Episode 2 The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain

It was a summer afternoon in June 1727.

The King's chief minister, Sir Robert Walpole,

turned up unannounced at the country residence of

George, Prince of Wales and his wife Caroline.

He was out of breath and in a state of great panic.

Walpole was the bearer of momentous news.

King George I was dead.

Sir Robert Walpole tried to get in

to see the Prince and Princess of Wales but the lady-in-waiting said,

"Stop! You can't go in. They're asleep."

But Sir Robert Walpole insisted.

He said, "I've got to go in with my news."

And the poor old Prince of Wales was rather caught on the hop.

At the moment when he learned that he'd become King George II

of Great Britain and Ireland,

he was probably still buttoning up his breeches.

There was an element of farce about this

and George as King would have to up his game.

No more afternoon naps for him!

Four months later, George was crowned at Westminster Abbey.

The coronation anthem Zadok The Priest

was specially composed for the occasion by Handel.

It accompanied George's transformation from Prince to King.

MUSIC: "Zadok The Priest" by George Frideric Handel

George II's reign would be long and turbulent.

German born, he found himself ruling a Britain that was

heading into the future at lightning speed.

New money had forged a new middling sort of people in society

who questioned the established order.

Affairs of state were being discussed in taverns

and coffee houses.

And the royal family found themselves mocked in newspapers,

in satirical prints and in the theatres.

It would have been difficult for any dynasty

but this lot were still new. They only had shallow roots.

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

If any one of them were to make a mistake,

it could break the monarchy.

But this was the most dysfunctional royal family since the Tudors.

Their feuding would shake the state to its foundations.

The first Georgian kings have fascinated me for years.

And for this series,

I've been given access to pieces from the Royal Collection as they're

prepared for an exhibition at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace.

These works of art, many of them commissioned or owned

by the first Georgian kings,

reveal how they had to adapt to a public

who were no longer merely just subjects.

And in doing this, the Hanoverians invented the modern monarchy.

This is George II's bed.

At first glance, it may look like any other grand Georgian bed.

But actually, this is his travelling bed,

which could be collapsed down into 54 separate pieces -

the original flat-pack.

The fact that George needed a special bed for travelling

tells us something important.

He was always, it seems,

popping off back to Hanover.

This was a real problem for his British subjects.

It looked like George's heart still lay in his homeland.

His absences reminded the British that he was alien -

that he had another country to think about as well as Britain.

To many of them, George became the King who wasn't there.

And as well as the small matter of ruling both

Hanover and Britain, much of the King's time

was taken up by his mistresses,

which was really quite annoying to his long-suffering,

but loyal, German wife.

Let me introduce you to Caroline. She is my favourite queen.

As you can see from the bust, she's not exactly a fairy-tale princess.

She's middle-aged, she's overweight,

she's had eight children.

But she had this wonderfully warm and witty personality.

It made her very good at her job as Queen, welcoming people to court.

But there was much more complexity and depth to her than that.

You do get a sense that she was bored

and sort of blunted by her royal duties.

She would rather have been cracking jokes

with her clever friends somewhere else.

And I think that if you look at the corner of her mouth here,

it's twitching, like she's about to start laughing.

While the King was prickly and distant,

Caroline was highly sociable.

In her private apartments at Hampton Court,

she gathered together a sparkling circle of intellectuals and wits.

Caroline, at heart, was a warm and convivial person.

She loved to eat and she loved to talk.

The British courtiers really relished the way that she could

remember little personal details about each of them.

She'd say things like,

"My Lord, how is your little girl? Is she better?"

Or one of them remembered that,

"The Queen was so interested in my print collection

"that I had to go home

"and get all of the rest of my books to show her."

Because of her husband's poor social skills,

Caroline becomes the user-friendly public face

of the Hanoverian monarchy.

She was its likeable and approachable ambassador.

Caroline wielded enormous power and influence,

especially over her husband.

This made her an indispensable ally

to the King's leading minister, Sir Robert Walpole.

As Prince of Wales, George had been wary of Walpole,

calling him a rogue and a rascal.

But Caroline persuaded George as King to keep Walpole on.

It proved to be a smart move. Walpole could get things done.

Walpole was the ultimate fixer.

He spent a lot of time whispering into people's ears.

"What about job X for person Y?"

If you wanted your son to be a captain in the Army, for example,

Walpole was your man.

His power was cemented when the King gave him

this house in Downing Street.

He accepted it not as an individual but on behalf of his office,

which was First Lord of the Treasury,

as it still says on the front door.

This job title is better known to us today as Prime Minister.

Downing Street was Walpole's reward for his ability to provide

a stable government and a lavish budget for the King's court.

A year into his reign,

George began making preparations for his first trip to Hanover as King.

Now, who was going to rule Britain?

