Assassination: The Royal Family's 1000-Year Curse (40 page)

When Queen Anne was approaching death, the Tories were in power. Many of them were uncomfortable that the true royal line had been subverted, even though James II (who had died in exile in 1701) and his son were Catholics. They believed that James II’s son, James Stuart, would convert to Protestantism and the Act of Settlement could be repealed. However, James Stuart was dominated by his mother, the devoutly Catholic Mary of Modena. James would not convert, and he even refused to guarantee the right of worship to Protestants should he become king as a Catholic. Like his father and his grandfather, each of whom lost the throne, it was all and everything without compromise.

So, on Anne’s death in 1714, the 54-year-old George Lewis was proclaimed King George of Great Britain and Ireland. The Ludwig/Lewis was dropped. Mirroring William of Orange’s prime motive for taking the crown, George was content to be king as it would benefit the security and power of Hanover.

With a marked lack of eagerness, George landed in England seven weeks after Anne’s death, accompanied by his son George, soon to be the Prince of Wales. King George’s ministers were almost all Whigs, their leaders being Viscount Townshend, James Stanhope, Lord Sunderland and Robert Warpole. Their first problem was that Jacobitism was still alive, and nowhere more so than in Scotland. The Scots resented the Act of Union, most of them supported the Scottish House of Stuart and many Highland chiefs were Catholics.

In September 1715, the Earl of Mar raised the Jacobite standard, proclaiming James II’s son, James Francis Edward Stuart (‘the Pretender’), as king. Mar’s forces captured Perth, but hopes of support from France ended abruptly when Louis XIV died. After a month of indecision, part of Mar’s army marched into England, and they were joined by the forces of several Catholic Northumbrian lords. The Jacobites advanced to Preston where they were surrounded by a royal army to whom they surrendered. On the very same day, at Sheriffmuir in Scotland, Mar’s remaining troops returned to their homes after they had failed to defeat forces loyal to George.

A month later, the Pretender landed in Scotland. He was unimpressed with Scotland and the Scots, and he made no secret of his views. The feeling was mutual, the Scots disliked him, a leader who had no respect for his supporters – men who were willing to die for the cause. But James was a Stuart, believing that he was appointed by God and that Scots and English were duty-bound to lay down their lives for him, there was no need to curry favour with them. He returned to Paris. The French Regent forced him to move to the papal city of Avignon, and James later travelled south to spend the rest of his life in Rome under the protection of the Pope.

Retribution was mixed; in Scotland there were confiscations and lootings, but no hangings. English rebels were more harshly treated; 26 officers were executed and 700 captured soldiers were sent to the West Indies as convicts. In addition, seven lords were sentenced to death, of whom two were executed and three were pardoned. That left two in the Tower awaiting execution. Lord Winton sawed through the bars of his cell and escaped to the Continent. Lord Nithsdale would be saved by his wife, Winifred.

The night before her husband’s execution, Winifred went to the Tower to say goodbye, accompanied by two other ladies. They were dressed in bulky dresses on top of which they wore cloaks with hoods. The three women made a great commotion going down the stairs to Nithsdale’s cell, two of them finding an excuse to go back upstairs, and then going down again. After all three entered the cell, they dressed Nithsdale in a spare dress and a cloak with a hood, which had been hidden within one of the women’s dresses. The guards were totally confused as to how many people had entered the cell. They did not realise that three went in, but four came out, and they did not for some time go to the cell to check, because Winifred had asked the guards not to disturb Nithsdale as he was saying his final prayers. Lord and Lady Nithsdale lived out the remainder of their lives in Italy.

The position of the Hanoverians was hugely enhanced by the Jacobite defeat. Now they could settle down to enjoy their good fortune. With his ex-wife imprisoned, George had brought his two mistresses to London; one tall and skinny, the other fat. The English called them the Maypole and the Elephant. They and the other Hanoverians would now exercise vast power through their influence over George, who spoke hardly a word of English. Any decision or appointment to be made by the King would involve the bribery of one or more mistresses and Hanoverian ministers.

George was regarded as stupid, dull and lazy. All true, but exaggerated because of his total lack of interest in England and the English. It was all a bore for him. The luckiest man in the world: his grandfather inherited by drawing lots, his father inherited by taking over his brother’s fiancée, George inherited the crown despite being 56th in line, he had been saved from certain death in battle, and the wife he hated had been locked up for life.

His son, George Prince of Wales, had similar good fortune when he visited the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1716. A man armed with several loaded pistols tried to enter the royal box. He was stopped, and then he drew one of the pistols and shot at George, the bullet just missing the Prince’s shoulder. The assassin, a man called Freeman, who was known to be mad, was taken away as ladies screamed and tried to climb out of the box. George remained calm in his seat.

The King’s relationship with the Prince of Wales had never been good. It deteriorated after a row over who should be appointed godfather to the Prince’s second son. The Prince and his wife were banished from court, being allowed to see their children once a week.A consequence of the rift was that the Prince was banned from attending Cabinet meetings as the Council was now called, ‘cabinet’ being the collective noun for a group of ministers. The Prince had been his father’s interpreter at those meetings; so, no longer having an interpreter present, the King stopped attending as well. This created a vacuum that resulted in one minister dominating the Cabinet in place of the King; he would become known as the ‘Prime Minister’. The influence of the monarch was forever reduced. But George did not care, he was content to rule Hanover as a despot, never wanting to be involved in ruling a country together with a parliament.

