GEORGE I , GEORGE II, GEORGE III
IN 1782, FACED WITH a Commons motion to make peace with Britain’s rebellious American colonies and recognize their independence, George III resolved to abdicate and return to his other kingdom of Hanover in Germany. He even got so far as drafting his abdication address:
His Majesty … with much sorrow finds he can be of no further utility to his native country, which drives him to the painful step of quitting it forever.
In consequence … his Majesty resigns the Crown of Great Britain … to his … son and lawful successor George, Prince of Wales, whose endeavours for the prosperity of the British Empire he hopes may prove more successful.
Was the House of Hanover about to go the way of its unlucky predecessors the Stuarts? And the British to lose the empire they had only recently won? If it had been left to the Hanoverians themselves, who were the least able and attractive house to sit on the British throne, it is unlikely there would have been much to lose in the first place.
But in fact Britain in the eighteenth century witnessed an extraordinary and unprecedented political development: the rise of a second, parallel monarchy in Britain – the premiership. It was monarchs of this new kind who created the first British Empire, and the old monarchy which eventually destroyed it.
The seeds of the premiership lay in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. But it was the accession of the House of Hanover in 1714, and the awkward, unattractive personalities of the first two Hanoverian kings, which accelerated its development and made it irreversible.
For most of the eighteenth century, the monarchy veered between deep unpopularity and a national joke. When George I became king in 1714 the English had, for the second time in thirty years, a foreign monarch. Indeed, George of Hanover was much more foreign than William of Orange. For William had an English mother, spoke fluent English and was married to an English princess. George, on the other hand, was resolutely, unremittingly German: he arrived with German ministers, German-speaking Turkish body-servants, and German mistresses. (Indeed, the mistresses had been a necessary part of his life since he condemned his wife to life imprisonment in a German castle following the discovery of her sensational affair with a Swedish count.) Even subsequently, he never learnt more than a few words of broken English and his interests remained essentially German too, centring on the welfare of his beloved north German principality, where he went whenever he could and stayed as long as possible.
It was all neatly symbolized by his heraldry, which showed the white horse of Hanover superimposed on the British royal coat of arms. Moreover, the German takeover of 1714 had consequences almost as momentous as those of the Dutch conquest of 1688. The conquest and the ensuing Glorious Revolution had been the work of Tories as well as Whigs and, for the following thirty years, the two parties had continued to alternate in power.
But George saw things very differently. Passionately interested in the military glory of Hanover, he blamed the Tories for the Peace of Utrecht, which halted the Grand Alliance’s chances of a crushing victory over France and, more importantly for George, the aggrandizement of his beloved Hanover. He blamed them even more for their flirtation with his rival, the Old Pretender. The Tories, for their part, believed that the new monarch was really the puppet of the Whigs. Under the control of their opponents, they feared, the monarchy would become the powerless figurehead of a republic and the Church of England would lose its privileged status. For them, 1714 was the victory of the old parliamentary cause of the Civil Wars and the triumph of the Protestant dissenters.
Nor was George popular with the country. On the day of his coronation banners mocking the new king were displayed throughout the country. There were riots and talk of plots to restore the Stuarts. The general election of 1715 was violent, with more banners proclaiming ‘No Hanover’ and ‘Down with the Roundheads’. And if the country seemed turbulent and dangerously polarized at the beginning of the reign, the king blamed it on the troublemaking Tories. Thus their prophesy that the new dynasty would exclude them in favour of the Whigs became self-fulfilling. Tories were deprived of office at every level, down to the gardener at Dublin Castle. George was certainly no natural supporter of the Whigs, but circumstances dictated that if he had anything to do with it, the sun would shine on them and not the Tories.
And George did have a lot to do with it, and royal influence, combined with distaste at the Tories’ slitheriness about the Hanoverian succession, helped win the Whigs a comfortable majority in the Commons. The Whigs now turned the Tory defeat into a rout by impeaching the former Tory ministers for the treachery in the peace negotiations at Utrecht. One was sent to the Tower; the other fled to the Old Pretender to encourage his bid for the throne.
It was a century before the Tories would win a general election again, and sixty years before a Tory held high political office. The resulting long Whig domination has been hailed as the Restoration of Political Stability. It could equally be characterized as six decades of one-party rule, with all the problems of one-party rule that our own times have familiarized us with once more. For the Whig consensus was dogged by bitter internal division and competing factions. And this struggle became linked with another poisonous dispute – within the new German royal family itself.
‘The Hanoverians’, it has been cruelly said, ‘like pigs, trample their young.’ The dictim was exemplified by the very public mutual loathing of fathers and eldest sons. There was good reason for this in 1714. At first sight, George’s eldest son, George Augustus, Prince of Wales, was a much more attractive character than his father. He was married to a vivacious, intelligent wife, Caroline. He was as fond of public pomp and circumstance as his reclusive father detested it. He had displayed conspicuous bravery at the Battle of Oudenarde, where he fought on the English side under Marlborough and had his horse killed under him in the thick of the fighting. He spoke voluble, if heavily accented, English and had thoroughly acquainted himself with English affairs. Indeed, he played the English card shamelessly and proclaimed, rather unconvincingly, ‘I have not one drop of blood in my veins dat is not English.’
