This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  This then was the atmosphere as Lord Wilmington, formerly Sir Spencer Compton, became Prime Minister instead of the man who would have been a safer choice, Henry Pelham, supported by his wealthy brother, the Duke of Newcastle. Wilmington was quite incompetent. What could the King do? He needed good government. He needed also, the support – financial and political – to further his military aims on the Continent of Europe.

  George II turned to John Carteret (1690–1763). Carteret was a brilliant man at a time when Walpole needed brilliance working for him and no one else. Carteret had been Secretary of State between 1721 and 1724. He was too clever not to be dangerous and so was sent to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant for six years (1724–30). George II brought him back as Secretary of State and immediately Carteret made clear that a partnership between the Electorate of Hanover (George II’s domain) and England with a treaty with Austria against France (more urgently against the Franco–Prussian alliance) was the flawless means of preserving the balance of power in the War of the Austrian Succession in favourable terms for the British. Carteret indeed had a reputation for brilliance, but not always for wisdom – a gift easily usurped by arrogance. Certainly he was the power behind Wilmington. But he was an individualist who cared little for the detail of political management which was necessary to hold together all the factions at Westminster; this was especially so if Britain was once again to enter the larger stage of Continental warfare. But the King, George II, wanted none of the inhibitions of the Parliamentarians he detested. He wanted to be at war.

  In 1740 the War of the Austrian Succession began. It was to last eight years. In simple terms, the war was between Britain and her allies against a Franco–Prussian alliance and Charles Albert of Bavaria. The allies fought to guarantee the succession of Maria Theresa to her father Charles VI’s rule of the Habsburg Empire. This was, in modest terms, the first world war. Led by George II, the British fought on Continental Europe and against the French in India and North America (the War of American Independence did not start until April 1775). The late Charles VI had the promises of European rulers that on his death they would support the succession of his daughter in Austria, Bohemia, Hungary and the southern Netherlands. Frederick the Great ignored such promises and seized Silesia, then an Austrian province.

  The House of Habsburg was one of the oldest European royal families. The name comes from Habsburg Castle which was built in Switzerland by the Bishop of Strasbourg. That was in the eleventh century at about the same time that the Normans were building in England. By the late thirteenth century, the then Count of Habsburg, one Rodolph, became the Holy Roman Emperor. And the last male in that line was Maria Theresa’s father, Charles. However, that wasn’t the end of the Habsburgs because Maria Theresa and the Duke of Lorraine, her husband, began the modern line of the family, the last of whom (another Charles) abdicated as Emperor in 1918. Britain engaged in the War of the Austrian Succession because it had a treaty with Austria, and the fear that its old enemies, the French, might gain the Austrian Netherlands was worrying for the Hanoverian George II. It would bring the French too close to home.

  But monarchs have never had an easy time raising money for wars other than when they were already winning them, or there was about to be an invasion. Nevertheless, the war existed, Britain had obligations and George wanted to protect his Hanoverian borders, but the Prussians and the French threatened to invade if he did. George agreed to remain neutral for twelve months so Maria Theresa fought on alone – she had to. She was defending her right to the Austrian throne – the old Emperor, her father, had even changed the so-called Pragmatic Sanction to favour her right to the throne on his death. But once the period of neutrality was ended George got his money and his permission from Parliament and, under the guise of being Maria Theresa’s auxiliaries (today they’d be called military advisers), 30,000 British soldiers went to the Continent. Their army was known as the Pragmatic Army. So King George II had his way and was soon to make a lasting entry in the military history books. On 27 June 1743, British, Hanoverian and Austrian troops commanded by George defeated the French and Bavarian army at the Battle of Dettingen. This was the final time that a British sovereign commanded his troops in battle.

