Part 2

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 in marshalling the attendants on a levee put him out of temper. He took the greatest pleasure in counting his money piece by piece, and he never forgot a date. He was above all things methodical and regular. "He seems," said one who knew him well, "to think his having done a thing to-day an unanswerable reason for his doing it to-morrow."

Most men so utterly immersed in details would be very impracticable to deal with. They would obstinately refuse to listen to a wisdom and prudence which meant nothing in their ears, and which brought home to them a sense of their own inferiority. It was the happy peculiarity of George II. that he was exempt from this failing. He seemed to have an instinctive understanding that such and such persons were either wiser or even stronger than himself, and when he had once discovered that, he gave way with scarcely a struggle. Thus it was that, though in his domestic relations he was as loose a liver as his father had been, he allowed himself to be guided by the wise but unobtrusive counsels of his wife until her death in 1737, and that when once he had recognized Walpole's superiority he allowed himself to be guided by the political sagacity of the great minister. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of such a temper upon the development of the constitution. The apathy of the nation in all but the most exciting political questions, fostered by the calculated conservatism of Walpole, had thrown power into the hands of the great landowners. They maintained their authority by supporting a minister who was ready to make use of corruption, wherever corruption was likely to be useful, and who could veil over the baseness of the means which he employed by his talents in debate and in finance. To shake off a combination so strong would not have been easy. George II. submitted to it without a struggle.

So strong indeed had the Whig aristocracy grown that it began to lose its cohesion. Walpole was determined to monopolize power, and he dismissed from office all who ventured to oppose him. An opposition formidable in talents was gradually formed. In its composite ranks were to be found Tories and discontented Whigs, discarded official hacks who were hungry for the emoluments of office, and youthful purists who fancied that if Walpole were removed, bribes and pensions would cease to be attractive to a corrupt generation. Behind them was Bolingbroke, excluded from parliament but suggesting every party move. In 1737 the opposition acquired the support of Frederick, prince of Wales. The young man, weak and headstrong, rebelled against the strict discipline exacted by his father. His marriage in 1736 to Augusta of Saxony brought on an open quarrel. In 1737, just as the princess of Wales was about to give birth to her first child, she was hurried away by her husband from Hampton Court to St James's Palace at the imminent risk of her life, simply in order that the prince might show his spite to his father who had provided all necessary attendance at the former place. George ordered his son to quit St James's, and to absent himself from court. Frederick in disgrace gave the support of his name, and he had nothing else to give, to the opposition. Later in the year 1737, on the 20th of November, Queen Caroline died. In 1742 Walpole, weighed down by the unpopularity both of his reluctance to engage in a war with Spain and of his supposed remissness in conducting the operations of that war, was driven from office. His successors formed a composite ministry in which Walpole's old colleagues and Walpole's old opponents were alike to be found.

The years which followed settled conclusively, at least for this reign, the constitutional question of the power of appointing ministers. The war between Spain and England had broken out in 1739. In 1741 the death of the emperor Charles VI. brought on the war of the Austrian succession. The position of George II. as a Hanoverian prince drew him to the side of Maria Theresa through jealousy of the rising Prussian monarchy. Jealousy of France led England in the same direction, and in 1741 a subsidy of L300,000 was voted to Maria Theresa. The king himself went to Germany and attempted to carry on the war according to his own notions. Those notions led him to regard the safety of Hanover as of far more importance than the wishes of England. Finding that a French army was about to march upon his German states, he concluded with France a treaty of neutrality for a year without consulting a single English minister. In England the news was received with feelings of disgust. The expenditure of English money and troops was to be thrown uselessly away as soon as it appeared that Hanover was in the slightest danger. In 1742 Walpole was no longer in office. Lord Wilmington, the nominal head of the ministry, was a mere cipher. The ablest and most energetic of his colleagues, Lord Carteret (afterwards Granville), attached himself specially to the king, and sought to maintain himself in power by his special favour and by brilliant achievements in diplomacy.

In part at least by Carteret's mediation the peace of Breslau was signed, by which Maria Theresa ceded Silesia to Frederick (July 28, 1742). Thus relieved on her northern frontier, she struck out vigorously towards the west. Bavaria was overrun by her troops. In the beginning of 1743 one French army was driven across the Rhine. On June 27th another French army was defeated by George II. in person at Dettingen. Victory brought elation to Maria Theresa. Her war of defence was turned into a war of vengeance. Bavaria was to be annexed. The French frontier was to be driven back. George II. and Carteret after some hesitation placed themselves on her side. Of the public opinion of the political classes in England they took no thought. Hanoverian troops were indeed to be employed in the war, but they were to be taken into British pay. Collisions between British and Hanoverian officers were frequent. A storm arose against the preference shown to Hanoverian interests. After a brief struggle Carteret, having become Lord Granville by his mother's death, was driven from office in November 1744.

