Prince George of Denmark - Duke of Cumberland

Duke of Cumberland

The mistrust between George and William was overcome during the revolution of 1688–89 but dogged relations during the latter's reign. George held mortgages on Femern, Tremsbüttel and Steinhorst, Schleswig-Holstein, which he surrendered to the Duke of Holstein as part of the peace of Altona of 1689 negotiated by William between Denmark and Sweden. William agreed to pay George interest and the capital in compensation, but George remained unpaid. During the military campaign against James's supporters in Ireland, George accompanied the Williamite troops at his own expense, but was excluded from command, and was even refused permission to travel in his brother-in-law's coach. Snubbed from the army by William, George sought to join the navy, without rank, but was again thwarted by his brother-in-law. When William's Dutch guards failed to salute George, Anne assumed they were acting under orders. George and Anne retired from court. Some degree of reconciliation was achieved following Queen Mary's sudden and unexpected death from smallpox in 1694, which made Anne heiress apparent. In November 1699, William finally recommended that Parliament pay the mortgage debt to George, and in early 1700, the debt was honoured.

By 1700, Anne had been pregnant at least seventeen times; twelve times, she miscarried or gave birth to stillborn children, and two of her five children born alive died within a day. The only one of Anne's children to survive infancy—William, Duke of Gloucester—died in July 1700 at the age of 11. With Gloucester's death, Anne was the only person in the line of succession to the throne, as established by the "Glorious Revolution". To extend the line and secure the Protestant succession, Parliament passed the Act of Settlement 1701, which designated William and Anne's nearest Protestant cousins, the House of Hanover, as the next in line after Anne.

George did not play a senior role in government until his wife Anne succeeded William on the latter's death in 1702. George was the chief mourner at William's funeral. Anne appointed him generalissimo of all English military forces on 17 April, and Lord High Admiral, the official but nominal head of the Royal Navy, on 20 May. Actual power at the Admiralty was held by George Churchill, whose elder brother was John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, a great friend of Anne's and the captain-general of English land forces. Prince George had known the Churchills for years: another brother Charles Churchill, had been one of his gentlemen of the bedchamber in Denmark, and Marlborough had accompanied George on his journey from Denmark to England for his marriage to Anne in 1683. The prince's secretary in the 1680s was Colonel Edward Griffith, who was married to the sister of the Duchess of Marlborough. Anne obtained a parliamentary allowance of £100,000 a year for George in the event of her death. The House of Commons passed the bill but it was only narrowly passed by the House of Lords. Marlborough supported the bill, but one of the lords against was Marlborough's son-in-law and Churchill's nephew-by-marriage, Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland. Anne failed, however, in her attempts to persuade the States-General of the Netherlands to elect her husband captain-general of all Dutch forces, to maintain the unified command of the Maritime Powers that William had held. Marlborough dissuaded her from asking Parliament to make "her dearly loved husband King Consort".

Generally, during her reign, Anne and her husband spent the winter at Kensington and St James's Palaces, and the summer at Windsor Castle or Hampton Court Palace, where the air was fresher. George had recurrent asthma, and the cleaner air in the country was better for his breathing. They visited the spa town of Bath, Somerset, in mid-1702, on the advice of George's doctors, and again in mid-1703. They occasionally visited Newmarket, Suffolk, to view the horse racing. On one visit, Anne bought George a horse, Leeds, for the vast sum of a thousand guineas.

At the end of 1702, the Occasional Conformity Bill was introduced to Parliament. The bill aimed to disqualify Protestant Dissenters from public office by closing a loophole in the Test Acts, legislation that restricted public office to Anglican conformists. The existing law permitted nonconformists to take office if they took Anglican communion once a year. Anne was in favour of the measure, and forced George to vote for the bill in the House of Lords, even though, being a practising Lutheran, he was an occasional conformist himself. As he cast his vote, he reportedly told an opponent of the bill, "My heart is vid you" . The bill did not gather sufficient parliamentary support and was eventually dropped. The following year, the bill was revived, but Anne withheld support, fearing its reintroduction was a deliberate pretence to cause a quarrel between the two main political groups: the Tories (who supported the bill) and the Whigs (who opposed it). Once again it failed. George never became a member of the Church of England, which was headed by his wife throughout her reign. He remained Lutheran even after her accession, and had his own personal chapel.

In the first years of Anne's reign, the Whigs gained more power and influence at the expense of the Tories. In his capacity as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, George held influence in parliamentary boroughs on the south coast of England, which he used to support Whig candidates in the general election of 1705. In that year's election for Speaker of the House of Commons, George and Anne supported a Whig candidate, John Smith. George instructed his secretary, George Clarke, who was a Member of Parliament, to vote for Smith, but Clarke refused, instead supporting the Tory candidate William Bromley. Clarke was sacked, and Smith was elected.