Chapter 15
In This Chapter
● Revealing how a German family came to Britain to rule
● Developing the role of the Prime Minister
● Ruling a vast empire, stretching all the way around the globe
● Evolving a less powerful, more ceremonial monarchy
After the death of the last Stuart ruler, Queen Anne, in 1714 (see Chapter 14), George I, the first Hanoverian ruler, came from Germany to become king. A German king of Britain - what a weird idea! Although George traced his ancestry back to the Stuart line, he was a non-English-speaker who seemed foreign to Britain. He had quite a few problems, most of them stemming from the fact that he was an alien ruler. But George’s descendents became more and more British and presided over a time during which Britain’s power in the world grew dramatically.
Under the Hanoverians, industry developed, agriculture became more efficient, and the empire grew by leaps and bounds. But if Britain became more prosperous and powerful as a nation, the monarchy wasn’t always a success. Big dips in its fortunes occurred when Britons watched with horror the extravagant and dissolute antics of George, the Prince Regent (later George IV). And another drop in popularity developed when Queen Victoria cut herself off from her people and went into deep and lengthy mourning after the death of her beloved husband, Albert. It was a surprise, and a relief in royal circles, when Victoria recovered her popularity, and her son Edward VII developed a less political, more symbolic role for the monarchy.
Fish Out of Water: George I
George I (1714-27) came to Britain from his native Germany and never properly learned to speak English. By the time he came to the throne, he was 54 years old and an experienced ruler and military leader. But George never really fitted in his new country, preferring to spend a large part of the year back home in Hanover.
If George disliked Britain, the Brits didn’t think much of him either. He had to cope with a rebellion in Scotland and at least one plot at home. Much of the responsibility of government was not even in royal hands, because one of the most notable developments of the monarchy during George’s reign was that of the role of the Prime Minister.
The power of the monarchy had been severely limited by the Bill of Rights brought in under William and Mary in 1688, when Parliament’s powers were defined clearly (see Chapter 14). But the Stuart monarchs still played a prominent role in the government of the country. With the arrival of the Prime Minister, a dominant politician who could make policy and get it implemented, the monarch was beginning to become much more of a figurehead than in the past.
The German king
George I inherited the British throne after the death of Queen Anne, who had no surviving children. Under Anne, Parliament had passed an Act of Settlement which laid down who should rule when she died. The choice fell upon Sophia, the daughter of Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine. Sophia was the granddaughter of the first Stuart king of England, James I. This ancestry gave her a good claim to the throne, and, most importantly to Queen Anne and her government, Sophia was a Protestant.
But Sophia died shortly before Queen Anne herself passed away, so her eldest son, George, who was Duke and Elector of Hanover, became king of Great Britain. The 54-year-old George was a rather dour, unsmiling character who spoke only German. His Dukedom was part of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, and George was prominent in imperial politics, becoming ArchTreasurer of the Empire in 1710. He had also been successful on the battlefield, commanding the Imperial Army during the War of Spanish Succession in 1707 to 1709.
Scandal with Sophia
By the time he came to the throne, George was divorced from his wife, Sophia Dorothea of Celle. The couple had children, but Sophia was unfaithful to George, and rumours about her affair and its fallout abounded. Sophia took up with a Swedish Colonel called Philip von Konigsmark. When George found out, he locked up Sophia and divorced her - and Konigsmark disappeared. Then the rumours started:
● According to one version, George ordered the murder of Konigsmark.
● Another rumour blamed Clara, Countess von Platten, who’d previously had an affair with Konigsmark, for doing away with him.
● George was said to be having an affair with Sophia Charlotte, the daughter of Clara, who had also been the mistress of George’s father, Ernst. In other words, George was said to be sleeping with his half-sister.
● George and Sophia Charlotte were both rather overweight, and gossips who saw them together took to calling them Elephant and Castle.
All this was hearsay, mind you. What was certain was that the king had another mistress.
Messing with Melusine
Ehrengard Melusine von Schulenberg was known to be the mistress of the king - and had been even before George divorced his wife. The pair had children, and people at court and in government knew about Melusine and saw her as a kind of unofficial consort, but without the power of a true queen. She even had a title, Duchess of Kendal.
Unlike Sophia Charlotte, Melusine was extremely thin, and her nickname was the maypole. There was a story that she and the king had married in secret - but this tale is, again, a rumour.
Up he rises: The Old Pretender
The Act of Settlement had put George in line for the throne because his family were Protestants. Needless to say, some Catholics didn’t want a Protestant king, and some of them still revered the memory of the last Catholic king, James II. These supporters of James, known as Jacobites, wanted James II’s son, James Edward Stuart, to become king. Some even took to calling him James III, although Protestant supporters of the Hanoverians referred to him as the Old Pretender.
Just under a year after George I was crowned, in September 1715, the first Jacobite rebellion began at Braemar. Fortunately for George, the rising was not hard to crush. In November 1715, 10,000 Highland supporters of James stood up to some 35,000 government troops at the Battle of Sheriffmuir. After this battle, the outnumbered Highlanders broke up, but the battle served to remind the Hanoverians that their hold on the throne could be challenged.
Yes, Prime Minister!
Because he spoke very little English, George I needed a lot of help with the work of ruling his English-speaking people. For the first couple of years of his reign, the king’s son, George Augustus, came to cabinet meetings and translated for his father. But young George fell out with his father, largely over the king’s treatment of Sophia, and after 1717, George I was in dire need of practical help.
