“The old town of Hanover,” says Thackeray, “must look still pretty much as in the time when George Louis left it. The gardens and pavilions of Herrenhausen are scarce changed since the day when the stout old Electress Sophia fell down in her last walk there, preceding but by a few weeks to the tomb James the Second’s daughter, whose death made way for the Brunswick Stuarts in England. . . . You may see at Herrenhausen the very rustic theatre in which the Platens danced and performed masks and sang before the Elector and his sons. There are the very fauns and dryads of stone still glimmering through the brandies, still grinning and piping their ditties of no tone, as in the days when painted nymphs hung garlands round them, appeared under their leafy arcades with gilt crooks, guiding rams with gilt horns, descended from ‘machines’ in the guise of Diana or Minerva, and delivered immense allegorical compliments to the princes returned home from the campaign.” Herrenhausen, indeed, is changed but little since those days of which Thackeray speaks. But although not many years have passed since Thackeray went to visit Hanover before delivering his lectures on “The Four Georges,” Hanover itself has undergone much alteration. If one of the Georges could now return to his ancestral capital he would indeed be bewildered at the great new squares, the rows of tall vast shops and warehouses, the spacious railway-station, penetrated to every corner at night by the keen electric light. But in passing from Hanover to Herrenhausen one goes back, in a short drive, from the days of the Emperor William of Germany to the days of George the Elector. Herrenhausen, the favorite residence of the Electors of Hanover, is but a short distance from the capital. Thackeray speaks of it as an ugly place, and it certainly has not many claims to the picturesque. But it is full of a certain curious half-melancholy interest, and well fitted to be the cradle and the home of a decaying Hanoverian dynasty. In its galleries one may spend many an hour, not unprofitably, in studying the faces of all the men and women who are famous, notorious, or infamous in connection with the history of Hanover. The story of that dynasty has more than one episode not unlike that of the unfortunate Sophia Dorothea and Koenigsmark, her lover. A good many grim legends haunt the place and give interest to some of the faces, otherwise insipid enough, which look out of the heavy frames and the formal court-dresses of the picture-gallery.

On the evening of August 5, 1714, four days after Queen Anne’s death, Lord Clarendon, the lately appointed English Minister at the Court of Hanover, set out for the palace of Herrenhausen to bear to the new King of Great Britain the tidings of Queen Anne’s death. About two o’clock in the morning he entered the royal apartments of the ungenial and sleepy George, and, kneeling, did homage to him as King of Great Britain. George took the announcement of his new rank without even a semblance of gratification. He had made up his mind to endure it, and that was all. He was too stolid, or lazy, or sincere to affect the slightest personal interest in the news. He lingered in Hanover as long as he decently could, and sauntered for many a day through the prim, dull, and orderly walks of Herrenhausen. He behaved very much in the fashion of the convict in Prior’s poem, who, when the cart was ready and the halter adjusted,

Often took leave but seemed loath to depart.

August 31st had arrived before George began his journey to England. But he did one or two good-natured things before leaving Hanover; he ordered the abolition of certain duties on provisions, and he had the insolvent debtors throughout the Electorate discharged from custody. On September 5th he reached the Hague, and here another stoppage took place. The exertion of travelling from Hanover to the Hague had been so great that George apparently required a respite from September 5th until the 16th. On the 16th he embarked, and reached Greenwich two days after. He was accompanied to England by his two leading favorites the ladies whose charms we have already described. For many days after his arrival in London the King did little but lament his exile from his beloved Herrenhausen, and tell every one he met how cordially he disliked England, its people, and its ways. Fortunately, perhaps, in this respect, for the popularity of his Majesty, George’s audience was necessarily limited. He spoke no English, and hardly any of those who surrounded him could speak German, while some of his ministers did not even speak French. Sir Robert Walpole tried to get on with him by talking Latin. Even the English oysters George could not abide; he grumbled long at their queer taste, their want of flavor, and it was some time before his devoted attendants discovered that their monarch liked stale oysters with a good strong rankness about them. No time was lost, when this important discovery had been made, in procuring oysters to the taste of the King, and one of George’s objections to the throne of England was easily removed.

