On 18 September Alistair Lexden, official historian of the Carlton Club, spoke at a special history evening held at the Club to mark the tercentenary of the Hanoverian succession and its devastating impact on the Tory Party of the day. It was on 18 September 1714 that George I set foot on British soil, landing at Greenwich after a sea crossing from Holland.
Alistair Lexden’s address, delivered to some 50 members of the Club, was entitled: “The Tory Party and a New Royal Dynasty: The Tercentenary of a Momentous Political Crisis”.
He argued that the popular impression of George I as a rather stupid man cut off from his new subjects by his inability to speak English is hopelessly wide of the mark. The new king was respected throughout continental Europe for his prowess as a soldier during the long wars against Louis XIV and as a highly effective ruler of Hanover which, thanks to his father’s and his own acquisition of new territory through conquest and marriage, had within a generation become one of the nine leading states of Germany, elevated in status from Duchy to Electorate. The king conversed freely in the common language of the rulers of Europe, French. He knew some English in 1714; by the end of his reign he was attending performances of Shakespeare’s plays. A leading Dutch diplomat, writing in 1702, said: “he has a special aptitude for affairs of state, a well-ordered economy, very sound brain and judgement”.
Within months of George I’s arrival the Tory Party, racked by internal division, ceased to exist as a serious force in British politics. The general election of 1715 replaced a Tory majority of 193 with a Whig majority of 124, the most dramatic reversal of fortune in British electoral history. The Tories were gravely weakened by a bitter personal quarrel between their two leading figures, the experienced, cautious Earl of Oxford and the brilliant, feckless Viscount Bolingbroke, the first firebrand in the Party’s history. Both were accused by the Whigs of plotting to overturn the Protestant Hanoverian succession in favour of the Jacobite cause of the Catholic Old Pretender; Bolingbroke was suspected particularly strongly. A deep fissure separated those Tories who attached overwhelming importance to keeping strictly to the line of succession and therefore supported the Jacobite cause, and those who accepted George I, even though he was fifty-eighth in the line of succession, because he would safeguard the Church of England.
The Whigs exploited the Tories' misfortunes ruthlessly in 1714-15. They purged Tory office-holders at both national and local level, a process referred to at the time as “the proscription of the Tories”. It was a truly momentous political crisis which enabled the Whigs to dominate British politics for the next fifty years.