But the sovereign had been reared in a ruthless and impure school, and the unfavourable impressions he had received may be pleaded in extenuation. The Courts of the Continent were at this period the scenes of gross debauchery and atrocious crimes. George I. had two children by the queen, one of whom succeeded him on the English throne, and the other became the wife of Frederic William of Brandenburg, afterwards King of Prussia. The cruelties endured by this princess from her brutal husband far exceeded those inflicted by George I. on her mother Sophia Dorothea. Voltaire has commemorated some of the eccentric outrages of the first sovereign of Prussia, and the picture has been completed in the "Memoirs of the Margravine of Bareith." The despicable and unmanly ruffian practised the same cruelties towards his wife and children as are now only found emblazoned in the police reports of London of the dregs of its population. Kicking his daughter with brutal violence, or dragging her by the hair about the room, were ordinary occurrences. His son, afterwards Frederic the Great, was subject to like or worse barbarities, with the additional refinement of torture, in being forced to witness the public execution of his friend, and be present at the castigation of a beloved mistress. * These brutalities were not peculiar to the meridian of Berlin. Almost every European court had its tale of horror or mystery, and to record them would be only • Lord Chesterfield writes from the Hague, September 15. 1750 : "My last letters from Rome inform me that the King of Prussia had beaten the Princess Royal, his daughter, most unmercifully, dragged her about the room by the hair, kicking her in the belly and breast, till her cries alarmed the officers of the guards, who came in. She keeps her bed of the bruises she received. Twenty-pence a day is allowed for the maintenance of the Prince Royal in the castle of Custrin."-Lord Mahon's Hist. of England, vol. ii. p. 72., Appendix. DISSOLUTENESS OF CONTINENTAL COURTS. 385 presenting a revolting drawback to Walpole's "History of Royal and Noble Authors." Happily, the age is advanced far beyond them, and would shudder at such a recital as that of the sacrifice of Don Carlos of Spain, or the parallel judicial immolation of his son, the unfortunate Iwan, by Peter the Great of Russia. Power was absolute, and subject to little or no responsibility, either to the law or public opinion. Christina of Sweden, it is well known, ordered the murder of her secretary in the palace of Fontainebleau without the French authorities taking cognisance of the violence, though of public notoriety, or the ex-queen being expelled from France. In England such enormities could not have been perpetrated with impunity. Still, though fast-days and thanksgiving days were more in vogue than at present, manners continued more openly indecorous and licentious. Most men of letters either had kept mistresses, or lived on terms of intimacy with those of others. This, however, chiefly applies only to one description of authors, the cultivators of elegant literature, or writers of the imaginative class. Philosophers are seldom deeply engaged in the entanglements of the heart. Sir Isaac Newton, John Locke, and Hobbes led a life of celibacy; the former, according to Voltaire, dying wholly intact. Poets are mostly amorous; it is the well-spring of their inspiration. But neither the language nor theme of much of the poetry of the time would be now admissible. In the miscellaneous writings of the most tasteful and exuberant of Queen Anne's poets, frequently occur phrases and sentiments alien to the present sense of delicacy and propriety. Pope, too, seems to have lived much in the fashion of his brother literati, and had his tender liaisons, the most commemorated being with the two Misses Blount, with both of whom he long carried on a wavering flirtation, с с which finally ended in his preference of Martha, who is considered to have been his mistress. He is understood to have been audacious enough to make a declaration to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and which elicited from that gay and clever epistoler so derisive a reception that the bard of Twickenham never forgave, but visited, in utter disregard of prior lavish idolatry, with the most coarse and unscrupulous satire. In continuation, it may be added that the dramatist Congreve passed as the gallant of Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, who was vain of the connection. Prior made himself generally agreeable; but many of his writings, from indecency, would be now held utterly repulsive; and he has been reproached with spending his nights with "a little alehouse-keeper's wife." Gay appears to have escaped the scandal of his contemporaries, though eminently witty and fascinating, and living and dying in a patrician household. Dean Swift's amours were odious, selfish, and