Episode 1 The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain

In 2014, it's 300 years since King George I and his family

arrived in Britain to begin the Georgian era.

This was the age in which modern Britain,

as we know it, would be formed.

Why should we care about these Georgians? They didn't give us

the industry of the Victorians or the sensational head-chopping

of Henry VIII.

But they did champion the idea of liberty and make Britain

a more open society.

One in which satire flourished

and a new form of expression was invented, the novel.

Bizarrely, this Georgian age, that seems so quintessentially British,

actually has a story beginning here in Hanover, in Northern Germany.

As outsiders, the first German Georges

were able to be modernisers.

It was on their watch that cabinet government first emerged.

For this series, I've been given access to the Royal Collection.

These pieces have been brought together for an exhibition at the

Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace,

telling the story of the first Georges

through art works they commissioned or owned.

We tend to think of the Georgian era

in terms of the madness of King George III

or the heroines of Jane Austen, but I think the key to it all

lies right at the start in the

reigns of the first two Georgian Kings.

Under George I and George II, Britain became the world's

most liberal and cosmopolitan society.

We owe so much to these German Kings who made Britain.

In 1701, Britain faced a big problem.

The heir to the throne, Princess Anne,

had failed to provide the royal family's next generation.

She'd gone through 17 pregnancies

in a desperate attempt to produce an heir...

..but her last surviving son had just died.

Parliament took drastic action.

They had the idea of importing a

ready-made royal family from overseas.

This 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 Queen 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.

This 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.

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.

Who should rule next?

So 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.

Electress Sophia of Hanover is pivotal in the history

of the British monarchy.

She was the next Protestant in the royal Stuart line.

That 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.

Sophia 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.

Sophia forms part of a very German tradition of royal women

leading the social and the intellectual life of a court.

Very unlike the British tradition, where we have the

badly-educated princesses Mary and Anne who were as dull as ditchwater.

In her statue, Sophia 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!

Sophia 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.

Sophia just had to sit and wait for Anne to die.

So, why have you never heard of Queen Sophia I of Great Britain?

She would have been very good at the job, she was intelligent

and rational. She 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 thunder storm that she drops down dead.

It's rather melancholy being here in her boudoir,

and thinking about Sophia, the greatest Queen we never had.

Sophia did not die in vain.

Her descendants would inherit the British crown.

It was her eldest son, George Ludwig, who was to become

King George I of Great Britain.

Unlike his mother, he was uncharismatic,

not particularly impressive and he already had enemies.

Without the Act of Settlement, George's distant cousin,

the Catholic James Stuart, would have become King James III.

He was in exile in France.

Although he was only 13 years old,

he was already plotting how to get his crown back.

So, when George arrived to start his new life as King of England

and Scotland, he was getting into a pretty tricky situation.

He 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,

so when George himself disembarked,

the spectators had sort of dribbled away.

George's new kingdom really was new.

The splicing together of England and Scotland had only

taken place seven years previously.

Things were unstable.

If I was a gambler, I wouldn't have put much money on the survival of

this Hanoverian dynasty.

George I was crowned at Westminster Abbey on the 20th of October, 1714.

All the great and good of Protestant Britain were in attendance.

This 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.

And look at the great, big cross on the top. It was George's Protestant

religion that had put him on the throne.

And 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.

But poor, old George's English language skills

weren't his strongest point.

You can't blame him. It was, after all, his fourth language.

Unfortunately, though, it was now the language of his new subjects

and he couldn't really speak it very well.

He couldn't understand what was happening in the ceremony.

But, nevertheless, the establishment were delighted.

One spectator said that the sight of the coronation

brought tears to her eyes.

They felt that everything was safe now. Their liberty,

their property and their religion.

But 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 too.

George's coronation at Westminster Abbey

was slightly marred by xenophobia.

Spectators were heard to call out,

"Down with the German!" and "Out with the foreigners!"

If you look at the popular protests against George at this time,

there's quite a funny theme running throughout them.

This idea that that Hanover is a place full of yokels.

In pamphlets, we see pictures of George hoeing a row of turnips,

there's a song calling him "Turnip Head".

And 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 -

it's a turnip on a stick.

# Of all the roots of Hanover, the turnip is the best

# 'Tis his salad when 'tis raw

# And his sweetmeat when 'tis dressed

# Then a hoeing he may go

# May go, may go

# And his turnips he may hoe. #

The turnip was a foreign vegetable

that suggested George's German roots.

Indeed singing the "Turnip Song"

became a popular way to protest against the new King.

The Jacobites, supporters of the would-be King James III, loved it!

