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The First Georgians episode 2
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00:00It was a summer afternoon in June 1727. The King's Chief Minister, Sir Robert Walpole,
00:10turned up unannounced at the country residence of George Prince of Wales and his wife Caroline.
00:15He was out of breath and in a state of great panic. Walpole was the bearer of momentous
00:22news. King George the first was dead. Sir Robert Walpole tried to get in to see
00:29the Prince and Princess of Wales but a lady-in-waiting said stop you can't go in
00:34they're asleep. But Sir Robert Walpole insisted he said I've got to go in with my
00:38news. And the poor old Prince of Wales was rather caught on the hop. At the moment
00:48when he learns that he'd become King George the second of Great Britain and
00:53Ireland he was probably still buttoning up his breeches. There was an element of
00:58farce about this and George as King would have to up his game. No more afternoon
01:04naps for him. Four months later George was crowned at Westminster Abbey. The
01:11coronation anthem Zadok the priest was specially composed for the occasion by
01:16Handel. It accompanied George's transformation from Prince to King.
01:21George the second's reign would be long and turbulent. German born he found himself
01:35ruling a Britain that was heading into the future at lightning speed. New money had
01:42forged a new middling sort of people in society who questioned the established order. Affairs
01:49of state were being discussed in taverns and coffee houses and the royal family found themselves
01:56mocked in newspapers, in satirical prints and in the theatres. It would have been difficult
02:05for any dynasty. But this lot was still new. They only had shallow roots. This was a very
02:12dangerous moment for the Hanoverian royal family. If any one of them were to make a mistake it
02:19could break the monarchy. But this was the most dysfunctional royal family since the Tudors. Their
02:28feuding would shake the state to its foundations. The first Georgian kings have fascinated me
02:39for years. And for this series I've been given access to pieces from the royal collection as
02:47they're prepared for an exhibition at the Queen's Gallery Buckingham Palace.
02:59These works of art, many of them commissioned or owned by the first Georgian kings, reveal
03:04how they had to adapt to a public who were no longer merely just subjects. And in doing this
03:11the Hanoverians invented the modern monarchy.
03:25This is George II's bed. At first glance it may look like any other Grand Georgian bed. But
03:34actually this is his travelling bed, which could be collapsed down into 54 separate pieces. The
03:40original flat pack. The fact that George needed a special bed for travelling tells us something
03:48important. He was always, it seems, popping off back to Hanover. This was a real problem
03:55for his British subjects. It looked like George's heart still lay in his homeland. His absences
04:02reminded the British that he was alien, that he had another country to think about as well
04:07as Britain. To many of them, George became the king who wasn't there.
04:17And as well as the small matter of ruling both Hanover and Britain, much of the king's time was taken
04:22up by his mistresses. Which was really quite annoying to his long-suffering but loyal German wife.
04:29Let me introduce you to Caroline. She's my favourite Queen. As you can see from the bust, she's not
04:38exactly a fairytale princess. She's middle-aged, she's overweight, she's had eight children. But she
04:45had this wonderfully warm and witty personality. It made her very good at her job as Queen, welcoming
04:52people to court. But there is much more complexity and depth to her than that. You do get a sense
04:58that she was bored and sort of blunted by her royal duties. She would rather have been cracking jokes
05:04with her clever friends somewhere else. And I think that if you look at the corner of her mouth here,
05:10it's twitching like she's about to start laughing.
05:22While the king was prickly and distant, Caroline was highly sociable. In her private apartment
05:29at Hampton Court, she gathered together a sparkling circle of intellectuals and wits.
05:35Caroline, at heart, was a warm and convivial person. She loved to eat and she loved to talk.
05:45The British courtiers really relished the way that she could remember little personal details
05:50about each of them. She'd say things like, my lord, how's your little girl? Is she better?
05:56Or one of them remembered that the Queen was so interested in my print collection that I had to go home
06:03and get all the rest of my books to show her.
06:07Because of her husband's poor social skills, Caroline becomes the user-friendly public face
06:12of the Hanoverian monarchy. She was its likeable and approachable ambassador.
06:20Caroline wielded enormous power and influence, especially over her husband.
06:26This made her an indispensable ally to the king's leading minister, Sir Robert Walpole.
06:33As Prince of Wales, George had been wary of Walpole, calling him a rogue and a rascal.
06:40But Caroline persuaded George as king to keep Walpole on.
06:45It proved to be a smart move. Walpole could get things done.
06:51Walpole was the ultimate fixer. He spent a lot of time whispering into people's ears.
06:57What about job X for person Y?
07:00If you wanted your son to be a captain in the army, for example, Walpole was your man.
07:05His power was cemented when the king gave him this house in Downing Street.
07:10He accepted it, not as an individual, but on behalf of his office,
07:14which was First Lord of the Treasury, as it still says on the front door.
07:21This job title is better known to us today as Prime Minister.
07:27Downing Street was Walpole's reward for his ability to provide a stable government
07:33and a lavish budget for the king's court.
07:37A year into his reign, George began making preparations for his first trip to Hanover as king.
07:45Now, who was going to rule Britain?
07:47Well, Parliament passed the Regency Act, putting Queen Caroline in charge.
07:52And this confirmed what a lot of people already thought,
07:55that Caroline was the one who wore the trousers.