Well, Parliament passed the Regency Act,

putting Queen Caroline in charge.

And this confirmed what a lot of people already thought -

that Caroline was the one who wore the trousers.

As the popular poem had it...

Caroline worked hard to strengthen the Georgian dynasty.

And one way she did it was by publicly encouraging

the intellectual upheaval, generally called the Enlightenment.

As Princess of Wales, Caroline had brought about a breakthrough

in the fight against smallpox.

The disease was attacking the population, people said,

like a destroying angel.

Professor of medicine Gareth Williams

is going to show me the grim details.

What we've got here are the three key stages of the smallpox rash.

So we've got the early vesicles here. Here are the pustules,

getting quite nicely developed.

And over there is the stage of the confluent rash.

This is where all the pustules are full of pus

and there are so many of them that you're left with something like that.

-My goodness!

-It was one of the great killers.

Smallpox actually killed one person in 12.

What happens in the early 18th century? There's a change, is there?

Well, they got reports from Turkey of a way of preventing smallpox,

reported by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,

who was a bit of a girl, and she was the wife of the ambassador to Turkey.

She heard about an extraordinary practice,

which was giving a healthy child smallpox deliberately.

And it sounds completely counterintuitive but, in fact,

it was actually one of the safest

and one of the most effective medical procedures of the day.

How did Caroline, who was then the Princess of Wales,

-get to hear about it?

-Well, it was through Lady Mary.

She became a good personal friend of Princess Caroline,

the Princess of Wales.

Caroline said, "Well, OK, let's see the evidence."

So the evidence was quite bold, actually.

Lady Mary had her daughter inoculated with smallpox the following spring -

this was in 1721 -

and it was a really good time to do this experiment because smallpox

had broken out in London and people were running scared again.

So Caroline is convinced that this really works

and it seems to me that the most important thing that she does

is to inoculate her own children.

Exactly right. But the broader issue is, yes,

you've got a royal who's engaged,

you've got a royal who's phenomenally bright

and actually interested in not just the people and their problems

but in scientific and medical solutions for those problems.

It was this scientific approach

that separated Caroline and the Hanoverians

from their Stuart predecessors.

The Stuarts had often laid their hands upon the sick,

believing they had semi-divine powers of healing.

But Caroline placed her trust in medicine, not magic.

The French philosopher Voltaire commented on smallpox

in his book Letters On England.

He said that Europe thought the British crazy

for this business of making a well child sick.

Voltaire tells us that inoculation really caught on.

"England followed her example," he says,

"and since then at least 10,000 children

"owe their lives to the Queen and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

"And as many girls are indebted to them for their beauty."

Voltaire's book also highlighted other great changes

under way in Britain.

He noted how commerce had enriched the citizens,

helping to make them freer.

This freedom had, in turn,

made greater entrepreneurship possible, widening wealth overall.

And nowhere was this more true than in London.

Here, economic changes were creating a new kind of behaviour.

There was lots of new money in Georgian Britain -

a lot of it in the hands of a new rank of people in society.

They weren't aristocrats and they weren't the workers, either.

They were what was called the middling sort.

Some of them were professionals,

like doctors and lawyers and clergymen.

Others ran shops or they were in trade,

particularly in the new products of sugar and cotton.

And like all these people here at the market,

they had money to burn on things that they didn't really need,

like vases for their houses

or trips to the pleasure gardens

or really expensive cups of coffee.

This emerging middling sort differentiated Britain

from its continental neighbours,

where the aristocracy still held sway.

And with this new social class came new spending power.

In 1720, a Yorkshireman called Charles Clay came to London,

hoping that some of this new money would come his way.

His particular wheeze was to construct

miraculously elaborate clocks,

which he then displayed to the public for a fee.

Rufus Bird is going to show me one of Clay's craziest creations.

It was originally called The Temple And Oracle Of Apollo.

It is an organ clock which, curiously,

has this magnificent 17th-century

Augsburg casket resting on top of it.

And then in the pedestal,

you have this organ which plays ten different tunes arranged by Handel.

How does it actually work?

If we open this door here, you can see inside there is the weights

and the pulley and then the barrel organ itself. I can play a tune.

-Shall we play one?

-Yes, let's hear it.

JAUNTY MUSIC PLAYS

And who was he making it for? What was the point of it?

It was a commercial enterprise.

We know that through the advertisement which his widow placed

in a newspaper in 1743. And I've got a copy of it just here.

Mrs 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."

-Amazing! And it's yours for a shilling.

-That's right.

You can see this, and hear it, for one shilling.

50 years earlier, Charles Clay would have been making

a specialised item like this for a royal patron.

But in this new Georgian age,

Clay could use his clocks to make a living from very different patrons -

paying customers.

