George inherited none of the accomplishments of his mother. His father was a man of some talent and force of character, but he cared nothing for books or education of any kind, and George was allowed to revel in ignorance. He had no particular merit except a certain easy good-nature, which rendered him unwilling to do harm or to give pain to any one, unless some interest of his own should make it convenient. His neglected and unrestrained youth was abandoned to license and to profligacy. He was married in the twenty-second year of his age, against his own inclination, to the Princess Sophia Dorothea of Zeil, who was some six years younger. The marriage was merely a political one, formed with the object of uniting the whole of the Duchy of Lüneberg. George was attached to another girl; the princess is supposed to have fixed her affections upon another man. They were married, however, on November 21, 1682, and during all her life Sophia Dorothea had to put up with the neglect, the contempt, and afterwards the cruelty of {7} her husband. George's strongest taste was for ugly women. One of his favorites, Mademoiselle Schulemberg, maid of honor to his mother, and who was afterwards made Duchess of Kendal, was conspicuous, even in the unlovely Hanoverian court, for the awkwardness of her long, gaunt, fleshless figure. Another favorite of George's, Madame Kilmansegge, afterwards made Countess of Darlington, represented a different style of beauty. She is described by Horace Walpole as having "large, fierce, black eyes, rolling beneath lofty-arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distinguishable from the lower part of her body, and no portion of which was restrained by stays."
It would not be surprising if the neglected Sophia Dorothea should have looked for love elsewhere, or at least should not have been strict enough in repelling it when it offered itself. Philip Christof Königsmark, a Swedish soldier of fortune, was supposed to be her favored lover. He suffered for his amour, and it was said that his death came by the special order—one version has it by the very hand—of George the Elector, the owner of the ladies Schulemberg and Kilmansegge. Sophia Dorothea was banished for the rest of her life to the Castle of Ahlden, on the river Aller. In the old schloss of Hanover the spot is still shown, outside the door of the Hall of Knights, which tradition has fixed upon as the spot where the assassination of Königsmark took place.
The Königsmarks were in their way a famous family. The elder brother was the Charles John Königsmark celebrated in an English State trial as the man who planned and helped to carry out the murder of Thomas Thynne. Thomas Thynne, of Longleat, the accused of Titus Oates, the "Wise Issachar," the "wealthy Western friend" of Dryden, the comrade of Monmouth, the "Tom of Ten Thousand," of every one, was betrothed to Elizabeth, the child widow—she was only fifteen years old—of Lord Ogle. Königsmark, fresh from love-making in {8} all the courts of Europe, and from fighting anything and everything from the Turk at Tangiers to the wild bulls of Madrid, seems to have fallen in love with Thynne's betrothed wife, and to have thought that the best way of obtaining her was to murder his rival. The murder was done, and its story is recorded in clumsy bas-relief over Thynne's tomb in Westminster Abbey. Königsmark's accomplices were executed, but Königsmark got off, and died years later fighting for the Venetians at the siege of classic Argos. The soldier in Virgil falls on a foreign field, and, dying, remembers sweet Argos. The elder Königsmark, dying before sweet Argos, ought of right to remember that spot where St. Albans Street joins Pall Mall, and where Thynne was done to death. The Königsmarks had a sister, the beautiful Aurora, who was mistress of Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony, and so mother of the famous Maurice de Saxe, and ancestress of George Sand. Later, like the fair sinner of some tale of chivalry, she ended her days in pious retirement, as prioress of the Protestant Abbey at Quedlinburg.
[Sidenote: 1714—Wooden shoes and warming-pans]
George was born in Osnabrück, in May, 1660, and was therefore now in his fifty-fifth year. As his first qualification for the government of England, it may be mentioned that he did not understand one sentence of the English language, was ignorant of English ways, history, and traditions, and had as little sympathy with the growing sentiments of the majority of educated English people as if he had been an Amurath succeeding an Amurath.
When George became Elector, on the death of his father in 1698, he showed, however, some capacity for improvement, under the influence of the new responsibility imposed upon him by his station. His private life did not amend, but his public conduct acquired a certain solidity and consistency which was not to have been expected from his previous mode of living. One of his merits was not likely to be by any means a merit in the eyes of the English people. He was, to do him justice, deeply attached to his native country. He had all the {9} love for Hanover that the cat has for the hearth to which it is accustomed. The ways of the place suited him; the climate, the soil, the whole conditions of life were exactly what he would have them to be. He lived up to the age of fifty-four a contented, stolid, happy, dissolute Elector of Hanover; and it was a complete disturbance to all his habits and his predilections when the expected death of Anne compelled him to turn his thoughts to England.