  In spite of the monarch’s spectacular command and also the cheering of victory, there was little support in England for a Continental war. Even though the French and Spanish were in some form of alliance and the Jacobites were said to be planning, with French help, a landing in southern England, the government had little chance of rousing the nation and the coffers for costly wars. Moreover, Carteret (Lord Granville), who had succeeded Wilmington as prime minister on the latter’s death in 1743, was an indifferent political leader. Henry Pelham became the nation’s fourth Prime Minister in 1745. Walpole had liked him: he was quiet, industrious and efficient. But the King still took a great deal of notice of Carteret and his friend Pulteney, the Earl of Bath, because they supported his military ambitions. And it was very easy for them to undermine Pelham, who was not in complete control when he became Prime Minister. The nation was still at war and the King had appointed his third son, the then twenty-four-year-old Duke of Cumberland, as captain general of the armies. Pelham was not much concerned at this news; he and his brother, the Secretary of State, Duke of Newcastle (‘That impertinent fool,’ as George II called him) were suffering enormous difficulty trying to hold together the differing interests of the administration.

  Then in 1745, not quite out of the blue, came news of a rumour turning to fact. The Jacobites were once more on the march and the Forty-Five, as the rising became known, was in the making. Legend was also in the making: the rebellion was led by Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender. There had been three Jacobite risings before the Forty-Five in 1708, 1715 and 1719. And they had three things in common: bad timing, bad organization and false hope. The 1708 uprising, which included a French invasion fleet, was scuppered by appalling weather, indifferent navigation and a failure actually to get ashore. The attempt in 1715 stood a better chance. The Eleventh Earl of Mar, who led the rising, soon raised support in Scotland but this time there was no French support for the Jacobites. In 1719, the year of the third Jacobite uprising, raiding parties were sent from Spain to preoccupy the British and perhaps deter them from taking sides in a European conflict that was going on at the time. It came to nothing other than a skirmish at Glen Shiel.

  So, in June 1745 Prince Charles Edward, relying more on romantic ideas than support, other than from the Highlanders, landed in the Western Isles. The Highlanders and Lowlanders did not care much for each other. The clans cared for none other than their own. The rising at first went Charles’s way. By the autumn, it was said that he could command most of Scotland. But any Jacobite euphoria was not long lived. The important Hebridean chiefs, Macdonald of Sleat, Macdonald of Clanranald and Macleod of Dunvegan, had refused to come out for him, although the young Clanranald did so. By the time he was at Edinburgh, the Young Pretender could begin to organize his brigade of followers: the Stewarts of Appin, the Robertsons and the Macphersons. Perhaps Prince Charles’s most important ally was Lochiel, the clan chief of the Camerons, although it is said that he joined against his better judgement. When Charles’s army defeated the English under Sir John Cope at Prestonpans there was national support for the not always popular George II. Unsurprising then that a rousing, patriotic song began to be sung in London. Its composer was Thomas Arne (1710–78) and it was first sung in its ‘British’ form after a performance of The Alchemist by Ben Jonson.

  God Save our noble King,

  God Save great George our King,

  God Save the King.

  Send him victorious . . .

  The line ‘send him victorious’ meant God should send victory over the Jacobite hence one of the verse’s distinctly anti-Scottish tone:

  Lord, grant that Marshal Wade,

  May by thy mighty aid, Victory bring.

  May he sedition hush and like a torrent rush,

>   Rebellious Scots to crush,

  God Save the King.

  The irony is that other versions of the song had been used for years by the Jacobites. But now the Hanoverians had now commandeered the song which would be called the National Anthem, but not until the nineteenth century.

  So with ‘God Save our King’ ringing to the rafters of London theatres, rebellious Scots (more accurately rebellious Jacobites) were to be crushed. On Culloden Moor near Inverness, Cumberland killed 1,000 Scots – in not much more than half an hour. And so the legend was made. Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender to the English throne, disguised as a woman by Flora Macdonald, escaped in a boat to Skye. But by then he was hardly a princely figure and Flora Macdonald took him to the island with some considerable reluctance. He was torn, hunted, hungry and nibbled by lice and mosquitoes. He was, eventually, rescued and taken to France as the hero of the moment. But the moment did not last long and in later years the once Bonnie Prince ended his days in Italy, as a drunkard. And there is one often-forgotten postscript to the Battle of Culloden: it was the last land battle ever to be fought in Britain. The date was 16 April 1746.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  1746–56

  Around the time of Culloden, the Prime Minister, Henry Pelham and his brother, the Duke of Newcastle, found themselves with a crisis of quite a different sort. The Pelhams wanted to improve their administration by bringing in William Pitt. But the King didn’t like the Pelhams and he still fancied he could have Carteret and Lord Bath leading his government so he said no to William Pitt.

