OBOROE I. 



->iE I. 



spread that the Duke of Cambridge would in any circumstance* 

 immediately ooine to England, threw the ministry into no small per- 

 I'lrxiiy , and so greatly aunoyed and irritated the queen that the forbade 

 Baron SchUU to appear at court. The following year however another 

 report was spread, that the Princess Sophia intended to solicit per- 

 mission from her majesty for the Electoral Prince to come to England. 

 On this the quean wrote both to the princes*, to her son the elector, 

 and to the Electoral Prince himself, expressing her disapprobation of 

 the project in the strongest term*. These letters may be said to have 

 killed the heiress presumptive ; she was so much affected by them, 

 that on the day after their receipt, the 28th of Hay, she was struck 

 with apoplexy as she was walking in the gardens of Uerenhausen, and 

 expired in the arms of her daughter. The Princess Sophia, who was 

 one of the most accomplished women of her time, was in her eighty- 

 fourth year when her life was thus terminated. Queen Anne died on 

 the 1st of August following, on which Oeorge, Elector of Brunswick, 

 the son of the Electress Sophia, became kin? of Great Britain. 



George I. waa born the 28th of Hay 1660 (the day before that on 

 which Charles II. made his entry into London at the Restoration). 

 In 1681 he came over to England with the intention of paying his 

 addretaes to the Prince** (afterwards Queen) Anne ; but immediately 

 after landing he received his father's orders not to proceed in the 

 business, on which he returned homo, and in the following year 

 married his cousin Sophia Dorothea, the daughter of the Duke of 

 ZelL He afterwards served in the armies of the Empire both against 

 the Turks and the French. He succeeded to the electorate on the 

 death of his father in 1698. In 1700 he led a force to the assistance 

 of the Duke of Hoist, iu, who was attacked by Frederick IV. of Den- 

 mark, and in conjunction with the Swedes under General Bauier, 

 compelled King Frederick to raise the siege of Tonningen. Hanover 

 had been created a ninth electorate by the Emperor Leopold in 1692, 

 bnt in consequence of the opposition of other electoral houses it was 

 not till 1708 that the duke was admitted into the college of electors. 

 Duke Ernest, the father of George I., had originally attached himself 

 to the French interest, but bis adhesion to England was of course 

 secured by the settlement of the succession to the crown on his family, 

 although it is probable that neither he nor even liis son regarded that 

 arrangement as very secure until the latter actually found himself 

 seated on the throne. The elector George remained steady to the 

 English alliance throughout the general war which began in 1702, and 

 both in 1707 and the two following years he commanded the Imperial 

 forces against the French. All the endeavours of the English ministry 

 however could not prevail upon him to go along with them in the 

 original propositions for the peace of Utrecht. In fact, he stood out 

 till the conclusion of the treaty of peace between the French King 

 and the Emperor, at Rastadt, 6th Mitrch 1714. 



The accession of George I. took place aa quietly, and as much like 

 a thing of course, as any such change has ever done in the most 

 settled times. The new king, with the prince his son, arrived at 

 Greenwich on the 28th of September 1714. Before this the Tories, 

 who had been in power at the death of Queen Anne, had all been 

 dismissed by the Lords-Justices ; and now a new ministry was formed, 

 consisting, with the single exception of the Earl of Nottingham (who 

 was removed within a year), wholly of Whigs, Viscount Townshend 

 and the celebrated Hr. (afterwards Sir Robert) Walpole being its 

 most influential members. A new parliament, which gave ministers 

 a great majority in the Commons, having assembled in January 1715, 

 immediately proceeded to the impeachment of Bolingbroke, Oxford, 

 and their associates, all of whom were compelled for the present to 

 bend to the storm. These determined (or, as some called them, 

 vindictive) measures however probably did not do much to strengthen 

 the position of the new dynasty. The rebellion in Scotland broke out 

 before the end of the year, and was not completely put down till 

 February 1716. One of the consequences by which it was followed 

 was the repeal of the Triennial Act by the 1st George I. stat. 2, c. 38, 

 entitled ' An Act for enlarging the time of continuance of parliaments,' 

 by which it was declared that not only all future parliaments, 

 but even the parliament then sitting, might be continued for seven 

 years, certainly one of the most daring assumptions of power 

 upon which an English parliament has ever ventured. The year 1717 

 was ushered in with the rumour of an intended invasion of the 

 country by Charles XII. of Sweden, who had been irritated by the 

 recent purchase by the King of England, from the Danes, of the two 

 duchies of Bremen and Vetden, which the Danes had taken from 

 Sweden in 1712. To counteract the designs of Sweden, to which 

 the Czar Peter of Russia had been induced to become a party, 

 George I. lost no time in arranging what was called the Treaty of Triple 

 Alliance (concluded at the Hague 4th January 1717) with France and 

 Holland. This war however was not marked by any operations of 

 importance, and it was put an end to by the death of Charles XII. 

