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Hanover 2003

Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover*

Nick Harding
Emory University

Abstract
Historical commonplace notwithstanding, Sir Robert Walpole was not instinct-
ively hostile to Hanover. On the contrary, he consistently argued that Britain’s
dynastic union with the Electorate should hurt neither country. Walpole and his
surrogates formulated this policy to reconcile his early misgivings about Hanover-
ian influence during the Northern War with his later support for Hanover when
endangered by British policy after 1725. Hanover’s exposure to Britain’s enemies
and the accession of George II, whose German sentiments were initially less
pronounced than his father’s, temporarily combined to make the Electorate more
popular. Walpole’s policy served him well until the War of Austrian Succession,
when the British public cared less for equity than for Hanoverian submission
within dynastic union. A survey of his career, however, shows Sir Robert Walpole
and British public opinion to have been more charitable towards Hanover than
previously thought.

Historians have begun to qualify Sir Robert Walpole’s insular reputation, 1

but have not yet questioned its Hanoverian component. This is odd,
given that the first political obituaries exaggerated his efforts for the king’s
beloved Electorate.2 Such opinions, however, receded once Walpole’s
successor John, Lord Carteret, appeared to show more favour to Hanover,
hiring 16,000 Electoral regulars to support Maria Theresia’s cause during
the War of Austrian Succession.3 Subsequent historians have veered to

* The author wishes to thank David Armitage and David Cannadine for their comments on
previous drafts of this article.
1
See, e.g., J. Black, ‘An “ignoramus” in European affairs?’, British Jour. 18th-Century Studies,
vi (1983), 55–65; J. Black, Walpole in Power (Stroud, 2001), pp. 131– 7.
2
[Henry Bland], The Conduct of the Late Administration with Regard to Foreign Affairs from 1722
to 1742, wherein That of the Right Honble the Earl of Orford (Late Sir Robert Walpole) Is Particularly
Vindicated (1742); The Late Minister Unmask’d, or an Answer to a Late Pamphlet Entitled The
Conduct of the Late Administration with Regard to Foreign Affairs (1742).
3
[Edmund Waller and Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th earl of Chesterfield], The Case of the
Hanover Forces in the Pay of Great Britain Impartially and Freely Examined (1743), pp. 29–30; A
Collection of Letters Publish’d in Old England, or the Constitutional Journal [1743], p. 4; William
Pitt the elder’s speech of 12 Dec. 1755 as reported in Horace Walpole, Memoirs of King George
II, ed. J. Brooke (3 vols., New Haven, Conn., 1985), ii. 109.

© Institute of Historical Research 2003. Historical Research, vol. 76, no. 192 (May 2003)
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover 165

the opposite extreme by overemphasizing Walpole’s misgivings about

Hanover.4 Eveline Cruickshanks has even misquoted Walpole to that
effect, writing that ‘he did . . . all he could to lessen the impact of Hano-
verian measures, looking on Hanover as “a millstone round the neck of
British ministers” and longing to be rid “of all the disagreeable German
disputes, the Hessian troops, the subsidies, etc.” ’.5 Such an approach was
plausible enough when whig history6 commemorated the ‘first’ prime
minister’s differences with Britain’s foreign-born kings, but is out of step
with later historiography which also remembers his deference to mon-
archy.7 Indeed, Walpole conducted a pro-Hanoverian foreign policy and
propaganda campaign during the early seventeen-thirties.
Not content with his successful courtship of the monarchy, Walpole
wooed the public with journalism which historians are only now
taking seriously.8 Increased public sympathy for Hanover during the early
seventeen-thirties – when Britain’s anti-Austrian foreign policy endan-
gered the German patrimony of a new king less outwardly foreign than
his predecessor – encouraged Walpole to associate himself more closely
with the Electorate. He proclaimed that neither country should suffer
because of their dynastic union, squaring his present attempts to mitigate
Britain’s inadvertent threat to Hanover with his earlier resistance to
Hanoverian initiatives which had imperiled Britain during the Northern
War. As Quentin Skinner said of Walpole’s great opponent Bolingbroke,
a political actor must ‘limit and direct his behaviour in such a way as to
make his actions compatible with the claim that they were motivated

4
See, e.g., William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of
Orford (3 vols., 1798), i. 747; A. C. Ewald, Sir Robert Walpole: a Political Biography, 1676 –1745
(1878), p. 269; W. E. H. Lecky, A History of England in the 18th Century (8 vols., 1878–90), i.
389–90; J. H. Plumb, The First Four Georges (1956), pp. 46–50; P. Langford, The 18th Century,
1688–1815 (1976), p. 79; P. Konigs, The Hanoverian Kings and their Homeland: a Study of the
Personal Union, 1714–1837 (Lewes, 1993), p. 59.
5
E. Cruickshanks, ‘The political management of Sir Robert Walpole, 1720 –42’, in Britain
in the Age of Walpole, ed. J. Black (1984), p. 31. Cruickshanks’s second quotation is from the
duke of Newcastle (repr. Coxe, ii. 644). The first is not in her designated location, [Philip
Yorke, 2nd earl of Hardwicke], Walpoliana (1783). For Cruickshanks’s influence, see B. W.
Hill, Sir Robert Walpole: ‘Sole and Prime Minister’ (1989), p. 163.
6
See H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931); H. Butterfield, The Englishman
and his History (Cambridge, 1944).
7
See, e.g., H. W. V. Temperley, ‘The age of Walpole and the Pelhams’, in The Cambridge
Modern History, ed. A. W. Ward, G. W. Prothero and S. Leathes (13 vols. and atlas, Cambridge,
1902–12), vi. 40 –89, at p. 42; R. Pares, King George III and the Politicians (Oxford, 1953),
p. 176; J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole (2 vols., 1956–60), i. 71–8, 250–1; J. B. Owen, The
Rise of the Pelhams (1957), pp. 38–9.
8
I. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: the Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 111–36; R. Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court
Whigs (Baton Rouge, La., 1982); S. Targett, ‘Government and ideology during the age of the
whig supremacy: the political argument of Sir Robert Walpole’s newspaper propagandists’,
Historical Jour., xxxvii (1994), 289–317; T. S. Urstad, Sir Robert Walpole’s Poets: the Use of
Literature as Pro-Government Propaganda, 1721–42 (Newark, Del., 1999).

© Institute of Historical Research 2003.

166 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover

by an accepted principle and that they can thus be justified’. 9 Far from
precluding intellectual activity, as many historians have assumed, Walpole’s
characteristic pragmatism actually occasioned it. In submitting to the
imperative of ideological consistency, however, Walpole did circumscribe
his future freedom of action. The theory of dynastic union he elaborated
in the early seventeen-thirties prevented him from opposing Hanover’s
unpopular neutrality of 1741, which the Electorate negotiated when
menaced by Britain’s enemies. For the first time in his career, Walpole
could not convincingly adjust to the public’s oscillating opinion of
Hanover.

Walpole was most wary of Hanover during the years immediately follow-
ing the Hanoverian succession. He mistrusted George I’s German mistress
and courtiers, with whom he competed to dispense British patronage. 10
The Germans were by no means united amongst themselves, but they did
combine with the earl of Sunderland to prise Walpole from office in
1717.11 Walpole subsequently told the house of commons that he had
resigned because the Electoral secretary, Jean de Robethon, had protested
against the diversion of an office from his son to one of Walpole’s. 12
Conversely, Walpole regained office in 1720 by exploiting Sunderland’s
jealously of the Germans, a coup which largely removed the issue of
patronage from Walpole’s Hanoverian calculations.13
The struggle for patronage obscured policy differences which proved
more enduring. Walpole left government in 1717 in solidarity with his
brother-in-law, Lord Townshend, when the latter was sacked for his
misgivings over George I’s Baltic policy. British naval support for Hanover
and its allies in the Northern War had secured the formerly Swedish
duchies of Bremen and Verden to the Electorate in 1715. Townshend
had hinted at Hanoverian cession of the duchies when he asked in
autumn 1716, ‘would it not therefore be right for the king to think
immediately how to make his peace with Sweden, even though he should
be obliged to make some sacrifice in obtaining it?’14 Townshend was
undoubtedly aware of British public opinion, which had been influenced

9
Q. Skinner, ‘The principles and practice of opposition: the case of Bolingbroke versus
Walpole’, in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb,
ed. N. McKendrick (1974), pp. 93–128, at p. 128.
10
See R. Walpole to J. Stanhope, 30 July/10 Aug. 1716 (Coxe, ii. 58– 9).
11
B. Williams, Stanhope: a Study in 18th-Century War and Diplomacy (Oxford, 1932), p. 252.
12
Cobbett’s Parliamentary History (36 vols., 1806–20), vii. 460.
13
Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, i. 283–5.
14
Townshend to J. Stanhope, 23 Sept./4 Oct. 1716 (Coxe, ii. 86). (Spelling and punctua-
tion have been modernized throughout.) For Townshend’s inconsistency on the subject, see
J. J. Murray, George I, the Baltic and the Whig Split of 1717: a Study in Diplomacy and Propaganda
(1969), p. 98.

