ABSTRACT
In justly celebrated recent publications, Linda Colley has argued that the experience of waging war during the eighteenth century helped to develop a growing sense of British nationhood. The experience of regular warfare against France-‘the Catholic Other’ as she calls it-helped to forge a Protestant British nation from its diverse, and often mutually antagonistic, constituent elements. She discusses the emergence of an expanded social and governing elite which included substantial numbers of Welsh, Scottish and Protestant Anglo-Irish landowners and businessmen. The experience of governing an increasingly complex state in both war and peace brought these elite elements together in pursuit of the common goal of national unity. The image of national identity was particularly prominent in attempts to mobilise support in the long wars against France which lasted, with only two short breaks, from February 1793 to June 1815. One important element in this image-making was the repackaging of George III, who, despite bouts of mental instability, was transmuted in visual representation from bucolic buffer to the symbol of decency, Christian values and proper order in a nation engaged in a desperate struggle against violence, atheism and low-born revolution.1 As is essential for successful propaganda, the image was substantially more important than the reality.
