From The Cornhill Magazine. THE FOUR GEORGES. SKETCHES OF MANNERS, MORALS, COURT AND I. GEORGE THE FIRST. humble wood-built place, with a great brick church, which he sedulously frequented, and in which he and others of his house lie buried. He was a very religious lord, and called William the Pious by his small circle of subjects, over whom he ruled till fate deprived him both of sight and reason. Sometimes, in his latter days, the good duke had glimpses of mental light, when he would bid his musicians play the psalm-tunes which he loved. One thinks of a descendant of his, two hundred years afterwards, blind, old, and lost of wits, singing Handel in Windsor Tower. William the Pious had fifteen children, eight daughters and seven sons, who, as the property left among them was small, drew lots to determine which one of them should marry, and continue the stout race of the Guelphs. The lot fell on Duke George, the sixth brother. The others remained single, or contracted left-handed marriages after the princely fashion of those days. It is a queer picture-that of the old prince dying in his little wood-built capital, and his seven sons tossing up which should inherit and transmit the crown of Brentford. Duke George, the lucky prize-man, made the tour of Europe, during which he visited the court of Queen Elizabeth; and in the year 1617, came back and settled at Zell, with a wife out of Darmstadt. His remaining brothers all kept their house at Zell, for economy's sake. And presently, in due course, they all died-all the honest dukes; Ernest, and Christian, and Augustus, and Magnus, and George, and John-and they are buried in the brick church of Brentford yonder, by the sandy banks of the Aller. A VERY few years since, I knew familiarly a lady who had been asked in marriage by Horace Walpole; who had been patted on the head by George I. This lady had knocked at Johnson's door; had been intimate with Fox, the beautiful Georgina of Devonshire, and that brilliant Whig society of the reign of George III.; had known the Duchess of Queensberry, the patroness of Gay and Prior, the admired young beauty of the court of Queen Anne. I often thought, as I took my kind old friend's hand, how with it I held on to the old society of wits and men of the world. I could travel back for seven score years of time-have glimpses of Brummell, Selwyn, Chesterfield and the men of pleasure; of Walpole and Conway; of Johnson, Reynolds, Goldsmith; of North, Chatham, Newcastle; of the fair maids of honor of George II.'s court; of the German retainers of George I.'s; where Addison was secretary of state; where Dick Steele held a place; whither the great Marlborough came with his fiery spouse; when Pope and Swift and Bolingbroke yet lived and wrote. Of a society so vast, busy, brilliant, it is impossible in four brief chapters to give a complete notion; but we may peep here and there into that bygone world of the Georges, see what they and their courts were like; glance at the people round about them; look at past manners, fashions, pleasures, and contrast them with our own. I have to say thus much by way of preface, because the Dr. Vehse gives a pleasant glimpse of the subject of these lectures have been misun-way of life of our dukes in Zell. "When the derstood, and I have been taken to task for trumpeter on the tower has blown," Duke not having given grave historical treatises, Christian orders-viz., at nine o'clock in the which it never was my intention to attempt. morning, and four in the evening, every one Not about battles, about politics, about must be present at meals, and those who are statesmen and measures of state, did I ever not must go without. None of the servants, think to lecture you: but to sketch the man- unless it be a knave who has been ordered to ners and life of the old world; to amuse for ride out, shall eat or drink in the kitchen or a few hours with talk about the old society; cellar; or, without special leave, fodder his and, with the result of many a day's and horses at the prince's cost. When the meal night's pleasant reading, to try and wile is served in the court-room, a page shall go away a few winter evenings for my hearers. round and bid every one be quiet and orAmong the German princes who sat un- derly, forbidding all cursing, swearing, and der Luther at Wittenberg, was Duke Ernest rudeness; all throwing about of bread, bones, of Celle, whose younger son, William of or roast, or pocketing of the same. Every Lüneburg, was the progenitor of the illus- morning, at seven, the squires shall have trious Hanoverian house at present reigning their morning soup, along with which, and in Great Britain. Duke William held his dinner, they shall be served with their undercourt at Celle, a little town of ten thousand drink-every morning except Friday mornpeople that lies on the railway line betweening, when there was sermon, and no drink. Hamburg and Hanover, in the midst of Every evening they shall have their beer, great plains of sand, upon the river Aller. and