Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (11 page)

Still, Walpole was always eager to recruit new agents, and preferred to meet with them face to face, sometimes going incognito to an out-of-the-way tavern for a rendezvous. There was no shortage of candidates wanting to be hired as agents. Letters arrived frequently from all sorts of people—doctors, businessmen, practitioners of the psychic arts—offering to reveal Jacobite secrets for a price. These people claimed to know when and where James and his army would strike, how many men he had recruited to his cause, and what their names were, what Catholic priests were lurking in the suburbs of the capital, waiting to take over the Church when the Pretender landed. None of these offers could be dismissed lightly, everyone had to be investigated, no matter how unlikely. Walpole paid a good deal out of the treasury to bring potential informers from the continent to London just to hear what they had to say.

Had the Hanoverian kings been popular their hold over the throne would not have seemed so precarious. But they had never been popular—merely tolerated because of what they represented: Protestantism and the parliamentary "revolution" of 1688.

George I, who was fifty-four when he became King of England as well as Elector of Hanover, was and remained a mild, dull-witted, unadventuresome German nobleman throughout his thirteen-year reign. He did not bother to learn English, less from snobbery than from an expectation that he probably would not keep his English throne long. He knew the English did not like him, and he was not reticent in saying—though not in English—that he did not like them very much either. (His German courtiers were downright insulting to the English. One of them. Baron Schutz, was overheard to say that "nothing could make him believe that there was one handsome woman in England," while another. Countess Buckeburgh, was said to believe that "English women did not look like women of quality.") George distrusted his English ministers, with whom he carried on thoroughly unsatisfactory and blessedly brief conversations in French. With Walpole his relationship was marginally better; they both spoke a little Latin, and managed to stumble through a dialogue from time to time, though with a considerable sacrifice in clarity and mutual understanding.

Personally the first King George was stodgy and lumpish. 'The King's character," wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "may be comprised in very few words. In private life he would have been called an honest blockhead." He had no ambition, no boldness, no desire to get ahead at anyone else's expense. "He was more properly dull than lazy," thought Lady Mary, "and would have been so well contented to have remained in his little town of Hanover, that if the ambition of those about him had not been greater than his own, we should never have seen him in England." In a pathetic way, she believed, the king was ashamed of his rank in England. His natural honesty, and his genuine lack of understanding of how a foreign nation such as Britain should desire him as a ruler, led him to "look upon his acceptance of the crown as an act of usurpation, which was always uneasy to him."
⁶

It may have been this uneasiness, coupled with a native shyness, that made King George reclusive. His subjects rarely saw him, save when he passed them on his way to morning service at St. James's chapel or when, infrequently, he appeared at the opera—choosing not to sit in the royal box but in a less visible place, where he was half hidden by his looming mistress the Duchess of Kendal. He had a private theater built in the great hall of Hampton Court where he could enjoy watching plays without the distraction caused by his own celebrity. His favorite plays were said to be
Hamlet
and
Henry VIII
—the latter appealing to him, perhaps, not only because of King Henry's repudiation of the pope but because like Henry with his six wives, George knew what it was to have trouble with women.

Before coming to England he had had trouble with his wife. She was Sophia Dorothea of Celle, an unfortunate woman who unwisely became involved in a liaison with Count Philip von Konigsmark when her marriage to George became tedious. Although George was himself an adulterer, he could not pardon his wife's transgression. Her lover, Count Philip, disappeared under mysterious circumstances and his body was never found. George divorced Sophia Dorothea and imprisoned her in a castle for the rest of her life, turning a deaf ear to her entreaties for mercy and refusing to allow her so much as a glimpse of her children.

When he arrived in England, it was with two mistresses—the tall, emaciated, sixtyish Ehrengard Melusina von Schulenburg (who became Duchess of Kendal) and the "corpulent and ample" Charlotte Sophia Kielmannsegge (who became Countess of Darlington).* [*Because the countess was a daughter of the Countess of Platen, who had been a mistress of George I's father, some historians have asserted that she could not have been King George's mistress. She may or may not have been his illegitimate half-sister (her paternity being indeterminate) but there was no doubt in any of the courtiers' minds that she was his mistress.]

