George I Read online

  Vienna had been besieged once before, in 1529, but this time the Turks were sent packing for good. In the years that followed, the Habsburgs and their German allies pursued a reconquista of Hungary, most of which had been under Ottoman rule since 1541. Georg Ludwig and his Hanoverian contingents played an active and often distinguished part, notably in 1685 at the Battle of Gran (Esztergom) on the Danube and in the ensuing capture of Neuhäusel (Nové Zámky).23 Less glorious was participation in the Nine Years War (1688–97), when Georg Ludwig went campaigning against the French again in the Low Countries in the army commanded by William III. He found himself on the losing side at Fleurus in 1690, Steenkerken in 1692 and Neerwinden in 1693.24 It was perhaps with a sense of relief that he returned to Hanover in 1695 to take over the government of the electorate from his increasingly incapacitated father. In 1700, by this time elector, he emerged from retirement to command the army sent to dislodge the Danes from the duchy of Holstein-Gottorp.25

  He was to enjoy one last blaze of military glory in 1707 at a critical time during the War of the Spanish Succession. With Prince Eugene busy in Italy and Marlborough in the Low Countries, the allies were desperate to find a competent general to take command on the Upper Rhine. Georg Ludwig drove a hard bargain, agreeing to serve only on condition that the Catholic electors dropped their obstruction of Hanover’s admission to the electoral college. In truth, he did not need to do much in return. Arriving at the front in September, he issued a new disciplinary code, reorganized the defensive lines and beat off a French raiding force. The French general, the duc de Villars, then obligingly went back across the Rhine and into winter quarters.26 For this modest feat of arms, Georg Ludwig was hailed by the pamphleteers as ‘Saviour of the Empire’.

  In 1708 Eugene and Marlborough concentrated their efforts on the Low Countries, where they won a great victory over the French at Oudenarde on 11 July. Among the many who distinguished themselves that day with feats of valour was Georg Ludwig’s eldest son, Georg August, whom he had sent to Marlborough’s camp to learn the art of war. He led the Hanoverian cavalry forming part of General Cadogan’s vanguard, was engaged in hand-to-hand fighting, and was reported to have had a horse shot under him and a fellow officer killed alongside him.27 This was a story that grew with the telling, especially when propagandists of the Hanoverian succession in England were doing the telling. The presence of the Stuart Pretender at the battle on the French side was naturally exploited to the full, not least because his inactivity as a distant observer of the conflict was in such sharp contrast to Georg August’s heroic role. Jonathan Swift’s ode to the victory included the lines:

  Not so did behave

  Young Hanover brave

  In this bloody Field,

  I assure ye

  When his War-horse was shot

  He valued it not

  But fought still on foot

  Like a Fury.28

  Back on the Rhine, Georg Ludwig was left short of men, short of supplies and short of esteem. He put up with this enforced inactivity for another year and then resigned his command in a huff in December 1709.29

  That marked the end of his military career, but by then it had served its purpose. Along the way, he had acquired first-hand knowledge, not only of warfare but of the most important contested areas in Europe – the Baltic, the Low Countries, the Rhineland and the Balkans. This was to serve him well when he took charge of British foreign policy in 1714 and was faced with a Jacobite rebellion in 1715. He had raised the prestige of the Hanoverian armed forces in Europe and had established good relations with Austrian, Dutch and English decision-makers. With his admission to the highest college of the Holy Roman Empire, Georg Ludwig was now every inch an elector. It would also burnish his credentials as a future British king. In the course of the wars of the late seventeenth century, the Hanoverian dukes had acquired the well-deserved reputation of being Christian warriors. Of Georg Ludwig’s five brothers, three died in battle fighting the Turks or the French and a fourth became an imperial field marshal. For a British audience it was especially important that a numerous Hanoverian contingent had fought on the right side with distinction and died in large numbers at the Battle of Blenheim in August 1704.30 So the Hanoverian pamphleteers hailed him as ‘well versed in the Art of War, and of invincible Courage, having often expos’d his Person to the greatest Dangers, in Hungary, in the Morea, on the Rhine, and in Flanders’.31

