V

Settling down

GREAT BRITAIN AT THE TIME OF GEORGE'S ACCESSION

The Great Britain of which George became ruler on 1/12 August 1714 had, since 1688, been one of the great powers of Europe, intimately involved with the continent and yet – as several attempts at Jacobite invasions by those who favoured the restoration of James II and (after 1701) ‘James III’ had shown – sufficiently protected by its island position to render it invulnerable as long as the Protestant revolution had the support of the majority of the inhabitants. William III's determination to make England the arbiter of Europe had not been generally popular, but during the wars against Louis XIV between 1689 and 1713 this role had become accepted and even appreciated, sweetened by Marlborough's military victories between 1704 and 1708, and hardened by the singleminded ruthlessness of Oxford and Bolingbroke in settling Europe's affairs between 1710 and 1713 without consulting Britain's allies. The growth in national self-assertiveness was striking. The leading men of queen Anne's last ministry let Europe know that England felt free to make peace with France whenever it wanted and was in ‘no need of a mediator’.1

Such behaviour reflected pride not only in the actual war-effort of Great Britain but in the skilful use of resources to finance the two long wars. William III had been a hard taskmaster at the treasury; he and his pupils, as well as French Protestant refugees and Dutch-trained bankers, had brought about the ‘financial revolution’ which enabled Britain to fit out large navies and pay considerable armies (the greater part of which consisted of foreign auxiliary troops) with less stress than was imposed on Louis XIV's France.² So complete was the success of this financial revolution that, though William himself had at times been forced to threaten abdication and announce his determination to ‘retire to the Indies’ unless money was forthcoming,³ Oxford found it relatively easy to raise money even when the Bank of England opposed his policies: thanks to the support of Tory-minded financial men at home and abroad (John Drummond, the merchant and banker settled in the Dutch Republic, is a good example of the latter), and the foundation of the South Sea Company in 1711, he was able to weather the crisis of 1710 to 1712.4

Tories of the blue-water school who advocated concentration on seaward expansion and conquests in the West Indies and on the American continent (north and south), with consequent disengagement from European land warfare, and Whigs who argued that overseas gains could most easily be won if the European campaigns were pushed to the very gates of Paris and Madrid, were at one in stressing the primary importance of providing money, the sinews of war. The national debt rose between 1688 and 1714 from five to fifteen million pounds, but there was no doubt that the nation could carry it, though Tories – especially the landed gentry of that persuasion – grumbled that the land tax sucked them dry while the financiers of the capital grew bloated. Some of the gentry and many yeomen farmers were indeed ruined by the burdens they were asked to carry, but generally speaking the wars had tended to enrich the ruling sections of society. Foreigners who visited England never ceased to marvel at the number of palaces, in magnificently laid-out parks, which were built or remodelled in the immediate post-war years by moneyed men of town and country.

The resources of Britain – though poor in population, even after the union with Scotland (or North Britain as it was often called after 1707), when compared with France and the Austrian Habsburg dominions – were considerable. Its eight and a half million inhabitants were not impressive;* but its trade was highly profitable thanks to its favourable geographical position, its colonial possessions and overseas trading posts and, even more, to its skilful manipulation of navigation laws which gave preference, and monopoly when and where it was judged necessary, to British ships and British citizens.⁵ The wars against France had given impetus to manufactures of all kinds, and towns like Manchester and Birmingham were thriving. Though the domestic market was the more important, exports continued to rise for a greater variety of goods than the pre-war dominant woollen cloth. The slave-contract obtained from Spain in 1713 led to rapid development for western ports, especially Bristol; these ports as well as the capital itself benefited from the increasing importance of Britain's role as an entrepot for extra-European produce – tobacco, coffee, sugar, and tea in particular. Dublin was booming, the second largest city after London in the realm, and Ireland (as a consequence of English restrictive laws which forbade the fattening of Irish cattle in England) had become an exporter of meat-products. Norwich was still the second largest city in England; but the east coast was, on the whole, declining in comparison with the centre and the west. Newcastle was important because of the domestic coal trade, carried by sea to London; and the ports in which naval dockyards were situated on the east and south coasts retained their significance because of the nation's strong naval commitment.

In the two houses of parliament – and especially in the House of Commons – Britain possessed a sensitive barometer for economic pressure. Vested interests were strong. The sensible Anglo-French commercial treaty signed by Bolingbroke in 1713 was denied ratification, partly because of remnants of political enmity towards France, but mainly because of the opposition of those who had profited from the monopoly position of Portuguese wines during the long years when the importation of French wines had been prohibited.6 Great hopes were built on the restoration of trade with Old Spain and on the clause in the asiento which permitted limited trade in British manufactures with New Spain: that such trade was in theory restricted to one ship's load a year was not taken too seriously by optimistic merchants and speculators who reckoned with an expanding exchange of goods with Philip V's American subjects in return for Spanish gold and silver.⁷ During the War of the Spanish Succession the gold discovered by the Portuguese in Brazil had largely found its way to Britain;⁸ but the appetite of the western European powers for precious metal was insatiable. They needed currency to pay for the naval stores from the Baltic which were essential for the fitting-out of their fleets and to buy those silks and cottons and china goods from the Far East which were so fashionable in Europe that they amounted to near necessities.⁹ The influence of those who traded with Spain and the Spanish empire (either through Spanish merchants in Castile or via the semi-legal smuggling trade which developed from the annual-ship clause of the asiento) was therefore considerable in parliament. Here again an element of competition with France is noticeable: Louis XIV had bought the asiento from a Portuguese company in 1701 and had aspired to a French domination of trade with Spain overseas; now it was Britain's turn.

This commercial confidence rested, in the last instance, on a conviction of financial and thus military, and especially naval, superiority. The French privateering warfare had hit hard at British shipping between 1704 and 1709, but the ability of Britain to continue her building programme of naval ships so that adequate convoys could be fitted out for both the Baltic and the Atlantic trade had left the country, when peace came, with a larger navy than France, which had been forced to concentrate on the expansion of its armies. It was realized that Spain, under the Bourbons, wanted to rebuild its navy so that the Castile monopoly of trade with New Spain should be maintained; but this would take time. The Dutch Republic – once so serious a rival in Baltic and Far East trade – was sufficiently exhausted from the late war not to be able to compete with Britain's naval programme; and though the Republic's economic prosperity continued far into the eighteenth century, its will for the pursuit of an aggressive economic policy had weakened.10 As for the Austrian Habsburg dominions, whose ruler since 1711 was the emperor Charles VI,* the British were conscious of the fact that he needed Britain more than they needed him. He was reluctant to give up his claim to the whole of the Spanish Habsburg dominions; but sooner or later, the British felt sure, he would see reason since for the security of the share of those dominions which the peacemakings of 1713–14 had guaranteed to the house of Austria – the Southern Netherlands, the duchy of Milan, the kingdom of Naples with the Tuscan ports, the so-called presidii, and the island of Sardinia – he was dependent on their naval power: it was only too likely that Bourbon Spain should harbour plans for the reconquest of some, or all, of its former Italian possessions as no peace had been signed between Philip V and Charles VI.

Britain had already shown how easily it could transport troops to the Southern Netherlands; and the British gains, at Spain's expense, from the war – the island of Minorca and the fortress of Gibraltar – gave effective control of the western Mediterranean to the British navy. Austria's navy was virtually non-existent, though Charles VI and his Spanish-Italian advisers hoped to build a sizable fleet as soon as their financial situation would permit. Charles VI was also in need of British loans, or at least of payment of arrears of subsidies from the last war. The Austrian Habsburg state, in spite of the extent of its dominions and its large population, had not yet caught up with the administrative and financial organization of Britain.¹¹

Britain's smaller size made it easier to govern than either France with its twenty million inhabitants or Habsburg Austria with its ten million: speedier action could be taken throughout the realm and control was surer than in the more centrally governed (in theory) state of Louis XIV and the geographically somewhat scattered dominions of Charles VI. Its taxation system was socially fairer and therefore less resented. The land tax was levied on all landowners, noble and commoner alike. Its method of raising income from indirect taxation was unusually flexible, capable of being changed in accordance with shifting economic and political needs. Its social cohesion was stronger, in spite of the gulf between rich and poor, since the sons of noblemen were legally commoners even though the eldest sons of high nobles held courtesy titles. Indeed, the nobility's only remaining privilege in law was its right to be tried by its peers in the House of Lords. The eldest son (who, in spite of his courtesy title, could be elected to the House of Commons in his father's lifetime) inherited his father's title, but the rest of the children did not – as on the continent – have noble status by hereditary right and had to find their place in society according to talents and luck. The move from commoner to nobleman was at least as difficult (or easy) as on the continent and took place for similar reasons: great services to the ruler or sufficient money – whether earned, inherited or achieved through marriage with an heiress – to live in the style and with the responsibilities of a landed nobleman. The pride of the English nobility was not usually behind that of its continental counterparts. Its members generally exceeded those of the continent in riches and political influence, for even if the individual nobleman held no ministerial or high court office he could bring pressure to bear through shire elections to the House of Commons.

