King George II and Queen Caroline

After the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion the previous year, and partly to please the King, Parliament had repealed the clause in the Act of Settlement which required its consent to the sovereign leaving his royal dominions.

However a message from his supporters that English forces were advancing against him threw him into an agony of indecision. With his army slowly melting away, as much due to his lack of leadership qualities as anything else, he accepted that his cause was lost. In February he returned quietly to France.

Uncoordinated and badly led risings north of the border and in the Border Counties fizzled out before the Pretender had landed at Peterhead on the Scottish coast shortly before Christmas.

On 28 May people wore mourning to mark King George’s birthday, wearing their brightest clothes on the following day to mark the Stuart restoration.

Some less easily pleased observers spoke of their excruciating boredom at these receptions, seeing ‘nothing but blue noses, pale faces, lying smiles, forced compliments, careful brows and made laughs’.

Jacobites present would surely have been happy to answer otherwise, but as the elderly Lady Dorchester, once King James II’s mistress, commented scornfully to Lady Cowper, ‘Does the old fool think anyone will say No to his question, when there are so many drawn swords?’ Looking round later she also noticed the Duchess of Portsmouth, a surviving mistress of King Charles II, and Lady Orkney, who had similarly offered her favours to King William III. ‘Who would have thought we three whores would have met together here?’ she asked.

In her last months, she seemed increasingly tortured by guilt at the part she had played in agreeing to her father, King James II, being deposed. She had long felt that her inability to bear at least one healthy heir who lived to maturity was a judgement on her unfilial behaviour, and that the restoration of the crown to her half-brother was the only atonement she could make to the family.

J.H. Plumb’s The First Four Georges (1956).

Ragnhild Hatton’s biography of King George I (1978).

a small-minded, stupid nonentity