  2

  The Hanoverian Succession in England

  All who met George’s mother, the Dowager Electress Sophia, agreed that she was the ornament of her age. In the opinion of the Duchess of Württemberg: ‘she is probably the most agreeable and cleverest person in the world and it is a great pleasure for anyone who has the honour to consort with her, for she is very good-natured and clever to a degree, so much so that everyone should take her as a model’.1 Her astuteness extended to the timing of her departure from the world she had graced for so long. On 28 May 1714, while taking a stroll at Herrenhausen, a sudden shower sent her running for cover, whereupon she collapsed and died eleven days later at the age of eighty-three. For the past twelve years she had been heir apparent to the English, Scottish and Irish thrones, as the closest Protestant relation of Queen Anne. Following the death of the latter’s only surviving child, the Duke of Gloucester, the Act of Settlement of 1701 had stated that if, as seemed certain, the queen were blessed with no further issue, then ‘the most excellent princess Sophia, and the heirs of her body, being Protestants’ should succeed.2 Although denying any regal ambitions, Sophia kept a sharp eye on her prospects, greeting the Act of Settlement with a medal depicting her own image on one side and on the other that of her remote ancestor Matilda, daughter of Henry II of England and wife of the great Guelph Duke Henry the Lion. Her hope for an invitation to England was frustrated by Queen Anne’s understandable reluctance to install a rival centre of power, strengthened by the further objection that the presence of her successor would force her ‘to look at her coffin every day that remained of her life’.3

  Queen Anne outlived Sophia by barely two months, dying on 1 August 1714. Had the order of fatalities been reversed, who knows what might have happened in London. Whether the aged Sophia would have been willing or able to make the arduous journey across Germany and the Netherlands to her new realm must be doubted. In the event, it was her hale and hearty son who took charge, although he was in no hurry to arrive. It was not until 18 September that the royal yacht docked at Greenwich. George had wanted to come ashore without fuss at what was then the remote port of Harwich, but had been persuaded not to miss a public relations opportunity. A member of his entourage recorded that their passage up the Thames in the gloaming was brightened in both senses by illuminations on both banks. Two days later George set out for London, accompanied by a procession so extended that it took half the day to pass.4 Watching in the City from a stand erected by the Grocers’ Company was the antiquarian Ralph Thoresby, who wrote in his diary: ‘we had a fair view of the cavalcade when his Majesty, King George, made his public entry through the city, which was most splendid and magnificent above expression, the nobility even burdened with gold and silver embroidery. We counted above two hundred and six coaches, though there were frequently two lords in one coach, besides the Bishops and Judges, &c.; at last came the most blessed sight of a Protestant King and Prince (whom I had a full view of) attended with the loud acclamations of the people.’5

  Beneath this smooth surface of public celebration, tumultuous conflict seethed. During the previous few weeks, London had been the scene of frantic agitation for and against the Hanoverian succession. Ever since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had sent James II fleeing into French exile, to be replaced by his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange, the ‘Jacobite’ supporters of the deposed king had conspired to bring about his return, by fair means or foul. The death of Queen Anne, Mary’s sister, was widely expected to be the signal for a violent attempt to secure a Stuart restoration. Alth
ough James II had died in 1701, his claim had passed to his eldest son, also called James and styled ‘James III’ by the Jacobites and ‘The Pretender’ by everyone else. His prospects in the summer of 1714 looked promising, for he enjoyed support at the very heart of government. For some years, rumours had been circulating that Queen Anne was secretly promoting her half-brother’s cause. They were not accurate, but they were widely believed.6 Her adamant refusal to allow Georg Ludwig’s eldest son, Georg August (the future George II), to move to England to safeguard the Hanoverian interest was thought to be especially ominous. As her health weakened in 1713, Jacobite agitation intensified. Since the autumn of that year, both the leading figures in the Tory administration, in office since 1710, the Earl of Oxford (Robert Harley) and Viscount Bolingbroke (Henry St John), had been corresponding secretly and separately with the Jacobite court-in-exile at Saint Germain in France.7