07:58As the popular poem had it, you may strut dapper George,
08:03but t'will all be in vain.
08:05We know tis Caroline, not you that reign.
08:09Caroline worked hard to strengthen the Georgian dynasty.
08:22And one way she did it was by publicly encouraging the intellectual upheaval,
08:27generally called the Enlightenment.
08:34As Princess of Wales, Caroline had brought about her breakthrough
08:37in the fight against smallpox.
08:40The disease was attacking the population, people said,
08:43like a destroying angel.
08:47Professor of Medicine Gareth Williams is going to show me the grim details.
08:52What we've got here are the three key stages of the smallpox rash.
08:56So we've got the early vesicles here.
08:59Here are the pustules getting quite nicely developed.
09:02And over there is the stage of the confluent rash.
09:06This is where all the pustules, they're full of pus,
09:09and there are so many of them and you're left with something like that.
09:11My goodness.
09:13It was one of the great killers.
09:15The smallpox actually killed one person in twelve.
09:17What happens in the early 18th century? There's a change, isn't there?
09:21Well, they got reports from Turkey of a way of preventing smallpox,
09:27reported by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was a bit of a gal,
09:31and she was the wife of the ambassador to Turkey.
09:34And she heard about an extraordinary practice,
09:37which was giving a healthy child smallpox deliberately.
09:41And it sounds completely counterintuitive,
09:44but in fact it was actually one of the safest
09:46and one of the most effective medical procedures of the day.
09:49How did Caroline, who was then the Princess of Wales, get to hear about it?
09:53Well, it was through Lady Mary.
09:55She became a good personal friend of Princess Caroline, Princess of Wales.
09:59Caroline said, well, OK, let's see the evidence.
10:02So the evidence was quite bold, actually.
10:05Lady Mary had her daughter inoculated with smallpox the following spring.
10:10This was in 1721.
10:12And it was a really good time to do this experiment
10:14because smallpox had broken out in London
10:16and people were running scared again.
10:18So Caroline is convinced that this really works.
10:21And it seems to me that the most important thing that she does
10:24is to inoculate her own children.
10:26Exactly right.
10:27But the broader issue is that, yes, you've got a royal who's engaged.
10:30You've got a royal who is phenomenally bright
10:33and actually interested in not just the people and their problems,
10:37but in scientific and medical solutions to those problems.
10:44It was this scientific approach
10:46that separated Caroline and the Hanoverians
10:49from their Stuart predecessors.
10:54The Stuarts had often laid their hands upon the sick,
10:57believing they had semi-divine powers of healing.
11:01But Caroline placed her trust in medicine, not magic.
11:08The French philosopher Voltaire commented on smallpox
11:11in his book Letters on England.
11:13He said that Europe fought the British crazy for this business
11:17of making a well child sick.
11:22Voltaire tells us that inoculation really caught on.
11:25England followed her example, he says.
11:28And since then, at least 10,000 children owe their lives to the Queen
11:34and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
11:37And as many girls are indebted to them for their beauty.
11:45Voltaire's book also highlighted other great changes underway in Britain.
11:49He noted how commerce had enriched the citizens, helping to make them freer.
11:56This freedom had in turn made greater entrepreneurship possible,
12:00widening wealth overall.
12:02And nowhere was this more true than in London.
12:16Here, economic changes were creating a new kind of behaviour.
12:20There was lots of new money in Georgian Britain,
12:26a lot of it in the hands of a new rank of people in society.
12:30They weren't aristocrats, and they weren't the workers either.
12:33They were what was called the middling sort.
12:36Some of them were professionals, like doctors and lawyers and clergymen.
12:40Others ran shops, or they were in trade,
12:43particularly in the new products of sugar and cotton.
12:46And like all these people here at the market,
12:49they had money to burn on things that they didn't really need,
12:52like vases for their houses, or trips to the pleasure gardens,
12:57or really expensive cups of coffee.
13:05This emerging middling sort differentiated Britain from its continental neighbours,
13:11where the aristocracy still held sway.
13:16And with this new social class came new spending power.
13:25In 1720, a Yorkshireman called Charles Clay came to London,
13:30hoping that some of this new money would come his way.
13:35His particular wheeze was to construct miraculously elaborate clocks,
13:40which he then displayed to the public for a fee.
13:43Rufus Byrd is going to show me one of Clay's craziest creations.
13:49It was originally called the Temple and Oracle of Apollo.
13:52It is an organ clock, which curiously has this magnificent 17th century Erlgsberg casket resting on top of it.
14:02And then in the pedestal you have this organ,
14:05which plays ten different tunes arranged by Handel.
14:09How does this actually work?
14:11If we open this door here, you can see inside there is the weights and the pulley,
14:17and then the barrel organ itself.
14:19I can play a tune, shall we play one?
14:21Yes, let's hear it.
14:22And who was he making it for? What was the point of it?
14:36It was a commercial enterprise.
14:38We know that through the advertisement which his widow placed in a newspaper in 1743.
14:46And I've got a copy of it just here.
14:49Mrs Clay describes this work of art as being the whole exceeding by many degrees anything ever exhibited to public view in any nation or by any artist whatsoever.
15:01Amazing, and it's yours for a shilling.
15:03That's right, you can see this and hear it for one shilling.