This early Georgian period was fast becoming

the age of the self-made man.

There was one individual who epitomised this - Alexander Pope.

Pope was a satirist with legendary bite,

who coined classic phrases like,

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

But Pope is remembered as much for his business nous

as his heroic couplets.

He showed that a writer could earn a fortune

by selling his work directly to the public.

And his success allowed him to live in some style.

Although his grand villa in Twickenham no longer stands,

one intriguing part of it has survived - a grotto.

This is not just an exciting underground grotto,

it's also a museum of mineralogy.

Look at this crystal set into the walls there. It's winking at me.

And originally there were little fragments of mirror

stuck in amongst the stones so when you came down here with a lamp

and you turned it on, suddenly rays were shooting everywhere

and the whole thing was glittering. Ooh!

Now, I think that is a piece of the Giant's Causeway.

You can see the six sides of the basalt there.

And there is a picture

that shows Alexander Pope doing some writing down here.

But you'd think it was a bit dark for that.

Now, how did he pay for all of this? The answer is this book.

This is the pocket version of his famous translation

of the Iliad by Homer.

And he made money out of his work like a modern author would.

He didn't have a single rich patron funding his lifestyle.

He sold individual copies to a broad range of people.

If you look at the first deluxe edition of the book,

you'll see the list of subscribers - headed by Caroline.

So she was acting here as a new type of patron.

She's just buying the book, giving him some money,

but - more importantly - offering him her moral support

so that other people would buy the book, too. And they did.

It made him the equivalent in today's money of £400,000 -

what he needed to buy his villa and to build his grotto.

Pope was very proud of the way he'd achieved all of this independently.

He said, "I live and I thrive

"not indebted to any prince or peer alive."

However, Alexander Pope was only 4'6",

suffered from curvature of the spine and was a Catholic, too.

He was always an outsider.

When he said he was in no-one's debt, he really did mean it.

Pope decided to write his own version of Homer's Iliad.

But his was going to be in English

and it was going to be a great big spoof.

The poem was called the Dunciad.

From the very start of the Dunciad, it was clear that not even

the royal family are safe from Pope's poisonous pen.

"You by whose care, in vain decry'd and curst,

"Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first."

Who do you think that he meant by that?

This blatant reference to George II

kicks off a depiction of a society dominated by dimwits,

and ruled by a king of the dunces.

He was under the thumb of a female character called Dullness.

She was very dreary and rather fat, too,

and by this, Pope meant Caroline.

"Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind,

"She rul'd, in native Anarchy, the mind."

She'd been his big supporter as Princess of Wales

but when she became Queen, she had other fish to fry.

Pope felt that he'd been neglected so he turned against her,

using his very wounding weapons of words.

He basically says in the Dunciad

that she's a bit of a porker and rather boring.

But just as Pope's relations with Caroline turned sour,

another member of the royal family was ready to take advantage.

Prince Frederick, Caroline's son and heir to the throne,

befriended the poet in her place.

He was even painted

with a copy of Pope's translation of Homer in his hand.

Caroline now had a rival in her patronage of the arts.

Frederick was a genuine music lover.

Sometimes he'd give a concert by an open window as the evening fell,

playing his cello.

And all the court servants

would creep out into the courtyard to listen.

Frederick's parents felt that this was undignified behaviour - vulgar.

Entertaining the masses?!

You could forgive Frederick

for thinking that his parents had abandoned him.

When he was seven, they left him behind in Hanover

when George and Caroline came over to London in 1714.

There were good political reasons for this -

Frederick was going to be the family's representative in Hanover

so that the people there wouldn't think they'd been

entirely forgotten about.

The problems emerged years later

when Frederick came over to London himself, now a grown-up.

It wasn't just that he'd lost touch with his parents

and needed to rebuild the relationship,

it was worse than that -

It turned out that he and his parents couldn't stand the sight

of each other.

And it was this hostility

that would pose the greatest threat to the Georgian monarchy.

Frederick's openness and his social nature were in marked contrast

to his grumpy father George II.

The Prince of Wales's common touch would be perfectly captured

in a painting by the artist Joseph Nicholls.

This is St James's Park on a summer evening

and everybody's out for a walk.

A French visitor tells us that sometimes the park was so packed

that you couldn't help touching your neighbour.

He says that some people came to see, others to be seen -

all on the lookout for adventures.

He says that there were many priestesses of Venus

about in the park.

And the brilliant thing about this painting is that

it's like a snapshot of the whole of Georgian society.

We have lowlife characters here,

like these ladies feeding their babies.

Here is kissing going on.

Here is a man taking a leak.

We also have commerce -

these ladies are selling cups of milk to the gentry.

Over here, we have high society.

This lady is taking snuff.

This foppish gentleman is doing a very fancy French sort of bow.

