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 Sher
iffmuir 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.
This story, which quickly made the rounds of the court, was regarded as outrageous, that an Englishwoman and the wife of a great English landowner should be treated so by a mere Hanoverian. There was considerable sympathy and delight when it was heard that the enterprising Lady Nithsdale, not a whit discomfited by her ordeal, had picked herself up, wiped her tears away and hotfooted it to the Tower. With her ladies’ maid, and another woman, she had persuaded a guard who was softer-hearted than the king to let her in to say her goodbyes to her husband. The guard, made jolly with port that she had thoughtfully brought with her, scarcely noticed that when the attractive Lady Nithsdale left, she actually had three female companions with her rather than the two with whom she had arrived. As dawn broke, the sleeping figure of Lord Nithsdale was revealed to be a mere bundle of rags. Thanks to his wife’s daring, that evening he was drinking wine in the sweet air of France, while the heads of his unluckier companions were no longer attached to their bodies.
Though the Old Pretender remained alive he now had to find a safe berth other than his old home, France. The regent Orleans with an ailing boy-king Louis XV on his hands and with designs on the throne himself was anxious to have the Hanoverian government as his ally. If Louis XV died he would need English backing to claim the French throne, against its nearest heir the French King of Spain, Philip V. And in fact it was in Spain that the pretender found a warmer reception for his cause. It tallied perfectly with the Spanish chief minister Cardinal Alberoni’s burning desire to resurrect Spain’s former prestige as a world power which had been destroyed by the Treaty of Utrecht. The pretender was Spain’s chance to get her revenge on the English.
At the battle of Cape Passaro in 1718 the English had once again stymied Spain’s plans for supremacy in the Mediterranean, where her soldiers had seized Sardinia and Sicily, by defeating the Spanish fleet. Alberoni was so angry about Cape Passaro that he retaliated by taking up the cause of the pretender. He interested King Charles XII of Sweden in the plot, who was furious with George I for buying the ex-Swedish duchies of Bremen and Verden from Denmark. Charles XII was one of the greatest generals of the age, and if he had appeared in the Highlands at the head of an army the Hanoverians would really have had something to fear. But once again destiny seemed determined to keep George on the throne, because Charles XII died quite suddenly before this new plan got off the drawing board. Alberoni’s last attempt to put the pretender on the throne was in 1719 when 5,000 men under the command of Ormonde sailed for Scotland, but only 300 men reached her shores and they were soon defeated at Glenshiel.
The scare the Fifteen had produced resulted in a flurry of legislation to stabilize matters by strengthening the government. The Septennial Act increased the Whigs’ hold on power by providing that henceforth elections were to be called every seven years instead of every three; it lasted until 1911. One of George I’s principle secretaries of state, General Stanhope, veteran of the last war, by contriving a new Quadruple Alliance of France, England, Holland and the emperor Charles VI forced Spain to the peace table. Removal of the troublesome Alberoni was one condition England laid down. Without Alberoni’s patronage the pretender was once again condemned to roam Europe, looking in his usual rather halfhearted fashion for sponsors for his great enterprise. He at least had the consolation of having recently fathered a little boy, Prince Charles Edward, so the Stuart direct line would continue.
George I’s first government had originally been made up of a mixture of old Junto Whigs like Marlborough’s son-in-law the Earl of Sunderland and the brave and distinguished Stanhope. Stanhope, his aide John Carteret and Sunderland were the sort of Whigs William III would have recognized, ones who believed in the need for England to play her role in Europe. But the government also included a new generation of Whig statesmen, of whom the most important were Lord Townshend and his brother-in-law Sir Robert Walpole, who was then chancellor of the Exchequer, and they split with Stanhope over continental involvement. In many ways these two men were more like Tories than Whigs, given that their priority was to put the country’s finances on a sounder basis by avoiding wars and foreign entanglements of all kinds. After their break with Stanhope, who was now in effect chief minister, they retreated to their estates in Norfolk to bide their time. Any free hours they had in London were now passed at Leicester House, the home of the Prince of Wales, as they were building an opposition round the ‘reversionary interest’, as the party of the heir to the throne was known. It was not to be long before they were recalled by George I.
Whatever Stanhope’s diplomatic gifts, in many areas his government was unsatisfactory. But it was above all in financial matters that the administration was to come a cropper, for the bluff ex-soldier did not exercise sufficient control over his ministers, and in 1720 the crisis of the South Sea Bubble burst. This was a financial scandal of great magnitude, a side-effect of ministers’ new-found enthusiasm for getting people to buy shares in government enterprises to pay for public borrowing. Inspired by the Whig Bank of England’s success in paying for the wars in 1711 under Harley, the Tories founded the South Sea Company to take over £900,000 of the National Debt in return for a monopoly of all the trade to South America granted to England at Utrecht.
The company was a joint-stock company: that is, people invested money and received a good dividend in return. Its directors aspired to manage the whole of the National Debt, which stood at the then enormous sum of £52 million, thanks to the cost of the French wars. With commissions it was a lucrative business and in 1720, by bribing government ministers, the South Sea Company was given permission by Parliament to take over half of it. The directors of the company proceeded to enrich themselves by persuading government
stockholders that they would do better to exchange their state bonds for South Sea stock.
The combination of advertisements promising an opportunity to make enormous profits in the South Sea Company compared to government stock and of government ministers themselves backing the South Sea stock proved irresistible. The price of the shares skyrocketed, and everyone from dustmen, shopkeepers and chambermaids to merchants and MPs bought some. People behaved quite crazily: many of them borrowed the value of their house and belongings together and then bought shares with the borrowed money. Very few resisted the temptation to make so much apparently easy money, though the ageing Duchess of Marlborough said publicly she believed that ‘This Bubble will soon burst.’
By the winter of 1721 South Sea shares were yielding an astonishing thousand-pound dividend. But the company started to issue writs against other companies which were trying to cash in on its success, and this had a catastrophic effect on the market. For what happened was that confidence was lost in all ventures, especially the South Sea Company. The market crashed, so did share prices. With the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, people were wiped out overnight; hundreds of thousands of people faced bankruptcy. Panic and distrust of the government swept the country, particularly when it emerged that government ministers had accepted bribes to promote the shares. One minister committed suicide, and the chancellor of the Exchequer, John Aislabie, was thrown out of the House of Commons for corruption. Stanhope died of a heart attack from the stress, while Sunderland was under investigation. The whole of England was verging on hysteria.
The Story of Britain Page 50