15:09Fifty years earlier, Charles Clay would have been making a specialised item like this for a royal patron.
15:16But in this new Georgian age, Clay could use his clocks to make a living from very different patrons paying customers.
15:31This early Georgian period was fast becoming the age of the self-made man.
15:38There was one individual who epitomised this, Alexander Pope.
15:45Pope was a satirist with legendary bite, who coined classic phrases like,
15:52Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
15:57But Pope is remembered as much for his business nows as for his heroic couplets.
16:04He showed that a writer could earn a fortune by selling his work directly to the public.
16:11And his success allowed him to live in some style.
16:15Although his grand villa in Twickenham no longer stands, one intriguing part of it has survived.
16:23A grotto.
16:28This is not just an exciting underground grotto.
16:32It's also a museum of mineralogy.
16:35Look at this crystal set into the walls there.
16:38It's winking at me.
16:40And originally there were little fragments of mirrors stuck in amongst the stones.
16:45So when you came down here with a lamp and you turned it on,
16:48suddenly rays were shooting everywhere and the whole thing was glittering.
16:52Oh, now I think that that is a piece of the giant's causeway.
16:56You can see the six sides of the basalt there.
17:00And there is a picture that shows Alexander Pope doing some writing down here.
17:05But you'd think it was a bit dark for that.
17:11Now how did he pay for all of this?
17:13The answer is this book.
17:16This is the pocket version of his famous translation of the Iliad by Homer.
17:22And he made money out of his work like a modern author would.
17:26He didn't have a single rich patron funding his lifestyle.
17:30He sold individual copies to a broad range of people.
17:34If you look at the first deluxe edition of the book,
17:37you'll see the list of subscribers headed by Caroline.
17:41So she was acting here as a new type of patron.
17:44She's just buying the book, giving him some money.
17:47But more importantly, offering him her moral support so that other people would buy the book too.
17:53And they did.
17:54It made him the equivalent in today's money of £400,000.
17:59What he needed to buy his villa and to build his grotto.
18:03Pope was very proud of the way he'd achieved all of this independently.
18:09He said, I live and I thrive, not indebted to any prince or peer alive.
18:24However, Alexander Pope was only 4'6", suffered from curvature of the spine and was a Catholic too.
18:31He was always an outsider.
18:35When he said he was in no one's debt, he really did mean it.
18:41Pope decided to write his own version of Homer's Iliad.
18:45But his was going to be in English and it was going to be a great big spoof.
18:49The poem was called The Dunciad.
18:54From the very start of The Dunciad, it's clear that not even the royal family are safe from Pope's poisonous pen.
19:02You by whose care in vain decried and cursed, still Dunce the Second reigns like Dunce the First.
19:11Who do you think that he meant by that?
19:14This blatant reference to George the Second kicks off a depiction of a society dominated by dimwits.
19:23And ruled by a king of the dunces.
19:26He was under the thumb of a female character called Dullness.
19:30She was very dreary and rather fat too.
19:34And by this, Pope meant Caroline.
19:36Laborious, heavy, busy, bold and blind.
19:44She ruled in native anarchy, the mind.
19:48She'd been his big supporter as Princess of Wales.
19:53But when she became queen, she had other fish to fry.
19:57Pope felt that he'd been neglected.
19:59So he turned against her using his very wounding weapons of words.
20:03He basically says in The Dunciad that she's a bit of a porker and rather boring.
20:11But just as Pope's relations with Caroline turned sour, another member of the royal family was ready to take advantage.
20:18Prince Frederick, Caroline's son and heir to the throne, befriended the poet in her place.
20:26He was even painted with a copy of Pope's translation of Homer in his hand.
20:31Caroline now had a rival in her patronage of the arts.
20:34Frederick was a genuine music lover.
20:55Sometimes he'd give a concert by an open window as the evening fell, playing his cello.
21:04And all the court servants would creep out into the courtyard to listen.
21:09Frederick's parents felt that this was undignified behaviour, vulgar, entertaining the masses.
21:15You could forgive Frederick for thinking that his parents had abandoned him.
21:25When he was seven, they left him behind in Hanover, when George and Caroline came over to London in 1714.
21:32There were good political reasons for this.
21:36Frederick was going to be the family's representative in Hanover, so that the people there wouldn't think they'd been entirely forgotten about.
21:42The problems emerged years later, when Frederick came over to London himself, now a grown-up.
21:49It wasn't just that he'd lost touch with his parents and needed to rebuild the relationship.
21:54It was worse than that.
21:56It turned out that he and his parents couldn't stand the sight of each other.
22:03And it was this hostility that would pose the greatest threat to the Georgian monarchy.
22:12Frederick's openness and his social nature were in marked contrast to his grumpy father George II.
22:21The Prince of Wales' common touch would be perfectly captured in a painting by the artist Joseph Nicholls.
22:27This is St. James's Park on a summer evening, and everybody's out for a walk.
22:35A French visitor tells us that sometimes the park was so packed that you couldn't help touching your neighbour.
22:41He says that some people came to see, others to be seen, all were on the lookout for adventures.
22:49He says that there were many priestesses of Venus about in the park.
22:53And the brilliant thing about this painting is that it's like a snapshot of the whole of Georgian society.
