It was a peculiarity of George I. that he had no friends in the world, not even his Hanoverian minions and mistresses, who followed him here from interested motives, with the exception of Schulemburg. The English, even those who were admitted to his intimacy, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, had little good to say of him. “In private life he would have been called an honest blockhead,” she writes, “and Fortune, which made him a King, added nothing to his happiness, only prejudiced his honesty and shortened his days.”[60] If this were the case with people who were near him and benefited by his favours, how can it be wondered that he was unpopular with his subjects at large? There was nothing to be spread abroad in his favour, not one gracious act, not one gracious word or kindly speech. The more his subjects knew of him the more they disliked him, and the reaction was soon setting in full flood. The foreign policy of the Government, which was directly influenced by the King and Bernstorff, tended to increase George’s unpopularity. The quarrel with Sweden on the purely Hanoverian question of Bremen and Verden, and the despatch of an English fleet to the Baltic, brought home to the nation the fact that it would be liable to be constantly embroiled in continental quarrels for the sake of Hanover.
The King, like his Hanoverians, considered his tenure of the English throne a precarious one. “He rather considers England as a temporary possession to be made the most of while it lasts than as a perpetual inheritance to himself and his family,” wrote the French ambassador; and, says Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, “the natural honesty of his temper, joined with the narrow motives of a low education, made him look upon his acceptance of the crown as an act of usurpation which was always uneasy to him”. At any rate, George was too honest to feign a belief in James being a pretended son of James the Second, and he knew, but for the accident of his Protestantism, that he had no claim to the English crown. To benefit Hanover at the expense of England was the keynote of his policy, and when the nation began to be aware of it, the tide of discontent ran higher and higher, and Jacobite plots were reported in all directions. There were riots on the King’s birthday, the crowds wore turnips in their hats in derision of George’s wish to turn St. James’s Park into a turnip field, effigies of dissenting ministers were burned, and their chapels wrecked. James’s health was publicly drunk on Ludgate Hill and in other places; the mob loudly shouted “Ormonde” and “No George,” and the following doggerel was sung in the streets:—
If Queen Anne had done justice George had still
O’er slaves and German boobies reigned,
On leeks and garlic still regaled his feast,
In dirty dowlas shirts and fustians dressed.
Disaffection spread everywhere, and recruiting for James went on even among the King’s guards. In many quarters there was something like a panic, but the King went about as usual, indifferent to danger. England, he frankly owned, had disappointed him, and perhaps he did not greatly care whether he was sent back to Hanover or not. So things continued through the summer and autumn, until in November they came to a crisis, and mounted messengers galloped south with the news that James’s standard had been unfurled in the Highlands.
FOOTNOTES TO BOOK II, CHAPTER III:
[58] La Correspondance Secrète du Comte Broglie.
[59] Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters and Works, edited by Lord Wharnecliff.