Introduction

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