It wasn't the most auspicious of starts.

And the balance of power between King and Parliament had shifted.

Parliament thought that their new pet king ought to follow their rules

and do what they wanted.

The King was not even allowed to leave his new country without

Parliament's permission!

George I was a lot less wealthy

than some of his contemporary European counterparts.

He just didn't have the cash to splash on palaces like Versailles.

Parliament gave him just £700,000 a year,

not enough to run a really big court.

George quickly realised he needed to work with Parliament

and not against them.

Some of his Stuart predecessors had been constantly head-to-head

with Parliament in some very violent and destructive confrontations,

insisting upon their divine right to rule,

but George was much more conciliatory.

He had to be.

Parliament had given the throne to George

and perhaps they would take it away from him.

He was a monarch appointed not by God, but by men.

Here at the Painted Hall in Greenwich

is George's mission statement.

It was his promise to the British to be the King they wanted.

Desmond Shawe-Taylor is Surveyor of The Queen's Pictures

and an experienced decoder of Georgian art.

What was the aim of this big painting at the end?

It is to show the arrival of the Hanoverians as the fulfilment

of the destiny of the Glorious Revolution. I think that's the idea.

So, we've got William and Mary up here and then Queen Anne.

And then, on the end wall, on the high altar as it were,

George I and his large family.

They are a race, aren't they?

There's a huge number of them.

There are plenty of them, there are lots of progeny, exactly.

And I think that's an important part of the Hanoverian offer, as it were.

So, talk me through who they all are.

It starts with Sophia, the matriarch of the dynasty.

Absolutely, there's the Electress Sophia of Hanover.

Her son, George I, sits on the throne,

with his elbow firmly resting on the globe, designs for...

-Expansion!

-Yeah, a bit of expansion going on.

And then his eldest son, George II, stands on his left-hand side.

And is it an accident that they're facing away from each other?

Well, it's certainly suggestive if it

is an accident because they didn't get on.

By contrast, the poor, old Queen Anne sitting up all lonely,

in solitary splendour in the sky. No children at all.

The artist has absolutely exploited that to give a sense of homely

reassurance to this new dynasty.

Particularly in the way that the grandchildren are presented,

playing around on the very steps.

As allegories of art and culture, yes,

but also as the idea of a sort of uncomplicated domestic life.

This is something which the new dynasty is bringing.

What are the differences between the Stuarts

and the Hanoverians in the way they're depicted then?

Well, it may be just an accident of what space was available but

it seems as if the Hanoverians are bringing us right down to earth.

-With a bump, almost.

-With a bump, exactly.

-Here they are,

face to face, shake hands!

The illusion, instead of the idea that the vault is open to the sky

and you just, sort of, look up and wonder. The illusion is that there is

a series of steps leading up from the high table

to the throne upon which George I sits.

So, one can just walk up and meet him.

And, in fact, the artist himself, James Thornhill, is showing

himself standing on that step, almost like a footman pointing to the King.

Saying, "Yes, go and talk to him...he's fine."

So, it's not really a revolution, this, it's more of an evolution.

I think that's what they would like us to think.

This was a Georgian manifesto.

The King wanted people to know that he was offering a very different

proposition to those tyrannical,

absolutist, pig-headed old Stuarts.

George I set up home at Kensington Palace,

and here on the stairs are portraits that he had painted

of members of his household.

Quite unusually, his lower servants are included.

They were an international lot and this caused trouble at court.

The most infamous example relates to the King's supposed

pair of mistresses.

The Elephant, the fat one, and the Maypole,

the ever so slightly thinner one.

The fat one, the Elephant, was in fact the King's illegitimate

half-sister, and he just had the one skinny mistress, the Maypole.

This reputation that George developed as a sort of deviant

sexual athlete, in fact, came from the xenophobic British courtiers.

The naughty Lord Chesterfield, for example,

put it about that the King rejected no woman

if she were "Very willing, very fat, and had great breasts!"

With the consequence that candidates for the position of royal mistress

strained and swelled to put on weight.

Some succeeded and others burst!

All of the foreigners close to the King

came in for this sort of scurrilous sexual slander.

Including the King's two Turkish valets, seen here.

This is Mustafa, with the white beard, and Muhammad,

in the blue cloak.

Mustafa was very close to the King, he helped him

to get dressed in the mornings and even treated his haemorrhoids.

Of course, gossip grew up about this.

People said that the King keeps his Turks for abominable uses.

But these same aristocrats who criticised George behind his back

were probably as keen as anybody to curry favour with the new regime.