There was in England also an intermediate class of social significance, consisting of those who obtained a knighthood. A knight was not a member of the peerage and therefore could not sit in the House of Lords (indeed he retained his right to stand for elections to the House of Commons), but he held the coveted title of Sir and his wife was styled Lady. From the government's point of view a distinction for merit or services could thus be bestowed without enlarging the peerage; from the point of view of the commoner, social mobility was made easier. Every educated and ambitious person considered it perfectly possible that he himself might be knighted and that his son (if not he himself) could aspire to even greater honours. It was realized that election to the House of Commons would facilitate the process for father as for son; it was so sure a route to influence that it was rated above that of service, whether at court, in the administration or in the army or navy. Courtiers and officials who wanted to get ahead, officers on the ladder of promotion, all coveted seats in the lower house. The very existence of the House of Commons, and the triennial parliaments established in 1694, was a cause of national pride among British commoners. The balance which it imparted to the constitution – holding in check not only the ruler but also the powerful House of Lords – was much admired by intellectuals abroad. ‘How we praise your House of Commons’, wrote Leibniz enthusiastically to a correspondent in England, ‘how perfect is your constitution and how in accordance with the dictates of reason’.12

Leibniz's enthusiasm must not (in combination with the ever-present temptation to read history backwards) blind us to the fact that at the time of George I's accession, the House of Lords was very powerful indeed. Here sat, with rare exceptions, the important ministers of the crown, either because they were already peers when called to their posts or because of rapid promotion thereafter. The archbishops and bishops of the Anglican church took part by virtue of their office. The upper house was much smaller than the House of Commons, with some 200 to 250 members in the period with which we are concerned (compared with the 480-odd which composed the lower house); but it was in the House of Lords that the great issues of the reigns of William III and queen Anne had been decided. The standard of debate was high. So was the percentage of active members, explicable by the large proportion of peers who held office or court position and by the number of ambitious opponents who wished to challenge, and hoped to supplant, those in places of power and profit. Between 1702 and 1714 ministries had frequently been saved by the Lords from bills, passed by the Commons, deemed inimical to good government; and the need to control the Lords had on two occasions been acute enough for Anne's ministers to force the queen into mass-creation of peers.* In George's reign, as we shall see, the relationship between the two chambers changed a good deal, but management of the lords temporal and spiritual remained of crucial significance.

Wherever Britain looked, at home or abroad, the present looked acceptable and the future promising. The union with Scotland, though undertaken for political purposes, had eliminated a prospective economic rival as well as filling a gap in national security: the not inconsiderable Scottish mercantile and expansionist drives were henceforth channelled into the British community. Integration was implicit in the arrangement that sixteen Scottish peers – elected by the whole Scottish peerage – should sit in the House of Lords; forty-five seats were allocated for Scottish constituencies in the House of Commons. Scottish noblemen and commoners alike were eligible for any office and any title to be bestowed by the ruler of Great Britain. A secretary of state for Scotland was nominated to take charge of specifically Scottish affairs, but this proved to be an interim measure and George I – as we shall see – decided to abolish the post in the interest of integration. The integration of Ireland – of much older date – had become fixed within a dynastic union pattern, and the union of Scotland and England in 1707 provoked no discussion as to whether change in Ireland was desirable or not. The Irish parliament continued to exist and had considerable autonomy; there was an Irish church establishment, a separate Irish peerage, and an Irish civil list to defray the king's expenses in ruling the country. But the presence of an English-nominated lord lieutenant, the claim of the central government to scrutinize acts passed by the Irish parliament, and the non-scrupling of the English House of Commons to enact laws which hit at Irish commercial interests if these came into conflict with those of England left no doubt which country was in control. In theory it might seem fair enough that Irish Catholics were unrepresented in the Irish parliament, that the Irish church was a purely Protestant (Anglican) one, and that no Irish Catholic could hold office under the crown. After all, English and Scottish Catholics suffered the same disabilities. But the far greater incidence of Catholicism in Ireland made this more of an injustice than in the rest of the kingdom, explicable only by the risk which haunted successive British governments, ever since Elizabeth I's time, of Irish Catholics cooperating with England's Catholic enemies abroad, first Spain and then France.

For political reasons William III, who was no bigot, had tried to minimize the harsher aspects of successive English conquests of Ireland. As the ally of Catholic powers, principally the house of Habsburg, the Spanish branch as well as the Austrian, he had promised ‘no persecution’ once James II's army (supported by Louis XIV with ships, men and money) had been defeated in 1692.13 Instead of the blood-baths of previous reigns, the remnants of James's army were in that year given the choice of submitting to William III or going into exile in France. Nearly all (some 12,000) chose to leave Ireland. For several years these Irish regiments served as distinct units with the French army, owing allegiance to James II; but in time they were merged with Louis' forces, though they still retained a national character and received recruits from Scottish Jacobites seeking refuge on the continent because of their objection to the union of 1707. A considerable number of Irishmen and Scots settled in the western ports of France where the departure of the Huguenots in the 1670s and '80s had left gaps to be filled in the commercial and shipping life of that part of the country; after 1713 military men of both nations (and at times whole companies) took service with other Catholic monarchs, especially Philip V of Spain. The exiled court of James II and – after 1701 – of ‘James III’ could absorb only a portion of Scottish, Irish and English Catholics who offered their services; but a good many were employed as spies and agitators, working clandestinely in Britain and, more openly, at foreign courts opposed, for however short a period, to the policies of those whom the Jacobites considered after 1688 as usurpers. Here they often found support from non-military men who had, because of their sympathy with the Stuart cause, emigrated and made careers for themselves which brought them into contact with influential court circles, medical men, naval officers and financiers being prominent among them.14

From the point of view of the central government in London, the exodus of Irish, Scottish and even English Jacobites was beneficial, though successive governments remained acutely aware of Jacobite machinations abroad. This exodus removed the unruly elements and cemented the cohesion of those who remained, helped by the high reputation of the Irish and Scottish regiments which had fought for Britain during the wars against Louis XIV. There was also a sense in which all three kingdoms felt proud of the powerful state which emerged from the peace of Utrecht. The trading posts in India had not been enlarged; but in the West Indies the French island of St Christopher – renamed St Kitts – had become British, and on the North American continent Louis XIV had ceded Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, as well as French settlements in the Hudson Bay area, to queen Anne. But France had retained its right to participate in the cod-fisheries off the Newfoundland coasts with the privilege of drying and curing catches before transporting them to Europe; and there was considerable alarm lest French exploration from the St Lawrence river towards the Gulf of Mexico – the legendary exit for the North American river network – prevent expansion of Britain's colonies beyond the Alleghenies.¹⁵

France was indeed the joker in the pack. There was a healthy respect for Louis XIV's kingdom quite apart from its vigour overseas. Its great resilience in Europe had confounded wartime prophecies of the ‘utter ruin’ which Britain was to impose on the ‘Christian Turk’.¹⁶ Englishmen, travelling on the continent in the immediate post-Utrecht years, marvelled at France's prosperity¹⁷ and in retrospect realized the fragility of English wartime propaganda. Statesmen in London, Tory and Whig, became aware that England's relationship to France was in need of redefinition. Would cooperation be more sensible than enmity? Bolingbroke had already made steps towards such cooperation by the time of queen Anne's death;¹⁸ and the issue was one which was to confront the Whigs – and George I – not long after his accession. Such cooperation was strongly tied to plans to conjure away the black cloud on the European horizon which persisted after the peacemakings of Utrecht, Rastadt and Baden, the Great Northern War which had raged ever since 1700. Commitment to resist Louis XIV had indeed denied Britain real influence in the Baltic since 1702. The Tories wished – if within the framework of their view that Charles XII was a hero whom fortune had deserted after 1709 and who must therefore accept sacrifices – to intervene on Sweden's side lest tsar Peter of Russia grow to exorbitant power in the north. For this purpose they aimed to recruit both French and Dutch support in the summer of 1714,19 confident that wherever Britain inclined to preserve the balance of Europe after 1713, there it would prevail. A squadron was already fitted out, ostensibly for the sole purpose of safeguarding British trade, when queen Anne fell mortally ill. On her death it was diverted to escort George I to his kingdom. It would not do to dispose of the fleet without consultation with the new sovereign.

GEORGE AND THE PARTY SYSTEM

In 1714 George I became the ruler of a go-ahead, confident people, ambitious in domestic and foreign affairs, but he also inherited problems in governing it. The nation had a reputation for being changeable, dating from the civil wars of the 1640s, the submission to Cromwell's protectorate in the 1650s, the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, and the revolt against James II in 1688. The radical element in Whig ideology had been much publicized on the continent; 1688 was widely thought to have made the monarchy, if not elective, wholly dependent on parliament. Republican principles took both aristocratic and democratic form. Some held that even if the nation would not yet stomach a republican constitution it could by degrees be brought to adopt the principle that the king could be ‘sacked’ – deemed to have abdicated, as had happened to James II – if he did not obey the dictates of the House of Lords. Others expressed agreement, though with the one important reservation that the preponderance of power should lie with the House of Commons. Neither Whig view was acceptable to George I who took care to let it be known that he came to Britain as a ruler by ‘hereditary right’, that right having been made extinct ‘only for Catholic members of the House of Stuart’.²⁰ This declaration was meant to scotch any Whig interpretation that parliament had given him the kingdom. At the same time it was also intended to convince the Tories that he was no usurper. The Tory party, while firm on the traditional value of the royal prerogative, also held disadvantages for George. Quite apart from its desertion of the Grand Alliance, still in vivid memory, it was too closely identified with the Anglican church and its intolerance towards Protestant dissenters to make a continental ruler of the Early Enlightenment feel comfortable.

It is clear therefore that George agreed with those who urged that the party-system should be kept in check whether the dividing line went, as in periods of crisis when issues of principle were at stake, between Whigs and Tories; or, in calmer periods, between ‘court’ and ‘country’; or, as continentals were wont to put it, between strong and weak government. That George preferred strong government is shown by his suggestion in 1717 that the British succession should be so modified that male heirs should take preference over female heirs:21 it would seem that he accepted Louis XIV's argument that England in queen Anne's reign had been a virtual republic.²² In 1714 he hoped and expected to steer a moderate course, independent of extremists of Whig and Tory persuasion, in short to govern with a ‘king's party’ in the sense in which Schulenburg used that term between 1717 and 1720.