Matters between father and son came to a head in 1716, when the king, who had been pining for Germany, returned to Hanover for a six-month visit. Custom dictated that the prince should have been left as regent; instead, an obscure precedent was dug out from the Middle Ages and he was created ‘guardian and lieutenant of the realm’ with severely restricted powers. All important decisions would be referred to the king in Hanover, as if his son were simply incapable of any kind of responsibility. The prince was left feeling humiliated and sidelined.
But still the prince was the figurehead of government and he and Caroline determined to exploit the fact for all that it was worth. On 25 July the prince and princess and their daughters moved to Hampton Court, where, with a short interval, they remained for four months. Many people were angry that the new king had so little respect for his new people that he had left the kingdom as soon as he could. As was said, George ‘is already become the Jest, the Contempt and Aversion of the Nation’. He had been cuckolded by his wife, whom he had been forced to lock up; he had two ugly mistresses nicknamed ‘the elephant and the maypole’ for their mismatched appearance; and he was stiff and humourless. All this was ripe for jokes and innuendo. But George’s ill-disguised dislike for England was offensive. His son and daughter-in-law, on the other hand, made great effort to show that they at least were pleased to be in England. And the young couple won popularity and loyalty for it.
Hampton Court Palace had lain unfinished and largely neglected since William III’s death. But now it burst into life as George and Caroline moved into the state apartments, which had been specially refurbished for them, and kept the kind of splendid open court that had not been seen in England since the days of Charles II. It attracted the aristocracy and politicians, poets such as Alexander Pope, the writer Joseph Addison and scientists including Isaac Newton and Edward Halley. Once again, there was a flourishing court culture and a popular prince. The royal couple dined in public, held balls, fêtes and picnics; they also went on a successful tour of the South-East.
George I reacted to his son’s public favour with jealous rage and, when he returned to England, entered – against all his instincts and preferences – into a public-relations war with the prince. So in the following summer of 1717, the king himself took up residence at Hampton Court, alongside the prince and princess. In uncomfortable proximity in the same building, the two adjacent but rival courts continued to maintain different styles: the king’s studiously informal, the Waleses’ preserving something of the traditional formality of the English court, with the consequent need for grand state apartments, like the Guard Chamber and, beyond it, the Presence Chamber, which were designed for them by Sir John Vanbrugh. It was a war of style and culture, and the prince and princess seemed to be winning it.
But King George had his own genius with whom to strike back: George Frideric Handel. On 17 July, just before his departure for Hampton Court, the king bade farewell to the capital in fine style with a grand water party to Chelsea and back. Accompanying the royal party was a barge with a large band of fifty musicians, who played the music that Handel had composed for the occasion. The king liked it so much that he had it ‘played over three times in going and returning’. And no wonder, for it was Handel’s Water Music. Let the Prince of Wales try to beat that!
In November the royal family returned from Hampton Court to London for the winter season. Within a few weeks the quarrel between father and son became an open breach, and the king ordered the Waleses in writing to leave St James’s Palace. In the new year they took up residence at Leicester House, in what is now Leicester Square. There were now two rival courts in London; Tories and dissident Whigs flocked to Leicester House in the expectation that when Prince George came to the throne they would be the favoured few. And the Jacobites rejoiced at the family feud, which, they hoped and prayed, presaged the fall of the House of Hanover.
One of the leading members of the Leicester House Set, as the followers of the Prince of Wales were known, was the up-and-coming Whig politician Sir Robert Walpole. Walpole, the son of a middling Norfolk squire, was a mountain of a man, with a gigantic appetite: for food and drink, sex, money, power – and work. He was shrewd, affable (when it suited him) and knew the price of everything and everyone. But, despite his coarseness and corpulence, he was attractive to women and understood them thoroughly.
What he understood most of all, however, was the House of Commons, of which he was the long-time undisputed master. For such a man, opposition, even when sanctioned by the Prince of Wales, was of limited appeal. For one thing, George I showed no signs of dying any time soon and no man could gain power without access to the patronage that was the gift of the monarch, even if he had Parliament on his side. So in 1720 Walpole brokered a general reconciliation of sorts: between the king and the prince and within the fractured Whig Party. But what propelled him to undisputed power was his handling of the financial crisis known as the South Sea Bubble.
For the Glorious Revolution not only brought in modern public finance, with the Bank of England and the national debt, it also introduced other, less obviously desirable features of capitalist modernity such as the stock market, speculation and boom and bust. And the South Sea Bubble was the mother of all busts.
The centre of this feverish activity was the Royal Exchange, where shares in ventures like the South Sea Company were traded. The company had been established in 1711 as a Tory riposte to the Whig-dominated Bank of England. Its original purpose was to reduce the burden of the national debt by converting loans to the government into shares in the company. The company did have real assets, in particular the assiento or forty-year monopoly on the slave trade to Spanish America, which the Tories had won at the Peace of Utrecht. But its value was talked up beyond all reason. In March 1720 South Sea Company shares stood at 170, before peaking at 1050 on 24 June. Then they crashed, bottoming out at 290.
