The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick

There was considerable discontent expressed in the early years of George's reign. Hallam says: "Much of this disaffection was owing to the cold reserve of George I., ignorant of the language, alien to the prejudices of his people, and continually absent in his electoral dominions, to which he seemed to sacrifice the nation's interest… The letters in Coxe's Memoirs of Walpole, abundantly show the German nationality, the impolicy and neglect of his duties, the rapacity and petty selfishness of George I. The Whigs were much dissatisfied, but the fear of losing their places made them his slaves." In order to add the duchies of Bremen and Verden to Hanover, in 1716, the King, as Elector, made a treaty with Denmark against Sweden, which treaty proved the source of those Continental wars, and the attendant system of subsidies to European powers, which have, in the main, created our enormous National Debt. Bremen and Verden being actually purchased for George I. as the Elector of Hanover, with English money, Great Britain in addition was pledged by George I. to guarantee Sleswick to Denmark. Sweden and Denmark quarrelling – and George I. as Elector of Hanover having, without the consent of the English Parliament, declared war against Sweden – an English fleet was sent into the Baltic to take up a quarrel with which we had no concern. In addition we were involved in a quarrel with Russia, because that power had interfered to prevent Mecklenburg being added to George's Hanoverian estates. The chief mover in this matter was the notorious Baron Bernstoff, who held some village property in Mecklenburg. In all these complications, Hanover gained, England lost. If Hanover found troops, England paid for them, while the Electorate solely reaped the benefit. Every thoughtful writer admits that English interests were always betrayed to satisfy Hanoverian greed.

The King's fondness for Germany provoked some hostility, and amongst the various squibs issued, one in 1716, from the pen of Samuel Wesley, brother of John Wesley, is not without interest. It represents a conversation between George and the Duchess of Kendal: —

"As soon as the wind it came fairly about, That kept the King in and his enemies out, He determined no longer confinement to bear, And thus to the Duchess his mind did declare:

"Quoth he, 'My dear Kenny, I've been tired along while, With living obscure in this poor little isle, And now Spain and Pretender have no more mines to spring, I'm resolved to go home and live like a King."

The Duchess approves of this, describes and laughs at all the persons nominated for the Council of Regency, and concludes: —

"On the whole, I'll be hanged if all over the realm There are thirteen such fools to be put to the helm; So for this time be easy, nor have jealous thought, They ha'n't sense to sell you, nor are worth being bought."

"'Tis for that (quoth the King, in very bad French), I chose them for my regents, and you for my wench, And neither, I'm sure, will my trust e'er betray, For the devil won't take you if I turn you away."

It was this same Duchess of Kendal who, as the King's mistress, was publicly accused of having received enormous sums of money from the South Sea Company for herself and the King, in order to shield from justice the principal persons connected with those terrible South Sea frauds, by which, in the year 1720, so many families were reduced to misery.

In 1717, Mr. Shippen, a member of the House of Commons, was committed to the Tower, for saying in his place in the House, that it was the "infelicity of his Majesty's reign that he is unacquainted with our language and constitution." Lord Macaulay tells us how Lord Carteret, afterwards Earl Granville, rose into favor. The King could speak no English; Carteret was the only one of the Ministry who could speak German. "All the communication that Walpole had with his master was in very bad Latin." The influence Carteret wielded over the King did not extend to every member of the Royal Family. The Princess of Wales afterwards described the Lords Carteret and Bolingbroke as two she had "long known to be two as worthless men of parts as any in the country, and who I have not only been often told are two of the greatest liars and knaves in any country, but whom my own observation and experience have found so."

Under George I. our standing army was nearly doubled by the Whig Ministry, and this when peace would rather have justified a reduction than an increase. The payments to Hanoverian troops commenced under this king, a payment which William Pitt afterwards earned the enmity of George II. by very sharply denouncing, and which payment was but a step in the system of continental subsidies which have helped to swell our national debt to its present enormous dimensions.

In this reign the enclosure of waste lands was practically commenced, sixteen enclosure Acts being passed, and 17, -660 acres of land enclosed. This example, once furnished, was followed in the next reign with increasing rapidity, 226 enclosure Acts being passed in the reign of George II., and 318,778 acres of land enclosed. As Mr. Fawcett states, up to 1845, more than 7,000,000 acres of land, over which the public possessed invaluable rights, have been gradually absorbed, and individuals wielding legislative influence have been enriched at the expense of the public and the poor.

