The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I (13 page)

It is hardly surprising that George’s accession to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland was so fiercely contested. Had Catholics been allowed to reign, George would have been very far back in the line of succession – there were fifty-three other candidates who
were more eligible. Even Liselotte was a little sniffy about George’s claim. In January 1715 she wrote to her half-sister the raugravine Louise: ‘I can’t think where he gets his haughtiness from; if I had been a Protestant, he wouldn’t be King. I was nearer to the Crown than he, and it is only through my family, and that of his late mother, that he is King now . . .’
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The most emotive Catholic contender for the throne and the next in the Stuart line of succession was James Frances Edward Stuart, the son of James II and Mary of Modena and Queen Anne’s half-brother – the Pretender. James had died in 1701 in exile in France, and his son became heir to the Jacobite cause. At Anne’s death in 1714 James Stuart was twenty-eight, in exile in Lorraine – and therefore closer to Britain than George in Hanover – and a hugely popular figure amongst many Tories. He also had the backing of his cousin Louis XIV of France.

George’s accession and arrival in London had been relatively quiet, with public displays, both organized and spontaneous, of joy at the expectation of what a new reign would bring. Queen Anne had been so dogged by ill health and her court so dull in the last years of her reign that bored courtiers hoped for a more dazzling display with the accession of George. Lady Dupplin wrote to Abigail Harley, Anne’s last favourite: ‘all the town was gazing at the fine show . . . there were great bonfires and illuminations at night . . . Aboard the yacht the king made the Earls Berkley and Dorset Gentlemen of his Bedchamber . . .’
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However, on the day of George’s coronation at Westminster Abbey on 20 October 1714, there were altercations in the south and the Midlands, in Birmingham, Bristol, Chippenham, Norwich and Reading. In November of that year, the Pretender proclaimed to his ‘loving subjects’ (with shades of the great orator Queen Elizabeth I) that ‘for some time past he could not well doubt of his sister’s good intentions towards him . . . which were unfortunately
prevented by her deplorable death’.
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Many Tories, realizing how desperately marginalized they were by George I, made overtures to James. They persuaded him to invade to claim his birthright.

London continued to see frequent Jacobite disturbances on every significant anniversary – Queen Anne’s coronation, George’s birthday, Charles II’s restoration. On 29 May 1715 a bonfire was lit in Chancery Lane and rioting lasted all summer throughout the Midlands.
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And it was London in particular that saw a torrent of anti-Hanoverian ballads, pamphlets and prints. In his extensive diaries Lord Egmont accused the Tories of using:

very vile acts to alienate the minds of the people from the king and proceeded at last to printing and dispersing a pamphlet called advice to the English freeholders etc. which is full of sedition, personal reflections on the royal family and notorious untruths . . . It would dirty my pen to write the load of lesser scandal invented by the king’s enemies to serve their purpose among the vulgar . . . I shall give only a specimen: they say the prince . . . has given the princess the pox. That he has sent £40,000 into the country to bribe elections . . . that the King goes into the chocolate houses and coffee houses incognito to hear what is said of him. That he is frantic often times and walks about in his shirt. That he keeps two Turks for abominable uses. That he gives his hand behind his back to the English to be kissed, that they may at the same time kiss his Breech. That the prince says he knows a Tory and a common whore by their looks . . .
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Even Liselotte was worried for her cousin, and wrote a typically vague letter to Louise in September 1714:

It is hard to believe that the English could ever be content with any king, let alone ours. I feel just as children do when they say ‘J’aime papa et mama’. I love our Elector, who has now become King, and the King of England here, and his mother, are dear to me too. I wish our Elector could have another kingdom, and our King of England his own, for I confess that I don’t trust the English one iota, and fear that our Elector, who is now King, will meet with disaster. If his rule in England were as absolute as our King’s here, I have no doubt that right and justice would reign, but there are altogether too many examples of the unfair way in which the English treat their kings. But my meal has arrived. Today I am eating earlier than usual because of the hunt.
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Although the Jacobite ranks in Scotland would eventually swell to 10,000 men, George and his ministers perceived rebellion in the south to be the greater threat. George’s spies reported that James was planning to invade and the king responded by suspending Habeas Corpus on 21 July 1715, ‘to impower his majesty to secure and detain such persons as his majesty shall suspect are conspiring against his person and government’. Arrest followed arrest – Lord Lansdowne and Lord Dupplin amongst others – and warrants were issued for the arrests of the Earl of Jersey, Sir William Wyndham and Thomas Forster. Wyndham and Forster declared for James at Warkworth and Alnwick, then joined the Scottish Jacobites. But the rebellion quickly fizzled out.

The Pretender’s resources were pitiful and Louis XIV, although he promised all, delivered nothing – no military or financial aid was forthcoming to his cousin’s campaign. When the French king died in September 1715, to be replaced by his five-year-old great-grandson, James’s venture seemed lost.

However the Scots, France’s ancient allies against the English, took up James’s cause, and on 6 September 1715 the Earl of Mar raised James’s standard at Braemar. Although union between Scotland and England had been achieved in 1707, many Scots felt
ignored and disaffected. When the Earl of Mar declared that the Pretender would restore the ‘ancient free and independent constitution’ of Scotland, James’s cause, despite his Catholicism, became the perfect excuse for a rebellion.

It was a lost cause. The Pretender was still in France, and without a strong leader the disparate army surrendered to Hanoverian troops on 14 November. The English Jacobite army was left in tatters; only the Scots remained. James’s half-brother, the Duke of Berwick, remarked: ‘I shall always consider it a folly to think that he [James] will be able to succeed in his undertaking with the Scotch alone.’
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James, realizing he had no hope of a successful invasion of England, headed for Scotland. But his Scottish supporters were on the run and he left again for France at the beginning of February.