This even extended to copying George's taste.

The new dynasty were early adopters of a brand-new architectural style.

It was the complete opposite to the fancy French showiness

loved by the Stuarts.

We can see the prototype round the back of Hampton Court Palace.

This looks like a little country house

but it isn't, it's a new kitchen

added to Hampton Court by George I for his German cooks.

They made his German sausages in there.

This is the first building in Britain in the Neo-Palladian style.

It's very stark and simple and symmetrical,

not much external decoration.

And the secret of its success lies in the harmony of the proportions,

the relationship between the horizontal and the vertical.

This style would catch on and all over Georgian Britain you'd find

country houses sprouting up that looked just like this.

This was a new orderly and rational way of seeing the world.

And you just need to look at cities like Bath and Edinburgh to see that

it would catch on.

The inspiration was the 16th century architect, Andrea Palladio,

who had recreated the works of the ancient Romans.

Neo-Palladianism was ancient Rome

brought back to life with an Anglo-Saxon twist.

The Georgians were saying, "Britons, we are the heirs to the power of

"Rome and together we can build a new empire!"

An important promoter of this new style of Neo-Palladianism was

Lord Burlington, a member of the King's inner circle.

Burlington's own house, at Chiswick, is a magnificent example,

as I'm shown by the architectural historian Carole Fry.

So, Carole, tell me why this is a Neo-Palladian room that we're in?

Well, it picks up on Roman antique architecture.

So, everything about this room is referenced to an antique source.

Erm, for example, the coffered ceiling is a direct replica

of the Basilica of Maxentius, in Rome.

And we've got these very ornate pediments and yet the room remains

very cold and spartan and very sparse,

which was a trait of Neo-Palladian architecture.

Burlington was a taste-maker and a trendsetter.

Chiswick was a Neo-Palladian masterpiece, but there was something

else going on under the Georgian veneer.

There is some very questionable imagery in this building,

treasonous imagery, which doesn't need to be here.

Treasonous imagery is hidden within this building, you're saying?

Yes, not hidden very well.

It's there to be seen if you have eyes to see it.

The painting up there of Charles I and his family,

and he was a very great Stuart King and that's hanging over that

doorway, directly in front of the door.

So, as soon as visitors would come in,

they would see the old Stuart King hanging there.

Not very Hanoverian.

They are the guys who were out of power, they'd been exiled.

Absolutely!

What's going on with the star that we're standing on?

That's important because this is the Order of the Garter, which was an

honour given out by Kings, and

the fact that this is placed underneath this

painting of the Stuart King, it is

possible that Lord Burlington was alluding to the fact that

actually he had been give the Order of the Garter by the exiled

King, the would-be James III.

Lord Burlington, he's right at the heart of the Hanoverian

establishment, his wife works for Caroline, the princess.

Isn't this just a mad conspiracy theory?

It could be indeed but then one has to wonder why he did incorporate

-these treasonous images into his building.

-That's a very good point.

I can show you some more if we head through into that room.

Take me to your secret clues!

As you can see up there, it's the 2nd Earl of Burlington,

so the Earl's father.

And he's sitting with two of his close cronies.

And they're obviously having a toast,

they've each got a glass of wine.

The central figure is the Earl

and he is holding a ring over the contents of his glass,

which, literally, was a toast across the water.

So, he was toasting Kings across the water.

Which was none other than the exiled James III, as he would have been.

-Who's living in France across the Channel.

-Precisely.

So, that is a piece of Jacobite propaganda,

there's no doubt about it.

Now, if what you're saying is right

and people right at the heart of the Hanoverian establishment,

living in New Palladian buildings

could be secretly expressing treason through their architecture,

what does that say about the stability of the Georgian monarchy?

Well, it wasn't very stable.

There was a lot of support for the Jacobites.

Nobody knew which way it was going to go.

In living memory, we had kings that had been ousted from the throne

and new ones brought in.

And we also had kings that had been returned from exile,

like Charles II in 1660.

So, it was an uncertain time.

There was almost a civil war going on under the surface

and no-one knew who to support.

1715 brought the first big crisis of George's reign -

a rebellion by the Jacobites.

They intended to replace George with his Catholic nemesis James III

and were joined by some disgruntled Tory members of Parliament.

One of them shouted out in a debate that George

"could never love Britain".

The rebellion was crushed, but it made George paranoid.

He turfed out all Tories from his inner circle,

and their rival Whigs were allowed to govern unchallenged.

But there was still the problem of Jacobite propaganda -

George the turnip-headed yokel.