George's list of regents,* to form the interim government until his arrival, has hitherto been analyzed in terms of party affiliations only: thirteen Whigs, four Hanover Tories and one ‘unattached’. Such a division is valid enough, but not sufficient for our purposes. Over five names George had no control, since they were there by virtue of offices held in queen Anne's last ministry; for the rest, the regents are found to have been chosen for their opposition to the Oxford-Bolingbroke betrayal of Britain's allies, for their ability to maintain the union of Scotland with England, for their expertise in a special field of administration or their strong influence in one or both houses of parliament, and for their record of being ‘court men’ who regarded it as their duty to work in the national interest as seen by the crown. No one of extremist views was included, nor anyone deemed too ambitious of power, though the element of reward for services rendered was naturally present. In alphabetical order, and apart from Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury who, because of his elevation to lord treasurer in the last hours of queen Anne's life, also became ex-officio regent, they were: Montague Bertie, earl of Abingdon, who controlled a Tory group in the House of Commons and had strongly opposed the commercial treaty with France; Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, a sound High Church Tory who had yet taken the Whig line in debates on peace negotiations in 1711–13; John Campbell, duke of Argyll, an army officer, influential in Scotland and known to George as committed to armed opposition to a Stuart succession; Charles Powlet, duke of Bolton, and Charles Howard, earl of Carlisle, both considerable borough patrons, who might be classified as court Whigs, having been allies or junior associates of the Whig junto during the War of the Spanish Succession rather than members of it; William Cowper, an experienced legal administrator (lord keeper 1705–07, lord chancellor 1707–10), one of the best speakers in the House of Lords and essentially fair-minded and moderate though – as will be seen – his religious toleration did not extend as far as George's; William Cavendish, duke of Devonshire, who, with Cowper, had been largely responsible for the adroit manoeuvring of the Whigs during the Oxford-Bolingbroke ministry; Charles Montagu, lord Halifax, who had long-established ties with Hanover and was – if vain and pompous – a skilled House of Lords debater with useful City connections; Henry Grey, duke of Kent, who had opposed Britain's separate peace with France, though he was by temperament a staunch court man holding that ‘a quiet mind is better than to embroil myself amongst the knaves and fools about either Church or State’;23 James Graham, duke of Montrose, keeper of the privy seal in Scotland between 1703 and 1713, who had furthered the cooperation between the Whigs and the Scottish unionists; Daniel Finch, earl of Nottingham, a pro-Hanoverian Tory throughout a long ministerial career who had left queen Anne's ministry in 1711; Edward Russell, earl of Orford who, having been first lord of the admiralty between 1709 and 1711, had influence with admiralty officials and naval men, as well as with his Russell relatives in the House of Commons; Thomas Herbert, earl of Pembroke, also noted for admiralty experience; John Ker, duke of Roxburghe, strongly committed to the Hanoverian succession and to Scotland's remaining within the union; Richard Lumley, earl of Scarborough, classified as an ‘independent Whig’;²⁴ Charles Seymour, duke of Somerset, a household officer and great magnate controlling numerous seats in the House of Commons, who had prevented Scotland breaking out of the union during the so-called malt tax-riots;* Charles, viscount Townshend, who as negotiator of the Anglo-Dutch treaty of Barrier and Succession of 1709 had rendered services which George held to be of the greatest importance for the cause of Hanover.

Shrewsbury had earned his nomination on George's list by his consistent support for moderate measures as well as for his loyalty to the house of Hanover in parliamentary debates. A ‘manager’ of queen Anne's reign, he had a sense of his own importance, and he must have enjoyed the distinction of being both a nominated and an ex-officio regent. His membership of the Oxford-Bolingbroke ministry (as lord chamberlain since 1710 and lord lieutenant of Ireland after 1713) made him particularly useful to George as a link between the ex-officio and the nominated regents.

It created some surprise that Marlborough was not among the regents, nor his son-in-law Sunderland. It might be suspected that George harboured ill-will towards Marlborough because of his deceit in 1708, or – as is often said – that the duke was distrusted because of his correspondence with the court of Saint-Germain. George's first action as king (on 6/17 August, as soon as notification of queen Anne's death reached him) disproves this, since he then dismissed Ormonde and restored Marlborough to command of the British army.25 He had complete confidence in the duke's willingness to defend the Hanoverian succession if James Edward should challenge the proclamation of 1/12 August; but he may have had some qualms about giving Marlborough – and his wife – political power. Sunderland's exclusion was certainly deliberate; he had the reputation of being an extreme and ambitious party man, a republican at heart. He was found a minor post in George's first ministry, but the king continued wary of him; when it became necessary to employ him in high political office after the crisis of 1716–17, he was, for a further two years, kept out of the court post he most coveted, that of groom of the stole, which brought easy access to the ruler. It is interesting to note that on his achieving a place in the inner cabinet, one of his protégés found him inclined to more moderate measures, ‘being of late much come off from the violence he shew'd in the last reign’.²⁶

Of the ex-officio regents only two, apart from Shrewsbury, were continued in office. Tenison, archbishop of Canterbury, a longstanding correspondent of the house of Hanover, had disassociated himself from the Oxford-Bolingbroke ministry, virtually immuring himself in Lambeth Palace after 1711. His renewed activity after 1/12 August 1714 seemed to augur well for a tolerant and moderate Anglican church; but he died in 1715 and his successor, William Wake, though ecumenically minded in Europe, treasured the dominant position of the Anglican church at home. Thomas Parker, lord chief justice since 1710, was confirmed by George even though it was held that rulers on their accession were at liberty to dispense with the ‘tenure during good behaviour’ act of William III's reign. He was an able man (as well as one willing to support the king), who was made chancellor in 1718 and created earl of Macclesfield in 1721.

The other ex-officio regents were not found places in George's first government: Harcourt had to give room to Cowper as lord chancellor; Buckingham, lord president, to Nottingham; Dartmouth, lord privy seal, to Wharton; Strafford, first lord of the admiralty, to Orford. Four of the new men had been on George's list as regents; the fifth, Wharton, had spoken vigorously against the separate peace.

George was not short of advice on the kind of men he should employ upon his arrival in England, nor on what policies were expected of him. He received solicited and unsolicited memoranda on the state of the parties, on the issues of the day, on which men to reward and which to punish. Traditionally Bothmer and Robethon are supposed to have decided ‘everything’ as the king has been held to be without either knowledge of or interest in English affairs.27 In reality George had long weighed the problems and studied the men from whom he would draw his ministers. Englishmen were more important than Hanoverians in giving information. There are letters from Cowper and Nottingham in the Hanover state archives, and Bernstorff carefully preserved an undated and unsigned paper on ‘La méthode dont s'est servir le dernier ministère pour faire casher le premier et se mettre eux mesmes dans la favour de la Reine’.²⁸ Via Bernstorff, Cowper did indeed become one of George's most prominent advisers. Building on the friendly relations that had existed between his brother-in-law Ludwig Justus von Schütz (the late Hanoverian envoy to St James's) and the Cowpers, Bernstorff entered into correspondence with lady Cowper as soon as news of queen Anne's death reached Hanover. Through Bernstorff, therefore, recommendations from the Cowpers reached the king, both before and after the move to England.²⁹ But George also listened to Friedrich Wilhelm von Görtz and Weipart Ludwig von Fabrice, who had friends and contacts in non-Jacobite Tory circles; and, since both ministers accompanied the king to England and continued there for several months, Cowper's ‘Impartial History of Parties’, in his wife's French translation, was not the only case of special pleading studied by George: the Tories also had their spokesmen and propagandists.³⁰

The Whigs, however, found foreign advocates denied to the Tories. They knew that George would travel to England via The Hague and urged Dutch ministers to press the case for ‘trusted Whigs only’ in all offices. George had intended to spend only three days in the Republic, but contrary winds kept him there from 16 to 27 September. During this time he met Dutch statesmen and discussed with Bernstorff and Görtz (who had arrived already on 11 September) their conversations with Heinsius, the raadpensionaris, Slingelandt, the secretary of the council of state, and Duyvenvoorde, the son-in-law of Portland, well-versed in English affairs and with a good knowledge of the English nobility.³¹

George's declaration that during his reign he would not think of the names Whig and Tory but of merit only when choosing his advisers, made Heinsius cautious enough to recommend only those Whigs he considered ‘friends of the Dutch’,32 and to concentrate on the offices which bore most strongly on Britain's foreign relations. The ministers who dealt with domestic affairs – the lord chancellor, the lord chief justice, the lord treasurer and the lord privy seal – all belonged to the important small group of royal advisers known as the cabinet council. This met, on a specific day of the week, with the sovereign (and, at his bidding, at other times if required), and prepared matters by discussion in sittings of their own which were called ‘meetings of the lords of the committee’. To this group, often labelled ‘the inner cabinet’ by historians,³³ the two specialists on foreign affairs, the secretaries of state, also belonged. It was these two posts which principally interested Heinsius and other Dutchmen who wished to restore the good relations with Britain largely lost during queen Anne's last ministry. Until the reform of 1782 which produced the Foreign Office and the Home Office, the two secretaries of state* were responsible for some domestic matters (shared between them partly by regions and partly by the nature of the business); but most of their time was spent on foreign affairs which were divided between them on a geographical basis. The ‘Secretary for the South’ covered relations with France, Spain and Portugal, the Italian states (with the exception of the Papal dominions), and the Ottoman empire; the ‘Secretary for the North’ dealt with Denmark-Norway, Sweden, Poland, Russia, the German states, and the Dutch Republic.³⁴ The senior secretary of the two, i.e., the one first appointed, tended to choose (or even change) office according to the relative urgency at any one time of problems in northern or southern Europe; he usually had some influence on the choice of his colleague since – though the ruler had the decisive say in matters of foreign policy – it was important that the two secretaries should pull together.

There was great joy therefore in the Republic when George announced from The Hague that Townshend would be his first secretary. Townshend was the architect of the treaty of 1709 whereby the Dutch had guaranteed the Protestant succession according to the Act of Settlement of 1701, receiving in return a guarantee for a given number of ‘barrier’ fortresses in the Southern Netherlands to be garrisoned by Dutch troops as a first defence against France. These garrisons were to be paid for by the future sovereign of this part of the Low Countries, governed – after the victory of Ramillies of 1706 – by an Anglo-Dutch condominium until that sovereign would be [??]nternationally recognized and able to make his terms with the Maritime Powers.³⁵ Queen Anne's last ministry, fearing Dutch commercial exploitation of the Barrier, had in 1713 forced a renegotiation of the 1709 treaty which drastically cut the number of fortresses. Townshend's nomination made the Dutch confident, first, that he would choose the northern office, given the continuing unrest in the north and George's interest in the Northern War; and, second, that he would agree to restore at least some of the ‘lost’ fortresses when the Barrier was settled with the designated sovereign of the Southern Netherlands, the emperor Charles VI in his capacity as Austrian Habsburg ruler. He had only just (in March 1714) made his peace with Louis XIV and could not be expected to enter into negotiations for the Barrier until the peace between France and the Empire, on the point of conclusion at the congress of Baden in the Swiss Argau, had been signed.