22:58We have low-life characters here, like these ladies feeding their babies.
23:05Here is kissing going on. Here is a man taking a leak.
23:08We also have commerce. These ladies are selling cups of milk to the gentry.
23:13Over here we have high society. This lady is taking snuff.
23:18This foppish gentleman is doing a very fancy French sort of bow.
23:24And right at the centre of all of this is Frederick, the Prince of Wales.
23:29And that's what makes it such a British scene.
23:32In France, the king was stuck out at Versailles.
23:36He was aloof and remote from his people.
23:39But Frederick thinks of himself as the people's prince.
23:43He's got the popular touch. He's on a royal walkabout.
23:46You can see people turning to watch him.
23:49And this is very typical of Frederick.
23:51He doesn't position himself above the crowd, but right at its centre.
24:05The royal court was no longer setting the rules for fashionable life.
24:11And Frederick responded by joining in the contemporary craze for refined,
24:16but informal gatherings.
24:19This was reflected in a new kind of painting, the conversation piece.
24:24Rather than formal group portraits, conversation pieces showed people actually enjoying each other's company.
24:33Here's a lively dinner party, with the host dishing out lots of drinks.
24:38guests fumbling with each other, and a fat clergyman looking on with worldly satisfaction.
24:47Even the royal family were depicted in this new style of painting.
24:55This is an oil sketch for a conversation piece of the royal family.
25:03It was done by the artist William Hogarth on spec.
25:06His hope was that the king would really like it, and that he'd buy it.
25:09It's got all the hallmarks of a conversation piece.
25:12It's a family scene, mother, father, the children all talking to each other.
25:18But there were three very good reasons that George II was never going to buy this picture.
25:22Firstly, William Hogarth wasn't an artist in favour at court.
25:26There the work was dominated by his rival, Queen Caroline's favourite artist William Kent.
25:32Secondly, the very idea that George II would buy a piece of avant-garde art is ridiculous.
25:38He didn't like art at all.
25:40And thirdly, it's a bit of a farce, because it looks like a happy family,
25:45but in fact this lot hated each other.
25:47There were terrible rivalries and tensions between these parents and these children.
25:51Fortunately for Hogarth, he didn't actually need royal patronage to be successful.
26:03Like Alexander Pope, Hogarth was a freelancer with an entrepreneurial streak.
26:09This is his very nice pad in Chiswick.
26:13That he could afford it shows how well he understood what his customers wanted.
26:19And what they wanted was prints, the original affordable art.
26:28Britain went wild for these characters and these images.
26:32But what most people were seeing wasn't Hogarth's own work.
26:36To keep things exclusive, he'd only produced enough prints to go to his list of just over a thousand subscribers.
26:42But almost instantly, his rivals and copycats started to produce cheap knock-offs.
26:49The speed with which they did this was incredible.
26:52It was almost before the ink had dried on the originals.
26:56A set of Hogarth prints, and these knock-off copies too, can be found in the Royal Collection.
27:01I'm meeting senior curator Kate Hurd to see how they differed and what, if anything, the artist could do about it.
27:11So I'm a subscriber, I've paid my money to Mr Hogarth, and the print is going to come out. What am I going to get?
27:17You're going to get six prints, of which this is the first one, showing the harlot of the Harlot's Progress arriving in London.
27:23Oh dear, she's a fresh young girl.
27:26Absolutely.
27:27We know that it's going to be bad.
27:29Hogarth made 1,240 of them, and refused to make any more.
27:32One of his great selling points was that it's an exclusive thing.
27:35You know, you subscribe, you pay up front, you're one of the clubs that can have them.
27:38What did you do if you weren't a subscriber then, but you wanted to own these images?
27:42Well you could actually get hold of slightly different copies.
27:46Not the real thing, but pirated copies, which were rushed out by the print sellers within a few weeks.
27:53And it's reversed as well, isn't it?
27:54Yes, that's because they're copying the original print.
27:57So if somebody's drawing it, here it is, and then he puts the ink on, and then he turns it over.
28:02And it turns it back to front on the sheet of paper.
28:05But they're not bad prints, considering how quickly they were made.
28:08And how did Hogarth respond to all of this? What action did he take?
28:11He was furious. He'd had his initiative taken away from him, and he got together with a group of fellow printmakers.
28:18And they petitioned Parliament, which in 1735 published a Copyright Act, which allowed people like Hogarth for 14 years to have the copyright over their images, over their prints.
28:29And if you copied the prints, you would be punished?
28:31You would be fined.
28:33And that law stood all the way until 1911?
28:36It was a very impressive piece of legislation.
28:38Was it known as Hogarth's?
28:39It was Hogarth's Act, absolutely.
28:40Hogarth's Act.
28:41Yes.
28:42If prints were popular, newspapers were even more so.
28:51During the course of the 18th century, newspaper production would rise from one million to just over 14 million a year.
29:01You didn't even need to purchase a copy yourself.
29:04Newspapers were available for browsing in your neighbourhood coffeehouse.
29:07What's really surprising is just how well-informed people were.
29:19Imagine that you and I are reasonably well-off, reasonably intelligent Georgian chaps.
29:24Before spending the afternoon at the Pleasure Garden or the theatre, perhaps we're going to pop into the coffeehouse to have a read of the newspapers.
