- 7/11/2025
Category
đ
LearningTranscript
00:00In 2014, it's 300 years since George I and his family arrived in Britain to begin the Georgian
00:15era. This was the age in which modern Britain as we know it would be formed. Why should we care
00:23about these Georgians? They didn't give us the industry of the Victorians or the sensational
00:29head-chopping of Henry VIII. But they did champion the idea of liberty and make Britain a more
00:36open society, one in which satire flourished and a new form of expression was invented,
00:42the novel. Bizarrely, this Georgian age that seems so quintessentially British actually
00:51has a story beginning here in Hanover in northern Germany. As outsiders, the first German Georges
01:01were able to be modernisers. It was on their watch that cabinet government first emerged.
01:09For this series, I've been given access to the Royal Collection as pieces are brought together
01:14for an exhibition at the Queen's Gallery Buckingham Palace, telling the story of the first Georges
01:21through artworks they commissioned or owned.
01:26We tend to think of the Georgian era in terms of the madness of George III or the heroines
01:33of Jane Austen. But I think the key to it all lies right at the start in the reigns of the
01:38the first two Georgian kings. Under George I and George II, Britain became the world's
01:45most liberal and cosmopolitan society. We owe so much to these German kings who made Britain.
01:53In 1701, Britain faced a big problem. The heir to the throne, Princess Anne, had failed to
02:14provide the royal family's next generation. She'd gone through seventeen pregnancies in her desperate
02:22attempt to produce an heir. But her last surviving son had just died.
02:34Parliament took drastic action. They had the idea of importing a ready-made royal family from overseas.
02:43This is one of the most important documents in the whole history of the British monarchy. This is the piece of parchment that changed history. It's the Act of Settlement from 1701 that sets out who can, and importantly who can't, be king or queen. First of all, you've got to have some Stuart blood. You've got to be related either to the late
03:12Queen Mary or to Princess Anne. But trumping that, you've got to be a Protestant. As it says here, if you profess the Popish religion or marry a Papist, you shall be excluded.
03:31This act came into the Queen Mary.
03:32This act came into force as a result of what Protestants called the Glorious Revolution. This was when James II was chucked off the throne for his Roman Catholic sympathies and his belief in the divine right of kings.
03:50James II. James II. James II was now in exile in France. But with the British Protestant royal line dying out, Parliament needed to find a new ruler who wasn't Catholic.
04:05Who should rule next?
04:08So now the Protestant aristocracy of England have to look back up the Stuart family tree in search of a Protestant heir. We go through James II, Charles II, Charles I. We get right back up to James I. And through his daughter Elizabeth, we find here Sophia.
04:30Electra Sophia of Hanover is pivotal in the history of the British monarchy. She was the next Protestant in the Royal Stuart line.
04:43That looks quite simple, but it wasn't. Queen Anne had actually had no less than 50 nearer relatives than Sophia who were all passed over on the grounds that regrettably, but unacceptably, they were Catholics.
04:58SofĂa was the matriarch of a princely family who ruled the remote German territory of Hanover. But now she was first in line to the British throne.
05:15SofĂa forms part of a German tradition of royal women leading the social and intellectual life of a court. Very unlike the British tradition where we have the badly educated princesses Mary and Anne who were dull as ditch water.
05:31In her statues, SofĂa is holding a book by her personal friend, the philosopher Leibniz. And she and Leibniz exchanged many, many letters discussing questions like the nature of the human soul. As well as Peter the Great of Russia, it was said that Louis XIV himself was in love with her brilliance.
05:50Sophia was thrilled about her new status and was desperate to come to London. But Queen Anne didn't want a rival queen, particularly one who was a whole lot cleverer, showing her up in her own kingdom.
06:05Sophia just had to sit and wait for Anne to die. So why have you never heard of Queen Sophia, the first of Great Britain? She would have been very good at the job. She was intelligent and rational.
06:20She was tolerant and enlightened. But very unluckily, just two months before Queen Anne died, Sophia was out here in the gardens and it was during a thunderstorm that she drops down dead.
06:35It's rather melancholy being here in her boudoir and thinking about Sophia, the greatest queen we never had.
06:44Sophia did not die in vain. Her descendants would inherit the British crown.
06:56It was her eldest son, Georg Ludwig, who was to become King George I of Great Britain.
07:04Unlike his mother, he was uncharismatic, not particularly impressive and he already had enemies.
07:13Without the act of settlement, George's distant cousin, the Catholic James Stuart would have become King James III.
07:23He was in exile in France. Although he was only 13 years old, he was already plotting how to get his crown back.
07:32So when George arrived to start his new life as King of England and Scotland, he was getting into a pretty tricky situation.
07:46He sailed up the River Thames and landed here at Greenwich. But he didn't exactly receive a royal welcome. There was a mix up. The crowd that had gathered mistook George's son for their new king.
08:00So when George himself disembarked, the spectators had sort of dribbled away.
08:07George's new kingdom really was new. The splicing together of England and Scotland had only taken place seven years previously.
08:16Things were unstable. If I was a gambler, I wouldn't have put much money on the survival of this Hanoverian dynasty.
08:25George I was crowned at Westminster Abbey on the 20th of October 1714.
08:35All the great and good of Protestant Britain were in attendance.
08:40This is the actual crown that George wore 300 years ago. It doesn't have any real jewels in it. Because George, being frugal, rented them.
08:55And look at the great big cross on the top. It was George's Protestant religion that had put him on the throne.
