from only one, the work of pacification was accomplished by George even more thoroughly than by William.
George I. was fortunate in arriving in England when a great military struggle had come to an end. He had therefore no reason to call upon the nation to make great sacrifices. All that he wanted was to secure for himself and his family a high position which he hardly knew how to occupy, to fill the pockets of his German attendants and his German mistresses, to get away as often as possible from the uncongenial islanders whose language he was unable to speak, and to use the strength of England to obtain petty advantages for his German principality. In order to do this he attached himself entirely to the Whig party, though he refused to place himself at the disposal of its leaders. He gave his confidence, not to Somers and Wharton and Marlborough, but to Stanhope and Townshend, the statesmen of the second rank. At first he seemed to be playing a dangerous game. The Tories, whom he rejected, were numerically superior to their adversaries, and were strong in the support of the country gentlemen and the country clergy. The strength of the Whigs lay in the towns and in the higher aristocracy. Below both parties lay the mass of the nation, which cared nothing for politics except in special seasons of excitement, and which asked only to be let alone. In 1715 a Jacobite insurrection in the north, supported by the appearance of the Pretender, the son of James II., in Scotland, was suppressed, and its suppression not only gave to the government a character of stability, but displayed its adversaries in an unfavourable light as the disturbers of the peace.
Even this advantage, however, would have been thrown away if the Whigs in power had continued to be animated by violent party spirit. What really happened was that the Tory leaders were excluded from office, but that the principles and prejudices of the Tories were admitted to their full weight in the policy of the government. The natural result followed. The leaders to whom no regard was paid continued in opposition. The rank and file, who would personally have gained nothing by a party victory, were conciliated into quiescence.
This mingling of two policies was conspicuous both in the foreign and the domestic actions of the reign. In the days of Queen Anne the Whig party had advocated the continuance of war with a view to the complete humiliation of the king of France, whom they feared as the protector of the Pretender, and in whose family connexion with the king of Spain they saw a danger for England. The Tory party, on the other hand, had been the authors of the peace of Utrecht, and held that France was sufficiently depressed. A fortunate concurrence of circumstances enabled George’s ministers, by an alliance with the regent of France, the duke of Orleans, to pursue at the same time the Whig policy of separating France from Spain and from the cause of the Pretender, and the Tory policy of the maintenance of a good understanding with their neighbour across the Channel. The same eclecticism was discernible in the proceedings of the home government. The Whigs were conciliated by the repeal of the Schism Act and the Occasional Conformity Act, whilst the Tories were conciliated by the maintenance of the Test Act in all its vigour. The satisfaction of the masses was increased by the general well-being of the nation.
Very little of all that was thus accomplished was directly owing to George I. The policy of the reign is the policy of his ministers. Stanhope and Townshend from 1714 to 1717 were mainly occupied with the defence of the Hanoverian settlement. After the dismissal of the latter in 1717, Stanhope in conjunction with Sunderland took up a more decided Whig policy. The Occasional Conformity Act and the Schism Act were repealed in 1719. But the wish of the liberal Whigs to modify if not to repeal the Test Act remained unsatisfied. In the following year the bursting of the South Sea bubble, and the subsequent deaths of Stanhope in 1721 and of Sunderland in 1722, cleared the way for the accession to power of Sir Robert Walpole, to whom and not to the king was due the conciliatory policy which quieted Tory opposition by abstaining from pushing Whig principles to their legitimate consequences.
Nevertheless something of the honour due to Walpole must be reckoned to the king’s credit. It is evident that at his accession his decisions were by no means unimportant. The royal authority was still able within certain limits to make its own terms. This support was so necessary to the Whigs that they made no resistance when he threw aside their leaders on his arrival in England. When by his personal intervention he dismissed Townshend and appointed Sunderland, he had no such social and parliamentary combination to fear as that which almost mastered his great-grandson in his struggle for power. If such a combination arose before the end of his reign it was owing more to his omitting to fulfil the duties of his station than from the necessity of the case. As he could talk no English, and his ministers could talk no German, he absented himself from the meetings of the cabinet, and his frequent absences from England and his want of interest in English politics strengthened the cabinet in its tendency to assert an independent position. Walpole at last by his skill in the management of parliament rose as a subject into the almost royal position denoted by the name of prime minister. In connexion with Walpole the force of wealth and station established the Whig aristocracy in a point of vantage from which it was afterwards difficult to dislodge them. Yet, though George had allowed the power which had been exercised by William and Anne to slip through his hands, it was understood to the last that if he chose to exert himself he might cease to be a mere cipher in the conduct of affairs. As late as 1727 Bolingbroke gained over one of the king’s mistresses, the duchess of Kendal; and though her support of the fallen Jacobite took no effect, Walpole was not without fear that her reiterated entreaties would lead to his dismissal. The king’s death in a carriage on his way to Hanover, in the night between 10th and 11th June in the same year, put an end to these apprehensions.
His only children were his successor George II. and Sophia Dorothea (1687–1757), who married in 1706 Frederick William, crown prince (afterwards king) of Prussia. She was the mother of Frederick the Great. (S. R. G.)
See the standard English histories. A recent popular work is L. Melville’s The First George in Hanover and England (1908).
GEORGE II. [George Augustus] (1683–1760), king of Great
Britain and Ireland, the only son of George I., was born in 1683.
In 1705 he married Wilhelmina Caroline of Anspach. In 1706
he was created earl of Cambridge. In 1708 he fought bravely
at Oudenarde. At his father’s accession to the English throne
he was thirty-one years of age. He was already on bad terms
with his father. The position of an heir-apparent is in no case an
easy one to fill with dignity, and the ill-treatment of the prince’s
mother by his father was not likely to strengthen in him a
reverence for paternal authority. It was most unwillingly that,
on his first journey to Hanover in 1716, George I. appointed the
prince of Wales guardian of the realm during his absence. In
1717 the existing ill-feeling ripened into an open breach. At
the baptism of one of his children, the prince selected one godfather
whilst the king persisted in selecting another. The young
man spoke angrily, was ordered into arrest, and was subsequently
commanded to leave St James’s and to be excluded from all
court ceremonies. The prince took up his residence at Leicester
House, and did everything in his power to support the opposition
against his father’s ministers.
When therefore George I. died in 1727, it was generally supposed that Walpole would be at once dismissed. The first direction of the new king was that Sir Spencer Compton would draw up the speech in which he was to announce to the privy council his accession. Compton, not knowing how to set about his task, applied to Walpole for aid. Queen Caroline took advantage of this evidence of incapacity, advocated Walpole’s cause with her husband and procured his continuance in office. This curious scene was indicative of the course likely to be taken by the new sovereign. His own mind was incapable of rising above the merest details of business. He made war in the spirit of a drill-sergeant, and he economized his income with the minute regularity of a clerk. A blunder of a master of the ceremonies