And right at the centre of all this is Frederick, the Prince of Wales.

And that's what makes it such a British scene.

In France, the King was stuck out at Versailles.

He was aloof and remote from his people.

But Frederick thinks of himself as the people's prince.

He's got the popular touch. He's on a royal walkabout.

You can see people turning to watch him.

And this is very typical of Frederick.

He doesn't position himself above the crowd but right at its centre.

The royal court was no longer setting the rules

for fashionable life.

And Frederick responded by joining in the contemporary craze

for refined but informal gatherings.

This was reflected in a new kind of painting - the conversation piece.

Rather than formal group portraits, conversation pieces showed people

actually enjoying each other's company.

Here's a lively dinner party

with the host dishing out lots of drinks,

guests fumbling with each other

and a fat clergyman looking on with worldly satisfaction.

Even the royal family were depicted in this new style of painting.

This is an oil sketch for a conversation piece

of the royal family.

It was done by the artist William Hogarth on spec.

His hope was that the King would really like it and that he'd buy it.

It's got all the hallmarks of a conversation piece.

It's a family scene -

mother, father, the children all talking to each other.

But there are three very good reasons that George II

was never going to buy this picture.

Firstly, William Hogarth wasn't an artist in favour at court.

There, the work was dominated by his rival,

Queen Caroline's favourite artist William Kent.

Secondly, the very idea that George II would buy

a piece of avant-garde art is ridiculous.

He didn't like art at all.

And thirdly, it's a bit of a farce cos it looks like a happy family

but, in fact, this lot hated each other.

There were terrible rivalries and tensions

between these parents and these children.

Fortunately for Hogarth,

he didn't actually need royal patronage to be successful.

Like Alexander Pope, Hogarth was a freelancer

with an entrepreneurial streak.

This is his very nice pad in Chiswick.

That he could afford it

shows how well he understood what his customers wanted.

And what they wanted was prints -

the original affordable art.

Britain went wild for these characters and these images

but what most people were seeing wasn't Hogarth's own work.

To keep things exclusive, he'd only produce enough prints

to go to his list of just over 1,000 subscribers.

But almost instantly,

his rivals and copycats started to produce cheap knock-offs.

The speed with which they did this was incredible.

It was almost before the ink had dried on the originals.

A set of Hogarth prints - and of these knock-off copies too -

can be found in the Royal Collection.

I'm meeting senior curator Kate Heard to see how they differed

and what, if anything, the artist could do about it.

So 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?

You're going to get six prints, of which this is the first one,

showing the harlot,

of The Harlot's Progress, arriving in London.

-Oh, dear! She's a fresh young girl.

-Absolutely.

We know that it's going to be bad.

Hogarth made 1,240 of them and refused to make any more.

One of his great selling points was that it's an exclusive thing.

You subscribe, you pay upfront,

you're one of the club that can have them.

What did you do if you weren't a subscriber, then,

but you wanted to own these images?

Well, you could actually get hold of slightly different copies -

not the real thing, but pirated copies,

which were rushed out by the print sellers within a few weeks.

It's reversed, as well, isn't it?

Yes, that's because they're copying the original print.

So somebody's drawing it - here it is -

and then he puts the ink on and he turns it over.

And turns it back to front on the sheet of paper.

They're not bad prints, considering how quickly they were made.

And how did Hogarth respond to this? What action did he take?

He was furious. He'd had his initiative taken away from him

and he got together with a group of fellow printmakers

and they petitioned Parliament which, in 1735,

published a Copyright Act, which allowed people like Hogarth,

for 14 years, to have copyright over their images, over their prints.

And if you copied the prints, you would be punished?

-You would be fined.

-And that law stood all the way until 1911.

It was a very impressive piece of legislation.

-Was it known as Hogarth's?

-It's known as Hogarth's Act. Absolutely.

If prints were popular, newspapers were even more so.

During the course of the 18th century, newspaper production

would rise from one million to just over 14 million a year.

You didn't even need to purchase a copy yourself.

Newspapers were available for browsing

in your neighbourhood coffee house.

What's really surprising is just how well informed people were.

Imagine that you and I are reasonably well-off,

reasonably intelligent Georgian chaps.

Before spending the afternoon at the pleasure garden or the theatre,

perhaps we're going to pop into the coffee house

to have a read of the newspapers.

What sort of information is available to us

in the London Journal of 1732?

Well, an enormous range.

Page one tells us about foreign affairs.

We've got a report from Paris.

Page two gives us a report from Hanover,

where the King is this week.

We've got a very detailed account of what he's up to there.

On page three, we've got a brand-new fruit

that's just been presented to Queen Caroline.

It's ripe and in a state of utmost perfection

and it is a pineapple, a complete novelty.

Now, you and I are not members of the court.

