The Hanoverian Succession

Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Culture

Andreas Gestrich, Michael Schaich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472437655
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317029311
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The Hanoverian succession of 1714 brought about a 123-year union between Britain and the German electorate of Hanover, ushering in a distinct new period in British history. Under the four Georges and William IV Britain became arguably the most powerful nation in the world with a growing colonial Empire, a muscular economy and an effervescent artistic, social and scientific culture. And yet history has not tended to be kind to the Hanoverians, frequently portraying them as petty-minded and boring monarchs presiding over a dull and inconsequential court, merely the puppets of parliament and powerful ministers. In order both to explain and to challenge such a paradox, this collection looks afresh at the Georgian monarchs and their role, influence and legacy within Britain, Hanover and beyond. Concentrating on the self-representation and the perception of the Hanoverians in their various dominions, each chapter shines new light on important topics: from rivalling concepts of monarchical legitimacy and court culture during the eighteenth century to the multi-confessional set-up of the British composite monarchy and the role of social groups such as the military, the Anglican Church and the aristocracy in defining and challenging the political order. As a result, the volume uncovers a clearly defined new style of Hanoverian kingship, one that emphasized the Protestantism of the dynasty, laid great store by rational government in close collaboration with traditional political powers, embraced army and navy to an unheard of extent and projected this image to audiences on the British Isles, in the German territories and in the colonies alike. Three hundred years after the succession of the first Hanoverian king, an intriguing new perspective of a dynasty emerges, challenging long held assumptions and prejudices.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Michael Schaich

I

History has not treated the Hanoverians kindly. For a long time they have been passed over quickly in general accounts of British history, as meek successors to the more colourful Stuarts and the invariably feted Tudors.¹ As luck would have it, their accession to the British throne in 1714 came at a point when, in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, the ascent of parliament was well advanced and seemed – at least with the benefit of hindsight – almost unstoppable. The royal court, so it was assumed, had to give way to the lobbies and corridors of Westminster as the stage on which political history was played out. Simultaneously, the British Isles experienced a ‘revolution in everyday life that took place between 1714 and 1830’ and was to transform society fundamentally: urbanisation, the rise of the public sphere and the triumph of a consumer culture with all the tell-tale signs of polite behaviour, the reign of fashion and the cult of celebrities came to be the hallmarks of the Georgian period.² Small wonder, then, that the history of monarchy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was subsumed within the master narrative of the onset of modernity, which left precious little space for the role of kings who, on top of everything else, were open to the charge of being of foreign extraction. Interestingly, the verdict of German historians on the dynasty was equally unfavourable. The Guelphs, as they were known in their home lands, were accused of sacrificing the interests of the electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg on the altar of dynastic status elevation, thereby prompting a long-term descent into political and cultural decline.³

Nor did the Hanoverians fare better as individuals. George I (1714–1727) and George II (1727–1760) were deemed dull, dim-witted and boorish by British contemporaries and later scholars alike.⁴ Even their bodies were distorted in pictorial and verbal representations to match their assumed mental and intellectual backwardness, as Robert Bucholz demonstrates in this volume. Many of their subjects and most historians also suspected them of loathing their new kingdom and still pining for their old territories. At best, the first two Georges were credited by posterity with keeping a low profile and not making any serious political blunders. George III (1760–1820) enjoyed a better reputation during his lifetime. He was applauded by many for his moral rectitude and his domestic portrayal of the royal family; but then he was the first Hanoverian to be born and educated a Briton, as he was keen to stress in his inaugural address to parliament in 1760.⁵ Even his popularity, however, was far from universal or enduring. There were long and repeated periods of outright criticism during his reign and the judgement of later scholars and writers has sometimes been scathing, making George III, in the words of John Cannon, ‘one of the most controversial and criticised monarchs in British history’, whose standing improved only slowly since the 1930s.⁶ His wayward son, George IV (1820–1830), on the other hand, squandered much of the emotional attachment that the dynasty had commanded under his father through his private affairs and pompous behaviour, while William IV (1830–1837), the last Hanoverian king, is usually seen as an unremarkable post-script to a rather tiresome era in the history of the British monarchy.⁷

