Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Kings & Queens (16 page)
Read Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Kings & Queens Online
Authors: Malcolm Day
The English non-plussed with George I
T
he Elector of Hanover’s pronouncement, ‘This is a very odd country’, on the day after his arrival in England in 1714, was hardly likely to endear him to his new subjects.
England may well have seemed odd to a 55 year-old German prince, whose life revolved around autocratic rule and keen soldiering in a small northern principality. Odder still was the way in which he came to be King of England. He was brought to the throne by an Act of Parliament, which had ignored the better claims of more than 50 other candidates in order to ensure a Protestant succession.
And looking back, one might well wonder at the decision. Georg, or George, as he would now spell his name, spoke virtually no English and made no effort to master the language either, preferring to communicate with his ministers in French or Latin.
He became unpopular with his subjects who thought his appearance and manners very strange. Dressed in a ginger wig and sporting a bright red complexion, his impression was made still more bizarre by his entourage. Two of the ugliest mistresses ever seen in court accompanied him on each arm, one grossly overweight, who was promptly nicknamed ‘Elephant’, the other anorexically thin, dubbed ‘Maypole’. Was there a wife? Yes, but locked up in a German castle having been discovered consorting with a Swedish count. Two swarthy Turks also accompanied the new king as body-servants.
Furthermore, George made little attempt to conceal the love he had for his homeland, which he visited as often as possible. Indeed he spent more time there than in England, and in fact died on one of those visits back to Germany. Such was the people’s disaffection for him that there was no incentive even to give the monarch an English burial. The nation simply moved on.
The rise to political power of a country squire, Robert Walpole, had much to do with the power vacuum created by an absentee monarch. The new German King of Great Britain needed the good advice and guidance available from the likes of this able and shrewd administrator. Following the financial crash caused by the South Sea Bubble crisis, in which a company failed to honour its promise to pay off the National Debt, Walpole was one of the few parliamentarians to emerge from the scandal unscathed. In taking on two government posts, Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Lord of the Treasury, Walpole elevated himself far higher than any of his peers. This dominance prompted his enemies to give him the title of ‘Prime Minister’, intended as a term of abuse, but it became an office that was soon to pass into the British way of life. Walpole held the position from 1721 to 1742, and during that time took Britain to new levels of prosperity at home and kept a good peace abroad.
George II is meat and drink to Robert Walpole
O
n acceding to the British throne, George II vowed to transform the monarchy from the dull, remote and Germanic flavour his father had created. As a mark of his intentions, the new king demanded a magnificent coronation with Handel playing his great anthem,
Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet Crowned Solomon King
. The music has been played at every British coronation since.
George II’s determination to be a better monarch than his father comes largely from his background. This last English monarch to be born abroad had a miserable childhood. Aged eleven, he saw his mother incarcerated for an alleged affair. He is unlikely to have ever seen her again, though he did once try to swim the moat of the castle where she was being kept prisoner, but was unsuccessful. Once brought to England, George maintained a hatred of his father who would never allow him to do anything for himself.
George II in coronation robes
When George married the German princess Caroline, they kept well away from the old king, biding their time until his death, upon which, it is said, the young George rejoiced wholeheartedly.
Though different from his father in many ways, George II still had instilled in him the Germanic passion for method. Business or pleasure, all had to conform to a strict routine – he was often to be found outside his mistress’s room, watch in hand, waiting for the hour of nine to chime.
His wife Caroline was a forceful character with a lively intelligence. Once Prime Minister Walpole realised she wore the trousers in their relationship, he weaselled his way into her confidence. Caroline’s ambition and vanity made her a sucker for Walpole’s flattery.
Together they manipulated the king to follow Walpole’s policies. The two would meet in secret, Walpole divulging his political ideas. The Queen would talk in private with her husband before he interviewed the Prime Minster, believing he had new ideas to present. Walpole duly humoured the King and went away with approval for what were in fact his own policy initiatives. In this way, Walpole and Caroline ruled the country. Indeed it was effectively Walpole doing the running.
