In 1760 Thomas Worsley of Hovingham, a close friend of George III’s favourite, the earl of Bute, penned a letter to his friend and patron insisting on his family’s antiquity. In their possession, he claimed, were ‘authentic documents of coming over with William the Conquerer’. Worsley’s concern to prove that he was no johnny-come-lately had originally been seen when he was appointed to the privy chamber back in the 1730s, but he was still clearly concerned to emphasise his suitability at the time of his appointment as surveyor general of the king’s works (thanks to Bute).

He had nothing to worry about. The Worsleys were an old family, who could trace their ownership of estates in Lancashire to at least the 14th century. Another branch of the family, ultimately settled in Hampshire (and on the Isle of Wight), produced a parliamentary dynasty of their own.

Supporting Thomas Worsley’s assertion of descent from a companion of William the Conqueror were accounts in ‘ancient chronicles’ recording the family’s progenitor as the giant Sir Elias de Workesley, who had followed Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, on ‘crusade’. The 1533 Visitation of Lancashire referred to this character as Elias, surnamed Gigas on account of his massive proportions, and suggested he was a contemporary of William I.

It took some time for the northern Worsleys to establish themselves but by the 15th century a number of distinguished figures had already emerged. The marriage of Seth Worsley to Margaret Booth linked the family to two archbishops of York, Margaret’s uncles, William Booth (archbishop 1452-64) and Lawrence Booth (1476-80). Their son, William, later became dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and towards the end of his life became caught up in the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy, for which he was sent to the Tower.

William Worsley may have conspired against Henry VII, but by the 16th century other members of the family had managed to establish themselves on the fringes of the Tudor court in the retinue of the earl of Derby and it seems to have been thanks to the 3rd earl (Edward Stanley) that Sir Robert Worsley was returned to Parliament in 1553 as knight of the shire for Lancashire. Nine years earlier, he had been knighted at Leith in recognition of his services in the English army. Worsley’s return in 1553 seems to have been somewhat accidental, only occurring as a result of a by-election after one of the other recently elected members had declared himself too ill to serve. By becoming one of the Lancashire knights of the shire, Worsley was following in the footsteps of his father-in-law, Thurstan Tyldesley, who had been elected to the same seat in 1547.

Sir Robert’s son, another Robert, continued the family tradition of following the Derbys by attaching himself to the retinue of the 4th earl (Henry Stanley). A passionate Protestant, as keeper of the gaol at Salford he had numerous recusant (Catholic) prisoners in his care, whom he tried to persuade away from their faith by organising time dedicated to reading from the Bible. How successful that policy was is uncertain, but he found the burden of his role intolerable and by the end of his life he had lost all of his principal estates in Lancashire. Like his father, he seems to have owed his election to Parliament to his patron, Derby, though in his case he was returned for the Cornish borough of Callington.

The best part of a century passed before another Worsley was returned to the Commons. In the interim, having lost their original estates, the family had relocated to Hovingham, near Malton in North Yorkshire. The manor had been acquired by Sir Robert Worsley in 1563 from Sir Thomas Gerard, and the connection was reinforced by the subsequent marriage of the younger Robert to Gerard’s daughter, Elizabeth. In 1685, it was one of the Hovingham Worsleys, Thomas (great-great-grandson of Robert and Elizabeth), who succeeded in being returned for Parliament, where he proved to be ‘totally inactive’.

Inactive he may have been, but this did not prevent him from making his views clear to the lord lieutenant when he was faced with the ‘Three Questions’, framed to tease out opposition to James II’s policies. In response to them he insisted that he would ‘go free into the House, and give my vote as my judgment and reason shall direct when I hear the debates’. This was not at all the response required by the king’s officials, and he was removed from his local offices. He regained them shortly after at the Revolution but it was not until 1698 that he was re-elected to Parliament, again for Malton. In 1712 he was removed from local office again, this time probably on account of his Whiggery.

The older Thomas lived to see the Hanoverian accession, which he doubtless welcomed. Three years before that his son (another Thomas) had been returned to Parliament as one of the Members for Thirsk, after failed attempts in 1708 and 1710. This Thomas Worsley also seems to have played little or no role in the Commons. This was perhaps ironic, given that his marriage to Mary Frankland linked him directly to Oliver Cromwell. Efforts by his father to secure him a government post through the patronage of the earl of Carlisle came to nothing.