To counter this image of George as a turnip-head,

his supporters described him as "George the Dragon Slayer".

They associated him with the patron saint of England,

the soldier saint, who ever since the Reformation

had been shown slaying the Dragon of Popery or Roman Catholicism.

Associating German George I with the very English Saint George

did a lot to naturalise his foreignness.

I think that this portrait of George is the most important of his reign.

Because this image would pass through the hands

of every single one of his subjects.

It's being worked on here

at the Royal Collection Trust's Conservation Studios.

This portrait of George I was painted

just seven months into his new reign.

He's projecting quite a serious and sober image here,

the main colour is grey,

there isn't the sort of flamboyance of his Stuart predecessors.

And the picture is in profile, and that's because it was used

for the image on his coins - these little mini portraits of the King

were the closest that most of his new subjects

were ever going to get to him.

Another important thing is that he's dressed in armour,

he's saying, "I'm not afraid to fight for my rights!"

And he'd spent most of the 1690s

fighting for Christianity against the Muslim Ottoman Empire.

This is an important part of his image -

"Onward Christian Soldiers!"

George had one more advantage -

he was a man.

Daniel Defoe was one of many writers

who rejoiced that Queen Anne was gone.

There was no longer a useless "woman on the throne",

he wrote, "but a warrior king, able to wield the sword".

And George also benefitted from the fact

that people didn't know that much about him.

Some people could say that George was a turnip-head

and some people could say he was a dragon slayer,

because he seemed to have a curious absence of personality.

He was quite shy and retiring,

he was difficult to get to know.

But his sobriety and frugality - he was very careful with his money -

did have a particular appeal, though, to a nation of shopkeepers.

Britain was fast becoming the most commercially successful country in Europe.

Daniel Defoe picked up on this when he wrote his book,

A Tour Through The Whole Island Of Great Britain.

It's a rough guide to Britain from Leith to London.

Just one of the many markets Defoe describes

is London's Leadenhall, which has

"infinite provisions of all sorts, be it flesh, fish or fowl".

Professor John Mullan believes that Defoe captures a period

of the most rapid economic growth that Britain had never seen.

What's the point of this survey of the markets

and the tour around the whole country?

Well, because he's trying to get a picture of the island

and its history, but also of its activity -

of the island NOW.

And he's interested in Britain as a whole, isn't he? This is important.

Absolutely.

I mean, England and Scotland are unified in 1707

and Defoe is a great fan of this project

and he thinks that ability of people in different parts of Britain -

notably Scotland and Wales - to come together

into one 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.

And do you think that he was a supporter of the people at the top,

the Hanoverian monarchs themselves?

George I and George II, what did he think of them?

I think he thought the Hanoverian monarchs were absolutely necessary,

because they were there to stop us having a Catholic king

who would be a tyrant and tell everybody what to do

and would return us to a court-centred tyrannical state.

So, they were important,

but to fend things off rather than to DO things, actually.

They were a safe-guard.

So, in this very bustling, commercially successful Britain,

where's the place for religion? What does he think about that?

He says, "There is no Protestant and Catholic in a good bargain."

In other words, he thinks that, in a proper commercial nation,

religious toleration is much more likely.

People won't worry about their differences,

because the things that bind them together -

the business of making money - is much more important.

Those are important words, then.

"There is no Protestant or Catholic in a good bargain."

Yes, when you're doing the deal,

you're not worrying about your petty differences.

And he does believe that trade actually unifies a nation.

This was a brave, new economic world

where religious bigotry gave way to profit.

George I was tolerant in religious matters,

and saw economic progress as a solution to society's divisions.

Britons didn't yet love their new ruler,

but they were pretty pleased with the stability that he was providing.

He was beginning to win grudging affection outside the palace gates.

But the greater threat came from inside.

He was the head of the most dysfunctional royal family since Henry VIII.

Meet Sophia Dorothea. This is the ex-wife of George I,

she's a very significant person in the royal family.

She is, after all, the mother of the future king, George II,

and yet this is the only contemporary portrait of her

in the whole of the Royal Collection.

There's a reason for that -

she was talked about in whispers at the court of George I

because of what she'd done.

Back in Germany, before coming over to Britain,

George had married his first cousin, Sophia Dorothea of Celle.

But it wasn't a love match, it was a marriage of state,

a strategic move by the House of Hanover

to increase its territory.

Sophia and George cared little for one another,

but George DID care about his dignity and his reputation.

Sophia started an adulterous relationship with a Swede,

Count Konigsmark, who was serving in the Hanoverian Army.

Unfortunately, they weren't discreet - their letters got out.

