A History of the Four Georges, Volume I

by Justin McCarthy

[Sidenote: 1727—The raven]

Even such a man as George the First may become invested by death with a certain dignity and something of a romantic interest. Legends are afloat concerning the King's later days which would not be altogether unworthy the closing hours of a great Roman emperor. George had his melting moments, it would seem, and not long before his death, being in a pathetic mood, he gave the Duchess of Kendal a pledge that if he should die before her, and it were possible for departed souls to return to earth and impress the living with a knowledge of their presence, he, the faithful and aged lover, would come back from the grave to his mistress. When the Duchess of Kendal returned to her home near Twickenham she was in constant expectation of a visit in some form from her lost adorer. One day while the windows of her house were open, a large black raven, or bird of some kind—raven would seem to be the more becoming and appropriate form for such a visitor—flew into her presence from the outer air. The lamenting lady assumed at once that in this shape the soul of King George had come back to earth. She cherished and petted the bird, it is said, and lavished all fondness and tenderness upon it. What {267} became of it in the end history does not allow us to know. Whether it still is sitting, like the more famous raven of poetry, it is not for us to guess. Probably when the Duchess herself expired in 1743, the ghastly, grim, and ancient raven disappeared with her. Why George the First, if he had the power of returning in any shape to see his mistress, did not come in his own proper form, it is not for us to explain. One might be disposed to imagine that in such a case it would be the first step which would involve the cost, and that there would be no greater difficulty for the departed soul to come back in the likeness of its old vestment of clay than to put on the unfamiliar and somewhat inconvenient form of a fowl. Perhaps the story is not true. Possibly there was no raven or other bird in the case at all. It may be that, if a black raven did fly in at the Duchess of Kendal's window, the bird was not the embodied spirit of King George. For ourselves, we should be sorry to lose the story. Neither the King nor the mistress could afford to part with any slight clement of romance wherewithal even legend has chosen to invest them. Another story, which probably has more truth in it, adds a new ghastliness to the circumstances of George's death. On November 13, 1726, some seven months before that event, there died in a German castle a woman whom the gazette of the capital described as the Electress Dowager of Hanover. This was the unfortunate Princess Sophia, the wife of George. Thirty-two years of melancholy captivity she had endured, while George was drinking and hoarding money and amusing himself with his seraglio of ugly women. She died protesting her innocence to the last. In the closing days of her illness, so runs the story, she gave into the hands of some one whom she could trust, a letter addressed to her husband, and obtained a promise that the letter should, somehow or other, be delivered to George himself. This letter contained a final declaration that she was absolutely guiltless of the offence alleged against her, a bitter reproach to George for his ruthless conduct, {268} and a solemn summons to him to stand by her side before the judgment-seat of Heaven within a year, and there make answer in her presence for the wrongs he had done her, for her blighted life and her miserable death. There was no way of getting this letter into George's hands while the King was in England, but an arrangement was made by means of which it was put into his coach when he crossed the frontier of Germany on his way towards his capital. George, it is said, opened the letter at once, and was so surprised and horror-stricken by its stern summons that he fell that moment into the apoplectic fit from which he never recovered. Sophia, therefore, had herself accomplished her own revenge; her reproach had killed the King; her summons brought him at once within the ban of that judgment to which she had called him. It would be well if one could believe the story; there would seem a dramatic justice—a tragic retribution—about it. Its very terror would dignify the story of a life that, on the whole, was commonplace and vulgar. But, for ourselves, we confess that we cannot believe in the mysterious letter, the fatal summons, the sudden fulfilment. There are too many stories of the kind floating about history to allow us to attach any special significance to this particular tale. We doubt even whether, if the letter had been written, it would have greatly impressed the mind of George. Remorse for the treatment of his wife he could not have felt—he was incapable of any such emotion; and we question whether any appeal to the sentiment of the supernatural, any summons to another and an impalpable world, would have made much impression on that stolid, prosaic intelligence and that heart of lead. Besides, according to some versions of the tale, it was not, after all, a letter from his wife which impressed him, but only the warning of a fortune-teller—a woman who admonished the King to be careful of the life of his imprisoned consort, because it was fated for him that he should not survive her a year. This story, too, is told of many kings and other persons less illustrious.