We're members of the public and this is an enormous

range of information that we've got access to.

Our kings and queens aren't just faces on a coin -

they're real characters in our minds.

This isn't just a newspaper -

it's an information superhighway.

And now the world and his dog

can have a well-informed opinion on current affairs.

What's more, the world and his dog

weren't going to keep their opinions to themselves.

Georgian coffee houses were called the "penny universities".

Pretty much blind to social status, they often hosted debating clubs.

There was more to this than just passing the time.

The Georgians had this new belief that you could refashion yourself

into a person of taste by soaking up the right kind of books and ideas.

To discuss all this, I'm meeting up with Lucy Inglis,

creator of the blog Georgian London.

Is this about self-improvement?

Is this about Georgian people wanting to learn from each other?

Yes, very much about self-improvement.

The new concept of the rising middle classes

and what it was to educate yourself and improve yourself.

And there was also this idea that there was

only so much knowledge in the world and it could be known and mastered

if you were only willing to apply yourself.

That's a brilliant idea -

you could read every single book that existed if you tried hard.

-Pretty much, yeah, yeah.

-What's this you've got here on your computer?

This here is some information that I've gathered

about one society in particular, the Robin Hood Society.

They met every Monday evening.

And what did they get up to in these meetings?

Well, 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 - it was a disputing one.

At those places, men feed their bodies

but at this one, they feed their mind.

And what sort of people attended?

Well, we have a list of members of the club here -

a baker, a doctor, a governor of the plantations, a soldier,

an author, a comedian, a house painter, a genius...

-A genius?

-A genius, yes.

So he's put that down as his profession - a genius.

-He was a genius. A noted bug doctor and a highwayman.

-No way!

-A highwayman attended the club?

-Yeah, absolutely!

A professional highwayman?

-Yeah, he was thought to be one of the best debaters but he...

-I bet!

Did he use his gun?

Yeah, he couldn't stay off the roads

-and he sadly met a sticky end at the end of a rope at Tyburn.

-Oh, dear!

-I know.

-A loss to the club, I would think.

-Yes.

So here we have a network of people

who have only been brought together by the club itself.

-They're from different ranks in society.

-Yes.

And that is one of the key points of all these clubs -

that they were deliberately bringing people together from all levels.

What did the King and the government think about these clubs?

Sometimes they were debating questions like,

"Is the Prime Minister any good?"

-This is quite dangerous.

-Absolutely. Very dangerous.

The Robin Hood Society tried to get around this by publishing

their set of rules and things they weren't going to discuss,

which was politics and God.

-However, they did discuss both.

-Oh, that was just for show, then?

-"We're not going to discuss this, but really we are."

-Exactly,

which is why the members were supposed to be known to each other,

so that you knew if you had a spy in the camp.

This culture of debate meant that the decisions of King and Parliament

were held to public scrutiny.

In 1733, Sir Robert Walpole introduced an Excise Bill

to Parliament, imposing a tax on popular commodities

like wine and tobacco.

Now, nobody likes a new tax,

especially not the self-confident new London trading classes.

There were riots outside Parliament

and Queen Caroline and Robert Walpole were burned in effigy.

Crucially, though, the King stood by his minister.

He let it be known that

to oppose his government was to oppose the King himself.

If you went against Walpole, then you were a traitor.

One of Walpole's opponents in Parliament was Lord Cobham.

He had been a great supporter of the Hanoverian monarchy.

But, for his disloyalty,

the King ejected Cobham from the House of Lords.

Cobham retreated to his country house at Stowe.

Here, he planted his revenge

in the form of Stowe's magnificent landscape garden.

In Georgian Britain, even gardening was political.

The landscape garden was supposed to embody British liberty.

A place where, as one Georgian put it, "The eye can roam free."

But Stowe also delivered a more pointed message.

Cobham hid within it a series of secret meanings

or metaphors for contemporary politics and morality.

Now, you weren't expected to work out

all of these hidden secret meanings all by yourself.

You could buy a guidebook to the gardens,

like this original Georgian version.

And it tells me that at this spot here, I have a decision to make.

I can either turn up that way, which is the path of virtue.

Up there we have temples dedicated to virtue

and the heroes of history.

Or I can go down that way.

That's the route of vice.

Down there the book promises me lustful monks,

women out of control, group sex and voyeurism.

The garden at Stowe certainly drew in the crowds.

And Lord Cobham had thoughtfully built this inn on the outskirts

to accommodate them all.

The tourists who chose the path of virtue crossed a series of bridges

to illustrate that a virtuous life is never without its obstacles.

But I'm on the path of vice,

where visitors get titillation alongside moral instruction.

One of the stopping-off points is the Temple Of Venus.