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 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover 167

against the Electorate by the Swedish ambassador’s propaganda. 15 He later

complained that ‘if the northern affairs were brought into parliament by
His Majesty’s order upon the foot they now stand, His Majesty would be
so far from obtaining any assistance on that head that there would be
great danger from such a step of ruining his credit and influence in both
houses’.16 Indeed, such assistance was only rendered later, after the reve-
lation of the same ambassador’s complicity in a Jacobite plot. Yet even
this demonstrated Hanover’s capacity to endanger Britain.
Once Walpole and Townshend went into opposition, pro-Walpole
propaganda stoked anti-Hanoverian public opinion.17 The Resigners Vin-
dicated, a 1718 pamphlet by the tory physician and publicist George
Sewell, presumed that Hanover had promised British assistance against
Sweden to its ally Denmark, and enquired ‘whether the Act of Settlement
is infringed by it or no?’18 The Act, which established the Hanoverians’
eventual succession to the British throne, had also prohibited the crown
from waging war on behalf of its foreign possessions without parlia-
mentary consent. For good measure, Sewell revived James Drake’s 1702
celebration of this particular provision in his history of the parliament
which had approved it. Drake had stressed the vulnerability of the crown’s
medieval possessions in France19 and, by inference, those of William III
in the Low Countries and those of the prospective Hanoverian successors
in Germany. Such possessions endangered Britain’s supposed identity as a
maritime nation.20
Walpole’s return to government roughly coincided with the waning of
Hanoverian influence on British policy.21 Of course, Hanover had less
interest in the latter once Sweden recognized its possession of Bremen
and Verden at Stockholm in 1719, but George I adhered to British
interests even when they endangered Hanover. British and Dutch oppo-
sition to Charles VI’s trading company at Ostend led the emperor to seek
special privileges within the Spanish empire, which Philip V’s minister
Ripperda conceded in the Treaty of Vienna (1725). When Britain and

15
See [Karl, Count Gyllenborg], ‘An English Merchant’s Remarks upon a Scandalous Jaco-
bite Paper, Publish’d the 19th of July Last in the Post-Boy under the Name of a Memorial
Presented to the Chancery of Sweden by the Resident of Great Britain’, in The Political State
of Great Britain, xii (1716), pp. 305–20.
16
Townshend to J. Stanhope, Hampton Court, 16/27 Oct. 1716 (Coxe, ii. 118).
17
See J. Black, ‘Parliament and the political and diplomatic crisis of 1717–18’, Parliamentary
Hist., iii (1984), 77–101, at p. 79.
18
[George Sewell], The Resigners Vindicated, or the Defection Re-Consider’d (1718), p. 25.
19
[ James Drake], The History of the Last Parliament Began at Westminster the 10th day of Feb.
in the 12th Year of the Reign of King William, A.D. 1700 (1702), pp. 42–3. For the attribution,
see Cobbett, vi. 20.
20
See D. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), esp. chs.
4, 7.
21
J. M. Beattie, The English Court in the Reign of George I (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 235–9;
D. McKay, ‘The struggle for control of George I’s northern policy, 1718–19’, Jour. Modern
Hist., xlv (1973), 367–86, at pp. 377–83.

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168 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover

France opposed the Austro-Spanish alliance with a countervailing one

concluded at Hanover, the flamboyant Ripperda responded by threaten-
ing an Austrian invasion of the Electorate.22 Where Hanoverian policy
had once endangered Britain, British policy now imperilled Hanover. The
British public was more likely to be sympathetic to Hanoverian claims
than in the past.
Parliament was not sure how to evaluate the change in circumstances
when it met in early 1726. The opposition tended to ignore it and assume
that Hanover was still leading British policy. The opposition whig William
Pulteney traced the Austro-British tensions which threatened the Elector-
ate to ‘the imperial court’s backwardness in granting the investiture for
Bremen and Verden’.23 While it was true that Charles VI had yet to
recognize Hanoverian rule in Bremen and Verden, Ragnhild Hatton has
shown that the investitures were a relatively low priority for George I. 24
Investitures aside, Hanoverian ministers violently opposed their British
counterparts’ provocations of the emperor, fearing for their homeland’s
safety.25
By contrast with Pulteney, Walpole accurately perceived the British-
Hanoverian role reversal. He pushed the house of commons to guarantee
Hanover, arguing that British opposition to Charles VI’s Ostend company
had exposed it to Austrian attack.26 Townshend’s equivalent motion in
the Lords underscored Walpole’s commitment to the measure. 27 Parlia-
ment ultimately resolved that
justice, gratitude, and honour . . . make it our indispensable duty to assure Your
Majesty upon this occasion that if Your Majesty shall be at any time insulted or
attacked by any prince or state whatsoever in any part of Your Majesty’s domin-
ions or territories not belonging to the crown of Great Britain in resentment of
such measures as Your Majesty has taken for preserving and maintaining the trade
and safety of this kingdom and of Your Majesty’s having entered into the said
defensive alliance [of Hanover] for that purpose, we are fully determined in
vindication of Your Majesty’s honour to exert ourselves to the utmost in defend-
ing and protecting such dominions from any such insults and attacks.28
Parliament’s guarantee had practical consequences, most famously the
subsequent employment of Hessian mercenaries to protect Hanover, 29 but

22
W. Stanhope to Townshend, Madrid, 27 Dec. 1725 (Coxe, ii. 575).
23
Cobbett, viii. 507.
24
R. Hatton, George I: Elector and King (1978), p. 243.
25
See the letters published in Coxe, ii. 498–512.
26
See G. C. Gibbs, ‘Britain and the alliance of Hanover, Apr. 1725–Feb. 1726’, in Eng. Hist.
Rev., lxxiii (1958), 404–30, at p. 428.
27
Cobbett, viii. 509.
28
Cobbett, viii. 512–13.
29
See J. Black, ‘Parliament and foreign policy in the age of Walpole: the case of the
Hessians’, in Knights Errant and True Englishmen: British Foreign Policy, 1660 –1800, ed. J. Black
(Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 41–54.

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 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover 169

it was also intellectually crucial. Promoters of dynastic union with Hanover

had previously argued in terms of British interest, but now they shifted
to concepts such as justice and gratitude. Parliament was grateful that
George I pursued British interests even when this policy might endanger
his Hanoverian lands, which thereby deserved protection. However, for
all that Walpole had revealed his personal opinion to parliament, he
declined to publicize it. The momentary absence of a viable opposition
press spared him the trouble of addressing a wider audience.
If Hanover’s prostration before British enemies was one factor soften-
ing Walpole towards the Electorate, another was the succession of George
II in 1727. Britons were more comfortable with the new monarch. He
spoke better English than his father, and his British mistress, Henrietta
Howard, contrasted favourably with the late king’s German favourites.
George II had, moreover, as prince of Wales, defined himself against
Hanover as part of his political opposition to George I. Upon leaving
Hanover in 1714, he had declared that ‘he had not one drop of blood in
his veins but what was English and at the service of his [father’s] new
subjects’.30 Over two years later, the future George II admitted that he
‘thought little of Bremen and Verden’.31 Such utterances encouraged a
belief that Hanover would recede in importance under the new king.
Pulteney’s new journal, The Craftsman, now declared that ‘the popular
topics of a new family and a foreign reign are in a great measure remov’d,
our present most gracious sovereign . . . having constantly resided amongst
us for above these thirteen years and made our language and constitution
familiar to him, which is more than can be said of the pretender’. 32 Even
William Shippen, the Jacobite member of parliament, hoped that ‘many
particular expenses in the late reign, especially those for frequent journeys
to Hanover, will be discontinued and entirely cease’, and sought a cor-
respondingly lower civil list in the new reign.33
Just as Pulteney temporarily divested himself of anti-Hanoverianism,
Walpole felt free to disparage the Electorate. Despite his support for
Hanover against Austria, he still found it convenient to draw attention to
his past quarrels with Hanover. In January 1729, his favourite journalist
blamed Britain’s poor relations with the commercially important Spanish
empire upon George I’s Hanoverian advisers. William Arnall absolved
British ministers of destroying Spain’s fleet in 1718 at Cape Passaro,
instead ascribing the action to ‘gentlemen at that time living who, though
they were not of this nation, yet had influence equal to designs which

30
Karl Ludwig, Freiherr von Pöllnitz, The Memoirs of Charles-Lewis, Baron de Pollnitz, trans.
S. Whatley (5 vols., 1745), iv. 233.
31
Hatton, p. 199.
32
The Country Journal, or the Craftsman, lxx (4 Nov. 1727), pp. 1–2.
33
Cobbett, viii. 601.