The secretaryship of the south, in which Townshend could be assumed to have some say, also interested Dutch statesmen.36 Bolingbroke had been dismissed and his papers sealed on George I's orders from Hanover, but whoever succeeded him would have to cope with a problem which had agitated him and the French foreign minister, Torcy: the non-existence of a formal peace between Charles VI as Habsburg ruler and Philip V of Spain. Technically these monarchs were still at war even if the treaty of neutrality for Italy (1713) had, temporarily at least, stopped hostilities between Spain and Austria in that contested area. The solution Bolingbroke had envisaged with Torcy and Victor Amadeus of Savoy-Sicily was that Charles VI should be made ‘reasonable’ towards Spain, at least to the extent of recognizing Philip V, and encouraged to keep the peace in the whole of Italy by strong Anglo-French support for Victor Amadeus: his royal title was to be confirmed, as were the terms of his 1703 treaty with the Grand Alliance in respect of Savoy's gains in the Milanese.³⁷ No conclusion had been reached at the time of queen Anne's death; but there is little doubt that Bolingbroke's project for ‘the perfecting the Utrecht system’ turned the thought of his successor Stanhope, and of George I, in a similar direction though the ‘peace plan for the south’ which was initiated in the autumn of 1716 was modified by Stanhope's personal knowledge of Spain and by George I's relationship to the regent of France.

Traditionally, Stanhope's appointment as second secretary has been attributed to Townshend's recommendation of him, which is supposed to have derived from Horatio Walpole, Robert's younger brother, who had served as secretary, in turn, to Stanhope in Spain and to Townshend at The Hague. This is not unlikely; but we know, from written contemporary evidence, that Stanhope was already known to George by reputation and had secretly been named as one of the triumvirate (with Cadogan and Argyll) charged with contingency planning for the armed defence of the Hanoverian succession while Marlborough was still on the continent.38 Moreover, Stanhope was one of the few Englishmen who knew Europe well. He had spent a good deal of his youth there with his diplomat father and had on his own, when a military commander in Spain, handled negotiations with the Dutch, the Portuguese and, above all, with ‘Carlos III’ and his advisers when Charles VI had been the allied candidate for the Spanish crown.³⁹ Since young Schulenburg had also been accredited to ‘Carlos III’, George may have had an independent assessment of Stanhope.

George had his own line to Charles VI's Hofburg since he and some of his Hanoverian advisers corresponded with the widowed empress Wilhelmine (daughter of his late uncle Johann Friedrich) and with the empress Elisabeth, a younger Brunswick relative; but after 1714 he was keen to have Englishmen with a feel for European problems and situations at his side.

While successful in nominating two secretaries of state versed in continental affairs, George fared less well in his plans to form a mixed ministry, containing Whigs and Tories who would ‘balance’ each other. The king had no use for Bolingbroke or Oxford. Both were held guilty of pro-Pretender plans and their separate overtures to Hanover had been judged feints, though we now know that they were sincerely intended once both had become convinced that James Edward Stuart could not be brought to change his religion even as a mere outward gesture. Of the two, Oxford was most disliked by the allies who had felt betrayed by the separate Anglo-French negotiations after 1710. Bolingbroke was frank, and allied diplomats knew where they stood with him; his intelligence and concern for logic also earned their respect. Oxford was, however, hated once they found out that his bland, reassuring phrases to their faces concealed, or were meant to conceal, deceit as soon as his back was turned: if cornered, he cravenly denied responsibility. Dutch, Hanoverian and Austrian diplomats had suffered this humiliating experience; so had Heinsius who, by correspondence and by special emissaries, had tried to reach a compromise peace by cooperation with Oxford; so had prince Eugène during his visit to London in 1712.⁴⁰ The difference in attitude of George and his advisers towards the two ex-ministers is instructive. Bolingbroke retained a measure of respect and was permitted to return to England even after he had served the Pretender between 1715 and 1716. Oxford was impeached and though the suit against him was eventually dropped, because of a quarrel between the House of Lords and the House of Commons at a time when Robert Walpole was in opposition, he was not forgiven. The king certainly gave the Commons a chance to proceed with the impeachment process in 1717 and was greatly relieved when Oxford decided in 1718 to retire to the country and take no further part in political life.41

But George did hope to tempt moderate Tories into his first ministry. He offered posts to William Bromley, a one-time speaker of the House of Commons, who had been Bolingbroke's fellow-secretary, and to Sir Thomas Hanmer, the speaker of the outgoing house. Both refused, excusing themselves on grounds of party loyalty: nothing but half of all places for the Tories would satisfy them.⁴² For their part many Whigs, and especially the younger Whigs called to office, thirsted for revenge against the Tories and were out of sympathy with the king's hopes.

They and the king were of one mind when it came to putting Whigs into particularly sensitive posts. Simon Harcourt, the lord chancellor, had to go since the chancellorship was so vital and a new incumbent was at hand in William Cowper; and Harcourt's relation by marriage, the postmaster-general, Sir John Evelyn, had to follow him into at least temporary wilderness since his office was crucial for the intelligence service – domestic and foreign – of the secretaries of state.⁴³ The intransigence of Bromley and Hanmer, however, even after they had been told that more posts would be found, if minor ones to start with, for the Hanover-Tories, saved the Whigs from a balanced ministry. They even resented that one important office, that of lord president, went to Nottingham whom they refused to regard as a ‘loyal party man’, and were not happy till they had hounded him out of office.

The death of the less revengeful Whigs, Halifax and Wharton, within the first year of George's reign brought able but even more forceful, less accommodating, younger men to the fore: in August 1715 Sunderland was promoted from the lord lieutenancy of Ireland to lord privy seal, and in October of the same year the paymaster-general, Robert Walpole, was transferred to the treasury. By this time party struggle had already been joined. Elections for the new parliament which met in March 1715 had produced a Whig majority estimated at 150 and emboldened the revenge-bent ministers to lay articles of impeachment for high treason against Oxford, Bolingbroke and Ormonde and for high crimes and misdemeanours against Strafford – moves which contributed to James Edward Stuart's decision in September 1715 to challenge the Hanoverian succession.

It is useless to speculate whether the various crises that beset George on the home front between 1715 and 1718 could have been avoided if he had achieved a better balanced first ministry. In theory the acceptance of Bromley and Hanmer might have helped to offset the development of Whig predominance; in practice party divisions and party loyalty proved stronger than George had expected, and cooperation of Hanover-Tories with Whigs had wilted even before he arrived in his new kingdom. George was realistic enough to accept this; but within the limits which circumstances permitted he continued throughout his reign to work for ministries that approached the one he had ideally aimed at. When the first crisis of the reign, the Jacobite rebellion of 1715–16, effectively destroyed the Tory party as a provider of viable alternative ministers, George pursued the idea of a balanced or mixed government by having different groups from those broadly labelled Whigs cooperate under his leadership in spite of personal rivalries or differing views on the best means to achieve desired ends. Unfortunately George's determination to shape royal foreign policy to suit Hanoverian ends largely provoked the second crisis – that of 1716–17 – in which ministerial tempers ran so high that the issues at stake were speedily forgotten and the king was forced to reap what he had not wished to sow: the resignations of Townshend and Robert Walpole. The third crisis, not unconnected with the second, involved George's heir. It broke early in 1718 and lasted for two years, years in which the Whigs in opposition joined the prince of Wales in making frequent, and effective, sorties against ‘the King's party’. George learnt his lessons, and after 1720 he managed his son and his ministers quite skilfully and, on the whole, with success.

THE KING'S ENGLISH

Life in Britain was not all crises even in the early and more turbulent years of the reign. George had brought Melusine and their three daughters with him and installed them in St James's Palace. They explored its park, made early visits to Kensington and its gardens, and planned – as early as October 1715 – improvements to Hampton Court.44 Georg August, now prince of Wales, was also installed at St James's with Caroline and their daughters – Anne born in 1709, Amalie (Emily) in 1711, and Caroline in 1713. Their son Frederick, seven years old in 1714, was left behind in Hanover with his tutors, under the supervision of his great-uncle Ernst August, to follow an educational programme laid down by George. It would not do to deprive Frederick of knowledge of the electorate, and the Hanoverians might well feel deprived if the whole family departed for London. Indeed, court life at Hanover, with the seasonal changes from the capital to Herrenhausen, continued as before, with concerts, plays and entertainments.45 George himself hoped to visit his electorate as opportunity afforded, much as William III had managed to visit the Netherlands and Celle. It could not have escaped him, however, that William had had the valid excuse of the campaigns of the Nine Years War for his presence on the continent; nor was he unaware of the fact that according to a clause added to the Act of Settlement Anne's successor had to ask permission from parliament to go abroad. He realized that England would be his home from now on, and planned accordingly. Given his enjoyment of the chase and of driving, it is not surprising that among his permanent entourage was Kielmansegg, his Hanoverian master of horse, nor that Kielmansegg's wife, George's half-sister Sophia Charlotte, and their children, should soon follow.*

The prince and princess of Wales took part in the coronation ceremony on October 20/31. George wore the crown made for queen Anne, the old Stuart crown having been taken away by James II and, so it was generally believed, lost in the Channel crossing. The crown of William's reigning consort, Mary, was adapted for Georg August: many generations had passed since a prince of Wales had been present at a coronation ceremony, and there was no time to have a special crown made. Immediately after the coronation George ordered work to begin on a new royal crown. Jewels from Anne's crown were transferred to the lighter crown (27 oz 16 dwt 6 g), and the frame of the discarded crown (weighing more than 40 oz) sold for the value of its gilt metal.⁴⁶