09:02And in this coronation for the first time, a copy of the Bible in English, a key text of the Protestant Reformation, was carried in the procession.
09:12But poor old George's English language skills weren't his strongest point. You can't blame him. It was after all his fourth language.
09:20Unfortunately, though, it was now the language of his new subjects and he couldn't really speak it very well.
09:26He couldn't understand what was happening in the ceremony. But nevertheless, the establishment were delighted.
09:33One spectator said that the sight of the coronation brought tears to her eyes.
09:38They felt that everything was safe now. Their liberty, their property and their religion.
09:44The Lord is the sun and the shield. The Lord is the sun and the shield.
09:52But the coronation was preaching to the converted. To many of his newly Georgian subjects, the idea of being ruled by a German took some getting used to.
10:03George's coronation at Westminster Abbey was slightly marred by xenophobia.
10:10Spectators were heard to call out, down with the German and out with the foreigners.
10:15If you look at the popular protests against George at this time, there's quite a funny theme running throughout them.
10:21This idea that Hanover is a place full of yokels.
10:25In pamphlets, we see pictures of George hoeing a row of turnips.
10:28There's a song calling him Turnip Head.
10:31And I'm sorry to say that on the day of the coronation, one man was pulled out of the crowd for brandishing one of these.
10:38It's a turnip on a stick.
10:40Of all the roots of Hanover, the turnip is the best.
10:43Tis his salad when tis raw, and his sweet meat when tis dressed.
10:47Ben a hoeing, he may go, may go, may go.
10:51And his turnips he may hoe.
10:54The turnip was a foreign vegetable that suggested George's German roots.
10:59Indeed, singing the turnip song became a popular way to protest against the new king.
11:05The Jacobites, supporters of the would-be King James III, loved it.
11:12It wasn't the most auspicious of starts.
11:15And the balance of power between king and parliament had shifted.
11:21Parliament thought that their new pet king ought to follow their rules and do what they wanted.
11:27The king wasn't even allowed to leave his new country without parliament's permission.
11:34George I was a lot less wealthy than some of his contemporary European counterparts.
11:41He just didn't have the cash to splash on palaces like Versailles.
11:46Parliament gave him just ÂŁ700,000 a year, not enough to run a really big court.
11:53George quickly realised that he needed to work with parliament and not against them.
11:58Some of his Stuart predecessors had been constantly head-to-head with parliament
12:02in some very violent and destructive confrontations, insisting upon their divine right to rule.
12:09But George was much more conciliatory.
12:18He had to be.
12:19Parliament had given the throne to George and perhaps they would take it away from him.
12:26He was a monarch appointed not by God, but by men.
12:32Here at the Painted Hall in Greenwich is George's mission statement.
12:38It was his promise to the British to be the king they wanted.
12:44Desmond Shaw Taylor is surveyor of the Queen's pictures and an experienced decoder of Georgian art.
12:54What was the aim of this big painting at the end?
12:56It is to show the arrival of the Hanoverians as the fulfilment of the destiny of the Glorious Revolution.
13:04I think that's the idea.
13:05So we've got William and Mary up here, then Queen Anne.
13:08And then on the end wall, on the sort of high altar as it were, George I and his large family.
13:14They are a race, aren't they? There's an awful huge number of them.
13:18There are plenty of them, lots of progeny, exactly.
13:20And I think that's an important part of the Hanoverian offer, as it were.
13:25So it taught me through who they all are.
13:27It starts with Sophia, the sort of matriarch of the dynasty.
13:30Absolutely, yeah. There's the electress Sophia of Hanover.
13:33Her son, George I, sits enthroned with his elbow firmly resting on the globe.
13:38Designs for... Expansion.
13:39Yeah, a bit of expansion going on.
13:41And then his eldest son, George II, stands on his left-hand side.
13:46And is this an accident that they're facing away from each other?
13:50Well, it's certainly suggestive if it is an accident, because they didn't get on.
13:54By contrast, the poor old Queen Anne sitting up all lonely and solitary splendour in the sky, no children at all.
14:00The artist has absolutely exploited that to give a sense almost of homely reassurance to this new dynasty.
14:06Particularly in the way that the grandchildren are presented playing around on the very steps,
14:13as allegories of art and culture, yes.
14:16But also, I think, as the idea that a sort of uncomplicated domestic life,
14:22this is something which the new dynasty is bringing.
14:25What are the differences between the Stuarts and the Hanoverians in the way they're depicted then?
14:30Well, it may be just an accident of what space was available,
14:34but it seems as if the Hanoverians are bringing us right down to earth.
14:38With a bump almost.
14:39With a bump, exactly.
14:40Here they are, face to face, shake hands.
14:42The illusion, instead of the idea that the vault is open to the sky and you just sort of look up and wonder,
14:49the illusion is that there is a series of steps leading up from the high table
14:55to the throne upon which George I sits, so one can just walk up and meet him.
15:00And in fact, the artist himself, James Thornhill, is showing himself standing on that step,
15:05almost like a footman pointing to the king saying,
15:08you know, go and talk to him, he's fine.
15:12So it's not really a revolution, this, it's more of an evolution.
15:15I think that's what they would like us to think.
15:20This was a Georgian manifesto.
15:23The king wanted people to know that he was offering a very different proposition
15:27to those tyrannical, absolutist, pig-headed old Stuarts.
15:33George I set up home at Kensington Palace, and here on the stairs are portraits
15:43that he had painted of members of his household.
15:46Quite unusually, his lower servants are included.
15:51They were an international lot, and this caused trouble at court.