The trio of Thomas Worsleys in Parliament was completed by the election for Orford of the second Thomas’s son in 1761. It was this Thomas Worsley, the friend of Bute, who had been so concerned to prove his family’s antiquity. Although he was to sit first for Orford and then (like his forebear, Robert) for Callington, Parliament was not Thomas’s passion. Rather, his interests lay in equestrianism, collecting and architecture. His true claim to fame was rebuilding the family seat at Hovingham, creating the elegant Georgian house that endures to this day, but his dedication to horseflesh was equally strong and he seems to have looked out for suitable mounts for his contacts, the king among them. Writing to Sir James Lowther, 5th bt. (future earl of Lonsdale) in 1763, he mentioned trying out one of Lowther’s horses in front of the king and queen. They liked the animal, but concluded it was not ‘strong enough to carry [the king’s] weight’. [HMC Lonsdale, 132]

Thomas Worsley died in December 1778 at his London residence in Scotland Yard. [Morning Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1778] Just a few months before, he had been contacted by the duke of Ancaster, the lord great chamberlain, requiring him to see to the repair of the House of Lords, which was reported to be ‘in bad condition’. [PA, LGC/5/1, f. 279] By then, he was probably in no fit state to oversee the work.

This Thomas seems to have been the last member of his family to show much interest in national politics until the 20th century. His eldest son, another Thomas, had died four years before him, leaving the inheritance to a younger son, Edward. In 1838 Edward’s nephew, Sir William Worsley, was created a baronet but his interests appear to have been largely confined to his immediate surroundings in North Yorkshire. The 4th baronet was a talented cricketer, serving as captain of Yorkshire, as well as president of the MCC. It was his son, Sir Marcus Worsley, 5th bt., who finally broke the family duck and returned to Parliament, first as MP for Keighley and latterly for Chelsea. In November 1969 he presented a bill to encourage the preservation of collections of manuscripts by controlling and regulating their export. His other chief preoccupation was as one of the church commissioners.

The late duchess of Kent was Sir Marcus’s younger sister. She continued the family’s long tradition of interest in sport (in her case tennis) and quiet dedication to their locality.

RDEE

Further reading
Estate and Household Accounts of William Worsley, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral 1479-1497 (Richard III & Yorkist Trust and London Record Society, 2004), ed. H. Kleineke and S. Hovland
VCH Yorkshire North Riding, volume one
Visitation of Lancashire and a part of Cheshire, 1533, ed. William Langton (Chetham Soc. 1876)

Every 30 January, the rhythm of the parliamentary session in the 17th and 18th centuries was adjusted to make way for the annual commemoration sermon, marking the death of Charles I in 1649. It usually fell to the most junior of the bishops to preach to the Lords in Westminster Abbey, while a senior member of the clergy would perform the same service for the Commons in St Margaret’s. Themed as they were around the subject of expiation for the sins of the nation, the sermons became steadily less well attended as the years went by and by the second half of the 18th century some, like John Wilkes, thought that they should be scrapped and replaced with a day of national rejoicing. Wilkes always made a point of staying away from the chamber on 30 January.

In a similar (though more celebratory) way, the date of the current monarch’s accession was also the occasion for the Members decamping from their chambers and heading across the way to listen to a sermon. For those living under George I, this took place on 1 August and the very first anniversary of his accession in 1715 was marked with an address by the newly minted bishop of Oxford, John Potter (1673/4-1747).

Potter’s background was unusual, though not entirely unique, for an 18th-century bishop. His father had been a linen draper in Wakefield and, more to the point, had been a nonconformist. Potter had been raised as such and educated at the local grammar school (now one of the constituent parts of the Wakefield Grammar School Foundation). From there he proceeded to Oxford, where he transformed himself into a high church Anglican, much to his father’s disgust. Although high church, and with a particular interest in patristics (the study of the early church), Potter remained a confirmed Whig and quickly attracted patronage from some extremely influential people.

From University College, where he had been an undergraduate, Potter proceeded to Lincoln College as a fellow and in 1699, the year of his ordination to the priesthood, he was appointed one of the chaplains to Bishop Hough of Lichfield and Coventry. In 1704, he traded up becoming one of Archbishop Tenison’s chaplains and was thought so closely tied to Tenison that he was known as his ‘darling scribbler’. Two years later, he achieved the key promotion to royal chaplain.