Because the monarchy was restored after the Commonwealth period, the Stuart rulers had gathered around them a small group of ministers who acted as advisers. These people met in a private chamber called the cabinet (a cabinet was a small room), and by the reign of Queen Anne, the word cabinet was used for the people themselves. The members of the cabinet came from the political party that held the majority in the House of Commons.
In 1715, and again in 1721, an experienced Member of Parliament called Robert Walpole was appointed First Lord of the Treasury. This position was the most senior post in the cabinet, and when Walpole was given this job the second time, in 1721, he was in effect the king’s special adviser and the first Prime Minister of Britain. This time, he stayed in the post permanently for more than 20 years, from 1721 to 1742.
In 1720, a major royal scandal hit the headlines. The problem surrounded the South Sea Company, which had been set up to trade with Spanish colonies in the South Seas. Thousands of people invested their savings in the company, expecting to make their fortunes, and even George I was involved - he became Governor of the company.
By 1720, lots of people still wanted to invest in the company, and so some officials in the company began to issue worthless false stock. In 1720, the bubble burst. The scam was discovered, lots of people realised their investments were worth nothing, and there was anger when they found out that senior people at court were involved in the dodgy deals.
As a senior member of the company, George was tarred with the same brush as the criminals, and it took Walpole’s clever politicking to help him through the crisis, which ever since has been known as the South Sea Bubble.
The problems over the South Sea Bubble encouraged George to take a back seat for the last few years of his life. In any case, he was in the habit of spending summer and autumn in his native Hanover. All these things gave Walpole still more power, setting the style for the kind of arm’s-length government that was to mark the British monarchy in later reigns, too. George was making one of his visits to Hanover in 1727 when he had a stroke and died.
He left one son, George Augustus, who became King George II.
Selfish but Successful: George II
When George II (1727-60) came to the throne, he was in his 40s and in many ways well-prepared for his new job. He had helped his non-English-speaking father in cabinet meetings in the early years of his reign and as a young man showed himself brave in battle during the War of the Spanish Succession. But George also had a stubborn, selfish streak that made him enemies.
This curious combination of qualities brought George some success as king. His generals helped him make territorial gains that marked the real beginnings of the British empire. Closer to home, he was able to fight off the challenge of the Jacobite claimants to the English throne. All these achievements came, of course, at the expense of a lot of bloodshed. But they meant that George could pass on a relatively secure throne to his son, together with vast territories around the world.
King and consort
George II was a rather pompous character - he liked to get things right and had a great respect for etiquette and protocol. Although he was born in his father’s home town of Hanover, he had been brought to England, and by the time he became king, he knew its people and its language well.
When he was 21, George married Caroline of Ansbach, daughter of the Margrave (ruler) of Brandenburg-Ansbach. Caroline was intelligent and played an important public part in the royal family even before her husband became king. Caroline was influential in several ways:
● In George I’s time, when he had no queen because he had divorced his wife, Sophia, Caroline often played the role of first lady.
● Again in George I’s reign, Caroline and young George were at the heart of the Leicester House Set. This political group, named for George and Caroline’s residence in London, enabled the pair to influence important politicians. They could use this influence against the king, demonstrating one of the least likeable character traits of the Hanoverian family - they mostly hated each other!
● Once George II became king, Caroline continued to use her intelligence and influence as the power behind the throne.
Caroline seems to have been very supportive to her husband, and she was also a keen supporter of Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister who had come to power during the reign of George I. Caroline died in 1737, and her husband seemed to be genuinely upset - even though he’d had mistresses when she was alive. For her part, Caroline seems to have tolerated the mistresses, valuing her companionship with George and the power she exercised as queen.
When Caroline approached death, she tried to encourage George to remarry. But he said he would not. Instead, he lived more publicly with his mistress, Amalia von Walmoden. He said that he had known many women, but none of them was fit to buckle Caroline’s shoe.
War, war, and more war
Prime Minister Robert Walpole pursued peaceful policies during his time in power under George II. But after his great supporter, Queen Caroline, died in 1737, Walpole lost his power. With the main influences for peace gone, George became involved in a series of wars. Here’s a list of some of the key European conflicts in the latter part of George’s reign:
● War of Jenkins’s Ear, 1739: Britain goes to war with Spain over the ear of a Captain Jenkins, which was said to have been cut off in a fight at sea.
● War of Austrian Succession, 1740-48: Various European powers fight over who should rule parts of the Holy Roman Empire; Britain and France are also at loggerheads for control of North America and India.
● Seven Years’ War, 1756-63: Europe is again in turmoil as the Austrian Hapsburg family try to win back Silesia, a territory they lost in the previous conflict.
George was personally involved in the War of Austrian Succession, because it was the last war in which a British monarch actually led his own troops into battle. This event happened at Dettingen in Bavaria in 1743 and showed that George, for all his arrogance, was also a brave leader.
A proper Charlie: The Jacobite Rising
The Jacobites, the people who supported the claim to the throne of the descendents of James II, kept their cause alive throughout the time of George I and into the reign of his son. After the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, who had led the 1715 rising, came his son, Charles Edward Stuart, known to his followers as Bonnie Prince Charlie and to others as the Young Pretender.
Charles lived in exile in France, but had put together plans for an invasion of England by 1745. Knowing that he would have plenty of support in Scotland, birthplace of the Stuart dynasty, he decided to travel there and then invade England from the north. He started impressively, but his campaign went seriously pear-shaped:
● In July 1745, Charles and a few supporters landed in Scotland.
● Charles attracted an army of some 3,000 men from the Highlands and arrived outside Edinburgh on 17 September. The city surrendered.
● The Jacobites scored a further victory over England at Prestonpans, about 10 miles from Edinburgh, a few days later.
