Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 51

George I. (1714—1727.)

George I. (1714—1727.)

To Anne succeeded George I., Elector of Hanover, the first of the ignoble Guelphs. He could speak no English, and his ministers, Carteret excepted, could speak no German. Walpole had to use the medium of dog Latin in his communications with his august sovereign. He surrounded himself with Germans. "The very dogs in England's Court," according to the Scottish Jacobite song," they bark and howl in German." The king admonished his retinue, from mistress to cook, to lay hold of everything they could get, lest their time among so fickle a people as the English should be short. "The German women plundered," says Thackeray, "the German secretaries plundered, the German cooks and attendants plundered; even Mustapha and Mahomet, the German negroes, had a share of the booty." "Coming," says Lord Mahon, "from a poor electorate, a flight of hungry Hanoverians, like so many famished vultures, fell with keen eyes and bended talons on the fruitful soil of England." And page 85 still, alas! they come, Where the carrion is, there the Teutonic vultures are gathered together.

In his own petty principality George had been accustomed to sell his subjects as mercenary soldiers at so many ducats per head. In England such things could not be done with impunity; consequently the king drew unfavourable comparisons between the two countries, and never remained a moment longer in London than he could help. He appropriated estates left to others under the wills of his wife and his father-in-law by the simple process of burning the obnoxious testaments. In England this offence was then punishable by hanging, and it is quite likely that George signed a few death-warrants as a lesson to such transgressors as himself.

As a husband and as a father his relations were simply brutal. His wife he immured in a dungeon at the age of twenty-eight for a suspected intrigue with Count Konigsmark. There she remained till she was sixty; and when her son, afterwards George II., sought to visit her, he was arrested by his father, and narrowly escaped with his life. Konigsmark, by the king's order, was brutally murdered. At a later date George deprived his son and daughter-in-law of the custody of their own children, and drove them with ignominy from St. James's Palace.

George I. literally kept a seraglio, with the Oriental accessories of two negro eunuchs, Mustapha and Mahomet. Among the host of his painted women were Frau von Kilmansegge (Countess of Darlington), Frau von Schulenberg (Duchess of Kendal), the Countess of Platen, and the two sisters, Elizabeth and Melusina, of the murdered Konigsmark. No such ugly and rapacious harpies had ever been seen or heard of in England. The Duchess of Kendal, being tall and lean, was popularly known as "Giraffe;" while the Countess of Darlington, from her enormous dimensions, was named "the Elephant." In describing George's predilections, Chesterfield went straight to the point—"No woman came amiss to him, if she were only very willing and very fat."

And to such courtesans, ministers and courtiers had humbly to bow if they desired either title, pension, or place. To bribes they were always open. Of the "South Sea Bill" promotion money, no less than £30,000 were traced to their unhallowed coffers. "A train of the deepest villany and page 86 fraud with which hell ever contrived to ruin a nation," was the verdict of a Select Committee of the House of Commons on these corruptions.

The subsidies granted by Parliament for the defence or augmentation of George's Hanoverian Dominions were enormous. While the Englishman and the Hanoverian hunted together, it was invariably the Hanoverian that got the turkey and the Englishman the crow.

George's death, it is said, happened in this wise. His long imprisoned queen predeceased him by a few months, but before leaving this world she wrote a letter to her royal spouse in which she protested her innocence, and summoned him to meet her before the tribunal of God within a year and a day. This disquieting epistle a faithful hand placed in his coach as he was entering Germany in the summer of 1714. On reading it he was seized with a convulsion from which he never recovered.