29:33What sort of information is available to us in the London Journal of 1732?
29:38Well, an enormous range.
29:42Page one tells us about foreign affairs.
29:45We've got a report from Paris.
29:47Page two gives us a report from Hanover, where the king is this week.
29:52We've got a very detailed account of what he's up to there.
29:54On page three, we've got a brand new fruit that's just been presented to Queen Caroline.
30:01It's ripe and in a state of utmost perfection.
30:04And it is a pineapple, a complete novelty.
30:08Now, you and I are not members of the court.
30:11We're members of the public.
30:12And this is an enormous range of information that we've got access to.
30:16Our kings and queens aren't just faces on a coin.
30:19They're real characters in our minds.
30:22This isn't just a newspaper.
30:24It's an information superhighway.
30:27And now the world and his dog can have a well-informed opinion on current affairs.
30:31What's more, the world and his dog weren't going to keep their opinions to themselves.
30:47Georgian coffee houses were called the Penny Universities.
30:51Pretty much blind to social status, they often hosted debating clubs.
30:56There was more to this than just passing the time.
30:58The Georgians had this new belief that you could refashion yourself into a person of taste.
31:04By soaking up the right kind of books and ideas.
31:09To discuss all this, I'm meeting up with Lucy Ingalls, creator of the blog Georgian London.
31:18Is this about self-improvement? Is this about Georgian people wanting to learn from each other?
31:23Yes, very much about self-improvement.
31:25The new concept of the rising middle classes and what it was to educate yourself and improve yourself.
31:32And there was also this idea that there was only so much knowledge in the world and it could be known and mastered if you're only willing to apply yourself.
31:40That's a brilliant idea. You could read every single book that existed if you tried hard.
31:44Pretty much, yeah.
31:46What's this you've got here on your computer?
31:47This here is some information that I've gathered about one society in particular, the Robin Hood Society.
31:54They met every Monday evening.
31:56And what did they get up to at these meetings?
31:58Well, they said first of all that even though they would enjoy a Welsh rarebit and a pot of beer, it was not a drinking club.
32:04It was a disputing one. At those places men feed their bodies, but at this one they feed their minds.
32:08And what sorts of people attended?
32:11Well, we have a list of members of the club here.
32:15A baker, a doctor, a governor of the plantations, a soldier, an author, a comedian, a house painter, a genius.
32:21A genius.
32:22A genius, yes.
32:23He's put that down as his profession, a genius.
32:25It was a genius. A noted bug doctor and a highwayman.
32:27No way.
32:28Yeah.
32:29A highwayman attended the club.
32:30Absolutely.
32:31A professional highwayman.
32:32Yeah, and he was thought to be one of the best debaters, but he couldn't.
32:35I bet. Did he use his gun?
32:37Yeah.
32:38He couldn't stay off the roads and he sadly met a sticky end at the end of a rope at Tyburn.
32:43Oh dear.
32:44I know.
32:45Lost to the club, I would think, yes.
32:47So here we have a network of people who have only been brought together by the club itself.
32:52They're from different ranks in society.
32:54Yes, and that is one of the key points of all these clubs, that they were deliberately bringing people together from all levels.
33:03What did the king and the government think about these clubs?
33:05Because sometimes they were debating questions like, is the prime minister any good?
33:09This is quite dangerous.
33:10Very dangerous.
33:11The Robin Hood Society tried to get around this by publishing their set of rules for things they weren't going to discuss,
33:17which was politics and God.
33:21But however, they did discuss both.
33:23Oh, that was just for sure then, we're not going to discuss this, but really we are.
33:26Exactly.
33:27Which is why the members were supposed to be known to each other, so that you knew if you had a spy in the camp.
33:33This culture of debate meant that the decisions of king and parliament were held to public scrutiny.
33:40In 1733, Sir Robert Walpole introduced an excise bill to parliament, imposing a tax on popular commodities like wine and tobacco.
33:58Now, nobody likes a new tax, especially not the self-confident new London trading classes.
34:07There were riots outside parliament, and Queen Caroline and Robert Walpole were burnt in effigy.
34:13Crucially though, the king stood by his minister.
34:19He let it be known that to oppose his government was to oppose the king himself.
34:24If you went against Walpole then, you were a traitor.
34:27One of Walpole's opponents in parliament was Lord Cobham.
34:34He had been a great supporter of the Hanoverian monarchy.
34:38But for his disloyalty, the king ejected Cobham from the House of Lords.
34:47Cobham retreated to his country house at Stowe.
34:50Here, he planted his revenge in the form of Stowe's magnificent landscape garden.
34:56In Georgian Britain, even gardening was political.
35:10The landscape garden was supposed to embody British liberty.
35:15A place where, as one Georgian put it, the eye can roam free.
35:21But Stowe also delivered a more pointed message.
35:31Cobham hid within it a series of secret meanings or metaphors for contemporary politics and morality.
35:40Now, you weren't expected to work out all of these hidden secret meanings all by yourself.
35:45You could buy a guidebook to the gardens, like this original Georgian version.
35:49And it tells me that at this spot here, I have a decision to make.
35:53I can either turn up that way, which is the path of virtue.
35:57Up there, we have temples dedicated to virtue and the heroes of history.
36:02Or I can go down that way. That's the route of vice.