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[Sidenote: 1727—Character of the first George]

Much more probable is the rumor that Sophia made a will bequeathing all her personal property to her son, that the will was given to George the First in England, and that he composedly destroyed it. If George committed this act, he seems to have been repaid in kind. His own will left large legacies to the Duchess of Kendal and to other ladies. The Archbishop of Canterbury gave the will to the new King, who read it, put it in his pocket, walked away with it, and never produced it again. Both these stories are doubted by some of the contemporaries of George the Second, but they were firmly believed in and strongly asserted by others, who seem to have had authority for their belief. At all events, they fit in better with the character and surroundings of both princes than the tragic story of the letter and its fearful summons, the warning of the fortune-teller, or the soul of the dead King revisiting the earth in the funereal form of a raven.

There is not much that is good to be said of George the First. He had a certain prosaic honesty, and was frugal amid all his vulgar voluptuousness. He managed the expenses of his court with creditable economy and regularity. The officers in his army, and his civil servants, received their pay at the properly-appointed time. It would be hardly worth while recording these particulars to the King's credit, but that it was somewhat of a novelty in the arrangements of a modern court for men to receive the reward of their services at regular intervals and in the proper amount. George occasionally did a liberal thing, and he more than once professed a strong interest in the improvement of university education. He is said to have declared to a German nobleman, who was complimenting him on the possession of two such kingdoms as England and Hanover, that a king ought to be congratulated rather on having two such subjects as Newton in the one country and Leibnitz in the other. We fear, however, that this story must go with the fortune-teller and the raven; one cannot think of dull prosaic {270} George uttering such a monumental sort of sentiment. He cared nothing for literature or science or art. He seems to have had no genuine friendships. He hated his son, and he used to speak of his daughter-in-law, Caroline, as "that she-devil the princess." [Sidenote: 1727—His epitaph] Whatever was respectable in his character came out best at times of trial. He was not a man whom danger could make afraid. At the most critical moments—as, for instance, at the outbreak of the rebellion in 1715—he never lost his head. If he was not capable of seeing far, he saw clearly, and he could look coming events steadily in the face. On one or two occasions, when an important choice had to be made between this political course and that, he chose quickly and well. The fact that he thoroughly appreciated the wisdom and the political integrity, of Walpole speaks, perhaps, his highest praise. His reign, on the whole, was one of prosperity for England. He did not love England—never, up to the very end, cared for the country over which destiny had appointed him to rule. His soul to the last was faithful to Hanover. England was to him as the State wife whom for political reasons he was compelled to marry; Hanover, as the sweetheart and mistress of his youth, to whom his affections, such as they were, always clung, and whom he stole out to see at every possible chance. George behaved much better to his political consort, England, than to the veritable wife of his bosom. He managed England's affairs for her like an honest, straightforward, narrow-minded steward. We shall see hereafter that England came to be governed much worse by men not nearly so bad as George the First. To do him justice, he knew when he ought to leave the business of the State in the hands of those who understood it better than he; this one merit redeemed many of his faults, and, perhaps, may be regarded as having secured his dynasty. Frederick the Great described George as a prince who governed England by respecting liberty, even while he made use of the subsidies granted by Parliament to corrupt the Parliament which voted them. {271} He was a king, Frederick declares, "without ostentation and without deceit," and who won by his conduct the confidence of Europe. This latter part of the description is a little too polite. Kings do not criticise each other too keenly in works that are meant for publication. But the words form, on the whole, an epitaph for George which might be inscribed on his tomb without greater straining of the truth than is common in the monumental inscriptions that adorn the graves of less exalted persons.

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CHAPTER XVIII.

GEORGE THE SECOND.

[Sidenote: 1727—Death of Newton]