Here's a sample from him to her.

"What joy! What rapture have I tasted in your arms!

"Ye Gods! What a night I spent!"

With this sort of thing circulating through the drawing rooms of Europe,

George was humiliated.

A scandal was about to unfold which would inflame court gossip

and spawn conspiracy theories for years to come.

It all came to a head here at the family's palace

on the River Leine.

One night, here at the Leine Palace,

we hear that Count Konigsmark

was creeping through the corridors to Sophia's room

when he was set upon by an assassin.

And this is the spot in the river

where the Swede's dead body is said to have been thrown.

The 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.

Count Kongismark's disappearance was wrapped up in mystery,

but we do know exactly what happened next to Sophia -

she 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.

That sounds pretty bad, but there was worse.

The couple had a son, another George,

the future George II of Great Britain. He was only 11,

Sophia was now parted from her son

and he would never see his mother again.

This left a massive gap in the young Prince George's life,

for which he naturally blamed his father.

It was this traumatic event that triggered

what you might call an Oedipal conflict

between George I and his son, Prince George.

This feud would have a cataclysmic effect on the royal family

for decades to come.

Not even Prince George's marriage

and the birth of his own children could heal the rift.

The tension escalated here at St James's Palace over

the birth of the prince's second son - yet another George.

An embarrassing kerfuffle broke out at this baby's christening.

The occasion was gate-crashed by a favoured courtier of the King.

The prince was pretty annoyed at 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."

But, unfortunately, because of the prince's thick German accent,

what the guy heard was, "You are a rascal, I will fight you!"

He took it as an invitation to a duel,

a dreadful breach of court etiquette.

The King got to hear of this and he was furious.

He decided to banish his son and his daughter-in-law,

the Prince and Princess of Wales, right out of St James's Palace.

All 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.

The Princess of Wales was in tears,

as she said goodbye to her three little girls

and to her newborn baby boy.

This little boy soon fell sick and the Princess of Wales believed

that the King gave him the wrong medical treatment.

Shortly afterwards, he died.

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.

Now, between father and son, there was all-out war.

The courts of Europe could talk about nothing else

but the British royal scandal.

In London, the nobility began to take sides.

Once the court had split into two factions,

each developed its own separate social life.

At the King's court, people tended to be older and more respectable,

at the Prince of Wales's court,

the courtiers were younger and more dynamic,

and at this court, they had the better parties.

At these parties, people had so much fun that some virgins conceived.

Now, you might think that this was dangerous and destabilising,

but there is an argument that this was a healthy development

in a parliamentary democracy.

Because if you wanted to criticise the King,

you didn't have to take up arms or commit treason,

you could just go to a different type of social event.

The concept of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition had been born.

The Prince of Wales's new court

effectively became a home for rebels.

After the Whigs won a great landslide victory

in the elections of 1722, many of the defeated Tories

went round the corner from the royal palace

to Prince George's house in Leicester Square instead.

It was a way of showing dissatisfaction with the King

that wasn't quite as drastic

as joining James III and the Jacobites.

Quarrels like this, between loyal fathers and sons

exacerbated by the politicians,

would happen throughout the 18th century.

This new vision of Britain, with its opposition and disputes -

its "freedom of speech", if you like -

appealed to one of the greatest thinkers in Europe.

He went by the pen name of Voltaire

and his fiery political views

had already seen him persecuted by the French government.

"How I love English boldness!"

said Voltaire. "How I love those who say what they think!

"Those who only half think are only half alive."

Voltaire knew what he was talking about,

because saying what he thought

had got him into terrible trouble in France.

So much so that he had been put in prison in the Bastille twice.

So, in 1726, to seek asylum from all of this,

he'd come over to England.

What Voltaire found was a culture of tolerance.

Indeed, in comparison to France,

he labelled Britain as a "land of liberty".

Professor Nicholas Cronk believes

that George I's rather liberal view of kingship

allowed writers like Voltaire to thrive.

When Voltaire came to England, then, things were very different.

-What differences did you notice?

-In France, under the Ancien Regime,

for the most part, writers lived through patronage.

So, you find an aristocrat, maybe the king,

who gives you a pension and you dedicate your works...

-You suck up, basically.

-You suck up, basically!

When Voltaire comes to England, what he finds is a society

where the court is much less all-powerful than it is in France.

It doesn't have the same glitz or prestige, but at the same time,

there are more centres of power outside the court.

There is a political debate between the two Houses of Parliament

and the King, so that's not like the French system.

Voltaire later writes that, "I think and I write like an Englishman."

