Non, j'aurai des maîtresses.
(No, I shall have mistresses.)George II, sobbing at the bedside of his dying wife Queen Caroline when she urged him to marry again, 1737
George II
parents: George I and Sophia Dorothea of Celle
date and place of birth: 30 October 1683 (Old Style) at Hanover
wife: Caroline of Ansbach
date of marriage: 22 August 1705 at Hanover
children: Frederick, Anne, Amelia, Caroline, George William, William (Duke of Cumberland), Mary, Louisa
years of reign: 1727-1760
date of coronation: 11 October 1727 at Westminster Abbey
date and place of death: 25 October 1760 at Kensington Palace
place of burial: Westminster Abbey
George Augustus was ten years old when his father divorced his mother and locked her away at Ahlden. He never saw her again, and he never forgave his father. He grew up short, fair and hot-tempered, with a passion for military uniform and a mind for detail: he knew the genealogy of every royal house in Europe and the precise date on which anything had happened. He fought bravely under the Duke of Marlborough at the Battle of Oudenarde in 1708, when his horse was shot from under him.
In 1705 he married Caroline of Ansbach, a clever, cultured princess who had turned down the future Holy Roman Emperor rather than convert to Catholicism. It proved the best decision of his life. Caroline was better read, more patient and far shrewder than her husband, and she managed him for thirty years while letting him believe he was in charge. A popular verse ran: "You may strut, dapper George, but 'twill all be in vain; / We know 'tis Queen Caroline, not you, that reign."
Prince of Wales
George came to England with his father in 1714 and became Prince of Wales. Unlike his father he made a point of liking the English, or at least of saying so, and he and Caroline kept a livelier court than the king. The quarrel of 1717, when George I threw him out of St James's Palace and kept his children, drove him into opposition. The rival court at Leicester House gathered every politician who had fallen out with the king's ministers, including for a while Robert Walpole. George disliked Walpole for rejoining his father's government.
Walpole and Caroline
George I died in June 1727. Walpole rode to Richmond to bring the news, and found the new king in bed after dinner. George told him to take his orders from Sir Spencer Compton, a courtier George meant to make his chief minister. Compton could not even draft the new king's first speech without asking Walpole's help. Walpole, meanwhile, offered Parliament a larger civil list for the king and queen than Compton would have dared, and Caroline, who admired him, made sure George kept him. Walpole remained in power for fifteen more years, and he worked through the queen: he said he had "the right sow by the ear."
These were years of peace, low taxes and growing trade. Walpole kept Britain out of the War of the Polish Succession, boasting to the queen in 1734 that fifty thousand men had died in Europe that year and not one of them was English. Handel, who had followed the family from Hanover, wrote the anthems for George's coronation, including Zadok the Priest, which has been sung at every coronation since.
Caroline died in November 1737 after a botched operation for a ruptured womb. As she lay dying she told George to marry again, and he answered, through his tears, that he would have mistresses instead. He never remarried. He kept her rooms as she had left them, and gave orders that when he died, one side of each of their coffins should be removed so that their remains could mingle.
Father and Son Again
George repeated his father's mistake with his own heir. Frederick, Prince of Wales, had been left behind in Hanover as a child when his parents came to England, and did not join them until 1728, when he was twenty-one. His parents disliked him from the start. Caroline said that if she saw him in hell she would feel no more for him than for any other rascal. In 1737, when Frederick's wife went into labour, he dragged her from Hampton Court to St James's in the middle of the night so that his parents would not be present at the birth. George banished him from court, and Frederick set up his own opposition court, in time at Leicester House, the building his father had used for the same purpose.
Frederick died suddenly in March 1751, aged forty-four, possibly from a burst abscess in the lung. A popular epigram of the time ran: "Here lies poor Fred who was alive and is dead." His eldest son, the twelve-year-old George, became heir.