And yet, the Hanoverians can also be cast in a distinctly positive light. They were arguably one of the more successful royal dynasties. Not the least of their achievements was to steer the ship of state clear of the rocks on which the Stuarts had foundered twice during the seventeenth century. They navigated the difficulties of Britain’s scattered religious landscape in a way unimaginable only a few decades earlier and always produced enough offspring to keep the family business going. There were no major religious or succession crises, which had been such a common feature of the previous two centuries; nor for that matter did the Georges face revolutions (apart, perhaps, from the War of American Independence to which we will return) or were forced into exile. On the contrary, against the backdrop of what had happened during the tumultuous century before 1714 it is rather striking that, as rulers imported from the continent and faced with a difficult dynastic legacy, as Ronald Asch explains, they managed to integrate themselves into British political culture and re-establish the monarchy as a national institution which was beyond principled criticism for most of their reign. In addition, they presided over one of the most significant periods in British political and economic history. They oversaw the rise of Britain to world power status and the birth of a new territorial empire after 1756 which was to reinforce the old empire of trade and commerce and would eventually compensate for the loss of the American colonies in the 1780s. At the same time they upheld Britain’s political and military engagement in Europe, securing it the position of arbiter in continental affairs.⁸

Why, then, is the image of the Hanoverian dynasty so overshadowed by jaundiced statements and clichés? Part of the answer certainly lies in the eighteenth century, when critics of the Georgian monarchy put many of these stereotypes into circulation. Fear of undue influence by foreign politicians and courtiers close to the royal family, suspicions about a waste of English resources for the electorate of Hanover – which, in any case, was seen as an albatross around the neck of ministers and diplomats – and dread of the possible import of autocratic forms of government by monarchs supposedly used to absolutist rule were widespread after 1714.⁹ Still, in 1800, as G.M Ditchfield reminds us in his chapter, the electorate could be used as the bête noir of British politics, although the volume of the criticism might have been turned down. Throughout the eighteenth century there was a visceral dislike of the German dominions as an alien adjunct to the British monarchy. It did not help that at least up to the middle of the eighteenth century the Hanoverians had to put up with the propaganda of the exiled Stuarts and their supporters. Many of the more scurrilous blots on the image of individual members of the Hanoverian family can be traced back to Jacobite writings and were later on readily accepted by historians.¹⁰

Equally important in explaining the long-standing bias against the Georgians is the composite nature of their kingship. The conjunction of two or more legally independent states under one common ruler, as was the case with Britain and Hanover between 1714 and 1837, is a regular occurrence in early modern Europe and of necessity shaped the self-image and political approach of rulers charged with the task of holding these unions together. Historians living and working under the impression of the end of the nation-state have been increasingly aware of the phenomenon since the 1970s.¹¹ The insights gained from the multiple kingdoms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, took a long time to filter through to the analysis of the Georgian monarchy and are still not yet fully developed. Until very recently most studies took no notice of the fact that the Hanoverians – not unlike their Stuart predecessors – ruled over composite states and had to adjust their policies to this situation. British historians failed to recognise the extent to which the Georges were (and were seen to be) kings of Great Britain and electors of Hanover and disparaged many of their decisions as self-serving and opportunistic, while their German counterparts regarded the Anglo-Hanoverian union as a mere dynastic link which was of little political consequence (apart from pushing the electorate indirectly on a downward trend) and thus did not require proper examination.¹² Both camps failed to realise the complexities which the Hanoverians had to navigate were they to do justice to their role as sovereigns of two, albeit unequal, partners.