15:56The most infamous example relates to the king's supposed pair of mistresses,
16:03the elephant, the fat one, and the maypole, the ever so slightly thinner one.
16:11The fat one, the elephant, was in fact the king's illegitimate half-sister,
16:18and he just had the one skinny mistress, the maypole.
16:21This reputation that George developed as a sort of deviant sexual athlete
16:26in fact came from the xenophobic British courtiers.
16:30The naughty Lord Chesterfield, for example, put it about that the king rejected no woman
16:36if she were very willing, very fat, and had great breasts.
16:41With the consequence, the candidates for the position of royal mistress
16:45strained and swelled to put on weight.
16:49Some succeeded, and others burst.
16:53All of the foreigners close to the king came in for this sort of scurrilous sexual slander,
16:59including the king's two Turkish valets seen here.
17:03This is Mustafa with the white beard, and Muhammad in the blue cloak.
17:08Muhammad was very close to the king.
17:11He helped him to get dressed in the mornings, and he even treated his haemorrhoids.
17:16And of course, gossip grew up about this.
17:19People said that the king keeps his Turks for abominable uses.
17:26But these same aristocrats who criticised George behind his back
17:30were probably as keen as anybody to carry favour with the new regime.
17:35This even extended to copying George's taste.
17:40The new dynasty were early adopters of a brand new architectural style.
17:45It was the complete opposite to the fancy French showiness loved by the Stuarts.
17:51We can see the prototype round the back of Hampton Court Palace.
17:56This looks like a little country house, but it isn't.
17:59It's a new kitchen added to Hampton Court by George I for his German cooks.
18:04They made his German sausages in there.
18:06This is the first building in Britain in the Neo-Palladian style.
18:11It's very stark and simple and symmetrical, not much external decoration.
18:17And the secret of its success lies in the harmony of the proportions,
18:22the relationship between the horizontal and the vertical.
18:26This style would catch on, and all over Georgian Britain
18:30you'd find country houses sprouting up that look just like this.
18:33This was a new, orderly and rational way of seeing the world.
18:41And you just need to look at cities like Bath and Edinburgh
18:44to see that it would catch on.
18:51The inspiration was the 16th century architect Andrea Palladio,
18:55who'd recreated the works of the ancient Romans.
18:59Neo-Palladianism was ancient Rome, brought back to life with an Anglo-Saxon twist.
19:06The Georgians were saying,
19:08Britons, we are the heirs to the power of Rome,
19:11and together we can build a new empire.
19:17An important promoter of this new style of Neo-Palladianism
19:20was Lord Burlington, a member of the King's inner circle.
19:25Burlington's own house at Chiswick is a magnificent example,
19:30as I'm shown by the architectural historian Carol Fry.
19:36So Carol, tell me why this is a Neo-Palladian room that we're in.
19:40Well, it picks up on Roman antique architecture.
19:44So everything about this room is referenced to an antique source.
19:48For example, the coffered ceiling is a direct replica of the Basilica of Maxentius in Rome.
19:55And we've got these very ornate pediments,
19:58and yet the room remains very cold and spartan and very sparse,
20:03which was a trait of Neo-Palladian architecture.
20:06Burlington was a tastemaker and a trendsetter.
20:11Chiswick was a Neo-Palladian masterpiece.
20:14But there was something else going on under the Georgian veneer.
20:18There is some very questionable imagery in this building,
20:22treasonous imagery, which doesn't need to be here.
20:24Treasonous imagery is hidden within this building, you say?
20:27Yes, not hidden very well.
20:28It's there to be seen if you have eyes to see it.
20:31The painting up there of Charles I and his family,
20:35and he was a very great Stuart King,
20:37and that's hanging over that doorway directly in front of the door.
20:41So as soon as visitors would come in,
20:43they would see the old Stuart King hanging there,
20:46not very Hanoverian.
20:47These are the guys who are out of power.
20:49They've been exiled.
20:50Absolutely.
20:51And what's going on with the star that we're standing on?
20:54Well, that's important because this is the Order of the Garter,
20:57which was an honour given out by kings.
21:00And the fact that this is placed underneath this painting of the Stuart King,
21:05it is possible that Lord Burlington was alluding to the fact
21:08that actually he had been given the Order of the Garter
21:11by the exiled king, the would-be James III.
21:14Lord Burlington, he's right at the heart of the Hanoverian establishment.
21:18His wife works for Caroline the Princess.
21:21Isn't this all just a mad conspiracy theory?
21:23It could be indeed, but then one has to wonder
21:26why he did incorporate these treasonous images into his building.
21:29That's a very good point.
21:30I could show you some more if we head through into that room.
21:32Take me to your secret clues.
21:35As you can see up there, it's the second Earl of Burlington,
21:38so the Earl's father,
21:40and he's sitting with two of his close cronies,
21:42and they're obviously having a toast.
21:44They've each got a glass of wine.
21:46The central figure is the Earl, and he is holding a ring over the contents of his glass,
21:52which literally was a toast across the water.
21:55So he was toasting kings across the water, which is none other than the exiled James III as he would have been.
22:01Who's living in France across the Channel?
22:03Precisely.
22:04So that is a piece of Jacobite propaganda.
22:07There's no doubt about it.
22:08Now, if what you're saying is right,
22:10and that people right at the heart of the Hanoverian establishment,
22:13living in Neo-Palladian buildings,
22:15could in fact be secretly expressing treason through their architecture,
22:19what does that say about the stability of the Georgian monarchy?
22:22Well, it wasn't very stable.