36:06Down there, the book promises me lustful monks, women out of control, group sex and voyeurism.
36:13The garden at Stowe certainly drew in the crowds.
36:22And Lord Cobham had thoughtfully built this inn on the outskirts to accommodate them all.
36:27The tourists who chose the path of virtue crossed a series of bridges to illustrate that a virtuous life is never without its obstacles.
36:40But I'm on the path of vice, where visitors get titillation alongside moral instruction.
36:46One of the stopping off points is the Temple of Venus.
36:52The book tells me that the paintings in here tell the story of this lady who runs away from her disagreeable husband
36:59and goes instead to revel with a beastly herd of satyrs, these famously lascivious creatures.
37:06So it's basically a temple to naughty women.
37:09But we're still in the vice area of the garden, don't forget, so we know not to follow their example.
37:15Let's go on improving our characters somewhere else.
37:20But Cobham intended his garden to offer something more than just moral instruction.
37:27Stowe also reads like a political pamphlet, Cobham's own State of the Nation address.
37:34And some of his messages seem to be aimed directly at Frederick Prince of Wales.
37:40Cobham and his group of opposition politicians had identified the prince as a potential leader for their cause.
37:48At the heart of the garden is the Temple of British Worthies.
37:54Here I'm meeting Richard Wheeler to find out how this pantheon of British heroes is actually an attack on George II.
38:02Obviously there's politics going on here, he's chosen some characters but not others.
38:08What was he trying to express?
38:10Well there's a subtext going on here because he had just broken from Sir Robert Walpole's Whig party
38:15to form his own internal Whig opposition, the Whig Patriots.
38:19So we have King Alfred, the mildest justice, most beneficent of kings, everything that King George II was not.
38:26And beside him, the Black Prince, the terror of Europe, the delight of England, everything to which Prince Frederick aspired.
38:33And of course Prince Frederick was the titular leader of the Whig opposition to Sir Robert Walpole.
38:39Why was Cobham so much against Sir Robert Walpole?
38:42Because he was our first Prime Minister and the idea of a Prime Minister was deeply objectionable.
38:47That one person should rule was dictatorial, absolutist and everything that was wrong.
38:52So according to the guidebook King Alfred's been picked out because he guarded liberty and he was the founder of the English constitution.
38:59This is all significant isn't it?
39:01The English constitution is probably the most significant because if anything works at Snow,
39:06it's the idea of our old Gothic constitution deriving from the Witan, the Parliament of the Saxons.
39:14So we have Alfred here, the greatest of the Saxon kings and on the hill behind you've got the Saxon temple,
39:21which is otherwise known as the Temple of Liberty.
39:24So it's all anti-autocracy and the main point of which was that Parliament chose the king as it did in Saxon times.
39:33I think a lot of this is instruction for Prince Frederick, telling him how to behave if he's going to be a patriot king.
39:39One has to remember that Lord Cobham and all his compatriots were the ones who brought the Hanoverians over,
39:45but they've got to remain under control.
39:47So it's the Whig oligarchy who are actually running the country and the king as a constitutional monarch.
39:52So the idea of the constitution, really important and the king really doing what he was told.
39:59And guess what, there's no Germans here at all.
40:01No, they're all over the other side of the garden in the Garden of Vice. I don't quite know why, but there it is.
40:09None of this was lost on Frederick, who would commission an opera in honour of Alfred, the great Patriot King.
40:16これ Rather of thatbaum Jowen sing that Feud alone.
40:22When you're married, over the bible.
40:26Frederick was emerging as the leader of the opposition, so his parents tried to rein him in by suppressing his allowance.
40:34allowance.
40:40The simplest way for a prince to up his income was to get married, but George and Caroline
40:46had deliberately put off finding their son a wife. Poor Fred was left on the shelf until
40:51he was almost 30.
40:54In April 1736, his parents finally relented. The German princess Augusta of Saxgota became
41:03Frederick's wife. Luckily for Augusta, Frederick liked his princess bride and got his pay rise,
41:10but he was disappointed when it turned out to be only £50,000 a year, half of what he'd
41:15been expecting. Now there was open conflict between the prince and his parents. This was
41:21the beginning of an annus horribilis for the Georgian monarchy.
41:27And when the king left for Germany yet again, his courtiers felt the force of public opinion.
41:33People got so fed up with George constantly going off to Hanover that a mysterious spoof
41:40notice appeared, stumped to the gates of St. James's palace. It read,
41:45lost or strayed out of this house, a man who has abandoned a wife and six children. A reward
41:54was offered for information of four shillings and sixpence, but you weren't to expect any
41:58more money than that. Nobody judging him to deserve a crown.
42:06And Prince Frederick's camp were furious that he hadn't been made regent.
42:12Caroline was once again running the show and she was back in full social reformer mode.
42:19Once her target had been smallpox. But she now wanted to clamp down on a new blight sweeping
42:25London. The craze for gin. Londoners thought that if beer came by the pint,
42:32so too should this new drink called gin. By the 1730s they were addicted to gin. They were
42:39drinking two pints per head per week. His Majesty's government decided to reduce gin consumption by
42:46increasing the price. They put a big new tax on gin. This went down very badly with Londoners.