The other claimant of the English crown was James Frederick Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, as he came to be afterwards called by his enemies, the Chevalier de Saint George, as his friends called him when they did not think it prudent to give him the title of king. James was the step-brother of Queen Anne. He was the son of James the Second, by James's second wife, Maria D'Este, sister to Francis, Duke of Modena. Maria was only the age of Juliet when she married: she had just passed her fourteenth year. Unlike Juliet she was not beautiful; unlike Juliet she was poor. She was, however, a devout Roman Catholic, and therefore was especially acceptable to her husband. She had four children in quick succession, all of whom died in infancy; and then for ten years she had no child. The London Gazette surprised the world one day by the announcement that the Queen had become pregnant, and upon June 10, 1688, she gave birth to a son. It need hardly be told now that the wildest commotion was raised by the birth of the prince. The great majority of the Protestants insinuated, or stoutly declared, that the alleged heir-apparent was not a child of the Queen. The story was that a newly-born child, the son of a poor miller, had been brought into the Queen's room in a warming-pan, and passed off as the son of the Queen. It was said that Father Petre, a Catholic clergyman, had been instrumental in carrying out this contrivance, and therefore the enemies of the royal family talked of the young prince as Perkin or Petrelin. The warming-pan was one of the most familiar objects in satirical literature and art for many generations after. {10} A whole school of caricature was heated into life, if we may use such an expression, by this fabulous warming-pan. Warming-pans were associated with brass money and wooden shoes in the mouths and minds of Whig partisans, down to a day not very far remote from our own. Mr. Jobson, the vulgar lawyer in Scott's "Rob Roy," talks rudely to Diana Vernon, a Catholic, about "King William, of glorious and immortal memory, our immortal deliverer from Papists and pretenders, and wooden shoes and warming-pans." "Sad things those wooden shoes and warming-pans," retorted the young lady, who seemed to take pleasure in augmenting his wrath; "and it is a comfort you don't seem to want a warming-pan at present, Mr. Jobson." There was not, of course, the slightest foundation for the absurd story about the spurious heir to the throne. Some little excuse was given for the spread of such a tale by the mere fact that there had been delay in summoning the proper officials to be present at the birth; but despite all the pains Bishop Burnet takes to make the report seem trustworthy, it may be doubted whether any one whose opinion was worth having seriously believed in the story, even at the time, and it soon ceased to have any believers at all. At the time, however, it was accepted as an article of faith by a large proportion of the outer public; and the supposed Jesuit plot and the supposed warming-pan served as missiles with which to pelt the supporters of the Stuarts, until long after there had ceased to be the slightest chance whatever of a Stuart restoration. This story of a spurious heir to a throne repeats itself at various intervals of history. The child of Napoleon the First and Maria Louisa was believed by many Legitimist partisans to be supposititious. In our own days there were many intelligent persons in France firmly convinced that the unfortunate Prince Louis Napoleon, who was killed in Zululand, was not the son of the Empress of the French, but that he was the son of her sister, the Duchess of Alva, and that he was merely palmed off on the French {11} people in order to secure the stability of the Bonapartist throne.
[Sidenote: 1714—The "Old Pretender">[
James Stuart was born, as we have said, on June 10, 1688, and was therefore still in his twenty-sixth year at the time when this history begins. Soon after his birth his mother hurried with him to France to escape the coming troubles, and his father presently followed discrowned. He had led an unhappy life—unhappy all the more because of the incessant dissipation with which he tried to enliven it. He is described as tall, meagre, and melancholy. Although not strikingly like Charles the First or Charles the Second, he had unmistakably the Stuart aspect. Horace Walpole said of him many years after that, "without the particular features of any Stuart, the Chevalier has the strong lines and fatality of air peculiar to them all." The words "fatality of air" describe very expressively that look of melancholy which all the Stuart features wore when in repose. The melancholy look represented an underlying habitual mood of melancholy, or even despondency, which a close observer may read in the character of the "merry monarch" himself, for all his mirth and his dissipation, just as well as in that of Charles the First or of James the Second. The profligacy of Charles the Second had little that was joyous in it. James Stuart, the Chevalier, had not the abilities and the culture of Charles the Second, and he had much the same taste for intrigue and dissipation. His amours were already beginning to be a scandal, and he drank now and then like a man determined at all cost to drown thought. He was always the slave of women. Women knew all his secrets, and were made acquainted with his projected political enterprises. Sometimes the fair favorite to whom he had unbosomed himself blabbed and tattled all over Versailles or Paris of what she had heard, and in some instances, perhaps, she even took her newly-acquired knowledge to the English Ambassador and disposed of it for a consideration. At this time James Stuart is not yet married; but marriage made as little {12} difference in his way of living as it had done in that of his elderly political rival, George the Elector. It is strange that James Stuart should have made so faint an impression upon history and upon literature. Romance and poetry, which have done so much for his son, "Bonnie Prince Charlie," have taken hardly any account of him. He figures in Thackeray's "Esmond," but the picture is not made very distinct, even by that master of portraiture, and the merely frivolous side of his character is presented with disproportionate prominence. James Stuart had stronger qualities for good or evil than Thackeray seems to have found in him. Some of his contemporaries denied him the credit of man's ordinary courage; he has even been accused of positive cowardice; but there does not seem to be the slightest ground for such an accusation. Studied with the severest eye, his various enterprises, and the manner in which he bore himself throughout them, would seem to prove that he had courage enough for any undertaking. Princes seldom show any want of physical courage. They are trained from their very birth to regard themselves as always on parade; and even if they should feel their hearts give way in presence of danger, they are not likely to allow it to be seen. It was not lack of personal bravery that marred the chances of James Stuart.
[Sidenote: 1714—Anne's sympathies]