ABSTRACT
It is easy to forget the importance of those ancient institutions, the monarchy and the House of Lords, as people trace the apparently unstoppable rise of the House of Commons. This is not a mistake any nineteenth-century minister would have made. No nineteenth-century statute limited the powers of the ancient House of Lords, and it was common for prime ministers and cabinet ministers to sit in the upper house. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the monarchy during the period was the fact that its actual existence was never under serious threat. Apart from one or two would-be assassins, there were no serious attempts to get rid either of the monarchy or of individual monarchs. Where the Stuarts had taken a very active role in the detail of political life, the first two Hanoverians left much more of the day-to-day running of the state to their ministers.