Everybody got their fingers burnt; still worse, everybody seemed to have their fingers in the pie: from the king, who had been made governor of the company, to his mistresses and his ministers, who had all received significant gifts of shares. Everybody, that is, apart from Walpole. With his usual good luck, he had been out of favour when the final scam was launched and so, for once in his life, appeared as whiter than white. He also used his financial skill to wind the crisis down, without provoking either a financial or a political meltdown.
On the other hand, his Whig rivals fell victim to the cry for vengeance: one died of a heart attack after angry scenes in Parliament; another committed suicide; and a third was sent to the Tower. With rivals eliminated and his own reputation riding high, Walpole emerged as unchallenged first or ‘prime’ minister.
And he made sure to advertise the fact to the world. Houghton Hall, which Walpole built on the site of his modest ancestral home in north Norfolk, symbolized his immense power. He moved with his usual purposeful expedition. Designs were commissioned in 1721, the year his premiership began; the foundation stone was laid the next year and the building was finished in 1735. And for ‘the Great Man’, as he soon became known, nothing but the best would do. Walpole built with the best materials; he used the finest architects and designers, such as William Kent, who was responsible for the opulently gilded interiors and furniture; and he embellished the house with the biggest and best collection of pictures in England.
The result was perfection: according to one contemporary connoisseur, it was ‘the greatest house in the world for its size’ and ‘a pattern for all great houses that may hereafter be built’. But at first it seemed as though Walpole might have counted his chickens before they were hatched. For in the summer of 1727 George I died, fittingly en route to Hanover. At first, his son refused to believe the news, thinking that it was another trick played by his father to entrap him into incautious expressions of joy. But once George II was persuaded of its truth, he made clear that the monarchy would be transformed from the dour, reclusive and Germanized version that Britain had suffered for thirteen years.
He indulged his love of splendour by having a magnificent coronation with music by Handel, whose great anthem, Zadoc the Priest and Nathan the Prophet crownèd Solomon King, has been played at every subsequent coronation. He vowed that unlike his father he would rule as a British king, not a reluctant German. Queen Caroline said that she would ‘as soon live on a dunghill as return to Hanover’. There would be other radical changes with the new reign. Above all, George told Walpole, whom he had never forgiven for going over to his father, to take his marching orders.
But Walpole kept his head. He still had a large following in the House of Commons and showed his usefulness by getting it to vote George a bigger Civil List (or personal income) than his father. But for all his abilities and backing in Parliament, Walpole could remain in office only as long as he retained his favour with the king. He tried to make sure of this by appointing his followers to court positions so that no faction could be built against him. Such Walpole courtiers controlled access to the royal family, and they could exclude the Prime Minister’s enemies from gaining the king’s ear.
But most importantly, he had a powerful ally. Other politicians had paid court to George’s insipid mistress. But Walpole knew better. Instead, he rebuilt his close friendship with Queen Caroline, whom he had betrayed in 1720: ‘I have the right sow by the ear,’ he boasted ungallantly. He was right and Caroline played a vital role in managing her husband – who quickly turned out to be even more curmudgeonly and more in love with Hanover than his father and much less intelligent – on Walpole’s behalf. Together they subtly governed the king, directing him towards Walpole’s policies. The minister and the queen would meet in secret, so that she could discuss matters with the king before Walpole had his private interview. Thus primed when the Prime Minister met George, the king would already have been manipulated into agreement. Walpole had nothing but praise for the queen’s arts in moulding the king’s mind: she ‘can make him propose the very thing as his own opinion which a week before he had rejected as mine’. And Walpole was skilful at keeping Caroline herself onside, flattering her with carefully chosen compliments. ‘Your Majesty knows that this country is entirely in your hands,’ he would lie, to the queen’s delight.
In fact, the country was in Walpole’s hands, as his premiership sailed on over the blip of George II’s accession. But it trembled once more ten years later. George and Caroline had an odd marital relationship: he had numerous affairs and snubbed her all the time in public, but she always bounced back and was able to control him. Nevertheless, when Caroline fell fatally ill in 1737, George was heartbroken and tearfully refused her deathbed injunction to marry again by exclaiming: ‘No! I’ll have mistresses!’ Walpole’s premiership survived, even though he was terrified that the easily led George would fall under the spell of someone hostile to him now that Caroline was dead. He remained as Prime Minister, however, despite being deprived of his greatest ally. But now his enemies were gathering strength. Most important was the group known as ‘Cobham’s Cubs’, who gathered round Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham. Cobham was a soldier, a statesman – and a landscape gardener.
His greatest creation was the garden at Stowe, his Buckinghamshire estate. Vistas, trees and water were punctuated with artfully sited temples to create the sort of idyllic classical landscape imagined by painters like Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. It was intended to delight the eye – but also to exercise the mind. One of the classical monuments was the Temple of British Worthies. It is a Whig pantheon, with, on the left, the proponents of political liberty, such as the poet John Milton and the philosopher John Locke, and, on the right, the heroes of the struggle against Catholic Spain and France, such as Elizabeth I and William of Orange. But there was another, very different monument. It looked like a ruin containing a damaged, headless statue. Actually it was built like this. The ruin was satirically entitled the Temple of Modern Virtue, while the ugly, headless torso was ‘the Great Man’, Walpole himself.