at night their sleep-drink. The butler When Duke William had it, it was a very is especially warned not to allow noble or simple to go into the cellar: wine shall only sailles, his Wilhelmshöhe or Ludwigslust; be served at the prince's or councillor's table; and every Monday, the honest old Duke Christian ordains the accounts shall be ready, and the expenses in the kitchen, the wine and beer cellar, the bakehouse and stable, made out. Duke George, the marrying duke, did not stop at home to partake of the beer and wine, and the sermons. He went about fighting wherever there was profit to be had. He served as general in the army of the circle of Lower Saxony, the Protestant army; then he went over to the emperor, and fought in his armies in Germany and Italy: and when Gustavus Adolphus appeared in Germany, George took service as a Swedish general, and seized the Abbey of Hildesheim as his share of the plunder. Here, in the year 1641, Duke George died, leaving four sons behind him, from the youngest of whom descend our royal Georges. his court and its splendors; his gardens laid out with statues; his fountains, and waterworks, and Tritons; his actors, and dancers, and singers, and fiddlers; his harem, with its inhabitants; his diamonds and duchies for these latter; his enormous festivities, his gaming-tables, tournaments, masquerades, and banquets lasting a week long, for which the people paid with their money, when the poor wretches had it; with their bodies and very blood when they had none; being sold in thousands by their lords and masters, who gayly dealt in soldiers, staked a regiment upon the red at the gaming-table; swapped a battalion against a dancing-girl's diamond necklace; and, as it were, pocketed their people. As one views Europe, through contemporary books of travel in the early part of the last century, the landscape is awful-wretched wastes, beggarly and plundered; half-burned Under these children of Duke George, the cottages and trembling peasants gathering old God-fearing, simple ways of Zell appear piteous harvests; gangs of such trampling to have gone out of mode. The second along with bayonets behind them, and corbrother was constantly visiting Venice, and porals with canes and cats-of-nine-tails to leading a jolly, wicked life there. It was the flog them to barracks. By these passes my most jovial of all places at the end of the lord's gilt carriage floundering through the seventeenth century; and military men, after ruts, as he swears at the postilions, and toils a campaign, rushed thither, as the warriors on to the Residenz. Hard by, but away of the Allies rushed to Paris in 1814, to gam- from the noise and brawling of the citizens ble, and rejoice, and partake of all sorts of and buyers, is Wilhelmslust or Ludwigsruhe, godless delights. This prince, then, loving or Monbijou, or Versailles-it scarcely matVenice and its pleasures, brought Italian ters which,-near to the city, shut out by singers and dancers back with him to quiet woods from the beggared country, the enor old Zell; and, worse still, demeaned himself mous, hideous, gilded, monstrous marble by marrying a French lady of birth quite in- | palace, where the prince is, and the court, ferior to his own-Eleanor D'Olbreuse, from and the trim gardens, and huge fountains, whom our queen is descended. Eleanor had and the forest where the ragged peasants a pretty daughter, who inherited a great for- are beating the game in (it is death to them tune, which inflamed her cousin, George to touch a feather); and the jolly hunt Louis of Hanover, with a desire to marry sweeps by with its uniform of crimson and her; and So, with her beauty and her riches, gold; and the prince gallops ahead puffing she came to a sad end. his royal horn; and his lords and mistresses ride after him; and the stag is pulled down; and the grand huntsman gives the knife in the midst of a chorus of bugles; and 'tis time the court go home to dinner; and our noble traveller, it may be the Baron of Pöllnitz, or the Count de Königsmarck, or the excellent Chevalier de Seingalt, sees the procession gleaming through the trim avenues of the wood, and hastens to the inn, and sends his noble name to the marshal of the court. Then our nobleman arrays himself in green and gold, or pink and silver, in the richest Paris mode, and is introduced by the chamberlain, and makes his bow to the jolly prince, and the gracious princess; and is presented to the chief lords and ladies, and then comes supper and a bank at Faro, where he loses or wins a thousand pieces by daylight. If it is a German court, you may add It is too long to tell how the four sons of Duke George divided his territories amongst them, and how, finally, they came into possession of the son of the youngest of the four. In this generation the Protestant faith was nearly extinguished in the family; and then where should we in England have gone for a king? The third brother also took delight in Italy, where the priests converted him and his Protestant chaplain