Jenkins' Ear and Dettingen
Walpole's peace ended over an ear. In 1731 Spanish coastguards had boarded the British ship Rebecca off Cuba and cut off the ear of its captain, Robert Jenkins. In 1738 he told the story to a committee of the House of Commons, reportedly producing the ear preserved in a jar, and the merchants and opposition who wanted war with Spain got it in 1739. Walpole remarked that they were ringing the bells now but would soon be wringing their hands. The War of Jenkins' Ear merged into the wider War of the Austrian Succession, and Walpole, blamed for its poor start, resigned in 1742.
On 27 June 1743 George, then fifty-nine, commanded an allied army of British, Hanoverian and Austrian troops at Dettingen, on the River Main in Germany. His horse bolted early in the battle, so he fought on foot at the head of his infantry, sword in hand. The French lost heavily and retreated across the river. George II was the last British monarch to lead his troops in battle. Handel wrote a Dettingen Te Deum to celebrate.
The Forty-Five
In July 1745 Charles Edward Stuart, grandson of James II and known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, landed in the Western Isles with a handful of companions. The Highland clans rose for him, took Edinburgh, and routed a government army at Prestonpans in September. In November the Jacobites invaded England and marched as far south as Derby, 125 miles from London, where panic set in and there was a run on the Bank of England. George reportedly kept his yachts ready on the Thames. But few English Jacobites joined, the promised French invasion never came, and on 6 December the prince's council overruled him and turned back to Scotland.
The king's second son, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, followed them north. On 16 April 1746, on Culloden Moor near Inverness, his army destroyed the Jacobites in less than an hour, the last pitched battle fought on British soil. His troops killed the wounded on the field, and in the months that followed they burned, looted and executed across the Highlands. In London Cumberland was a hero, and Handel wrote "See, the Conquering Hero Comes" for Judas Maccabaeus, which the audience took as a tribute to him. In Scotland he became "the Butcher." Parliament banned Highland dress, disarmed the clans and abolished the chiefs' hereditary jurisdictions.
Changes at Home
George's reign saw the founding of the Foundling Hospital in 1739 and the British Museum in 1753, and the colony of Georgia in America was named after him in 1732. The Gin Act of 1751 finally brought the London gin craze, which Hogarth attacked in his print Gin Lane, under control. And in 1752 Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar used across most of Europe. To bring the country into line, Parliament ordered that Wednesday 2 September 1752 be followed by Thursday 14 September. The story that crowds rioted, demanding "give us our eleven days," comes from a Hogarth painting and later embellishment rather than from any record of a riot.
The Seven Years' War
The last years of the reign brought the Seven Years' War with France, fought across Europe, North America, India and the oceans in between. It began badly. In 1756 the French took Minorca, and the admiral who failed to relieve it, John Byng, was court-martialled and shot on the quarterdeck of HMS Monarch in 1757, "to encourage the others," as Voltaire put it. George disliked William Pitt the Elder, who had mocked his devotion to Hanover, but Pitt was the only politician the public trusted, and the king had to accept him. With the Duke of Newcastle managing Parliament and Pitt running the war, the tide turned.
In 1757 Robert Clive won at Plassey in Bengal. 1759 became Britain's "year of victories": Minden in Germany, Lagos and Quiberon Bay at sea, and James Wolfe's capture of Quebec, where both Wolfe and the French commander Montcalm died of their wounds. When someone told George that Wolfe was mad, the king is supposed to have replied, "Mad, is he? Then I hope he will bite some of my other generals."
Death at Kensington
George II rose early on 25 October 1760, drank his chocolate, and went to his close stool. His valet heard a crash and found the king on the floor. He had suffered a ruptured aorta and died within minutes, aged seventy-six. He was buried in Westminster Abbey beside Caroline, and his instructions were carried out: one side of each coffin was removed. His grandson became George III, the first Hanoverian king born in England.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "George II" https://englishhistory.net/house-of-hanover/george-ii/, September 30, 2026