As a clergyman at Court and with close connexions to Oxford, it is perhaps not surprising that he came to the notice of the duke and duchess of Marlborough, and when the regius professorship of divinity became vacant at Oxford, he was their candidate for the place. In his way was the rival claim of George Smalridge, backed by Robert Harley and others, but in the end the Marlboroughs won out (as was so often the case) and in 1708 Potter became Professor Potter.

For the next few years, Potter focused his attentions on his role at the university, never apparently being considered seriously for any of the vacant bishoprics that came up. Indeed, in 1714 it was Smalridge who was promoted first, taking on the poverty-stricken bishopric of Bristol. However, soon after the accession of George I another opportunity arose following the death of Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury. Thus, when Bishop Talbot of Oxford was translated to Burnet’s vacant see, Potter was appointed to replace him at Oxford.

Potter’s 1 August sermon was his first major opportunity to make his mark in his new role. Unsurprisingly, he attracted criticism from Jacobite Tory opponents like Thomas Hearne, at that point still in post as one of the librarians at the Bodleian, but soon to be forced out as he was unwilling to take the oaths to George I. Recording the sermon a few weeks later, Hearne noted that it had been preached by ‘our present sneaking, poor-spirited, cringing, whiggish bishop’. The content, he thought, was ‘vile, silly, injudicious, illiterate, & roguish stuff, sufficiently showing what the author is’. [Hearne, v. 122] Hearne never lost an opportunity of deriding Potter using terms like ‘snivelling’ or ‘white-livered’ to describe him. [Hearne, vi. 123; ix. 360]

Potter’s chosen text was Psalm 20, verse 5: ‘We will rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of our God we will set up our banners’. His theme, obviously enough, was the blessings the nation had received by the peaceful succession of the House of Hanover, and how narrowly they had avoided the prospect of civil war. Not only was the nation peaceful, he urged but he may also have had half a mind on his own significant progress when he argued:

Neither can there be any just complaint, that arts and industry, virtue and public services want suitable encouragement; where the way lies open for ever man to advance himself to the highest honours and preferments and after he hath enjoyed the fruits of all his labour in his own person, there is as great certainty… that he shall transmit them entire to his posterity…

As well as lauding the prospect before them under the house of Hanover, Potter also allowed himself some predictable venting against the horrors of life under a Catholic sovereign. Even other religions, he suggested, might be ‘kind and merciful’. He also trotted out the familiar theme of the importance of divine providence in settling King George among them.

Over the next few years, Potter developed his role in the Church, becoming a close associate of William Wake, archbishop of Canterbury, and co-operating with him closely in opposing two pieces of government-backed legislation. He attracted attention for wading into the ‘Bangorian controversy’, criticizing the apparent Arianism of Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Bangor. Even Hearne had to acknowledge that he did so ‘very deservedly’. [Hearne, vii. 82] He also became close to the Princess of Wales, the future Queen Caroline.

When George I died it was widely rumoured that Potter would be promoted to Bath and Wells. Although that proved not to be the case (he seems to have turned the promotion down) he was the person selected to preach the new king and queen’s coronation sermon in October 1727. Controversially, for a Whig, he used high church terminology to justify George’s claim to the throne by hereditary right. [Smith, 37] More controversially, for a Whig, he also emphasized the need for the new king’s subjects to give their ‘entire submission to his authority’.

It was to be another decade before Potter was finally rewarded with a richer diocese. On Wake’s death in 1737, it was Potter who became Archbishop of Canterbury, rather than Bishop Hare of Chichester, backed by Sir Robert Walpole. The translation was widely attributed to the queen’s personal intervention and came just a few months before her death later that year.

Potter may not be the best-remembered of 18th-century bishops, or indeed a particularly memorable Archbishop of Canterbury. Much more attention is paid to his younger son, Thomas, a Member of Parliament, associate of the so-called Hellfire Club and a generally archetypal Georgian rake. But Potter was important in showing that the Church of England was able to adapt in the period, adopt language used by the Jacobites to justify the Hanoverian monarchy and was open to advancing the son of a Yorkshire linen draper, and a nonconformist one at that, to the highest place in the Church.

RDEE

Further reading:
J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688-1832
Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. C.E. Doble
Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714-1760
The Theological Works of the most reverend Dr John Potter, late Archbishop of Canterbury

Following the death of the queen, according to the Act of Regency of 1706, a group of regents, both appointed and ex officio, took over running the country. On 1 September the Privy Council set up a committee composed of 15 councillors (all members of the House of Lords except for the marquess of Annandale) to look into the Coronation. At their first meeting on the 3rd, there was discussion about the Coronation medal, with Master of the Mint, Sir Isaac Newton’s designs being rejected. The chosen design bore the inscription ‘the Nobles and the People Consenting.’