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170 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover

no Englishman would undertake’.34 This implied an Electoral impulse to

flatter Spain’s then rival, Emperor Charles VI, in an effort to procure
investitures for Bremen and Verden. Arnall’s interpretation of past events
must have originated in some form with Walpole, who met with the
young journalist frequently and sometimes even dictated his essays. 35
Shortly after Arnall’s anti-Hanoverian reminiscences, the consistency of
Walpole’s stance on Hanover was tested when George II visited Hanover
for the first time in fifteen years. For Lord Hervey, the memoirist, the
king’s first visit to Hanover as Elector was doubly significant. Firstly, it
showed that George II’s ‘thoughts, whatever they might have been, were
no longer turned either with contempt or dislike to his Electoral domin-
ions’.36 Secondly, wrote Hervey, ‘whilst the king was at Hanover he had
several little German disputes with his brother of Prussia, the particulars
of which [were] about a few cart-loads of hay, a mill, and some soldiers
improperly enlisted by the king of Prussia in the Hanoverian state’.37 For
all its apparent pettiness, the Prusso-Hanoverian dispute might easily have
escalated into a fully fledged war involving Britain. Unbeknownst to the
public, George II prepared to have thousands of British regulars shipped
into Germany.38 Harder to conceal were his appeals for assistance from
British stipendiaries such as Hesse-Cassel. Hanoverian interests again
drove British policy, as they had during the Northern War. Walpole’s
challenge was to serve George II without appearing to back away from
his historical opposition to Hanoverian ascendancy within dynastic union.
Critics of union mobilized to attack as they had not done for some
time. Fog’s Weekly Journal sardonically reported that
our news writers indeed tell us that the Hessian troops have received orders to
march that way, but this we take to be a mistake for those troops are paid by
England, and we know by the Act of Succession that England is not to be engaged
in any broils which relate only to Germany.39
Such criticism was not restricted to Jacobite organs such as Fog’s. Pulteney
warned Hervey that several members of parliament might ‘declare the Act
of Settlement broken by the continuation of the Hessian troops in the
English pay for the defence of Hanover’.40 He also linked the Act of

34
The British Journal, or the Censor, liii (18 Jan. 1729), p. 1. The Craftsman’s allegation that
Arnall here impugned the memory of George I later compelled him to concede that the late
king’s consultations with Hanoverian courtiers had not violated the Act of Settlement (see The
British Journal, lvi (8 Feb. 1729), p. 2n.).
35
M. Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole: a Study of the Origins of the Modern
English Press (Rutherford, N.J., 1987), p. 103; Urstad, p. 84.
36
John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey of Ickworth, Some Materials towards Memoirs of the Reign
of King George II, ed. R. Sedgwick (3 vols., 1931), ii. 485.
37
Hervey, i. 102.
38
J. Black, The Collapse of the Anglo-French Alliance, 1727–31 (Gloucester, 1987), p. 140.
39
Fog’s Weekly Journal, xlix (30 Aug. 1729), p. 2.
40
Hervey, i. 106.

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 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover 171

Settlement to one of its original rationales, the prevention of specie from

leaving Britain for Hanoverian purposes, when he condemned the ‘vast
and unnecessary and ridiculous expense of the Hessians’.41 Pulteney even
threatened that some members of parliament might suggest replacing
George II as king with his eight-year-old son the duke of Cumberland,42
the first time a leading whig had contemplated dissolving dynastic union
since its inception.
If Pulteney correctly divined the Act of Settlement’s original intent,
Hervey was more accurate in interpreting its letter. He answered,
supposing the Hessians to be kept up for the sake of the Hanover dominions, it
would be no breach of the Act of Settlement because it is done with the consent
of parliament and that the Act of Settlement only says that England shall be
engaged in no quarrel or expenses on account of the king’s foreign possessions
without consent of parliament.43
This was the argument first advanced by the war secretary, Henry Pelham,
during the 1726 debate over the parliamentary guarantee of Hanover. 44
However, sensitive to the fact that circumstances had since changed,
Hervey insisted that the Hessians served another purpose. He argued that
they fulfilled ‘a treaty with the Dutch by which England is bound to have
12,000 men ready on the other side of the water for their defence in case
they shall be attacked’,45 prudently overlooking the cover that the Dutch
afforded Hanover in turn.
Like Hervey, Walpole downplayed British involvement in Hanover’s
Prussian crisis. Arnall observed that ‘His Britannic Majesty can have ready
assistance in his own Electorate – not only from his own forces, but the
quotas of his allies’. Arnall omitted to mention that these quotas rested
upon British diplomacy and money. Rather than contradict his employer’s
position against serving Hanoverian interests, taken during and after the
Northern War, he simply ignored the similarity of the present Prussian
dispute. Luckily, mediation between the German rivals gave Arnall an
escape clause. ‘This difference’, Arnall noted, ‘is in a fair way to be adjusted
without the expense of blood or treasure’.46
One politician sensitive to Walpole’s enduring ambivalence towards
the Electorate was Townshend. Relations between the two had cooled
since the death of Walpole’s sister in 1726, and Townshend sought to
protect himself in government by catering more enthusiastically to Hanover.
Walpole’s younger brother Horatio, the ambassador to France, observed
that Townshend ‘endeavours to make all measures Electoral, preferable to

41
Hervey, i. 107.
42
Hervey, i. 106.
43
Hervey, i. 106.
44
Cobbett, viii. 506.
45
Hervey, i. 106.
46
The British Journal, or the Censor, lxxxviii (6 Sept. 1729), p. 2.

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172 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover

all other considerations, which is entirely agreeable to the king’s senti-

ments’.47 For his part, Townshend described his rival ‘as giving up Hanover
quite’, and noted that he ‘has worked much with the king upon that
head’.48 Walpole procured Townsend’s resignation in early 1730, but this
victory necessarily involved assuring the king of his own support for
Hanover.

Walpole publicly embraced Hanover in January 1730, when he addressed

the Prussian crisis in Observations upon the Treaty between the Crowns of
Great Britain, France, and Spain. He was in the habit of commissioning
a pro-government treatise on foreign affairs before each parliamentary
session, but this year composed it himself in order to take credit for the
Treaty of Seville with Spain. Walpole’s scarcely concealed authorship
garnered the pamphlet the highest profile possible. Although Walpole
admitted that the Prussian crisis ‘was so happily dissipated’ by the time
he wrote,49 he examined the subject nonetheless. He claimed that the
Prusso-Hanoverian feud had evolved from Britain’s continuing dispute
with Austria, which had, moreover, worsened after the Treaty of Seville.
Walpole wrote that
His Majesty’s preferring an alliance with Spain is a strong proof that the interests
of Great Britain have the chief place in his thoughts. His Majesty might certainly
have promised himself not only security, but even great advantages, to his Ger-
man territories from a reconciliation with the Emperor. And on the contrary, he
may now perhaps meet with marks of resentment in those quarters. Seckendorff,
the imperial minister at Berlin, will without doubt be again called upon to exert
the credit which he pretends to have gain’d with His Prussian Majesty to induce
him to quarrel once more with those to whom he ought by all the ties of blood,
interest, and religion to be most closely united.50
Walpole’s conflation of the Prussian case with its Austrian precedent
absolved him of any inconsistency on the subject of Hanover, while
justifying British assistance to the Electorate under the guarantee of 1726.
Yet Walpole was preparing an even more expansive logic for British
protection of Hanover. Walpole naturally mentioned the parliamentary
guarantee, which had been predicated upon dynastic union, but he
argued further that Hanover’s Protestantism alone qualified it for British
succour. Walpole wrote,
I cannot see how it can be the duty of an Englishman to encourage foreign
powers to invade the king’s German dominions and to excite the neighbouring
princes to oppress a people merely because they acknowledge the same sovereign

47
Horatio Walpole to Poyntz, London, 21 Jan. 1730 (Coxe, ii. 667).
48
Newcastle to Harrington, London, 24 March–14 Apr. 1730 (Coxe, ii. 678).
49
[Sir Robert Walpole], Observations upon the Treaty between the Crowns of Great Britain,
France, and Spain (1729), p. 26.
50
[Walpole], Observations upon the Treaty, pp. 23–4.