42:53There were riots about the gin tax. Liquor shops were draped in black to mourn the death of gin
43:00drinking. And there was an ominous new chant amongst the crowds on the street. They went,
43:04no gin, no king, no gin, no king. What did Prince Frederick do to calm down the situation? Well,
43:13nothing at all. In fact, he inflamed it. He was seen going to a tavern and drinking a glass of gin.
43:21And by doing this, he was saying, I'm just like you. I like gin and I don't like the king.
43:30Frederick's ingratiating ways incensed Caroline. My God, she said, popularity always makes me sick,
43:38but Fred's popularity makes me vomit. A storm was brewing.
43:49In December 1736, King George was returning from Hanover when his ship was caught in a violent gale.
44:00Rumours reached London that he'd been lost at sea.
44:08Caroline was distraught and also disgusted at Prince Frederick, who was clearly relishing
44:14the prospect of becoming king himself. For a week, the country held its breath.
44:19Many were wishing that the king had drowned, but finally news arrived that he was safe and well.
44:29Back in London, George II now had to deal with his upstart son and mounting political opposition.
44:39One of the best mouthpieces for dissident voices was the theatre, perhaps the most subversive art form in
44:45Georgian Britain. Not surprisingly, Prince Frederick had already associated himself with the stage.
44:53He had written his own comedy, The Modish Couple.
44:59Here at the Bristol Old Vic, an original Georgian theatre,
45:03It's artistic director Tom Morris can explain how the stage provided a platform for mocking the ruling order.
45:12We're standing on a stage here. It's not the way people think of a modern theatre. We're not
45:18kind of shut away from the audience somewhere up there. We're surrounded by them.
45:22And what's more, it's manifest in the architecture of the building that different members of the audience
45:30will have a different point of view. Someone sitting over there will necessarily have a different
45:35point of view of this conversation than someone sitting over there. It's like a reverse shot.
45:40If, as an actor then, that person is booing and that person is cheering, can you sort of
45:45shut them out and go with them? Absolutely. And we know that there were asides in Georgian theatre.
45:51If you play an aside in a theatre like this, you choose who you play it to and you choose who you
45:55don't play it to. Oh, right. So, you can constantly manipulate the relationship with the audience.
46:01When you look at 18th century plays, they appear to be incredibly naughty. They're always satirical.
46:07They're always causing trouble. They seem to be against power and authority. Yeah, I mean, Tom Thumb,
46:13which is a pretty tough read, I have to say, is largely a sequence of knob jokes about Robert
46:19Walpole, which obviously he hated. Now, if you read the script, he's not going to say that. He can't
46:25quite say that because it's all negotiated live with sort of double entendre in this kind of theatre,
46:32where something can be implied, a joke aimed here can be shared to the exclusion of those people,
46:38and meanings are kind of fluid, immediate and transitory. And that makes it very threatening politically.
46:48In 1737, Sir Robert Walpole would try to bring the curtain down on seditious theatres,
46:55citing a play that mysteriously hasn't survived, The Golden Rump.
47:00The details of the play itself are a bit mysterious, but you can get a hint of what it was about from
47:07this contemporary print called The Festival of the Golden Rump. The focus of the scene is the
47:14King's bottom. And this itself was the focus of Georgian society because of a habit the King had of
47:20turning his back on people who were out of favour at court. If the King didn't want to speak to you,
47:25he would turn around and show you his backside, a technique that everybody called rumping. Also,
47:32everybody knew that part of the reason the King had such a bad temper was because he suffered
47:37terribly from the haemorrhoids. In this print, the King is shown as a satyr, a creature that's out of
47:44control and it's lashing out. In this case, the satyr is kicking a magician-like figure who represents Sir
47:51Robert Walpole. But don't worry, sensible Queen Caroline is here, the mistress of medicine.
47:58She's going to bring the King back under her control by giving him an enema. She's injecting
48:04a magic potion up the royal bum. It's quite amusing to think that this play was only performed in public
48:14in the House of Commons. What happened was that Sir Robert Walpole claimed he'd been given a manuscript
48:20version of it. And in order to show how offensive and scandalous it was, he read it out in Parliament.
48:27Of course, everybody went, this is terrible, we can't have this.
48:32From now on, there would only be two licensed theatres in London.
48:36But there's a very attractive conspiracy theory here. I like this one. The idea is that perhaps
48:51Sir Robert Walpole cooks the whole thing up himself. Perhaps he commissioned the scandalous play
48:57in order to create the outrage and to get his censorship law passed.
49:01In February 1737, Frederick took the feud with his father right into Parliament. His supporters
49:13backed a motion to get the Prince's allowance increased. Frederick's side lost by only a few votes.
49:21This was the most public affront yet, by the Prince to the King.
49:31And to make matters worse, Frederick and his wife Augusta had moved into Kensington Palace,
49:46where Frederick's habits quickly began to grate on his mother.
49:52The palace was so claustrophobic that Caroline had to come out into the gardens to get a bit of
49:57privacy. She loved walking. She'd clack along in her slippers with red heels. Other times though,
50:04she was trapped indoors. Once she was looking out of the window and she saw Frederick crossing the
50:10courtyard beneath her and she was heard to say, there he goes, that monster. How I wish that a hole
50:17from hell would open up and swallow him. In July 1737, this feud finally came to a head.