● Charles delayed after Prestonpans, waiting until November to cross the border into England.
● A huge English force under the king’s son, William, Duke of Cumberland, defeated Charles at Culloden Moor on 15 April 1746, forcing Charles to flee to the Highlands. Cumberland unmercifully had Jacobite supporters and troops pursued and killed after the battle, and the Young Pretender’s invasion attempt was over.
Charles Stuart’s fatal error was to hesitate after winning the Battle of Prestonpans. If he had gone south more quickly, he could have done big damage in England and may even have forced George off the throne. Instead, he thought that a delay might give more and more English time to come around to his cause.
The English didn’t see it Charles’s way, however. One symptom of their reaction was a famous occasion in September 1745 when the national anthem, ‘God save the king’, was sung for the first time. Charles didn’t calculate for English patriotism, a sign that his claim to the throne on behalf of his father was hopeless.
After his defeat, Charles fled, dressed as a woman, to the island of Skye, before making his way to mainland Europe. After a long life in relative obscurity, he died in Rome in 1788.
Meanwhile, many of his supporters were put to death, some languished in prison, ill-treated and starving, and others were sent as slaves to plantations in America. Oppressive policies were introduced in Highland Scotland, where so much of Charles’s support had originated. These measures ranged from political ones (such as taking the power from the chiefs of the clans) to symbolic ones (such as banning kilts, tartans, and other symbols of clan identity).
Poor Fred
George Il’s eldest son was Prince Frederick, who was born in 1707. Frederick spent his early life in Hanover, but came to England in 1728 and was made Prince of Wales the following year. Frederick did not get on with his parents. Queen Caroline was reported to have called him an ass, and the king and queen sidelined him, preferring their younger children. They even delayed allowing him to marry, implying that they didn’t trust him to carry on the succession.
As a result of his poor treatment, Frederick became a focus for those who opposed the king and his minister Walpole. The prince supported Walpole’s political opponents and even used his interest in the arts against George, setting up an Opera of the Nobility as a rival to the opera company sponsored by the king.
Prince Frederick obviously hoped to become king after his father. But the prince died suddenly in 1751, while George was still alive. He succumbed to a burst abscess on one of his lungs. The unfulfilled prince has been known ever since as poor Fred.
Building an empire
George was a German king, and, like the English, the Germans were old enemies of the French. In the early 18th century, France was a major power with interests all over the world, including India and North America. Being at war with France from the 1740s onwards gave George a reason to attack French outposts around the world. A string of victories under able leaders gave the king huge territorial gains amounting to a vast empire.
Britain had had interests in India since the British East India Company began to set up trading posts there in 1600. But India is a vast and diverse subcontinent, home to many peoples with many religions, spread far and wide. War with France gave George, and his talented and adventurous Indian governor Robert Clive, the chance to push out the French. Clive - a soldier as well as an administrator - won a serious of victories against France (Madras, Arcot, Cacutta, Chandernagore, and Plassey) between 1746 and 1757 that cemented British power in India, opening up a vast source of raw materials, such as cotton, and a ready market for British manufactured goods.
In addition, Prime Minister William Pitt wanted to remove the French from Canada and increase British power and influence there, too. The chance came in September 1759 with a British force under General James Wolfe, a soldier who, although a mere 32 years of age, already had a good record of fighting for George. Wolfe triumphantly took Quebec from the French. The victory entailed the dramatic ascent of the high cliffs along the city’s river frontage to take the French by surprise.
In terms of the power of the monarch and the area of the globe ruled from Britain, George II was a resounding success. It was an impressive achievement for a rather pompous and not very intelligent man. But George was helped by an able Prime Minister and an intelligent consort in the first part of his reign. Toward the end of his life, he was served by men who won him rewards on the battlefield.
But fate had a final, deflating trick to play on pompous George - he died of a heart attack while sitting on the lavatory. His grandson, another George, was ready to take his place on the throne.
Farmer George: George III
George III (1760-1820) was the grandson of George II and the son of Frederick Louis, the second George’s son who died in 1751 when only 44. When he came to the throne, George III was a young man. He was well educated, religious, and had wide interests. But he was also rather stubborn and lacked the good judgement that an effective ruler needs.
George’s reign was dominated by foreign policy. Britain lost its North American colonies when the United States became independent in 1776, but he also had successes, such as notable victories in the wars against the French emperor, Napoleon.
The king, however, was more at ease pursuing personal interests, such as agriculture. He toured the country finding out about new farming techniques and improved the royal farms at Windsor and Richmond, increasing their profits by a factor of ten. George even wrote articles about agriculture, using the pen-name of Ralph Robinson. His success in this field and his ease when talking to country people earned him the nickname Farmer George.
The end of George’s long reign was marked by illness. He suffered bouts of instability, and his contemporaries thought him insane. But he suffered from a physical illness, porphyria, that brought on these symptoms, which got so bad that his son, yet another George, had to rule as Prince Regent in the last decade of his reign.
Right and proper?
By the standards of the 18th century, George III lived a very moral life. He had one affair when a young man, with a woman called Hannah Lightfoot who was the daughter of a London shoemaker, and there was a rumour that the couple had married in secret. The affair doesn’t seem to have been long lasting, and it was small beer compared to the loose living of most of the Hanoverian rulers.
When he knew that he had inherited the throne, George did the rounds of the courts of Europe and quickly found his bride, Charlotte of Mecklenburg. Charlotte was not George’s first choice, coming from a fairly low-profile Germanic princely family. But the couple were married in September 1761 and two weeks later were crowned as king and queen.