Henry Pelham, who had become prime minister in the preceding year, thus saw himself established in power. By the acceptance of this ministry, the king acknowledged that the function of choosing a ministry and directing a policy had passed from his hands. In 1745 indeed he recalled Granville, but a few days were sufficient to convince him of the futility of his attempt, and the effort to exclude Pitt at a later time proved equally fruitless.

Important as were the events of the remainder of the reign, therefore, they can hardly be grouped round the name of George II. The resistance to the invasion of the Young Pretender in 1745, the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the great war ministry of Pitt at the close of the reign, did not receive their impulse from him. He had indeed done his best to exclude Pitt from office. He disliked him on account of his opposition in former years to the sacrifices demanded by the Hanoverian connexion. When in 1756 Pitt became secretary of state in the Devonshire administration, the king bore the yoke with difficulty. Early in the next year he complained of Pitt's long speeches as being above his comprehension, and on April 5, 1757, he dismissed him, only to take him back shortly after, when Pitt, coalescing with Newcastle, became master of the situation. Before Pitt's dismissal George II. had for once an opportunity of placing himself on the popular side, though, as was the case of his grandson during the American war, it was when the popular side happened to be in the wrong. In the true spirit of a martinet, he wished to see Admiral Byng executed. Pitt urged the wish of the House of Commons to have him pardoned. "Sir," replied the king, "you have taught me to look for the sense of my subjects in another place than in the House of Commons." When George II. died in 1760, he left behind him a settled understanding that the monarchy was one of the least of the forces by which the policy of the country was directed. To this end he had contributed much by his disregard of English opinion in 1743; but it may fairly be added that, but for his readiness to give way to irresistible adversaries, the struggle might have been far more bitter and severe than it was.

Of the connexion between Hanover and England in this reign two memorials remain more pleasant to contemplate than the records of parliamentary and ministerial intrigues. With the support of George II., amidst the derision of the English fashionable world, the Hanoverian Handel produced in England those masterpieces which have given delight to millions, whilst the foundation of the university of Gottingen by the same king opened a door through which English political ideas afterwards penetrated into Germany.

George II. had three sons,--Frederick Louis (1707-1751); George William (1717-1718); and William Augustus, duke of Cumberland (1721-1765); and five daughters, Anne (1709-1759), married to William, prince of Orange, 1734; Amelia Sophia Eleonora (1711-1786); Elizabeth Caroline (1713-1757); Mary (1723-1772), married to Frederick, landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, 1740; Louisa (1724-1751), married to Frederick V., king of Denmark, 1743. (S. R. G.)

See Lord Hervey, _Memoirs of the Reign of George II._, ed. by J. W, Croker (3 vols., London, 1884); Horace Walpole, _Mem. of the Reign of George II._, with notes by Lord Holland (3 vols., 2nd ed., 1847).

GEORGE III. [George William Frederick] (1738-1820), king of Great Britain and Ireland, son of Frederick, prince of Wales, and grandson of George II., whom he succeeded in 1760, was born on the 4th of June 1738. After his father's death in 1751 he had been educated in seclusion from the fashionable world under the care of his mother and of her favourite counsellor the earl of Bute. He had been taught to revere the maxims of Bolingbroke's "Patriot King," and to believe that it was his appointed task in life to break the power of the Whig houses resting upon extensive property and the influence of patronage and corruption. That power had already been gravely shaken. The Whigs from their incompetency were obliged when the Seven Years' War broke out to leave its management in the hands of William Pitt. The nation learned to applaud the great war minister who succeeded where others had failed, and whose immaculate purity put to shame the ruck of barterers of votes for places and pensions.

In some sort the work of the new king was the continuation of the work of Pitt. But his methods were very different. He did not appeal to any widely spread feeling or prejudice; nor did he disdain the use of the arts which had maintained his opponents in power. The patronage of the crown was to be really as well as nominally his own; and he calculated, not without reason, that men would feel more flattered in accepting a place from a king than from a minister. The new Toryism of which he was the founder was no recurrence to the Toryism of the days of Charles II. or even of Anne. The question of the amount of toleration to be accorded to Dissenters had been entirely laid aside. The point at issue was whether the crown should be replaced in the position which George I. might have occupied at the beginning of his reign, selecting the ministers and influencing the deliberations of the cabinet. For this struggle George III. possessed no inconsiderable advantages. With an inflexible tenacity of purpose, he was always ready to give way when resistance was really hopeless. As the first English-born sovereign of his house, speaking from his birth the language of his subjects, he found a way to the hearts of many who never regarded his predecessors as other than foreign intruders. The contrast, too, between the pure domestic life which he led with his wife Charlotte, whom he married in 1761, and the habits of three generations of his house, told in his favour with the vast majority of his subjects. Even his marriage had been a sacrifice to duty. Soon after his accession he had fallen in love with Lady Sarah Lennox, and had been observed to ride morning by morning along the Kensington Road, from which the object of his affections was to be seen from the lawn of Holland House making hay, or engaged in some other ostensible employment. Before the year was over Lady Sarah appeared as one of the queen's bridesmaids, and she was herself married to Sir Charles Bunbury in 1762.