For Walpole, Cobham and his Cubs believed, had comprehensively betrayed Whig principles by stealing the Tories’ clothes. The Whigs had been the great anti-court party, determined to keep the powers of the king within bounds. But Walpole discovered that the way to keep office was to cultivate the king’s favour and then use the royal patronage – of titles, jobs and straightforward bribes – to control Parliament. Whig heroes, or Worthies, should not be court toadies, as the oleaginous Walpole had become. The Whigs had also been the war party. But both the king and Walpole wanted peace with France: George to protect Hanover and Walpole to restore the public finances from the effects of the vast expense of Marlborough’s wars.
Faced with mounting opposition, in 1742 Walpole won what amounted to a vote of confidence by only 253 votes to 250. The margin of victory was too small for effective government and three weeks later Walpole resigned. Within three years, deprived of the energizing effects of power, he was dead. And at first it seemed as though he might, like Samson, bring down the pillars of the Hanoverian temple with him.
For 1745 showed every sign of being a catastrophic year for Britain. In April, the French, against whom Walpole had reluctantly resumed hostilities, defeated the British under William, Duke of Cumberland, the king’s second and favourite son, at the great Battle of Fontenoy in Belgium. Still worse, the French victory opened the way to another Stuart invasion of Britain. It was led by the Old Pretender’s eldest son, Charles Edward. Aged only twenty-four, and tall, handsome and dashing, ‘Bonny Prince Charlie’ had all the Stuart charisma and charm that his father and grandfather had so conspicuously lacked.
He landed in the Outer Hebrides in June. At first the Highlands were slow to respond. But over the summer the rebellion gathered force. By September, Charles had taken Edinburgh, routed the tiny Hanoverian army in Scotland and announced the dissolution of the Union. In November, he invaded England and got as far as Derby before the failure of the English to rally to his cause forced him to retreat back to Scotland.
The final battle took place at Culloden in April 1746, when Charles’s Highland army was confronted by a much larger, better-disciplined professional force under Cumberland. This personal struggle between two royal princes for the Crown was like an episode of the Wars of the Roses, and both the battle and the repression of the Highlands after Charles’s inevitable defeat were medieval in their savagery.
Charles, after many hardships and adventures, escaped, to die an early death of alcoholism and disillusionment; while Jacobitism itself died too – or rather, perhaps, was killed by Cumberland’s scorched-earth policy after Culloden.
The Forty-Five was a turning point. Scotland threw itself more heartily into the Union, which was now yielding visible economic benefits; while in England the Tories, freed at last from the incubus of Jacobitism, were able to re-enter ordinary political life. But the greatest beneficiary of the year of crisis was Cobham’s nephew by marriage, William Pitt the Elder, who was to emerge, despite George II’s profound personal loathing, as the most remarkable politician of the age.
Of all the shades we can imagine wandering through the Elysian Fields of Stowe amid the follies and temples, William Pitt’s is the greatest – and the strangest. The favourite grandson of Thomas ‘Diamond’ Pitt, a tough, irascible East India merchant who had made a fortune and founded a gentry family, Pitt had first been introduced to Cobham in his thirties when his dazzling parliamentary oratory against Walpole had immediately made him one of the leading Cubs. The connection became much closer when, years later, Pitt married the childless Cobham’s niece, Hester. The couple were middle-aged – he was forty-six and she was thirty-four – but it was a passionate courtship that led to a devoted marriage.
Hester often acted as her husband’s secretary; even more importantly, she was his nurse. For Pitt was plagued with illness, physical and mental, and subject to swings of emotion, from elation to prostration, that were so extreme as to sometimes amount to madness. At their worst, his mood changes laid him low for months on end; at their best they drove him to heights of oratory that convinced his hearers that he was the voice of destiny: Britain’s destiny.
And that national destiny too was prefigured in the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe with its roll-call of naval heroes: King Alfred, who was honoured as founder of the English navy; Sir Francis Drake, who became the first Englishman to sail round the globe in an expedition of magnificent, insolent plundering of the riches of the Spanish Empire; Queen Elizabeth I, who had knighted Drake and gave her name to the first great age of English sea power and Sir Walter Raleigh, Drake’s younger contemporary, who first projected an English colonial empire in America. Completing the pantheon of greats is the Elizabethan merchant-prince, Sir Thomas Gresham, who stabilized the coinage and founded the Royal Exchange. Britain, in this version of history, was founded on the marriage of buccaneering sailors and solid mercantile wealth.
And Pitt, himself the grandson of a merchant-robber-baroncum-empire-builder, took these ideas and made them his own. The result can be boiled down to three axioms. First, the proper field of British endeavour was overseas and worldwide, not Continental and European; second, the navy, not the army, was the right instrument to advance British power; and third, overseas trade was the means to the wealth, and hence the power, of the nation.