  The eventual failure of the Jacobites should not be allowed to diminish the appeal of their creed. They had a good case when they argued that James II remained the lawful sovereign after 1688 for the good reason that they believed his title came from God. As the eldest living legitimate son of Charles I, he had an ‘indefeasible right’ to the crown which no human agency could remove. And the same applied to his own son, James III. Those who opposed them were traitors to both their king and their God. Plentiful indeed were the biblical references to support such a view, the most popular being St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, chapter thirteen, verse two: ‘Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.’ So the Jacobite package – the divine right of kings, the indefeasible right of hereditary succession and non-resistance – was underpinned by a logic with a powerful appeal to those who accepted the premises.

  Against it, the supporters of the Hanoverian succession could muster cogent arguments of their own. Firstly, there was the question of heredity. Jacobites at the time, and neo-Jacobite historians since, have made much play with the statistic that it was not just the Pretender who had a superior hereditary claim to the Hanoverians: there were fifty-three others better qualified. This would not be the first time that a statistic has been abused. Georg Ludwig was not ‘a distant descendant’ of the Stuarts or ‘absurdly remote from the hereditary line’, as two recent historians (who ought to have known better) put it. The Electress Sophia was in fact the granddaughter of James I and the niece of Charles I. The much-vaunted claims of the fifty-three claimants were superior solely on account of their date of birth. In terms of consanguinity, these other French, Italian or Savoyard families were no more Stuart than were the Hanoverians.8

  Better qualified by birth they may have been, but they were disqualified by religion, for they were all Catholics and the Act of Settlement stated that no Catholic could succeed. Moreover, that Act had been passed almost unanimously by a House of Commons in which the Tories enjoyed a majority and with only five peers dissenting in the upper house.9 As this indicated, the Glorious Revolution had initiated a paradigm shift: Parliament was now quite clear that it could settle succession by statute.10 All kinds of verbal fudges were deployed to soften the blow to sensitive consciences, but the fact remained that hereditary divine right had died when James II fled his kingdom. In its place came reason of state, whose most potent ingredient was hostility to Roman Catholicism, tersely summarized by the Convention Parliament of 1689: ‘it hath been found, by experience, to be inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant Kingdom, to be governed by a Popish Prince’. The three disastrous years of James II’s reign confirmed the long-held suspicion harboured by most of his subjects that Catholicism threatened not just Protestantism but also liberty and property. Although they comprised only around 1 per cent of the population of England, Catholics loomed very large in the English demonology. In Hugh Trevor-Roper’s caustic verdict: ‘there were a hundred thousand men ready to rise in arms against Popery, without knowing whether Popery were a man or a horse’.11

  Closely allied was Francophobia. As one French observer lamented about the English: ‘before they learn there is a God to be served, they learn that there are Frenchmen to be detested, and the first words they utter are curses against us, the Pretender and the Pope’.12 What was to prove a durable prejudice harked back to Louis XIV, whose aggressive militarism went hand in hand with domination of his servile Stuart relations and persecution of his Protestant subjects. It was a symbiosis expressed well by the House of Lords in a collective declaration in 1702: ‘All true Englishmen, since the decay of the Spanish monarchy, have taken it for granted that the security of their religion, liberty and property, that their honour, their wealth and their trade, depend chiefly on the measures to be taken from time to time against the growing power of France.’13

  The last ingredient in this stew of anti-Jacobite prejudice was the firmly held belief that Catholicism equalled poverty while Protestantism equalled prosperity. A trope of the prolific pamphlet literature was the allegation that the French lived on ‘soupe maigre’ (hot water with a bit of fat added), ‘grass’ (the contemptuous name for salad) and frogs, and wore wooden shoes. Dietary and vestiary nationalism is not always given the attention it deserves, but it was certainly common in early-eighteenth-century England. Typical of the genre was an anti-Jacobite pamphlet of 1716, threatening that the Pretender’s regime would mean a diet of brown bread and water and a wardrobe consisting simply of ‘caddos’ – the rough woollen jerkins favoured by ‘the wild Irish’ – and wooden shoes.14 The other side of the coin, of course, was the belief that the commercial prosperity enjoyed by the beef-eating English and their Dutch allies derived from, and was dependent on, their Protestantism.