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 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover 173

that we do. That country, barren and despicable as it has been represented, has
surely the common claim of all Protestant nations to our favour and good wishes,
if not to our protection. The last as well as the present parliament have declared
themselves to be in this way of thinking, and we need not surely repine at their
quiet, nor are we under any temptation to disturb it. I hope therefore that the
malicious desire which these false patriots have shown to distress the king’s affairs
there will have no other effect than to open the eyes of those who have been
deceived by their specious pretences of loyalty and affection for His Majesty. And
it may reasonably be expected that the complaisant person who once conde-
scended to make a private submission in the last reign for some free expressions
that fell from him in public upon a subject not very unlike that which I have
been now treating of will think this a proper occasion for showing once more
his great address in making recantations.51
Not only did this passage clarify Walpole’s argument for assistance to
Hanover, but it also revealed his strategy in so doing. Walpole targeted
his most formidable whig rival, William Pulteney – the ‘complaisant
person’ to whom he referred. He recalled an incident in which Pulteney
had apologized to George I for telling the Commons in 1717 (ironically
enough, as part of Walpole’s opposition) that the king would never love
Britain.52 Walpole then associated Pulteney with the conviction that the
Electorate was ‘barren and despicable’, paraphrasing the old Jacobite
argument against Hanover. His object was not only to call Pulteney a
Jacobite, but also to goad him and his followers into further attacks
upon Hanover. Walpole obviously believed that Hanover’s utility to his
familiar strategy of smoking out Jacobitism53 outweighed whatever dis-
advantages it possessed.
Pulteney’s dilemma was immediately apparent in the substantive
moderation of his response, which he entitled A Short View of the State of
Affairs. He could not resist baiting Hanover when he wrote of Walpole
that ‘I scorn as much as he to represent that country barren and despicable,
though I cannot help thinking the British dominions much more consid-
erable both to His Majesty and us, and deserving the first place in our
thoughts’.54 Pulteney’s belief that Britain was ‘more considerable’ than
Hanover risked confirming Walpole’s imputation of Jacobitism, for it
echoed the Pretender’s 1715 characterization of the Electorate as ‘one of
the most inconsiderable provinces of the Empire’.55 To make matters

51
[Walpole], Observations upon the Treaty, pp. 26 – 7, or 27–8, depending upon the edn.
52
Pulteney had also opposed the influence of George I’s German ministers (Hatton, pp. 202–
3).
53
See G. V. Bennett, ‘Jacobitism and the rise of Walpole’, in McKendrick, pp. 70– 92;
P. S. Fritz, The English Ministers and Jacobitism between the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 (Toronto,
1975).
54
[William Pulteney], A Short View of the State of Affairs with Relation to Great Britain for Four
Years Past, with Some Remarks on the Treaty Lately Published and a Pamphlet Intitled Observations
upon It (1730), pp. 34–5.
55
James Francis Edward Stuart, His Majesty’s Most Gracious Declaration (n.p., 1715).

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174 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover

worse, the Pretender’s language had been coined by Pulteney’s journ-

alistic partner, Lord Bolingbroke, during his short stint as James Stuart’s
Secretary of State. Perhaps conscious of the weakness of his position,
Pulteney accepted that parliament might endorse Britain’s defence of
Hanover. He wrote: ‘how far we are obliged under the name of protection
to engage ourselves in a war upon that account I must leave to the decision
of the Act of Settlement, and to that way of thinking upon it . . . in which the
parliament shall declare themselves to be’.56 This was, of course, precisely the
opinion to which Pulteney had been led in private conversation with
Hervey.
Another anti-Walpole pamphlet, the anonymously-authored The Observa-
tions on the Treaty of Seville Examined, was not so sure that parliament
could endorse assistance to Hanover under the terms of 1726. The
pamphlet dissected Walpole’s conceit that Britain’s Austrian quarrel had
precipitated Hanover’s Prussian crisis. The latter derived not from ‘hatred
to the Hanover treaty’,57 which had ranged Britain and France against
Austria, but from ‘a few cartloads of hay [and] some irregular practices in
listing or detaining a few sorry peasants’.58 The distinction implied acquies-
cence in Britain’s protection of Hanover from Austria. However, if
parliament consented to defend Hanover from Prussia as well, The Obser-
vations on the Treaty of Seville Examined concluded that ‘there never can
happen any disturbance in Lower Saxony by which we must not be
alarm’d, nor any war there, wherein we must not be engag’d . . . If that
ever comes to be our case, what advantage [can] we . . . reap from the
situation of our country as an island’?59 The pamphlet drew upon the
same conception of Britain as a maritime nation which Walpolean prop-
aganda had used in opposition.
The insular critique of dynastic union ultimately furnished the most
durable argument for Britain’s and Hanover’s independence from one
another. Drake’s original comparison of Hanover to the crown’s medieval
territories in France later evolved into Blackstone’s observation that the
king’s German territories ‘do not in any wise appertain to the crown of
these kingdoms, they are entirely unconnected with the laws of England,
and do not communicate with this nation in any respect whatsoever’.60
The Observations on the Treaty of Seville Examined was an important link in
this tradition. Its author averred that
every man who labours . . . to introduce the notion that we are under other
obligations of protecting His Majesty’s German dominions than we are under of
protecting any other state (I mean obligations of general interest and particular
56
[Pulteney], A Short View of the State of Affairs, p. 35.
57
The Observations on the Treaty of Seville Examined (1730), p. 9, or 10, depending upon the
edn.
58
The Observations on the Treaty of Seville Examined, p. 8, or 9.
59
The Observations on the Treaty of Seville Examined, p. 9, or 10.
60
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (4 vols., Oxford, 1765– 9), i. 106.

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 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover 175

compact) [is] a man who betrays one of the most essential rights of the British
nation . . . which we hold by the same tenure as His Majesty holds his crown.61
This was an unfair distortion of Walpole’s argument, which had justified
support for Hanover in terms of its Protestantism rather than the dynastic
union, but the author was nonetheless correct that the Act of Settlement
obviated any British obligation to Hanover, such as Walpole had undeni-
ably posited. This allowed him to argue for Walpole’s unconstitutionality
on contractual grounds.
Yet the author of The Observations on the Treaty of Seville Examined may
have realized that this colourful language risked confirming the aspersions
which Walpole had cast upon Pulteney. He perceived that Walpole’s
remarks about Hanover had been intended ‘to establish that scandalous
practice . . . of accusing those who are enemies to ministers as enemies to
the crown, and of representing all opposition to their measures as an oppo-
sition to the measures of the king’.62 So The Observations on the Treaty of
Seville Examined made sure to be generous to Hanover even as it criti-
cized dynastic union with it. It wrote that ‘the people of Hanover are our
friends, they are Protestants, they are subjects of the same prince. In all
these respects, far from having that ignoble and wicked sentiment of
repining at their quiet, we ought to wish for their prosperity’.63
Walpole did not respond in further pamphlets.64 Instead, he lobbied
members of parliament in the days prior to its debate about the Hessian
subsidies. In one case, Horatio Walpole told Lord Perceval that ‘the
quarrel between Prussia and Hanover for a truss of hay is only a pretence
to cover greater matters which the emperor has in view, actuating the
court of Prussia – over which he has got an ascendant – in what manner
he pleases’.65 This was precisely his brother Robert’s argument from the
Observations upon the Treaty between the Crowns of Great Britain, France, and
Spain, an indication that the minister would not back down from his new
policy respecting Hanover in the coming parliamentary debate.
Yet Horatio Walpole appeared to retreat from his brother’s forward
position on Hanover three days later before the house of commons. He
informed the Commons that
these [Hessian] troops were not for defence of Hanover territories, and . . . the
Dutch apprehended an attack upon Emden or their barriers by the emperor

61
The Observations on the Treaty of Seville Examined, pp. 9 –10, or 10.
62
The Observations on the Treaty of Seville Examined, p. 10, or 11.
63
The Observations on the Treaty of Seville Examined, p. 8, or 9.
64
Walpole did not write The Treaty of Seville and the Measures That Have Been Taken for the
Four Last Years Impartially Considered, as contended in H. T. Dickinson, Walpole and the Whig
Supremacy (1973), p. 116. Dickinson probably misread G. C. Gibbs, ‘Parliament and foreign
policy in the age of Stanhope and Walpole’, Eng. Hist. Rev., lxxvii (1962), 18–37, at p. 36.
65
Diary of Viscount Percival, afterwards 1st Earl of Egmont, ed. R. A. Roberts (3 vols., 1920 –3)
(hereafter Percival, Diary), i. 21–2.