Thomas Tenison, archbishop of Canterbury, had been one of those to attend the meeting, although the effort led to him suffering from bouts of sudden vomiting. His age led to some modifications to the ceremonial. He did not join the procession from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey, but met the king at the door. A concession was also made to the king’s assumed poor grasp of English when it was decided to conduct most of the ceremony in Latin, which all the main participants could understand.

The aged Tenison, primate since 1694, was the key to the ceremony. He had spent the previous year secluded in Lambeth, protecting his health and ensuring that he out-lived the ailing queen. The chief fear was that if Tenison died the queen would appoint a high church Tory, or even a Jacobite, to succeed him.

Tenison’s age may have been a factor in several missteps during the ceremony. The two bishops traditionally assigned to assist the monarch as supporters, the bishops of Bath and Wells and Durham were subjected to several humiliations. First, they were unable to accompany the king under his canopy by ‘colonels and military men’ thrusting them out of the way. Then, Tenison refused to let them take communion with the king, forcing them to bow to both altar and monarch and retire as gracefully as possible. [Marshall, George Hooper, 130-1].

One of the Countess of Cowper’s companions felt that Tension overdid his demands for the congregation’s consent, asking: ‘does the old fool think that anyone here will say no to his question, when there are so many drawn swords.’ [Cowper Diary, 3-5]. However, Tenison was hardly responsible for the Sicilian and Venetian ambassadors quarrelling over their positions in the gallery reserved for foreign ministers, or for the collapse of some scaffolding which killed over 20 people.

Two other bishops had important roles during the Coronation. Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester was widely believed to harbour Jacobite sympathies, and indeed had been rumoured to have offered to don his episcopal robes and proclaim the Pretender on the queen’s death. Ironically, as he was also dean of Westminster, he was assigned a key role in crowning the new monarch.

The other prominent bishop was William Talbot, of Oxford (later to be translated to Durham), a kinsman of the lord chamberlain, Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury, who was selected to preach the Coronation Sermon. Taking his text from Psalm 118: 24-25, ‘this is the day which the Lord hath chosen, we will rejoice and be glad in it’, Talbot propounded the view that divine providence had directed events towards the accession of King George. The Jacobite commentator Thomas Hearne denounced it as:

very poor, silly, flattering stuff. Unbecoming a Christian, and a scholar, and shows him to be a cringing, time-serving man, and a great rebel and a rogue

Hearne, iv. 422

The Coronation certainly captured the imagination of the elite. The countess of Mar irked her sister, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, by referring to preparations for the event. Tickets were much sought after. The Whig lawyer, Alexander Denton, ended a letter to Lord Wharton about Buckinghamshire politics with a request for a ticket, while the earl of Oxford provided tickets for his nephews. Nevertheless, it was expected to be a gruelling occasion. Peers had to be in place in the House of Lords by 8 a.m. wearing their robes and coronets, with proceedings continuing until late in the afternoon.

Members of the Lords were summoned to attend by individual letters sent out on 6 October by the earl of Suffolk in his role as deputy Earl Marshal. Matters were complicated by the announcement on 19 October of the Coronation honours list. This added five new (British) barons, a viscount and eight new earls, many of them already peers but rewarded with promotions to higher titles. These creations and promotions took their place in the Coronation procession according to their new rank.

Total attendance among the members of the House of Lords can be estimated with reference to The Whole Ceremony of the Coronation (1715), which suggested that about 130 to 135 members of the House of Lords attended (including all but three of those honoured on the previous day). Counting is not straightforward as many peers held official positions and appeared twice in the lists. Catholic peers were not invited, but stalwarts of Queen Anne’s last ministry turned out. Not only Oxford, but Lord Harcourt, the duke of Ormond and Viscount Bolingbroke all graced the occasion, the last having failed in previous attempts to wait upon the king. As he paid homage, the king asked who it was, and upon being told, Bolingbroke ‘turned round and bowed three times down to the very ground’. [Cowper Diary, 3-5].

Of the 16 Scottish Representative Peers elected in 1713, ten attended the Coronation, as did 22 Scottish non-representative peers. With the bishoprics of Ely and Gloucester vacant, 24 bishops were invited. Blackall of Exeter and Lloyd of Worcester did not sit after the Hanoverian Succession and were absent, as were Nicolson of Carlisle and Manningham of Chichester. Fleetwood of St. Asaph and Tyler of Llandaff ought to have been present, as both were seeking promotion, but they do not appear to have attended either.

