ABSTRACT
The culture of representation of the Hanoverian dynasty was developed long before George I set foot in England. The tumultuous history of the previous century had led to a sharp change of style in 1688, as first William III and Mary II and then Anne I, and their advisers, showed that they had learned from the fate of Charles I and James II. However tumultuous the years between the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession, the period demonstrated that a consensus had formed around four fundamental principles. The first was liberty. Apart from the hardcore Jacobites who learned nothing and forgot nothing, there was a general recognition that the ejection of the aspiring absolutist marked a watershed. As Bolingbroke put it in his Dissertation upon Parties in 1733: ‘the Revolution is looked upon by all sides as a new era’. This belief became a central axiom of British politics in the eighteenth century, as a veritable litany of tributes testified, whether it was the Duke of Devonshire inscribing ‘begun in the year of liberty 1688’ above the fireplace of the Painted Hall at Chatsworth, or John Wilkes claiming ‘from this most auspicious period, freedom has made a regular uninterrupted abode in our happy island’. 1