All this was guaranteed to set Pitt on a collision course with George II that was both personal and political. For the king, who had led his army to victory against the French at Dettingen in 1743 at the ripe age of sixty, regarded the army as his own peculiar pride and joy. He was also as devoted to Hanover as his father and, like him, regarded foreign policy as the flower of his prerogative.
As such, he was overjoyed at the victory at Dettingen. And he expected that his subjects would share the celebrations of their victorious king when he returned home with Handel’s Dettingen te deum ringing in his ears. He was the last British monarch to personally lead an army in battle, and he had done so bravely. But there were those who would downplay his success, in particular William Pitt, who sneeringly disparaged it in Parliament: ‘His Majesty was exposed to few or no dangers abroad, such as the overturning of a coach or the stumbling of his horse.’ But there was more pointed criticism than the merely personal. A sizeable group in Parliament did not think that Britain should be fighting in Europe for the sake of Hanover at all. Indeed, victory or no victory, it was a betrayal of Britain. Pitt spoke for them too: ‘It is now too apparent that this great, this powerful, this formidable kingdom is considered only a province to a despicable electorate,’ he declared. ‘We need only look at the instances of particularity that have been shown; the yearly visits that have been made to that delightful country.’
Such language was unforgivable. And George was a good hater with an excellent memory for slights. The result was that Pitt spent the next decade in a sort of political limbo. He was admitted to government and in office because he was both too useful and too dangerous in Parliament not to be. But he was not in power because the royal veto prevented it. This was frustrating for someone as aware of his own abilities as Pitt. But it did give him the opportunity to reconsider his instinctive opposition to Continental alliances; indeed, he became something of a convert – as he proclaimed with his accustomed breathtaking effrontery. ‘I have,’ he confided to the House of Commons, ‘upon some former occasions, by the heat of youth and the warmth of a debate, been hurried into expressions, which upon cool reflexion, I have heartily regretted.’ Being Pitt, he got away with it.
Being Pitt also, his moment came. War with France broke out again in 1756 and it began disastrously with the loss of Minorca and the control of the Mediterranean. Popular clamour arose for the punishment of the commanding officer, Admiral Byng, who was shot on his own quarterdeck – to encourage, as Voltaire acidly observed, the rest. The cry also went up for Pitt: ‘I know’, he said, ‘I can save this country and no one else can.’ In the circumstances, George had to yield to his appointment as secretary of state with the direction of the war, albeit with a bad grace.
Almost immediately, the tide of war began to turn. For Pitt was a new sort of minister, who demanded – and got – a new sort of control over both policy and its detailed execution. There was a uniform, overarching strategy, which combined Continental and overseas war. Britain’s principal Continental ally, Frederick the Great of Prussia, was given money but no men, while both money and men were flung to the far corners of the globe against the key points of France’s colonial empire. For this too was to be a new sort of war in which no quarter was given: ‘his administration [would] decide which alone should exist as a nation, Britain or France.’
The result caught France in a vice. On the Continent, the military genius of Frederick the Great kept up the pressure, against formidable odds. But what was decisive in the wider struggle was the quality of the British navy. For Britain had moved fast to equip itself with the infrastructure to meet the requirements of worldwide war. The great dockyard at Chatham was the jewel in the crown of the new policy. The naval dockyards were then by far the largest industrial establishments in Britain, and only a hundred years later, in the nineteenth century, did private enterprise begin to catch up – in size, managerial efficiency and technical sophistication. Britain had four or five dry docks, like the ones that still exist in Chatham, to France’s one. And they were bigger and better too. The pulleys and tackle for manoeuvring sails were much superior. British naval stores of food and drink were also better, longer lasting – and half the price.
This transformed the scope of British naval and combined operations. At the beginning of the eighteenth century a ship was lucky to be able to remain at sea for more than a fortnight; fifty years later cruises of three months and more were common. With voyages of this length, and the technical expertise to run them, all the world was now a stage for Pitt’s great imperial drama.
It was fought in four principal theatres: Canada, the West Indies, Africa and India. In each, Pitt was victorious: General Wolfe defeated the French general Montcalm on the Heights of Abraham before Quebec in 1759 and all Canada fell the following year; at the same time, Martinique and Guadeloupe were captured in the West Indies and Dakar in Africa; Clive carried all before him in India, while both the northern and southern French fleets were smashed in European waters, giving Britain what she often asserted but rarely held: an absolute mastery of the sea. ‘Our bells’, wrote Horace Walpole, the witty, waspish son of the great Sir Robert, ‘are quite worn threadbare with ringing for victories. Indeed, one is forced to ask every morning, “what victory is there?” for fear of missing one.’
It was a triumph too for Stowe and its new master, Pitt’s brother-in-law, Earl Temple. The landscape was once more transformed with fresh shrines to British prowess and her new generation of heroes, more than equal to Alfred, Drake, Elizabeth, William III and all the other Worthies of history. An obelisk was erected in memory of General Wolfe, who had been killed at the moment of victory at Quebec. The Temple of Concord and Victory depicted an enthroned Britannia receiving tribute from the rest of the world. A selection of heraldic icons also mark a victory, one that was just as hard fought and won over a foe nearer home. They represent the august Order of the Garter, an honour on which Pitt’s brother-in-law had set his heart.