The book tells me that the paintings in here

tell the story of this lady, who runs away from

her disagreeable husband and goes instead

to revel with a beastly herd of satyrs,

these famously lascivious creatures.

So it's basically a temple to naughty women.

But we're still in the vice area of the garden, don't forget,

so we know not to follow their example.

Let's go on improving our characters somewhere else.

But Cobham intended his garden

to offer something more than just moral instruction.

Stowe also reads like a political pamphlet,

Cobham's own State Of The Nation address.

And some of these messages seem to be aimed directly

at Frederick, Prince of Wales.

Cobham and his group of opposition politicians had identified

the Prince as a potential leader for their cause.

At the heart of the garden is the Temple Of British Worthies.

Here I'm meeting Richard Wheeler to find out how

this pantheon of British heroes is actually an attack on George II.

Obviously, there's politics going on here.

He's chosen some characters but not others.

What was he trying to express?

Well, there's a subtext going on here, because he'd just broken

from Sir Robert Walpole's Whig Party

to form his own internal Whig opposition, the Whig Patriots.

So we have King Alfred, the mildest, justest, most beneficent of kings -

everything that King George II the second was not.

And beside him Edward, the Black Prince, the terror of Europe,

the delight of England -

everything to which Prince Frederick aspired.

And, of course, Prince Frederick was the titular leader

of the Whig opposition to Sir Robert Walpole.

Why was Cobham so much against Sir Robert Walpole?

Because he was our first Prime Minister

and the idea of a Prime Minister was deeply objectionable -

that one person should rule was dictatorial, absolutist

and everything that was wrong.

So, according to the guidebook, King Alfred's been picked out because

he guarded liberty and he was the founder of the English Constitution.

This is all significant, isn't it?

English Constitution is probably the most significant,

because if anything works at Stowe

it's the idea of our old Gothic Constitution deriving from

the Witan, the parliament of the Saxons.

So we have Alfred here, the greatest of the Saxon kings.

And on the hill behind, you've got the Saxon Temple,

which is otherwise known as the Temple Of Liberty.

So it's all anti-autocracy and the main point of which was that

Parliament chose the King, as it did in Saxon times.

I think a lot of this is instruction for Prince Frederick,

telling him how to behave if he's going to be a patriot king.

One has to remember that Lord Cobham and all his compatriots

were the ones who brought the Hanoverians over.

But they've got to remain under control.

So it's the Whig oligarchy who are actually running the country

and the King as a constitutional monarch.

So the idea of the constitution - really important.

And the King really doing what he was told.

And guess what? There's no Germans here at all.

No, they're all over in the other side in the garden of vice.

I don't quite know why but there it is.

None of this was lost on Frederick, who would commission an opera

in honour of Alfred, the great patriot king.

OPERA SINGING

Frederick was emerging as the leader of the opposition.

So his parents tried to rein him in by suppressing his allowance.

The simplest way for a prince to up his income was to get married.

But George and Caroline had deliberately put off

finding their son a wife.

Poor Fred was left on the shelf until he was almost 30.

In April 1736, his parents finally relented.

The German princess, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha became Frederick's wife.

Luckily for Augusta,

Frederick liked his princess bride and got his pay rise.

But he was disappointed when it turned out to be

only £50,000 a year, half of what he had been expecting.

Now there was open conflict between the prince and his parents.

This was the beginning of an annus horribilis

for the Georgian monarchy.

And when the King left for Germany yet again,

his courtiers felt the force of public opinion.

People got so fed up with George constantly going off to Hanover,

that a mysterious spoof notice appeared,

stuck to the gates of St James's Palace.

It read, "Lost or strayed out of this house,

"a man who has abandoned a wife and six children."

A reward was offered for information of four shillings and sixpence,

but you weren't to expect any more money than that.

"Nobody judging him to deserve a crown."

Prince Frederick's camp were furious that he hadn't been made regent.

Caroline was once again running the show,

and she was back in full social reformer mode.

Once her target had been smallpox.

But she now wanted to clamp down on a new blight sweeping London,

the craze for gin.

Londoners thought that if beer came by the pint,

so too should this new drink called gin.

By the 1730s, they were addicted to gin.

They were drinking two pints per head per week.

His Majesty's government decided to reduce gin consumption

by increasing the price. They put a big new tax on gin.

This went down very badly with Londoners.

There were riots about the gin tax.

Liquor shops were draped in black to mourn the death of gin drinking.

And there was an ominous new chant amongst the crowds on the street.

They went, "No gin, no king. No gin, no king."

What did Prince Frederick do to calm down the situation?

Well, nothing at all. In fact, he inflamed it.

He was seen going to a tavern and drinking a glass of gin.

And by doing this he was saying,

"I'm just like you. I like gin and I don't like the king."

Frederick's ingratiating ways incensed Caroline.