22:24There was a lot of support for the Jacobites.
22:26Nobody knew which way it was going to go.
22:28In living memory, we had kings that had been ousted from the throne,
22:32and new ones brought in,
22:34and we also had kings that had been returned from exile,
22:36like Charles II in 1660.
22:39So it was an uncertain time.
22:41There was almost a civil war going on under the surface,
22:43and no-one knew who to support.
22:451715 brought the first big crisis of George's reign,
22:55a rebellion by the Jacobites.
22:58They intended to replace George with his Catholic nemesis, James III,
23:03and were joined by some disgruntled Tory members of Parliament.
23:10One of them shouted out in a debate
23:12that George could never love Britain.
23:16The rebellion was crushed, but it made George paranoid.
23:21He turfed out all the Tories from his inner circle,
23:24and their rival Whigs were allowed to govern unchallenged.
23:29But there was still the problem of Jacobite propaganda.
23:33George the Turnip-Headed Yokel.
23:38To counter this image of George the Turnip-Head,
23:41his supporters instead described him as George the Dragon Slayer.
23:46They associated him with the patron saint of England,
23:50the Soldier Saint, who ever since the Reformation
23:53had been shown slaying the Dragon of Popery or Roman Catholicism.
23:59Associating German George I with the very English Saint George
24:03did a lot to naturalise his foreignness.
24:06I think that this portrait of George is the most important of his reign.
24:15Because this image would pass through the hands of every single one of his subjects.
24:21It's being worked on here at the Royal Collection Trust's conservation studios.
24:27This portrait of George I was painted just seven months into his new reign.
24:36He's projecting quite a serious and sober image here.
24:40The main colour is grey.
24:42There isn't the sort of flamboyance of his Stuart predecessors.
24:46And the picture is in profile and that's because it was used for the image on his coins.
24:52These little mini-portraits of the king were the closest that most of his new subjects were ever going to get to him.
24:58Another important thing is that he's dressed in armour.
25:01He's saying, I'm not afraid to fight for my rights.
25:05And he'd spent most of the 1690s fighting for Christianity against the Muslim Ottoman Empire.
25:12This is an important part of his image.
25:14Onward, Christian soldiers.
25:17George had one more obvious advantage.
25:20He was a man.
25:22Daniel Defoe was one of many writers who rejoiced that Queen Anne was gone.
25:27There was no longer a useless woman on the throne, he wrote,
25:31but a warrior king able to wield the sword.
25:35And George also benefited from the fact that people didn't know that much about him.
25:41Some people could say that George was a turnip head
25:44and others could say that he was a dragon slayer
25:47because he seemed to have a curious absence of personality.
25:51He was quite shy and retiring.
25:53He was difficult to get to know.
25:55But his sobriety and his frugality, he was very careful with his money,
26:00had a certain appeal though to a nation of shopkeepers.
26:08Britain was fast becoming the most commercially successful country in Europe.
26:13Daniel Defoe picked up on this when he wrote his book
26:16A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain.
26:20It's a rough guide to Britain from Leith to London.
26:25Just one of the many markets Defoe describes is London's Leadenhall,
26:30which has infinite provisions of all sorts, be it flesh, fish or fowl.
26:36Professor John Mullen believes that Defoe captures a period of the most rapid economic growth that Britain had ever seen.
26:44What's the point of this survey of the markets and the tour around the whole country?
26:48Well, because I think that he's trying to get a picture of the island and its history,
26:53but also of its activity, of the island now.
26:57And he's interested in Britain as a whole, isn't he?
27:00This is important.
27:01Absolutely.
27:02I mean, England and Scotland are unified in 1707 and Defoe is a great fan of this project.
27:09And he thinks that the ability of people in different parts of Britain, notably Scotland and Wales,
27:14to come together in one sort of commercially unified whole is a sign that the British are sort of modern and enlightened in a way that those continentals aren't at all.
27:25And do you think that he was a supporter of the people at the top, the Hanoverian monarchs themselves, George I, George II, what did he think of them?
27:33I think he thought the Hanoverian monarchs were absolutely necessary,
27:37because they were there to stop us having a Catholic king who would be a tyrant and would tell everybody what to do
27:44and would return us to a kind of court-centred and kind of, yes, tyrannical state.
27:51Yeah.
27:52So they were important, but to fend things off rather than to do things, actually.
27:56They were a safeguard.
27:58So in this very bustling, commercially successful Britain, where's the place for religion?
28:03What does he think about that?
28:04He says there is no Protestant and Catholic in a good bargain.
28:09In other words, he thinks that in a proper commercial nation, religious toleration is much more likely.
28:16People won't worry about their differences because the things that bind them together, the business of making money, is much more important.
28:24Those are important words then. There is no Protestant or Catholic in a good bargain.
28:29Yes. When you're doing the deal, you're not worrying about, you know, your petty differences.
28:36And, I mean, he does believe that trade actually unifies a nation.
28:47This was a brave new economic world, where religious bigotry gave way to profit.
28:53George I was tolerant in religious matters and saw economic progress as a solution to society's divisions.
29:00Britons didn't yet love their new ruler, but they were pretty pleased with the stability that he was providing.
29:07He was beginning to win grudging affection outside the palace gates.
29:12But the greater threat came from inside, because he was the head of the most dysfunctional royal family since Henry VIII.
29:20Meet Sofia Dorothea. This is the ex-wife of George I. She's a very significant person in the royal family.
29:29She is, after all, the mother of the future king, George II.
