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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe
- [00:35]
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- [02:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from and Berlin to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. By the time Queen anne died in 1714, the Stuart story was running out of road after decades of civil war, revolution, religious fear and political improvisation. Britain faced a question that had haunted the Restoration from the start. Who could rule on what terms and by whose authority? The answer that emerged the Hanoverian succession was bold, controversial and carefully engineered, and it would reshape the British state for generations. Our earlier episodes of this Restoration series have brought us to this moment. James II's rigid belief in divine right and his catastrophic fall, William and Mary's revolutionary joint monarchy and the limits it placed on royal power and Queen Anne's determined, often underestimated effort to hold a fragile political settlement together. The Hanoverian succession was not a clean break from that world, but its culmination, the final attempt to secure Protestantism, parliamentary authority and political stability after half a century of upheaval. Our guide for this final chapter is Dr. Greg Sirota of the Department of History at North Carolina State University, one of the leading historians of the late Stuart and early Hanoverian Britain. His work, such as the Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and Its Empire, a collection of essays he edited with Alan McInnes, cuts to the heart of how monarchy, religion and Parliament were fundamentally reimagined in these years, not as abstract theory, but as lived political reality. Together, we will explore how Parliament came to choose a German Protestant dynasty over closer hereditary claimants, why the act of Settlement mattered far beyond the question of succession, and how the apparently smooth transition of 1714 concealed deep anxieties about loyalty, legitimacy and rebellion. From the union with Scotland to the threat of Jacobitism. From George I's arrival to the rise of cabinet government, this episode asks what the Hanoverian succession truly settled and what it left unresolved. The Hanoverian succession didn't just change who wore the crown, it helped define what Britain was becoming. Hi, I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Doctor Sirota, thank you so much for joining me.
- [05:27]
Dr. Greg Sirota
Thanks for having me.
- [05:29]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Let me ask an obvious but very important question. What was the Hanoverian succession?
- [05:36]
Dr. Greg Sirota
So the Hanoverian succession was the coming to the throne of the dynasty of Brunswick Lundberg, which is a North German dynasty that had been ruling over a congeries of territories that had recently been raised to electoral status in the Holy Roman Empire as recently as 1692. In July 1700, Anne's only remaining son, William, the Duke of Gloucester, dies at age 11. And given that Queen Mary of William and Mary has already died in 1694, William is still on the throne, but he is unmarried. And William and Mary had no children of their own. And Anne's now only surviving heir has passed away There are no more Protestants in the Stuart line to inherit the throne of Great Britain. By some counts, There are famously 57 closer claimants to the throne. I've said that before, and that's sometimes controversial. This is a thing that gets rooted about. But the next Protestant in line is the electress, Sophia of Hanover, and she is the granddaughter of James I.
- [06:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So is it fair to say that to understand the Hanoverian succession, we actually need to go back a long way, before 1714, possibly even back to James II?
- [07:09]
Dr. Greg Sirota
Yes, I think so, in the sense that one way of thinking about the Glorious Revolution is thinking about the idea that's promulgated in the Declaration of Rights at the culmination of the Glorious Revolution, which is that it has been found in inconsistent with the safety and welfare of a Protestant kingdom to be governed by a popish prince. The idea affirmed at the Revolution is that the Crown, the monarchy itself, is on some fundamental, irrevocable level, Protestant. And that deviation from that has led to disaster, as you just said, under James ii, and therefore only Protestants can be eligible to inherit the Crown, and therefore we have to reach all the way into Germany to find the next Protestant in line.
- [08:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So how is this succession engineered and by whom?