"My God," she said, "popularity always makes me sick,

"but Fred's popularity makes me vomit."

A storm was brewing.

In December 1736, King George was returning from Hanover

when his ship was caught in a violent gale.

Rumours reached London that he'd been lost at sea.

Caroline was distraught and also disgusted at Prince Frederick,

who was clearly relishing the prospect of becoming King himself.

For a week, the country held its breath.

Many were wishing that the King had drowned.

But finally, news arrived that he was safe and well.

Back in London, George II now had to deal with his upstart son

and mounting political opposition.

One of the best mouthpieces for dissident voices was the theatre,

perhaps the most subversive art form in Georgian Britain.

Not surprisingly, Prince Frederick

had already associated himself with the stage.

He had written his own comedy, The Modish Couple.

Here at the Bristol Old Vic, an original Georgian theatre,

its artistic director, Tom Morris, can explain how the stage

provided a platform for mocking the ruling order.

We're standing on a stage here.

It's not the way people think of a modern theatre.

We're not kind of shut away from the audience somewhere up there.

We're surrounded by them.

And what's more, it's manifest in the architecture of the building

that different members of the audience

will have a different point of view.

Someone sitting over there will necessarily have

a different point of view of this conversation

than someone sitting over there. It's like a reverse shot.

If, as an actor then, that person is booing and that person is cheering,

can you sort of shut them out and go with them?

Absolutely. We know that there were asides in Georgian theatre.

If you play an aside in a theatre like this, you choose

who you play it to and you choose who you don't play it to.

-Ah, right!

-So you can constantly manipulate the relationship

with the audience.

When you look at 18th-century plays,

they appear to be incredibly naughty.

They're always satirical, they're always causing trouble,

they seem to be against power and authority.

Yeah, I mean Tom Thumb, which is a pretty tough read,

I have to say, is largely a sequence of knob jokes about Robert Walpole,

which obviously he hated. Now if you read the script,

he's not going to say that, he can't quite say that,

because it's all negotiated live with sort of double entendre

in this kind of theatre, where something can be implied,

a joke aimed here can be shared to the exclusion of those people,

and meanings are kind of fluid, immediate and transitory.

And that makes it very threatening, politically.

In 1737, Sir Robert Walpole would try to bring the curtain down

on seditious theatres, citing a play that mysteriously hasn't survived -

The Golden Rump.

The details of the play itself are a bit mysterious.

But you can get a hint of what it was about

from this contemporary print, called The Festival of the Golden Rump -

the focus of the scene is the King's bottom.

And this itself was the focus of Georgian society

because of the habit the King had at turning his back on people

who were out of favour at court.

If the King didn't want to speak to you, he would turn around

and show you his backside,

a technique that everybody called rumping.

Also, everybody knew that part of the reason the King

had such a bad temper

was because he suffered terribly from the haemorrhoids.

In this print, the King is shown as a satyr,

a creature that's out of control.

And it's lashing out - in this case the satyr is kicking

a magician-like figure who represents Sir Robert Walpole.

But don't worry, sensible Queen Caroline is here,

the mistress of medicine. She's going to bring the King

back under her control by giving him an enema.

She's injecting a magic potion up the royal bum.

It's quite amusing to think

that this play was only performed in public

in the House of Commons.

What happened was that Sir Robert Walpole claimed

he'd been given a manuscript version of it,

and in order to show how offensive and scandalous it was,

he read it out in Parliament.

Of course, everybody went, "This is terrible! We can't have this!"

From now on, there would only be two licensed theatres in London.

And all new plays had to be vetted by the Lord Chamberlain.

But there's a very attractive conspiracy theory here.

I like this one. The idea is that perhaps Sir Robert Walpole

cooked the whole thing up himself.

Perhaps he commissioned the scandalous play

in order to create the outrage and to get his censorship law passed.

In February 1737,

Frederick took the feud with his father right into Parliament.

His supporters backed a motion

to get the Prince's allowance increased.

Frederick's side lost by only a few votes.

This was the most public affront yet by the Prince to the King.

And to make matters worse,

Frederick and his wife, Augusta, had moved into Kensington Palace...

..where Frederick's habits quickly began to grate on his mother.

The palace was so claustrophobic

that Caroline had to come out into the gardens

to get a bit of privacy. She loved walking.

She'd clack along in her slippers with red heels.

Other times, though, she was trapped indoors.

Once, she was looking out of the window,

and she saw Frederick crossing the courtyard beneath her,

and she was heard to say "There he goes, that monster!

"How I wish that a hole from hell would open up and swallow him."

In July 1737, this feud finally came to a head.

The royal family had assembled at Hampton Court

to witness the arrival of Frederick and Augusta's first child.

But Frederick was determined to keep his parents away from the birth.

Augusta's labour pains began in the middle of the night.