29:33And yet this is the only contemporary portrait of her in the whole of the royal collection.
29:39There's a reason for that. She was talked about in whispers at the court of George I because of what she'd done.
29:47Back in Germany, before coming over to Britain, George had married his first cousin, Sofia Dorothea of Zella.
29:59But it wasn't a love match. It was a marriage of state, a strategic move by the House of Hanover to increase its territory.
30:08Sofia and George cared little for one another. But George did care about his dignity and his reputation.
30:20Sofia started an adulterous relationship with a Swede, Count Konigsmark, who was serving in the Hanoverian army.
30:27Unfortunately, they weren't discreet. Their letters got out. Here's a sample from him to her.
30:33What joy, what rapture have I tasted in your arms? Ye gods, what a night I spent!
30:41With this sort of thing circulating through the drawing rooms of Europe, though, George was humiliated.
30:47A scandal was about to unfold that would inflame court gossip and spawn conspiracy theories for years to come.
30:58It all came to a head here at the family's palace on the River Lina.
31:03One night, here at the Lina Palace, we hear that Count Konigsmark was creeping along the corridors to Sofia's room when he was set upon by an assassin.
31:14And this is the spot in the river where the Swede's dead body is said to have been thrown.
31:20The culprits were never apprehended. The whole affair was hushed up and George never spoke about his estranged wife, her lover or the murder ever again.
31:36Count Konigsmark's disappearance was wrapped up in mystery. But we do know exactly what happened next to Sofia.
31:43She was put on trial for the crime of adultery. She was divorced by her husband and his punishment was to lock her up in a remote German castle for the rest of her life.
31:55That sounds pretty bad, but there was worse. The couple had a son, another George, the future George II of Great Britain.
32:02He was only 11. Sofia was now parted from her son and he would never see his mother again.
32:09This left a massive gap in the young Prince George's life, for which he naturally blamed his father.
32:19It was this traumatic event that triggered what you might call an Oedipal conflict between George I and his son Prince George.
32:30This feud would have a cataclysmic effect on the royal family for decades to come.
32:38Not even Prince George's marriage and the birth of his own children could heal the rift.
32:47The tension escalated here at St. James's Palace over the birth of the Prince's second son, yet another George.
32:55An embarrassing kerfuffle broke out at this baby's christening. The occasion was gatecrashed by a favoured courtier of the King.
33:05The Prince was pretty annoyed about this and he said, you are a rascal. I will find you. The implication was, I'll find you later to give you a piece of my mind.
33:14But unfortunately, because of the Prince's thick German accent, what the guy heard was, you are a rascal. I will fight you.
33:23He took it as an invitation to a duel, a dreadful breach of court etiquette. The King got to hear about all of this and he was furious.
33:32He decided to banish his son and his daughter-in-law, the Prince and the Princess of Wales, right out of St. James's Palace.
33:42All this was embarrassing for the Prince and Princess, but worse was to come. The King decided to keep behind their children, his grandchildren, as hostages to ensure future good behaviour.
33:57The Princess of Wales was in tears as she said goodbye to her three little girls and to her newborn baby boy.
34:04This little boy soon fell sick and the Princess of Wales believed that the King gave him the wrong medical treatment. Shortly afterwards, he died.
34:14And in the National Archives, there's an account of money paid for a pitiful little square of black velvet, just big enough to cover the coffin of a baby.
34:26Now, between father and son, there was all-out war.
34:30The courts of Europe could talk about nothing else but the British royal scandal.
34:40In London, the nobility began to take sides.
34:44Once the court had split into two factions, each developed its own separate social life.
34:51At the King's court, people tended to be older and more respectable.
34:54At the Prince of Wales's court, the courtiers were younger and more dynamic.
34:59And at this court, they had the better parties.
35:03At these parties, people had so much fun that some virgins conceived.
35:09Now, you might think that this was very dangerous and destabilising.
35:12But there is an argument that this was a healthy development in a parliamentary democracy.
35:19Because if you wanted to criticise the King, you didn't have to take up arms or commit treason.
35:25You could just go to a different type of social event.
35:28The concept of His Majesty's loyal opposition had been born.
35:32The Prince of Wales's new court effectively became a home for rebels.
35:40After the Whigs won a landslide victory in the elections of 1722,
35:45many of the defeated Tories went round the corner from the royal palace
35:49to Prince George's house in Leicester Square instead.
35:52It was a way of showing dissatisfaction with the King that wasn't quite as drastic as joining James III and the Jacobites.
36:01Quarrels like this between royal fathers and sons, exacerbated by the politicians,
36:08would happen throughout the 18th century.
36:10This new vision of Britain, with its opposition and disputes, its freedom of speech, if you like,
36:20appealed to one of the greatest thinkers in Europe.
36:25He went by the pen name of Voltaire,
36:28and his fiery political views had already seen him persecuted by the French government.
36:35How I love English boldness, said Voltaire.
36:40How I love those who say what they think.
36:43Those who only half think are only half alive.
36:47Voltaire knew what he was talking about,
36:49because saying what he thought had got him into terrible trouble in France,
36:53so much so that he'd been put in prison in the Bastille twice.
36:58So in 1726, to seek asylum from all of this, he'd come over to England.
37:02What Voltaire found was a culture of tolerance.
37:07Indeed, in comparison to France, he labelled Britain as a land of liberty.
37:13Professor Nicolas Cronk believes that George I's rather liberal view of kingship
37:20allowed writers like Voltaire to thrive.
37:24When Voltaire came to England then, things were very different.
37:28What differences did he notice?
