Read Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Online
Authors: David Starkey
But equally, the institutions of the United Kingdom were new and were framed with the innovative, rational methods of Anglo-Dutch political economy. Most pressing, however, was the issue of Scottish representation in the Union Parliament at Westminster. It could be determined either by population or (since the principal business of Parliament was to vote taxation) by taxable wealth. Using the former basis would have given Scotland eighty-five MPs; using the latter (since Scotland’s wealth was only a fortieth of England’s) only thirteen. Eventually the commissioners compromised at forty-five, and honour was more or less satisfied.
Nevertheless, there were no celebrations for Union in Scotland. But, as the intellectual and economic transformation of eighteenth-century Scotland would show, the Scots probably got the better deal.
On 19 August 1708, Anne processed once more to the spiritual home of her reign, St Paul’s, to give thanks for Marlborough’s victory of Oudenarde. Accompanying her in her coach, as etiquette demanded, was Marlborough’s duchess, Sarah. There had been much resentment at the duke and duchess of Marlborough’s influence over the queen. Sarah was a committed Whig, contemptuous of princes and princesses, proudly atheist and opposed to the Anglican monopoly. She believed that it was her job to keep Anne from the Tories, whom the queen instinctively supported. Many detested Sarah as the malign power behind the throne.
All this came to a head on the way to St Paul’s. En route, the two women had a terrible quarrel because Anne, who hated cumbrous clothing, had refused to wear the rich, heavy jewels that Sarah, as Groom of the Stole, had put out for her. As they stepped out of the coach, Sarah was heard to hiss ‘Be quiet’ to the queen, lest (she claimed) others overheard their quarrel. It seemed to confirm Sarah’s unnatural power over the monarch. But more importantly, Anne never forgave the insult to majesty and the long and fraught friendship was over.
The quarrel was in fact only the straw that broke the camel’s back. For Sarah had fought her own war at home against the Tory leaders whom she accused, not altogether wrongly as it turned out, of being secret Jacobites. Aware of James III’s insidious charms, Sarah campaigned, with all her husband’s relentlessness but none of his panache, for the Tories to be removed from government and for her Whig friends to retain power. But Anne, desperate to preserve her freedom of action between the competing political parties, refused. The result was that Sarah’s company became increasingly disagreeable to the queen, who resented the political lectures and nagging. Lonely, unwell and in need of friendship, she transferred her affections to another courtier, Abigail Masham, who, unlike the domineering and high-handed Sarah, was demure and undemanding. Abigail was also close to the Tories, and her favour with the queen threatened to break the Whigs’ monopoly on power. Sarah, outraged in turn, then accused the queen, in barely concealed terms, of lesbianism.
Sarah’s loss of favour dangerously exposed Marlborough on the home front. For in any case, Anne, and much of the nation, were getting sick of the war, the deaths and the spiralling taxation. The turning point was Marlborough’s last great set-piece battle of Malplaquet. It was an English victory of sorts. But the casualties were enormous and the French, faced with the invasion of their own soil, dug their heels in to fight a patriotic war. Marlborough’s reaction was to demand the captain-generalship for life, like Oliver Cromwell. Anne’s was to exclaim, ‘when will this bloodshed ever cease?’ and to decide that Marlborough must go.
Marlborough was dismissed in December 1711 and his Whig allies were replaced by a Tory ministry determined to make a unilateral peace with France. Secret negotiations were opened and agreement quickly reached. Louis XIV’s grandson Philip would retain Spain and her American empire, but renounce any future right to France. England would be granted huge exclusive commercial concessions in the Spanish Empire, including a thirty-year monopoly on the slave trade. The Tories also had a secret plot. They had provoked outrage in Europe by abandoning their allies. One very important loser in this matter was Georg Ludwig, the elector of Hanover and heir to Sophia, who stood to inherit the English crown. Once on the throne, Georg would be unlikely to forget or forgive this gross betrayal. The outcome of the Act of Succession would be to place the Tories in danger. The leaders would therefore dump Hanover and offer the crown to the Old Pretender, provided he renounced Catholicism.