There was naturally great curiosity to see the King, and a writer of the time gives an amusing account of the efforts made to obtain a sight of him. “A certain person has paid several guineas for the benefit of Cheapside conduit, and another has almost given twenty years’ purchase for a shed in Stocks Market. Some lay out great sums in shop-windows, others sell lottery tickets to hire cobblers’ stalls, and here and there a vintner has received earnest for the use of his sign-post. King Charles the Second’s horse at the aforesaid market is to carry double, and his Majesty at Charing Cross is to ride between two draymen. Some have made interest to climb chimneys, and others to be exalted to the airy station of a steeple.”

The princely pageant which people were so eager to see lives still in a print issued by “Tim. Jordan and Tho. Bakenwell at Ye Golden Lion in Fleet Street.” We are thus gladdened by a sight of the splendid procession winding its way through St. James’s Park to St. James’s Palace. There are musketeers and trumpeters on horseback; there are courtly gentlemen on horse and afoot, and great lumbering, gilded, gaudily-bedizened carriages with four and six steeds, and more trumpeters, on foot this time, and pursuivants and heralds George was fond of heralds, and created two of his own, Hanover and Gloucester and then the royal carriage, with its eight prancing horses, and the Elector of Hanover and King of England inside, with his hand to his heart, and still more soldiers following, both horse and foot, and, of course, a loyal populace everywhere waving their three-cornered hats and huzzaing with all their might.

The day of the entry was not without its element of tragedy. In the crowd Colonel Chudleigh called Mr. Charles Aldworth, M.P. for New Windsor, a Jacobite. There was a quarrel, the gentlemen went to Marylebone Fields, exchanged a few passes, and Mr. Aldworth was almost immediately killed. This was no great wonder, for we learn, in a letter from Lord Berkeley of Stratton, preserved in the Wentworth Papers, describing the duel, that Mr. Aldworth had such a weakness in his arms from childhood that he could not stretch them out; a fact, Lord Berkeley hints, by no means unknown to his adversary.

Horace Walpole has left a description of King George which is worth citation. “The person of the King,” he says, “is as perfect in my memory as if I saw him yesterday; it was that of an elderly man, rather pale, and exactly like his pictures and coins; not tall, of an aspect rather good than august, with a dark tie-wig, a plain coat, waistcoat and breeches of snuff-colored cloth, with stockings of the same color, and a blue ribbon over all.” George was fond of heavy dining and heavy drinking. He often dined at Sir Robert Walpole’s, at Richmond Hill, where he used to drink so much punch that even the Duchess of Kendal endeavored to restrain him, and received in return some coarse admonition in German. He was shy and reserved in general, and he detested all the troublesome display of royalty. He hated going to the theatre in state, and he did not even care to show himself in front of the royal box; he preferred to sit in another and less conspicuous box with the Duchess of Kendal and Lady Walsingham. On the whole, it would seem as if the inclination of the English people for the Hanoverian dynasty was about to be tried by the severest test that fate could well ordain. A dull, stolid, and profligate king, fond of drink and of low conversation, without dignity of appearance or manner, without sympathy of any kind with the English people and English ways, and without the slightest knowledge of the English language, was suddenly thrust upon the people and proclaimed their king. Fortunately for the Hanoverian dynasty, the English people, as a whole, had grown into a mood of comparative indifference as to who should rule them so long as they were let alone. It was impossible that a strong feeling of loyalty to any House should burn just then in the breast of the great majority of the English people. Those who were devoted to the Stuarts and those who detested the Stuarts felt strongly on the subject this way or that, and they would therefore admire or detest King George according to their previously acquired political principles. But to the ordinary Englishman it only seemed that England had lately been trying a variety of political systems and a variety of rulers; that one seemed to succeed hardly better than the other; that so long as no great breakdown in the system took place, it mattered little whether a Stuart or a Brunswick was in temporary possession of the throne. Within a comparatively short space of time the English Parliament had deposed Charles the First; the Protectorate had been tried under Cromwell; the Restoration had been brought about by the adroitness of Monk; James the Second, a Catholic, had come to the throne, and had been driven off the throne by William the Third; William had established a new dynasty and a new system, which was no sooner established than it had to be succeeded by the introduction to the throne of one of the daughters of the displaced House of Stuart. England had not had time to become attached, or even reconciled, to any of these succeeding rulers, and the English people in general the English people outside the circle of courts and Parliament and politics were well satisfied when George came to the throne to let any one wear the crown who did not make himself and his system absolutely intolerable to the nation.