37:29Well, in France, under the Anseo regime, for the most part, writers live through patronage.
37:34So you find an aristocrat, or maybe the king, who gives you a pension,
37:39you dedicate your works to a...
37:41You suck up, basically.
37:43When Voltaire comes to England, what he finds is a society where the court is much less all-powerful than it is in France.
37:49It doesn't quite have the same glitz or the same prestige, but at the same time there are more centres of power outside the court.
37:58There is a political debate between the two houses of parliament and the king, so that's not like the French system.
38:05Voltaire later writes that I think and I write like an Englishman. This was clearly an important time for him.
38:09Voltaire comes to London and finds that there are Catholics and Jews as well as Anglicans, so there is, of course, greater tolerance than there is in France.
38:18The idea that the English were free was something that they were very pleased about, so to some extent Voltaire has picked this up from the contemporary English press.
38:24You know, you find it in the spectator or the craftsman or whatever.
38:29We'd like to think it's very grand about the big noble ideals of freedom of mankind.
38:34I think it's for him, it's also about freedom of the writer.
38:36I think he just sees that there is a literary space in England, partly because of these different forms of publication,
38:43where he thinks a writer can express himself differently from a writer in France, who is much more tied into how things are at court.
38:49What's the best-known work that Voltaire produced during this time in England?
38:54Well, the work that he's most famous for now is the book that in French is called the Lette Philosophique,
38:59Philosophical Letters, but in England was published as The Letters Concerning the English Nation.
39:03This is a book where he talks about English liberty, he talks about English religions, he talks about the English toleration of different religions,
39:10in a way which actually is quite flattering to the English, and of course the English liked it because they liked being praised by a foreigner.
39:15So it has a rather extraordinary parallel career, so the Lette Philosophique was condemned and burnt in the Paris law courts,
39:24and Voltaire was forbidden from ever using the title again in any publication.
39:28Whereas in England, The Letters on the English Nation is republished in Edinburgh and Dublin and Glasgow,
39:34and it's an 18th century British bestseller.
39:35Voltaire wrote that the English were the only people on earth who'd been able to limit the power of kings by establishing wise government.
39:47This meant that all over Europe, George I got a reputation as a protector of progressive views.
39:53But in Britain, his reputation had taken a knock after the Christening Quarrel.
40:00The King's supporters were defecting to the Prince of Wales' court, and he had to try to win them back.
40:08He embarked on a plan to redecorate Kensington Palace.
40:12He hopes there to host parties that would be the most spectacular in London.
40:17Now this room is pretty sensational. Take a look at that ceiling.
40:26This is the cupula room. The commission was fought over between designers of the Old Guard,
40:44still working in the 17th century style, and adopters of the new Georgian look that would define the future.
40:53Everybody expected that this plum royal commission would go to Sir James Fornhill,
41:00who'd been mopping up all the work of this type.
41:03But Fornhill had got a bit complacent, and the King liked a bargain.
41:07Fornhill's estimate was ÂŁ800, an awful lot of money.
41:12So the King was persuaded to look at a young, new painter instead, William Kent, fresh back from Rome.
41:19He wanted the job. His estimate was half of Fornhill's.
41:24William Kent got the commission, and this is what he produced.
41:27Kent is playing with perspective, turning this room into a space seemingly twice as tall.
41:36He uses paint to emulate architecture.
41:39But his more traditional colleagues found it garish and tasteless.
41:44It's not surprising that there was a bit of carping and naysaying when this room was first completed,
41:51because the British just weren't used to this sort of thing.
41:54It's like a completely fake Roman palace interior, made out of wood and paint.
42:00And William Kent was doing something entirely new here.
42:03Kensington Palace would be Kent's breakthrough in Britain.
42:11Rufus Byrd is deputy surveyor of the Queen's Works of Art,
42:16and believes that Kent was the first interior designer.
42:20He wanted to get involved in every single aspect.
42:23He was a complete sort of attention to detail in every corner.
42:27So if furniture was going to go into interiors that he designed,
42:30he wanted to make sure that it harmonised perfectly.
42:34A bit of a control freak?
42:35A little bit, perhaps, yeah.
42:37And just looking at it, what are the visual clues that this is a Kent design?
42:41Well, firstly, you have this very obvious Roman symbolism.
42:45The particular elements are the fish scales, which you see on the panels of the legs,
42:50and the fish scales are associated with dolphins in the 18th century,
42:54and dolphins drew the shell chariot of Venus,
42:57and of course there is this large shell in the centre here,
42:59and then there is another shell at the top of the back there.
43:02Why is William Kent making all of these classical references?
43:06Well, in the early 18th century, Kent had been to Italy,
43:09and came back filled with a desire to bring Italy and Rome,
43:15and the patterns associated with ancient Rome, into Britain.
43:20And so this is a major change that we see.
43:22So France in the 17th century had been this predominant artistic leader, if you like,
43:26and then in the 18th century it's Kent and his supporters who really want to bring Italy into England.
43:33Would you describe it as almost like a piece of stage scenery,
43:36not intended for use, but to look good?
43:39Exactly, that's right, yeah.
43:40And so often court functions, particularly at this date,
43:43are great theatrical events, and the spectacle was all,
43:47and the furnishing of the rooms was just as important as what people wore and how they populated those spaces.
43:56It was Kent who heralded in an entirely new kind of Georgian interior,
44:02and helped make George I's parties a glamorous success.
44:05Kent's triumphant progress up the social ladder from humble sign painter to royal decorator,
44:13revealed what was now possible in terms of social mobility in Britain.