- [08:05]
Dr. Greg Sirota
So, I mean, it's interesting, at the time of the Revolution itself, apparently Sophia wanted the Hanoverian line included in the Bill of Rights, and this, this did not happen. So there's already a sense that William and Mary have no children, Anne has been unlucky in motherhood, and that, you know, in the event of the failure of issue, as they would call it, that the Hanoverians are the next in line. Hanoverians are also a deeply ambitious family, I would say, and so Sophia very much has her eye on the possibility of becoming Queen of Great Britain. But at the time, William is still on the throne and there is still the possibility of William remarrying. And that actually is debated and many people want that to happen. William, by all accounts, seems to be uninterested in it. Sophia visits William in the Netherlands in the late 1690s. And apparently it's around then that it's worked out that should anything happen to the Duke of Gloucester, to Anne's only surviving child, that some statutory settlement naming Sophia and her descendants as next in line for the throne must be worked out at this point. And that's. That's famously embodied in the act of Settlement, which is passed in 1701. Interestingly enough, at this point in 1701, when the act of Settlement is passed, the House of Commons is dominated by Tories. And so we tend to think of the Protestant succession, the Hanoverian succession, as the bulwark of ascendant wiggery, but it's actually passed by the Tories, you know. And on the flip side, we tend to think of the Tories as being at least residually sympathetic to the claims of the Catholic stewards. But as of 1700, 1701, in the face of a succession crisis, there is a widespread consensus that Hanover is the only possible solution.
- [10:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's so interesting. Even the fact that there are Whigs and Tories, that parties, political parties, have come about, is pretty recent in the history of Britain. It's a key part of the story. It feels like that might be a whole separate episode, but it's an interesting question, isn't it? And I suppose we want to just quickly remind listeners that Sophia is the granddaughter of James vi. And first, I mean, she's the other line. She's the daughter of Elizabeth of Bohemia. People might know her as the Winter Queen. You know, she's relatively distant as a claimant, but. But she's the nearest Protestant relative, as you said, in the Stuart line. So how much support did the act of Settlement have when it was reached then, given that we've got Tories leading
- [10:51]
Dr. Greg Sirota
the charge now, the act of Settlement does more than simply designate the Hanovers as next in line after William, Anne and any children they might have. The actual order of succession would be William, then Anne's children, but between before Anne ascended, if William were to get married then and have children, then his children, because, of course, William himself, in his own right, is a steward. But failing all of that, it would go to Sophia and her children. But beyond that, the act of Settlement, then, interestingly enough, and I think really significantly, and this really, to me, is the Tory component of it, given that there is widespread acknowledgement that the Crown is probably going to go to this German family that comes from an electoral polity that is, for all intents and purposes, run as a form of kind of absolutist government. The kind of constitutional settlement we have in Britain does not exist in Hanover. So the. Just the sheer anxiety about a foreign king in the first place, but also a foreign king who's used to ruling directly, impels the House of Commons to place a whole battery of limitations on the crown that are, interestingly enough, only to take effect after Anne dies. Right. So, I mean, it's quite. It's quite deliberate, it's quite deliberately aimed at Sophia, or more likely, George, her son, and those are basically all kinds of restrictions, some of which have to do with limitations on the Crown, directing British foreign policy in a way that's going to serve Hanoverian interests, giving titles or lands to foreigners. There's all kinds of measures about what are called place bills, that is essentially place restrictions. People who can't serve in the Ministry and serve in the House of Commons at the same time. But there's also, quite independently, this is the point at which the idea of judges serving under the terms of good behavior and not merely at the arbitrary pleasure of the Prince is established. The idea that the Royal Pardon can't undo an impeachment, which is a massive assertion of parliamentary power, that we have the right to essentially discipline Crown officials and they can't be shielded by the Crown itself, all of that is put into the act of Settlement. And so it's not just a dynastic measure. I mean, it really is a deepening and a consolidation of the Revolution settlement. If we think of the Revolution Settlement as really the foundation of the constitutional monarchy, it's interesting.
- [13:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It reminds me of the anxieties around James VI becoming James I, and the kind of threat to English liberties as they were conceived at the beginning of the 17th century. Do you think that these limitations, which seem sort of quite directed at foreign born monarchs, even as they're naming them, were a form of nationalism?