A banner raised on the roof of Westminster Abbey served as a signal for the guns in Hyde Park and at the Tower of London to commence their salute. Medals were distributed to the crowd and the procession returned to Westminster Hall for dinner and the traditional appearance of the champion. Much fatigued the members of the House of Lords retired to their abodes.

SNH

Further Reading:
Diary Mary Countess Cowper, Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess of Wales, 1714-1720 (1864)

Find the inaugural blog of our Coronation series here.

Read more blogs from our coronation series here.

At the time of George I’s accession, Oxford had a clear reputation as a hive of Toryism. The city’s perceived loyalty to the Stuarts had been one of the reasons for Charles II opting to hold two parliaments there. The corporation was Tory, the university was perceived to be a thorough bulwark of Toryism and both MPs returned in January 1715 were Tory. One, Sir John Walter, a former member of Queen’s College, had held the seat since 1706 and retained it until his death; the other, Thomas Rowney, who had attended St John’s College, had represented Oxford since 1695. Both voted against the administration at every turn.

In appearance, Georgian Oxford was undergoing considerable alterations, carrying on the high-profile building projects started in the second half of the previous century and continued under Queen Anne. A brand new college, Worcester, had been founded in 1714 on the site of the defunct Gloucester Hall, while mediaeval Queen’s College was being reborn in fashionable classical guise. In May 1715 the resident Jacobite Tory antiquarian Thomas Hearne noted the completion of the new hall at Queen’s, and how it had been used for the first time, at which

old Smooth-Boots exerted himself according to his usual pride.

An attempt to do the same to Magdalen in the 1720s and 30s stalled and a scheme to tear down the 15th-century cloisters (now Grade 1 listed) was prevented. All that was completed of the grand vision for a shiny new classical college was the New Buildings range.

If some colleges were busy rebuilding and reimaging themselves, in other respects the city was faced with occasional moments of violent altercation.

Within months of George I coming to the throne Oxford had become a problem for the new regime. There were riots in the city in the summer of 1715. George I’s birthday was marked by some, though the extremely partial Hearne was disparaging about the attempt:

some of the bells were jambled in Oxford, by the care of some of the Whiggish fanatical crew

He believed few else paid any attention, except to ridicule the celebration. So concerned were the authorities at the time of the Jacobite rising that year that in October a regiment of dragoons (described by Hearne as ‘a parcel of pitiful, tired raw fellows’) marched into the city under the command of Colonel Pepper in search of 13 wanted individuals. According to one newsletter they were successful in rounding up a dozen of them, but the 13th, a recently cashiered guards officer called Colonel Owen, who had been lodging at the Greyhound Inn, managed to evade capture by fleeing over Magdalen’s wall. There was an unfortunate incident before the troops sloped off when one of them, indulging in a pint outside Christ Church, shot two children when his gun went off by accident.

Oxford’s reputation as pro-Stuart meant there were often troops on the ground to help keep order. Even so, problems continued into the following year when there was further rioting around the time of the king’s birthday in May 1716, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the presence of Colonel Handasyde’s regiment, which made a show of strength marching around the town. One of those to suffer was Thomas Rowney, who had a house on St Giles next door to his old college, whose windows were broken by the troops.

The following year, in April 1717, yet another riot coinciding with another royal birthday celebration became a subject of enquiry in Parliament. In the Lords, there was lively disagreement about exactly who should be censured for the latest disturbances. Some were for censuring the soldiers quartered there, under the command of Major Franks, while others believed the respective heads of the colleges were the ones who should be upbraided. Lord Coningsby made it clear that he did not believe the soldiers were to blame but the ‘citizens and scholars’.

The situation was complicated because the university was able to argue that royal celebrations in favour of the Prince and Princess of Wales implied loyalty, while others suspected that it was really a demonstration of precisely the opposite, citing previous examples when William III was on the throne and the university had been noisy in support of the heir presumptive, Princess Anne. The Lords ultimately came to the resolution that the heads of houses and the mayor had neglected their duty by not arranging public rejoicing, and that when some fellows and students, along with the officers, gathered for their own celebrations they were set on by the rabble, breaking windows and sparking the ensuing rioting.