  Newcastle wrote to Lord Chesterfield, who was then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

  Newcastle House, February 18, 1746

  Private

  My Dear Lord,

  I am now to give you an account of the most surprising scene that has ever happened in this country, or, I believe, in any other.

  Some few days before the meeting of Parliament after Christmas Mr Pitt went to the Duke of Bedford, expressed an inclination to know our foreign scheme, shewed a disposition to come into it, and wished that some of us would go and talk with Lord Cobham, into whose hands they had now entirely committed themselves.

  Lord Cobham was Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham, for some time one of Pitt’s patrons. His young followers, Cobham’s Cubs or the Boy Patrons, had been Walpole’s sharpest critics. In fact Cobham himself had been stripped of the command of his own regiment: Cobham’s Horse. Newcastle’s letter continues:

  He seemed very desirous to come into us and to bring his Boys, as he called them, exclusively (as he expressly said) of the Tories, for whom he had nothing to say. The terms were Mr Pitt to be Secretary of War, Lord Barrington in the Admiralty and Mr James Grenville [Pitt’s brother-in-law] to have employment of £1000 a year. Upon this, I opened the budget to the King, which was better received than I had expected; and the only objection was to the giving Mr Pitt this particular office of Secretary of War. We had several conferences with His Majesty upon it, the King insisting for some time that he would not make him Secretary of War; afterwards that he would use him ill of he had it; and at last that he would give him the office, but he would not admit him into his presence to do the business of it.

  Two long-time political enemies of the Pelhams’, Carteret, since 1744 the Earl of Granville, and William Pulteney, the Earl of Bath, now sided with the King against Pitt and, of course, the wishes of the Pelhams.

  The King grew very uneasy, and complained extremely of being forced. But, when the difficulty seemed in a way of being removed, my Lord Bath got to the King, represented against the behaviour of his ministers in forcing him in such a manner to take a disagreeable man into a particular office and thereby dishonouring him both at home and abroad and encouraging the King to resist if by offering him, I suppose, the support of his friends in so doing. This strengthened the King in his dislike of the measure, and encouraged, I conclude, his Majesty to think that he had a party behind the curtain [that] would either force his ministers to do what he liked or, if he did not do it, would be able to support his affairs without them.

  Tho’ Lord Bath was the open transactor of this affair, it is not to be imagined but that my Lord Granville was in the secret. Mr Pitt, very decently and honourably, authorized us immediately to renounce all his pretensions to the Office of Secretary of War.

  But it was thought proper, at the same time, to suggest to the King that, after so public an éclat as my Lord Bath had made of this affair, it was thought absolutely necessary that his Majesty should give some publick mark of his resolution to support and place confidence in his then administration; or otherwise we should be at the mercy of our enemies, whenever they were able to take advantage of us, without having it in our power to do the King of the public any service.

  In other words, the Pelhams were demanding a public vote of confidence from the King.

  His majesty was extremely irritated, loudly complaining of our conduct both at home and abroad, unwilling to give us any satisfaction of assurance of his countenance or support and plainly shewing a most determined predilection for the other party. Upon this we thought, in duty to the King and in justice to ourselves, the wisest and honestest part that we could take was to desire leave to resign our employments.

  But the King’s party, in other words Bath and Granville, simply did not have the Commons support to lead a government so the King backed down, at least partly. Pitt was immediately created Joint Vice Treasurer of Ireland and, a couple of months later, Paymaster General of the forces – a lucrative arrangement inasmuch that the Paymaster General could put his budget in his own bank account and keep the interest on the capital. Pitt turned down this customary bonus and lived on his salary. When news of this grand gesture reached the general public, Pitt’s star shone brightly.