This was clearly an important time for him.

Voltaire 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.

The idea that the English were free

was something that they were very pleased about,

so to some extent, Voltaire's picked this up

from the contemporary English press.

You find it in The Spectator or The Craftsman or whatever.

We'd like to think he's very grand

about the big, noble ideals of the freedom of mankind.

I think, for him, it's also about freedom of the writer.

He just sees that there is a literary space in England,

partly because of these different forms of publication

where he thinks a writer can express himself differently

from a writer in France who is much more

tied into how things are at court.

What's the best-known work that Voltaire produced during this time in England?

He's most famous for the book that, in French,

is called The Lettres Philosophique - "The Philosophical Letters".

In England, it was published as The Letters Concerning The English Nation.

This is a book where he talks about English liberty, he talks about English religions,

he talks about English toleration of different religions

in a way that is quite flattering to the English,

and the English liked it cos they liked being praised by a foreigner.

So, it has a rather extraordinary parallel career.

The Lettres Philosophique was condemned and burnt

in the Paris law courts and Voltaire was forbidden

from ever using the title again in any publication.

Whereas, in England,

the Letters On The English Nation is republished in Edinburgh

and Dublin and Glasgow and it's an 18th-century British best-seller.

Voltaire wrote that the English were the only people on Earth

who'd been able to limit the power of kings

by establishing wise government.

This meant that all over Europe,

George I got a reputation as a protector of progressive views.

But, in Britain, his reputation had taken a knock

after the christening quarrel.

The King's supporters were defecting to the Prince of Wales's court,

and he had to try to win them back.

He embarked on a plan to redecorate Kensington Palace.

He hoped there to host parties

that would be THE most spectacular in London.

Now, this room is pretty sensational,

take a look at that ceiling!

This is the Cupola Room. The commission for it was fought over

between designers of the old guard,

still working in the 17th-century style,

and adopters of the new Georgian look that would define the future.

Everybody expected that this plum royal commission

would go to Sir James Thornhill,

who'd been mopping up all the work of this type -

but Thornhill had got a bit complacent

and the King liked a bargain.

Thornhill's estimate was £800 - an awful lot of money.

So, the King was persuaded to look at a young, new painter instead -

William Kent, fresh back from Rome.

He wanted the job, his estimate was half of Thornhill's.

William Kent got the commission

and this was what he produced.

Kent is playing with perspective,

turning this room into a space seemingly twice as tall.

He uses paint to emulate architecture.

But his more traditional colleagues found it garish and tasteless.

It's not surprising that there was a bit of carping and nay-saying

when this room was first completed

because the British just weren't used to this sort of thing.

It's like a completely fake Roman palace interior

made out of wood and paint

and William Kent was doing something entirely new here.

Kensington Palace would be Kent's breakthrough in Britain.

Rufus Bird is Deputy Surveyor of The Queen's Works of Art

and believes that Kent was the first interior designer.

He wanted to get involved in every single aspect.

He was a complete... Sort of attention to detail in every corner,

so, if furniture was going to go into interiors that he designed,

he wanted to make sure that it harmonised perfectly.

-A bit of a control freak?

-A little bit, perhaps, yeah.

And, just looking at it,

what are the visual clues that this is a Kent design?

Firstly, you have this very obvious Roman symbolism.

The particular elements are the fish scales

which you see on the panels of the legs

and the fish scales are associated with dolphins in the 18th century,

and dolphins drew the shell chariot of Venus

and there is this large shell in the centre here

and there is another shell at the top of the back there.

Why is William Kent making all of these classical references?

In the early 18th century, Kent had been to Italy,

and came back filled with the desire

to bring Italy and Rome

and the patterns associated with Ancient Rome into Britain,

and so, this is a major change that we see.

So, France in the 17th century had been this dominant artistic leader

if you like, and then, in the 18th century,

it's Kent and his supporters

who really want to bring Italy into England.

Would you describe it as almost like a bit of stage scenery?

-Not intended for use, but to look good.

-Exactly. That's right, yeah.

And so often, court functions, particularly at this date,

are great theatrical events

and the spectacle was all.

The furnishing of the rooms was just as important as what people wore

and how they populated those spaces.

It was Kent who heralded in an entirely new kind of Georgian interior

and helped make George I's parties a glamorous success.

Kent's triumphant progress up the social ladder

from humble sign-painter to royal decorator

reveals what was now possible in terms of social mobility in Britain.

And around this time, George I decided to celebrate

his own meteoric rise by constructing a scientific marvel!

It was back in Hanover that George I spent a huge amount of money

on the most technologically ambitious project of his reign.