The prince of Wales was brought into affairs of state, much as George himself had been by his father, and took his seat in the cabinet and the privy council. He did not share the secrets of the closet where the king gave audiences to individual ministers, courtiers, private petitioners and foreign diplomats, again on the pattern of George's own Hanoverian upbringing. Queen Anne had also used the closet-interview, but George seems to have relied on it more than she did, particularly after 1717. The slight but perceptive distinction made between king and heir can be seen in the last surviving fragments of Cowper's diary. The chancellor records his audience at St James's on his nomination as lord chancellor: the prince of Wales received him in an anteroom, he then went on to meet the king, alone, in his closet.⁴⁷

It used to be held that George never attended cabinet meetings because of his difficulty in communicating with his ministers. Professor Plumb has, however, shown that the king continued to hold cabinet meetings at least until April 1717 (his rudimentary knowledge of spoken English creating no serious problem, apart from the extra work of having papers submitted to him translated into French), and has surmised that the change towards a system whereby the king did not meet with his inner cabinet, but only with his prime minister, was effected over a longish period.48 Later writers have, erroneously, interpreted the date-line ‘April 1717’ as the final date at which George presided over his cabinet and have explained this by the tension which developed between the king and his heir: without the prince of Wales as ‘interpreter’ at the meetings, it is argued, George floundered and took the easy way out.⁴⁹

My own researches have established that George continued to hold cabinet councils throughout his reign, and that it was the prince of Wales who – in a bid for independent power – absented himself from them, and from the privy council, in the autumn of 1717. Schulenburg notes Thursday as being the fixed day for cabinet-councils at Hampton Court in 1718 and 1719;⁵⁰ Carteret in 1723 refers to a cabinet-council where a certain matter had been laid before the king and decided by him.⁵¹

George's knowledge of English was not extensive, but it was not as limited (or non-existent) as once believed. There may have been a measure of flattery when a subject of queen Anne's, ‘who knew Hanover well’, wrote in 1707 to George in English, stressing that he took this liberty because he knew the elector to be ‘a master of the language’.⁵² Certainly Oxford was more guarded when in 1710 he excused the use of his native tongue by the flattering conviction that he knew the elector had ‘an English heart’.⁵³ But there are several incontrovertible pointers to George's grasp of English and occasional use of it, spoken and written. Cowper, à propos the October 1714 audience referred to above, notes that the prince of Wales spoke to him in French and English, and that the king – though Cowper himself used English – spoke to and answered him in French.⁵⁴ It is on record that George I opened his first parliament by a brief sentence in English: ‘My Lords and Gentlemen, I have ordered my Lord Chancellor to declare to you, in my name, the causes of calling this Parliament.’⁵⁵ This sentence might, of course, have been learnt by heart parrot-fashion; but to it can be added evidence of George employing English phrases when talking French, of his speaking whole sentences in English in conversations after 1720, and even of his annotating, in English, a memorandum written in English.

Lady Cowper, in the early portions of her diary from George's reign, invariably quotes the king's remarks in French;⁵⁶ but in 1720 she records an English sentence which – it seems to me – must be a straight quote since it has a wrong plural of the kind often employed by Germans then and since. The topic of her conversation with George was the Townshend-Walpole return to the king's ministry and the sentence, a somewhat grumpy one, runs as follows: ‘What did they go away for? it was their own faults’.57 That faulty plurals of this kind were a common error among contemporary Germans in England is shown by the following, probably apocryphal, story. Melusine and Sophia Charlotte shared a carriage which was stopped by an unfriendly mob. The following exchange then took place. La Schulenburg, ‘Good people, why do you plague us so? We have come for your own goods.’ Mob: ‘Yes, and for our chattels too.’*

George's grasp of written English is implied in the circumstance that after 1714 Mehemet increasingly used English expressions and terms, and included English material – written and printed – without translations, in the king's private accounts which he knew would be carefully perused;⁵⁸ and of spoken English in his regular attendance at English plays. The Shakespeare performances he arranged at Hampton Court may not provide conclusive evidence;⁵⁹ but Schulenburg's report, at the height of the crisis of April 1718, that the king has a special ‘envie’ to hear in a given play a specific actor, now old, but ‘fort renomé quie ne jouait pour faire Sa cour au Roy, etant Whig outré’, is decisive.⁶⁰

It also seems proved that George, at least after Stanhope's death, did not demand that memoranda from his British ministers should be written in French. In the Public Record Office there is a memorandum of 1723 in English by Townshend on which George has written in his own hand: ‘I agree with you in everything contain'd in this letter, and desire you to communicate your opinion either to the Duke of Newcastle or H. Walpole, that the instructions to the Ambassadors may be sent according to your opinion.’ GR.⁶¹

It is not strange, however, that George should have preferred to use French. French was the polite language of society in Europe and the one he had grown up with, using it, with German, in his correspondence with his mother, who herself wrote her memoirs in French. Germans, courtiers and diplomats, frequently used French. The Schulenburg correspondence with Görtz, for instance, is in French with the occasional Latin tag and German proverb. The Fabrice memoirs were written in French.⁶²

Personal diffidence may be one explanation for George's sparing use of English; but concern for royal dignity, and for the dignity of the language of his kingdom, may have played its part. The dowager electress of Hanover had seen to it that the younger members of the family took English lessons after 1701 (though she discreetly refrains from mentioning her own sons in this context). Georg August's English was fairly fluent, but he had a strong Germanic accent which was much ridiculed just because he was so proud of his command of the language.63 The princess of Wales, who was fluent in speech, avoided written use of English and increasingly employed her daughters as secretaries when needing English.⁶⁴ On the whole it was the women of the court who did best (though Bothmer was praised for speaking English well). Melusine and Sophia Charlotte received letters in English and wrote at times in English;⁶⁵ their daughters – like those of the prince and princess of Wales – grew up trilingual in French, German and English. The Gräfin zu Schaumburg-Lippe's command of English was so perfect that her correspondence with queen Caroline's ladies-in-waiting after her retirement to Germany aroused astonishment and admiration in nineteenth-century editors.⁶⁶ She herself noted from Twickenham in 1727, with pride, that her grandsons (and George's), at the age of five and three respectively could now read and understand all three languages.⁶⁷

THE ROYAL HOUSEHOLD

George's court, after the first year or two, had few Germans; but the very fact that there were any at all offended English susceptibilities and created mutual distrust in moments of crisis. So eminently sensible and well-balanced a person as the Gräfin zu Schaumburg-Lippe grew bitter and frantic when describing the scenes at the several childbirths of the princess of Wales: why must the English doctors use instruments before labour-pains had started, against the more sensible German usage? No wonder the result of their interference was a still-born son or one that did not live long.⁶⁸

The main English complaint against the king was that he kept to himself too much and was never as intimate with his English gentlemen-in-waiting as with his few German attendants. The layout of English palaces had already been so fashioned as to impose a spatial distance between ruler and subject, the privilege of access being graded from the relatively public to the increasingly more private rooms; but George removed the innermost sanctum, his bedroom, even from those who claimed a traditional right to wait on the king wherever he might be in his palace. In the presence chamber he saw courtiers and members of the public; in his closet he saw ministers, officials and foreign diplomats if he so wished; but Mehemet and Mustafa guarded the privacy of his bedroom in a way that was unexpected and disturbing. George had tried to avoid unnecessary fuss and ostentation even as elector; he had, for instance, forbidden the use of trumpets and drums to greet him on his return from the campaigns of the War of the Spanish Succession, while not begrudging the expense and traditional ceremonial at his electoral coronation.69 He had worked hard but he had also managed to keep his private life his own, and he had no intention of abandoning either habit. He was available for the necessary ceremonies, but he wanted to read despatches and other documents in peace and therefore usually did not leave his private apartments till nearly noon. He preferred to see his ministers, English and German, at stated and prearranged times except in emergencies. He liked exercise and when there was no hunting, walked long distances either in the late afternoon or, during the summer months, in the evenings. The planning of improvements to the royal palaces and gardens – though money was scarce until after 1720 – was one of his greatest relaxations. Though he frequently dined with his ‘gentlemen’ and with visitors, his late suppers were taken with members of the closer circle, with Melusine and their daughters, with his German Kammerjunker and other intimate friends. These suppers were informal and Fabrice has left us a good description of how they were arranged. Several small tables were laid, the servants withdrew after having placed the food on buffets, everyone helped himself, and the conversation ranged widely.⁷⁰ Fabrice and Schulenburg have given us samples of the topics which cropped up in the supper conversations: the business at any given time in parliament, the military and diplomatic happenings in Europe, news of family and acquaintances, mildly salacious gossip related from courts abroad.* Schulenburg made a point of noting down the stories George himself contributed. Typical of these is one about a soldier and a freeholder (the English phrase was kept though the story itself is given in French) which had reached the court and aroused George's curiosity. A soldier met a freeholder in an inn and invited him to drink the health of the king. The freeholder refused and revealed his pro-Stuart sympathies. He offered, however, to throw dice to decide the issue: if the soldier won, the freeholder would drink to king George; if the freeholder won, his prize would be the soldier's life. Luck was on the side of the freeholder. The two men went outside in the dark night where the soldier, intent on keeping his word, made no protest when the freeholder grabbed an axe and set to his work as an executioner till the unexpected arrival of other travellers saved the soldier's life. The king was torn between his respect for the obstinacy of both men and his amazement that they should take their respective allegiances so seriously.⁷¹

Plans for outings and entertainments were also mooted at the supper table. George liked to visit the houses of his ministers and courtiers if they were within reasonable distance; he enjoyed the layout of the gardens, the architecture of the buildings and the collections, especially those of paintings. He went regularly to the theatre, to operas and concerts, usually with Melusine and one or more of her ‘nieces’. The masquerades arranged by the Swiss-born impresario, Heidegger, also appealed to him, reminiscent as they were of the Hanover carnival. He preferred, however, to leave the more lively entertainments to his son and daughter-in-law, though during his estrangement from them between 1718 and 1720 he carried the burden of being the sole host at Hampton Court, St James's and Kensington. The receptions for his birthday were always splendid and he took great pride in his granddaughters' growing skill in music and dancing, displayed on these as on more intimate family occasions. For the former Handel was responsible; in the latter, the princesses' governess after 1718, the countess of Portland, and the Gräfin zu Schaumburg-Lippe took a particular interest.72 The seasonal moves from St James's to Kensington Palace, where the spring months were usually spent, and to Hampton Court, the summer residence, were accompanied with a certain amount of ceremonial, in particular that to Hampton Court when bells were rung in churches all along the route and surprisingly large presents of money – it would seem on a fixed scale – given in return. This was customary also when George made longer progresses to visit the country seats of noblemen, or to attend the races at Newmarket (a rare occurrence), or when he journeyed to and from the coast on his way between England and Hanover.⁷³ In all such moves his extended family accompanied him.

