ABSTRACT
On 6 August 1714, the Tory parliament at Westminster proclaimed loyalty to George, Elector of Hanover, as king of Great Britain and Ireland, pledged enmity to all opponents of his ‘undoubted right to the imperial crown’ and secured the Protestant succession peacefully by a unanimous vote. Yet only a year after this triumphant moment, the dynastic horizons appeared notably less propitious. By the autumn of 1715, Scotland was ablaze with rebellion: an insurgency that soon snaked south to engulf Lancashire and Northumberland. Habeas corpus had been suspended amid fears of foreign invasions, and the commanding personalities of the old Tory ministry had been impeached, banished or thrown into the Tower. Before the end of the year, a rival prince was sailing across from the continent, resolved to plant his claim upon British shores. The eventual, comprehensive failure of the 1715 Jacobite rebellion appeared markedly less certain in the chaotic months that followed its inception, and its effect was to force a shift in the mood of Hanoverian rule, away from the serene consensus of August 1714. For the remainder of the new king’s life, and long into the reign of his son, the British state stood on a war footing, unsettled by the twin perils of internal subversion and external assault. Thirty years later, when a second pretender occupied Edinburgh, the Whig Earl of Marchmont believed his monarch to be only one defeat away from being toppled. 1 Stirring Marchmont’s alarm, moreover, was the anxiety that Jacobitism had burgeoned because of defects in the principles and practices shaping Hanoverian rule. The greatest threat to the dynasty, he had argued, lay in an ‘absence of zeal’ among its advocates, when the court had fallen sway to the ‘interested persuasions of Favorites and Ministers’; when parliament now resembled the ‘corrupt and adulating Senate’ of imperial Rome; and when ‘the Royal Family every Day more and more estranges the good Will and Fidelity of their Subjects’. 2