When this fountain was first switched on,

it was the tallest fountain in Europe.

It was based on ideas of Liebnitz

and it spurts up 35 metres into the air.

It isn't just a toy,

the fountain is actually an analogy

for the rise of the House of Hanover.

They, too, spurted up, defying gravity.

They went from being a second-rate princely house

to being one of the most important dynasties in Europe.

George fancied himself as an enlightened monarch

interested in learning and science.

And he now turned his attention to the British economy.

He needed to deal with the problem of the national debt

and his administration took a gamble

on a new emerging phenomenon - the stock market.

They sold the nation's debt

to a private business, the South Sea Company,

in exchange for a monopoly

in the fledgling British slave trade.

If that wasn't dodgy enough,

the company then issued shares

and the British were such big fans of gambling

that they bought in their thousands.

By 1720, this financial revolution was well under way,

and I think of this activity of share trading as very characteristic

of this early Georgian period.

People now realised that you could make money

out of servicing the debts of other people.

Doesn't that sound familiar?

George was about to plunge Britain into financial chaos.

The whole affair became known as the South Sea Bubble.

Shares prices rose so quickly that the company

was worth £2.5 trillion in today's money.

There were even playing cards produced

that charted this frenzy of speculation.

Dr Helen Paul is an economic historian

who has investigated the boom and bust of the South Sea Company.

What was the atmosphere like in 1720 as the prices began to rise?

The prices went up far too high to be sustainable

and once you realise that you've got naive investors coming in,

other people try to buy the same shares to sell out to them,

but you've also got a lot of money coming in from Paris

where the stock market recently crashed,

trying to find a safe haven. That pushes up prices.

Eventually, the bubble has to burst

and when the smart money leaves, everyone else panics.

So, this man has lost money in the company,

he's actually thrown himself from the window here.

"A ruined South Sea Jobber of renown

"who leaps from a lofty window, headlong down."

Oh, dear, and it's saying,

"South Sea stock! Oh, those villains!"

There was a huge amount of outcry.

People were called the "South Sea sufferers".

There was a lot of debate about whether people who gained money

should be forced to hand it back.

But, people who gained money didn't say very much about it.

Is it the beginning of a sort of fear,

a tarnishing of the image of stock market?

There'd always been the sense that finance was somehow dirty.

Land was so important,

these people were not necessarily the landed class,

so there'd always been this sense of grubbiness about it.

And there was a lot of criticism of financiers per se,

many of whom were assumed to be foreigners and Jews,

Catholics and other alleged undesirables.

So, this card here shows a Jewish broker

being forcibly baptised in a horse pond.

"Drown the Jewish dog!"

-There he goes, into the pond.

-This is just one card.

There are several that are anti-Semetic.

And it says here, "All the Jews deserve as much."

So, blame the Jews for this particular bubble?

That's right, but Jewish people have been associated

with usury or finance for many centuries.

This really unpleasant anti-Semitism

exposed the holes in Georgian Britain's facade

as a land of liberty and tolerance.

To make things worse, the corruption of the South Sea scandal

went right to the heart of Government.

Backhanders were paid to politicians

and insider trading was rife.

When the bubble burst, George had to call in a fixer.

He chose his closest political ally, Robert Walpole.

Having sold his shares at the top of the market, though, people thought

that Walpole, too, had his snout in the South Sea trough.

This is Change Alley in the city

and it was in the coffee houses along here

that the wheeling and the dealing of the South Sea Bubble took place.

When it burst, they were full of panic and fear,

and now, up pops Robert Walpole to limit the damage.

He was put in charge of an investigation into the crisis

but it didn't really go anywhere.

It was thought that he protected prominent people

from charges of bribery and corruption

and because he'd shielded them from the consequences of their actions,

people called him the "Screen Master General".

There was a growing feeling that, once again, the elite had won,

but Walpole didn't get off entirely scot-free.

There was a new force at work in Georgian society - satire.

One of the Georgian age's most notorious images

is Walpole's huge naked bottom

blocking the way into the Treasury.

To get on in 18th-century government,

this is what you had to kiss.

These satirists used lewd images and language

to skewer hypocrisy,

from a diving competition into the sewers of Fleet Street

to a giant weeing on the royal palace.

They were reaping the benefits of a very strange thing

that had happened at the end of the previous century.

According to contemporary satirist Martin Rowson,

parliament had inadvertently made this satire boom possible.

Could you print anything you wanted?

It's, I think, one of the most beautiful moments

certainly in British and probably in world history,

because it was an accident.

