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 suffered martyrdom, among whom also the Holy George was martyred.”

Two Syrian church inscriptions bearing the name, one at Ezr’a and the other at Shaka, found by Burckhardt and Porter, and discussed by J. Hogg in the Transactions of the Royal Literary Society, may with some probability be assigned to the middle of the 4th century. Calvin impugned the saint’s existence altogether, and Edward Reynolds (1599–1676), bishop of Norwich, like Edward Gibbon a century later, made him one with George of Laodicea, called “the Cappadocian,” the Arian bishop of Alexandria (see ).

Modern criticism, while rejecting this identification, is not unwilling to accept the main fact that an officer named Georgios, of high rank in the army, suffered martyrdom probably under Diocletian. In the canon of Pope Gelasius (494) George is mentioned in a list of those “whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God,” a statement which implies that legends had already grown up around his name. The caution of Gelasius was not long preserved; Gregory of Tours, for example, asserts that the saint’s relics actually existed in the French village of Le Maine, where many miracles were wrought by means of them; and Bede, while still explaining that the Gesta Georgii are reckoned apocryphal, commits himself to the statement that the martyr was beheaded under Dacian, king of Persia, whose wife Alexandra, however, adhered to the Christian faith. The great fame of George, who is reverenced alike by Eastern and Western Christendom and by Mahommedans, is due to many causes. He was martyred on the eve of the triumph of Christianity, his shrine was reared near the scene of a great Greek legend (Perseus and Andromeda), and his relics when removed from Lydda, where many pilgrims had visited them, to Zorava in the Hauran served to impress his fame not only on the Syrian population, but on their Moslem conquerors, and again on the Crusaders, who in grateful memory of the saint’s intervention on their behalf at Antioch built a new cathedral at Lydda to take the place of the church destroyed by the Saracens. This cathedral was in turn destroyed by Saladin.

The connexion of St George with a dragon, familiar since the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, can be traced to the close of the 6th century. At Arsuf or Joppa—neither of them far from Lydda—Perseus had slain the sea-monster that threatened the virgin Andromeda, and George, like many another Christian saint, entered into the inheritance of veneration previously enjoyed by a pagan hero. The exploit thus attaches itself to the very common Aryan myth of the sun-god as the conqueror of the powers of darkness.

The popularity of St George in England has never reached the height attained by St Andrew in Scotland, St David in Wales or St Patrick in Ireland. The council of Oxford in 1222 ordered that his feast should be kept as a national festival; but it was not until the time of Edward III. that he was made patron of the kingdom. The republics of Genoa and Venice were also under his protection.

See P. Heylin, ''The History of ... S. George of Cappadocia'' (1631); S. Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages; Fr. Görres, “Der Ritter St Georg in der Geschichte, Legende und Kunst” (Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie, xxx., 1887, Heft i.); E. A. W. Budge, The Martyrdom and Miracles of St George of Cappadocia: the Coptic texts edited with an English translation (1888); Bolland, Acta Sancti, iii. 101; E. O. Gordon, Saint George (1907); M. H. Bulley, St George for Merrie England (1908).

GEORGE I. [George Louis] (1660–1727), king of Great Britain and Ireland, born in 1660, was heir through his father Ernest Augustus to the hereditary lay bishopric of Osnabrück, 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. The morals of German courts in the end of the 17th century took their tone from the splendid profligacy of Versailles. It became the fashion for a prince to amuse himself with a mistress or more frequently with many mistresses simultaneously, and he was often content that the mistresses whom he favoured should be neither beautiful nor witty. George Louis followed the usual course. Count Königsmark—a handsome adventurer—seized the opportunity of paying court to the deserted wife. Conjugal infidelity was held at Hanover to be a privilege of the male sex. Count Königsmark was assassinated. Sophia Dorothea was divorced in 1694, and remained in seclusion till her death in 1726. When George IV., her descendant in the fourth generation, attempted in England to call his wife to account for sins of which he was himself notoriously guilty, free-spoken public opinion reprobated the offence in no measured terms. But in the Germany of the 17th century all free-spoken public opinion had been crushed out by the misery of the Thirty Years’ War, and it was understood that princes were to arrange their domestic life according to their own pleasure.

The prince’s father did much to raise the dignity of his family. By sending help to the emperor when he was struggling against the French and the Turks, he obtained the grant of a ninth electorate in 1692. His marriage with Sophia, the youngest daughter of Elizabeth the daughter of James I. of England, was not one which at first seemed likely to confer any prospect of advancement to his family. But though there were many persons whose birth gave them better claims than she had to the English crown, she found herself, upon the death of the duke of Gloucester, the next Protestant heir after Anne. The Act of Settlement in 1701 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 Marlborough at Blenheim. With prudent persistence he attached himself 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 eldest son, who was duke of Cambridge, 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 (August 1, 1714), had not laid open George’s way to the succession without further effort of his own.

In some respects the position of the new king was not unlike that of William III. a quarter of a century before. Both sovereigns were foreigners, with little knowledge of English politics and little interest in English legislation. Both sovereigns arrived at a time when party spirit had been running high, and when the task before the ruler was to still the waves of contention. In spite of the difference between an intellectually great man and an intellectually small one, in spite too of the difference between the king who began by choosing his ministers from both parties and the king who persisted in choosing his ministers