George I

I

Introduction

George I (1660-1727), Elector of Hanover (1698-1727), King of Great Britain and Ireland (1714-1727), and the first of the Hanoverian (Guelph) dynasty (see Hanover, House of).

II

Early Career

George Ludwig was born in Osnabrück, Hanover, now in Germany, on May 28, 1660, the eldest son of Ernest Augustus, later Elector of Hanover, and Sophia, a granddaughter of King James I of England (James VI of Scotland). From his mid-teens, George saw regular military service. In 1680-1681 he visited England, and rumours circulated that he was to marry his cousin Anne (later Queen Anne), but nothing came of this.

In November 1682 he was married to his first cousin, Sophia Dorothea of Celle. Although undertaken for strictly dynastic and territorial aims, the match initially appears to have been a relatively happy one, and two children were born of it: the future George II and Sophia Dorothea, the future queen of Prussia (George was thus the grandfather of Frederick the Great). Such happiness did not last and by 1691 the couple were estranged. George began a liaison with Melusine von der Schulenburg (later Duchess of Kendal), which resulted in the birth of three daughters and lasted until his death. Sophia Dorothea, meanwhile, had an affair with an army officer, Philip von Königsmarck. The dynasty’s supporters feared that Sophia Dorothea and her lover were planning to elope, thus bringing scandal upon the house of Guelph, and so Königsmarck was murdered by a group of them in 1694, probably with the connivance of Ernest Augustus. It seems that George knew nothing of the plot. The consequences were manifold. Sophia Dorothea refused to cohabit with George. They were divorced, and she was placed under house arrest until her death in 1726. The scandal had a deep impact on George, whose reputation remained badly damaged by it. It also injured his relations with his son, who considered his mother to be innocent.

In the years that followed, George immersed himself in the campaigns of the Nine Years’ War, and later in the War of the Spanish Succession. Throughout his life he retained a keen interest in the military, and on his succession to the British Crown he undertook a number of reforms to make the British army more professional and to increase his control over it. He inherited the Electorship of Hanover from his father in 1698.

III

King of Great Britain and Ireland

On the death of Queen Anne on August 1, 1714, George became king of Great Britain and Ireland under the Act of Settlement of 1701, since he was the closest of Anne’s relatives who was a Protestant. Nevertheless, his lineal claim to the throne was slight and throughout his reign his right was actively challenged by the adherents of Anne’s Catholic half-brother, James, who made much of the fact that the new king was a foreigner. George I himself did little to remedy this criticism. Reserved by nature, he proved unwilling to embrace the public and ceremonial side of English kingship. Famously, he could speak no English, and although he learnt some of the language during the course of his reign, he does not appear to have become especially fluent in it. Nevertheless, the staunch Protestantism of the dynasty ensured that the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 was ill supported and swiftly defeated.

In Parliament, the king favoured the Whigs and soon abandoned any attempt to include the Tories in his government. In particular, he endorsed the plans of his ministers, James Stanhope and the Earl of Sunderland, in the late 1710s, to enhance Whig hegemony through such measures as the Septennial Act, the Peerage Bill, the reform of the universities, and the repeal of certain restrictions against Protestant Dissenters. Such was his determination to uphold their ministry against attacks by dissident Whigs, led by Robert Walpole, Viscount Townshend, and the Prince of Wales, who at that time was estranged from his father, that he set aside his customary dislike for entertaining. He made the court a social centre for the political elites until the schism in the Whig Party was healed in 1720, and Walpole and Townshend returned to office. Walpole soon won the king’s respect both by his adept and successful management of the South Sea Bubble crisis, in which the king was financially implicated, and his skilful handling of Jacobite plots against the new dynasty, in particular the Atterbury Plot in the early 1720s (see Atterbury, Francis). Above all, George I’s particular métier was foreign policy. Here he clearly set his own agenda and often put the interests of Hanover before those of Britain, especially in his quarrel with Sweden over disputed territory that he claimed as Elector of Hanover. But George’s treaties with other European powers, in particular with France in 1717, were also in British interests.

George I does not enjoy a reputation as a patron of the arts and sciences, but this characterization is not wholly accurate. He was a patron of George Handel, and the artist and interior designer William Kent, who executed some of his most striking work for the king at Kensington Palace. Moreover, George was receptive to the ideas of the early Enlightenment. He rejected ceremonies, such as touching for scrofula, which suggested that the monarch had divine powers. He also threw his support behind the highly controversial experiments of Sir Hans Sloane for inoculating against smallpox to the extent that he had his grandchildren inoculated, thus helping to popularize the practice.

George I died on June 11, 1727, at Osnabrück, after suffering a stroke while travelling to Hanover.

IV

Assessment

George I has received a poor press from historians, who, until recently, have followed the hostile assessments of his enemies, who depicted him as a boorish and unpopular philistine absorbed in his Hanoverian territories. Recent scholarship has moderated this view to stress George I’s political intelligence and interest in British affairs. Although he remained disliked by Jacobites and some Tories, his martial career and Protestantism won him steady enough support among his subjects, and, on his death, he left his dynasty, in the person of George II, firmly established on the British throne.