44:18And around this time, George I decided to celebrate his own meteoric rise,
44:29by constructing a scientific marvel.
44:32It was back in Hanover that George I spent a huge amount of money on the most technologically ambitious project of his reign.
44:44When this fountain was first switched on, it was the tallest fountain in Europe.
44:49It was based on the ideas of Leibniz, and it spurts up 35 metres into the air.
44:54It wasn't just a toy. The fountain is actually an analogy for the rise of the House of Hanover.
45:02They too spurted up, defying gravity.
45:05They went from being a second-rate princely house to being one of the most important dynasties in Europe.
45:14George fancied himself as an enlightened monarch interested in learning and science.
45:19And he now turned his attention to the British economy.
45:24He needed to deal with the problem of the national debt.
45:28And his administration took a gamble on a newly emerging phenomenon, the stock market.
45:35They sold the nation's debt to a private business, the South Sea Company,
45:41in exchange for a monopoly in the fledgling British slave trade.
45:46If that wasn't dodgy enough, the company then issued shares,
45:51and the British were such big fans of gambling that they bought in their thousands.
45:56By 1720, this financial revolution was well underway.
46:01And I think of this activity of share trading as being very characteristic of this early Georgian period.
46:08People now realised that you could make money out of servicing the debts of other people.
46:13Doesn't that sound familiar?
46:17George was about to plunge Britain into financial chaos.
46:22The whole affair became known as the South Sea Bubble.
46:28Share prices rose so quickly that the company was worth ÂŁ2.5 trillion in today's money.
46:34There were even playing cards produced that charted this frenzy of speculation.
46:42Dr Helen Paul is an economic historian who's investigated the boom and the bust of the South Sea Company.
46:49What was the atmosphere like in 1720 then, as the prices began to rise?
46:54The prices went up far too high to be sustainable.
46:57And once you realise that you've got naive investors coming in,
47:00other people try to buy the same shares to sell out to them.
47:04But you also got a lot of money coming in from Paris, where the stock market had recently crashed,
47:09trying to find a safe haven. That pushes up prices.
47:11Eventually, the bubble has to burst. And when the smart money leaves, everyone else panics.
47:18So this man has lost money in the company. He's actually thrown himself from the window here.
47:24A ruined South Sea jobber of renown who leaps from a lofty window headlong down.
47:30Oh dear, and it's saying, South Sea stock owe those villains.
47:36There was a huge amount of outcry. People were called the South Sea sufferers.
47:41There was a lot of debate about whether people who'd gained money should be forced to hand it back.
47:46But people who'd gained money didn't say very much about it.
47:50Is it the beginning of a sort of fear, a tarnishing of the image of stock market?
47:55There'd always been the sense that finance was somehow dirty.
47:58Land was so important. These people weren't necessarily the landed class.
48:04So there'd always been this sense of grubbiness about it.
48:07And there was a lot of criticism of financiers per se,
48:11many of whom were assumed to be foreigners and Jews, Catholics and other alleged undesirables.
48:18So this card here shows a Jewish broker being forcibly baptised in a horse pond.
48:24Drown the Jewish dog. There he goes into the pond.
48:29And this is just one card. There are several that are anti-Semitic.
48:32And it says here, all the Jews deserve as much.
48:35So blame the Jews for this particular bubble.
48:36That's right. But of course, Jewish people have been associated with usury or finance for many centuries.
48:44This really unpleasant anti-Semitism exposed the holes in Georgian Britain's facade as a land of liberty and tolerance.
48:57To make things worse, the corruption of the South Sea scandal went right to the heart of the government.
49:04Backhanders were paid to politicians and insider trading was rife.
49:15When the bubble burst, George had to call in a fixer.
49:19He chose his closest political ally, Robert Walpole.
49:28Having sold his shares at the top of the market though,
49:32people thought that Walpole too had his snout in the South Sea trough.
49:36This is Change Alley in the city and it was in the coffee houses along here that all the wheeling and the dealing of the South Sea bubble took place.
49:46When it burst, they were full of panic and fear.
49:50And now up pops Robert Walpole to limit the damage.
49:54He was put in charge of an investigation into the crisis, but he didn't really go anywhere.
49:59It was thought that he'd protected prominent people from charges of bribery and corruption.
50:06And because he'd shielded them from the consequences of their actions, people called him the Screen Master General.
50:17There was a growing feeling that once again the elite had won.
50:21But Walpole didn't get off entirely scot-free.
50:23There was a new force at work in Georgian society.
50:28Satire.
50:32One of the Georgian age's most notorious images is Walpole's huge naked bottom, blocking the way into the treasury.
50:41To get on in 18th century government, this is what you had to kiss.
50:46These satirists used lewd images and language to skewer hypocrisy.
50:53From a diving competition into the sewers of Fleet Street, to a giant weeing on the Royal Palace.
51:01The satirists were reaping the benefit of a strange thing that had happened at the end of the previous century.
51:07According to the modern satirist Martin Rosen, Parliament had inadvertently made this satire boom possible.
51:16Could you print anything you wanted?
51:19Well, it's, I think, one of the most beautiful moments certainly in British and probably in world history.
51:24Because it was an accident if they were meant to be renewing the Licensing Act, which was essentially press censorship.
51:32The Royal Licence.
51:34And somebody forgot to put it in the parliamentary timetable.
51:37Suddenly, Pandora's box was opened.
51:40You could print anything you wanted.
51:42You could print anything you wanted.