 before the end of the following year. Meanwhile, in April 1717, the 

 ministry of Townahcnd and Walpole was broken up by the dismissal 

 of Townshend and the immediate resignation of Walpole the result 

 of internal ilissvn-ions which had been for some time growing, and of 

 the intrigues of a section of the Whig party. The heads of the new 

 cabinet were Hr. (afterwards Lord) Stanhope, who became first lord of 

 the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer in the room of Walpole, 

 and the Earl of Sunderland, who took the office of one of the principal 



secretaries of state, Hr. Addison being taken in aa the other. The 

 intrigue* of Cardinal Alberoni, which bad also been at the bottom of 

 the late demonstrations of hostility by Sweden, now led to a war with 

 Spain. Here England was again cordially assisted by Francf, tliu 

 Spanish minister's ambitious designs embracing at once the expulsion 

 of the Hanoverian family from the government of England, and of the 

 Regent Duke of Orleans from that of France. The Quadruple 

 Alliance between Great Britain, France, the Emperor, and Holland 

 was now arranged, and various military operations took place, the 

 most distinguished of which was the victory obtained by Admiral Sir 

 George Byng (afterwards Lord Torrington) over the Spanish fleet off 

 the coast of Sicily (31 July, 1718), in which about fifteen of the 

 enemy's ships were captured or destroyed. In June 1719, also, a 

 Spanish force that had landed in Scotland, and had been joined by a 

 body of Highlanders under the command of the Earl Harischal and 

 Lord Sesforth, was defeated by General Wightman in an action 

 fought at Glenshield, in Inverness-shire, and compelled to surrender 

 at discretion a check by which a second Jacobite rebellion was at 

 once put down. The differences with Sweden however were finally 

 accommodated by the treaty of Stockholm, signed the 20th of Novem- 

 ber 1719; and before the close of the same year Cardinal Alberoni 

 waa dismissed by the King of Spain, and peace was soon after made 

 also with that power. 



A concurrence of events now brought about a change of ministry. 

 In April 1720 a reconcilement was effected between the king and the 

 Prince of Wales, with whom he had been for some years at variance ; 

 this re-introduced Walpole, who had attached himself to the prince, 

 into the ministry iu the subordinate capacity of paymaster of the 

 forces ; and soon after the terrible explosion of the South-Sea scheme 

 at once overthrew the administration of Stanhope and Sunderlaini l>y 

 the extent to which several members of the cabinet were personally 

 involved, and produced a crisis in which Walpole, with his great 

 financial skill and reputation, found everything thrown into his own 

 hands. He became first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the 

 exchequer in April 1721, commencing from that date a premiership 

 which lasted for twenty-one years, being the longest period that any 

 English minister has continued iu power since the time of Lord 

 Burleigh. Of the transactions in domestic politics under the late 

 administration, the most remarkable were the repeal in 1718 of the 

 Schism Act, passed in the last year of Queen Anne a repeal which, 

 to bis discredit, Walpole, actuated by considerations of party, opposed 

 to the utmost, though happily without success ; and the attempt of 

 the ministers iu 1718 and 1719 to carry their celebrated bill for the 

 limitation of the peerage, in which they were defeated by the junction 

 of Walpole with the Tories. 



The pacific disposition of Walpole, and the continued friendship of 

 France, both under the government of the Duke of Orleans and after- 

 wards under that of Cardinal Floury, tended to preserve the repose of 

 Europe during the latter years of the reign of George I. ; but it was, 

 on the other hand, constantly endangered by the persevering intrigues 

 of the adherents of the family that bad been ejected from the British 

 throne, and still more by the apprehensions of the king for the safety 

 of his German dominions, and the entanglement of the country in 

 continental politics through that connection. The most memorable 

 event of 1722 was the detection of the conspiracy for bringing in the 

 Pretender, in which the celebrated Atterbury, bishop oi Rochester, 

 was involved. War was at length rekindled by the alliance formed 

 between the king of Spain and the emperor by the treaty of Vienna, 

 signed the 30th of April 1725, and the treaty of Hanover, concluded 

 the 3rd of September following, between England, France, and Prussia, 

 to which Sweden afterwards acceded. The siege of Gibraltar was begun 

 by Spain in February 1726, and a British fleet was about the same time 

 sent to the West Indies under command of Admiral Hosier, where 

 in consequence of contradictory or indecisive orders it remained 

 inactive till the admiral and nearly all his crew perished of disease 

 a calamity which at the time occasioned a vehement outcry against 

 the administration. Preliminary articles for a general paritication 

 however were signed at Paris, 31st of May, 1727. On the 3rd of June 

 following, King George embarked at Greenwich for Hanover, but had 

 only reached Osnaburg when he was struck with apoplexy, and died 

 there in the night between the 10th and llth of June, iu the sixty- 

 eighth year of his age, and the thirteenth of his reign. 



By his unfortunate queen, who died on the 2nd of November 1726 

 at the castle of Ahlen iu Hanover, in which she had been immured 

 since 1694 on a charge, never proved and generally disbelieved, of an 

 intrigue with Count Koningsmark, George 1. had one son, George, by 

 whom he was succeeded, and a daughter, Sophia Dorothea, born 16th 

 of March 1687, and married in 1706 to King Frederick II. of Prussia. 

 George I. has the credit of not having allowed himself to be influenced 

 in affairs of state by the female favourites with whose society he solaced 

 himself. Of these, the oue who enjoyed his chief favour after he came 

 to the English throne was Ermengard Melusine de Schuleuberg, who in 

 1716 was created Duchess of Huuster in the Irish peerage, and in 1719 

 Duchess of Kendal in the English peerage, for Ufa ; her niece, Melusine 

 de Schuleuberg (afterwards married to Philip, earl of Chesterfield) 

 being also made Countess of WaUingham for lite in 1722. This woman, 

 who survived till 1743, the king is believed to have married with the 

 left hand. His other chief mistress in his latter days was Charlotte 