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176 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover

. . . The Hanover alliance and not the Electorate of Hanover . . . was the cause
of the emperor’s anger against the king, and . . . these [Hessian] troops were kept
up to support that and not the preservation of German dominions . . . When the
emperor found the Treaty of Seville would go on without him, he was resolved
to attack the Hanover dominions and persuaded the king of Prussia to pick a
quarrel and by Count Seckendorff promised to assist him with 30,000 men. The
French and Swedes, Dutch and Danes saw the meaning of this . . . was to make
a division between the Hanover allies, and made it a casus fœderis and were all
marching to the assistance of the Hanover dominions . . . Why should we think
it was only for the sake of them that these Hessians are kept, since all the powers
in alliance with us take it to be to preserve the Hanover alliance?66
Horatio Walpole’s speech, and one made the previous day by Pelham, 67
echoed Hervey’s earlier contention that the Hessians defended the United
Provinces over and above Hanover. The argument that Hanover be
preserved merely as a buffer for Britain’s allies replied nicely to the insist-
ence of The Observations on the Treaty of Seville Examined upon ‘particular
compact’ as a criterion for British foreign aid, and secured the loyalty of
government supporters with tory pedigrees, such as Judge John Verney
and Thomas Winnington.68 Yet Horatio nonetheless supported his
brother’s view that Austria had precipitated Hanover’s Prussian crisis.
Robert Walpole stuck to another of his arguments from the Observa-
tions. Speaking of the Treaty of Seville, he reiterated that ‘His Majesty
had calculated this peace entirely and solely with a view to the interest
of Great Britain, to her honour, peace, and trade, in so much that he had
exposed his own [Hanoverian] territories to a possibility of being invaded
for our sakes’.69 Here, he practically quoted a passage from his Observations
verbatim. Walpole did not, however, as he had in the pamphlet, address
the question of Britain’s obligation to defend Hanover. He had no need
to do so, having already inspired his brother, Pelham and others to perform
this role.
If anything, Walpole’s Hanoverian offensive produced a more emo-
tional response in parliament than in the press. Walpole’s linkage of
Pulteney to Jacobitism had led the latter (and his propaganda machine) to
pull his rhetorical punches in public, but opposition whigs echoed the
more extreme sentiments he had shared with Hervey in private. John
Norris, the son of the very admiral whose Baltic squadron had effectively
secured Bremen and Verden to Hanover fifteen years earlier, repeated
Pulteney’s fear that the Hessian subsidies drained Britain of specie. 70 This
66
The Parliamentary Diary of Sir Edward Knatchbull, 1722 –30, ed. A. N. Newman (Camden
3rd ser., xciv, 1963) (hereafter Knatchbull, Diary), p. 104.
67
Percival, Diary, i. 25– 6.
68
Percival, Diary, i. 30. Despite his concurrence with Pelham’s analysis of the Hessian forces,
Winnington believed the Act of Settlement permitted the parliament to approve assistance to
Hanover under other circumstances (Percival, Diary, i. 28).
69
Percival, Diary, i. 25.
70
Percival, Diary, i. 27.

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 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover 177

led others to reprise Pulteney’s idea of dissolving dynastic union with

Hanover. The London member of parliament John Barnard wished that
the Act of Settlement had required the Hanoverian successors to
renounce their German patrimony, as Philip V of Spain had done with
his French rights.71 John Toland had argued similarly before the Act’s
adoption in 1701,72 but no other whig had again articulated the view
until Barnard. Walpole’s former supporter George Heathcote seconded
Barnard with a more menacing tone. Heathcote said that
keeping [Hessians] at our expense was a breach of the contract made with this
family, and doubted whether it would not throw us into a state of nature . . .
[and] that our history shows the nation has more than once eased themselves of
the burden of kings who have kept not their contract.73
This was a Lockean call to resistance. Walpole had probably not imagined
that his attempt to drive dissident whigs into apparent complicity with
Jacobitism would instead inspire them to seek a dissolution of dynastic
union upon whig terms. He could, however, content himself that resist-
ance theory was no more attractive to the political mainstream than the
Stuarts.
Perhaps this is why Walpole, or rather his surrogate Arnall, resumed
the case for Hanover some months later. While he did take up Horatio
Walpole’s argument that Hanover was important as a Dutch buffer, Arnall
also expanded upon one of Sir Robert’s original arguments. He wrote
that
it is not equal terms between any prince and people that he should hazard his
private interests for the public welfare without being duly supported. So if we
refuse or neglect that support thus due, we should open a temptation to princes
of less consummate goodness than His most sacred Majesty never to pursue the
public welfare when it may endanger their private interest. And though we are
assured the great benignity and bravery of that great prince who governs us would
scorn the temptation and pursue his people’s general happiness how little soever
they support his private interest, yet from thence to take an occasion of deserting
his support and exposing him to a hardship because he may resist a temptation
is . . . folly and ingratitude.
This argument basically reprised that of the 1726 parliamentary guarantee,
which had partially underpinned the Observations. Indeed, Arnall claimed
that parliament’s failure to continue to support Hanover ‘would be a
breach of faith’.74 Walpole’s influence was discernible in Arnall’s florid
prose, for the attitude of the latter towards Hanover had previously been
ambivalent at best.

71
Knatchbull, Diary, p. 150.
72
[ John Toland], Limitations for the Next Foreign Successor, or New Saxon Race (1701), pp. 8– 9.
73
Percival, Diary, i. 27.
74
The Free Briton, xxvi (28 May 1730), p. 2.

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178 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover

Sir Robert Walpole was sufficiently pleased with his pro-Hanoverian

campaign to revive it shortly before the next parliamentary session.
Although Hanover’s Prussian crisis had long since cooled off, British
relations with Austria remained unsettled enough to imperil the Elector-
ate. This time Sir Robert engaged his brother Horatio and the diplomat
Stephen Poyntz to write the annual treatise on foreign policy, entitled
Considerations on the Present State of Affairs in Europe.75 The Considerations
expanded upon Horatio Walpole’s theme of the previous winter. He
elevated Hanover from its subordination to Britain’s foreign allies, now
asking the public to ‘consider the electorate of Hanover as an ally of Great
Britain’, and thereby revived Sir Richard Steele’s 1716 conception of
Hanover as ‘a rich and powerful ally’.76 While the Treaty of Hanover
obliged its signatories to defend the Electorate as one of George I’s
dominions, neither he nor his son had ever explicitly acceded to it as
Elector. This hardly made Hanover a British ally in the conventional
sense. Horatio Walpole recognized this weakness in his argument, for he
continued that
it is true indeed there is no formal alliance between Great Britain and Hanover for,
the quality of king and Elector residing in the same person, His Majesty could
not contract with himself. But the union betwixt the two governments and the
obligations of mutual defence and guarantee are as strongly and necessarily
implied as the most formal treaties and conventions could possibly make them.77
Horatio Walpole transformed his earlier argument that Hanover was a
strategic buffer for more important British allies into a broader argument
for defence of the Electorate on its own merits, predicated on interna-
tional law.
This was not, however, Horatio Walpole’s sole argument in favour of
assistance to Hanover. He also wrote that ‘as His Majesty might expect
. . . insults upon his Hanover dominions, out of resentment for the measures
taken by him to make good his engagements as king of England, it would
be unjust to leave him exposed as Elector purely on that account’. 78 Here
again was the justice-based case for assistance to Hanover of the 1726
parliamentary guarantee. Horatio Walpole anticipated and refuted the
opposition argument against the justice-based theory for aid to Hanover,
which was that Austria threatened Hanover out of a dispute more Electoral
than British. He claimed that ‘not one word had passed for some years
before the conclusion of Vienna about [the imperial investitures for] Bremen
and Verden’.79 The justice-based argument was the only one for defending
75
For the attribution, see Percival, Diary, i. 125.
76
[Horatio Walpole and Stephen Poyntz], Considerations on the Present State of Affairs in
Europe (1730), p. 49; Town-Talk, v (13 Jan. 1716), in Tracts and Pamphlets by Richard Steele, ed.
R. Blanchard (Baltimore, Md., 1944), p. 383.
77
[Horatio Walpole and Poyntz], p. 50.
78
[Horatio Walpole and Poyntz], p. 43.
79
[Horatio Walpole and Poyntz], p. 47.

