For the leading players in the South Sea drama which was about to unfold, the ground had also shifted. John Blunt had to court the new regime, as he had courted Harley, but Robert Walpole, at the age of thirty-eight was back in power. He held office first as Paymaster of the Forces, and then, within a year, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, posts which allowed him to see at first hand the debts of the nation, and which also gave him a licence to line his own pockets.
Political stability was absent at the start of George’s reign. He was a contingent king, an interloper who had taken the throne after a political battle of wills, not through divine right or the hereditary principle. His presence assured the Protestant succession, but not the warm embrace of his new countrymen. Both sides in this convenient compact eyed each other warily, not knowing quite what to expect; neither felt an emotional pull towards the other. George was an administrative convenience, a fruit grafted on to Anne’s barren reign, a foreigner who would have to win the respect of his citizens, but who possessed neither the charm nor the intellect to do so. Cruelly, the traveller and letter-writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu noted: ‘The King’s character may be comprised in a very few words. In private life he would have been called an honest block-head.’
This was an exaggeration. George was a complicated man, not clever but not entirely stupid either; idle, but energetic enough to want to rule in his own way without interference, and short-tempered enough to cast out those who did not fall into line. At fifty-four, he was not in the full flush of youth; nor was he handsome, but he more than made up for this with an extraordinary appetite for women which was to make him an object of ridicule in his kingdom – less for his sexual charge per se, more for the way he chose to express it: the objects of his desire were, by common consent, downright ugly. Added to which, there was something positively medieval about his family background. His wife Sophia had once taken a lover, perhaps in retaliation for her husband’s considerable dedication to his extramarital activities. George’s revenge was terrible to behold. The lover, the Swedish Count von Königsmark, disappeared after he was lured to a false rendezvous with his lady. George probably ordered the murder, though he was away in Berlin when it happened. Sophia was divorced and incarcerated in the Castle of Ahlden, near Hanover, forbidden to see her children again. For her, there was no fairy-tale rescue by a handsome prince. For thirty-two years she languished there until her death, while George frolicked with his mistresses.
The two mistresses he brought with him to England were both, in their own ways, improbable recipients of their monarch’s favours. Baroness Eremengarda Melusina von der Schulenburg was tall and bony. She was called ‘the Maypole’ by the King’s subjects; Madame Carlotte Sophia Kielmansegge, fifty and fat, was known as ‘the Elephant’. As a child, the writer Horace Walpole was scared witless by her: ‘I remember being terrified at her enormous figure … [she] was as corpulent and ample as the Duchess was long and emaciated. Two fierce black eyes, large and rolling beneath two lofty arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distinguished from the lower parts of her body, and no part restrained by stays – no wonder that a child dreaded such an ogress!’
Money, or the lack of it, was still the driving force in politics, and with the presence of the royal mistresses it became even more so. Their grasping nature, the rapidly acquired debts of the new monarch and the shattering of the government Exchequer through war combined to form a corruption which wrapped itself around the very institutions of state. In this the strangeness of King George I also played a part. He was a foreigner, who spoke little or no English; an outsider, who had brought with him not just his own women to share the royal bed, but his own placemen who staffed his court and who needed to be bribed. An American businessman, William Byrd, attended court in the hope of being appointed Governor of Virginia and was advised to bribe one of the leading German courtiers, while the future Duke of Chandos oiled his way through the early years of George’s reign in order that his brother could become cashier of the Salt Office, dishing out 250 lottery tickets here, 400 guineas there. In 1715 he gave £3,000, an enormous sum, to Madame Kielmansegge, followed by a ring for her daughter. The Maypole, in particular, saw that she could make serious money out of her status. She sold the patent for copper coinage in Ireland for £14,000 and she also sold peerages. George’s arrival on the throne had accentuated the establishment’s tendency towards corruption.
The King’s mistresses also played their part in overturning the established political order, to promote the men who were to prove susceptible to the overtures of the South Sea Company. The catalyst for political change was the legal obstacle the two consorts faced in their desire to make their mark on British society, a desire which began to undermine, insidiously, Walpole’s return to office. The mistresses wanted to acquire the status which would be the true sign that they had been accepted by their adoptive country, that their foreign accents and their physical unattractiveness would no longer be the butt of jokes. They considered that the best social defence they could gain against such cruelty was to become aristocrats. But the Act of Settlement of 1701 prevented them from receiving titles or any position of profit under the Crown.
This did not, however, prevent them from working out a cunning way round the difficulty. Madame Schulenburg decided to become naturalised, and campaigned to be granted an Irish title. So it was that the Maypole was transformed into the Duchess of Munster. This merely spurred her rival for the King’s affections into a fury of action. The Elephant too became naturalised, and after much trumpeting of her cause was rewarded with the tide Countess of Darlington, though not until 1722. Here was the formal recognition that the Maypole and the Elephant stood at the pinnacle of society. But it didn’t entirely work. The mistresses were too comic, the King too foreign, for the country to stand in awe. Indeed, the King’s preference for these women was just too alien for popular taste, as the balladeers made clear in scatological vein:
At St James’s of late
On a great bed of State
A dismal Disaster did happen;
For Munster’s good Grace
In her Brunswick’s Embrace,
was taken indeed, but not napping.
But, alas! In this Hurry,
While with too much Fury,
The rampant old lecher embrac’d her
Her Ladyship’s Weight
(which we all know is great)
Brought down on ’em both, the Bed’s Tester.
In the face of such ridicule, the attainment of titular aristocracy was never going to be enough to sate the mistresses’ ambition. The Maypole continued her campaign for social acceptance, deciding that an Irish title was not enough and that she wanted an English one instead. Her preferred route was to exploit the jockeying for position among the ambitious politicians in and around the government.
She had several men to choose from, all of them eager for power. Charles, the third Earl of Sunderland, was a court man to the tips of his well manicured fingers. It was in his blood: he was the son of a minister to three kings and connected through marriage to perhaps the greatest family of them all, the Marlboroughs. He was cunning and clever, self-possessed and rich; he spoke French fluently, and floated easily through the European courts; indeed, he lived and breathed court life, at ease with himself and with greatness. But Sunderland, though he could offer George a window on the world which the introverted king could not see for himself, was not the only Whig with ambitions. James Stanhope, who later became the first Earl Stanhope, was already a master of foreign diplomacy, the war hero who had fought valiantly in the War of the Spanish Succession as commander of the British forces and who had been imprisoned for a year. Politically, he was the friend of everyone, but he was committed to no one.
Sunderland and Stanhope were ranged against Charles, the second Viscount Townshend, who had been appointed by George as his first minister. He had none of Sunderland’s sophistication: indeed, upon his retirement a decade hence he would become known as ‘Turnip Townshend’ because of his passion for experimental farming. But what he lacked in finesse he made up for with hard work, notably as a commissioner negotiating the