too. Mass was said in Hanover once more; and Italian soprani piped their Latin rhymes in place of the hymns which William the Pious and Dr. Luther sang. Louis XIV. gave this and other converts a splendid pension. Crowds of Frenchmen and brilliant French fashions came into his court. It is incalculable how much that royal bigwig cost Germany. Every prince imitated the French king, and had his Ver not a little drunkenness to this picture of Augustus of Brunswick, and brought the rehigh life; but German, or French, or Span- version to the crown of the three kingdoms ish, if you can see out of your palace-win- in her scanty trousseau. One of the handdows, beyond the trim-cut forest vistas, mis somest, the most cheerful, sensible, shrewd, ery is lying outside; hunger is stalking about accomplished of women, was Sophia, daughthe bare villages, listlessly following preca-ter of poor Frederick, the winter king of rious husbandry; ploughing stony fields with Bohemia. The other daughters of lovely, starved cattle; or fearfully taking in scanty unhappy Elizabeth Stuart went off into the harvests. Augustus is fat and jolly on his Catholic Church; this one, luckily for her throne; he can knock down an ox, and eat family, remained, I cannot say faithful to the one almost; his mistress Aurora von Kön- Reformed Religion, but at least she adopted igsmarck is the loveliest, the wittiest crea- no other. An agent of the French king's, ture; his diamonds are the biggest and most Gourville, a convert himself, strove to bring brilliant in the world, and his feasts as splen- her and her husband to a sense of the truth; did as those of Versailles. As for Louis the and tells us that he one day asked Madame Great, he is more than mortal. Lift up the Duchess of Hanover, of what religion your glances respectfully, and mark him ey- her daughter was, then a pretty girl of thiring Madame de Fontanges or Madame de teen years old. The duchess replied that Montespan from under his sublime periwig, the princess was of no religion as yet. They as he passes through the great gallery where were waiting to know of what religion her Villars, and Vendome, and Berwick, and husband would be, Protestant or Catholic. Boussuet, and Masillon are waiting. Can before instructing her! And the Duke of court be more splendid; nobles and knights Hanover having heard all Gourville's promore gallant and superb; ladies more lovely? posal, said that a change would be advanA grander monarch, or a more miserable tageous to his house, but that he himself was starved wretch than the peasant his subject, too old to change. you cannot look on. Let us bear both these types in mind, if we wish to estimate the old society properly. Remember the glory and the chivalry? Yes! Remember the grace and beauty, the splendor and lofty politeness; the gallant courtesy of Fontenoy, where the French line bids the gentlemen of the English guard to fire first; the noble constancy of the old king and Villars his general, who fits out the last army with the last crown-piece from the treasury, and goes to meet the enemy and die or conquer for France at Denain. But round all that royal splendor lies a nation enslaved and ruined; there are people robbed of their rights communities laid waste-faith, justice, commerce trampled upon, and wellnigh destroyed-nay, in the very centre of royalty itself, what horrible stains and meamess, crime and shame! It is but to a silly harlot that some of the noblest gentlemen, and some of the proudest women in the world are bowing down; it is the price of a miserable province that the king ties in diamonds round his mistress' white neck. In the first half of the last century, I say, this is going on all Europe over. Saxony is a waste as well as Picardy or Artois; and Versailles is only larger and not worse than Herrenhausen. This shrewd woman had such keen eyes that she knew how to shut them upon occasion, and was blind to many faults which it appeared that her husband the Bishop of Osnaburg and Duke of Hanover committed. He loved to take his pleasure like other sovcreigns-was a merry prince, fond of dinner and the bottle; liked to go to Italy, as his brothers had done before him; and we read how he jovially sold six thousand seven hundred of his Hanoverians to the seigniory of Venice. They went bravely off to the Morea, under command of Ernest's son, Prince Max, and only one thousand four hundred of them ever came home again. The German princes sold a good deal of this kind of stock. You may remember how George III.'s government purchased Hessians, and the use we made of them during the War of Independence. The ducats Duke Ernest got for his soldiers he spent in a series of the most brilliant entertainments. Nevertheless, the joyial prince was economical, and kept a steady eye upon his own interests. He achieved the electoral dignity for himself: he married his eldest son George to his beautiful cousin of Zell; and sending his sons out in command of armies to fight-now on this side, now on that he lived