George William, Duke of Brunswick

“ CAROLINE, AMELIA ELIZABETH, of Brunswick - Wolfenbüttel (1768–1821) , queen of George IV, second daughter of Duke Charles William Ferdinand of Brunswick and the Princess Augusta of England, sister of George III, was born 17 May 1768. ”

“ Queen Mary was in her day a very popular sign, as may be gathered from many of the shop-bills in the Banks Collection; whilst William and Mary are still to be seen in Maiden Causeway, Cambridge. The accession of the house of Brunswick produced the Brunswick, still very common, particularly in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Then come the Georges, of whom George III. and George IV. still survive in nearly as many instances as their successor, William IV.; with them a few of the royal Dukes of Clarence, Suffolk, and, above all, “the Butcher Cumberland;” ”

“ A rope fastened to a wall, which had borne 3,500 lbs. weight, without giving way, is broke asunder by his amazing strength. The celebrity of this man attracted the curiosity of King William III., before whom he exhibited at Kensington Palace; likewise before George, Prince of Denmark, and his royal consort, the Princess, afterwards Queen Anne, and their son William, Duke of Gloucester, called the Hope of England. He also went through a regular course of performances at the Duke's Theatre, in Dorset-gardens, Salisbury-square, which was attended by the first nobility and gentry in the kingdom. ”

“ In 1695 William's troops besieged and captured the town of Namur. At length Louis was moved by the exhaustion of his treasury, and the stagnation of industry in France, to conclude the Peace of Ryswick with England, Spain, and Holland (1697) . The Duke of Savoy had been detached from the alliance. Most of the conquests on both sides were restored. William III. was acknowledged to be king of England. In the treaty with the emperor, France retained Strasburg. William was a man of sterling worth, but he was a Dutchman, and was cold in his manners. ”

“ At midnight on Friday, August 24, the last rites were performed over the deceased consort of George IV. The body had been removed from the hearse to a funeral car, which was drawn by some hundred Brunswickers to the cathedral gates. No extraordinary service was allowed to be celebrated at the side of the vault. The Duke of Brunswick was then a minor and an absentee, and the government of the country was administered by the King of England. But though the service was of the most ordinary character, the sexagenarian pastor, Woolf, pronounced an oration above the remains of the Queen. ”

“ Her present Majesty, Alexandrina Victoria, was born May 24th, 1819, and ascended the throne June 20th, 1837, as representing her father, the Duke of Kent, fourth son of George HI. On February 10th, 1840, it being the general etiquette for the Brunswick family to intermarry amongst themselves, she was married to her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe Coburg, who received an allowance from the nation of £30,000, to compensate him for becoming the husband of his wife. The Queen, more sensible than others of the arduous position of a Prince Consort, wished her loyal husband to have £100,000 a year. ”

“ The least the late friends of the princess could do was, to remain silent; but human beings can articulate sounds, and be oppositely communicative with their optical faculties. An individual, who accepts place amongst those whom he formerly professed to despise, renders himself an object of suspicion, if not of detestation.
For the present, we abstain from further remarks upon these two late principal friends of the persecuted Princess of Wales.
Upon hearing of the Duke of Brunswick's death, the king could do no less than solicit the duchess, his sister, to visit England. ”

“ George approved of their depriving military officers of their commands for voting against the government on the question of general warrants. ‘Firmness and resolution,’ he said, ‘must be shown, and no one saved who dared to fly off.’ He was much annoyed by the hereditary Prince of Brunswick, who came over in January 1764 to marry his sister Augusta, and who openly sympathised with the opposition. The king's unpopularity was shown by the enthusiasm with which the prince was received, and king and prince behaved rudely to each other. George disliked his ministers more and more ”

“ It was but yesterday that this prince, in the flower of life and fortune, went out to the field full of military ardour, and gloriously fell in battle, leading on his soldiers to the charge. He was the first of the noble warriors [Pg 60] who fell on the memorable field of Quatre Bras. But he has lived long enough who has lived to acquire glory: he dies a noble death who dies for his country. The Duke of Brunswick lived and died like a hero, and he has left his monument in the hearts of his people, by whom his fate will be long and deeply lamented ”

“ The antiquity, dignity, and importance of the illustrious house of Brunswick, have occasioned such extraordinary care to transmit their annals to posterity, and have employed the pens of so many ingenious writers, in the various languages and different parts of Europe, that we are thereby enabled to trace it up to a very early period with the greatest certainty. And farther to honour this subject, it has been illustrated by the elaborate investigations of the historian Gibbon ”

“ The rival who in the end gave William most trouble was his cousin Guy of Burgundy, son of a daughter of his grandfather Richard the Good. Though William’s succession was not liked, no one of these candidates was generally preferred to him. He therefore succeeded; but the first twelve years of his reign were spent in the revolts and conspiracies of unruly nobles, who hated the young duke as the one representative of law and order, and who were not eager to set any one in his place who might be better able to enforce them. ”

“ A readiness to do the things that must be done was making a true man of Duke William even in his boyhood. For many years he had seen revolt and violence grow more easy and more frequent in his dukedom; the noise of quarrels and fighting grew louder and louder. In his first great battle at Val-ès-dunes the rule of the Côtentin lords and Guy of Burgundy, or the rule of William the Bastard, struggled for the mastery. ”

“ The task Brunswick had to fulfil was an anxious one, but by the exercise of great tact, during the seven years of William's minority, he managed to gather into his hands a great deal of the powers of a stadholder, and at the same time to ingratiate himself with the anti-Orange States party, whose power especially in Holland had been growing in strength and was in fact predominant. By politic concessions to the regents, and by the interest he displayed in the commercial and financial prosperity of the city of Amsterdam, that chief centre of opposition gave its support to his authority ”

