The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I (12 page)

It was typical of Melusine that as it became ever more likely that George would inherit the British throne, she learnt the language. Even so, once in England, she found herself at the mercy of the Jacobite pamphleteers and the free press. They would give Melusine one of the ugliest reputations a British royal mistress has ever endured. In England, the ‘good’, gentle and benevolent aristocrat became the avaricious and grasping ‘Maypole’.

6.
The Crown at Last

And what men that little rustic England could breed! A nation of five and a half millions that had Wren for its architect, Newton for its scientist, Locke for its philosopher, Bentley for its scholar, Pope for its poet, Addison for its essayist, Bolingbroke for its orator, Swift for its pamphleteer and Marlborough to win its battles, had the recipe for genius.

– The historian G. M. Trevelyan, describing the country that George became king of on 1 August 1714

Great Britain was a very different prospect to the benign autocracy of Hanover, with its tiny population of 600,000. The seventeenth century had been one of the most turbulent in the country’s history, a century that had moved away from autocracy and the notion of the divine right of kings towards constitutional monarchy. It had forged a people suspicious of dictatorial government who closely guarded their rights. James I’s declaration in 1609 that ‘Kings are justly called Gods . . .’
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and its implicit autocratic doctrine had arguably set in motion the severing of his son Charles I’s head at his glorious Banqueting House at Whitehall on a freezing January day in 1649 – an event that precipitated the Hanoverian claim to the throne. This unprecedented act of legal regicide, when Charles I went ‘from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown’, heralded the moment that England said farewell for ever to absolutist monarchy. Cromwell’s ten-year Protectorate, the Catholic James II’s disastrous and short-lived reign, the Protestant William III’s successful invasion, albeit by invitation, and continuous wars against Louis XIV’s France between 1689 and 1713 fashioned a desire not only for stable government, but more importantly for Protestant government. England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 had forever entwined Catholicism and repression, and Protestantism and freedom, in the national consciousness.

The turmoil had created a nation whose self-confidence was out of all proportion to its relatively small population of eight million.
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National pride was enhanced by the flamboyant Duke of Marlborough’s brilliant military victories against the French. His reward from a grateful people and monarch – Blenheim Palace – was more beautiful than any of the royal palaces.

What set Britain apart from her continental and predominantly absolutist neighbours? As the historian W. A. Speck has argued, it was England’s unique constitutional monarchy, precipitated by the absolutist Charles I’s beheading – mixed rule by monarchy and parliament, which in turn led to the growth of liberalism. With liberty grew trade, which would otherwise have been ‘stifled by absolutism’.

A pamphlet of 1757,
A Tract of the National Interest
, asserted that ‘riches, trade and commerce are nowhere to be found but in the regions of freedom, where the lives and properties of the subjects are secured by wholesome laws. Nowhere else, in no other soil can they grow or subsist . . .’
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That great barometer of liberalism and trade, the Jews, had returned to England with Oliver Cromwell during his Protectorate. They had been expelled by Edward I in 1290; by 1665 the wealthy merchant Menasseh Ben Israel, who had moved to England from the Netherlands, noted: ‘And so ’tis observed, that wheresoever they [the Jews] go to dwell, there presently the Traficq begins to florish . . .’
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With wealth came a desire for education. Towards the end of the seventeenth century many cheap schools were established, reflecting Londoners’ desire to give their children the tools to do better.
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By the end of the seventeenth century the essayist Addison could proclaim: ‘this Metropolis [London] [is] a kind of Emporium of the whole Earth’. And by the time Melusine and George arrived in the capital it was the most important commercial centre in the world. As Peter Ackroyd notes in his
London, the Biography
, the start of the eighteenth century ‘was the age of lotteries and flotations and “bubbles”. Everything was for sale – political office, religious preferment, landed heiresses – and, said Swift, “Power, which according to the old Maxim, was used to follow
Land
, is now gone over to Money”.’
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The establishment, of course, loathed the new monied classes
created by the burgeoning of trade. In 1715 the dramatist and poet John Gay complained:

Now gaudy Pride corrupts the lavish Age

And the Streets flame with glaring Equipage;

The tricking Gamester insolently rides,

With Loves and Graces on his Chariot’s sides;

In sawcy State the griping Broker sits

And laughs at Honesty, and trudging Wits.
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But trade had grown so entrenched in the national character that the author Daniel Defoe felt able to write:

the Blood of Trade is mixed and blended with the Blood of Gallantry, so that Trade is the Lifeblood of the Nation, the Soul of Felicity, the Spring of its Wealth, the Support of its Greatness, and the Staff on which both King and People lean.
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Parliament was dominated by two political parties, the Whigs and the Tories. During George’s reign the country was effectively ruled by an oligarchy – the king and his ministers, all powerful Whiggish parliamentarians. Although the king still enjoyed an enormous amount of power, George was required to work with parliament, not least because he depended on it to approve his civil list. The country was still far from a democracy: an archaic system of property qualifications decided who could vote, and it has been estimated that this privilege was enjoyed by, at best, 5 per cent of the adult male population.

The terms Whig and Tory had their origins in insults – Whig meant horse thief in Scottish Gaelic; Tory was an Irish term meaning outlaw, or robber (it eventually came to mean ‘Papist outlaw’). The parties had emerged out of the ‘exclusion crisis’ of 1679 in
which the group of noblemen and parliamentarians who would become known as the Whigs argued heatedly for the exclusion of the Catholic James, Charles II’s brother, from the succession.

By the time of George’s accession the Whigs were associated in the popular imagination with trade, new money and urban life, while the Tories represented the privileges of the Anglican Church and the landed classes, with their roots in the countryside.

Charles, famously libidinous (he had at least fifteen mistresses), had fathered many illegitimate children. But his wife, Catherine of Braganza, was unable to conceive. This meant that the throne would pass to the next Stuart male in the line of succession on Charles’s death – his brother James. But shockingly to a fiercely Protestant England, James converted to Catholicism, in either 1668 or 1669. Charles was furious. James’s young daughters by the commoner Anne Hyde, Mary and Anne (both future queens of England), were removed from his care and made children of state, to be brought up as Protestants. James further alarmed and infuriated the king and the nation by marrying the Catholic princess Mary of Modena on Anne Hyde’s death.

In 1678 a maverick Anglican priest, Titus Oates, caused mass panic when he fabricated his tale of the ‘Popish Plot’, a scheme to assassinate Charles and place James on the throne instead. Although Oates was tried and found guilty of sedition, many believed his story, a mark of the strength of feeling against Catholics amongst much of the population. Three successive parliaments attempted to exclude James from the succession, and the opposing factions – those who advocated his removal (the Whigs) and those who did not (the Tories) – hurled vile insults at one another across the floor. Ultimately the Whigs were defeated.

Despite the hysteria, James came to the throne on the death of Charles in 1685. It was his daughter Anne’s machinations that aided his deposition three years later. James’s eldest daughter Mary
had married her cousin the Protestant William of Orange in 1677. Mary was childless and the younger Anne was second in line to the throne on her father’s accession. Her young stepmother had had numerous miscarriages and Anne believed she could not carry a child to full term. But to her horror, in June 1688 she gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward. The zealously Protestant and fiercely ambitious Anne convinced her sister and brother-in-law that the baby was a changeling; William took the bait and, at the invitation of a group of the nobility, successfully invaded England to save the country from the Papists.
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The joint rule of William and Mary firmly established a Protestant dynasty in England, first with their sovereignty and then with Anne’s. It was Anne’s reign, a second ‘Golden Age’, that oversaw such artistic and military glories as the architecture of Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh and Marlborough’s victories. And, as we have seen, it was Anne’s childless misery that ensured the Hanoverian succession. Catholicism had become such an emotive subject that the majority of Englishmen were determined never to tolerate rule by a ‘Papist’ again.