on, taking his pleasure, and scheming his schemes, a merry, wise prince enough, not, I fear, a moral prince, of which kind we shall have but very few specimens in the course of these lectures. It was the first elector of Hanover who made the fortunate match which bestowed the race of Hanoverian sovereigns upon us Britons. Nine years after Charles Stuart lost his head, his niece Sophia, one of many children of another luckless dethroned sov- Ernest Augustus had seven children in ereign, the Elector Palatine, married Ernest all, some of whom were scapegraces, and rebelled against the parental system of primo- man Protestant was a cheaper, and better, and kinder king than the Catholic Stuart in whose chair he sat, and so far loyal to England, that he let England govern herself. Having these lectures in view, I made it my business to visit that ugly cradle in which our Georges were nursed. The old town of Hanover 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 II.'s daughter, whose death made way for the Brunswick Stuarts in England. A nicce of the Electress Sophia-who had The two first royal Georges, and their been made to change her religion, and marry father, Ernest Augustus, had quite royal nothe Duke of Orleans, brother of the French tions regarding marriage; and Louis XIV. king; a woman whose honest heart was al- and Charles II. scarce distinguished themways with her friends and dear old Deutsch-selves more at Versailles or St. James', than land, though her fat little body was confined these German sultans in their little city on at Paris, or Marly, or Versailles-has left the banks of the Leine. You may see at us, in her enormous correspondence (part of Herrenhausen the very rustic theatre in which has been printed in German and French) recollections of the electress, and of George her son. Elizabeth Charlotte was at Osnaburg when George was born (1660). She narrowly escaped a whipping for being in the way on that auspicious day. She seems not to have liked little George, nor George grown up; and represents him as odiously hard, cold, and silent. Silent he may have been not a jolly prince like his father before him, but a prudent, quiet, selfish potentate, going his own way, managing his own affairs, and understanding his own interests remarkably well. In his father's lifetime, and at the head of the Hanover forces of eight or ten thousand men, George served the emperor, on the Danube against Turks, at the siege of Vienna, in Italy, and on the Rhine. When he succeeded to the electorate, he handled its affairs with great prudence and dexterity. He was very much liked by his people of Hanover. He did not show his feelings much, but he cried heartily on leaving them; as they used for joy when he came back. He showed an uncommon prudence and coolness of behavior when he came into his kingdom; exhibiting no elation; reasonably doubtful whether he should not be turned out some day; looking upon himself only as a lodger, and making the most of his brief tenure of St. James' and Hampton Court; plundering, it is true, somewhat, and dividing amongst his German followers;-but what could be expected of a sovereign who at home could sell his subjects at so many ducats per head, and make no scruple in so disposing of them? I fancy a considerable shrewdness, prudence, and even moderation in his ways. The Ger which the Platens danced and performed masques, and sang before the elector and his sons. There are the very fauns and dryads of stone still glimmering through the branches, 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 and Minerva; and delivered immense allegorical compliments to the princes returned home from the campaign. That was a curious state of morals and politics in Europe; a queer consequence of the triumph of the monarchical principle. Feudalism was beaten down. The nobility, in its quarrels with the crown, had pretty well succumbed, and the monarch was all in all. He became almost divine: the proudest and most ancient gentry of the fand did menial service for him. Who should carry Louis XIV.'s candle when he went to bed? what prince of the blood should hold the king's shirt when his most Christian majesty changed that garment ?-the French memoirs of the seventeenth century are full of such details and squabbles. The tradition is not yet extinct in Europe. Any of you who were present, as myriads were, at that splendid pageant, the opening of our Crystal Palace in London, must have seen two noble lords, great officers of the household, with ancient pedigrees, with embroidered coats, and stars on their breasts and wands in their hands, walking backwards for near the space of a mile, while the royal procession made its progress. Shall we wonder-shall we be angry-shall we laugh at these old world ceremonies? View them as you will, ac- the princes of the house in the first class; in cording to your mood; and with scorn or the second, the single field-marshal of the with respect, or with anger and sorrow, as army (the contingent was