A History of the Four Georges, Volume I | Page 5

Westminster Abbey. Königsmark's accomplices were executed, but
Königsmark got off, and died years later fighting for the Venetians at
the siege of classic Argos. The soldier in Virgil falls on a foreign field,
and, dying, remembers sweet Argos. The elder Königsmark, dying
before sweet Argos, ought of right to remember that spot where St.
Albans Street joins Pall Mall, and where Thynne was done to death.
The Königsmarks had a sister, the beautiful Aurora, who was mistress
of Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony, and so mother of the famous
Maurice de Saxe, and ancestress of George Sand. Later, like the fair
sinner of some tale of chivalry, she ended her days in pious retirement,
as prioress of the Protestant Abbey at Quedlinburg.
[Sidenote: 1714--Wooden shoes and warming-pans]
George was born in Osnabrück, in May, 1660, and was therefore now

in his fifty-fifth year. As his first qualification for the government of
England, it may be mentioned that he did not understand one sentence
of the English language, was ignorant of English ways, history, and
traditions, and had as little sympathy with the growing sentiments of
the majority of educated English people as if he had been an Amurath
succeeding an Amurath.
When George became Elector, on the death of his father in 1698, he
showed, however, some capacity for improvement, under the influence
of the new responsibility imposed upon him by his station. His private
life did not amend, but his public conduct acquired a certain solidity
and consistency which was not to have been expected from his previous
mode of living. One of his merits was not likely to be by any means a
merit in the eyes of the English people. He was, to do him justice,
deeply attached to his native country. He had all the {9} love for
Hanover that the cat has for the hearth to which it is accustomed. The
ways of the place suited him; the climate, the soil, the whole conditions
of life were exactly what he would have them to be. He lived up to the
age of fifty-four a contented, stolid, happy, dissolute Elector of
Hanover; and it was a complete disturbance to all his habits and his
predilections when the expected death of Anne compelled him to turn
his thoughts to England.
The other claimant of the English crown was James Frederick Edward
Stuart, the Old Pretender, as he came to be afterwards called by his
enemies, the Chevalier de Saint George, as his friends called him when
they did not think it prudent to give him the title of king. James was the
step-brother of Queen Anne. He was the son of James the Second, by
James's second wife, Maria D'Este, sister to Francis, Duke of Modena.
Maria was only the age of Juliet when she married: she had just passed
her fourteenth year. Unlike Juliet she was not beautiful; unlike Juliet
she was poor. She was, however, a devout Roman Catholic, and
therefore was especially acceptable to her husband. She had four
children in quick succession, all of whom died in infancy; and then for
ten years she had no child. The London Gazette surprised the world one
day by the announcement that the Queen had become pregnant, and
upon June 10, 1688, she gave birth to a son. It need hardly be told now

that the wildest commotion was raised by the birth of the prince. The
great majority of the Protestants insinuated, or stoutly declared, that the
alleged heir-apparent was not a child of the Queen. The story was that a
newly-born child, the son of a poor miller, had been brought into the
Queen's room in a warming-pan, and passed off as the son of the Queen.
It was said that Father Petre, a Catholic clergyman, had been
instrumental in carrying out this contrivance, and therefore the enemies
of the royal family talked of the young prince as Perkin or Petrelin. The
warming-pan was one of the most familiar objects in satirical literature
and art for many generations after. {10} A whole school of caricature
was heated into life, if we may use such an expression, by this fabulous
warming-pan. Warming-pans were associated with brass money and
wooden shoes in the mouths and minds of Whig partisans, down to a
day not very far remote from our own. Mr. Jobson, the vulgar lawyer in
Scott's "Rob Roy," talks rudely to Diana Vernon, a Catholic, about
"King William, of glorious and immortal memory, our immortal
deliverer from Papists and pretenders, and wooden shoes and
warming-pans." "Sad things those wooden shoes and warming-pans,"
retorted the young lady, who seemed to take pleasure in augmenting his
wrath; "and it is a comfort you don't seem to want a warming-pan at
present, Mr. Jobson." There was not, of course, the