- [13:58]
Dr. Greg Sirota
Yes, possibly. Obviously the response to that is, well, which kings have actually been English? Which of these dynasties have been English? The, the Normans, the Plantagenets, the Tudors from Wales, the Stewards from Scotland. I mean, it's actually English kings that are the relative rarity here, strictly speaking. So I suppose so in many ways, and I don't know if this is going to take us too far afield, but I think that a lot of these restrictions are in line with what we think of as what were beginning to be called at the time sort of country politics. I don't know if this is something you've covered here, but when we talk about sort of court and country, the interests of the state itself and its hangers on are often called court politics. And the country interests are usually about limiting the power of the Crown to interfere not just with the parliament, but with other institutions, local government, the universities, the church, things like that. So a lot of these restrictions that are put into the act of Settlement are really part of, I think, this kind of country movement of good, accountable, responsible, limited government. To what extent that's nationalistic? I think there is a layer of anxiety about a genuinely foreign king. Remember, it's Sophia, who is being named, who is a lot less. This is a strange way to put it, but I think is a lot less foreign than her son. Sophia speaks English. Sophia grew up in the Netherlands. Sophia has been to England. Her son Georg Ludwig, you know, George Lewis, speaks virtually no English and has had relatively limited exposure to kind of English national life, I suppose. So to the extent that it's still her in mind, I don't know if you have quite the same kind of anxiety about the foreignness of the heir apparent.
- [15:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What about faith? I mean, she was a Lutheran. So how acceptable was severe to Parliament? Are they not glossing over some major theological differences between the denominations?
- [16:08]
Dr. Greg Sirota
They surely are. I mean, the short answer is they're not glossing over them because the act of Settlement says that the monarch not only has to be a Protestant, but has to be in communion with the Church of England. So your Lutheranism is basically checked at the gate, so to speak. Right? So that's as far as the law is concerned. You're not going to be Lutheran. I mean, to put it another way, the Crown itself is Anglican. Whatever you personally believe, the Crown is Anglican. The Crown belongs to the Church of England. It is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. And that's something that has to be accepted. Right? So statutorily, that's what gets settled on the ground. And I mostly work on ecclesiastical history, so this is sort of my bread and butter. But there is a tremendous amount of anxiety about a Lutheran, and there's a huge debate, actually, among English clergy about whether Lutheranism is more or less acceptable. Right? Particularly more or less acceptable than, say, William of Orange's Calvinism. Most people think that's worse. I'm sorry to put it that way, but most people think that that's closer to Protestant nonconformity, who also come out of a Calvinist tradition. Whereas Lutheranism is seen to be more amenable to royal power, it is more hierarchical, it has reserved more ceremony and liturgy than the Calvinist tradition has. So there's a lot of people who actually make the case that Lutheranism is actually in closer proximity to Anglicanism than, say, the other Protestant alternative, which would of course be Calvinism.
- [17:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you've said explicitly that the settlement isn't just about who is suddenly thrust into the line of succession and who is suddenly excluded, but who is excluded by it.
- [17:54]
Dr. Greg Sirota
So, James McPherson, who is a kind of Scottish Enlightenment figure that we associate with the Asian poems, I don't know. I mean, in the late 18th century, who's also a historian and literati. He publishes a work that's basically subtitled like the Secret History of Great Britain from the Restoration on or something to that effect. And he has, you can look it up. I mean, he has the genealogical table with numbers on them that, that literally put Georg Ludwig as number 58 and suggests that there are these 57 better claimants. Now, I have not done the genealogical research to verify that.
- [18:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Come on, give me the list of 57.
- [18:33]
Dr. Greg Sirota
But, and like I said, people have said, oh, that just, that turned into one of these talking points that Everybody just says, 57, 57, 57. And it isn't true. And I have to confess that I just, I can't independently evaluate each one of those. But there is an entire branch of the family that comes out of Henrietta the Duchess of Orleans, right, who is James II's sister, who marries into the French line and basically every Jacobite claimant to the throne after the, the son and grandson of James ii, the so called old and young pretender, all come out of that line. All come out of this kind of largely French Catholic line that traces itself back to Charles I through Henriette.
- [19:21]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, so we've got Sophia of Hanover. Tell me about Hanover. I mean, how powerful, how important a state was it at this period of time?
