GEORGE I. (George Louis) (166o-1727), king of Great Britain and Ireland, born in 166o, was heir through his father Ernest Augustus to the hereditary lay bishopric of Osnabruck, and to the duchy of Calenberg, which formed one portion of the Hanoverian possessions of the house of Brunswick, whilst he secured the reversion of the other portion, the duchy of Celle or Zell, by his marriage (1682) with the heiress, his cousin Sophia Dorothea. The marriage was not a happy one. George Louis was a bad husband. Count Knnigsmark—a handsome adventurer— seized the opportunity of paying court to (he deserted wife. Con jugal infidelity was held at Hanover to be a privilege of the male sex. Count Kdnigsmark was assassinated. Sophia Dorothea was divorced in 1694, and remained in seclusion till her death in 1726.
The prince's mother was Sophia, the youngest daughter of Elizabeth (q.v.) the daughter of James I. of England. Sophia found herself, upon the death of the duke of Gloucester, the next Protestant heir after Anne. The Act of Settlement in I7o1 secured the inheritance to herself and her descendants. Being old and unambitious she rather permitted herself to be burthened with the honour than thrust herself forward to meet it. Her son George took a deeper interest in the matter. In his youth he had fought with determined courage in the wars of William III. Succeeding to the electorate on his father's death in 1698, he had sent a welcome reinforcement of Hanoverians to fight under Marlbor ough at Blenheim. With prudent persistence he attached him self closely to the Whigs and to Marlborough, refusing Tory offers of an independent command, and receiving in return for his fidelity a guarantee by the Dutch of his succession to England in the Barrier treaty of 1709.
In 1714 when Anne was growing old, and Bolingbroke and the more reckless Tories were coquetting with the son of James II., the Whigs invited George's only son, who was duke of Cam bridge, to visit England in order to be on the spot in case of need. Neither the elector nor his mother approved of a step which was likely to alienate the queen, and which was specially distasteful to himself, as he was on very bad terms with his son. Yet they did not set themselves against the strong wish of the party to which they looked for support, and it is possible that troubles would have arisen from any attempt to carry out the plan, if the deaths, first of the electress (May 28) and then of the queen (Aug. I, 1714), had not laid open George's way to the succession without further effort of his own.
George I. arrived in England when a great military struggle had come to an end. He had therefore no reason to call upon the nation to make great sacrifices. All that he wanted was to secure for himself and his family a high position which he hardly knew how to occupy, to fill the pockets of his German attendants and his German mistresses, to get away as often as possible from the uncongenial islanders whose language he could not speak, and to use the strength of England to obtain petty advantages for his German principality. He attached himself entirely to the Whig party, though he refused to place himself at the disposal of its leaders. He gave his confidence, not to Somers and Wharton and Marlborough, but to Stanhope and Townshend, the statesmen of the second rank. At first he seemed to be playing a dangerous game. The Tories, whom he rejected, were numerically superior to their adversaries, and were strong in the support of the country gentlemen and the country clergy. The strength of the Whigs lay in the towns and in the higher aristocracy. In 1715 a Jacobite insurrection in the north, supported by the appearance of the Pretender, the son of James II., in Scotland, was suppressed, and its suppression not only gave to the Government a character of stability, but displayed its adversaries in an unfavourable light as the disturbers of the peace.
The policy of George I.'s reign is the policy of his ministers. Stanhope and Townshend from 1714 to 1717 were mainly occu pied with the defence of the Hanoverian settlement. After the dismissal of the latter in 1717, Stanhope in conjunction with Sunderland took up a more decided Whig policy. The Occasional Conformity Act and the Schism Act were repealed in 1719. But the wish of the liberal Whigs to modify if not to repeal the Test Act remained unsatisfied. In the following year the bursting of the South Sea bubble, and the subsequent deaths of Stanhope in 1721 and of Sunderland in 1722, cleared the way for the acces sion to power of Sir Robert Walpole, to whom and not to the king was due the conciliatory policy which quieted Tory opposi tion by abstaining from pushing Whig principles to their legitimate consequences.
Nevertheless something of the honour due to Walpole must be reckoned to the king's credit. It is evident that at his acces sion his decisions were by no means unimportant. The royal authority was still able within certain limits to make its own terms. This support was so necessary to the Whigs that they made no resistance when he threw aside their leaders on his arrival in Eng land. When by Isis personal intervention he dismissed Town shend and appointed Sunderland, he had no such social and parlia mentary combination to fear as that which almost mastered his great-grandson in his struggle for power. If such a combination arose before the end of his reign it was owing more to his omitting to fulfil the duties of his station than from the necessity of the case. As he could talk no English, and his ministers could talk no German, he absented himself from the meetings of the cabinet, and his frequent absences from England and his want of interest in English politics strengthened the cabinet in its tendency to assert an independent position.
Walpole at last by his skill in the management of parliament rose as a subject into the almost royal position denoted by the name of prime minister. In connexion with Walpole the force of wealth and station established the Whig aristocracy in a point of van tage from which it was afterwards difficult to dislodge them. Yet, though George had allowed the power which had been exercised by William and Anne to slip through his hands, it was understood to the last that if he chose to exert himself he might cease to be a mere cipher in the conduct of affairs. As late as 1727 Boling broke gained over one of the king's mistresses, the duchess of Kendal; and though her support of the fallen Jacobite took no effect, Walpole was not without fear that her reiterated entreaties would lead to his dismissal. The king's death in a carriage on his way to Hanover, in the night of June 10-11 in the same year, put an end to these apprehensions.
His only children were his successor George II. and Sophia Dorothea (1687-17S7), who married in 1706 Frederick William, crown prince (afterwards king) of Prussia. She was the mother of Frederick the Great. (S. R. G. ; X.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Earl Stanhope, History of England from the Peace Bibliography.-Earl Stanhope, History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles, vol. I. (7 vol., 3rd ed., rev., ; J. H. Glover, The Stuart Papers (1847) ; L. von Ranke, Englische Geschichte, vornehmlich im sechzehnten and siebzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. VII. (1859-69, trans. C. W. Boase, etc., vol. VI., 1875) ; W. E. H. Lecky, A History of England in the 18th Century (1878-90, new ed., 7 vol., 1892) ; J. MacCarthy, A History of the Four Georges (4 vol., 1884-1901 ; new ed., 2 vol., in St. Martin's Library, 1905) ; W. Michael, Englische Geschichte im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. i. (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1896) ; L. Melville, The First George in Hanover and England (1908) ; I. S. Leadam, The History of England from the accession of Anne to the death of George 11. 1702-1760 (1909) , being vol. ix. of W. Hunt and R. L. Poole, The Political His tory of England (12 vol., 1905-20) ; J. F. Chance, George I. and the Northern War. A Study of British-Hanoverian Policy 1709-1721 (1909) ; Sir H. M. I. Terry, A Constitutional King—George the First