Oxford continued to be a problem for future administrations, eager to check the university’s apparent disloyalty. There were even serious proposals to bring the institution under royal control. In spite of all that the administration could do, though, the office of Chancellor of the University remained firmly identified with the Tories; some of the holders were firmly Jacobite. One of the most prominent of these, the 4th duke of Beaufort, who succeeded his brother in the title in 1745 shortly before the outbreak of the latest Jacobite rebellion, lavished gifts on the university. In April 1749 he took a prominent role as one of the trustees for the new Radcliffe Camera, when it was opened formally amid general celebration.

Oxford retained its Tory reputation well into the century. In spite of this, it is striking that of those peers who received a university education, many continued to prefer Oxford over Cambridge. Of these, the vast majority flocked to the largest of the colleges, Christ Church, with other popular options being Magdalen, Trinity, University and New College. [Cannon, Aristocratic Century, 48-50]

Popular perceptions of Oxford may have been of town versus gown, but quite as often the fault-lines were blurred. There were famous rivalries between some colleges, notably Balliol and Trinity, and it was noticeable that whereas both the 3rd and 4th dukes of Beaufort were students at University College, they opted to shower prizes on Oriel College, instead, which was presumably more to their political inclinations. As had been apparent at the time of the 1716 investigations, both the heads of houses and the mayor were jointly upbraided, while some members of colleges, fellows and students alike, along with soldiers and, presumably townspeople, made a point of demonstrating their good Whig credentials in the face of hostility from their Tory counterparts. Early Georgian Oxford was not, thus, always a case of Town v. Gown, but not infrequently a lively expression of partisan politics that cut across the social (and educational) divide.

RDEE

Further Reading:

John Cannon, Aristocratic Century (Cambridge, 1984)

Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, eds. Doble, Rannie and Salter (Oxford Historical Society, 1885-1921)

Click here for more local history blogs. Keep up to date with the research of our Lords 1715-1790 project through the Georgian Lords section of our blog and by following @GeorgianLords on twitter.

Popular impressions of the Hanoverians have rarely been that positive. George I, it is usually thought, was a dull middle-aged man with a somewhat unsavoury past who remained closely tied to his German homeland; George II was an uncultured martinet whose best-known saying was uttered at his wife, Queen Caroline’s deathbed when she urged him to remarry, which he dismissed with ‘non, j’aurai des maîtresses’. George III was mad; George IV a spendthrift.

This problem of attitude to the Georges was the starting point for J.H. Plumb’s The First Four Georges, in which he ‘attempted to portray [them] as human beings caught in exceptional circumstances’, and much has been done subsequently to revise attitudes to the second, third and fourth of the line. Recent biographies of George II and studies of the court over which he presided have painted him as a far more engaged character. George III is well-known for his scientific and artistic interests, and his much-studied ill health has attracted more sympathy than scorn, particularly following the success of Alan Bennett’s play (later film) The Madness of King George. Even George IV has come to be seen as an important arbiter of taste and a more thoughtful character, thanks in part to recent releases from the Royal Archives via the Georgian Papers Programme.

George I, however, remains little known and little loved. Plumb dismissed him as ‘Very stupid and lacking interest in the arts’ while at the same time insisting that he was ‘far from a nonentity’. This chimed with impressions circulated in the nineteenth century that George was interested in England only for what it could offer him rather than the other way around.

The most enduring myth has been that he was unable to speak English, or at best spoke little haltingly. His linguistic weakness was supposedly the reason for the preference shown to his German advisers over most English politicians, who were for the most part similarly limited in their knowledge of foreign languages (Lord Carteret being one obvious exception). This, it has been argued, helped pave the way for authority being delegated to his ministers, while George remained little more than a cipher.

Yet how true is it? When Lord Halifax met the then elector in 1706 he recorded that they conversed in ‘very ill French’. Recent publications have certainly done nothing to question the assumption that George struggled with English. Writing in a volume produced to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Hanoverian succession Tim Blanning insisted that George was ‘Handicapped by his rudimentary knowledge of the English language’, while Tracy Borman asserted that because of his lack of English George’s preferred entertainments were ballets and pantomimes. His poor grasp of English, or at least his inability to pick up on the cultural reference, may also have been behind the supposedly insulting choice of Psalm 75, verses 3-6, as the text for the thanksgiving day marking the first anniversary of his reign in August 1715:

Set not your horns on high:

I said unto them, set not up

Your raised horns on high…

According to the thoroughly hostile commentator, Thomas Hearne, the selection gave ‘great offence to the Whigs, who say it was done on purpose by way of affront to King George, who is known to be a cuckold.’