  The scoundrels of the pamphleteering classes, the periodicals and the satirists could find much to jeer at but Pitt could not easily be lampooned with much malice. There was enough wrong in society to provide seemingly endless inspiration to the cartoonists and writers including, William Hogarth. By the 1740s, Hogarth was an artist of considerable influence. In the previous decade, his ‘morality’ engravings about mid-eighteenth century Britain tell us more of that society than any other work. For example, the social novel had yet to be invented and so, almost for that reason alone, literature was never to have such a lasting impact as Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress, The Rake’s Progress, Marriage à la Mode and The Election. One of his most powerful images, The March to Finchley, was a scathing illustration of part of Cumberland’s army before its march north to Culloden. The central figure is a soldier. On one side he is tugged by a dark-cloaked, haggard female with a swinging crucifix who clutches the newspapers of the day. On the other arm is a comely lady, heavily pregnant, with a basket on her arm from which peeps a scroll on which we can see the words ‘God Save the King’. The soldier is Hogarth’s Britain and the two women are fighting for his soul. The dark figure is Catholicism in the form of the Jacobites. The lady in white is for the monarch and the child she carries is Britain’s child. This was a sickly creature as one of his most memorable engravings, Gin Lane, testifies to the commonplace of drunkenness in London. The gin was swigged much further than the mucky alleys of the capital, London, as a 1740s christening report from Surrey distressingly shows:

  The nurse was so intoxicated that after she had undressed the child, instead of laying it in the cradle, she put it behind a large fire, which burned it to death in a few minutes. She was examined before a magistrate, and said she was quite stupid and senseless, so that she took the child for a log of wood, on which she was discharged.

  There were about 7,000 gin shops in London alone and it was to this city that Hogarth turned for his social commentary. Parliament passed the Gin Act which put up taxes on the spirit and restricted its sale through retailers. The nation continued to drink, but the gin craze was on the wane. The moral crusade of the decade was reflected by Charles Wesley who had
been preaching and writing what became a collection of 7,000 hymns, and his elder brother, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, began his open-air evangelical crusade and would eventually preach 40,000 sermons.

  Small factories were being built and textile-makers were leading what one day would be known as the Industrial Revolution. John Kay invented his flying shuttle for weavers but reaped few rewards. There was still famine in Ireland; witchcraft in England was no longer a crime; and Handel finished his Messiah.

  At the time of the passing of the Gin Act, William Pitt was mourning the passing of a powerful ally, the Prince of Wales, in 1751. The man who would have been King on George II’s death would probably have guaranteed Pitt’s future. It was an unexpected interruption to a political career and an even more unexpected cause of death: it is thought that the Prince died as a result of having been struck by a cricket ball.

  It was the middle of the eighteenth century and the war in Europe, the War of the Austrian Succession, was about to end. Henry Fielding was finishing his fat, bawdy novel, Tom Jones. Robert Clive was about to establish his name forever in India. The calendar that is still used today – the Gregorian calendar – was introduced by Henry Pelham. It replaced the Julian calendar and meant that Britain, after a lapse of almost 200 years, was once more using the same calendar as the rest of Continental Europe. Dr Johnson published his dictionary and Pitt eventually became Prime Minister. The Black Hole of Calcutta became notorious; James Wolfe set off to fight, and die, in Quebec; and, in the sky, the world saw the return of Halley’s Comet.

  First, the war in Europe. The Austrian Succession had never been Britain’s war but a series of unnecessary treaties and the King’s belief that his homelands were threatened, especially by Frederick of Prussia, Frederick the Great, had involved the British. But now the war was over chiefly because Frederick the Great had got what he wanted: Silesia. Britain, preoccupied with the Forty-Five Jacobite rebellion, had once again found it impossible to fight on more than one front. And in London there was more concern for the National Debt than the outcome of the war. The conclusion was yet another peace accord which did little to guarantee peace. It was called the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle and dated 18 October 1748. In this treaty the title of George II is King of Great Britain, Ireland and France. The English monarchy had not formally given up its claim to France, the old enemy. However, in the treaty the French once more recognized the Hanoverian right to Great Britain, said they would not support the Jacobite claim to the British throne and gave back Madras, which had been won from the English East India Company in 1746. But the war had been inconclusive, so the treaty was similarly inconclusive. Within eight years, Britain would be once again at war.