- [19:29]
Dr. Greg Sirota
I mean, like I said, Hanover is a kind of polity on the make. George is the future George I, Georg Ludwig, George Lewis. His father, Ernst Augustus is the Duke of Brunswick or the Duke of Brunswick, Hanover. He has a kind of grab bag of territories in Lower Saxony that are all kind of held together. He's also from a kind of cadet branch of his family. So there's all kinds of shenanigans that go into him actually becoming the Duke in relation to his own older brother that aren't worth going into. But by the time you get to 1692, there's been enough territories that have kind of been soldered together. And this family's loyalty to the Holy Roman Empire in the kind of European wars against France that begin with the Glorious Revolution have earned a tremendous amount of goodwill with the Habsburgs, with the Austrian Habsburgs. And the reward for that is electoral status. So Hanover becomes the electorate of Hanover and is eventually, obviously given a vote in the next Holy Roman Emperor. The House of Brunswick had served the Habsburgs. George himself fought at the siege of Vienna against the Turks. So there's a, there's a. They accrued a decent amount of loyalty and this is their reward. So Finally, Hanover in 1692 is made the ninth electorate in the Holy Roman Empire. And then in 1698, George himself succeeds his father and becomes elector of Hanover in the wars against Louis xiv, both the Nine Years War after the Glorious Revolution and the War of the Spanish Succession, Hanover is a key ally of the Habsburgs, the Austrian Habsburgs, and therefore a key member, small but key member of the grand alliance, which is the maritime powers, Britain, the Dutch Republic and Austria. Hanover is obviously not a major player, but they are a stalwart supporter of this anti French coalition. And so, interestingly enough, even absent any dynastic claims that the Brunswick line, the Hanoverian dynasty, have on Britain, they're still already geopolitically invested in keeping Britain out of the hands of the Stuarts, that is to say, keeping Britain as part of the alliance against France, because Hanover is, it's not that far away from the Netherlands. And so if you look at a map, I mean, it's probably about 250, 300 miles away from it. But if you look at a map and you were to see where France is putting pressure on modern day Belgium, the Spanish Netherlands and eventually the Austrian Netherlands and then the Dutch Republic, Hanover and Hanoverian territories would be sort of next in line. So they're deeply interested in maintaining this alliance and therefore that it's important to them to keep the Stuarts out of power in Britain, keep Britain out of an alliance with France and also by maintaining the Emperor, by supporting the Emperor, that's the key to their electoral status being confirmed, which apparently isn't actually confirmed by the Imperial Diet until, I think, 1708.
- [22:44]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do you have a sense of what the average man or woman in England would have known about Hanover and its royal family before the succession?
- [22:54]
Dr. Greg Sirota
That's a really good question. I think that there's a tremendous amount of popular support behind the idea of the quote, unquote, Protestant succession. Right. I think that, you know, I think that's a buzzword in the sense of people. It features in sermons, it features in pamphlets, it's a talking point. It's a part of the kind of Whig platform. It's how they demonstrate their commitment to the revolution itself is, you know, the Protestant succession. To what extent? And I think on some level people realize that the Protestant succession means ultimately that at the failure of issue in Anne's family, that this means this German family. How much the average person actually knows anything about the geopolitical ambitions of little Hanover? Probably not all that much. I think that they would know that Hanover had been a key ally in the wars against Louis xiv. I think that they would probably know that. Again, I don't when we're certainly average person I don't know, but I think someone who was thinking about politics at all would know at least know something about where Hanover sits geopolitically. By the time you get to the Hanoverian Succession 1714 Quarter century of conflict against Louis XIV.
- [24:19]
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- [27:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And obviously, six years after the actual of settlement, we have a very important development, which is the union of Scotland and England. How did that complicate matters?