Within six years from his accession, the King was about £600,000 in debt, and this sum was the first of a long list of debts discharged by the nation for these Brunswicks. When our ministers to-day talk of obligations on the part of the people to endow each additional member of the Royal Family, the memory of these shameful extravagances should have some effect. George I. had a civil list of £700,000 a year; he received £300,000 from the Royal Exchange Assurance Company, and £300,000 from the London Assurance Companies, and had one million voted to him in 1726 towards payment of his debts.

When the "South Sea Bill" was promoted in 1720, wholesale bribery was resorted to. Transfers of stock were proved to have been made to persons high in office. Two members of the Whig Ministry, Lord Sunderland and Mr. Aislabie, were so implicated that they had to resign their offices, and the last-named, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, was ignominiously expelled the House of Commons. Royalty itself, or at least, the King's sultanas, and several of his German household, shared the spoil. £30,000 were traced to the King's mistresses, and a select committee of the House denounced the whole business as "a train of the deepest villany and fraud with which hell ever contrived to ruin a nation." Near the close of the reign, Lord Macclesfied, Lord Chancellor and favorite and tool of the King, was impeached for extortion and abuse of trust in his office, and, being convicted, was sentenced to pay a fine of £30,000. In 1716, Mademoiselle Schulenberg, then Duchess of Munster, received £5,000 as a bribe for procuring the title of Viscount for Sir Henry St. John. In 1724, the same mistress, bribed by Lord Bolingbroke, successfully used her influence to pass an act through Parliament restoring him his forfeited estates. Mr. Chetwynd, says my Lady Cowper, in order to secure his position in the Board of Trade, paid to another of George's mistresses £500 down, agreed to allow her £200 a year as long as he held the place, and gave her also the fine, brilliant ear-rings she wore.

In 1724 there appeared in Dublin, the first of the famous "Drapier Letters," written by Jonathan Swift against Wood's coinage patent. A patent had been granted to a man named Wood for coining half-pence in Ireland. This grant was made under the influence of the Duchess of Kendal, the mistress of the King, and on the stipulation that she should receive a large share of the profits. These "Drapier Letters" were prosecuted by the Government, but Swift followed them with others; the grand juries refused to find true bills, and ultimately the patent was cancelled. Wood, or the Duchess, got as compensation a grant of a pension of £3,000 a year for eight years.

George died at Osnabruck, on his journey Hanover-wards, in June, 1727, having made a will by which he disposed of his money in some fashion displeasing to his son George II.; and as the Edinburgh Review tells us, the latter "evaded the old king's directions, and got his money by burning his will." In this, George II. only followed his royal father's example. When Sophia Dorothea died, she left a will bequeathing her property in a fashion displeasing to Greorge I., who, without scruple, destroyed the testament and appropriated the estate. George I. had also previously burned the will of his father-in-law, the Duke of Zell. At this time the destruction of a will was a capital felony in England.

In concluding this rough sketch of the reign of George I., it must not be forgotten that his accession meant the triumph of the Protestant caste in Ireland, and that under his rule much was done to render permanent the utter hatred manifested by the Irish people to their English conquerors, who had always preferred the policy of extermination to that of conciliation. Things were so sad in Ireland at the end of this reign, that Dean Swift, in bitter mockery, "wrote and published his 'Modest Proposal' for relieving the miseries of the people, by cooking and eating the children of the poor;" "a piece of the fiercest sarcasm," says Mitchell, "steeped in all the concentrated bitterness of his soul." Poor Ireland, she had, at any rate, nothing to endear to her the memory of George I.