Inevitably the foreign aspect of their new king and his retinue, coupled with George's reserve in respect of his private life, gave rise to speculation and rumours. The fact that La Schulenburg and Sophia Charlotte von Kielmansegg often travelled in the same carriage probably started the story that they were both George's mistresses. The blood-relationship between George and Sophia Charlotte was not unknown in England. Lady Cowper notes in her diary that she had been told of it,⁷⁴ and in 1718 when Sophia Charlotte, after her husband's death, was naturalized and created countess of Darlington in the English peerage, a good many officials must have noticed that the king described her as of the consanguineam nostram (i.e., of our common blood) on the parchment which announced the honour, and that the broken baton of illegitimacy appeared in her Brunswick coat of arms. There is of course no reason why a half-sister should not be a mistress. The publicity given to early nineteenth-century scandals of incest may help to account for the persistent characterization of Sophia Charlotte as George's mistress down to our own day, though some historians have assumed that incest had by then become fashionable because of the royal example set in the eighteenth century. Sophia Charlotte was, however, exceptionally devoted to her own husband, and incest was never imputed to George by anyone close to the royal circle. It should be noted that George's mother went out of her way in 1701 to deny to a correspondent the truth of rumours that the as yet unmarried Sophia Charlotte von Platen was George's mistress: she stressed that, to her certain knowledge, it was not so, the nearest Sophia would go on paper with regard to the blood relationship between her son and his half-sister.75 Others were less squeamish, Liselotte and Wilhelmine were both quite open about it in their letters and memoirs. In England the veiled hint of a physical relationship between them voiced by a confectioner of the royal household was regarded as scandalous by officials who found nothing shocking in the common talk of Melusine being the king's mistress. They urged that the man should be punished, but George, who thought him a good pastrycook, decided that dismissal sufficed.⁷⁶

Gossip, deriving in part from ignorance of family relationships, ascribed several other mistresses to the king. In his lifetime the young countess Platen, Sophia Charlotte's sister-in-law, was often listed (and has continued to be so by historians) among George's mistresses; it was believed that only her Catholicism prevented him from bringing her to London. She certainly wielded some influence at the court of Hanover and – as she showed some enmity towards La Schulenburg – English ministers who espoused the cause of one or the other nourished these rumours or, possibly, believed in them. The fact that George was willing to pay for the dowry of her daughter was interpreted as proof that this daughter was his. Her husband's standing in Hanover offers, however, a sufficient explanation; and if guesses are hazarded (given the overall situation) it would be more sensible to assume that George believed Sophia Charlotte's brother to be his father's child.⁷⁷ Towards the very end of George's life a Miss Brett was said to have gained the king's favour and it was assumed that, but for George's death, she would have displaced Melusine; but the only foundation for this is a dispute between the young lady and the daughters of the princess of Wales about quarters at St James's which goes back to Horace Walpole's reminiscences and hardly bears the interpretation put on it.⁷⁸ Odder still* is the contention by Hervey, after George's death, that the Gräfin von Delitz had been the mistress of three members of the royal family: George I, George II, and Frederick prince of Wales while he was resident in Hanover, seemingly on no other basis than that she had been lodged in Herrenhausen during George II's visit to Hanover in 1735 and lost her apartments because of a quarrel in 1736.79 The pedestrian unravelling of kinship and connections, while less titillating, produces results which fit better George's sober, conscientious and controlled way of life after his early youth. He was, it would seem, faithful to Melusine and happy in his family life with her and their daughters and with his granddaughters by the prince and princess of Wales. The latter were ‘the apples of his eye’; the former his and Melusine's constant companions, at concerts, operas and at masquerades and balls as well as at the supper table and on drives. English commentators usually mention only two nieces of La Schulenburg. The explanation for this is probably that Gertrud, the youngest, was only thirteen in 1714, and was not at first permitted to go to operas and concerts, and that when she became old enough to join the party, Louise had developed a more independent life-style. Trudchen, die schöne Gertrud, was especially dear to George; she was gay as well as beautiful and when the elder Melusine began to suffer from ill health it was the youngest daughter who went on drives with the king. At the age of twenty he married her to Graf Albrecht Wolfgang zu Schaumburg-Lippe and delighted in her happiness and in the two sons she bore. Her husband and his brother had been brought up in England (with studies abroad) because of the estrangement of their parents, and in 1720 Albrecht had entered into George's service, accompanying the elector-king on his visit to Hanover in that year. The letters of his mother, the Gräfin zu Schaumburg-Lippe, barely concealed her knowledge that Gertrud was George's child: she would not have permitted her elder son (due to inherit, as he did in 1728, the Grafschaft of Schaumburg-Lippe) to marry a mere Hofdame, even if the daughter of the duchess of Kendal's sister, except for the ‘special circumstances’; the king is acting the father's part regarding the girl's dowry and trousseau; the king is so overjoyed and so concerned for the boy born in 1722 and christened Georg August Wilhelm ‘as if the child was of the royal family’; the king insists that this boy and his younger brother born in 1724* shall be painted by La Fontaine.⁸⁰ Even more significant (though not revealed in the Gräfin's letters) is the fact that George promised in the marriage contract that he would support Albrecht Wolfgang's succession to Schaumburg-Lippe and that he and his Hanoverian successors would undertake to defend Schaumburg-Lippe against any attacker.⁸¹ It was a terrible grief for the young husband, and for George, when Trudchen died of tuberculosis in 1726, in spite of efforts for about two years to save her and visits to spas and specialists on the continent.82

Melusine was particularly attached to the second daughter, usually called young Melusine, who remained unmarried until 1733 and from whom she was hardly ever parted.⁸³ It is possible that she got on less well with the eldest, Louise; certainly in 1723, when George drew a money-order on the treasury from Hanover for the ‘sister of Lady Walsingham’, he asked that this should ‘be done without the knowledge of the Duchess of Kendal’.⁸⁴ In 1726 he presented Louise with a beautiful little palace at Herrenhausen, known after her as the Delitzsche Palais,* presumably so that she should have a refuge if need be.⁸⁵ Possibly Melusine was less tolerant than George of Louise's way of life. She was witty and beautiful. An unnamed reader of a document, now in the Public Record Office, which mentions her by name has added a tribute to her pleasant personality in the margin.⁸⁶ But it is clear from Ernst August's letters that she was strong-willed,⁸⁷ and, according to Hervey, she not only had ‘a thousand lovers’ but her divorce was the result of being caught in flagranti by her husband.⁸⁸ She had been married young, into the Bussche-Ippenburg family; but all that is known for certain is that George arranged for her divorce before 1714,⁸⁹ and that he obtained for her – at the time when young Melusine was given an English title – an Imperial title as Gräfin von Delitz.⁹⁰ La Schulenburg clearly had strict standards. She disapproved so strongly of the gambling habits of Philip Dormer Stanhope 4th earl of Chesterfield, who married young Melusine, that he was too scared to confess his losses at cards during a visit to Bath: he pretended he had not played at all.⁹¹

Some tensions in family relationships are unavoidable; but the only one in George's nearest entourage of which we have specific knowledge is the envy which Sophia Charlotte is said to have felt at Melusine having the title of duchess while she had to be content with that of countess. When in Hanover she formed an anti-Schulenburg clique with her sister-in-law, the countess Platen; and there was sufficient vexation for Melusine in 1723 to confess to Townshend that she would not mind if, next summer, the parliamentary session went on long enough to save her from another visit to the electorate. George's Hohenzollern granddaughter Wilhelmine has a good deal to say of this rivalry in her memoirs – she, like her mother, taking the Schulenburg side.⁹² The pressure exerted by Sophia Charlotte and countess Platen – on behalf of the latter's daughter – to have the father of her French husband-to-be raised to the rank of due et pair caused George great embarrassment in 1723–24. His diplomats became involved and he himself lost some face in extricating himself from an awkward situation in which he was made to feel that he had interfered in French domestic affairs.93

But, except during visits to Hanover after 1719, harmony was the rule rather than the exception. The princess of Wales and Melusine got on well together and this kept Sophia Charlotte (who was disliked by the princess) in check. George always remained on good terms with his half-sister. His private accounts show that, as long as she lived, she was entrusted with the task of choosing presents for George's daughter, the queen of Prussia.⁹⁴ George's ‘special concern’ for her sons is noted in the instrument for the Imperial Graf titles which Charles VI bestowed on them in 1723.⁹⁵ Sophia Charlotte was more popular than Melusine among English women who moved in the royal circle. She was gregarious, well-read, a good conversationalist and had excellent taste:⁹⁶ Melusine, more retiring in society, was politically influential since she proved a useful ‘breaker of ice’ for topics which ministers wanted to put before George, particularly where personalities and promotions were concerned. She dined both English politicians and foreign diplomats of note,⁹⁷ and became involved – as discreetly as she could – in the struggles between George's British ministers after 1723.⁹⁸

It is a measure of their adaptation to English life that Melusine and the daughters who survived George chose to live in England after 1727. The duchess of Kendal sold the Holstein estate which she had bought in the 1720s and settled at Twickenham; the Gräfin von Delitz disposed of the Delitzsche Palais (though her name clung for a generation or two to the Herrenhausen property) and bought a house in Paddington.⁹⁹ Sophia Charlotte remained in England after her husband's death in 1717, and though her sons made their careers in Germany, one daughter married in England.¹⁰⁰

*    *    *

It is interesting to speculate on why this adaptation took place, but investigation suggests that it was just because these ladies were of the extended royal family that they did settle down in England. They had all, the countess zu Schaumburg-Lippe noted, cried ‘bitter tears’ when they left Hanover; but their fate was, like George's, tied to England from 1/12 August 1714 onwards. The very fact that they obtained Irish and English titles after naturalization created a particular bond with George's kingdom.