- [27:32]
Dr. Greg Sirota
There's a direct line of causation in the sense that the act of Settlement is passed by the English Parliament without any reference to Scotland whatsoever. The Scots aren't consulted. Right. They have their own parliament at this point. Okay. So the Scots find the act of Settlement offensive just by virtue of the fact that it's basically gone and saddled England with this dynasty without consulting Scotland. And so Scotland, in retaliation, passes a series of laws in 1703, 1704. The act of Security is one of them, and the Act Anent War and Peace, I believe, is the other one that basically put all kinds of conditions on the possibility of a Hanoverian succession, I.e. the Hanoverian succession in Scotland as well. Right. So that is to say, Scotland needs to be consulted and Scottish interests need to be maintained in a certain number of specified ways. And Scotland's autonomy has to be affirmed. Okay. If we're going to once again share a monarchy. This infuriates the English ministry, and this winds up creating this tit for tat. In 1705, in retaliation against Scotland, the English Parliament passes what's called the Alien act, which basically puts a series of penalties on Scotland for its gestures toward dynastic independence and possibly the right to conduct its own independent foreign policy, both of which are completely intolerable to the English state, which is in the depths of the War of the Spanish Succession. And basically, there are threats to seize English property that's held by Scots. And this won't go into effect on one condition, if Scotland sits down to the negotiating table for the Union. And so there's literally, you could just see these things. One climbs on top of the other until everybody in 1706 sits down to begin negotiating the Union, which is passed in late 1706, 1707. And of course, the Union not only obviously dissolves the Edinburgh Parliament, it creates a single great British state, but it creates a great British state with the succession vested in the House of Hanover for both England and Scotland. There is this Real anxiety that, that Scotland, once the kind of Stuart line is done, what holds England and Scotland together at this point, Right, that, you know, Scotland has this traditional, the old alliance with France. Could Scotland restore the Stuarts on its own? Could it join the alliance with France against England and the Netherlands? I mean, all of these things are possibilities. I don't know how likely they are, but they're possibilities and they are intolerable to the English state. And so that, you know, Scotland cannot be allowed to have its own monarchy. It cannot be allowed to have a Stuart succession which would permanently put the English settlement in danger. And so that has to be neutralized. And that's what the Union does.
- [30:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So obviously, as you said so clearly, the Scottish as a parliament, as a people, had been offended by the act of settlement existing in the first place. But as they move into this Union, what are their interests? What are their concerns with regard to the future succession?
- [30:54]
Dr. Greg Sirota
There's a lot of bad blood between England and Scotland Even in the 10 years between the Glorious Revolution and this kind of succession crisis. Right. There's the Darien Expedition. I mean, there's a real sense that both England and Scotland have replaced the Catholic Stuart line with William and Mary and then Anne, but it is still very much a kind of composite monarchy. Right. There are still separate parliaments, there are still separate established churches, and there's still these questions about the relationship, a, how much Scotland should be contributing to the kind of English war effort and the wars that follow the Glorious Revolution. There's all kinds of economic tensions, there's all kinds of questions about what Scotland's place in the empire are. The opportunities of the Atlantic Empire, of England, which is still at this point, very much an English and not a British empire. Are they open to Scotland? And the Darien Expedition in Panama is an attempt to found an autonomous Scottish empire, if you will, which again, creates tremendous amount of problems for Westminster. And so you have these series of. Of just tensions that are an exacerbated version in many ways of the tensions that are besetting all three kingdoms in the kind of pressure of these unprecedented global wars against Louis xiv. Right. So I'm not quite sure whether there's a real antipathy toward the Hanoverian succession as such in Scotland, or really, it's just, once again, Scotland is being subordinated to English interests. And the thing that has united these two kingdoms, which again, is the mere coincidence of the Stuart monarchy sitting on both thrones. And is there anything that naturally means that the next monarchy, who are not Scottish, should sit on both thrones. And of course, as far as England is concerned, yes. Simply because Scotland's subordination to England in all in these sort of geopolitical and imperial contexts is kind of non negotiable as far as Westminster is concerned.
- [33:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And so as Queen Anne near the end of her life, then, do you think there were lingering doubts both north and south of the border about the next steps or do you think the settlement had settled people's minds?