To English eyes at least, they were figures out of farce, the one dwarfing the short king by her height, the other eclipsing him with her girth. The countess was particularly memorable, having "two fierce black eyes, large and rolling beneath two lofty arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distinguished from the lower parts of her body, and no part restrained by stays." The duchess lacked charm, but the countess was lively and warm, and the unkind courtiers who referred to them as "old ugly trulls" and "the Maypole and the Elephant and Castle" did them an injustice. Toward the end of his life the king took another mistress, an Englishwoman named Anne Brett, but the two German women remained his preferred companions and the portals to royal favor. Bribes paid to Kendal and Darlington worked wonders for petitioners and ambitious men seeking advancement at court, and they served incidentally to protect the shy King George from harassment.

Quiet, passive and uneasy on his throne, living in two rooms at St. James's Palace, King George escaped frequently to Hanover, where he died in 1727.

Much was hoped for from his son, who as Prince of Wales had gone out of his way to ingratiate himself with his future subjects and, in contrast to his father, had announced that he thought the English were "the best, the handsomest, the best shaped, the best natured, and lovingest People in the World." The new king was crowned in October of 1727, amid lavish and highly public display. He was no more physically attractive than his father had been, but his wife, Caroline of Anspach, was a handsome woman, fair and blond and with a powerful feminine charm, and she added a good deal to the occasion in her diamond-studded gown—the diamonds having been hired from the London jewelers.

This promising beginning to the reign of George II was short-lived, however, and it was not long before the king was revealing his "bilious temper" and referring to his kingdom as "this mean dull island." The honeymoon was over.

The problem was that England simply did not measure up to Hanover, and the oftener the king visited his electoral domain the more he returned convinced that "no English or even French cook could dress a dinner, no English confectioner set out a dessert, no English player could act, no English coachman could drive, or English jockey ride, nor were any English horses fit to be driven or fit to be ridden."
⁷
The list of English inadequacies was endless. English manners lacked polish, English clothes were ugly, English recreations insipid. Conversation in England was not to be borne— the men talked of nothing but "dull politics," the women of their unbecoming fashions.

At Hanover, naturally, all was perfection. According to King George, "the men were patterns of politeness, bravery, and gallantry; the women of beauty, wit and entertainment; his troops there were the bravest in the world, his counsellors the wisest, his manufacturers the most ingenious, his subjects the happiest," and so on.

Queen Caroline, normally calm and controlled, was vexed when her husband returned from Hanover to pour out his venom on his English subjects.

"I see no reason that made your coming to England necessary," she told him once in an unusual display of sharpness. "You might have continued there." Whereupon the king, trembling and beside himself with anger, left the room without saying a word.

His silent rage was unusual. Normally he was loud and brash and full of bluster. He shouted at the queen, insulting her rudely and often in public, and nearly became apoplectic when angered by his ministers. James Waldegrave, lord of the bedchamber to the king and his close friend, described him fairly candidly as moderately intelligent, capable of affability, knowledgeable about foreign affairs, and polite to women, especially good-looking ones. He was also, Waldegrave pointed out, personally brave, an admirable if somewhat anachronistic quality in a monarch. He liked to dress up in the old battleworn hat and coat he had worn as a courageous young soldier in the battles of Oudenarde and Malplaquet, and every Saturday he rode to Richmond in a coach-and-six escorted by his uniformed Horse Guards. Leading his men at the battle of Dettingen was an obligation he welcomed and would gladly have repeated.