The separate peace was formally agreed at Utrecht in 1713 and celebrated with yet another grand thanksgiving service in St Paul’s. And there was much to celebrate, since the peace, despite its consciously moderate terms, marked England’s eclipse of the two powers that, only half a century before, had overshadowed her: England was now more powerful militarily than France and more commercially successful than the Netherlands.
And she had found her own unique way to modernity. At the root of this success was a new relationship between monarch and Parliament, in which the sovereign reigned, but for the most part the ministers ruled. Forged in the revolution of 1688, developed under William and consolidated under Anne, this new constitutional monarchy had proved more than a match for the absolutist political model represented by France. Over the coming centuries it would do so time and again.
But Anne, despite her passionate personal support for the peace, was too frail to attend the ceremonies. On Christmas Eve she fell suddenly and dangerously ill. She made a recovery of sorts. But it was soon clear that she had only months, if not weeks, to live. The Tory ministers now made a secret offer of the crown to the Old Pretender, subject only to his conversion. But James III had inherited his father’s arrogance as well as his unyielding commitment to Catholicism. He now calculated that the Tories had so alienated Hanover that they would have to bring him back, conversion or no conversion, and refused point blank to change his religion.
That was the end of the Pretender’s chances and, it turned out, of the Tories’ as well.
IV
On 30 July Anne suffered two violent strokes, which left her able to say only yes or no. Two days later, at the age of only forty-nine, she was dead, and Marlborough and his duchess, who had gone into ostentatious voluntary exile in disgust at the peace, returned in triumph to London.
Anne’s reign was a paradox, between public power and popularity and personal physical weakness. The latter was unsparingly described by one of the Scottish Union commissioners in his account of an audience with the queen:
Her Majesty was labouring under a fit of the gout, and in extreme pain and agony … Her face, which was red and spotted, was rendered something frightful by her negligent dress, and the foot affected was tied up with a poultice and some nasty bandages … Nature seems to be inverted when a poor infirm woman becomes one of the rulers of the world.
This was possible, of course, only because of the machinery of England’s new constitutional monarchy, in which the queen was a powerful figure-head, but the actual government was left to ministers.
Nevertheless, a woman who could resist and finally face down Marlborough and his formidable duchess was nobody’s tool. Likewise the peace with France was hers, as much as the Tories’. But her most important contribution was to remain steadfastly loyal after her own fashion to the Hanoverian succession. And so, England and Scotland were likely to get another female ruler, Sophia of Hanover. But Sophia died before she could inherit, and the heir to the British crown was her son, Georg Ludwig.
When Anne died shortly after, the two principal claimants were both several hundred miles from London: Georg Ludwig in Hanover and the Old Pretender in Lorraine, where he had been forced to withdraw after the peace with France. If he had made a dash for it, the Old Pretender could have given the Hanoverian a run for his money. But James III did not do dashing.
Instead, correctly confident in the machinery of the Act of Settlement, George, as he now signed himself in English, took a leisurely six weeks to arrive in England. He landed at Greenwich on 18 September at 6 p.m. Accompanied by his son, Georg August, and a great crowd of nobles, gentry and common folk, he walked through the grand colonnades and courtyards of the Royal Naval Hospital to the Queen’s House in the park, where he spent his first night in England.
The following morning, in the Queen’s House, George held his first English court. He made plain his high regard for the leaders of the Whig Party and he administered a very public snub to the Tory leader: he allowed him to kiss his hands but said nothing to him in return. If George had anything to do with it, the sun, it was clear, would shine on the Whigs, while the Tories were destined for the wilderness.
And George did have a lot to do with it, despite the constitutional nature of the monarchy. And royal influence, combined with distaste at the Tories’ slitheriness about the Hanoverian succession, helped win the Whigs a comfortable majority in the Commons. They now turned the Tory defeat into a rout by impeaching the former Tory ministers for their treachery in the peace negotiations at Utrecht. One was sent to the Tower; the other fled to the Old Pretender to encourage his bid for the throne.