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 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover 179

Hanover which rested completely upon Britain’s dynastic union with that
country. Horatio Walpole also shared his brother’s political calculation.
He exhorted British opponents of Hanover to ‘give over the little artifices
of complaining that we have anything to do with the Hanover dominions,
and utter their grief plainly, that we have anything to do with the Elector of
Hanover’.80 The allegation necessarily comprehended both Jacobites and
whig extremists.
Once again Pulteney responded to Walpolean provocation, this time
in the house of commons rather than in print. Debating the address of
thanks for the king’s speech, he seconded Sir William Wyndham’s
motion to ‘support His Majesty’s engagements, so far as they related to
the interest of Great Britain’. Pulteney drew attention to the Act of
Settlement, adding that ‘Bremen and Verden had been the foundations
of . . . bad treaties . . . and were the real source of all the present disputes
in Europe’.81 This was, of course, precisely the view he had expressed
when debating parliament’s original guarantee to Hanover back in 1726.
For his part, Sir Robert Walpole echoed his remarks of the previous
year, when he had argued that the Treaty of Seville demonstrated the
ascendancy of British over Hanoverian interests in George II’s concerns.
Walpole and Hervey fought Wyndham’s motion, which
would seem to insinuate that His Majesty had enter’d into engagements that did
not relate to the interest of Great Britain, which would be the greatest ingratitude
that could be imagin’d towards His Majesty, who in all his measures had never
show’d the least regard to anything but the interest of Great Britain and the ease
and security of the people thereof.82
This argument, combined with Walpole’s mastery of the Commons,
helped to quash Wyndham’s motion.
The debate, however, continued in the press. The anonymously-
authored The Case of the Hessian Forces evaluated British assistance to Hanover
in terms of interest rather than justice by agreeing, for argument’s sake,
with the younger Walpole’s contention that the two countries were allies.
‘Even supposing this to be the case’, it asked, are the Hanoverian domin-
ions ‘not a weight upon the strength of England? Are they not a constant
pledge, as it were, in the emperor’s hands’?83 This was the maritime
argument which The Observations on the Treaty of Seville Examined had
deployed against assistance to Hanover the previous winter. The Case of
the Hessian Forces also deliberately misconstrued Horatio Walpole’s argu-
ment respecting the purported alliance between Britain and Hanover.
Noting that the younger Walpole had spoken of a ‘union betwixt the

80
[Horatio Walpole and Poyntz], p. 53.
81
T. Pelham to Waldegrave, London, 22 Jan. 1731 (Coxe, iii. 79 –80).
82
Cobbett, viii. 837.
83
The Case of the Hessian Forces in the Pay of Great Britain Impartially and Freely Examin’d
(1731), p. 35.

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180 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover

two governments’, its author inquired ‘What union of the two governments
can the author possibly mean? Though we have the happiness of living
under the same prince . . . we do not live under the same form of government.
Ours is limited, theirs is absolute, and whilst this difference subsists there
can be no union between them’.84 The word ‘union’ in Horatio Walpole’s
argument had undoubtedly referred to an alliance rather than political
integration, but The Case of the Hessian Forces cleverly exploited the con-
cept’s ambiguity to revive the old objection that the king ruled Hanover
absolutely as Elector. This was one of the oldest criticisms of dynastic
union with Hanover, and had been raised as early as 1701 by John
Toland.85
These were inflammatory arguments, yet again the mainstream organs
of opposition whig propaganda stopped short of abjuring union. The Case
of the Hessian Forces would have been satisfied with a change in behaviour,
trusting ‘in His Majesty’s wisdom that he will . . . consider himself in a
double capacity as king of Great Britain and elector of Hanover’.86 Not so
opposition whig parliamentarians, whose animus against union with
Hanover only increased during the annual debate on the Hessians. A
member for Liverpool, Sir Thomas Aston, ‘wished the king would part
with Hanover to his second son’, the duke of Cumberland, and was
seconded by Barnard of London.87 This was, of course, the reverse of the
plan first mooted in private by Pulteney over a year before. Such a plan
to dissolve dynastic union was certain to have more public support than
the comparatively extreme solutions of Jacobite restoration or whig
revolution. Its potential popularity was underscored by the collusion of
Barnard and Aston, members for large urban constituencies. Whig oppo-
sition to dynastic union with Hanover was now even more distinctive,
and therefore dangerous to Walpole, than it had been a year before.
Walpole deputed Arnall to answer his whig opponents’ objections to
dynastic union. Arnall’s essay was fertile, provocatively comparing the
British-Hanoverian union with the Anglo-Scottish union of crowns 88 and
the more recent one between Sweden and Hesse-Cassel.89 He argued that
Britons should trust their king as much as the English of 1603 and the
Swedes of 1730 supposedly had. Yet Arnall could not deny the existence
of an Act of Settlement, which did not pertain in his comparisons. His
solution was to minimize its significance. Arnall did admit that
though the legislature did . . . know that it must be the king’s greatest interest
always to prefer the care of his greatest dominion to considerations of less import-

84
The Case of the Hessian Forces, p. 35.
85
[Toland], pp. 7–8.
86
The Case of the Hessian Forces, p. 36.
87
Percival, Diary, i. 126.
88
The Free Briton, lxv (25 Feb. 1731), p. 1.
89
The Free Briton, lxv (25 Feb. 1731), p. 2.

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 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover 181

ance, yet they could not answer for natural infirmities of temper, wrong bias of
mind, and other incidents to which human nature is liable and from which all
princes are not exempt.
He observed that this consideration had produced the provision requiring
parliamentary consent for war on Hanover’s behalf and, in the tradition
of Pelham and Hervey, he implied that parliament had acceded to every
subsidy designed to protect Hanover.90 Arnall continued, however, that
‘even if there was a breach, it would be [parliament’s] highest, their truest
interest as Englishmen, as Protestants, and lovers of liberty to heal that breach
and to fortify his title rather than to make the one wider and the other
weaker’.91 Here was Walpole’s familiar strategy of tarnishing the opposi-
tion with disloyalty, particularly of the Jacobite variety, but rarely had it
excused infractions of the Act of Settlement.
Arnall nonetheless admitted that Hanoverians ‘are not entitled to pro-
tection as a people who are [British] subjects or as countries which are
appendages to the crown’. This required him to justify it upon other
grounds, which were by now familiar. He drew firstly upon Horatio
Walpole’s postulated alliance between Britain and the Electorate:
the king’s dominions abroad are to be treated as in alliance with us, an alliance
which gives some weight and authority to us in particular with some advantages
to Europe in general, nor less deserve support and assistance from us, as those are
the mutual terms of every league and confederacy.
It is equally true that the Dutch republic are a part of our national care and ought
to be so, since they are our greatest bulwark against the princes of the continent
whom ambition or interest may induce at any time to become our enemies . . .
Now every one knows how much the king of Great Britain as Elector of Hanover
hath it in his power to protect this useful and inseparable ally from the attempts
of those princes in the lower circles of the Empire who have force and opportunity
to oppress and encroach upon it.92
Arnall seconded Horatio Walpole’s dual case for assistance to Hanover,
based upon Britain’s imaginary and real alliances with Hanover and the
United Provinces respectively. Although he concurred with the younger
Walpole’s argument from obligation, he added the element of interest as
well. This was somewhat unusual, for British supporters of Hanover
predominantly relied upon duty in the years following 1726.
Arnall also justified protecting Hanover ‘as a Protestant state’.93 He
likened Hanover to the Palatinate during the previous century, when
James I had failed to defend his son-in-law (and George II’s great-
grandfather) from the emperor. The argument was an extension of one

90
The Free Briton, lxv (25 Feb. 1731), p. 1.
91
The Free Briton, lxv (25 Feb. 1731), p. 2.
92
The Free Briton, lxv (25 Feb. 1731), p. 1.
93
The Free Briton, lxv (25 Feb. 1731), p. 1.

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182 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover

made several weeks earlier by the anonymously-authored pamphlet, Some

Observations on the Present State of Affairs.94 Arnall wrote,
their circumstances are the same, and Hanover more justly claims our care than
ever the Palatinate did. ‘Tis a Protestant Electorate threatened by the same power,
with the same usage. And it is more entitled to our tender regard as in truth this
usage is threatened on our account because we oppose a usurping Ostend Company
trading to the Indies and because we have made an alliance with Spain for the
advantage of our national commerce . . . Not only humanity, not only good policy,
but also absolute justice loudly demands our assistance.95
This was Sir Robert Walpole’s argument from his Observations on the
Treaty of Seville, intensified by reference to an emotional episode from
English history. It succeeded in provoking a gratifying rejoinder from
Bolingbroke, in his famous Remarks on the History of England.96
Sir Robert Walpole might have ended his pro-Hanoverian propaganda
after concluding a treaty with Austria at Vienna. Charles VI abandoned
his trading company at Ostend in exchange for British recognition of
his daughter Maria Theresia as his heiress. The treaty ended the British
component of Austria’s dissatisfaction with Hanover, sparing his govern-
ment the expense of the Hessians for the immediate future. In a move
which epitomized Walpole’s independence from Hanoverian influence
for J. H. Plumb, Britain signed the treaty before Austria had satisfied
Hanover’s outstanding claims.97 Walpole might have trumpeted this fact
had Hanover been overwhelmingly unpopular. Instead, Britain’s separate
peace occasioned more rhetoric about obligations to George II as Elector.
Townshend’s successor as Secretary of State, Lord Harrington, wrote that
the king, out of his paternal affection and goodness to his British subjects, would
not suffer the signing a treaty so necessary and advantageous to them to be
deferred for the settling his Electoral demands, though never so justly founded.
What less return then can the nation make for such an unexampled generosity
and goodness, than to look upon all his interests as their own and be equally
solicitous about them?98
The second Treaty of Vienna ordained no immediate cessation of hostil-
ities in the public battle over Britain’s relationship to Hanover.
Arnall signalled the continuation of Walpole’s pro-Hanoverian pro-
paganda with another attack on Pulteney, in response to the concluding
instalment of Bolingbroke’s Remarks. Arnall’s Remarks on the Craftsman’s
Vindication of His Two Honble Patrons may have emerged from his collab-
oration with another, eminent, author. Alexander Pettit has surmised that

94
Some Observations on the Present State of Affairs in a Letter to a Member of the House of
Commons by a Member of Parliament (1731), pp. 30 –1.
95
The Free Briton, lxv (25 Feb. 1731), p. 2.
96
The Country Journal, or the Craftsman, ccliii (8 May 1731), p. 2.
97
Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, ii. 230.
98
Harrington to Robinson, London, 30 March 1731 (Coxe, iii. 102).