"He has a restless mind," Waldegrave wrote about King George, "which requires constant exercise." "He becomes fretful and uneasy, merely from want of employment." The king's restless mind fed on trifles, looking for petty excuses to let loose his bilious temper. He liked his household to be run according to a precise and unvarying schedule, and if anyone or anything interfered with that schedule, he flew into a towering rage. The court wintered at St. James's, spent the spring and summer at Kensington, and the autumn at Hampton Court. Day in and day out, week in and week out, King George followed his exacting routine. Once a year, on his birthday, he put on a scarlet velvet suit and presided, with his family and household officials, over a reception and ball. Usually his evenings were quiet, however. At nine o'clock the tables were put up for card playing, and the queen, her ladies, and some of the royal children sat down to play. While the others were playing, the king liked to slip away to the apartments of his daughters Emily and Caroline, whose governess. Lady Deloraine, was to take her place in his sequence of mistresses.

Queen Caroline, herself a woman of healthy sexual appetites, was resigned to her husband's infidelities and urged him, on her deathbed, to marry again.

"No," he protested in a burst of loyalty, "I shall have mistresses."

He was as good as his word, and did not remarry. Before long he brought Mme. Walmoden, who had been his mistress during his stays in Hanover, to London, and installed her at St. James's Palace. But he grieved for the late queen, and dreamed about her. One night he awakened out of a dream "very uneasy," and had himself carried in a great hurry to Westminster Abbey, where he ordered Caroline's burial vault opened. In his anxiety he even had the coffin itself opened—perhaps to reassure himself that she was still inside— before returning to the palace and going back to bed.

George II was tolerated by his subjects because he was preferable to the Catholic James Stuart. But he was intensely disliked nonetheless. His quarrels with his son Frederick, Prince of Wales, put him in a bad light, and he was the subject of endless bawdy lampoons and rhymes, which ridiculed his lechery in earthy language. People spread stories about how he liked to visit masquerades and pleasure gardens where he could attempt to seduce young girls, "His Majesty's character with all ranks of people," a well-informed contemporary wrote, had "fallen so low that the disregard with which everybody spoke of him, and the open manner in which they expressed their contempt and dislike, is hardly to be credited."

It was no wonder Walpole did his best to stir up fear of the Pretender and the wicked Jacobites. There had to be a counterforce to the general contempt for the king.

Clearly the army could not be relied on to any great extent in the event of a popular uprising. The standing army, consisting of some eighteen thousand men (plus another twelve thousand serving in Ireland), was a poorly trained, rough and unsavory collection of recruits. They volunteered for the sake of the pay—which, after deductions were made for billeting, food, clothing, medicine, and other charges, came to only about 6d. a week for a private in the infantry—or to escape unemployment or personal entanglements. Criminals and debtors were routinely offered their freedom from prison if they joined the army. Ill-fed, ill-housed and underpaid, the soldiers had little incentive to do their job well, and many deserted. Those who remained varied in effectiveness, sometimes fighting courageously, sometimes proving to be all but useless.

Had they been at their peak of efficiency thirty thousand soldiers were not enough to defend the realm, particularly a realm that lacked an organized police force and had to rely on its army to put down riots and deal with other local emergencies. More men were needed, yet Parliament resisted authorizing recruitment, preferring to leave the government no alternative but to hire troops from Hanover or Holland in case of need. Parliament also resisted proposals to build barracks, preferring to have the soldiers billeted in inns scattered over the countryside.

The haphazard nature of these arrangements arose in part from the lack of a central administrative focus. The secretaries of state, on the king's command, determined general strategy and troop movements, but the actual marching orders came from the secretary at war, who also issued orders for recruitment and arranged billeting. Pay for the soldiers came from yet another source, the paymaster of the forces, while clothing was under the jurisdiction of the Board of General Officers. Arms and stores came from the Board of Ordnance. Coordination among these agencies was the exception rather than the rule, and George IPs close supervision of military affairs made things generally worse from an administrative standpoint.

There had been improvement since 1715, when the exasperated Foot Guards demonstrated in front of St. James's, lighting bonfires and throwing their shabby uniforms into the palace gardens shouting "Look at our Hanover shirts!" But the army was still small, its recruits badly trained and their morale very low. It was an unreliable bulwark standing between the monarchy and the combined forces of invasion and rebellion.