51:43There was a sudden eruption of freedom of speech.
51:46And of satire.
51:48And whereas people had previously been writing satires on behalf of rich men and powerful men to attack other rich and powerful men because it meant they had a protector.
51:56Now, they could write whatever they wanted.
52:00So you could now print all kinds of naughty stuff with impunity?
52:03It meant suddenly that people were liberated to satirise everything.
52:08And after Leveson last year, when people were saying,
52:11we fought, we fought for centuries for this freedom of the press.
52:14No, we didn't.
52:15It just happened by mistake because somebody forgot to put it in the parliamentary timetable.
52:19And it's what led to our understanding of the 18th century as not necessarily being the age of George's first, George I, George II, George III,
52:31but the age of Swift and Pope and Hogarth and later Gilray and Stern and the rest of them.
52:36There is this open sewer of satire running through the Enlightenment.
52:39How popular was this? Who did it appeal to?
52:42It's a weird relationship because on the one hand, this is scurrilous, filthy stuff.
52:48On the other hand, the people who bought Gilray's stuff and who bought Hogarth's stuff were the people who were being satirised because they understood it was part of the joke.
52:58Satire allowed people to criticise the highest echelons of society without getting thrown into the Tower of London.
53:07But the satirists upped the ante once again when writers like Jonathan Swift were bold enough to have a go at the monarchy itself.
53:17In Gulliver's Travels, Swift has his main character, Lemuel Gulliver, wash up on the island of Lilliput.
53:25Here he found a tiny royal court where everyone was obsessed with climbing the greasy pole.
53:34How did Swift satirise the monarchy?
53:36Gulliver's Travels is a prolonged satire on the whole notion of courts.
53:41So there's all this stuff about people having to jump over higher sticks to get preferment, courtiers having to do this rope dance on a tightrope.
53:50The levels of corruption, the levels of venality, it's not that difficult to satire to say these people who thought they were such great men are really little tiny things.
54:03And, of course, all the people in George I's court recognised what it was all about.
54:08Did these people not mind Jonathan Swift laughing at them?
54:11It is part of the game. If you're in a position of power over your fellow citizens and you can't take a joke about yourself, then really you're not quite the thing.
54:20You're not quite right, because you should recognise that your position is inherently ludicrous.
54:27All this satire was so popular that the king and the politicians had to just take it on the chin.
54:36Better to laugh along, pretending that you were in on the joke.
54:40But it was Robert Walpole, not the king, who was the greatest target of fun.
54:46George I often just wasn't there. He'd gone back to Germany.
54:51Here's George I on a happy hunting holiday back in Hanover. These are his ancestral forests. You get the sense that this is where he thinks he really belongs.
55:04And he's brought an awful lot of people with him. We can see here the whole of his German household.
55:10There are Mustafa and Mohammed, his valets. But he's also brought with him some very prominent British politicians.
55:16Me Lord Townsend, as it says here. He was a top Whig. And here we have Me Lady Townsend. He's brought his wife with him.
55:25And this is a real problem. When the king comes over to Germany and he brings all these people, it's like he sucks the life out of British politics.
55:33Nothing can happen in London without him. And something of a power vacuum opens up.
55:44And when the king's away, Walpole will play.
55:49Many of George's ministers were strongly opposed to his frequent visits to Hanover.
55:54But Walpole saw them as an opportunity.
55:58This was the origin of modern government.
56:02When the king was away in Germany, his ministers got into the habit of meeting by themselves, without him making autonomous decisions.
56:11These meetings of the government ministers were chaired by, who else?
56:15Sir Robert Walpole. He was first amongst equals.
56:18And he came up with the concept of cabinet solidarity. Once they'd all agreed on a policy, they had to defend it in public or else resign.
56:29This is the essence of the system of cabinet government that we still have today.
56:33George had always kept his Hanover base. I wonder if deep down he was worried that parliament would change their mind and take away his throne.
56:48He didn't have worried.
56:49For the century before his reign, Britain had been eating itself. There had been civil wars and revolutions and disputes about inheritance.
57:01With George I, though, came stability, freedom of speech and modern government.
57:07George may not have been the sharpest or the brightest or the most vigorous king, but thanks to his benign rule, Britain was on the way to becoming truly great.
57:19For himself, though, George still called Hanover home. Indeed, he was travelling back here at the very moment of his death.
57:33George's body ended up in this mausoleum, overlooking his beloved palace of Herrenhausen, the place that he'd never really wanted to leave.
57:41Some of George's British subjects called him Lucky George, this man who'd so unexpectedly inherited their throne.
57:50But I think of him as unlucky George. He never really wanted to leave Hanover.
57:55He was deeply unlucky in his personal life, with his divorce and his terrible relationship with his son.
58:01The history books have overlooked him because he wasn't showy, he had no charisma.
58:06But sometimes it's the quiet ones that you've got to watch.
58:09I think I'd say not so much lucky George, but lucky Britain.
58:17Next time, as their personal divisions deepen, the royal family have to deal with a new force that's reshaping Britain.
58:26The power of the public.
58:28This was a very dangerous moment for the Hanoverian royal family.
58:32If any one of them were to make a mistake, it could break the monarchy.
58:38Thank you!
58:391
58:401
58:411
58:422
58:431
58:441
58:452
58:462
58:472
58:482
59:08You
Recommended
47:01
|
Up next
58:13
59:01
58:52
59:04
43:39
58:58
29:00
29:07
59:05
43:33
59:08
58:03
29:00
49:07
58:57
57:27
59:01
28:58