Radio Script #1062

Little Talks on Common Things
October 26, 1975

During the period of the nation’s Bicentennial, this program will often be concerned with events connected with the nation’s birth two hundred years ago. Most of the broadcasts between now and the end of 1976 that have any reference to the Bicentennial will be concerned with Maine, but occasionally they may have wide scope. Such is today’s broadcast. I want to point out an aspect of the American Revolution that is too little known. And to bring it to your attention I make this astounding statement: It was not Englishmen but Germans who were chiefly responsible for the revolt of the American colonies that won independence.

When Queen Anne died in 1714, she left no heir to the British throne. Her only child, William Duke of Gloucester, had died in 1700. Earlier, after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, there occurred the union of the Scottish and British thrones, when James VI of Scotland became also James I of England. His granddaughter Sophia married Ernst August, Elector of the sovereign nation of Hanover in Germany. During the last 14 childless years of Queen Anne’s reign, Sophia was recognized as the first-in-line heir to the British throne. She herself died only a few months before Queen Anne. It was her son George of Hanover who became the next English king, and he took the title of George I. Thus, began the British dynasty known as the House of Hanover. Succeeding also to his father’s title, Elector of Hanover, George was thus a monarch of two jurisdictions, one British, the other German.

Beginning with William the Conqueror in 1066, England had had other foreign sovereigns, but none whose family did more to upset the nation than did the four Hanoverian kings from George I to George IV. George I did not speak English and made no attempt to learn it. He hated living in England and took every chance he could get to spend time in Hanover.

Attention might have been paid to other descendants of previous British monarchs, historians tell us there were at least fifty royal-blooded men and women living in England who had a better claim to the throne, but descendants of King James prevailed over them, and foreign-tongued George became king. One historian commented: “George did not set out to be disagreeable to the British people; he was simply naturally disagreeable.” He was a typical continental ruler of the early 18th century, one of a line of rulers determined to have their own way, with no concern for the welfare of the people. He possessed the same pig-headedness that made Kaiser Wilhelm II launch a disastrous war two hundred years later.

George I was succeeded in 1727 by his son George II. Like his father, the second George preferred Germany to England. He was truly happy only in Hanover, and he made no attempt to hide it. At his court, George II insisted that no English cook could properly prepare a dinner, no English actor knew how to act, no English coachman could drive, and anyhow there were no English horses fit to be driven. Only in Hanover did such things reach perfection.

George also insisted on precision, a quality quite alien to the English spirit. Every meal was served at a precise minute. Even the king’s walks through his garden were carefully timed. His games of backgammon started on the dot. One courtier said of him, “No mill-horse ever went in a more constant track or a more unchanging circle.” That was indeed a German trait. Long afterward in the First World War, the Allies knew that if they timed a German battery for ten minutes they knew exactly how it would be fired for the next hour.

Another trait of George II was his dislike for his son and heir. Of the prince, the king was quoted as saying, “If I was to see him in hell, I should feel no worse for him than I should for any other rogue that went there.” Whether the king one day saw Frederick in that place, no historian knows, but Frederick did die before his father. What the country thought of both father and son is shown by verses circulated about London when the prince died.
“Here lies Fred
Who was alive and is dead;
Had it been his father
I had much rather;
Had it been his brother
Still better another;
Had it been his sister
No one would have missed her;

Had it been the whole generation
Still better for the nation;
But sure ’tis only Fred
Who was alive and is dead.
There’s no more to be said.”

Because of Prince Frederick’s death, it was George II’s younger son who succeeded to the throne in 1760 and became George III. He had, one can hardly say enjoyed, one of the longest reigns in British history, sixty long years until 1820. The Americans connect George III so completely with the American Revolution that few of us remember that he continued to be king for 45 years after the shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, dying at last, with his mind completely gone, in the very year when Maine became a separate state.

Before his final mental collapse, in a brief period of rational mind, George II had said to that son, “Convince the nation that you are not only an Englishman born and bred, but that you are also one by inclination.” That George III could not do. In him it was German, not British, genes that prevailed. His outstanding traits were more German than English. The same stubborn, unyielding autocracy that characterized his father and his grandfather so thoroughly possessed him that it was to cost England the loss of the thirteen American colonies.

George III was a backward child, eleven years old before he could read, and his writing was always like a child’s. When he became king in 1760, the framework of British government was well fixed by having executive power vested in a majority party that chose the prime minister. But Parliament then was far from the representative assembly it has since become. The aristocracy kept the membership even of the House of Commons well within their own ranks. For that reason, despite memory of the British Civil War in the 1640’s when Parliament prevailed over the throne and even executed Charles I, the king did not find it difficult to have his way with Parliament and its ministers.

Through the tense years that preceded the American Revolution, the king had only one effective opponent, William Pitt the elder. Even before they clashed on policy for the colonies, the king came to hate Pitt, who in George’s view was not friendly enough toward Germany. Although he had a long life, George III was never a well man. He suffered from a rare desease called porphyria, which caused hallucinations and mental wanderings.

Ignoring the obvious fact that Pitt’s wise conduct of overseas policy when he was Prime Minister had assured British, rather than French control of North America, the king would not listen to Pitt’s advice for moderation in dealing with the thirteen colonies. By ineptitude and stubborn persistence, George III not only lost the American colonies, but also plunged England into war with France and Spain, and spurred revolt in Ireland.

When the king’s political manipulators got the Earl of Rockingham appointed to succeed Pitt as prime minister, he told the new parliamentary leader to act on a policy of dominant suppression. He said: “Great Britain has protected America, and still protects her against the French. America is bound to yield obedience. If not, tell me when the Americans were emancipated.”

When the deposed Pitt heard of that royal pronouncement, he said: “You ask when the colonies were emancipated. I ask you when they were ever made slaves. Now you see there, instead of obedience, open rebellion. I rejoice that America
has resisted.”

By a clever move King George thought he had put Pitt on the shelf by making him a Lord and thus no longer in the House of Commons. But even in the hereditary House of Lords, Pitt was not to be silenced. Though dying, and unable to attend parliament unless carried in, he begged that body to recognize the Continental Congress recently set up in Philadelphia. But his efforts were vain.

Until his death, he raged helplessly against the Hanoverian king who seemed determined to destroy Pitt’s lifetime achievement of making America British. Although knowing that parliament was wholly subservient to George III, Pitt said in one of his last speeches: “The whole of your political conduct has been one continual series of weakness, temerity, despotism, ignorance, futility, negligence and corruption.”

The Rockingham ministry was succeeded by that of Lord North, an even closer friend of the king. When Lord North tried to settle differences with the colonies by means short of war, George III was enraged. He simply would not listen to sound advice. He made no attempt to understand the American mind. The plea, “No taxation without representation” meant nothing to him. Of course, he insisted, it was England’s right to tax the colonies as she pleased. Anyone who thought otherwise was a traitor.

After Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga in 1778, many leading Englishmen clamored for peace, but the king would hear nothing of it. To him every military disaster was just another reason for continuing the war. It was his control of parliament, against the will of the British people, that spelled disaster.

When it was allover and the thirteen colonies became an independent nation, another British leader, Charles James Fox wrote: “There was one grand source from which all has , the influence of the crown. To that we must attribute the loss of the army in Virginia and the loss of all thirteen colonies in America. It was the influence of the crown that made the ministers persevere against the voice of reason, the voice of truth, the voice of the people.”

And that is the story of how it was the German House of Hanover, not the British people, who made necessary the American Revolution.

Year: 1975