CHAPTER III. THE REIGN OF GEORGE II

When George I. died there was so little interest or affection exhibited by his son and successor, that Sir Robert Walpole, on announcing to George II. that by the demise of his father he had succeeded to regal honors, was saluted with a volley of oaths, and "Dat is one big lie." No pretence even was made of sorrow. Greorge Augustus had hated George Lewis during life, and at the first council, when the will of the late King was produced by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the new monarch simply took it up and walked out of the room with the document, which was never seen again. Thackeray, who pictures George II. as "a dull, little man, of low tastes," says that he "made away with his father's will under the astonished nose of the Archbishop of Canterbury." A duplicate of this will having been deposited with the Duke of Brunswick, a large sum of money was paid to that Prince nominally as a subsidy by the English Government for the maintenance of troops, but really as a bribe for surrendering the document. A legacy having been left by this will to Lady Walsingham, threats were held out in 1733 by her then husband, Lord Chesterfield, and £20,000 was paid in compromise.

The eldest son of George II. was Frederick, born in 1706, and who up to 1728 resided permanently in Hanover. Lord Hervey tells us that the King hated his son Frederick, and that the Queen Caroline, his mother, abhorred him. To Lord Hervey the Queen says: "My dear Lord, I will give it you under my hand, if you are in any fear of my relapsing, that my dear first-born is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille and the greatest beast in the whole world; and that I most heartily wish he were out of it." This is a tolerably strong description of the father of George HI. from the lips of his own mother. Along with this description of Frederick by the Queen, take Thackeray's character of George II.'s worthy father of worthy son: "Here was one who had neither dignity, learning, morals, nor wit – who tainted a great society by a bad example; who in youth, manhood, old age, was gross, low, and sensual."

In 1705, when only Electoral Prince of Hanover, George had married Caroline, daughter of the Margrave of Anspach, a woman of more than average ability. Thackeray describes Caroline in high terms of praise, but Lord Chesterfield says that "she valued herself upon her skill in simulation and dissimulation… Cunning and perfidy were the means she made use of in business." The Prince of Anspach is alleged by the Whimperer to have raised some difficulties as to the marriage, on account of George I. being disposed to deny the legitimacy of his son, and it is further pretended that George I. had actually to make distinct acknowledgment of his son to King William III. before the arrangements for the Act of Settlement were consented to by that King. It is quite clear from the diary of Lady Cowper, that the old King's feeling towards George II. was always one of the most bitter hatred.

The influence exercised by Queen Caroline over George II. was purely political; and Lord Hervey declares that "wherever the interest of Germany and the honor of the Empire were concerned, her thoughts and reasonings were as German and Imperial as if England had been out of the question."

A strange story is told of Sir Robert Walpole and Caroline. Sir Robert, when intriguing for office under George I., with Townshend, Devonshire, and others, objected to their plans being communicated to the Prince of Wales, saying,

"The fat b – h, his wife, would betray the secret and spoil the project." This courtly speech being made known by some kind friend to the Princess Caroline, considerable hostility was naturally exhibited. Sir Robert Walpole, who held the doctrine that every person was purchasable, the only question being one of price, managed to purchase peace with Caroline when Queen. When the ministry suspended, "Walpole not fairly out, Compton not fairly in," Sir Robert assured the Queen that he would secure her an annuity of £100,000 in the event of the King's death, Sir Spencer Compton, who was then looked to as likely to be in power, having only offered £60,000. The Queen sent back word, "Tell Sir Robert the fat b – h has forgiven him," and thenceforth they were political allies until the Queen's death in 1737.

The domestic relations of George II. were marvellous. We pass with little notice Lady Suffolk, lady-in-waiting to the Queen and mistress to the King, who was sold by her husband for a pension of £12,000 a year, paid by the British tax-payers, and who was coarsely insulted by both their Majesties. It is needless to dwell on the confidential communications, in which "that strutting little sultan George II.," as Thackeray calls him, solicited favors from his wife for his mistress, the Countess of Walmoden; but to use the words of the cultured Edinburgh Review, the Queen's "actual intercession to secure for the King the favors of the Duchess of Modena precludes the idea that these sentiments were as revolting to the royal Philaminte as they would nowadays be to a scavenger's daughter. Nor was the Queen the only lady of the Royal Family who talked openly on these matters. When Lady Suffolk was waning at court, the Princess Royal could find nothing better to say than this: 'I wish with all my heart that he (i. e., the King) would take somebody else, that Mamma might be relieved from the ennui of seeing him forever in her room.'"

