George I

by Tim Blanning

  7. See the brilliant analysis in John Adamson, ‘The making of the Ancien Régime court 1500–1700’, in John Adamson (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Régime 1500–1750 (London: Seven Dials, 2000), pp. 7–41.

  8. Claudia Gold, The King’s Mistress: The True and Scandalous Story of the Woman who Stole the Heart of George I (London: Quercus, 2012), pp. 119–20.

  9. Beattie, The English Court in the Reign of George I, pp. 11–17.

  10. Thompson, George II, p. 45.

  11. J. M. Beattie, ‘The Court of George I and English Politics, 1717–1720’, English Historical Review, 81, 318 (January 1966), p. 26.

  12. Schnath, Hillebrecht and Plath, Das Leineschloss, p. 79.

  13. Donald Burrows and Robert D. Hume, ‘George I, the Haymarket Opera Company and Handel’s “Water Music” ’, Early Music, 19, 3 (1991), pp. 326–7, 334.

  14. Burrows has conjectured that the occasion was also intended to demonstrate that Handel’s move from Hanoverian employment to London in 1710 had not been resented by George – Handel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 76–7.

  15. Schnath, Briefwechsel der Kurfürstin Sophie von Hannover mit dem preußischen Königshause, p. 273.

  16. Volkmar Koehler, ‘Jagdschloß Göhrde’, in Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte, 8 (1969), p. 171.

  17. Jürgen Delfs, ‘Jagdarten’, in Norbert Steinau (ed.), Jagd in der Lüneburger Heide: Beiträge zur Jagdgeschichte (Celle: Bomann-Museum Celle und Suderburg-Hösseringen Landwirtschaftsmuseum Lüneburger Heide, 2007), p. 34.

  18. Wallbrecht, Das Theater des Barock-Zeitalters, p. 102.

  19. Gibbs, ‘George I (1660–1727)’.

  20. J. P. Hore, The History of the Royal Buckhounds (London: Remington & Co., 1893), p. 264.

  21. Gibbs, ‘George I (1660–1727)’.

  22. Aubrey Newman, ‘Two countries, one monarch: The union England/Hanover as the ruler’s personal problem’, in Rexheuser (ed.), Die Personalunionen von Sachsen-Polen 1697–1763, p. 361.

  23. Stanhope, History of England, vol. 1, p. 245; Thompson, George II, pp. 47–8.

  24. Hallam, The Constitutional History of England, p. 775. He was referring to Frederick, Prince of Wales, George I’s grandson, but it applies just as well to his son.

  25. Henry L. Snyder, ‘Spencer, Charles, third earl of Sunderland (1675–1722)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edn May 2006 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26117, accessed 6 October 2016].

  26. Beattie, ‘The Court of George I and English Politics’, pp. 29, 33.

  27. Hatton, George I, p. 204.

  28. Beattie, ‘The Court of George I and English Politics’, p. 34.

  29. The best accounts of this unedifying episode are to be found in Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, vol. 1, pp. 259–60, and Thompson, George II, pp. 51–3.

  30. Joanna Marschner, Queen Caroline: Cultural Politics at the Early Eighteenth-Century Court (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 15.

  31. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, vol. 1, p. 260.

  32. Beattie, ‘The Court of George I and English Politics’, p. 36.

  33. Quoted in Edward Impey, Kensington Palace, rev. edn (London and New York: Merrell, 2012), pp. 72–3.

  4. WHIGS AND TORIES

  1. The belief of some historians that the Tory Party was indeed a Jacobite party has been demolished comprehensively, by, for example, W. A. Speck in ‘Whigs and Tories dim their glories: English political parties under the first two Georges’, in John Cannon (ed.), The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), and Andrew Hanham, ‘ “So few facts”: Jacobites, Tories and the Pretender’, Parliamentary History, 19, 2 (2000) pp. 233–57.

  2. Estimates vary considerably. Speck, Stability and Strife, p. 177, gives the Tory majority as 65; Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?, p. 391, gives almost double that figure – 124.