Since 1688 and her ‘Glorious Revolution’, England had truly become one of Europe’s great powers. Under the successive reigns of William III and Anne, Britain had entered the Grand Alliance with Austria and the United Provinces to fight against the hegemony of Louis XIV’s France in the War of the Spanish Succession, a pan-European struggle. John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough and Anne’s brilliant general, had delivered phenomenal military victories for the country. But towards the end of Anne’s reign her leading Tory ministers, St John, Viscount Bolingbroke and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, had taken England out of the war in 1713 by signing a separate peace with France, the Treaty of Utrecht. George was horrified. Hanover was an ally of the Grand Alliance and according to the terms of the founding treaty, should have been
consulted on any peace. He saw it as a betrayal; he would never, forgive the Tory ministers who had engineered it.

Although Anne’s natural inclination was to favour the Tories, with their more royalist sentiments, she endeavoured throughout her reign to appear impartial. The absolutist tendencies of English monarchs did not vanish overnight with the deposition and death of Charles I. Anne reputedly enquired of the young Robert Walpole what the cost would be to enclose Green Park within her garden, to which the Whig minister replied: ‘A crown, Madam, a crown.’

George, like Anne, hoped to rule without seeming to favour either party. But by the time he entered a London covered with thick fog on 29 September 1714 to take up residence at St James’s Palace, the Tories had little chance of forming a ministry under the new monarch. They had been labelled, somewhat unfairly, the anti-Hanoverian party. The most prominent men in Anne’s last ministry, Viscount Bolingbroke and the Earl of Oxford, were suspected by George of favouring the accession of the Stuart claimant over the Hanoverians;
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he loathed them for their part in the Peace of Utrecht; they were associated in George’s mind with Anglicanism and the correlating prejudice towards Protestant dissenters; and the enmity between the Tories’ leading lights, Bolingbroke and Oxford, meant that the party was hopelessly fractured.

The Tories did little to help their cause with the publication of scurrilous poems by Tory satirists. George was thrust into the arms of the Whigs in part because of the sentiments of poems such as ‘The Blessings Attending George’s Accession’, which contained the lines:

Hither he brought the dear Illustrious House;

That is, himself, his pipe, close stool and louse;

Two Turks, three Whores, and half a dozen nurses,

Five hundred Germans, all with empty purses.
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George duly filled all of the posts in his Cabinet bar one with Whigs – the Earl of Nottingham was the only Tory – and the privy council was stocked with Whigs and a few loyal Tories. Similarly the only Tories who survived George’s purge of the state departments were those known to be loyal Hanoverians. By the time parliament was dissolved on 15 January 1715, George had given power over to the Whigs.

A desperate Bolingbroke fled to France knowing there was no hope of favour, and into the arms of the Pretender James Stuart, the son of James II. He became his secretary of state. His actions could not have been more damning to the Tory party. The earls of Oxford and Stafford were impeached in the wake of his flight and Oxford was sent to the Tower. The Whigs were overjoyed and capitalized on the appalling image the Tories had in the king’s eyes. They enthusiastically dubbed the Tories who had served under Anne ‘Jacobites’ – that is, sympathizers with the cause of ‘The Pretender’. But not all Tories were Jacobites; many, such as Oxford, fully supported the Hanoverian succession. Others retreated into an apathetic silence. In February 1714 Baron Schutz, George’s envoy to Britain, presciently wrote: ‘it is certain that of fifteen Tories there are fourteen who would not oppose the Pretender, in case he came with a French army.’
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The turbulent events of George’s first year as king ensured that the Tories would be out of office for nearly half a century. A leading Whig, James Stanhope, stated somewhat smugly in 1716: ‘His majesty’s affairs are, thanks be to God, at present in a more settled and prosperous condition than his most sanguine servants could ever have expected.’
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