George and Charlotte seem to have been a faithful couple, and they had 15 children. Their ordered family lifestyle was in stark contrast to the antics of some of their offspring, who became famous for loose and lavish living. Their eldest son, George, was the most notorious. Young George had a string of mistresses as well as entering into a marriage that was illegal because his bride, a commoner called Maria Fitzherbert, was a Catholic - an English king or heir to the throne wasn’t allowed to marry a member of the church of Rome.
Losing America
George III is famous for the biggest crisis of his reign, the loss of Britain’s colonies in the part of North America that became the United States.
The problem across the Atlantic was that British kings and their Prime Ministers tried to impose unpopular taxes, but offered the colonists no representation in the British Parliament.
George’s ministers imposed a series of taxes on America, and the colonists were not amused. Here’s the dirt on some of these money-grubbing measures:
● Cider tax, 1763: Caused an uproar and was subsequently repealed.
● Molasses tax, 1764: Also later repealed.
● Stamp duty, 1765: Imposed on legal documents and newspapers. Caused a big outcry and was quickly repealed, in spite of the king’s misgivings.
● Tea tax, 1773: Led to the famous Boston Tea Party, when colonists tossed tea on board ships in Boston Harbour into the water and the British sent in the troops.
The king’s ministers were blamed for these disasters, but the general influence of the king was attacked, too. And things got worse for Britain when war broke out between Britain and America. The colonists were victorious, and the United States of America was created. It was a disaster for George, but the beginning of great things for the United States.
Ruling the waves
George’s reign is also famous as the period in which Britain ruled the waves, scoring notable victories over the French in the Napoleonic Wars.
To match the American debacle, the Brits had a resounding success in the 1790s and early 1800s in a series of battles against the old enemy, the French. The French leader at the time was Napoleon Bonaparte. By the end of the 19th century, Napoleon was busy extending his power all over mainland Europe, and the Brits were in constant fear that he would cross the Channel and invade Britain, too.
Napoleon was all too good at winning land battles. But the British had a secret weapon in Admiral Horatio Nelson, the hero of the British navy. Nelson scored a series of victories over the French navy that eventually put to rest to any invasion plans that Napoleon may have had. His most famous victories were
● The Battle of the Nile, 1798: Nelson smashes most of the French navy to pieces in Aboukir Bay in Egypt.
● The Battle of Copenhagen, 1801: The British fleet destroy the Danish navy in Copenhagen harbour when it seemed that the Danes were going to enter the war. Nelson, second in command on this occasion, was ordered not to attack but ignored the command.
● The Battle of Trafalgar, 1805: Nelson defeats both the French and the Spanish fleets as they were sailing from Cadiz, Spain, towards the Mediterranean. Nelson was killed in the battle, but French and Spanish naval powers were destroyed.
Britain ruled the waves. It wasn’t just the naval battles that defeated Napoleon. The army leader the Duke of Wellington helped give him the boot, too. At the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Wellington struggled to hold off the French, but when Britain’s Prussian allies arrived, Napoleon was finally defeated.
Mad or sad?
King George III is well known for being Britain’s mad king. In fact, his health was a problem early on in his reign, when he had a physical collapse in 1765. Parliament passed a Regency Act, to allow a relative to rule in his stead when he was ill, but he seemed to recover.
Then, later in life, the king had a series of debilitating attacks - the worst ones were in 1788, 1801, and 1804 - each time giving the impression that he was losing his mind. In the 1788 episode, for example, he grew violent, attacking the Prince of Wales. He also talked continuously. In the 1801 and 1804 episodes, the symptoms got worse, but were followed by periods of recovery. To onlookers at the time, it seemed that the king was steadily succumbing to mental illness.
Things got even worse for George in November 1810, when his youngest daughter, Amelia, died. Soon afterwards, the king had a still worse bout of illness, talking incoherently, failing to recognise people, and baffling a number of eminent doctors who the royal family consulted. It became clear that he would be unable to rule, and his son George was appointed Prince Regent, king in all but name.
George III, meanwhile, was packed off to Windsor Castle, where he was kept for the rest of his life. Here, he spent nine years, deranged and also blind. He seems to have been badly neglected, his hair and beard allowed to grow long.
Modern medical experts who have studied George’s case history believe that he was not suffering from mental illness in the strict sense of the phrase. The most likely diagnosis of the king’s illness is a blood disease called porphyria, which can cause symptoms similar to mental illness. Historians suspect that a number of English kings had porphyria. The line of sufferers may even go as far back as Henry VI, who had periods of apparent mental collapse.
If Britain’s mad king was not mad, he certainly had a sad end. One person, though, was happy at George’s decline in health. That was the Prince Regent, who had been waiting for years to get his seat on the throne. He could barely conceal his happiness at being made Prince Regent in 1811, ten years before becoming king in his own right when his father finally died, a broken man of 81, in 1821.
Prince of Pleasure: George IV
When George III became so ill he could not rule, his son, also George, ruled in his stead as Prince Regent. When the prince became king as George IV in 1820, his character was already very well known. George IV (1820-30) was notorious as a libertine who was devoted to a life of luxury and enjoyment. He ran up huge debts on everything from grand houses to lavish parties, enjoying the benefits of kingship without attending to its responsibilities.
Lord of luxury
As both Prince Regent and king, George spent a fortune on his lifestyle. He was obsessed with having the best of the latest fashions in everything from clothes to houses and ran up enormous debts in the process. In 1802, the Prince’s debts were calculated at £146,000 and included:
● £20,000 spent on a regimental band.
● £17,000 on jewellers’ bills.