For the majority of Hanoverians who came over with George their years in England were limited. Those who stayed the shortest time were the courtiers and servants intended to cover the interim period until George's English court and household should be settled. Concern that the king-elector should arrive in state, dignifying Hanover's image, had influenced the composition of the suite and staff which arrived with, or shortly after, George in 1714. They numbered some seventy in all, ranging from ministers, officials and courtiers of high rank, physicians, apothecaries, tailors and trumpeters, to a complete kitchen staff. But most of them returned home in 1715 and 1716. After 1716 George's Hanoverian servants in England never exceeded twenty-five.101

Those who had business to conduct remained: all the important officials of the Kanzlei; a few courtiers in key positions, like Hardenberg and Kielmansegg and (for sentimental reasons) the general-adjutant Hammerstein who had saved George's life at Neerwinden in 1693; the body servants Mehemet and Mustafa; two pages and a few gentlemen of the bedchamber (Melusine's half-brother Friedrich Wilhelm having a privileged position among them between 1717 and 1720 and Fabrice from 1719 onwards); one or two medical men and, at times, a Hanoverian court-painter. There was also a court dwarf, Christian Ulrich Jorry (who entertained at George's supper-parties and is depicted in the Kensington Palace murals). He had been presented to the king by a German nobleman; but he does not seem to have received a Hanoverian salary, though his clothes were paid for by George.¹⁰²

It should be noted that some staff, responsible for George's meals, remained: six cooks and three bakers and confectioners. George took a lively interest in his food though, contrary to what is generally believed, he did not put on much weight as he got older.¹⁰³ Like most German exiles among his contemporaries – Liselotte von der Pfalz must be especially mentioned – he enjoyed the typical dishes of his homeland; but whereas she had to rely on presents for sausages and hams prepared in the German manner,¹⁰⁴ George was in a position to command what he wanted. Fruit, of which he was a discriminating judge, presented no problem in England, though we do not find him praising the grapes of Hampton Court as highly as those grown at Herrenhausen.¹⁰⁵ There was game in plenty; we hear of George and his son shooting hare, pheasant, partridge, woodcock, and occasionally deer. Deer, especially stags and bucks, were, however, much rarer than in Hanover until George's improvements at Windsor and Walpole's at Richmond had taken effect in the 1720s. On visits to Germany, therefore, the king particularly enjoyed the hunting of large game, though the boar hunts of his youth and early manhood were not often his to enjoy: the parliamentary session in England opened before the best time for this sport. George grew to like English beer* and developed distinct preferences for individual brews served him in noble households. In 1717 Schulenburg reported him full of praise for lord Onslow's ‘freeholder’ or ‘election’ beer (‘better even than the Cholmondeley brew’), but intimated to his correspondent that the royal palate was fickle: ‘Je crois que cette préference ne durera guerres et changera à la première que d'autres Luy offriroit.’106 Of rare delicacies which were sent George as presents he particularly appreciated the truffles with which the French statesman Dubois regaled the royal table when in London for the Quadruple Alliance negotiations in 1718. Delicious truffles, Schulenburg tells us, then became ‘more or less ordinary fare’ at supper.¹⁰⁷

In filling the posts for his English household, some 950 in all, George exhibited two peculiarities and one firm line of policy. His refusal to nominate a groom of the stole until 1719 (when his growing dependence on Sunderland left him no choice) was motivated by his desire to avoid an English courtier with unlimited access to himself; and his putting the mastership of the horse in commission after December 1715 was dictated by deference to his half-sister so that no one Englishman in charge of the royal stables should seem superior to her husband, the Hanoverian Oberstall-meister. It should be noted, however, that Kielmansegg was not paid from English funds and that the saving effected in the English household accounts was a real one, the money not being passed (as contemporaries believed) to one or other of the king's Hanoverian favourites. The distinct policy followed can be seen when George made new or confirmed old appointments as soon as the customary period of security of tenure after a royal demise was over. Changes were made mainly in the higher ranks, George putting in men of families who had strongly supported the war in Europe: Marlborough's sons-in-law, Godolphin's relatives, Cadogan and his protégés. Reward for past service can be seen also in appointments to the household of the prince of Wales (e.g., Argyll in return for his pre-1714 commitment to the house of Hanover). Most courtiers had some political influence, either via a government post or by membership of the House of Lords or the House of Commons. It is worth noting, however, that those who were promoted to the highest of the household offices (if the king was not under particular pressure from his ministers) were those who had proved themselves least ambitious politically. After Sunderland's death in April 1722, for instance, George waited a full year before filling his post as groom of the stole and then appointed Francis, earl Godolphin and Marlborough's son-in-law, who enjoyed the honour and profit of the place but was content not to exert political pressure on the king.

The most prestigious appointment within the household was that of the lord chamberlain, and all four holders of the office during George's reign were dukes. Shrewsbury was succeeded in 1715 by Bolton; Newcastle took over in 1717 and was followed by Grafton in 1724. This courtier was in charge of the whole household above stairs (some six hundred individuals) and of court ceremonial in its widest sense, arranging court entertainments and receptions for foreign diplomats, allocating lodgings in royal palaces and taking responsibility for the upkeep and improvement of buildings. He and his staff issued orders and arbitrated disputes, but powers were naturally delegated to various semi-autonomous departments: the wardrobe, the jewel office, the king's messengers and so on.

Closest to the king were in theory his English gentlemen of the bedchamber. Traditionally they were eleven in number, though George increased this between 1719 and 1720 to seventeen.* If George's private apartments remained closed to them (contrary to former practice and contrary to the custom followed by the prince of Wales), they were still his companions of the nobility on public occasions, his seigneurs in the French phraseology of the court, who on a rota basis attended him once he emerged from his private apartments, who introduced petitioners and other visitors at the closet door, who dined with him when he dined ‘in public’ and who at times walked with him, especially when he was at Hampton Court.¹⁰⁸ The fact that some of them combined their duties with administrative office and that others – like Charles Hamilton Douglas, earl of Selkirk¹⁰⁹ – were courtiers of long experience made them in their various ways useful to George, who liked conversation to focus on specific issues. The groom of the stole was, technically, the first gentleman of the bedchamber but his independence of the lord chamberlain (established in William III's reign) made him the second most important court official.

Most decorative at the court were the gentlemen-pensioners (all members of the nobility), the several sergeants-at-arms, the yeomen of the guard, the musicians and the watermen. The band of gentlemen-pensioners or gentlemen-at-arms had been formed in the sixteenth century as the personal bodyguard of the king and in their crimson uniforms with gold braid and lace, carrying axes, they added splendour and colour. On Sundays one officer and twenty gentlemen formed a guard in the presence chamber and marched in the chapel procession immediately after the king. On the king's birthday (and on certain festival days such as Easter and Christmas) the whole band of three officers and fifty gentlemen attended. Two sergeants-at-arms (there were four pairs in all who served one quarter of the year in turn) acted as mace-bearers in these Sunday and festival processions. The yeomen of the guard, less socially distinguished, were on guard rather than ceremonial duties in the first of the public rooms and at the head of the stairs of any palace in which the king stayed, to the number of forty under a non-commissioned officer. Two yeomen slept in the guardroom at night, and from their whole number – one hundred, commanded by a captain, a lieutenant and four corporals – an escort was provided whenever the king went out of the palace precincts. Twenty-four musicians and a ‘Master of Musick’ formed part of ceremonial court life, as did the sergeant-trumpeter with his twelve trumpeters, the kettle-drummer, the four drum-majors and the six hautboy players. To our mind the musicians of George's court are forever associated with Handel's ‘Water Music.’ The story that the king only became reconciled to Handel (who had ‘deserted’ Hanover for England before 1/12 August 1714 while still in the pay of the elector) because of the excellence of this composition and the way in which the King's Musick played it as George's barge, with attendant boats, was rowed over the waters of the Thames is not strictly correct: Handel had been ‘forgiven’ long before the water-music was composed.110

Also connected with the ceremonial side of court life was the staff of the chapel royal with its dean, its forty-eight chaplains and choir of gentlemen and boys; the principal painter and the painter in enamel; the keepers of the pictures and the armoury; the court poet, who composed odes to the king's birthday, the New Year and to other festive occasions; the writer and embellisher; the engraver of the seals and quite a few others with evocative titles.¹¹¹ These, like the physicians, surgeons and apothecaries to the person (with others for the household), the strewer of herbs, the mathematical instrument maker, the decipherer, the cardmaker, the printer, the ratkiller, the mole-taker, the keeper of the lions in the Tower, the tuner of organs, the master of the tennis court, the harpsichord maker, the furrier and the chocolate-maker, the gunsmith and the glover, and a host more, were all under the authority of the lord chamberlain.

