1714
IN SEPTEMBER 1714 KING GEORGE I ARRIVED in London in a cavalcade of 260 horse-drawn coaches that took three hours to pass by. In the coaches were more than ninety of his German ministers and courtiers, his two German mistresses – one inordinately fat and the other contrastingly thin – and his much favoured Turkish grooms and body-servants, captured at the siege of Vienna in 1683. None of these companions spoke more than a few words of English, and nor did the King himself. Having passed most of his fifty-four years in the small north German state of Hanover, Georg Ludwig had to converse with his English ministers in a mixture of French and schoolroom Latin.
The family tree on p. x shows the complicated blood route by which Georg Ludwig of Hanover’s descent from James I entitled him to become King George I of Great Britain, but his principal qualification was his Protestant faith. ‘A Protestant country can never have stable times under a popish Prince,’ declared Bishop Richard Willis in 1715, ‘any more than a flock of sheep can have quiet when a wolf is their shepherd.’
Understanding this, England’s Protestant elite – the gentry, merchants and nobility – flocked to greet the King in the Painted Hall at Greenwich. But the ordinary people felt resentment. On George’s coronation day the following month, ‘strange tumults and disorders’ were reported in Bristol, Norwich, Birmingham and some thirty other towns in the south. In the subsequent months, disturbances became so commonplace in London, the Midlands and along the Welsh border that in July 1715 Parliament passed the Riot Act. This gave the authorities the power to ‘read the riot act’ to any gathering of twelve people or more: if they refused to disperse within an hour, they could be hanged.
That autumn, ‘the Pretender’, the tall and thin, white-faced James Francis Edward Stuart, son of James II, landed in Scotland in a bid to reclaim his throne. But though loyalists might secretly toast ‘the King over the water’, few were prepared to risk their lives. Only a few diehard Roman Catholics rallied to the small Jacobite army as it marched south. If German George was uninspiring, the fastidious, French-educated James III had even less charisma. His troops surrendered at Preston in November 1715, while James himself escaped to Scotland and thence to France.
So the English had to work up some enthusiasm for their short, pop-eyed German monarch, who demonstrated his enthusiasm for them by going off to Hanover every summer and staying there for as long as he could. When George was in London he spent as much time as possible with his fellow Germans, particularly his two mistresses, whom he visited on alternate nights, fat and thin, listening to music, playing cards and amusing himself with such pastimes as cutting out paper silhouettes. His problems with the language discouraged him from getting too involved in England’s politics – and that suited England’s politicians just fine.