The coup d'etat of 1714 - when the Whigs won

I have a piece in the latest Spectator on the
tercentenary of King George I:

 

The centenary of the start of the first world war is getting
much more attention than the tricentenary of the accession of
George I, which also falls this week. As far as I can tell, no new
biographies of the first Hanoverian king are imminent, whereas
books on the great war are pouring forth. You can see why. The
replacement of a plump, if benign, queen by an ‘obstinate and
humdrum German martinet with dull brains and coarse tastes’
(Winston Churchill’s words), who presided over a huge financial
scandal and died unlamented after a short reign, need hardly detain
us.

But forget the royals and focus on what we might call the
reshuffle among politicians that accompanied the change. Here’s how
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, described the last week of
July 1714 in a letter to Dean Swift: ‘The Earl of Oxford was
removed on Tuesday. The Queen died on Sunday. What a world this is,
and how does fortune banter us.’

The fall of the Jacobite-leaning Tories, led by Bolingbroke and
his rival and former friend Oxford, with a coup
d’état in the Privy Council by the Hanoverian-favouring Whigs,
led by the Duke of Shrewsbury, on 30 July turned out to be a key
moment in British history. It was never reversed, despite several
attempts. In its own way it was as significant as 1215 and
1688.

The Tory Bolingbroke, a dazzling orator and spectacular
libertine, had been stuffing positions of power with fellow
Jacobites since becoming secretary of state and overshadowing his
erstwhile ally the Earl of Oxford. But at an emergency privy
council meeting on 30 July following the Queen’s stroke, he found
himself outwitted by Shrewsbury, who unexpectedly summoned two
fellow Whigs, the Dukes of Argyll and Somerset. The council got the
barely conscious Queen to make Shrewsbury Lord Treasurer, then sat
late into the night dispatching messages to alert garrisons and
ensure that the Hanoverian succession was proclaimed.

Had Bolingbroke prevailed at that meeting, we would probably
have had a King James III, though there would almost certainly have
been a civil war (instead of the minor fiasco of the Fifteen).
Britain might have been more absolutist, more French influenced,
more Catholic-tolerant and less commercial. The stirrings of steam
in the north that were to start the industrial revolution — the
first faltering steps to turning heat into work — might have
fizzled. The Act of Union with Scotland, agreed to some years
earlier as part of the English insistence on the Hanoverian
succession, might have unravelled.

At least, so goes conventional wisdom. In Churchill’s words, the
outcome of that long meeting of the privy council was ‘No popery,
no disputed succession, no French bayonets, no civil war’.

However, there is another possibility. When not bonking,
Bolingbroke was a philosopher, a religious free thinker greatly
admired by Voltaire and Alexander Pope. His speeches and writings
were read with avidity by the American founding fathers, who
credited Bolingbroke with the idea that liberty means being free,
‘not of the law but by the law’. He invented the concept of an
official political opposition and saw it as his duty to prevent the
Whigs turning into a perpetual oligarchy. He proposed free trade
with France.

He was, in other words, a great deal more of an Enlightenment
figure than the Whig who replaced him and, thanks to the blind
support of George I and II, dominated politics for 20 years, while
filling his pockets with ill-gotten gains: Robert Walpole.

Thus the cartoon version of history in which Whigs and
Hanoverians brought liberty, parliament, Protestantism and trade,
while Tories and Stuarts would have brought absolutism, Popery and
civil war, may not be right. You cannot quite help wondering if a
Bolingbroke ascendancy might have given England a more vigorous
Enlightenment, too, to rival those in France and Scotland. It has
always puzzled me that the stars of the Enlightenment — Voltaire,
Diderot, Hume, Smith and co. — included plenty of Scots and French,
but no Englishmen.

Had Bolingbroke persuaded James Edward Stuart to turn
Protestant, as he had tried to, then many British people would have
welcomed a Stuart king. The idea of a German-speaking monarch was
not at all popular. Shrewsbury’s coup might well have failed.

As it was, it was a close-run thing. There were plenty of
Protestants who favoured James. I recently found out that my
ancestor, who was Tory mayor of Newcastle that year, refused to
declare the accession of George despite being a staunch Protestant.
A rival faction did declare it, so Richard Ridley sent his thugs to
stamp it out, resulting in a Friday night riot on the Quayside
(nothing much has changed).

Still, it all worked out in the end. Britain may not have loved
its new king, nor the corrupt grandees who ruled in his name and
promptly debauched the currency in the South Sea Bubble. But George
did give sanctuary to Voltaire when he was exiled from France, and
gradually the country did take advantage of the largest free-trade
area in Europe (England and Scotland) to sow the seeds of
prosperity and incubate freedom.

Bolingbroke’s most famous work, The Idea of a Patriot
King, was written at Alexander Pope’s behest much later in
1738 to influence George I’s grandson Frederick, Prince of Wales,
into being a monarch who rose above faction, was a father to his
country and championed trade.

Which, if you think about it, is roughly what we have now.

This article first
appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine,
dated 2 August
2014