The perpetuation of the view that George had little or no English is the more remarkable, however, given that the seminal biography by Ragnhild Hatton committed an entire sub-section to the question of the king’s English, and concluded that when he arrived in England his knowledge ‘was not as limited (or non-existent) as once believed’. Hatton detailed how prior to his accession one correspondent, writing to George in English, flattered his command of the language; and how Robert Harley (future earl of Oxford) writing in 1710 insisted that he knew George possessed ‘an English heart’. Both seem to indicate that George had more than a smattering of English at the time of his accession. References to him holding talks with the notoriously unpolished 3rd earl of Berkeley about the condition of French sea defences early in the reign also suggest that he was capable of holding a technical conversation.

What, then, is the evidence for the king’s supposed ignorance of his new kingdom’s language? A comment made by Lady Ferrers complaining to a correspondent in August 1714 that the new king spoke ‘neither French nor English’ and consequently would not ‘be very good company’ was certainly wide of the mark: if nothing else, there is no doubting that he spoke French.  Confidence may have been part of the problem. He disliked dining in public at his English court, unlike in Hanover where he was considerably more outgoing, and he avoided addressing Parliament directly, allowing the lord chancellor to deliver the speech at the opening of sessions while he looked on from the throne. In July 1721 although the papers noted that he was expected in the Lords ‘to open the new session with a speech’, he merely spoke briefly (in English) to inform the two Houses that he had once again delegated the task to the lord chancellor, who then read it out as usual. By the 1720s, though, George had clearly made progress in the language. Official documents were no longer translated into French, which suggests that he was more than capable of following arguments relating to policy in English. There is also evidence, via his annotations, of him engaging directly at a sophisticated level*.

Even if George never quite cast off his own preference for speaking French or German in private, he undoubtedly understood that for the dynasty to prosper it was important that the following generations were not so encumbered. In 1705 Sir Rowland Gwynne had recommended that someone be sent to Hanover to instruct the electoral prince (the future George II) in English as his tuition had thus far been undertaken by a German whose ‘pronunciation was not good’. George I was also eager to ensure that instruction in English should be a key aspect of his grandson, Prince Frederick’s education and by the time the prince arrived in England in the winter of 1728 there is every reason to suppose that he was fluent.

It is telling, though, that at private moments George I, George II and Prince Frederick preferred to fall back on French (or German). When Prince Frederick lay dying in the spring of 1751, his last words were said to have been ‘Je sens la mort!’ rather than anything more handily patriotic. When told of his heir’s death, according to one source, George II’s response was to repeat the information in German: ‘Fritz ist tot’. Another source reported that his reaction was in English, but was the no less asinine, ‘why, they told me he was better’. By flitting in and out of different languages, though, the royal family were far from alone within British polite society in making use of a fairly broad polyglot language that might be littered with occasional bon mots.

Nothing could be more different from Prince Frederick’s son, who succeeded as George III in 1760. The first of the Hanoverian kings to be born in England, his opening speech to Parliament following his accession emphasized his Britishness, making a no doubt conscious reference to Queen Anne. His choice of the term ‘Briton’ when describing himself was every bit as controversial as if the king had insisted on giving his speech in French or German, but it undoubtedly marked a turning point for the dynasty as it attempted to shuffle off the image of being ‘foreign’.

(*One example cited by Hatton has, though, since been demonstrated to have been by George II and not George I)

RDEE

Further Reading:

J.H. Plumb, The First Four Georges (1957)

Ragnhild Hatton, George I (1978)

Andrew C. Thompson, George II: king and elector (2012)

Queen Anne got some satisfaction at having outlived her heir, Sophia. The Electress had, even a few days before her death, agitated for a member of her family to come to England to secure the Hanoverian succession. It was an agitation that Anne found offensive and had repeatedly resisted for over a decade. Contemporaries gossiped about whether Anne would prefer to be succeeded by her half-brother, James Edward Stuart. According to John Wesley, Queen Anne told Archbishop John Sharp of York,

I love my brother well: but I never had the least thought or desire of resigning my crown in his favour. I would not, if I could: for it can never be good for England to have a Papist on the throne. And I could not place him upon it if I would: my people would not suffer it.