“ William I., King of England, surnamed the Conqueror, was born in 1027 or 1028. He was the son of Robert, Duke of Normandy and Herleva, daughter of Fulbert, a tanner of Falaise. When he was about seven years old his father, intending to go on pilgrimage and having no legitimate sons, proposed him as his heir. The great men of the duchy did homage to the child, and a year later (1035) his father's death left him to make good his claim. Anarchy was the natural result of a minority. William's life was on more than one occasion in danger, and several of his guardians perished in his service. ”

“ None save Duke William could bend Duke William's bow, and while these glowing accounts of him were written from a later standpoint, and his story might easily be read backward, as a fulfilment of prophecy, we can be sure, at least, that his power asserted itself in a marked way, and that he soon gained importance and mustered a respectable company of followers as the beginning of a brilliant and almost irresistible court and army. Even King Henry of France was jealous of his vassal's rising fame and popularity, and felt obliged to pay William a deference that his years did not merit. ”

“ Had William’s whole life been spent in the duties of a Norman duke, ruling his duchy wisely, defending it manfully, the world might never have known him for one of its foremost men, but his life on that narrower field would have been useful and honourable almost without a drawback. ”

“ At the close of the reign of George the Second, the feeling of aversion with which the House of Brunswick had long been regarded by half the nation had died away; but no feeling of affection to that house had yet sprung up. There was little, indeed, in the old King's character to inspire esteem or tenderness. He was not our countryman. He never set foot on our soil till he was more than thirty years old. His speech bewrayed his foreign origin and breeding. His love for his native land, though the most amiable part of his character, was not likely to endear him to his British subjects. ”

“ When William was obliged to go to Ireland, and to enter upon that 171memorable campaign which finally decided the peace of the United Kingdom, Prince George involved himself in a great expense to attend his Majesty, with a zeal returned only by ungracious and unbecoming conduct,—William not even suffering the Prince to go in the same coach with him; an affront never before offered to any person of the same rank. ”

“ England had nothing to gain in that war, and gained nothing but defeat.{22}
William himself took the command. In person William III. was thin, pale, dyspeptic and unwholesome, which accounts for his bad temper. He was brave and obstinate, and no series of defeats could take the conceit out of him. A good statesman, he was a bad general: it has even been said of him that he lost more battles than any other commander in history. He was now opposed in the field by a genius of high order, François de Montmorenci, Duke of Luxembourg, Marshal of France. ”

“ The Norman duke had, by a wanton invasion, wronged, not the King only, but every man in England, and every man might claim to help in driving him out. Again, in an ordinary wager of battle, the judgement can be enforced; here, whether William slew Harold or Harold slew William, there was no means of enforcing the judgement except by the strength of the two armies. If Harold fell, the English army were not likely to receive William as king ”

“ No man in his realm should plead duty towards an immediate lord as an excuse for breach of duty towards the lord of that immediate lord. Hence William’s policy with regard to earldoms. There was to be nothing like the great governments which had been held by Godwine, Leofric, and Siward; an Earl of the West-Saxons or the Northumbrians was too like a Duke of the Normans to be endured by one who was Duke of the Normans himself. The earl, even of the king’s appointment, still represented the separate being of the district over which he was set. ”

“ But no such leader came: men stood still, or resisted piecemeal, so the land was conquered piecemeal, and that under cover of being brought under the obedience of its lawful king.
Now that the Norman duke has become an English king, his career as an English statesman strictly begins, and a wonderful career it is. Its main principle was to respect formal legality wherever he could. All William’s purposes were to be carried out, as far as possible, under cover of strict adherence to the law of the land of which he had become the lawful ruler. ”

“ William's claims to the English throne. It is not to be supposed that, even in the warlike times of which we are writing, such a potentate as a duke of Normandy would invade a country like England, so large and powerful in comparison to his own, without some pretext. William's pretext was, that he himself was the legitimate successor to the English crown, and that the English king who possessed it at the time of his invasion was a usurper. In order that the reader may understand the nature and origin of this his claim, it is necessary to relate somewhat in full the story of the Lady Emma. ”

“ A man with a more malevolent turn of mind would very likely have acted as public expectation seemed to foreshadow, but William, as we have seen, soon made it clear that he had no fault to find with the Duke of Wellington, that he cherished no ill-will and was quite ready to let bygones be bygones. There can be no doubt that William, although he had no great defects of any deep or serious nature, no defects at least which are not common enough among the sovereigns of his time, was yet as undignified a figure for a throne as even the modern comic opera itself could imagine. ”

“ Two others, the seneschal Osbern and Gilbert Count of Eu, were irregular kinsmen of the duke. All these were murdered, the Breton count by poison. Such a childhood as this made William play the man while he was still a child. The helpless boy had to seek for support of some kind. He got together the chief men of his duchy, and took a new guardian by their advice. But it marks the state of things that the new guardian was one of the murderers of those whom he succeeded. This was Ralph of Wacey, son of William’s great-uncle, Archbishop Robert. ”

“ Murderer as he was, he seems to have discharged his duty faithfully. There are men who are careless of general moral obligations, but who will strictly carry out any charge which appeals to personal honour. Anyhow Ralph’s guardianship brought with it a certain amount of calm. But men, high in the young duke’s favour, were still plotting against him, and they presently began to plot, not only against their prince but against their country. The disaffected nobles of Normandy sought for a helper against young William in his lord King Henry of Paris. ”