eighteen thousand, your temper leads you. Up goes Gesler's Pöllnitz says, and the elector had other hat upon the pole. Salute that symbol of fourteen thousand troops in his pay). Then Sovereignty with heartfelt awe; or with a follow, in due order, the authorities civil and sulky shrug of acquiescence, or with a grin- military, the working privy councillors, the ning obeisance; or with a stout rebellious generals of cavalry and infantry, in the third no-clap your own beaver down on your class; the high chamberlain, high marshals pate, and refuse to doff it to that spangled of the court, high masters of the horse, the velvet and flaunting feather. I make no major-generals of cavalry and infantry, in comment upon the spectators' behavior; all I say is, that Gesler's cap is still up in the market-place of Europe, and not a few folks are still kneeling to it. the fourth class, down to the majors, the Hofjunkers or pages, the secretaries or assessors, of the tenth class, of whom all were noble. Put clumsy, high Dutch statues in place We find the master of the horse had one of the marbles of Versailles: fancy Herren- thousand and ninety thalers of pay; the high hausen waterworks in place of those of chamberlain, two thousand-a thaler being Marly spread the tables with Schweins- about three shillings of our money. There kopf, Specksuppe, Leberkuchen, and the like were two chamberlains, and one for the delicacies, in place of the French cuisine; princess; five gentlemen of the chamber, and fancy Frau von Kielmansegge dancing and five gentlemen ushers; eleven pages and with Count Kammerjunker Quirini, or sing- personages to educate these young noblemen ing French songs with the most awful Ger--such as a governor, a preceptor, a fechtman accent imagine a coarse Versailles, meister, or fencing master, and a dancing and we have a Hanover before us. "I am ditto, this latter with a handsome salary of now got into the region of beauty," writes four hundred thalers. There were three Mary Wortley, from Hanover in 1716; "all body and court physicians, with eight hunthe women have literally rosy cheeks, snowy dred and five hundred thalers; a court foreheads and necks, jet eyebrows, to which may generally be added coal-black hair. These perfections never leave them to the day of their death, and have a very fine effect by candle-light; but I could wish they were handsome with a little variety. They resemble one another as Mrs. Salmon's court of Great Britain, and are in as much danger of melting away by two nearly approaching the fire." The sly Mary Wortley saw this painted seraglio of the first George at Hanover, the year after his accession to the British throne. There were great doings and feasts there. Here Lady Mary saw George II. too. "I can tell you, without flattery or partiality," she says, "that our young prince has all the accomplishments that it is possible to have at his age, with an air of sprightliness and understanding, and a something so very engaging in his behavior that needs not the advantage of his rank to appear charming." I find elsewhere similar panegyrics upon Frederick Prince of Wales, George II.'s son; and upon George III., of course, and upon George IV. in an eminent degree. It was the rule to be dazzled by princes, and people's eyes winked quite honestly at that royal radiance. The electoral court of Hanover was numerous-pretty well paid, as times went; above all, paid with a regularity which few other European courts could boast of. Perhaps you will be amused to know how the electoral court was composed. There were barber, six hundred thalers; a court organist; two musikanten; four French fiddlers; twelve trumpeters, and a bugler; so that there was plenty of music, profane and pious, in Hanover. There were ten chamber waiters, and twenty-four lacqueys in livery; a maître-d'hotel, and attendants of the kitchen; a French cook; a body cook; ten cooks; six cooks' assistants; two Braten masters, or masters of the roast-(one fancies enormous spits turning slowly, and the honest masters of the roast beladling the dripping); a pastry baker; a pie maker; and finally, three sculions, at the modest remuneration of eleven thalers. In the sugar-chamber there were four pastrycooks (for the ladies, no doubt); seven officers in the wine and beer cellars; four bread bakers; and five men in the plateroom. There were six hundred horses in the Serene stables-no less than twenty teams of princely carriage horses, eight to a team; sixteen coachmen; fourteen postilions; nineteen ostlers; thirteen helps, besides smiths, carriage-masters, horse-doctors, and other attendants of the stable. The fe male attendants were not so numerous: I grieve to find but a dozen or fourteen of them about the clectoral premises, and only two washerwomen for all the court. These functionaries had not so much to do as in the present age. I own to finding a pleasure in these small beer chronicles. I like to people the old world, with its every-day figures and inhabitants-not so much with |