But George loathed Temple even more than he did Pitt. Nevertheless, Pitt insisted and the king had to back down and confer the coveted honour. But he made his feelings plain at the investiture. Instead of decorously placing the ribbon over Temple’s shoulder, as etiquette demanded, he threw it at him and immediately turned his back. Faced with the power of Pitt, the King of Great Britain was reduced to making an impotent protest, like a naughty child. Pitt was able thus to humiliate the king, not only because he was uniquely successful, but also because he had a new sort of power. He had been called to office, he asserted, ‘by his sovereign’ – which was conventional – and ‘by the voice of the people’ – which was a radical and bold claim.
Not even Walpole could boast that. Now, as George II moaned, ‘Ministers are Kings in this Country’. Frustration built up over the years; when he was in Hanover in 1755 he almost did not go back to England: ‘There are Kings enough in England. I am nothing there. I am old and want rest, and should only go to be plagued and teased there about the damned House of Commons.’ In 1727, when he had come to the throne, a minister as formidable as Robert Walpole had to win and retain royal favour, as his assiduous and unctuous flattery of Queen Caroline showed. Since then, the king had been forced to accept men he hated as ministers, above all William Pitt, who never ceased to denigrate his beloved Hanover and oppose Continental wars. Power was no longer gained by a minister’s standing at court and personal relationship with the king, but by his ability to break down the doors and impose himself on the sovereign. How had George found himself in this situation at the end of his long reign?
Partly, it was simply a matter of Pitt’s translation of his war aims into bold and vivid language that had a resonance far beyond Parliament. But there were also more concrete alliances, like the one commemorated in the Guildhall, the centre of the government of the City of London. Pitt’s own statue dominates the hall. But standing up on high to equal the great Prime Minister is the statue of Alderman William Beckford, millionaire, City politician and radical press lord, who marshalled City opinion behind Pitt with his weekly paper, The Monitor. Imperial might, parliamentary legitimacy and prime ministerial power stood four-square with City finance, mercantile wealth and the press.
Winston Churchill, who resembled Pitt in so many ways, called the Seven Years War ‘the first world war’. But unlike the world wars of the twentieth century, it did not exhaust the country. When it began, Britain was one of two or three leading European powers. When it ended, she was all powerful and mistress of the first empire to stretch across four continents. But George was not there to see it and Pitt was not in office either.
The morning of 25 October 1760 began like any other for George II. He rose early, drank his chocolate and retired to relieve himself on his close-stool. But there, without a day’s illness or a moment’s warning, he died, at about 7.30 a.m.
The gruff, choleric seventy-seven-year-old was succeeded by his grandson, the fresh-faced, twenty-two-year-old George III. George had been a late developer. Sulky, idle and apparently rather dim at first, he had been transformed in his late teens by a sympathetic mentor into a paragon of hard work and selfdiscipline. He was intensely musical, fluent in French and German, a competent draughtsman and an omnivorous bibliophile with a particular interest in history.
He had been a late developer sexually too. But following his marriage, eleven months after his accession, to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, he made up for lost time by fathering no fewer than fifteen children.
Above all, he was aware, unlike his two predecessors, that he was English through and through – by birth and by inclination. He was also determined to fulfil his duties, as he saw them, as a patriotic British king. Perhaps, indeed, he was too determined, too demanding – both of others and, critically, of himself.
The clash with the great war minister, William Pitt, who saw himself as having something of a monopoly on patriotism, came within hours. In his accession speech, given at 6 p.m. on the day of his grandfather’s death, George referred to the ‘bloody war’ in which Britain was engaged. At Pitt’s outraged insistence, this was toned down to ‘expensive but just and necessary war’ in the published version. Within the year, however, Pitt had resigned and in 1763 the Treaty of Paris was signed, bringing the war to a triumphant conclusion.
Triumphant or not, the war still had to be paid for. So, too, did the new British Empire. The war had doubled the national debt, from £70,000,000 to £140,000,000. This meant that interest payments alone totalled £4,000,000 a year, or half the tax revenue. Ongoing costs had multiplied as well. Before the war, the annual cost of the American establishment was £75,000. Now it had increased more than fourfold to £350,000. All this fell on a British population of only eight million. Why shouldn’t, ministers asked, British America bear a part? After all, the war, as Pitt had repeatedly stated, had been fought on their behalf, and they had been its principal beneficiaries with the removal of the threat from the French in Canada and the French allies among the Indian tribes. As Pitt had said in 1755, ‘The present war was undertaken for the long-injured, long-neglected, long-forgotten people of America.’ France had been expelled from much of North America while Britain and her allies tied up the French in Europe. ‘America had been conquered in Germany,’ Pitt bluntly asserted.
And there is no doubt that British America had deep pockets. Philadelphia, New York and Boston were large and rich; Charleston was catching up fast. And these were only the urban centres of an overwhelmingly rural economy in which about two million people were unevenly divided between thirteen colonies. The colonies were wildly different in size, religious complexion, economic interest and geographical focus, and were almost as suspicious of each other as of the British government. Nevertheless, there was a sense of British America – and of the fact that it was already four or five times the size of Old England.