● More than £9,000 owed to the Prince’s tailors.
● About £7,500 owed to lacemakers.
At this period, the Prince’s annual income was around £108,000 per year, but out of it he had to pay for essentials, staff, and the expenses of the Princess of Wales, so his debts were way more than he could afford.
The main surviving monument to this life of luxury is Brighton Pavilion, the extraordinary house he built near England’s south coast, an architectural extravaganza with Indian-style onion-shaped domes on the roof and rich decoration inside. George even sent a representative to China to buy various things for the rooms inside the Pavilion. Wallpaper, tables, gongs, pottery, swords, and garden seats were all brought back from China for the Royal Pavilion.
George’s patronage of artists, architects, and decorators, influenced a whole new style of architecture, called Regency. Not all of it was as exotic as Brighton Pavilion, but it was all elegant, and it went with new fashions in dress and a vogue for glamorous parties. It was all the kind of thing that rich people in London liked, and as a result, George was quite a popular figure when young. But George’s hedonistic lifestyle also had its down side. It wasn’t just the money. George also had a string of mistresses. The prince’s first mistress set the tone. She was an actress called Mary Robinson, known as Perdita after the character she was playing in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale when George first saw her. The couple were together for a while, and then George found another mistress - and discovered that Mary expected to be paid off in return for keeping quiet about their liaison.
This pattern went on for several years, with each jilted mistress extracting a hefty payment, and with the king - who had always spoiled his son when the prince was a child - forking out the money.
The secret wife
The sequence of royal mistresses was interrupted when George married a young widow called Maria Fitzherbert. Mrs Fitzherbert was an inappropriate wife for an 18th-century heir to the throne, in several ways:
● She was a commoner, and kings were usually married to other royals or members of the aristocracy.
● She was twice a widow, which meant she came with the kind of historical baggage (not to mention sexual experience) that was not normal for royal wives.
● She was a Catholic in an era when the law forbade the king from being a Catholic. In effect, marrying Maria barred George from the throne.
● She did not have the approval of the king even though the 1772 Royal Marriages Act made it necessary for all matches of royal family members under age 25.
George would have been content to get around this problem by maintaining Maria as a mistress. But Maria refused to live in sin with George and insisted on marriage. So George and Maria married in secret, in the full knowledge that their match was illegal under English law, even though it was accepted by the Catholic Church.
The coronation scandal
In the period after George married Mrs Fitzherbert, he was overeating, drinking like a fish, and satisfying his sexual cravings with yet more mistresses. His rather more moral father, George III, with the backing of Parliament, insisted that the prince should take a wife who was acceptable in English law. There would be no trouble about George’s marriage to Mrs Fitzherbert because it was seen in law as void, so George wouldn’t be committing bigamy by marrying a second time.
The king found a bride for George in Caroline of Brunswick, a relative of the Hanoverians who, though somewhat unattractive, was at least Protestant, previously unmarried, and royal. King and Parliament also produced a tempting bribe for George - if he would marry Caroline, Parliament would help pay off a chunk of his debts.
George duly accepted this bribe, and a meeting was arranged between him and Caroline, just three days before they were due to be married. George was disappointed with his bride, who was said to have a personal hygiene problem, was rather plain, and had a reputation for temper tantrums. The prince asked for a stiff brandy on meeting her and was still drunk when they got married three days later.
George and Caroline stayed together just long enough for the queen to produce a child, Princess Charlotte Augusta, but then separated. The king was soon back with Mrs Fitzherbert, while the queen was shunted out and spent her spare time setting up an orphanage.
By the time George III died, Caroline was in exile in Italy, where there was a rumour that she was having an affair with a courtier called Bartolomeo Pergami. However, when she heard that George was about to be crowned, she shocked king and court alike by demanding to take her rightful place at his side.
George offered to pay his estranged queen £50,000 a year to stay out of the country, but she refused. Instead, she came to England and faced up to an inquiry into her conduct. A kind of trial was held in the House of Lords, and Caroline was found not guilty of any misconduct, but George still managed to keep her away from the coronation. Poor Caroline died of some kind of intestinal illness a few weeks afterwards.
King and public
What did the people of Britain think of the dissolute George? Most people disapproved of him, and many even hated him. It was not just his dissolute lifestyle. He reigned at a time of high unemployment and widespread poverty, and he had close links with reactionary politicians who did nothing to alleviate these social ills. He was especially detested in London, where Parliament had to cope with his mounting debts and carry on running the country while he was partying with his mistresses.
Britain was fortunate that for the first seven years of his reign, the government was steered along by a strong and able Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool. Later, another powerful minister, the Duke of Wellington, took over the government. A notable feature of his period in office was the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, which allowed Catholics to take public office, a right they had previously been denied. George, meanwhile, tended to keep away from the London limelight, preferring to stay in Windsor and Brighton while his ministers ran the government.
One reason for the king keeping out of the public eye was simply that he had lost all his glamour. George’s health was in serious decline:
● He was virtually blind, with cataracts in both eyes.
● His gout was so bad that he couldn’t sign official documents.
● He was grossly overweight - one contemporary described him as looking like a feather bed.
● He had bladder trouble and breathing difficulties.
● He dosed himself with laudanum and cherry brandy.
The king lived out his last years in rather pathetic seclusion, dying in 1830 of respiratory disease. He had had one legitimate child, Princess Charlotte, who became a much more popular figure than her father. She married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield in 1816, but died in childbirth the following year. As a result of this tragedy, George had no direct heir, and his brothers realised that they were in line for the throne. The throne passed to George’s eldest surviving brother, William IV.
