A History of the Four Georges, Volume II

by Justin McCarthy

FAMILY JARS.

[Sidenote: 1737—Unpopularity of George the Second]

"How is the wind now for the King?" "Like the nation—against him." Such was the question put, and such the answer promptly given, by two persons meeting in a London street during certain stormy days of December, 1736. The King had been on a visit to his loved Hanover. When the royal yachts were returning, some fierce tempests sprang up and raged along both coasts; and the King's vessel was forced to return to Helvoetsluis, in Holland, from which she had sailed. She had parted company with some of the other vessels. The storms continued to rage, and the King, who had been most reluctant to leave Hanover, was wild with impatience to get away from Helvoetsluis. Having had to take leave of Madame Walmoden, he was now anxious to get back to the Queen. He sailed for Helvoetsluis while the tempest was still not wholly allayed, and another tempest seemed likely to spring up. News travelled slowly in those times, and there were successive intervals of several days, during which the English Court and the English public did not know whether George was safe in a port, or was drifting on a wreck, or was lying at the bottom of the sea.

That was a trying time for the Queen and those who stood by her. George the Second was just then very unpopular in London, and indeed all over England. "The King's danger," Lord Hervey says, "did not in the least soften the minds of the people towards him; a thousand impertinent and treasonable reflections were thrown out against him every day publicly in the streets—such as wishing him at the bottom of the sea; that he had been {70} drowned instead of some of the poor sailors that had been washed off the decks—and many other affectionate douceurs in the same style." A man went into an ale-house where several soldiers were drinking; he addressed them "as brave English boys," and called on them to drink "damnation to your master." The man went on to argue that there was no reason why the English people should not hate the King, and that the King had gone to Hanover only to spend the money of England there, and to bring back his Hanoverian mistress. There is not much in this of any particular importance; but there is significance in what followed. The man was arrested, and the sergeant who was with the soldiers when the invitation to drink was given went to Sir Robert Walpole to tell him what had happened. Sir Robert thanked the sergeant and rewarded him, but enjoined him to leave out of the affidavit he would have to make any allusion to the English money and the Hanoverian mistress. There was quite enough in the mere invitation to drink the disloyal toast, Sir Robert said, to secure the offender's punishment; but the Prime-minister was decidedly of opinion that the less said just then in public about the spending of English money and the endowment of Hanoverian women, the better for peace and quietness.

[Sidenote: 1737—The Prince of Wales]

The Queen and Sir Robert and Lord Hervey were in constant consultation. They would not show in public the fear which all alike entertained. The Queen went to chapel, and passed her evenings with her circle just as usual; but she was in the uttermost alarm and the deepest distress. Any hour might bring the news that the King was drowned; and who could tell what might not happen in England then? Of course in the natural order of things the Prince of Wales would succeed to the throne; and what would become of the Queen and Walpole and Hervey then? Hervey, indeed, tried to reassure the Queen, and to persuade her that her son would acknowledge her influence and be led by it; but Caroline could not be prevailed upon to indulge in such a hope even for {71} a moment. To add to her troubles, her daughter, the Princess of Orange, was lying in a most dangerous condition at the Hague—her confinement had taken place; she had suffered terribly; and, to save her life, it had been found necessary to sacrifice the unborn child, a daughter. Every hour that passed without bringing news of the King seemed to increase the chance of the news when it came proving the worst. Such was the moment when the Prince of Wales made himself conspicuous by several bids for popularity. He gave a dinner to the Lord Mayor and aldermen of the City of London on the occasion of their presenting him with the freedom of the city. The Queen, who, for all her philosophical scepticism and her emancipated mind, had many lingering superstitions in her, saw an evil omen in the fact that the only two Princes of Wales who before Frederick had been presented with the freedom of the city were Charles the First and James the Second. The prince was reported to the Queen to have made several speeches at the dinner which were certain to ingratiate him in popular favor. "My God!" she exclaimed, "popularity always makes me sick; but Fritz's popularity makes me vomit." People told her that the prince and those around him talked of the King's being cast away "with the same sang-froid as you would talk of a coach being overturned." She said she had been told that Frederick strutted about as if he were already King. But she added, "He is such an ass that one cannot tell what he thinks; and yet he is not so great a fool as you take him for, neither." The Princess Caroline vowed that if the worst were to prove true, she would run out of the house au grand galop. Walpole described the prince to Hervey as "a poor, weak, irresolute, false, lying, dishonest, contemptible wretch," and asked, "What is to become of this divided family and this divided country?" It is something of a relief to find that there was in one mind at least a thought of what might happen to the country.