Lady Cowper in her diary tells us that George II., when Prince of Wales, intrigued with Lady Walpole, not only with the knowledge of the Princess Caroline, but also with connivance of the Prime Minister himself. Lord Hervey adds that Caroline used to sneer at Sir Robert Walpole, asking how the poor man – "avec ce gros corps, ces jambes enflees et ce villain ventre" – could possibly believe that any woman could love him for himself. And that Sir Robert retaliated, when Caroline afterwards complained to him of the King's cross temper, by telling her very coolly that "it was impossible it could be otherwise, since the King had tasted better things," and ended by advising her to bring pretty Lady Tankerville en rapport with the King.

In 1727 an Act was passed, directed against workmen in the woollen trade, rendering combination for the purpose of raising wages unlawful. Some years afterwards, this Act was extended to other trades, and the whole tendency of the Septennial Parliament legislation manifests a most unfortunate desire on the part of the Legislature to coerce and keep in subjection the artisan classes.

In February, 1728, the celebrated "Beggar's Opera," by Gay, was put on the stage at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, and, being supposed to contain some satirical reflections on court-corruption, provoked much displeasure on the part of Royalty. The Duchess of Queensborough, who patronized Gay, being forbidden to attend court, wrote thus: "The Duchess of Queensborough is surprised and well pleased that the King has given her so agreeable a command as forbidding her the court… She hopes that, by so unprecedented an order as this, the King will see as few as she wishes at his court, particularly such as dare speak or think truth."

In 1729, £115,000 was voted by Parliament for the payment of the King's debts. This vote seems to have been obtained under false pretences, to benefit the King, whose "cardinal passion," says Phillimore, "was avarice."

The Craftsman during the first decade of the reign, fiercely assailed the Whig ministry for "a wasteful expenditure of money in foreign subsidies and bribes;" and in his place in the House of Commons William Pitt, "the great Commoner," in the strongest language attacked the system of foreign bribery by which home corruption was supplemented.

The rapidly increasing expenditure needed every day increased taxation, and a caricature published in 1732 marks the public feeling. A monster (Excise), in the form of a many-headed dragon, is drawing the minister (Sir Robert Walpole) in his coach, and pouring into his lap, in the shape of gold, what it has eaten up in the forms of mutton, hams, cups, glasses, mugs, pipes, etc.

 
     "See this dragon Excise
     Has ten thousand eyes,
     And five thousand mouths to devour us;
     A sting and sharp claws,
     With wide gaping jaws,
     And a belly as big as a store-house."
 
 
     Beginning with wines and liquors, —
     "Grant these, and the glutton
     Will roar out for mutton,
     Your beef, bread, and bacon to boot;
     Your goose, pig, and pullet,
     He'll thrust down his gullet,
     Whilst the laborer munches a root."
 

In 1730 Mr. Sandys introduced a Bill to disable pensioners from sitting in Parliament. George II. vigorously opposed this measure, which was defeated. In the King's private notes to Lord Townshend, Mr. Sandys' proposed act is termed a "villanous measure," which should be "torn to pieces in every particular."

It was in 1732 that the Earl of Aylesford, a Tory peer, declared that standing armies in time of peace were "against the very words of the Petition of Rights," and that "all the confusions and disorders which have been brought upon this kingdom for many years, have been all brought upon it by means of standing armies." In 1733 Earl Strafford affirmed that "a standing army" was "always inconsistent with the liberties of the people;" and urged that "where the people have any regard for their liberties, they ought never to keep up a greater number of regular forces than are absolutely necessary for the security of the Government." Sir John Barnard declared that the army ought not to be used on political questions. He said: "In a free country, if a tumult happens from a just cause of complaint, the people ought to be satisfied; their grievances ought to be redressed; they ought not surely to be immediately knocked on the head because they may happen to complain in an irregular way." Mr. Pulteney urged that a standing army is "a body of men distinct from the body of the people; they are governed by different laws; blind obedience and an entire submission to the orders of their commanding officer is their only principle. The nations around us are already enslaved by those very means; by means of their standing armies they have every one lost their liberties; it is indeed impossible that the liberties of the people can be preserved in a country where a numerous standing army is kept up."