February 12 1765 was a quiet day in the House of Commons, with only a Bill to tap American wealth by imposing stamp duty on American property and legal transactions to be debated. As colonial business rarely aroused much interest (unless Pitt was displaying his pyrotechnics), the Bill was nodded through an almost empty chamber with minimal opposition.
But the Stamp Act set America alight. For the British Parliament was not the only one in the British Empire. Indeed, in America there were thirteen such assemblies – one for each colony – which, in their own worlds, thought themselves the equal of the Westminster Parliament.
The eighteenth-century Capitol in Williamsburg, was the seat of the General Assembly of the Colony of Virginia. The Assembly was the oldest colonial legislative, first meeting on 20 July 1619. It was the closest in structure to Westminster, consisting of an elected Lower House, presided over by a Speaker, a nominated Upper House and the Royal Governor, who opened the sessions with a speech and wielded the veto on all Bills. Above all, perhaps, the personnel of the Virginian Assembly was nearest to that of the Westminster Parliament, since it was dominated by wealthy gentleman-planters, like the Lee family of Stratford Hall.
Stratford Hall, built in the 1730s, is a not-so-miniature version of an English country house. And the Lees, with their wealth derived from the surrounding tobacco plantation cultivated by dozens of black slaves, lived a provincial version of the life of the English country gentlemen who made up the great bulk of Westminster MPs, and they displayed a similar selfconfidence and sense of their own importance. Thus it was that, on 30 May 1765, with Lees in the lead, the Virginian Assembly passed the first resolution against the Stamp Act. This solemnly declared that ‘the taxation of the people by themselves, or by persons chosen to represent them … is the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom, without which the ancient constitution cannot exist’.
This was Whig language turned against the British Parliament that had first invented it. Less decorously, as the date for the coming into operation of the Stamp Act approached, Richard Henry Lee organized a protest procession, featuring his own slaves in costume and the mock-hanging of the collector of stamp duties. Similar resolutions and protests, many of them violent, spread like wildfire across the colonies, and British America became ungovernable. Wholly unprepared for the reaction, the Westminster Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. But it tried to preserve the principle of British parliamentary sovereignty by declaring that Westminster was competent to pass laws for the British colonies ‘in all cases whatsoever’.
There remained only the little matter of translating the principle into practice. This every succeeding British government tried to do and failed. American resistance continued and the net yield of American taxation, at a few hundred pounds a year, was derisory. A final attempt was made in 1773. The usual British duty of 12 pence a pound on tea was lifted and a low American duty of 3 pence imposed. The effect was to make tea cheaper in America than in Britain, and the ‘Sons of Liberty’, as the American radical opposition called themselves, were afraid that Americans, who loved their tea, might sell their liberty for a nice, cheap cuppa.
To forestall them, in December 1763 they perpetrated ‘the Boston Tea Party’, in which forty or fifty ‘patriots’, disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded three ships in the harbour and forcibly threw 343 chests of tea overboard. Goaded beyond endurance, the British government took a hard line at last. The port of Boston was closed, the Massachusetts Assembly remodelled and British troops exempted from trial by American juries.
But instead of being cowed, the Americans summoned a Continental Congress of representatives from all thirteen colonies to coordinate their response to the coercive British measures. Once again, the Virginian Assembly, meeting as usual in Williamsburg and steered by Richard Henry Lee, had taken the lead. But the most interesting Virginian initiative had its origins in the College of William and Mary, which lies at the other end of Duke of Gloucester Street from the Capitol.
The college was the Virginian University and the second oldest of the seven university colleges in colonial America. And it was here that Thomas Jefferson, who came from the same wealthy, slave-owning background as Lee, became a student and began to form the ideas expressed in the paper he wrote for the forthcoming Continental Congress. Entitled ‘The Summary View of the Rights of British Americans’, it takes the Whig idea that all government ultimately depends on a social contract, entered into by the people in a state of nature, and applies it brilliantly to America.
In Old England the state of nature was a mere abstraction – albeit a very useful one. But in America it was real – in the endless, rolling acres of Jefferson’s native Virginia. Here, Jefferson points out, his ancestors had come, voluntarily, to a New World, occupied and cultivated it by their own efforts, formed their own societies and chosen and established their own forms of government. Therefore, for the British Parliament, which represented only the British people, to presume to legislate for the people of America, who already had their own representatives in their own assemblies, was a gross usurpation. Instead, only George himself, as king and ultimate sovereign of America, had a right to intervene.
This idea of a monarch who, as sovereign of free and independent peoples, holds an empire together was both ingenious and far sighted. Indeed, it became the foundation of Britain’s twentiethcentury imperial policy as the Empire evolved into the Commonwealth of self-governing dominions, united only by allegiance to a common crown. But in the circumstances of the eighteenth century it was impossible.