  In short, the new king’s greatest asset was his religion and the fact that he was not James II’s son. He was a Stuart on his mother’s side, but he was a Protestant Stuart. That he was a Lutheran Protestant troubled few. Although some Jacobites tried to argue, rather disingenuously, that consubstantiation was almost the same as transubstantiation and expressed the hope that ‘The Lutheran Churches approach somewhat too much the Romish Superstition, in some points of Doctrine and Ceremony, to meet with a favourable Reception here’,15 everyone knew that Martin Luther had been the rock of the Reformation and the scourge of popery. To allay any remaining doubts, King George was careful to attend Anglican services and to take Communion in the Anglican rite as soon as he arrived. When he returned to Hanover, as he did six times during the course of his reign, he was equally careful to take with him an Anglican chaplain and to ensure that his attendance at Anglican services while abroad was reported in the English press.16

  During those crucial few weeks at the beginning of his reign, George also benefited from the enterprise shown by his English supporters in securing his throne. Their task proved to be not as formidable as they had feared or the Jacobites had hoped. Oxford and Bolingbroke’s flirtation with the Jacobite exiles at Saint Germain had been motivated more by a wish to ensure the support of Jacobite Tories in Parliament than by any real desire to bring in the Pretender.17 Bolingbroke bluntly told ‘James III’ that he had no chance of succeeding unless he abandoned his Catholic faith, adding that the English would rather have the ‘Grand Turk’ for their sovereign than a papist.18 His cause was not helped by the vicious feud between Oxford and Bolingbroke, eventually won by the latter but not until Queen Anne was at death’s door. As Bolingbroke lamented: ‘The Earl of Oxford was removed on Tuesday; the Queen died on Sunday. What a world is this and how does Fortune banter us,’ adding in a letter to Jonathan Swift, ‘The fruit turned rotten at the very moment it grew ripe.’19 His opponents would have been too quick for him, even if he had tried to frustrate the Hanoverians. Shortly before she finally lost consciousness, the old queen was induced to make the Duke of Shrewsbury Lord Treasurer. Even before she had drawn her last choking breath, Shrewsbury and the Dukes of Argyll and Somerset had wrested control from Bolingbroke. The Privy Council they summ
oned immediately took decisive action, sending troops to occupy key positions in the capital, closing ports and sending off a courier to Hanover to announce the impending succession.20

  Already discredited across the political spectrum by his flagrant debauchery and free-thinking, Bolingbroke had no prospect of mounting an insurrection.21 When Francis Atterbury, the Jacobite Bishop of Rochester, offered to proclaim the Pretender at Charing Cross, Bolingbroke told him it was pointless. ‘Never was a better cause lost for want of spirit!’ was Atterbury’s disgusted response.22 But Bolingbroke was right. Popular agitation for a Stuart restoration was conspicuous by its absence in the summer of 1714. Two weeks after Queen Anne’s death, he recorded ruefully: ‘there never was yet so quiet a transition from one government to another … for we are at this moment in as perfect tranquillity as ever’.23 Nor was any action to be expected from the political elite. The Whigs in Parliament were united in their opposition to a Stuart restoration, but the Tory Party was hopelessly divided. As many as seventy-five of the latter’s MPs could be classified as ‘Hanoverian Tories’, that is to say they would refuse to accept the Pretender even if he abandoned Catholicism.24 As Geoffrey Holmes sagely commented: ‘a majority of Tories were Jacobite by conviction but Hanoverian by caution’ (‘Hanoverian when sober, Jacobite when drunk’ was Edward Gregg’s alternative version).25