torturing; but the ascription to him by Sir Walter Scott of impotence, offers a ready solution of the chief mystery, and which is probable enough, from the dean's craving atrabilious temperament. The age was mean, corrupt, and mendacious, and without regret a prominent feature of this chapter may be hastily dismissed. The law, from the triviality, privacy, and often inappreciable character of manners, abstains from taking cognisance of them, and has left this branch of social jurisdiction to the control of the community; but society still continued latitudinarian, and had not yet begun to prescribe a high standard of decency or decorum, either to prince or people. The curb most needed was that responsibility which makes every class dependent on the good opinion of the rest, and without which most indulgences are apt to degenerate into grossness. The DEGRADED MANNERS OF GERMAN PRINCES. 387 philosophy of the moral guarantee of each over all appears rightly set forth in the following extract: - "Philosophers have long considered it probable that the private manners of sovereigns are vulgar, their pleasures low, and their dispositions selfish; - that the two extremes of life, in short, approach pretty closely to each other, and that the masters of mankind, when stripped of the artificial pomp and magnificence which invest them in public, resemble nothing so much as the meanest of the multitude. The ground of this opinion is that the very highest and the very lowest of mankind are equally beyond the influence of that wholesome control to which all the intermediate classes are subjected by their mutual dependence, and the need they have for the goodwill and esteem of each other. Those who are at the very bottom of the scale are below the sphere of this influence, and those at the very top are above it. The one have no chance of distinction by any effort they are capable of making; and the other are secure of the highest degree without any effort to secure it.”—Edinburgh Review, vol. xx. 66 care The writer then elucidates his solution by examples of the degraded state of the German courts about the period of the Hanoverian accession. Gross intemperance in living, sexual irregularities, violent domestic quarrels, and a free dispensation of kicks and blows, formed the established regimen of most of the continental palaces. It was the regimen of the tinker and gipsy and other vagrant races, who, in their own favourite distich, for nobody, since nobody cares for them." The next reign refined a little in its progress, but did not, at the outset, promise any immediate improvement. George II began his reign by the commission of a highly criminal act in the destruction of the will of his predecessor; and on one occasion, carried away by an ungovernable fit of passion, he struck his grandson, then Prince of Wales, and afterwards George III.* Jesse's Memoirs of the Court of England, vol. iii. p. 45. - CHAPTER XX. REIGN OF GEORGE II. George II. and his Predecessors. - Queen Caroline.- Policy of Sir Robert Walpole.— Bribery; Decline of Patriotism. - Public Prosperity, its Influence on Criminality; Popular Errors on Crime and its Characteristics; Prevalence of Intemperance; Causes of Demoralisation. Education of the Gentry; Contempt of Trade and Social Industry. London in respect of Health and Cleanliness. Progress; Beau Nash and his Code of Etiquette. - Reform of the Calendar. Condition of the Productive Classes. - The Church and Religious Tranquillity. — Rise and Influence of Methodism. — Police of the Metropolis and Environs. - Wars of George II.— Increase of Executive and Popular Power.. Writers. Science, Literature, and the Arts. Hireling Public THIS was a progressive reign both in its material aspects and public characters. The king was not altogether without the failings of his predecessor, but upon the whole was an improvement upon him. He was ten years younger, being in his forty-fourth year; and, though a Hanoverian by birth, he spoke our language fluently, was familiar with English society, sociable and accessible. He was much more temperate than George I., who, in the obliviousness of the punch-bowl, was wont to divulge secrets of state; but he was more fiery and passionate, and indulged in greater excess the unroyal vice of avarice." This little * Jesse relates that he once spent a considerable time in turning over some logs of wood among which he had accidentally dropped a guinea (Memoirs, vol. iii. p. 5.). But he opened his heart some. times, and presented 2000l. to Trinity College, Cambridge, as the price of an evening's entertainment in their hall. His niggardliness was more a habit of watchfulness over small than large sums; and probably contracted, when more needed and pardonable, in the less affluent course of his antecedent German life. He saved little during his kingship, adding only 50,000l. to the 300,000l. he had amassed in his electorate. |