But at this moment, Louis XIV of France, the inveterate enemy of the new English monarchy and the principal casualty of its success, died and was succeeded by a regency that was committed to good relations with England. Deprived of French active support, a Jacobite rising conducted by northern English Catholics was easily defeated at Preston. But in Scotland, though the rebels were held back from the Lowlands by the drawn battle of Sheriffmuir, they took the Highlands and occupied Perth.
After lengthy delays and disguised as a French bishop, the Old Pretender finally set sail for Scotland, where he landed just before Christmas 1715. At first, it was a triumphal progress: the magistrates of Aberdeen paid him homage; he made a state entry into Dundee; and proclaimed his forthcoming coronation as King James VIII and III at Scone. He then took up residence at Scone Palace and kept his court with the royal state of his ancestors.
But, after this good start, things began to crumble. With his shy, cold public manner, James couldn’t even keep the loyalty of his existing followers, let alone recruit new ones. ‘If he found himself disappointed with us’, one of his soldiers wrote, ‘we were tenfold more so in him.’ It was no basis on which to stand and fight the government forces that were marching on them through the snow of winter.
After retreating to Montrose the Old Pretender took ship secretly to France on 3 February 1716, abandoning his army to their fate. He never saw Britain again. The House of Hanover had seen off the Stuart dynasty.
The arrival of George I and ensuing triumph of the House of Hanover were also commemorated in the Painted Hall at Greenwich, a few paces from where George actually landed.
But that was the only realistic thing about the painting. Done in grisaille (or shades of grey) to imitate a Roman stone relief, it shows George arriving in a Roman triumphal chariot, while personifications of Tyrannic Power and Rebellious Despair quail before his harbinger, Liberty, with her cap.
The reality had been very different as the painter, James Thornhill, who had been an eyewitness and shows himself as such at the edge of the composition, well knew. It was night, he noted. George’s clothes were unworthy of the event. And most of the receiving peers were Tories, which was the wrong political party. Hence, he explained, his decision to go for high-flown allegory.
But the sober reality had been right. George was a modest man and would preside over a modest monarchy. No British king would ever again inhabit a palace as large as Greenwich or hold court in a space as splendid as the Painted Hall. And if more and more of the globe would indeed be British, it was not the king but his ministers who made it so.
Nevertheless, Thornhill’s vast swirling allegories were not wholly disproportionate to the events they represent. For the Revolution and its aftermath in the Hanoverian Succession were glorious. By good luck, as well as good management, Britain had freed herself from political and religious absolutism and in so doing freed herself for the rapid and most significant expansion of any European power since Rome. No wonder Thornhill, like most subsequent commentators on the British monarchy, was uncertain of what language he should use to describe the limitation of the Crown and the triumph of the Nation.
Goerge I, George II, George III
IN 1782, FACED WITH A COMMONS MOTION
to make peace with Britain’s rebellious American colonies and recognize their independence, George III resolved to abdicate and return to his other kingdom of Hanover in Germany. He even got so far as drafting his abdication address:
His Majesty … with much sorrow finds he can be of no further utility to his native country, which drives him to the painful step of quitting it forever.
In consequence … his Majesty resigns the Crown of Great Britain … to his … son and lawful successor George, Prince of Wales, whose endeavours for the prosperity of the British Empire he hopes may prove more successful.
Was the House of Hanover about to go the way of its unlucky predecessors the Stuarts? And the British to lose the empire they had only recently won? If it had been left to the Hanoverians themselves, who were the least able and attractive house to sit on the British throne, it is unlikely there would have been much to lose in the first place.
But in fact Britain in the eighteenth century witnessed an extraordinary and unprecedented political development: the rise of a second, parallel monarchy in Britain – the premiership. It was monarchs of this new kind who created the first British Empire, and the old monarchy which eventually destroyed it.
The seeds of the premiership lay in the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89. But it was the accession of the House of Hanover in 1714, and the awkward, unattractive personalities of the first two Hanoverian kings, which accelerated its development and made it irreversible.