So for contemporaries the issue was whether and how the Hanoverians would succeed. Today assumptions are often made about how closely related Anne and George I were. Jacobites liked to emphasise how distant the Hanover family connection was, as well as George’s ‘alien’ German ways. Historians have often followed this, even suggesting that there were between thirty and fifty people more closely related to Anne disbarred from the succession by the Act of Settlement of 1701 because of their Catholicism. In fact the number who stood between Anne and George were very few. There were only six living people with a closer kinship to Anne than George. The reason for this is partly because of the extraordinary poor health of the Stuarts.

Anne herself, of course, was the end of a line of Stuart descent, her sister Mary having died childless in 1694 and her brother-in-law William, also a Stuart through his mother, in 1702. Anne’s father, James II had died in 1701 (leaving Francis Edward as his heir) and his brothers, Charles II and Henry Duke of Gloucester, had both died without legitimate issue. James II’s sister, Henrietta, had married Phillip d’Orleans and converted to Catholicism. Henrietta had four children, only one of whom was still alive in 1714, Anne Marie d’Orleans, who had married Victor Amadeus of Savoy. Anne Marie had two children, Charles Emmanuel and Victor Amadeus, both of whom were Catholics. But Henrietta’s descendants in 1714 represent three of the six cousins who stood between Anne and George of Hanover.

In the generation above James II, Charles II and Henrietta, the Stuart line had also been unlucky: James I and Anne of Denmark had eight children, six of whom died young or without issue. These included Henry Prince of Wales, who died of typhoid in 1612 and is often thought of as a great renaissance prince. This left Charles I and his sister Elizabeth, who married Frederick of the Palatine. Elizabeth and Frederick were, briefly, the elected King and Queen of Bohemia, reigning less than a year before they were ejected from their new kingdom by the Catholic Hapsburgs. Thereafter, Elizabeth, often called the ‘Winter Queen’, lived in Holland and for the last two years of her life in London following Charles II’s restoration. Elizabeth was hugely popular in England, having suffered for her Protestantism. Her portraits were some of the most widely copied and there can have been few English men and women in the period 1660-1714 who did not admire her. Elizabeth had thirteen children; of these only two had legitimate issue. The first was Edward, who became a Catholic and had two daughters, Anne Henrietta and Benedicta, both of whom were alive in 1714. These are the other two living cousins who were closer in kinship to Anne than George of Hanover. Elizabeth of Bohemia’s youngest daughter was Sophia, who married Ernest Augustus of Hanover in 1658.

Elizabeth, the Winter Queen, died in 1662, and was interred in Westminster Abbey. As the sister of the executed Charles I, and mother of the royalist heroes Prince Rupert and Prince Maurice, she had been briefly feted in England in the last two years of her life. Her daughter Sophia was also strong in her identity as a Stuart princess. When after 1701 some tried to portray her as a foreign princess she indignantly emphasised that she regarded herself as thoroughly English. She read the English newsletters, received visitors from England and had a number of English correspondents.

It is moreover to Sophia that a little-known feature of royal law is due: the Sophia Naturalisation Act of 1705. This confirmed that Sophia was a naturalised British citizen and inadvertently granted that right to all their heirs of her body, together with the style of prince or princess of Great Britain and Ireland. It is to this act, confirmed in a legal ruling in 1957, that the current princes of Hanover claim British citizenship and also the right to the title prince of Great Britain and Ireland.

When in May 1714 the eighty four year old Sophia of Hanover died, Queen Anne referred to the event as ‘chipping porridge’ –meaning it had no significance for her. This was not because Sophia was such a distant cousin, but because Anne wanted to disguise the annoyance she had felt from Sophia’s repeated requests for a family member to come to England ready to claim the throne on Anne’s death. It was, as Queen Elizabeth I had said, like having her own shroud laid out before her. However it would be a mistake to assume that George of Hanover was a remote kinsman, he was a close Stuart cousin.

W.G.

Further reading:

– J. N. Duggan, Sophia of Hanover: From Winter Princess to Heiress of Great Britain, London, Peter Owen, 2010.

– Edward Gregg, Queen Anne London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1980.

– F. Holmes, The Sickly Stuarts, The Medical Downfall of a Dynasty, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2003.

– Rosalind K. Marshall, The Winter Queen, The Life of Elizabeth of Bohemia, 1596-1662, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1998.

– J. Wesley, Concise History of England, London, 1775-6, 4 vols.

– James Anderson Winn, Queen Anne, Oxford University Press, 2014.

Professor William Gibson is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford Brookes University and Director of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History.

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