In 1735 sixteen Scottish peers were elected to sit in the House of Lords, and in a petition to Parliament it was alleged, that the whole of this list of sixteen peers was elected by bribery and corruption. The petition positively asserted "that the list of sixteen peers for Scotland had been formed by persons high in trust under the crown, previous to the election itself, The peers were solicited to vote for this list without the liberty of making any alteration, and endeavors were used to engage peers to vote for this list by promise of pensions and offices, civil and military, to themselves and their relations, and by actual promise and offers of sums of money. Several had received money, and releases of debts owing to the crown were granted to those who voted for this list. To render this transaction more infamous, a battalion of troops occupied the Abbey-Court of Edinburgh, and continued there during the whole time of the election, while there was a considerable body lying within a mile of the city ready to advance on the signal." This petition, notwithstanding the gravity of its allegations, was quietly suppressed.

Lady Sundon, Woman of the Bedchamber and Mistress of the Robes to Queen Caroline, received from Lord Pom-fret jewelry of £1,400 value, for obtaining him the appointment of Master of the Horse.

With a Civil List of £800,000 a year, George II. was continually in debt, but an obedient Ministry and a corrupt Parliament never hesitated to discharge his Majesty's obligations out of the pockets of the unrepresented people. Lord Carteret, in 1733, speaking of a Bill before the House for granting the King half a million out of the Sinking Fund, said: "This Fund, my Lords, has been clandestinely defrauded of several small sums at different times, which indeed together amount to a pretty large sum; but by this Bill it is to be openly and avowedly plundered of £500,000 at once."

On the 27th of April, 1736, Prince Frederick was married to the Princess Augusta, of Saxe Gotha, whom King George II. afterwards described as "cette diablesse Madame la Princesse." In August of the same year, a sharp open quarrel took place between the Prince of Wales and his parents, which, after some resumptions of pretended friendliness, ended, on September 10, 1737, in the former being ordered by the King to quit St. James's palace, where he was residing. On the 22d of the preceding February, Pulteney had moved for an allowance of £100,000 a year to Prince Frederick. George II. refused to consent, on the ground that the responsibility to provide for the Prince of Wales rested with himself, and that "it would be highly indecorous to interfere between father and son." On the Prince of Wales taking up his residence at Norfolk House, "the King issued an order that no persons who paid their court to the Prince and Princess should be admitted to his presence." An official intimation of this was given to foreign ambassadors.

On the 20th of November, 1737, Queen Caroline died, never having spoken to her son since the quarrel. "She was," says Walpole, "implacable in hatred even to her dying moments. She absolutely refused to pardon, or even to see, her son." The death-bed scene is thus spoken of by Thackeray: "There never was such a ghastly farce;" and as sketched by Lord Hervey, it is a monstrous mixture of religion, disgusting comedy, and brutishness. "We are shocked in the very chamber of death by the intrusion of egotism, vanity, buffoonery, and inhumanity. The King is at one moment dissolved in a mawkish tenderness, at another sunk into brutal apathy. He is at one moment all tears for the loss of one who united the softness and amiability of one sex to the courage and firmness of the other; at another all fury because the object of his regrets cannot swallow, or cannot change her posture, or cannot animate the glassy fixedness of her eyes; at one moment he begins an elaborate panegyric on her virtues, then breaks off into an enumeration of his own, by which he implies that her heart has been enthralled, and her intelligence awed. He then breaks off into a stupid story about a storm, for which his daughter laughs at him, and then while he is weeping over his consort's death-bed, she advises him to marry again; and we are – what the Queen was not – startled by the strange reply, 'Non, faurai des maitresses,' with the faintly moaned out rejoinder, 'Cela, n'empeche pas.'" So does the Edinburgh reviewer, following Lord Hervey, paint the dying scene of the Queen of our second George.

After the death of the Queen, the influence of the King's mistresses became supreme, and Sir R. Walpole, who, in losing Queen Caroline had lost his greatest hold over George, paid court to Lady Walmoden, in order to maintain his weakened influence. In the private letters of the Pelham family, who succeeded to power soon after Walpole's fall, we find frequent mention of the Countess of Yarmouth as a power to be gained, a person to stand well with. "I read," says Thackeray, "that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and gracious King's favorite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman for £5,000. (He betted her £5,000 that he would not be made a bishop, and he lost, and paid her.) Was he the only prelate of his time led up by such hands for consecration? As I peep into George H.'s St. James's, I see crowds of cassocks rustling up the back-stairs of the ladies of the Court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps; that godless old Bang yawning under his canopy in his Chapel Royal, as the chaplain before him is discoursing."