At first everything seemed easy to him. Pitt had come to be regarded by his own colleagues as a minister who would pursue war at any price, and in getting rid of Pitt in 1761 and in carrying on the negotiations which led to the peace of Paris in 1762, the king was able to gather round him many persons who would not be willing to acquiesce in any permanent change in the system of government. With the signature of the peace his real difficulties began. The Whig houses, indeed, were divided amongst themselves by personal rivalries. But they were none of them inclined to let power and the advantages of power slip from their hands without a struggle. For some years a contest of influence was carried on without dignity and without any worthy aim. The king was not strong enough to impose upon parliament a ministry of his own choice. But he gathered round himself a body of dependants known as the king's friends, who were secure of his favour, and who voted one way or the other according to his wishes. Under these circumstances no ministry could possibly be stable; and yet every ministry was strong enough to impose some conditions on the king. Lord Bute, the king's first choice, resigned from a sense of his own incompetency in 1763. George Grenville was in office till 1765; the marquis of Rockingham till 1766; Pitt, becoming earl of Chatham, till illness compelled him to retire from the conduct of affairs in 1767, when he was succeeded by the duke of Grafton. But a struggle of interests could gain no real strength for any government, and the only chance the king had of effecting a permanent change in the balance of power lay in the possibility of his associating himself with some phase of strong national feeling, as Pitt had associated himself with the war feeling caused by the dissatisfaction spread by the weakness and ineptitude of his predecessors.

Such a chance was offered by the question of the right to tax America. The notion that England was justified in throwing on America part of the expenses caused in the late war was popular in the country, and no one adopted it more pertinaciously then George III. At the bottom the position which he assumed was as contrary to the principles of parliamentary government as the encroachments of Charles I. had been. But it was veiled in the eyes of Englishmen by the prominence given to the power of the British parliament rather than to the power of the British king. In fact the theory of parliamentary government, like most theories after their truth has long been universally acknowledged, had become a superstition. Parliaments were held to be properly vested with authority, not because they adequately represented the national will, but simply because they were parliaments. There were thousands of people in England to whom it never occurred that there was any good reason why a British parliament should be allowed to levy a duty on tea in the London docks and should not be allowed to levy a duty on tea at the wharves of Boston. Undoubtedly George III. derived great strength from his honest participation in this mistake. Contending under parliamentary forms, he did not wound the susceptibilities of members of parliament, and when at last in 1770 he appointed Lord North--a minister of his own selection--prime minister, the object of his ambition was achieved with the concurrence of a large body of politicians who had nothing in common with the servile band of the king's friends.

As long as the struggle with America was carried on with any hope of success they gained that kind of support which is always forthcoming to a government which shares in the errors and prejudices of its subjects. The expulsion of Wilkes from the House of Commons in 1769, and the refusal of the House to accept him as a member after his re-election, raised a grave constitutional question in which the king was wholly in the wrong; and Wilkes was popular in London and Middlesex. But his case roused no national indignation, and when in 1774 those sharp measures were taken with Boston which led to the commencement of the American rebellion in 1775, the opposition to the course taken by the king made little way either in parliament or in the country. Burke might point out the folly and inexpedience of the proceedings of the government. Chatham might point out that the true spirit of English government was to be representative, and that that spirit was being violated at home and abroad. George III., who thought that the first duty of the Americans was to obey himself, had on his side the mass of unreflecting Englishmen who thought that the first duty of all colonists was to be useful and submissive to the mother-country. The natural dislike of every country engaged in war to see itself defeated was on his side, and when the news of Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga arrived in 1777, subscriptions of money to raise new regiments poured freely in.

In March 1778 the French ambassador in London announced that a treaty of friendship and commerce had been concluded between France and the new United States of America. Lord North was anxious to resign power into stronger hands, and begged the king to receive Chatham as his prime minister. The king would not hear of it. He would have nothing to say to "that perfidious man" unless he would humble himself to enter the ministry as North's subordinate. Chatham naturally refused to do anything of the kind, and his death in the course of the year relieved the king of the danger of being again overruled by too overbearing a minister. England was now at war with France, and in 1779 she was also at war with Spain.

George III. was still able to control the disposition of office. He could not control the course of events. His very ministers gave up the struggle as hopeless long before he would acknowledge the true state of the case. Before the end of 1779, two of the leading members of the cabinet, Lords Gower and Weymouth, resigned rather than bear the responsibility of so ruinous an enterprise as the attempt to overpower America and France together. Lord North retained office, but he acknowledged to the king that his own opinion was precisely the same as that of his late colleagues.