Parliament and premier had only just got some sort of control of the monarchy. To allow George to become King of America would be to give the Crown a new and expanding power base that might once again allow the old monarchy to challenge the new. Nor did George want the power of an American monarch independent of Parliament, for he was far too loyal to the settlement that had brought the Hanoverians to the throne. Instead, he threw his weight behind the British Parliament’s determination to impose its will on the rebellious colonies. ‘I will never make my inclinations alone nor even my own opinions the sole rule of my conduct in public measures,’ he said, confirming the power of the premiership. ‘I will at all times consult my ministers and place in them as entire a confidence as the nature of this government can be supposed to require of me.’ If the minister had been Pitt, there is little doubt he would have succeeded. But faced by a weak Prime Minister, the king himself increasingly emerged as the figurehead of the struggle. The result was indecision and disarray.
Troops, including German regiments personally raised by the king, were dispatched, and in April 1775 the first armed clash, in which the colonials acquitted themselves surprisingly well against seasoned professional troops, took place near Boston, at Lexington. The Americans took this as a declaration of war and a month later in May the Second Continental Congress convened in the State House in Philadelphia, the seat of the Pennsylvania Assembly, to organize military resistance. On 15 June Congress appointed George Washington as commander-in-chief of the American army.
It could not have chosen better. For Washington, though not a great general, was a great man. He was another product of the planter gentry of Virginia, where his family were neighbours of the Lees of Stratford Hall. As a younger son, he became an officer in the Virginian militia; played an honourable part in the Seven Years War against the French; and tried but failed to get a commission in the British army. Marriage to a rich widow and deaths in his own family now enabled him to acquire his own plantation at Mount Vernon, where the mansion house, modest at first, was steadily enlarged and beautified over the years.
But despite his new-found wealth and status, Washington never lost his interest in military affairs, and he turned up to the congress in Philadelphia in uniform and using his rank of colonel in the militia. As commander-in-chief, Washington found himself in charge of a motley crew: badly armed, badly fed and clothed and badly paid when they were paid at all. To keep them in the field required tact, occasional firmness and infinite dogged patience. Washington had them all. He also had the natural leadership of a born-and-bred American gentleman.
The Continental Congress reconvened the following year at Philadelphia. The fighting had hardened positions and in June Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved the resolution for independence, while his fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, drafted the Declaration itself, which was adopted on 4 July 1776 and became the Ark of the Covenant of the new republic.
Subsequent generations have focused on the grand principles of the preamble, with its ringing assertion (written by a slaveowner, of course) that all men, being born free and equal, have the right to determine how and by whom they are governed. Contemporaries were more interested in its violent and highly personal repudiation of allegiance to George III as a tyrant and ‘unfit to be the ruler of a free people’. But the immediate importance of the Declaration lay elsewhere, in the claim that, as Free and Independent States, the United Colonies were entitled to contract what alliances they pleased.
And there was no doubt where their best hope of allies lay: the old enemy, France. For France was burning for revenge for its comprehensive humiliation by Britain in the Seven Years War. And how better to take vengeance than by separating Britain from the fruits of that victory – the better part of its newly acquired empire? Hence the bizarre marriage of convenience between the new republic and the oldest, proudest and most absolute monarchy in Europe. ‘Do they read?’ a French radical asked, as the French translation of the fiercely anti-monarchical Declaration of Independence was devoured at the Court of Versailles. He might well have asked, ‘Do they think?’, as the sweetly air-headed and super-fashionable queen, Marie Antoinette, demanded news of her ‘dear republicans’.
And French help was desperately needed since, despite all Washington’s efforts, the Americans barely hung on. New York and Charleston remained in British hands and the most likely outcome seemed a stalemate. The deadlock was broken at Yorktown, a few miles to the south-east of Williamsburg, where Lord Cornwallis, the British commander in America, set up his headquarters in 1781. Yorktown lies on the narrow peninsula between the estuaries of the York and James rivers as they debouch into the mighty Chesapeake Bay.
So long as the British navy controlled the sea, Cornwallis was impregnable. But the French threw money – all borrowed and at outrageous rates of interest – at their fleet while the British navy was overstretched and divided. The result was that Cornwallis found himself caught between a strong French fleet which blockaded the York river and Washington’s army, which the French had also buoyed up with loans and gifts. Trapped and outnumbered by more than two to one, Cornwallis surrendered to Washington on 19 October with his whole army.
‘Oh God, it is all over,’ the British Prime Minister wailed when the news arrived. It was, though it took George III some time to realize it. In 1783 the Americans, in their first betrayal of their French allies, signed a separate preliminary peace with Britain that recognized American independence. George drafted and redrafted his abdication address. And the Holy Roman Emperor predicted that, with the loss of America, Britain would swiftly become a second-class power, like Sweden or Denmark. His words were echoed in Britain. ‘America is lost,’ said George. ‘Must we fall beneath the blow?’
Thereafter, Britain and America went their separate ways. But only one remained loyal to its eighteenth-century roots.
These show clearly in Washington, the new American capital that was named after George Washington, who, after he had resigned his military command, became the first President of the new American Republic.
Laid out in the 1790s, its monuments, lawns and grand, sweeping vistas are the lineal descendants of the landscape gardens of Stowe. Similarly, it is America today which best embodies the ideas of freedom, power and Empire which inspired that great denizen of Stowe, William Pitt, in the reign of George II.
And it does so for better or for worse.