On the 23d of May, 1738, George William Frederick, son of Frederick, and afterwards George III., was born.

In 1739 Lady Walmoden, who had up to this year remained in Hanover, was brought to England, and formally installed at the English Court. In this year we bound ourselves by treaty to pay 250,000 dollars per annum for three years to the Danish Government. "The secret motive of this treaty," says Mahon, "as of too many others, was not English, but Hanoverian; and regarded the possession of a petty castle and lordship called Steinhorst. This castle had been bought from Holstein by George H. as Elector of Hanover, but the Danes claiming the sovereignty, a skirmish ensued… The well-timed treaty of subsidy calmed their resentment, and obtained the cession of their claim." Many urged, as in truth it was, that Steinhorst was bought with British money, and Bolingbroke expressed his fear "that we shall throw the small remainder of our wealth where we have thrown so much already, into the German Gulf, which cries Give! Give! and is never satisfied."

On the 19th of May, 1739, in accordance with the wish of the King, war was declared with Spain, nominally on the question of the right of search, but when peace was declared at Aix-la-Chapelle, this subject was never mentioned. According to Dr. Colquhoun, this war cost the country, £46,418,680.

George II. was, despite the provisions of the Act of Settlement, continually in Hanover. From 1729 to 1731, again in 1735 and 1736, and eight times between 1740 and 1755. In 1745 he wished to go, but was not allowed.

On the 2d of October, 1741 (the Pelham family having managed to acquire power by dint, as Lord Macaulay puts it, of more than suspected treason to their leader and colleague), the Duke of Newcastle, then Prime Minister, wrote his brother, Henry Pelham, as follows: "I must freely own to you, that I think the King's unjustifiable partiality for Hanover, to which he makes all other views and considerations subservient, has manifested itself so much that no man can continue in the active part of the administration with honor." The Duke goes on to describe the King's policy as "both dishonorable and fatal;" and Henry Pelham, on the 8th of October, writes him back that "a partiality to Hanover is general, is what all men of business have found great obstructions from, ever since this family have been upon the throne." Yet these are amongst the most prominent of the public defenders of the House of Brunswick, and a family which reaped great place and profit from the connection.

Of the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Macaulay says: "No man was so unmercifully satirized. But in truth he was himself a satire ready made. All that the art of the satirist does for other men, nature had done for him. Whatever was absurd about him stood out with grotesque prominence from the rest of the character. He was a living, moving, talking caricature. His gait was a shuffling trot, his utterance a rapid stutter; he was always in a hurry; he was never in time; he abounded in fulsome caresses and in hysterical tears. His oratory resembled that of Justice Shallow. It was nonsense, effervescent with animal spirits and impertinence. Of his ignorance many anecdotes remain, some well authenticated, some probably invented at coffee-houses, but all exquisitely characteristic. 'Oh, yes, yes, to be sure! Annapolis must be defended; troops must be sent to Annapolis. Pray, where is Annapolis?' 'Cape Breton an island! Wonderful! show it me in the map. So it is, sure enough. My dear sir, you always bring us good news. I must go and tell the King that Cape Breton is an island.' And this man was, during near thirty years, Secretary of State, and during near ten years First Lord of the Treasury! His large fortune, his strong hereditary connection, his great Parliamentary interest, will not alone explain this extraordinary fact. His success is a signal instance of what may be effected by a man who devotes his whole heart and soul without reserve to one object. He was eaten up by ambition. His love of influence and authority resembled the avarice of the old usurer in the 'Fortunes of Nigel.' It was so intense a passion that it supplied the place of talents, that it inspired even fatuity with cunning. 'Have no money dealings with my father,' says Martha to Lord Glenvarloch, 'for, dotard as he is, he will make an ass of you.' It was as dangerous to have any political connection with Newcastle as to buy and sell with old Trapbois. He was greedy after power with a greediness all his own. He was jealous of all colleagues, and even of his own brother. Under the disguise of levity, he was false beyond all example of political falsehood. All the able men of his time ridiculed him as a dunce, a driveller, a child who never knew his own mind for an hour together; and he overreached them all round."