George and his Whig ministers were brutal in their reprisals. Twenty-eight were hanged, and hundreds sent to exile in Britain’s colonial territories, chiefly the Americas. The Earl of Nottingham, the sole Tory in George’s Cabinet, begged for mercy for the rebel peers. George had wanted to execute them all, but Nottingham’s intercession ensured that only two, Lords Derwentwater and Kenmure, were hanged. Nottingham then departed the king’s service, leaving the Whigs as George’s sole British advisers.

The Whigs were dominated by huge personalities, particularly Charles, second Viscount Townshend, and Robert Walpole. They were brothers-in-law whose families were neighbours in their native Norfolk – Townshend had married Walpole’s sister Dorothy in 1713. She was his second wife. The alliance facilitated a close political partnership between the pair, who otherwise had little in common. Townshend, an astute politician, was refined, charming and hard-working. His contemporary John Mackay called him a ‘Gentleman of Great Learning, attended with a sweet Disposition;
a Lover of the Constitution of his Country; is beloved by every Body that knows him’.
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Walpole was loud, coarse, fat, rude and brilliant. An early member of the Whiggish political and literary Kit-Kat club, he was obsessed with politics. He was the son of a wealthy squire and was originally meant for the Church, but the death of his older brother made him his father’s heir and destined him for other things. Melusine’s brother Frederick William, not easily impressed, was struck by Walpole’s skilful handling of his fellow politicians, which he communicated in his extensive missives to Baron Görtz, one of George’s Hanoverian ministers. Walpole was extremely attractive to women and had many mistresses, despite his two marriages. We know the name of at least one – Carey Daye – with whom he had a daughter, named Catherine. Walpole embraced life and always lived beyond his means. He was constantly dogged by debt.

During the last years of George’s reign, Walpole would preside over an oligarchy. He would realize Melusine’s full political potential and ultimately save her from absolute disgrace.

7.
Germans in England

England is a mad country.

– Liselotte to Louise, 23 April 1715

In spite of an unfamiliar country, new and forthright ministers, political upheaval, riots and an invasion, family life went on. Theirs was no longer a young family. Melusine was forty-six when she arrived in Britain, George fifty-four, Louise twenty-two and young Melusine twenty-one. Only Trudchen remained too young, at thirteen, to fully enter society, a detail that has led some historians to overlook her, and even to speculate that Melusine had only two daughters, or ‘nieces’.

Melusine initially lived with George and the girls in St James’s Palace, together with Caroline, Georg August and their daughters the princesses Anne, Amalie and Caroline Elizabeth. Their eldest child, Frederick, remained in Hanover as a mark of George’s continued commitment towards the principality. He was determined to rule both his dominions and gave his directions to the Hanoverian Chancery in London. Young Frederick became the charge of his great-uncle Ernst August, who took care of his upbringing and education. About ninety Hanoverians – ministers, courtiers and servants – accompanied Melusine and George to London, staffing George’s bedchamber, his kitchen and his Hanoverian Chancery. They had come with the king only as an interim measure until the places in his household could be filled by Englishmen. Most of them would return to Hanover in 1716.

St James’s Palace had been built by Henry VIII on the site of a leper hospital dedicated to St James the Less. Not the most comfortable royal household, it had been meant to be only a temporary replacement for Whitehall after it burned down in 1697, but it remained the royal residence in central London and it is still the palace to which ambassadors are formally called.

It was universally loathed for its small, labyrinthine rooms. Daniel Defoe called its apartments ‘mean’. In 1734 James Ralph, in his publication on the buildings of London and Westminster, declared that: ‘so far from having one single beauty to recommend it . . . ’tis at once the contempt of foreign nations, and the disgrace of our own.’
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St James’s did not impress either the family or their visitors. J. Gwynn, the author of
London & Westminster Improved
of 1766 lamented that the royal family should ‘reside in a house so ill-becoming the state and grandeur of the most powerful and respectable monarch in the universe’.
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It was difficult to house the entire family and their staff under its roof, and many of George’s English and Hanoverian servants were lodged instead around Whitehall and in Somerset House. Most of the Hanoverians who had come over with Melusine and George were found rooms in surrounding houses. St James’s saw a frenzy of building as kitchens, cellars and sculleries were put in to feed the new royal family.

Despite the inadequacy of the palace, Melusine’s apartments were ‘lavishly furnished’ and her rooms the best St James’s could offer.
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The palace was dark and dank, but its location near the river was wonderful and Melusine and the girls used their early days in London well, exploring the parks, which were the envy of Europe. St James’s Park in particular was a magnet for those wanting to be seen:

[It] contains several avenues of elm and lime trees, two large ponds, and a pretty little island; in a word, this is an enchanting spot in summer time. Society comes to walk here on fine, warm days, from seven to ten in the evening, and in winter from one to three o’clock. English men and women are fond of walking, and the park is so crowded at times that you cannot help touching your neighbour. Some people come to see, some to be seen, and others to seek their fortunes; for many priestesses of Venus are abroad, some of them magnificently attired, and all on the look-out for adventures, and many young men are not long in repenting that they have become acquainted with such beautiful and amiable nymphs . . .
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Court was a round of public and private parties, of jostling for power between the Hanoverian and the English courtiers, of familial rivalry, corruption and bribery.

The English had high hopes of a social renaissance with a new monarch. The latter years of Queen Anne’s court had been so dreary that many had stayed away. In 1711 Swift wrote to Stella, after one particularly dull afternoon:

There was a drawing room today at Court; but so few company, that the Queen sent for us into her bed-chamber, where we made our bows, and stood about twenty of us around the room, while she looked at us round with her fan in her mouth, and once a minute said about three words to some that were nearest her, and then she was told dinner was ready, and went out.
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