  3. Quoted in Dickinson, Bolingbroke, p. 144.

  4. Atterbury, English advice to the freeholders of England, p. 19.

  5. Jeremy Black, Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I, 1714–1727 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), p. 12.

  6. William Edward Hartpole Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longmans Green, 1892), vol. 1, p. 259.

  7. Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, p. 275.

  8. There is an exceedingly, perhaps excessively, sympathetic account of this farcical episode in Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill, The Atterbury Plot (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), most of which was written by the former. Some idea of Dr Cruickshanks’s attitude to the Jacobites can be gained from her observation that, when interrogated, the conspirators ‘were much in the same position as members of the Resistance in Europe in the years 1940–44 who were questioned by the Germans’, p. 198.

  9. G. V. Bennett, ‘Jacobitism and the rise of Walpole’, in Neil McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb (London: Europa, 1974), p. 91.

  10. Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, p. 267.

  11. Williams, Stanhope, p. 393.

  12. Ibid., pp. 225–6.

  13. Lothar Kettenacker, ‘Georg I.’, in Peter Wende (ed.), Englische Könige und Königinnen der Neuzeit: Von Heinrich VIII. bis Elisabeth II (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2008), p. 196.

  14. Quoted in Williams, Stanhope, p. 442.

  15. Fritz Genzel, ‘Studien zur Geschichte des Nordischen Krieges 1714–20, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Personalunion zwischen Grossbritannien und Hannover’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Bonn, 1951), p. 26.

  16. Matthew Kilburn, ‘Robethon, John (d. 1722)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edn May 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23821, accessed 10 October 2016].

  17. J. F. Chance, ‘John de Robethon and the Robethon Papers’, English Historical Review, 13, 49 (1898), pp. 58–60.

  18. In the judgement of Adolphus Ward, ‘more than any other individual, Bothmer was responsible for the Hanoverian Succession’ – A. W. Ward, ‘Great Britain under George I’, in A. W. Ward, G. W. Prothero and Stanley Leathes (eds), The Cambridge Modern History, vol. 6: The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), p. 12.

  19. Andrew C. Thompson, ‘Bothmer, Hans Kaspar von, Count Bothmer in the nobility of the Holy Roman empire (1656–1732)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edn January 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/89690, accessed 10 October 2016].

  20. Genzel, Studien zur Geschichte des Nordischen Krieges, p. 20.

  21. Williams, Stanhope, p. 366.

  22. Chance, ‘John de Robethon’, p. 61. See also Stanhope’s remarks to the Duke of Newcastle quoted in Jeremy Black, The Hanoverians: The History of a Dynasty (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), p. 71.

  23. R. J. Minney, 10 Downing Street: A House in History (London: Cassell, 1963), p. 33.

  24. Williams, Stanhope, p. 416.

  25. Stephen Taylor, ‘Walpole, Robert, first earl of Orford (1676–1745)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edn January 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28601, accessed 10 October 2016].

  26. Diary of Mary Countess Cowper, pp. 128–45. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, vol. 1, pp. 285–92 supplies a convenient summary, including many quotations from Lady Cowper’s diary.

  27. Diary of Mary Countess Cowper, p. 134.

  28. Ibid., pp. 142–3.

  29. Ibid., p. 145.

  30. Impey, Kensington Palace, p. 73.

  31. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, vol. 2, p. 65, n. 1.

  32. P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688–1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 197.

  33. Ibid., p. 94.

  34. Peter Dickson, ‘The South Sea Bubble’, History Today, May 1954, p. 328.

  35. Black, The Hanoverians, p. 76.

  36. Plumb, Sir Rober
t Walpole, vol. 1, p. 355 n. 1.

  37. W. A. Speck and Matthew Kilburn, ‘Promoters of the South Sea Bubble (act. 1720)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/theme/92793, accessed 11 October 2016].

  38. Unusually for a biographer, Plumb was at pains to play down Walpole’s achievement and to ascribe his success to luck – Walpole, vol. 1, chs 8–9. Dickson, however, showed convincingly that Walpole really did deserve most of the credit – The Financial Revolution in England, chs 7–8. His general conclusion is on p. 176: ‘There can be little doubt that Walpole was the main architect of these proposals, which applied the harsh cautery of common sense to the soaring dreams and megalomaniac expectations of the South Sea year.’

