The Story of Britain by Rebecca Fraser

Author:Rebecca Fraser [Fraser, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2006-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

George II (1727–1760)

In most ways George II was a far nicer man than his father; like George I he was a brave soldier, but taller and better looking. He spoke better English too, sometimes acting as his father’s interpreter with the English ministers. The first two Georges took such a close interest in the British army that it was the one institution that experienced some attempts at reform in an era very careless about public services. Discipline was improved, and the system of outfitting was overhauled. Commendably George II did not approve of the English practice of purchasing commissions, believing that the holding of a command should be merited. The success of British arms during the Seven Years War of 1756–63 which sealed the First British Empire was due in no small part to the Hanoverian influence.

One of the first things George II did when he became king aged forty-four was, rather touchingly, to put a portrait of his unhappy mother on display. (No one knew he had secretly always carried a miniature of her in his pocket, which he liked to take out and gaze at when he was alone.) The new king’s experience of England so far had been punctuated by humiliating rows between himself and his father. They culminated in George I threatening to have the then Prince of Wales arrested at his first son’s christening. Fortunately a great deal of soft pedalling by the prince’s clever, flirtatious wife Caroline of Ansbach managed to avert this.

Caroline of Ansbach had not been at all in awe of her late father-in-law, but she could see that she and her husband had far more to gain if he ate his pride and was on speaking terms with his father than if he was at daggers drawn. Blonde with a magnificent embonpoint and intellectual tastes (she corresponded with the leading philosophers of the day for amusement) Queen Caroline enjoyed ruling George II. She even tolerated his apparently insatiable appetite for mistresses–English ones, she opined, at least would teach him better English. Throughout her husband’s reign she continued to urge him to entrust himself utterly to the suave Walpole’s wisdom. For his part Walpole commented pleasantly, ‘I have the right sow by the ear.’

But, despite his own suffering at his father’s hands, George II’s atrocious relations with his own son and heir Frederick, the new Prince of Wales, who arrived from Hanover to live in England aged twenty-one in 1728, were no less a source of scandal. That intimate observer of the Georgian era Horace Walpole, Robert’s son, remarked that ‘it was something in the blood’ which prevented the Hanoverians from getting on with their heirs. After a quarrel with his parents, Frederick, or ‘Poor Fred’ as he was generally known, actually carried his wife out of their palace while she was in the middle of labour, to prevent his first child, Princess Augusta, being born near the hated pair.

Just as before, the opposition of out-of-office Whigs and Tories soon began to gather at the court of the new Prince of Wales at Leicester House.

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