All Change: William IV
The daughter of George IV, Princess Charlotte, died before her father, and the king’s first brother, Frederick, died before him, so his younger brother, William IV (1830-37) became king at the ripe old age of 64. His reign was short, and its main achievements, the passing of some important reforming laws that made Britain more democratic, went through Parliament in spite of the king’s conservative opinions.
Sailor Bill
As a younger son, William did not expect to become king, and as a young man, he embarked on a career in the Navy. Amazingly, in a time of power and privilege for royals, he did not ask for special treatment when he joined the Navy and began as an ordinary able seaman, working his way steadily through the ranks until he was given command of his own ship and was finally, in 1811, made Admiral of the Fleet.
Apart from his naval career, William was known, like most of his family, for being highly sexed. He had a number of mistresses, but in his mid-20s, he had a long-term relationship with one of them, an actress called Dorothea Jordan. Dorothea and William had ten children. Because his main title was Duke of Clarence, the children were given the surname Fitzclarence.
The illegitimate sons of royalty were often given surnames beginning with the prefix Fitz. This term comes from the French word for son, fils. So a surname beginning with Fitz was a two-edged sword, enabling the bearer to show his connection with the royal family, but also indicating that he was not part of the legitimate royal line.
The Fitzclarence family seemed happy, but William ditched Dorothea in 1811, after they’d spent more than 20 years together. The split is a bit of a mystery, but it’s thought that the reason was that Dorothea, by then an alcoholic, had gone to seed, and William was looking for a more attractive partner.
When it became clear that he was in line for the throne, William decided to marry. His chosen bride was Adelaide, daughter of the German Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. She was just under half the age of the 52-year-old William, but the pair got on well together and settled down happily. Adelaide even brought up William’s illegitimate children, although sadly none of her own babies lived beyond infancy.
Vote, vote, vote: Electoral reform
During William’s reign, there was a movement to make the electoral system fairer by giving more people the right to vote. Lord Grey, the leader of the Whig government that came in when William became king, was keen on reform; the other side, the Tories, opposed it. In 1831, the Whig-dominated House of Commons passed a Reform Bill, but the House of Lords, which included a majority of Tories, threw it out.
With the chance of reform snatched away, a lot of popular resentment developed over what the Lords had done - riots even occurred in some places, such as Bristol, Nottingham, and South Wales. To get the Reform Bill through the House of Lords, the Prime Minister put pressure on William to create 50 new Whig peers - enough to outvote the Tories and get the bill passed. William was not keen on using his power to create lords politically in this way and refused. The government resigned, William appointed a new Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, and an election occurred, which the Whigs won. With a Whig majority in the House of Commons, the king had to agree to appoint the new peers, but in the end, he didn’t have to appoint them - the House of Lords agreed to the Reform Bill after all.
This wasn’t the only time when William intervened dramatically in government affairs. In 1834, he sacked the government out of the blue - while he was having dinner at Windsor Castle! The result of William’s hasty action was another election, which was also won by the side the king didn’t support. William’s heavy-handed involvement in government made him a far-from-perfect constitutional monarch.
One way of looking at William is to see him as a caretaker ruler, a man who was already middle-aged when he became king and whose main function was to keep the throne warm for the next ruler, Queen Victoria. In this view, he was just muddling along. But a more positive view sees him as a reforming king, showing how the limited powers of the monarchy can be used to bring about beneficial change.
Whichever view of William is true, he was never likely to reign for long. He died in 1837, aged 71, of pneumonia and cirrhosis of the liver. Because he and his queen, Adelaide, produced no surviving heirs, the throne passed to the king’s niece Victoria, daughter of the Duke of Kent, one of the brothers of George IV, and his wife Mary Louise Victoria, who came from one of the noble Germanic families from whom the Hanoverians often chose their marriage partners.
Loathed and Then Loved: Victoria
When Victoria was named as William IV’s heir, she was shown a family tree to help explain her relationship to the British king. When she realised how close she was to becoming queen, she said, ‘I will be good’. And good she was, a pillar of rectitude, for all of her long reign.
Queen Victoria (1837-1901) reigned longer than any other British monarch. She presided over the period when Britain was at its most prosperous, at the centre of a worldwide empire and in the forefront of technology and industry. To begin with, Victoria was not much liked, but in partnership with her consort, Prince Albert, she won people over. Unlike so many royal couples, the queen and consort were actually in love, and the public saw their large family as an ideal they could look up to. In addition, many benefited directly from the reforms Albert pressed for in fields such as education and public health.
Trying to be good
Victoria was in a difficult position when she came to the throne. She was a young single woman of 18 who, as far as most British people were concerned, was related to the Hanoverians and therefore stood for the dodgy morals, German outlook, and extravagance of the dynasty. She had had a tough childhood because her father died when she was a baby. Her first couple of years on the throne were difficult, too, as shown by two episodes that happened in the early years of her reign.
Falsely accused: Lady Flora Hastings
It was not surprising that politicians and courtiers tried to control and influence the apparently weak young queen. One of these men was Sir John Conroy, a close friend of Victoria’s mother. Victoria disliked Conroy and believed he was trying to influence her through one of her ladies-in-waiting, Lady Flora Hastings, who Victoria thought was having an affair with Conroy.
When Lady Flora’s stomach began to swell, Victoria jumped to the conclusion that Conroy had got her pregnant. Lady Flora denied the charge, and Victoria made her undergo a humiliating medical examination. Result: Lady Flora was still a virgin. The swelling turned out to be the result of cancer of the liver. Lady Flora died soon afterwards, and Victoria was reviled and jeered at in public.