  39. Linda Frey and Marsha Frey, ‘Townshend, Charles, second Viscount Townshend (1674–1738)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27617, accessed 12 October 2016].

  40. John Cannon, ‘Carteret, John, second Earl Granville (1690–1763)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edn May 2006 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4804, accessed 12 October 2016].

  41. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England, pp. 200–201.

  42. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?, p. 322.

  5. THE SINEWS OF POWER AND FOREIGN POLICY

  1. Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne, vol. 1, p. 24.

  2. Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III, p. 281.

  3. Martin Daunton, ‘The wealth of the nation’, in Paul Langford (ed.), The Short Oxford History of the British Isles: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 158.

  4. David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 46.

  5. Geoffrey Holmes, ‘The achievement of stability: the social context of politics from the 1680s to the age of Walpole’, in Cannon (ed.), The Whig Ascendancy, p. 6.

  6. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?, pp. 67, 266–7, 344, 353.

  7. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England, p. 13.

  8. Geoffrey Holmes, ‘Post-Revolution Britain and the Historian’, in Holmes (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution, p. 22.

  9. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England, p. 55.

  10. Stanhope, History of England, vol. 1, p. 25.

  11. Guy Rowlands, ‘The economics of war: tax, trade and credit in pursuit of an acceptable peace’, in Renger de Bruin and Maarten Brinkmann (eds), Peace Was Made Here: The Treaties of Utrecht, Rastatt and Baden (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2013), p. 36.

  12. David Hayton, ‘Contested kingdoms, 1699–1756’, in Langford (ed.), The Short Oxford History of the British Isles, p. 42.

  13. Richard Price, British Society 1680–1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 142.

  14. Martin Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 1. Daunton was writing mainly about the nineteenth century, but his remarks apply a fortiori to the earlier period.

  15. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: a history of ideology and discourse’, in J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 222.

  16. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?, pp. 125, 264.

  17. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 68.

  18. The phrase comes from the Address of Thanks presented to George following the opening of Parliament on 17 March 1715. The address was composed by a committee chaired by Walpole, ‘First Parliament of George I: First session (part 1 of 3) – begins 17/3/1715’, in The History and Proceedings of the House of Commons, vol. 6, 1714–1727 (London: Chandler, 1742), pp. 9–47. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-hist-proceedings/vol6/pp9-47 [accessed 17 October 2016].

  19. The most lucid account of the northern question is to be found in Janet Hartley, Charles Whitworth: Diplomat in the Age of Peter the Great (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

  20. Quoted in Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 40.

  21. See the review of Hatton, George I, by W. A. Speck in The English Historical Review, 94, 373 (October 1979), pp. 866–8.

  22. Quoted in Williams, Stanhope, p. 159.

  23. Hartley, Charles Whitworth, p. 119.

  24. J. F. Chance, ‘The foreign policy of George I’, in Ward, Prothero and Leathes (eds), The Cambridge Modern History, vol. 6, p. 24.

  25. Genzel, Studien zur Geschichte des Nordischen Krieges, p. 603.

  26. David Denis Aldridge, Admiral Sir John Norris and the British Naval Expeditions to the Baltic Sea 1715–1727, ed. Leos Müller and Patrick Salmon (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2009), p. 64.

  27. Williams, Stanhope, p. 232; Chance, ‘The foreign policy of George I’, p. 24.

  28. Genzel, Studien zur Geschichte des Nordischen Krieges, pp. 143–54.

  29. Chance, ‘The foreign policy of George I’, p. 36.

  30. Williams, Stanhope, p. 428.

  31. Brendan Simms, ‘Hanover in British policy 1714–1783: Interests and aims of the protagonists’, in Rexheuser (ed.), Die Personalunionen von Sachsen-Polen 1697–1763, p. 134.

  32. Quoted in Brendan Simms and Torsten Riotte (eds), The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 55. For an alternative maritime perspective, see N. A. M. Rodger, ‘The continental commitment in the eighteenth century’, in L. Freedman, P. Hayes and R. O’Neill (eds), War, Strategy and International Relations: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 53.