An economic catastrophe arrived with what became known as the South Sea Bubble. The Government granted exclusive trading rights (mainly slave-trading) in South America to the South Sea Company. Then the Government convinced holders of government debt securities to exchange them for South Sea Company shares, the National Debt having hugely increased to fund Marlborough’s battles. In addition, the South Sea Company was to be paid £500,000 a year, which the Government expected to recover from duties on the company’s imports from South America. The arrangements were accompanied by massive corruption of ministers, George’s mistresses and others, all of whom were given free shares with the right to sell them back to the company at market price, so encouraging them to drive up the share price.

A frenzy developed as the share price rocketed from £128 to £1,050, with people eager to buy shares regardless of the cost; and the frenzy spread to shares in other companies, many of them without any substance. Then a similar scheme in France collapsed, as did numerous fraudulent companies in England. The market plummeted. Thousands were ruined; only a few got out in time. One was Sarah Churchill; another was publisher and printer Thomas Guy, called by some the meanest man in England, who made a fortune from selling his shares. At least he used £20,000 of his profit to build the hospital in London that still bears his name.

Walpole had retired to the country, keeping out of the allegations of corruption. He lost money, but he was saved from financial disaster by following the advice of his banker, Robert Jacomb of Gibson, Jacob and Jacomb. Walpole was called back to London. He put forward schemes devised by Jacomb, and with limited compensation (funded by property confiscated from the directors of the South Sea Company), rescheduling of debts and the transfer of South Sea stock to the East India Company and the Bank of England, the economy was saved and stability gradually returned. After a stressful debate on the scandal in the House of Lords, Stanhope collapsed and died, and Sunderland resigned. The success of the schemes he had proposed led to Walpole’s appointment as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He became in fact the first Prime Minister, although it was not an official position, the premier title being First Lord of the Treasury
²⁹
. With Walpole controlling Parliament and the Cabinet, the Hanoverian cronies lost their power.

Recognised as the supreme politician and master of bribery (“Every man has his price” – his own saying), Walpole continued as Prime Minister for 30 years. He is immortalised as Macheath (highwayman and captain of thieves) in John Gay’s
The Beggar’s Opera
; and as Mack the Knife in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s adaptation,
The Threepenny Opera
.

One of Walpole’s interests was art. George had repeatedly said that he hated poets and painters, so there would be no royal art collection. It was left to Walpole to create one of the world’s great collections, buying Poussins, Rubens, Rembrandts, Raphaels, Titians and so on. Unfortunately, his grandson had to sell the collection in order to pay off his debts. The British Government would not meet the asking price, so the collection was sold to Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. It became the basis for the collection at the Hermitage in St Petersburg.

29 Even today, the inscription on the brass plate on the door of 10 Downing Street reads ‘First Lord of the Treasury’ rather than Prime Minister, as it is the official residence of the First Lord of the Treasury, not of the Prime Minister. Nowadays the Prime Minister takes both positions, but as recently as the beginning of the twentieth century when Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister, he was not First Lord of the Treasury and had to live elsewhere.

For all the country’s new-found prosperity, George never became popular. He still could not speak English, he spent as much time as possible in Hanover and he held only a limited court in St James’s Palace. George used just two rooms; one for sleeping and eating, the other for audiences. In the evenings, he spent his time with one of his elderly mistresses, usually cutting pieces of paper into interesting shapes.

Yet unsophisticated as the King was, Britain was still the country of Vanbrugh, Wren, Newton, Gay, Swift, Defoe, Pope, Fielding and Handel.

In 1727, now aged 67, George was preparing for another trip to Hanover, when he suffered a fit. Undeterred, he left on 3rd June. Having crossed the North Sea and reached the Netherlands, George stopped for the night in the village of Delden. For dinner, he ate a huge meal ending with plate after plate of melons. Resuming his journey the next morning, within one hour George had collapsed. After recovering consciousness, he insisted on proceeding, later reaching his brother’s palace in Osnabruck. He lived through the following day, but died during the next night in the room in which he had been born.

It was said that he died of a fit of apoplexy brought on by severe indigestion. Another story is that Sophia Dorothea (who had died seven months earlier) had written to George just before her death, cursing George and denying adultery with Konigsmark, although her correspondance with Konigsmark (if genuine) suggests otherwise. As George was leaving Delden, the letter was delivered to him. He read it while the journey started, the contents leading to his fit.

Perhaps Sophia Dorothea had her revenge. Did she posthumously kill George? Maybe she had more success than the French cavalry at the Battles of Oudenarde and Neerwinden.

When King George I died, his first-born child George Augustus
took the throne as King George II. It was the natural succession, yet it was anything but usual. Since the death of Henry V, this was the first time a crowned English king succeeding on his predecessor’s death had been that predecessor’s first-born child; and after George II, it would happen only once more
(George IV) until today.

Few people in England, certainly not his son, mourned George I’s death. There was little interest in bringing his body back for burial in Westminster Abbey. In Hanover they waited for three months, and then they gave up and buried him there. George II’s first act as king was to take out a hidden portrait of his mother, Sophia Dorothea (whom he had not been allowed to see since the age of ten), and hang it in a prominent position.

Initially, George wanted to dismiss Walpole, whom he considered his father’s man. George had decided to appoint Sir Spencer Compton as First Minister, and George instructed him to write the King’s inaugural speech. But Compton took fright and asked Walpole to write the speech for him. George had married his aunt’s former ward, the orphaned Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach. When Queen Caroline, always Walpole’s greatest supporter, found out about the speech (perhaps Walpole told her), she convinced George to keep Walpole on, aided no doubt by Walpole’s promise to increase George’s Civil List payment to £800,000 a year. More significantly, although George could understand and speak English, albeit with a heavy accent, he continued the practice developed during his father’s reign of leaving government largely in the hands of his ministers.