The Guardian View on the Hanoverian Monarchy

Started by cinrit, August 01, 2014, 12:52:55 PM

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cinrit

QuoteIt is 300 years since George I succeeded to the throne. There could have been civil war. But the Hanoverians were the kind of monarchs that 18th-century Britain required.

Compared with the Tudors and Stuarts, the Hanoverians – who succeeded to the British throne 300 years ago on Friday – remain something of a hard sell. The Georgians are celebrated for their architecture and gardens, yet their monarchs and politicians seem remote, barely etched in the public mind. With rare exceptions, like The Madness of King George, few films or novels feature the House of Hanover. The 18th century is on few school syllabuses either. Although Hanoverian Britain was that of the slave trade and the press gang, it was also the Britain of Jane Austen and James Watt, of the British Museum, the Scottish enlightenment and the foundation of a free press. But it is in danger of slipping beyond the collective mental horizon.

Yet an effort should be made to re-engage with the Hanoverian heritage, and Friday is one such opportunity. If nothing else, the era lasted longer than either the Tudor or the Stuart age. This was far from inevitable in 1714. When Queen Anne died 300 years ago this Friday, childless in spite of her 17 pregnancies, her subjects could easily imagine a fresh civil war between the Protestant Hanoverians, on whom parliament conferred the succession in 1701, and the Jacobite supporters of the Catholic Stuart line. Only a year after George I arrived from Hanover, an armed Jacobite uprising duly threatened his throne.

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Cindy
Always be yourself.  Unless you can be a unicorn.  Then always be a unicorn.

LouisFerdinand

What would the new dynasty have been like if George I had gotten along with his wife Sophia Dorothea and she would not have been imprisoned in the Castle of Ahlden? Sophia Dorothea would have been the Queen Consort. What achievements would she have accomplished?