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 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover 183

‘like some other efforts more or less “by” Arnall, the Remarks on the
Craftsman’s Vindication was written with the assistance of [Sir Robert]
Walpole’.99 Arnall and Walpole considered that Pulteney
hath even attacked the royal title to the crown and invaded the prince on the throne,
invaded him in open parliament by charging him with having broken the terms of
the Act of Settlement, by insisting that the Act of Settlement is His Majesty’s only
tenure by which he holds his crown, by suggesting that the care of his foreign
dominions provided for in pursuance of parliamentary powers and consistently with
the Act of Settlement . . . was in breach of that act, and leaving others to conclude
that as the terms were broken the title was forfeited and the throne was thereby become
vacant. If this was done by this gentleman, may it not be asked whether any title in
this world was ever impeached but with a view to change the possession?100
Arnall later claimed that he had paraphrased Pulteney’s remarks from the
previous winter’s Commons debates respecting the king’s speech and the
mercenaries of Wolfenbüttel in Britain’s pay.101 Arnall opposed Pulteney’s
argument that the Act of Settlement was George II’s sole title to the
throne, to the exclusion of heredity and religion. Yet, if Pulteney indeed
believed this, what was the implication of his argument that the king had
violated the Act of Settlement? Arnall was in no doubt about what sort
of solution Pulteney favoured, if it were found that George II had indeed
invalidated his claim to the throne. He commented darkly that Pulteney
‘suffers himself to be governed by veteran Jacobites, by men who con-
fessedly have been in the pretender’s service and would return to it on
the first temptation or provocation’.102 This was an unmistakable allusion
to Bolingbroke.
Pulteney’s response to Arnall, An Answer to One Part of a Late Infamous
Libel, was ambivalent in the manner of A Short View of the State of Affairs.
His rehearsal of Sir Robert Walpole’s aspersions on George II when the
latter had still been prince of Wales prompted his expulsion from the privy
council,103 and some of his remarks upon dynastic union were similarly
inflammatory. He admitted saying what Arnall had alleged, while denying
Arnall’s interpretation of it. Pulteney wrote that his remarks were
not intended as a charge against the king, but only as a motive to the house of
commons, by putting them in mind that it tended to invalidate and was in con-
travention to one of the limitations of the Act of Settlement. He might take notice,
perhaps, that too much regard had been paid to His Majesty’s German dominions,
but I am sure he never said that this was a breach of the Act of Settlement. He

99
A. Pettit, ‘Propaganda, public relations, and the Remarks on the Craftsman’s Vindication of
His Two Honble Patrons in His Paper of May 22, 1731’, Huntington Libr. Quart., lvii (1994), 45–
59, at p. 50.
100
[William Arnall], Remarks on the Craftsman’s Vindication of His Two Honble Patrons in His
Paper of May 22, 1731 (1731), pp. 42–3.
101
The Free Briton, lxxxiii (1 July 1731), p. 1.
102
[Arnall], pp. 43–4.
103
Pettit, p. 58.

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184 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover

might observe that the Act of Settlement was the only tenure by which His Majesty
holds the crown. And I will defy you, Sir, to mention any other tenure upon which
he can depend. It is the strongest and most glorious tenure by which any prince can
hold his crown.104
Pulteney then showed how he could allege that the Act of Settlement’s
war clause had been violated without eviscerating its establishment of the
succession in the royal family. He observed that ‘the Act of Settlement is
a complicated bill consisting of various conditions, some of much less
importance than others’. Unsurprisingly, he characterized its provisions
relating to the succession as ‘essential’.105 However, Pulteney implicitly
compared the limitation on war for Hanover’s sake to that respecting
royal travel abroad, which had been repealed in 1716. He described the
latter restriction as ‘not fundamental in itself ’, but asked
if any bad consequences should hereafter arise from the repeal of this limitation
(suppose for instance that some future prince should think fit to reside chiefly
abroad) might not any member of the house of commons complain of it and offer his
reasons for putting it in force again without incurring such a grievous imputation
as that of attacking the royal title and declaring the throne vacant?106
Pulteney thereby hoped to be able to maintain his anti-Hanoverian
rhetoric while avoiding Walpolean accusations of sedition.
Arnall disputed Pulteney’s distinctions between ‘essential’ and ‘not
fundamental’ provisions within the Act of Settlement. He asked, ‘who
shall distinguish fundamentals from non-fundamentals? The legislature hath
not done it, and the law cannot do it. All the limitations are equally
binding and restrictive’.107 Arnall had to uphold the Act of Settlement’s
coherence in order to preserve the accusation that Pulteney was seditious.
This he did even more sensationally several weeks later, when he wrote
that Pulteney
hath laboured to prove, laboured it even in the house of commons, that the title
of his lawful sovereign the prince on the throne, and even that of his royal
father . . . was forfeited by contraventions of the Act of Settlement . . . The very
facts which he charged as contraventions were literal compliances with the
express terms of that act, according to the tenor of which the king applied to
parliament for their advice and consent previously to his royal measures. Upon
which application, His Majesty was desired by the address of both houses then
sitting to pursue the measures which he proposed. And yet Mr. P. with equal
ingratitude, folly, and temerity treated those measures in this most shocking
manner, wickedly and boldly asserting that the rights, the treasure, the glory, and
the welfare of the British nation had been in either of these two reigns sacrificed

104
[William Pulteney], An Answer to One Part of a Late Infamous Libel Intitled Remarks on the
Craftsman’s Vindication of His Two Honourable Patrons (1731), p. 10.
105
[Pulteney], An Answer to One Part of a Late Infamous Libel, p. 11.
106
[Pulteney], An Answer to One Part of a Late Infamous Libel, p. 12.
107
The Free Briton, lxxxiii (1 July 1731), p. 1.

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 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover 185

to the interests of two little German duchies ever since the late king’s accession to
this throne.108
This was to be Arnall’s most daring attack upon Pulteney’s loyalty,
although his terming parliament’s assent to the subsidy treaties with
Hanover’s neighbours ‘literal compliances’ with the Act of Settlement
seemed to admit that the treaties were perhaps contrary to its spirit.
It was perhaps a measure of Arnall’s success that the opposition press
ceased to rise to his pro-Hanoverian provocations; except for an outburst
in early 1732,109 the opposition maintained its silence on the issue. The
British public realized that the second Treaty of Vienna had effectively
ended Hanover’s peril, by tempering Austrian hostility to Britain. Dynastic
union was no longer a cause célèbre, and was further obscured by the
controversy surrounding Walpole’s proposed excise.

Inevitably, Hanover’s profile rose again as circumstances conspired to

make it less sympathetic to the British public. It was then that Walpole
reaped the bitter consequences of his previous efforts for Hanover. He
had provoked his whig opponents into argumentation which now became
more attractive, and prevented himself from plausibly attacking Hanover
as he had before 1730. That did not stop Walpole trying to do so on
occasion, but more often he kept his peace in the hope that the Electorate
would fade into obscurity. Yet he still remained sympathetic to Hanover
when British policy again endangered it, as during the War of Austrian
Succession.
Walpole first reverted to his earlier circumspection about dynastic
union during the War of Polish Succession, wherein Britain remained
neutral despite Hanoverian support for Austria. Hervey wrote that
George II
could not help remembering that, as Elector of Hanover, he was part of the
Empire, and the emperor at the head of it. And these prejudices, operating in
every consideration where his interest as king of England ought only to have
been weighed, gave his minister, who consulted only the interest of England,
perpetual difficulties to surmount whenever he was persuading His Majesty to
adhere solely to that.110
Hanover once again threatened to involve Britain in war, as it had during
the Northern War. Indeed, Walpole’s propaganda machine advanced the
analogy when John, Lord Carteret, decried the Electorate in parliament.
Arnall recalled that Carteret had been the British diplomat who obtained
Sweden’s official cession of Bremen and Verden to Hanover at Stock-
holm in 1719. He remarked that ‘by the accession of that identical hand

108
The Free Briton, xciv (16 Sept. 1731), p. 4.
109
Percival, Diary, i. 251–3; The Country Journal, or the Craftsman, cccii (15 Apr. 1732), p. 1.
110
Hervey, ii. 340.