Meanwhile George increasingly took a back seat in government, going off on longer breaks to Hanover in a manner reminiscent of his father. His ‘reign’, if that is what it can be called, lasted for 33 years. During it, his government ministers increased considerably Britain’s strength and influence abroad. George II was the last king to be buried in Westminster Abbey and was succeeded by his grandson because his own son, Frederick, had died in an accident while playing cricket.
Political stability in the Hanoverian period allowed 18th century life to bloom into a colourful exuberance. The upper classes became eccentric, sophisticated and, above all, they loved gossip. One dandy, Beau Nash, became the renowned ‘Arbiter of Elegance’. From his unofficial ‘thronedom’ in the spa town of Bath, Nash laid down rules of etiquette which the rest of society – meaning the aristocracy – followed. One book gave instructions on ‘How to take off your Hat and replace it’. Correct manners complimented correct appearance: in George II’s reign, officers in the British army used 65,000 tons of flour every year for powdering wigs.
George III faces the realities of a modernising democracy
S
tubborn, simple and well meaning, George III ascended the throne in 1760 determined to follow his mother’s advice to ‘be a king’. Being unusually British-born for a Hanoverian, he believed he possessed something his two predecessors lacked – the ability to understand the turbulent nation he had been called upon to lead.
George III was convinced that his two predecessors had been tricked by unscrupulous politicians – the Whigs – into giving up many of the customary rights of a king. He was determined to assert himself and claw back power to the crown.
But such determination could not conceal a degree of naivety about the task ahead. The world was marching to a new order with the rising Industrial Revolution. Prosperity was spreading into the Midlands and the North as the innovations of water-power and then steam power brought new found wealth – and with it political power. As the mill-owner Joseph Arkwright boasted, his invention, the spinning frame, could ‘pay off the National Debt’ on its own. There was no doubt power was shifting into the hands of industrial businessmen, and the king had to realise that.
At the same time, the British Empire was fast expanding. Victory in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) won vast new territories in Canada and India, while Captain Cook discovered Australia. Amid the general euphoria roused by these conquests, there was one demoralising failure: the loss of America. George’s ebullient rule was not used to failure.
When the American colonies rebelled against British rule, the King declared he would rather lose his crown than abandon the empire. With a one-track mind George pursued a hardline policy, refusing to make concessions.
This attitude was typified by the government’s famous effort to ruin American tea merchants in 1773. Having dispatched a ship of the East India Company laden with tea to Boston, the government was dismayed to find out that on achoring in the harbour, the ship’s entire cargo was tipped into the sea, an incident dubbed as The Boston Tea Party.
The eventual failure in America, at huge financial cost, severely dented George’s self-confidence. His government, led by Prime Minister Lord North, fell and a year of crisis followed. This was ended only by the appointment of a new prime minister in William Pitt who, it was understood, would have to introduce far-reaching reforms. Ultimately these measures spelled the end of royal power as George knew it.
King and Pitt conducted an uneasy alliance out of necessity to prevent the forces of insurrection that seemed to be sparking everywhere around them, notably in France. Fear that revolution could spread across the Channel kept the British government in constant jitters.
By the time Britain had ridden out that particular storm, and was triumphing in naval wars against the French and Spanish, George had unfortunately descended into madness. For 50 years he had tried to dominate events, often striving against the prevailing current. But the last ten years of his reign he spent in isolation at Windsor Castle suffering from a rare disease of the metabolism known as porphyria, or ‘flying gout’.
In his youth the Prince Regent was renowned for his dashing good looks
Bouts of violent derangement meant he had to be constrained in a straitjacket within a padded chamber. He would talk incessantly and suffer delusions, claiming to converse with angels. Once when taking fresh air, he addressed a tree as the king of Prussia.
A palliative for the disease was thought to be sea-bathing; and inadvertently his trips to the south coast started a fashion for seaside holidays. Towards the end, exhausted by illness and the travails of a long reign, George III dressed in ragged clothes with trailing white beard, looking more like a crazed king Lear than the genial monarch who had come to the throne.