If they were meant to be renewing the Licensing Act

which was essentially press censorship, the Royal Licence.

And somebody forgot to put it in the parliamentary timetable.

Suddenly, Pandora's Box was opened.

-You could print anything you wanted?

-You could print anything you wanted.

There was a sudden eruption of freedom of speech and of satire.

And whereas people had previously been writing satires on behalf of rich and powerful men

to attack other rich and powerful men - which meant that they had a protector -

now, they could write whatever they wanted.

So, you could now print all kinds of naughty stuff with impunity?

It meant suddenly the people were liberated to satirise everything.

And after Leveson last year when people were saying,

"We fought! We fought for centuries for this freedom of the press!"

No, we didn't! It just happened by mistake

because somebody forgot to put it in the parliamentary timetables.

And it's what led to our understanding in the 18th century.

It's not necessarily been the age of George I, George II, George III,

but the age of Swift and Pope and Hogarth,

and later, Gillray and Sterne.

There is this open sewer of satire running through the Enlightenment.

How popular was this? Who did it appeal to?

It's a weird relationship,

because, on the one hand, this is scurrilous, filthy stuff,

but on the other hand, the people who bought Gillray's stuff

and who bought Hogarth's stuff were the people who were being satirised.

They understood it was part of the joke.

Satire allowed people to criticise the highest echelons of society

without getting thrown into the Tower Of London.

But the satirists upped the ante again -

when writers such as Jonathan Swift were bold enough

to have a go at the monarchy itself.

In Gulliver's Travels,

Swift has his main character, Lemuel Gulliver,

wash up on the island of Lilliput.

Here, he found a tiny royal court

where everyone is obsessed with climbing the greasy pole.

How did Swift satirise the monarchy?

Gulliver's Travels is a prolonged satire

on the whole notion of courts.

So, 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.

The levels of corruption, the levels of venality...

It's not that difficult a satire to say these people who thought

they were such great men are really little tiny things.

And, of course, all the people in George I's court

recognised what it was all about.

Did these people not mind Jonathan Swift laughing at them?

It 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, you're not quite right,

because you should recognise

that your position is inherently ludicrous.

All this satire was so popular that the King and the politicians

had to take it took it on the chin.

Better to laugh along, pretending you were in on the joke.

But it was Robert Walpole, not the King,

who was the greatest target of fun.

George I often just wasn't there. He'd gone back to Germany.

Here'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

and he's brought an awful lot of people with him.

You can see here the whole of his German household,

there are Mustafa and Muhammad, his valets,

but he's also brought with him some prominent British politicians.

Milord Townsend, as it says here, he was a top Whig,

and here we have Milady Townsend - he's brought his wife with him.

And this is a real problem - when the King comes over to Germany

and he brings all these people,

it's like he sucks all the life out of the British politics.

Nothing can happen in London without him

and something of a power vacuum opens up.

And when the King's away, Walpole will play.

Many of George's ministers were strongly opposed

to his frequent visits to Hanover

but Walpole saw them as an opportunity.

This was the origin of modern government.

When the King was away in Germany, his ministers got into the habit

of meeting by themselves without him, making autonomous decisions.

These meetings of the government ministers were chaired by -

who else? - Sir Robert Walpole.

He was first amongst the equals

and 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.

This is the essence of the system of cabinet government

that we still have today.

George 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.

He needn't have worried.

For the century before his reign, Britain had been eating itself,

there had been civil wars

and revolutions and disputes about inheritance.

With George I, though, came stability,

freedom of speech and modern government.

George may not have been the sharpest or brightest

or most vigorous king,

but thanks to his benign rule,

Britain was on the way to becoming truly great.

For himself, though, George still called Hanover home.

Indeed, he was travelling back here at the very moment of his death.

George's body ended up in this mausoleum,

overlooking his beloved Palace of Herrenhausen,

the place he never really wanted to leave.

Some of George's British subjects called him "Lucky George",

this man who had so unexpectedly inherited their throne.

But I think of him as "Unlucky George".

He never really wanted to leave Hanover,

he was deeply unlucky in his personal life

with his divorce and his terrible relationship with his son.

The history books have overlooked him

because he wasn't showy, he had no charisma,

but sometimes it's the quiet ones that you've got to watch.

I think I'd say not so much "Lucky George", but "Lucky Britain".

Next time, as their personal divisions deepen,

the royal family have to deal with a new force

that's reshaping Britain - the power of the public.

This is a very dangerous moment for the Hanoverian royal family.

If any one of them were to make a mistake,

it could break the monarchy.