Now, you'd expect them to call the midwife

and keep her in bed, but no.

Her husband Frederick made her get up.

He made her walk down the stairs, and he bundled her into a carriage

to drive 15 miles through the night to St James's Palace.

Now, poor Augusta was a teenager. She was in a foreign land.

This was her first pregnancy, and she spent her first labour

in a bumpy carriage in the middle of the night.

This is terribly cruel behaviour on Frederick's part.

Augusta was writhing about in agony,

and Frederick held her down with his weight.

He used so much force that he later said he put his back out doing it.

When they arrived at St James's Palace, they weren't expected,

so nothing was ready for them.

There weren't even any sheets for the bed.

And when the little baby girl was eventually born,

they had to wrap her up in a table napkin.

Frederick was successful

in tricking his parents out of their privilege

of being present at the birth of their grandchild.

When Caroline heard what had happened,

she too got up in the middle of the night

and came dashing to St James's Palace, but she was too late.

The baby was already born.

The next day, there was an almighty bust-up,

and everybody knew about it. It got into the newspapers.

This was a very dangerous moment for the Hanoverian monarchy.

Both sides were damaged.

George II looked like he couldn't even control his family,

and as for Frederick, he looked irresponsible.

He'd risked the life of his wife.

How could he be trusted with the future of the nation

when the time came?

And worst of all, there was no prospect of reconciliation.

This quarrel looked set to continue to the grave.

It would take just that, a death,

to make the royal family and the country take stock.

In November 1737, in her brand-new library at St James's Palace,

Caroline was suddenly stricken with intense pain.

What was actually wrong with Caroline? Well, nobody knew.

The doctors weren't allowed to examine her body.

There was a sense that this would have been undignified,

and also an idea that queens weren't really made out of flesh and blood,

that they were never ill.

But poor Caroline was clearly in agony.

She was put to bed, and eventually the King insisted

that the doctors have a look at her stomach.

And then they discovered

that ever since the birth of her last child,

Caroline had been suffering in secret from an umbilical hernia.

This is when a hole opens up in the walls of the stomach.

It's terribly painful.

Caroline had come to her crisis

because a little loop of her bowels had popped out through that hole.

What the doctor should have done is get the bowels,

push them back in and sew up the hole.

That's what they would do today.

But Caroline's doctors made a terrible mistake.

That little loop of bowels,

they cut it off.

Throughout all of this, Caroline kept up her good spirits.

When the doctor came in to operate, she encouraged him

by saying, "Dr Ranby, just pretend you're cutting up your ex-wife."

Her only concern seemed to be

for the grief of her husband and her children.

George II now devoted himself to her care. He sat by the bed in tears.

And when she was at death's door,

they had this very famous conversation.

She said to him, "I want you to be happy. Marry again after I'm gone".

But he said "No. I will have mistresses."

The implication was that the mistresses meant nothing to him.

He would never have a second Queen.

And when she died, it was with her hand in his.

And where was Prince Frederick?

Despite the estrangement,

he had asked to come to his mother's bedside,

but the King had forbidden it. "Frederick", he said,

"shall not come and act any of his silly plays here."

When Caroline had heard this, she had deferred to her husband.

But later, she sent a private message, a blessing,

and forgiveness to her son.

A piece of street poetry summed up the public reaction.

"Death, where is thy sting,

"to take the Queen and leave the King?"

And what of the King?

Here is sad and lonely George, all by himself, missing his wife.

He's gone to her library

to have a look at the bust of her over the door.

This was a real low point for George II.

Not only had he lost his companion of 30 years,

he had also lost an important political ally.

She had been the friendly face of his regime.

He would eventually recover and, old soldier as he was,

go on to enjoy military victories over the French and the Scots.

This period saw the development of a well-informed and pugnacious public,

a new force that challenged the old elite.

The world had changed, and sooner or later,

every monarchy across Europe would have to come to terms with it.

If you were an 18th-century king or queen,

you had two choices here.

Either you could ignore all of this and hope that it went away -

that's what they did in France, and look what happened to them -

or you could subtly change the way

in which you went about being a monarch.

In Britain, it was Queen Caroline and Prince Frederick

who really understood this,

so much so that I think they rather overshadowed George II.

Caroline had tried to help the British, promoting science

and philosophy and social improvement.

And Frederick had embraced the people,

placing himself amongst the crowd, rather than above it.

They somehow knew how to ease the friction between the monarchy

and the people, and I think we can judge their success

by the fact that 300 years later,

their descendants are still on the throne.

Next time, as Britain seeks to rule the waves,

King George's love of fighting helps him overcome the death of his queen,

renewing his sense of kingship as he leads his troops into battle.

"Now, boys!" he said.

"Fire and be brave, and the French will soon run!"