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186 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover

which drew the Swedish treaty and disposed of the Swedish subsidy, [the oppo-
sition] were bless’d with a qualified orator to rave at German dominions,
Hessian troops, and votes of credit’.111 Arnall contrasted Carteret’s obvious
hypocrisy with Walpole’s consistency. Sir Robert was still as proud of
defending Hanover when Britain endangered it as he was of resisting
the reverse instance. Arnall’s even-handed treatment of both scenarios
reflected Hanover’s changed position in British politics. His first reference
to Walpole’s record during the Northern War since 1729 indicated that
the Electorate was no longer as sympathetic as it had been in the years
after the Treaty of Seville.
George II’s visit to Hanover in 1735 further worried Walpole, who
feared that Electoral ministers would strengthen the king’s desire to enter
hostilities.112 As it happened, George II’s consequent love affair with
Amelia Sophia von Walmoden proved even worse in that it prompted
the king to return to the Electorate the very next year. Hervey considered
that the king now ‘convinced the distant part of the nation of what those
who had the honour to be more near him had discovered long ago,
which was his preferring his German to his English subjects at least as
much as his father had done’.113
Hanover’s diminished position in British public opinion did not escape
Walpole, whose propaganda by now avoided rather than exploited the
Electorate. His altered strategy was evident in an incident recounted by
Hervey. An alehouse patron had declared that ‘the king hated the nation,
and he saw no reason why the nation should not hate him; that he was
gone to Hanover only to spend English money there and bring back a
Hanover whore here’.114 This argument combined reflection upon the
king’s personal immorality with the apprehension, first voiced by James
Drake in 1702, that royal visits to Hanover would transport (inadvertently
or not) specie out of Britain.115 Modern research has confirmed that
British funds did in fact cover the majority of George II’s costs en route
to and in Hanover during the seventeen-thirties.116 Walpole prosecuted
the offender, but asked a witness, ‘in the affidavit he was to make, leave
out the account of the English money and Hanover whore, the rest being
enough to make the fellow punishable without descending into these
particulars’.117 Walpole’s unaccustomed daintiness in the face of anti-
Hanoverian sentiment suggests that dynastic union’s liabilities had eclipsed
its assets.

111
The Free Briton, cclvii (3 Oct. 1734), p. 2.
112
Hervey, ii. 456.
113
Hervey, ii. 646.
114
Hervey, ii. 639.
115
[Drake], p. 48.
116
U. Richter-Uhlig, Hof und Politik unter den Bedingungen der Personalunion zwischen Hannover
und England (Hanover, 1992), pp. 59 – 62.
117
Hervey, ii. 639.

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 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover 187

Walpole revealed his new opinion of Hanover when Hervey informed

him that the prince of Wales intended to cede his Electoral rights to the
duke of Cumberland in exchange for a parliamentary annuity (and, he
hoped, popularity). Hervey by now opposed dynastic union, and urged
the proposal upon Walpole. Walpole rejected this scheme, but did so in
language which hardly flattered the Electorate. The minister objected that
should this be done, it will ever after be such a series of rapaciousness to hoard at
Hanover for the duke’s grandeur and profit and the queen’s security and retreat.
And Hanover in all foreign negotiations would so cross on all our measures, that
it is impossible to foresee half the difficulties it would bring upon us. Not but
that I own, at the same time, it would in futurity be the greatest real benefit the
sagacity of all mankind combined could procure for this country.118
Despite this opposition, Walpole informed the king and queen that par-
liament would buy the prince’s consent, ‘since the benefit of the bargain
was to accrue to the nation’.119 Although nothing came of the scheme to
dissolve union, Walpole’s openness to it indicated a new willingness to
part with Hanover out of British political expediency.
The idea of a dissolution recurred during the War of Austrian Succes-
sion, in the one episode of Walpolean inconsistency on the right course
of action respecting Hanover. In 1741 a French army forced neutrality
upon Hanover, depriving both Britain and its ally Austria of the Elector-
ate’s services. According to Walpole’s previous beliefs, Hanover had been
correct to detach itself from Britain when indirectly threatened by its
policy. However, because the position of neutrality was understandably
unpopular in Britain, he once again considered a dissolution. Arthur
Onslow, the speaker of the house of commons, later remembered that
a little while before Sir Robert Walpole’s fall, and as a popular act to save himself
(for he went very unwillingly out of his offices and power), he took me one day
aside and said, ‘what will you say, speaker, if this hand of mine shall bring a
message from the king to the house of commons declaring his consent to having
any of his family after his own death, to be made by act of parliament incapable
of inheriting and enjoying the crown and possessing the Electoral dominions at
the same time’? My answer was, ‘Sir, it will be as a message from heaven’. He
replied, ‘It will be done’. But it was not done, and I have good reason to believe
it would have been opposed and rejected at that time because it came from him,
and by the means of those who had always been most clamorous for it.120
One of the reasons Britons would have mistrusted Walpole’s proposed
dissolution of dynastic union was that it compromised the consistency
necessary for political credibility.
Indeed Walpole’s sauve qui peut was the exception that proved the rule.
He otherwise supported Hanover, which was once again jeopardized by
118
Hervey, iii. 800.
119
Hervey, iii. 802.
120
Coxe, ii. 571–2.

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188 Sir Robert Walpole and Hanover

British policy during the War of Austrian Succession. During the opposi-
tion’s premature attempt to remove him from office in February 1741,
Walpole defended the precedent set by his foreign policy of 1726 –31. Of
the Austrians, he asked
will it be said they might not have invaded His Majesty’s dominions in Germany
in order to force him to a compliance with what they desired of him as king of
Great Britain? And if those dominions had been invaded on account of a quarrel
with this nation, should not we have been obliged, both in honour and in
interest, to defend them?121
As the Electorate’s neutrality took shape, Pelham’s brother, the duke
of Newcastle, ‘stated and lamented the Hanover influence which had
brought many of these misfortunes upon us, which occasion’d a warm
and very unbecoming reply from Sir Robert Walpole’. 122 Walpole’s ser-
vices to Hanover continued after his fall. After Carteret lured Hanover
out of neutrality by hiring Electoral troops, it was Walpole (now the earl
of Orford) who persuaded the cabinet to retain them after their supposed
cowardice at the battle of Dettingen.123 He even rallied the government’s
parliamentary supporters to reject opposition calls to cashier the Hanove-
rian mercenaries.124 Walpole continued to believe that Hanover should
not suffer for Britain’s sake. His theory of dynastic union had not faltered,
despite his momentary loss of nerve at the end of his administration.

A study of Walpole’s Hanoverian policy belies the familiar caricature of

him as a parochial Norfolk squire. It shows him to have been no literary
philistine, and acquits both him and the British public of the charge of
thorough-going insularity. Walpole’s formulation that neither Hanover
nor Great Britain should suffer because of dynastic union, which was
based more upon justice than national interest, was eminently popular for
most of his political career. He resisted Hanoverian influence during the
Northern War, when its role behind Sweden’s Jacobite plotting made
the Electorate unpopular. Walpole later defended Hanover from Austria,
when Britain’s complicity in Hanoverian vulnerability made the Elector-
ate’s cause more sympathetic. His consistent application of his Hanoverian
policy only hurt him at the very end of his administration, when George
II’s more obvious personal bias towards Hanover increased the Elector-
ate’s unpopularity even as British policy endangered it again. The evolu-
tion of Walpole’s attitude towards Hanover proves that he, and the public
he courted, were fairer to the Electorate than historians have believed.
121
Cobbett, xi. 1297. See also pp. 1288– 9n.
122
Newcastle to Hardwicke, Claremont, 19 July 1741 (P. C. Yorke, The Life and Correspond-
ence of Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain (3 vols., Cambridge,
1913), i. 259).
123
J. B. Owen, The Rise of the Pelhams (1957), p. 187; G. Brauer, Die hannoversch-englischen
Subsidienverträge 1702–48 (Aalen, 1962), p. 152.
124
Owen, pp. 210–11.

© Institute of Historical Research 2003.