The head of one offshoot of the chamber, the master of the robes, had become recognized as rather a privileged person, especially as the duchess of Marlborough had wielded such influence when she was queen Anne's mistress of the robes. During George's reign the master's post was a near sinecure, partly because William, earl Cadogan, who held the office till 1721, was busy, first in Scotland during the rebellion of 1715–16 and then on diplomatic missions in Europe; partly also because George let Mehemet arrange and pay for his hats, wigs and suits as can be seen from the Schatull-Quittungen for the items supplied by tailors, hatmakers, embroiderers, lace- and shirt-makers.112

The lord steward was in charge of the household below stairs with its staff of nearly three hundred. Like the lord chamberlain he was of high rank,* and with his assistants (the treasurer, the comptroller, the master of the household, the cofferer) formed the ‘board of the green cloth’. This board made contracts with victuallers for food, drink, fuel, candles; and the nomenclature below stairs indicates the many functions under the board's control: the spicery, the acatery, the confectionery, the scalding house, the poultry office, the ewry, the larder, the kitchen, the cellar, the woodyard, the bakehouse, the pantry, the buttery and so on. When ‘public tables’ were provided at court – that is, when the king did not dine or sup in private but entertained members of his household, his ministry and other guests – these were known as ‘tables of the green cloth’. If the king gave orders that no such table was to be kept, as for instance during his stay in Hanover in 1716, extra expense fell on his chief ministers who felt obliged to provide tables of their own during the two public days a week when visitors, diplomats, and men and women on court business came to Hampton Court where the prince of Wales represented his father.¹¹³

The stables, as at every court in Europe, formed an important part of the household even if, as in George's reign, the mastership of the horse was in commission. Though George did not need as many horses, coaches, waggons, grooms and drivers in England as when he set out as elector on campaigns,¹¹⁴ the list of surveyors of stables and highways, coachmen, postilions, grooms and helpers, saddlers and farriers was not negligible; and the equerries and pages of honour who (in turn) had the privilege of accompanying the king when he went riding or hunting valued the prestige of their office though they were paid much less than the gentlemen of the bedchamber.

The expense of the household was vast and consumed one-third of George I's civil list of £700,000 a year, some 15 per cent of the total budget of Great Britain.¹¹⁵ Only one category of courtiers served without pay for the honour only, the gentlemen of the privy chamber.† Their duties were minimal, being restricted to attendance at great ceremonial occasions, but the posts were eagerly sought since, like all others at court, they carried exemption from various duties such as militia and jury service. From the king's point of view they enabled recognition to be given at no cost, and George permitted their numbers to increase from the forty-eight of queen Anne's reign to sixty-five in 1723. A similar purpose, that of recognition of service, was effected by the revival of the Order of the Bath in 1725.116

It proved extremely difficult to cut down on household expenses, particularly on those below stairs. George, accustomed at Hanover to regular payments and sensible household management, did what he could. He achieved a measure of rationalization, but no savings to speak of. It is symptomatic of his interest in the contracts and accounts side of management that he tried to appoint comptrollers known for their experience of business, yet loyal to himself. He first asked James Brydges, paymaster-general of queen Anne's reign, to fill the post. Brydges was now rich enough to have no need to make money out of any office, though he had previously benefited greatly from the way in which the English system of late and infrequent audits permitted officeholders to enrich themselves by using government money for speculation. He had spent some years in his youth in Wolfenbüttel and Hanover, spoke German fluently and was on friendly terms with all the Hanoverians at court and in the Deutsche Kanzlei. But he refused, not wishing to tie himself to regular duties at a time when he wanted to enjoy the fruits of his fortune, the building and embellishing of Canons and the planning of concert performances by his own musicians. George therefore appointed Hugh Boscawen, Godolphin's nephew, a man of the same moral rectitude as the late treasurer and one who – as the Schulenburg correspondence shows – had George's confidence and could have occupied, if he so wished, high political office in 1717.¹¹⁷

Yet the system of perquisites, and even deliberate fraud, had grown and become so enmeshed over the centuries that it could neither be unravelled nor brought within reasonable bounds. It is possible that George, if he had not been faced with one crisis after another between 1715 and 1718, might have attempted a clean sweep. That he was irked and irritated even on a personal level is indicated by his ironic surprise that he could not take a carp from the lake in the park of St James's without the permission of one of his own officials and that – even when such permission had been obtained – he had to pay handsomely for ‘taking his own carp from his own lake in his own park’.¹¹⁸

*    *    *

George had an income, the so-called civil list, made up from the ‘hereditary revenues of the crown’ (the customs, excise and the postal dues) granted by parliament. From this sum he had to defray all civil expenses of the administration and the royal household, with the exception of those incurred for the army and the navy, voted annually by parliament to provide a restraint on the sovereign's foreign policy: control of the ruler's ability to wage war was thus largely in the hands of the House of Lords and the House of Commons. From the civil list, therefore, the monarch had to pay the salaries of judges, ministers and officials, the outgoings for the diplomatic and the secret service, for the royal household and for the upkeep of all palaces – including the Palace of Westminster in which both houses of parliament sat. All pensions, whether agreed before 1714 or after that date, also fell on the civil list.

Until George's reign the income from the enumerated sources had fallen far short of the estimates, especially as during the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession appropriations for the war effort had been the rule rather than the exception. By 1713 the civil list debt stood at nearly one million pounds sterling. Parliament, in the euphoria engendered by the peaceful Hanoverian succession, paid off this debt in May 1715 and guaranteed George I the annual sum of £700,000 with the proviso that £100,000 of it should be earmarked for the prince of Wales. This arrangement disproves, incidentally, the contention that George ‘hated’ his son even before 1714: at this time he could easily have tied Georg August to his own purse-strings. Indeed, when conflict broke out between them in 1717, he wished he had been wise enough to have taken such a precaution. In 1715 parliament also decided that any surplus from the enumerated revenues should be paid into an aggregate fund. In the peaceful years after 1714 this fund grew fairly rapidly. In theory there was therefore a reserve from which new civil list debts could be met. In practice not only did George's total expenses outstrip the £700,000, but the aggregate fund was, first, earmarked for paying off the national debt and, later, raided by English ministers reluctant to increase the land tax.

In George's accounts a distinction was clearly made between the administrative expenses, pensions, and the royal household outgoings. At Windsor elaborate comparisons have survived between pension expenditure in the late queen's reign and in George's reign,119 and in the British Museum I have found full details of all privy purse and secret service expenditure for the years 1721–25, marked ‘to be laid before Parliament’.¹²⁰

It is possible that this distinction derives from 1718 when the new civil list debts were examined by a parliamentary committee, and the expenses of the royal household came under particular scrutiny. It was noted that Melusine and Sophia Charlotte had drawn food, wine and beer, fuel and candles and furniture for their own apartments, from the royal kitchens and the Wardrobe, as had the prince and princess of Wales until their departure from George's court early in 1718. Some Hanoverian courtiers had also benefited in various ways at the expense of the royal household. In the case of the latter the privileges were withdrawn or severely curtailed, and George agreed that fixed sums of money should be given La Schulenburg and La Kielmansegg in lieu of kind (£3,000 for below stairs and £1,000 for the Wardrobe) so that the outgoings in respect of these two ladies could be properly budgeted for. Melusine, since George habitually took his supper in her apartment, was, however, still permitted to draw fuel and candles.121

The committee failed to tackle the far more numerous and much greater perks and frauds (which were not rooted out till the radical reforms of the 1780s) of the English members of the household; but the information which had come to light helped to fix the image of covetous Hanoverians ‘who sucked the English dry’ – George's ladies, as well as his electoral courtiers and ministers residing in England. This complaint, voiced from the early days of George's accession, raised an issue of principle in British politics and, in its turn, had some influence in directing George's thoughts towards the problem of how best to dissolve the dynastic union between Hanover and Britain.

* Six million in England and Wales, one and a half in Ireland, one in Scotland.

* The election of the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire had, by custom, become so firmly associated with the Austrian house of Habsburg that Louis XIV regarded its right as ‘hereditary’.

* Four Tory peers were created in 1703 to redress the Whig balance, and in three days (29–31 Dec. 1711) a dozen peers were created to defeat Whig opposition to the government's peace moves.

* There were three copies of the list, one deposited with the archbishop of Canterbury, one with the lord chancellor, and one with Bothmer, George's Hanoverian representative in Britain; at a privy council meeting in the forenoon of Sunday August 1/12 the seals were broken and the names made known.

* The extension to Scotland of the English malt-tax had caused riots and loud demands for the repeal of the union in 1713.

* Since the union with Scotland there was also a secretary for Scotland, but his office (which was abolished in 1724) had no share in foreign affairs.

* Rumours, still repeated in books on the period as facts, that Sophia Charlotte was forced to remain on the continent because of her debts, have been refuted; she could not leave as early as her husband as she had to organize the move. She did, indeed, take up a loan (repaid within five years) to cover the expenses of the move: Kielmansegg, Familien-Chronik, p. 453, n.i.

* My italics for ‘faults’ and ‘chattels’. My curiosity about the implication of faults was stimulated by an elderly German friend (the late learned Gertrud Koebner) who, in spite of many years' residence in England, persisted in saying monthses for months – a different type of mistake, yet providing grist to the historian's mill on so vexed a question as George's lack of English. Since then I have become aware of the linguistic idiosyncrasy of the faulty s even in persons more or less bilingual in English and German.

* Often from the French court, e.g., the story that tsar Peter, during his visit to Versailles, demanded the bed of the late Louis XIV and Mme de Maintenon for himself and his mistress.

* Odd, since Hervey realized that Louise was the sister of young Melusine, but seems totally unaware of the real relationship of the two to La Schulenburg.

* The elder boy died young (it was rumoured, in a duel) while studying at Leiden; the younger distinguished himself as an ally of Britain in the Seven Years War. His interest in military matters (he had been entrusted with the reorganization of the Portuguese army by Pombal; he wrote treatises on the art of war; and the fort he built as reigning Graf of Schaumburg-Lippe still stands) and his patronage of music remind us of George I, as do the ‘Hanover’ hands noticeable even in his portrait as a child.

* Now used as the Herrenhausen museum and known as the Fürstenhaus.

* So did Germans who had stayed in England for a while after 1714: presents of beer and cider were sent to Görtz and Oberg in Hanover by the duke of Kent and Hugh Boscawen: see Görtz Archive 121/6, letters for 11 and 20 July 1717.

* In 1714 the dukes of Grafton, Kent and Richmond, the earls of Lincoln, Manchester, Orrery, Selkirk and Stair, and lord Carteret had been appointed; in 1719 the marquess of Lindsay and the earls of Bridgewater, Holderness and Warwick were added; and in 1720 the duke of Queensberry and lord Hardy.

* Successively, in George's reign, the dukes of Devonshire, Kent, Argyll and Dorset.

† The paid ushers and grooms of the privy chamber, as of the guard chamber and the presence chamber – also referred to as the drawing room – had of course specific duties: opening of doors, seeing that fires were lit and candles replenished, and so on.