  33. Peace between France and the Habsburg monarchy was signed at Rastatt on 7 March 1714 and between France and the Holy Roman Empire at Baden on 7 September 1714.

  34. Heinz Duchhardt, ‘England-Hannover und der europäische Friede 1714–1748’, in Adolf Birke and Kurt Kluxen (eds), England und Hannover/ England and Hanover (Munich, London, New York and Oxford: De Gruyter, 1986), p. 128. It was also the first international treaty to be drafted in the French language. It can be found in English translation at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Peace_and_Friendship_Treaty_of_Utrecht_ between_Spain_and_Great_Britain.

  35. Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne, vol. 1, p. 118.

  36. Toland, John, The art of governing by partys: particularly, in religion, in politics, in Parlament, on the Bench, and in the Ministry; with the ill effects of partys on the people in general, the King in particular, and all our foren Affairs; as well as on our Credit and Trade, in Peace or War (London: Bernard Lintott, 1701), p. 143.

  37. Quoted in G. C. Gibbs, ‘The Revolution in foreign policy’, in Holmes (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution, p. 62.

  38. For a more sympathetic treatment of Philip V, see Christopher Storrs, The Spanish Resurgence 1713–1748 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016).

  39. Williams, Stanhope, pp. 227–9. Despite over-emphasis on Stanhope’s role, this is the best account of British diplomacy during this period.

  40. G. C. Gibbs, ‘Parliament and the Treaty of Quadruple Alliance’, in Ragnhild Hatton and J. S. Bromley (eds), William III and Louis XIV: Essays by and for Mark A. Thomson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1968), p. 287.

  41. Duchhardt, ‘England – Hannover und der europäische Friede 1714–1748’, p. 134.

  42. The best account of the extremely confusing and inconsequential diplomacy of these years is to be found in Derek McKay and H. M. Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers 1648–1815 (London: Longman, 1983), pp. 118–34.

  43. Gerald B. Hertz, ‘England and the Ostend Company’, English Historical Review, 22, 86 (1907), pp. 265–6.

  44. Sp
eck, Stability and Strife, p. 232.

  45. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol22/pp574-583.

  46. McKay and Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers, p. 133.

  6. CONCLUSION

  1. Gibbs, ‘George I (1660–1727)’.

  2. John Bold, Greenwich: An Architectural History of the Royal Hospital for Seamen and the Queen’s House (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 1.

  3. James Thornhill, An explanation of the painting in the Royal-Hospital at Greenwich (London, c.1730), p. 18.

  4. Richard Steele, The Lover, in Walter Lewin (ed.), The Lover, and Other Papers of Steele and Addison (London: Walter Scott, 1887), pp. 155–9.

  5. J. H. Plumb, The First Four Georges (London: Batsford, 1956), p. 60.

  6. Jonathan Keates, Handel, the Man and his Music (London: Pimlico, 2009), p. 51.

  Further Reading

  Only titles written in English have been included. For German readers, a good place to start is the collection edited by Jochen Meiners: Als die Royals aus Hannover kamen, 4 vols (Dresden: Sandstein, 2014).

  The standard biography of George I remains Ragnhild Hatton, George I: Elector and King (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), based on extensive archival research and deep knowledge of the period. There is an excellent concise and penetrating biography by G. C. Gibbs in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), which can be accessed online. There is also a good deal to be learned about both George and Hanover in Andrew Thompson’s distinguished biography George II: King and Elector (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011).

  There are several first-rate general histories of Britain in the period, the best being W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England 1714–1760 (London: Edward Arnold, 1977) and Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Helpful collections of articles are Geoffrey Holmes (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1969); John Cannon (ed.), The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (London: Edward Arnold, 1981); Brendan Simms and Torsten Riotte (eds), The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Andreas Gestrich and Michael Schaich (eds), The Hanoverian Succession: Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Many of the contributions to Rex Rexheuser (ed.), Die Personalunionen von Sachsen-Polen 1697–1763 und Hannover-England 1714–1837: Ein Vergleich (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005) are in English.