The Guardian view on the Hanoverian monarchy

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/31/guardian-view-hanoverian-monarchy

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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.

Yet the audacious constitutional improvisation of 1714 worked. The Hanoverians were rarely popular, but they broadly accepted the deal they were offered – a legally circumscribed Protestant kingdom with a powerful parliament. They had, in the words of historian Julian Hoppit, a less elevated conception of monarchy than their predecessors. As such, they were the monarchs who turned the corner towards today’s constitutional monarchy.

The Hanoverians should not be individually airbrushed. George I was unremarkable and treated his wife cruelly. George II was obstinate and unpopular. George III was a reactionary who meddled in politics to a degree that no subsequent monarch has done (though this may change). George IV was unfit to govern and widely hated. His brother William IV was the last British monarch to dismiss a government (Lord Melbourne’s) which he disliked.

Nevertheless, as German princes, they also personified the deep connections between 18th-century Britain and the geopolitics of continental Europe. The Hanoverians did not invent this multifarious trading, military, political and religious network. But they gave it a particularly striking dynastic form, uniting Great Britain with a prosperous northern German state to such a degree that the historian Brendan Simms argues that “the history of 18th-century Britain was in Europe”.

The emerging apparatus of the Hanoverian state – the Bank of England, the national debt, the Royal Navy, the stock market, even the Union of England and Scotland – were all developed to sustain Britain’s role in Europe, not its growing empire overseas, which came later. None of this is to imply that 21st-century Britain should maintain its engagement in Europe merely because something distantly similar was the 18th-century norm. But it is to remind ourselves that Britain’s history lay in Europe for centuries and that, with the end of empire, Europe remains our natural neighbourhood, as it always was to the Hanoverians.