Its Hohenzollern sovereign, Frederick William, whose father had negotiated an upgrade to king, was a half-demented martinet but also a frugal, shrewd visionary who turned Prussia into the Sparta of Europe. Inheriting the throne at twenty-five, he purged the kingdom of his father’s Frenchified frippery and instead focused on attracting industrious settlers to his territories, advancing trade and creating a disproportionately large army, featuring infantry that fired ‘like a walking battery whose speed in reloading tripled its firepower’ (in the words of his son) – and a regiment of ‘Potsdam giants’. He hired colossi from all over Europe, dispatching giant-nappers to capture them. ‘The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me,’ he said, ‘but tall soldiers – they are my weakness.’
He loved his queen Sophia Dorothea of Hanover but she loathed his violent abuse, ‘horrible avarice’ and oafish philistinism. He considered divorcing her, but he could not risk offending the family: her father had become George I of Britain.
London was in the grip of a speculative frenzy, ignited by shares of the slave-trading South Sea Company, which was structured to pay off government debt. Fortunes were made trading in and out of the shares. The elderly Isaac Newton made so much selling shares that he could not resist rebuying them. But few realized that the company was badly run. When it crashed, it wiped out many investors. Newton, who in old age lived with his niece (her husband had succeeded him at the Mint), was abashed to lose half his fortune – though he remained very rich. A furious backlash blamed corrupt politicians, Elephant and Castle, and the German king. George turned to Robert Walpole, Godolphin’s protégé, who first acted as ‘the Skreen’, protecting those at fault, then turned to solving the crisis. Known as Cock Robin, unflappable, cynical and earthy, jovially munching apples in the House of Commons, Walpole boasted he always opened his gamekeeper’s letters first, and described himself as ‘no saint, no spartan, no reformer’, but he had remained so loyal to Godolphin and Marlborough that he had been imprisoned by Harley. He had traded in South Sea stocks and had made losses (not the 1,000 per cent profit of legend), but he was compensated by massive profits in another slave-trading stock, Royal African. Now he turned the crash into a success by dividing the South Sea Company into two, a slave-trading company that profitably sold human beings for decades more and a bank that issued government bonds. Walpole converted decades of random debt into a single easily traded bond, creating the first modern bond market which gave Britain unique access to the capital that was crucial in making a world power.
Walpole mocked public virtue, which he called ‘schoolboy flights’, teasing youngsters, ‘Well, are you to be an old Roman, a patriot? You’ll soon come off of that and grow wiser.’ He was, recalled a friend, ‘good-natured, cheerful, social, inelegant in his manners, loose in his morals’ with ‘a coarse wit’ but ‘the ablest manager of a parliament I believe ever lived’. Accumulating a fortune and art collection for his palatial Houghton Hall in Norfolk, Walpole was married to Catherine, a merchant’s daughter, both of them sensual enthusiasts who when their marriage cooled took a bevy of lovers. After her death, Robin married his witty, glamorous mistress, Maria Skerritt, twenty-five years younger, but three months later she died in childbirth, leaving him bereft.
Robin was a master at managing his royal masters, first the sausagey George I then his son George II.* ‘All men,’ he often said, ‘have their price.’ When a rival tried to cultivate George II’s mistress, Walpole countered by befriending his vivacious wife Queen Caroline; he earthily joked that his rival ‘took the wrong sow by the ear, I the right’. Gossips claimed that he had pimped his wife to George II (when prince of Wales) and slept with the queen. His twenty-year rule confirmed the supremacy of the House of Commons, and his Whig oligarchy – the ‘Robinocracy’ – ruled Britain for the next forty years.
The Hanoverians feuded with their sons – but this was nothing compared to family atrocities of Hohenzollerns and Romanovs.* Frederick William and Sophia, George II’s sister, had fifteen children; she was devoted to the eldest, Frederick, whom she hoped to marry into the British dynasty. The king ruined the negotiations and then when she got pregnant unexpectedly tried to kill her for adultery. He bullied and beat Frederick, punishing him for small infractions such as wearing gloves or being thrown by a horse. Sophia supported the children. ‘Whatever my father ordered my brother to do,’ remembered Frederick, ‘my mother commanded him to do the very reverse.’