Ministerial mayhem
In 1839, the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, resigned. Victoria had relied heavily on his guidance and missed him deeply. The incoming Prime Minister, Robert Peel, was worried that the queen would be unduly influenced by the ladies-in-waiting at her court, who had been appointed by the previous Whig government. He demanded Tory replacements.
Victoria put her foot down and refused. Peel, in turn, refused to be Prime Minister, and Lord Melbourne returned, much to the queen’s relief. Victoria got some stick for her liking of Melbourne, who had been tainted with scandal in the public mind since his wife had had an affair with the poet Lord Byron years ago. People called the queen Mrs Melbourne, but at least she got her way over her ladies-in-waiting.
King without a crown: Prince Albert
Albert, the son of Germanic nobleman Ernst, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, first met Victoria in 1836. The queen’s parents thought he would be a good match for their daughter, and she was attracted to him, too. When the couple met again three years later, the queen proposed marriage. The couple were wed in February 1840, and their marriage was happy, fulfilling, and fertile - Victoria had nine children.
Albert didn’t become king when he married Victoria. He took the title of Prince Consort. In other words, Victoria remained the reigning monarch, while Albert’s role, in theory, was mainly ceremonial, just like that of a queen when a king was on the throne.
But in practice, Albert was much more than a ceremonial royal. He had a huge influence over his wife, shaping not just the life of the royal family, but influencing new policies and laws that affected everyone in the kingdom. Perhaps his greatest achievement of all was the 1851 Great Exhibition, an enormous display of the products of the entire British empire, held in the Crystal Palace, a specially built glass-and-iron building of vast proportions, erected in London’s Hyde Park. Albert was such an important figure that he has been called a king without a crown.
With their large brood of children and their loving relationship, Victoria and Albert headed up that rare thing, a happy royal family. The image they created, of a happy family at the head of the nation, was highly influential, and ever since, people have expected the royal family to be a picture of domestic bliss - even when it has fallen far short of this ideal.
The queen and consort had other ideals, too. They were all too aware of the scandalous history of the House of Hanover, in which it was normal for kings to have strings of mistresses, and many of Victoria’s relations were born out of wedlock. Albert, too, grew up with a father and brother who jumped in and out of bed with different women.
Victoria and Albert wanted to be different from their predecessors. They believed that if they set a good example, the moral climate of the whole country would improve, too, which happened, up to a point. Courtiers and politicians realised that ‘unofficial’ liaisons would be frowned upon. Many of them still had their mistresses - but they were more discreet about it.
Families and peace
One other consequence of Victoria’s family values was that she saw her family as extending right across Europe. This view was true, literally, because she was related through her huge family to most of the crowned heads of the continent.
This extended family came into being mainly because of Victoria herself.
She had nine children and arranged marriages for them with royals on the European mainland. Some of her children married members of the royal families of Prussia and Russia; others wed princes and princesses of the ruling houses of the various smaller states that existed before Germany became a single united country.
Victoria wanted to keep her European family, so on the whole, she worked for peace in Europe - and indeed in the lands beyond Europe over which she had power or influence. Here are a few examples of Victorian peace initiatives:
● 1857: In the war between Austria and Sardinia, she persuaded her government to stay neutral.
● 1858: She appealed for leniency and calm after the bloodshed during the Indian Mutiny.
● 1877-8: She and Prime Minister Disraeli kept out of the way when Turkey was fighting - and massacring - in Bulgaria, although Disraeli did intervene in the war between Russia and Turkey.
Ministerial manoeuvres
In 1861, Prince Albert died. His death was due to several assaults on his health:
● He caught a bad cold, which turned to pneumonia, after a visit to Cambridge to take his son Bertie to task about his debts, mistresses, and other misdemeanours.
● He caught typhoid fever because of the unhygienic state of the drains at Windsor Castle.
● He had become exhausted after sitting up all night amending a letter from the British government to Abraham Lincoln - if Albert hadn’t changed the letter, Britain would probably have entered the American Civil War on the side of the South.
As a result of Albert’s death, the whole complexion of the monarchy changed. Victoria went into deep mourning and lost the close contact with her people that she had achieved through her husband. After a while, people got tired of Victoria’s grief - widows were expected to mourn, but the queen’s grief seemed to go on for ever.
Victoria kept in touch with the business of government through a succession of Prime Ministers. Here are some of the most important:
● Robert Peel (PM 1834-5, 1841-6): Peel was famous as a supporter of free trade, reducing taxes and repealing duties to encourage commerce. In 1839, the Tory Peel was on the point of becoming Prime Minister, but realised that his government would be weak because it would have a minority in the House of Commons. To strengthen his position, Peel wanted Victoria to appoint Tory ladies in her household. Victoria refused, effectively preventing Peel from taking office.
● Benjamin Disraeli (PM 1868, 1874-80): Disraeli brought in social reforms (in housing, safety at work, and other areas) and promoted the British empire. Disraeli handled Queen Victoria by flattering her and by making her Empress of India in 1877. Disraeli’s flattery ensured that he was the queen’s favourite Prime Minister.
● William Ewart Gladstone (PM 1868-74, 1880-5, 1886, 1892-4):
Gladstone was a supporter of the working classes and introduced reforms in a wide range of areas, from local government to the law, which were designed to make the lives of ordinary people easier. Queen Victoria didn’t get on with Gladstone because she didn’t like his way of preaching at her. She also disliked his policy of removing state support from the Irish church and was upset when he did not support British general Charles George Gordon when Gordon was besieged in Khartoum, capital of Sudan.