50:32The royal family had assembled at Hampton Court to witness the arrival of Frederick and Augusta's first
50:38child. But Frederick was determined to keep his parents away from the birth.
50:45Augusta's labour pains began in the middle of the night. Now you'd expect them to call the midwife
50:51and keep her in bed. But no, her husband Frederick made her get up, he made her walk downstairs,
50:58and he bundled her into a carriage to drive 50 miles through the night to St. James's Palace.
51:05Now poor Augusta was a teenager. She was in a foreign land. This was her first pregnancy,
51:11and she spent her first labour in a bumpy carriage in the middle of the night. This was terribly cruel
51:18behaviour on Frederick's part. Augusta was writhing about in agony and Frederick held her down with
51:24his weight. He used so much force that he later said he'd put his back out doing it.
51:29When they arrived at St. James's Palace, they weren't expected, so nothing was ready for them. There
51:37weren't even any sheets for the bed. And when the little baby girl was eventually born,
51:42they had to wrap her up in a table napkin.
51:45Frederick was successful in tricking his parents out of their privilege of being present at the birth
51:57of their grandchild. When Caroline heard what had happened, she too got up in the middle of the night
52:03and came dashing to St. James's Palace. But she was too late. The baby was already born. The next day,
52:10there was an almighty bust up. And everybody knew about it. It got into the newspapers.
52:16This was a very dangerous moment for the Hanoverian monarchy. Both sides were damaged.
52:22George II looked like he couldn't even control his own family. And as for Frederick, he looked
52:27irresponsible. He'd risked the life of his wife. How could he be trusted with the future of the nation
52:33when the time came? And worst of all, there was no prospect of reconciliation. This quarrel looked set
52:42to continue to the grave. It would take just that, a death, to make the royal family and the country take stock.
52:52In November 1737, in her brand new library at St. James's Palace, Caroline was suddenly stricken with intense pain.
53:10What was actually wrong with Caroline? Well, nobody knew. The doctors weren't allowed to examine her body.
53:17There was a sense that this would have been undignified, and also an idea that queens weren't really made out of flesh and blood,
53:24that they were never ill. But poor Caroline was clearly in agony. She was put to bed,
53:30and eventually the king insisted that the doctors have a look at her stomach.
53:34And then they discovered that ever since the birth of her last child, Caroline had been suffering in secret
53:41from an umbilical hernia. This is when a hole opens up in the walls of the stomach. It's terribly painful.
53:50Caroline had come to her crisis because a little loop of her bowels had popped out through that hole.
53:58What the doctors should have done is get the bowels, push them back in, and sew up the hole. That's what they would do today.
54:04But Caroline's doctors made a terrible mistake. That little loop of bowels, they cut it off.
54:21Throughout all of this, Caroline kept up her good spirits. When the doctor came in to operate, she
54:26encouraged him by saying, Dr Ranby, just pretend you're cutting up your ex-wife.
54:32The only concern seemed to be for the grief of her husband and her children.
54:41George II now devoted himself to her care. He sat by the bed in tears.
54:48And when she was at death's door, they had this very famous conversation.
54:53She said to him, I want you to be happy, marry again after I'm gone.
54:58But he said, no, I will have mistresses. And the implication was that the mistresses had meant
55:05nothing to him. He would never have a second queen. And when she died, it was with her hand in his.
55:14And where was Prince Frederick? Despite the estrangement, he had asked to come to his mother's bedside,
55:28but the king had forbidden it. Frederick, he said, shall not come and act any of his silly plays here.
55:36When Caroline had heard this, she'd deferred to her husband. But later, she sent a private message
55:44of blessing and forgiveness to her son. A piece of street poetry summed up the public reaction.
55:54Death, where is thy sting? To take the queen and leave the king.
56:06And what of the king?
56:10Here is sad and lonely George, all by himself, missing his wife. He's gone to her library to have a look at
56:18the bust of her over the door. This was a real low point for George II. Not only had he lost his companion
56:26of 30 years, he'd also lost an important political ally. She had been the friendly face of his regime.
56:34He would eventually recover and, old soldier as he was, go on to enjoy military victories over the French
56:45and the Scots. This period saw the development of a well-informed and pugnacious public, a new force
56:58that challenged the old elite. The world had changed. And sooner or later, every monarchy across Europe
57:06would have to come to terms with it. If you were an 18th century king or queen, you had two choices here.
57:13Either you could ignore all of this and hope that it went away. That's what they did in France,
57:18and look what happened to them. Or you could subtly change the way in which you went about being a monarch.
57:25And in Britain, it was Queen Caroline and Prince Frederick who really understood this,
57:31so much so that I think they rather overshadow George II. Caroline had tried to help the British,
57:38promoting science and philosophy and social improvement. And Frederick had embraced the people,
57:46placing himself amongst the crowd rather than above it. They somehow knew how to ease the friction between
57:54the monarchy and the people. And I think we can judge their success by the fact that 300 years later,
58:02their descendants are still on the throne.
58:11Next time, as Britain seeks to rule the waves, King George's love of fighting helps him overcome the
58:18death of his queen, renewing his sense of kingship as he leads his troops into battle.
58:27Now boys, he said, fire and be brave and the French will soon run!
58:36And since he pronounced the king, he said, fire and be brave!
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