We have to take all these pictures of Frederick on {72} trust—on the faith of the father who loathed him, of the mother who detested and despised him, of the brothers and sisters who shrank away from him, of the minister who could not find words enough to express his hatred and contempt for him. Of course the mere fact that father and mother, brothers and sisters, felt thus towards the prince is terrible testimony against him. But there does not seem much in his conduct, at least in his public conduct, during this crisis, which might not bear a favorable interpretation. He might have given his dinners, as the Queen held her public drawing-rooms, for the purpose of preventing the spread of an alarm. No doubt the entertainment to the Lord Mayor and aldermen had been long arranged; and the prince may have thought it would be unwise to put it off at such a moment. Every report was believed against him. A fire broke out at the Temple, and the prince went down and stayed all night, giving directions and taking the control of the work for the putting out of the flames. His exertions undoubtedly helped to save the Temple from destruction; and he became for the time a hero with the populace. It was reported to Caroline that either the prince himself or some of his friends were going about saying that the crowd on the night of the fire kept crying out, "Crown him! crown him!"

[Sidenote: 1737—Monarchy a prosaic institution]

So far as the alarm of the Queen and Walpole had to do with the state of the country, it does not seem that there was any solid ground. What would have happened if the bloated King had been tossed ashore a corpse on the coast of England or the coast of Holland? So far as the public affairs of England are concerned, nothing in particular would have happened, we think. George would have been buried in right royal fashion; there would have been an immense concourse of sight-seers to stare at the royal obsequies; and Frederick would have been proclaimed, and the people would have taken little notice of the fact. What could it have mattered to the English people whether George the Second or his eldest son was {73} on the throne? No doubt Frederick was generally distrusted and disliked wherever he was known; but, then, George the Second was ever so much more widely known, and therefore was ever so much more distrusted and disliked. The chances of a successful Jacobite rising would not have been affected in any way by the fact that it was this Hanoverian prince and not that who was sitting on the throne of England. It would be hardly possible to find a more utterly unkingly and ignoble sovereign than George the Second; it is hardly possible that his son could have turned out any worse; and there was, at all events, the possibility that he might turn out better. Outside London and Richmond very few people cared in the least which of the Hanoverians wore the crown. Those who were loyal to the reigning family were honestly loyal on the principle that it was better for the country to have a Hanoverian sovereign than a Stuart. Many of those who in their feelings were still devoted to the Stuart tradition did not think it would be worth while plunging the country into a civil war for the almost hopeless chance of a revolution. England was beginning to see that, with all the corruption of Parliament and the constituencies under Walpole's administration, there was yet a very much better presentation of constitutional government than they had ever seen before. The arbitrary power of the sovereign had practically ceased to affect anybody outside the circles of the Ministry and the Court. The law tribunals sat and judged men impartially according to their lights, and person and property were at least secure against the arbitrary intrusion of the sovereign power. The old-fashioned chivalric, picturesque loyalty was gone; not merely because royalty itself had ceased to be chivalric and picturesque, but because men had, after so many experiments and changes, come to regard the monarchy as a merely practical and prosaic institution, to be rated according to its working merits. The majority in England at the time when George was tossing about the North Sea, or waiting impatiently at Helvoetsluis, had come to the conclusion {74} that on the whole the monarchy worked better under the Hanoverians than it had done under the Stuarts, and was more satisfactory than the protectorate of Cromwell. Therefore, we do not believe there was the slightest probability that the loss of George the Second would have brought any political trouble on the State. One can imagine objections made even by very moderate and reasonable Englishmen to each and all of the Hanoverian kings; but we find it hard to imagine how any reasonable Englishman, who had quietly put up with George the Second, should be at any pains to resist the accession of George the Second's eldest son.

But the truth is that although in her many consultations with Walpole and with Hervey the Queen did sometimes let drop a word or two about the condition of the country and the danger to the State, she was not thinking much about the state of the country. She was thinking honestly about herself and those who were around her, and whom she loved and wished to see maintained in comfort and in dignity. Her conviction was that if her son Frederick came to the throne she and her other children would be forced to go into an obscure life in Somerset House, the old palace which had been assigned to her in her jointure, and that they would even in that obscurity have to depend very much on the charity of the new King. This was the view Walpole took of the prospect. He thought those most in peril, those most to be pitied, were the Queen and the duke, her son, and the princesses. "I do not know," said Walpole to Hervey, "any people in the world so much to be pitied as that gay young company with which you and I stand every day in the drawing-room, at that door from which we this moment came, bred up in state, in affluence, caressed and courted, and to go at once from that into dependence on a brother who loves them not, and whose extravagance and covetousness will make him grudge every guinea they spend, as it must come from out of a purse not sufficient to defray the expenses of his own vices."