● Viscount Palmerston (PM 1855-8, 1859-65): Palmerston was a very popular Prime Minister, but the queen didn’t take to him at all. She disapproved of his habit of seducing her ladies-in-waiting and disliked the way he made changes to diplomatic communications after she’d seen them, undermining her role in foreign policy.
Jubilee!
Victoria snapped out of her mourning when she found an unlikely male confidant in John Brown, one of her servants from the Scottish Highlands. Brown seemed able to break through the queen’s grief and was prepared to answer her bluntly, without a lot of the false deference with which people normally approached royalty.
The queen got some flak for her relationship with Brown. Rumours circulated that it went beyond a mere friendship, and that Victoria had reverted to the Hanoverian type and jumped into bed with a commoner. This rumour was almost certainly untrue, but the queen’s popularity took a nose-dive. Victorians, who were quite prepared to accept that a man might have any number of mistresses, couldn’t countenance any hint of sexual freedom amongst their womenfolk. In the early 1870s, some even called for the monarchy to be abolished. This reform didn’t happen, of course, and the criticism died away and was forgotten after Brown died in 1883.
One event that helped make royalty popular gains was the Golden Jubilee, held in 1887 to celebrate Victoria’s 50th year on the throne. It was a major royal occasion, with kings and queens from all over Europe attending. The main events were a banquet attended by 50 European kings and princes, and a memorial service in Westminster Abbey.
Ten years later, a Diamond Jubilee marked the 60th anniversary of the queen’s accession. This time, the emphasis was on the British empire, with troops and others from Britain’s various colonies in attendance. As the century drew to a close, Britain enjoyed a feeling of optimism and affection for the queen. She died in 1901, the head of the world’s largest empire and the longest reigning monarch in British history.
Unlikely Success: Edward VII
Edward VII (1901-10) was the eldest son of Queen Victoria and her consort Prince Albert. Because his mother had such a long reign, Edward was almost 60 years old when he came to the throne. He spent most of his life as Prince of Wales, enjoying all the pleasures life could offer him, from the embraces of numerous mistresses to slap-up meals in top Parisian restaurants. When he finally became king, Edward was rather poorly prepared for his new role, but he made a surprisingly good job of it, developing the ceremonial aspect of the monarchy and becoming a popular national figurehead.
As the son of Prince Albert, Edward took his father’s surname of Saxe-Coburg, so, technically, he was not strictly a member of the royal House of Hanover. But because of anti-German feelings in the first World War, Edward’s descendents changed their Teutonic name to a more English-friendly one, Windsor. As a result, Edward was the only king of the house of Saxe-Coburg, so in this book he’s included with his Hanoverian relatives for convenience.
Playboy prince
Prince Albert Edward was born in 1841. His parents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, brought him up in an atmosphere of moral seriousness, in the hope that he would not turn out like the previous Prince of Wales - the Prince Regent, who became George IV - who was infamous for a dissolute life of overspending.
But Bertie rebelled against his parents’ strict values. The prince was a party animal who loved big occasions, good food, and foreign travel. A keen sportsman, he was a lover of yachting, shooting, hunting, and horse-racing. Another passionate interest was the newly invented motor car. Bertie owned several cars, all of which were adorned with the royal coat of arms.
The prince’s greatest love of all was for the opposite sex. He soon notched up a list of mistresses that included many actresses, and this trend continued after he had married the beautiful Princess Alexandra, elder daughter of the king of Denmark, in 1863.
Queen Victoria, of course, did not approve of her son’s behaviour, especially when he told her that her lengthy mourning after the death of Albert was making her unpopular. The queen’s attitude toward Bertie amounted to one of distrust, and she wouldn’t let him anywhere near the governmental side of her duties - in other words, he wasn’t allowed to play any part in meetings with ministers or to see any of the official papers she had to sign. It was not surprising, then, that Bertie devoted more and more of his life to the pursuit of pleasure.
The king as ambassador
When he became king, Edward VII had had little experience of politics, but he had a genuine love of the ceremony surrounding the monarchy. He liked going on tours around the country so that his subjects could see him in the flesh. He established the custom that the monarch is the one who ceremonially ‘opens’ Parliament each year. And he made sure that ceremonial occasions, from receptions to visits by foreign rulers, were held with all the appropriate pomp.
As a prince, Edward had been keen on foreign travel and he had a special affection for France. When he became king, he continued to travel for pleasure. But his good personal relations with the French had important consequences for his country, too. The king’s French connections brought Britain and France closer together politically. In 1904, an Anglo-French agreement settled various disputes between the two countries about their colonial interests. Edward’s good relations with France encouraged this entente cordiale.
The other side of the diplomatic coin was England’s relations with Germany. Edward and his nephew, the German ruler Kaiser Wilhelm II, simply did not get on, in spite of the fact that Wilhelm had been very fond of Queen Victoria, who had died in his arms. The personal coldness between the two men pushed their countries apart, too.
Edward’s social skills made him a popular ruler. He saw how well people responded to seeing the royal family in public and gave them what they wanted with lots of public appearances. And in spite of his habit of ‘playing away’ with his many mistresses, his marriage to Queen Alexandra seems to have been affectionate, and the couple surrounded themselves with a loving family of princes and princesses.
When Edward died in 1910, he was widely mourned. A 7-mile queue stretched through London as people waited to pay their last respects. Vast crowds, perhaps up to 2 million strong, took to the streets to watch his funeral procession. Edward’s mourners respected a king who had made the monarchy more symbolic and less political as it entered the 20th century. They did not know that this trend was set to continue.