The old-fashioned romantic principle of personal loyalty, unconditional loyalty the loyalty of Divine right was already languishing unto death. It was now seen for the last time in effective contrast with what we may call the modern principle of loyalty. The modern principle of loyalty to a sovereign is that which, having decided in favor of monarchical government and of an hereditary succession, resolves to abide by that choice, and for the sake of the principle and of the country to pay all respect and homage to the person of the chosen ruler. But the loyalty which still clung to the fading fortunes of the Stuarts was very different from this, and came into direct contrast with the feelings shown by the majority of the people of England towards the House of Hanover. Though faults and weaknesses beyond number, weaknesses which were even worse than actual faults, tainted the character and corroded the moral fibre of every successive Stuart prince, the devotees of personal loyalty still clung with sentiment and with passion to the surviving representatives of the fallen dynasty. Poets and balladists, singers in the streets and singers on the mountain-side, were, even in these early days of George the First, inspired with songs of loyal homage in favor of the son of James the Second. Men and women in thousands, not only among the wild romantic hills of Scotland, but in prosaic North of England towns, and yet more prosaic London streets and alleys, were ready, if the occasion offered, to die for the Stuart cause. Despite the evidence of their own senses, men and women would still endow any representative of the Stuarts with all the virtues and talents and graces that might become an ideal prince of romance. No one thought in this way of the successors of William the Third. No one had had any particular admiration for Queen Anne, either as a sovereign or as a woman; nobody pretended to feel any thrill of sentimental emotion towards portly, stolid, sensual George the First. About the King, personally, hardly anybody cared anything. The mass of the English people who accepted him and adhered to him did so because they understood that he represented a certain quiet homely principle in politics which would secure tranquillity and stability to the country. They did not ask of him that he should be noble or gifted or dignified, or even virtuous. They asked of him two things in especial: first, that he would maintain a steady system of government; and next, that he would in general let the country alone. This is the feeling which must be taken into account if we would understand how it came to pass that the English people so contentedly accepted a sovereign like George the First. The explanation is not to be found merely in the fact that the Stuarts, as a race, had discredited themselves hopelessly with the moral sentiment of the people of England. The very worst of the Stuarts, Charles the Second, was not any worse as regards moral character than George the First, or than some of the Georges who followed him. In education and in mental capacity he was far superior to any of the Georges. There were many qualities in Charles the Second which, if his fatal love of ease and of amusement could have been kept under control, might have made him a successful sovereign, and which, were he in private life, would undoubtedly have made him an eminent man. But the truth is that the old feeling of blind unconditional homage to the sovereign was dying out; it was dying of inanition and old age and natural decay. Other and stronger forces in political thought were coming up to jostle it aside, even before its death-hour, and to occupy its place. A king was to be in England, for the future, a respected and honored chief magistrate appointed for life and to hereditary office. This new condition of things influenced the feelings and conduct of hundreds of thousands of persons who were not themselves conscious of the change. This was one great reason why George the First was so easily accepted by the country. The king was in future to be a business king, and not a king of sentiment and romance.