It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that the most important re-evaluations of the Georgian monarchy in recent years have come from historians who recognised the significance of the dual nature of Hanoverian kingship. Hannah Smith’s inquiry into the cultural underpinnings of monarchy and the continuing relevance of the royal court under the first two Georges, Brendan Simms and Torsten Riotte’s volume of collected essays which for the first time considered the implications of the ‘Hanoverian Dimension’ for British politics more generally, Clarissa Campbell Orr’s studies of Queen Charlotte and her entourage and Andrew Thompson’s rehabilitation of George II as a capable and, above all, still powerful figure central to the political process are all cases in point.¹³ The Hanoverians emerge from these studies in a decidedly more positive light than previously thought. Clearly they were quite successful at commanding the loyalty of large parts of their subjects; they discharged their duties in a conscientious and, by and large, skilful manner; and their reign presented politicians in London and Hanover with opportunities as well as problems in pursuing the interests of a composite state. The reassessment of the Hanoverians has thus been under way for a few years now and is bound to continue (and become more public) with the spate of exhibitions in London and Hanover in 2014 to mark the tercentenary of the Protestant succession.

While the publications accompanying these celebratory events are mainly devoted to royal patronage of the arts and processes of communication and cultural transfer within the personal union,¹⁴ the chapters in this volume aim to shed light on the mechanisms at the heart of the Georgian monarchy from a slightly different angle. They concentrate on the various ways in which the Hanoverian monarchs dealt with the problems arising from the diversity and heterogeneity of the territories over which they ruled and the competing claims made on these lands. Concentrating on the realms of religious affiliations, monarchical representation and political discourses, the individual contributions to this volume discuss the different dynastic legacies which the German dynasty embodied as well as encountered in 1714. They explore the widely diverging confessional obligations of their subjects that the monarchs had to integrate; the conflicting worlds of princely self-fashioning and commercial imagemaking; and the competing ideological programmes threatening to dislodge the Hanoverians’ claim to rule. Along the way the chapters take in all parts of the Georgian composite monarchy, from the German dominions to the American colonies – although, due to the current state of research, the British perspective still dominates. Whatever chapter is considered, however, the hybrid identity of a ruling dynasty in eighteenth-century Europe will be thrown into sharper relief. Historians of early modern monarchies usually tend to homogenise the messages which rulers conveyed to the outside world in an effort to instil a sense of logic and inevitability into the policies of princely self-legitimation.¹⁵ The Hanoverian dynasty, by contrast, furnishes us with an example of a ruling house whose self-representation and conception of itself was the site of contested identities and competing strategies – a model which might be more common in the société des princes than is sometimes acknowledged.

II

This problem of contested identities becomes obvious when we turn to the one feature of Hanoverian rule which is usually acknowledged as the new dynasty’s undisputed strength – its profession of the Protestant faith. As is well known, only their seemingly impeccable Protestant credentials secured Electress Sophia and her descendants the succession to the British crown. The fact that merely a generation earlier some senior members of the Guelph dynasty had converted to Catholicism had been conveniently forgotten by the time the Act of Settlement was passed in 1701. After 1714, in any case, the Hanoverians were keenly aware of their dependence on the Protestant religion, and acted accordingly. As Hannah Smith and others have shown, and several chapters in this volume confirm, the (self-)portrayal of the royal family bore unmistakable religious overtones: the first two Georges were depicted as Protestant soldier-kings, while George III was a paragon of personal piety and devotion.¹⁶ It did not go amiss that compared to the Stuart queens the Hanoverian consorts turned out to be assets rather than liabilities in confessional terms. They might have been recruited from obscure German princely families and not from the royal houses of France and Portugal, the dynastic homes of Henrietta Maria and Catherine of Braganza, the wives of Charles I and Charles II respectively. Their religious record, however, was beyond any reproach. Far from being Catholic or showing any sympathies for the ‘popish religion’ like their more prominent Stuart predecessors, George II’s consort Queen Caroline, for example, had spurned the crown of the Holy Roman Empire when asked to marry a Habsburg prince, the future Charles VI, to stay true to the religious convictions of her ancestors. This at least was the story that was spun by her admirers to great effect.¹⁷ The other Hanoverian queens did not ac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I DYNASTIC LEGACIES
• PART II REPRESENTING PROTESTANTISM
• PART III IMAGE POLICIES
• PART IV CONTESTED LOYALTIES
• Index