, the heads of those grand landed aristocratic families who had been accruing power since the Revolution, he was delivering privileges which even under Anne had been the prerogative of the monarch. Thus it was the Whigs who now determined the composition of the ministries, who decided when the Parliamentary session should end and who distributed the vast panoply of lucrative offices at the disposal of the crown which ensured men’s loyalty.

It was not until the era of George I’s grandson, George III, who was born in England, that the Hanoverians became wise to what was going on. George III took it upon himself to claw back the crown patronage appropriated by the Whig grandees, but for two generations, during the reigns of his father and grandfather, they controlled everything in the name of the king. The Whig oligarchy thus remained in power from 1714 to 1760, an astonishing forty-seven years. For all that time the Tories were in the wilderness, heavily tainted with Jacobitism by their Stuart sympathies and by the conduct of their leader Bolingbroke, who on George I’s accession had fled to become the Pretender’s chief adviser.

More than ever, it was the House of Commons within Parliament which mattered. The two great figures of this period, Sir Robert Walpole and William Pitt, owed their prominence to their mastery of it. Walpole, a twenty-stone Norfolk squire, controlled its members by straightforward bribery, while the slender, sarcastic Pitt made them do his bidding by outstanding oratory. Both of them accepted peerages and moved from the Commons to the Upper House only when they recognized that their time had come. For under the first two Georges, the tendency that had been developing from Charles II onwards became a fully fledged political principle: the country was governed by the Cabinet via the system of party government which had been growing up over the previous two reigns. In other words, the Cabinet, consisting of the king’s ministers with seats in either the Lords or Commons, had to belong to the party which had a majority in the Commons.

George I’s frequent absences in Hanover led to another important constitutional development: during his reign there first grew up what became known as the office of prime minister. This was the chief executive who could take decisions in the king’s absence. For twenty years, George’s reign and that of his son George II were stamped with the imprint of the extraordinary prime minister who carved out this office, Sir Robert Walpole. Hated by many of his contemporaries for his greed, his cynicism and his astonishingly widespread system of bribery and corruption, Walpole nevertheless succeeded in his objective of establishing a climate of peace and stability within which the fragile new Hanoverian dynasty could grow. Convinced that the Stuarts would always seize the chance to take the side of Britain’s enemy in wartime and achieve a restoration by the back door, he became notorious for his refusal to go to war. He therefore skilfully if unscrupulously skirted attempts to bring Great Britain on her allies’ side to honour treaty commitments. He kept peace with France for twenty years and charmed the Tory squires into becoming Whig supporters by the low taxation that flowed from avoiding foreign wars. Thanks to Walpole’s shrewdness and careful nurturing, the Hanoverian dynasty pushed deep roots into British soil.

Nevertheless, in many households throughout the country there remained an emotional attachment to the Stuarts as the rightful dynasty. Tory squires would make secret toasts to James II’s son, ‘the king over the water’, by passing their wine over a glass of water. Walpole, the consummate realist, was anxious to ensure that that remained the limit of their physical activity; he believed that if he tolerated this form of Jacobitism he would slowly reconcile England to the Hanoverians.

Even so, less than a year after George I arrived in England Jacobitism flared into a dangerous rising known as the Fifteen. By late spring 1715, there was an ominous mood in the country which in the summer turned into riots, with mobs calling for ‘James III and No Pretender’. In September it burst into open rebellion at Braemar in Scotland under the Earl of Mar, when he raised the standard for James III and VIII.

As well as Anglican squires who could not overcome their instinctive dislike of a foreign king, the Stuart cause flourished among recusant Catholic families as a result of the Stuarts’ loyalty to the ancient faith. Such families were better able to cling to their forbidden religion in out-of-the-way places than in central England, so Jacobitism was strong in the west and north of England. But the greatest concentration of Jacobites was in Scotland, where a significant number of both Lowland and Highland lords were for once united against the Hanoverian king and yearned for the ancient House of Stuart. To all these parties the Jacobites in France began sending messages, concealed in gloves, sewn up in coat linings, instructing them to be ready to fight for their rightful king when he landed on his own soil–which they promised would be soon. It was in Scotland that the Jacobite plotters under Bolingbroke decided the uprising should begin.

But nothing in the ill-fated rising of the Fifteen went according to plan. Most calamitous of all, the French troops promised by Louis XIV never materialized. With appalling timing–or what might be called the blessing of history on the Hanoverians, like the Protestant east wind of William III–five days before the Earl of Mar raised the Stuart standard, the Sun King died. The French government was now headed by the pro-Hanoverian regent, the Duke of Orleans, who put paid to all hopes for troops to back the pretender. Mar was thus stranded in Scotland, having raised the Highlands, but quite unsure of what he should do next. He needed military support in England, but this grew less and less likely. In the face of the Jacobite threat a Riot Act had been passed, enabling magistrates to arrest any gathering of twelve or more people if they failed to disperse after a proclamation ordering them to do so had been read out. The government used it to the hilt to arrest many of the southern ringleaders.

But by November after the Battle of Sheriffmuir near Stirling, fought between Mar’s 10,000 men and the government’s 35,000, it became clear that George was in little danger. Apart from being outnumbered, Mar was a feeble general who retreated when his soldiers believed that one last charge would have won the day. Too late in December 1715 did the pretender arrive, but his own person did nothing to raise his armies’ spirits, for he was a very solemn, tall, white-faced young man with none of the Stuart magic expected from the legendary king over the water. The refined, French-educated pretender was in turn horrified by the appearance of his most fervent supporters, the Highlanders. To him they were filthy savages, with whom he could scarcely bring himself to converse.

Perhaps the pretender could have achieved something if he had marched south, but Mar gave the order to retreat north to Perth after Sheriffmuir, and after that the Fifteen was lost. On 16 January 1716 the rebels melted back north, and on 4 February Mar and the prince abandoned their romantic followers. They took a boat for France, leaving the leaders of the northern English and southern Scottish rebellion, Lords Derwentwater, Kenmure, Nithsdale and others, to be beheaded.

The whole episode had been so mismanaged that the government granted a general amnesty, and the Scots were scarcely punished at all. But the English Catholic lords like Lord Nithsdale were viewed as a potentially serious threat, and the government and George I decided to make a proper example of them.

There was still enough anti-Hanoverian feeling in England for many people to feel that it was quite monstrous that Englishmen should be executed by a German king who had only recently arrived in the country. George increased his unpopularity when it was announced that he intended to hold a ball on the night before the beheadings. Fortunately for Lord Nithsdale, his wife was a woman of spirit who was not going to stand by and see her husband executed for an affair of honour which she believed most English people should have been involved in anyway. She had seen the king at a dance a few nights previously, and, greatly daring, had bearded him in a small anteroom. Unable to control her tears at the thought of her husband in the Tower of London with only days to live, she had fallen on her knees before the king. ‘Spare his life, Sire,’ she cried, ‘and he will become the most loyal of your servants.’ But the king brutally pushed her aside and ordered his guards to throw her out.