- [33:21]
Dr. Greg Sirota
No, it's so particularly in the final years of the reign of Queen Anne. I think you have covered this on this show, maybe, Right. This is obviously not the word they would use, but it's the word we in the 21st century would use. The politics of the final years of the reign of Queen Anne are toxic, right? I mean, they are thick with paranoia and the ever present possibility and sometimes actual realization of violence. What's really interesting is that you had this entire machinery, starting with the act of Settlement, but then all of these international treaties with the Empire, with the Netherlands, all guaranteeing the Protestant succession, right? The, you know, the entire kind of apparatus of the alliance is invested in this right. Anne herself is in favor of it. By this point, the Church of England right is preaching the Protestant succession, right. I mean, every institution there is is set up to deliver this one result, putting this German family on the throne. And despite all that, nobody ever feels it's secure. It can never be secure enough. And so in this kind of really toxic politics, the succession just never goes away as an issue. And no matter what Ann says, and no matter what Ann does, particularly the Whigs will never feel that she's done enough. And so you constantly have more and more securities being added. So in the barrier treaty with the Netherlands, And I think 1708, the Netherlands becomes a military guarantor of the Hanoverian succession. That is to say, should there be any military threat to this, the Netherlands is basically pledging military support, just like in the Glorious Revolution, military support to ensure the Hanoverian line takes the crown. Right? But it's never enough. So the Whigs put a bounty on the head of the pretender, alive or dead, which is incredibly controversial because people are saying, look, we don't want this guy to be king, but you're basically passing a law that says it's okay to murder him in the streets if you see him. There is this non stop effort to invite some representative of the House of Hanover to live in England as a kind of guarantor, as a kind of anchorage for the Hanoverian succession, which Anne will under no circumstances tolerate. Under no circumstances. Anne is a lot like. I mean, this is not just the tutors. I mean, Anne in that way is a lot like Elizabeth. She realizes she has no children at this point, she has no living children. She realizes that after her, the crown is going to a kind of foreign family, cousins to be sure, but still not English. And she's made her peace with it, but she wants it to be a kind of removed abstraction, I think, and tangible reminders of it, like having Sophia come here or some other representative of the Hanoverian family are just intolerable to her. So there's this really interesting incident in which George I's son, the future George ii, who at this point is the electoral prince Georg Augustus, he is ennobled in the English peerage as the Duke of Cambridge, which means that he is of course entitled to sit in the House of Lords. The Whigs demand that he be issued the writ to come sit. Now, the Tory ministry and Anne won't tolerate this, but they have no constitutional recourse. And so the ministry actually has to engage in this really careful dance in which they basically say, we're giving you the writ, but we will not look favorably upon this guy showing up here. And which they don't. And then, you know, the Hanoverian family is actually pretty hands off about it. But Anne is just pathologically opposed to the succession being kind of thrown in her face. And I don't want to psychologize, but whether it's reminder of her own mortality or reminder of the loss of her own children or whatever it is, or just the political. The political prospect of a kind of rival court being set up in London is something that she just can't.
- [37:58]
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- [39:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, I mean one can imagine how painful it might be to consider yourself to be the setting sun and you've got the rising one just over the road. So I mean the extraordinary thing is that after all these years of careful planning, Sophia of hanover dies on 8 June 1714, just weeks before Queen Anne herself. How peaceful then was the transition of 1714 after Anne's death?
- [39:43]
Dr. Greg Sirota
The transition is extraordinarily peaceful. It is shockingly peaceful. It is shockingly without incident. And this is something that people make a note of because like I said, in the years leading up to the actual death of Queen Anne and the succession of George, there is widespread fear of a civil war. There was widespread fear of civil war, some conflict and really given the way things are going in Europe, we've already seen that the kind of succession crisis in 1688 with the birth of James Francis Edward Stuart leads to the Glorious Revolution and this enormous nine years war against Louis XIV. We've seen in 1700, 1701 the Spanish succession, right, leads to another enormous European conflict. There is widespread fear that when Anne goes there might be the possibility of domestic conflict. There might be the possibility, as I said, of a kind of war of three kingdoms where Scotland and Ireland might try and proclaim James Francis Edward as James viii. And England goes a different way and there's that kind of conflict. There might be Whig Tory conflict or worse, there might be the war of the British Succession where all of the like World War I, where all of these alliances and people have made these commitments, the Empire, the Netherlands, France etc. All these alliances get reactivated just a year after the end of the war, the Spanish Succession and suddenly we're back in another European wide or indeed sort of practically global conflict, right? So there's this enormous apprehension about this and then nothing happens, right? And eyes there does not seem to be any meaningful Stewart claimant at the time. George is proclaimed everywhere. Wigan Tory, both all pledge their allegiance to the Hanoverian succession. George takes his sweet time coming over. He doesn't get there till later in the fall, a few months later and in the meanwhile nothing has happened. And what's funny is, is when I'm doing research in the archives. There's this constant teasing, particularly among Tories, who basically say, see, you've been to the Whigs, you've been freaking out and paranoid about this threat to the succession for nothing. And the Whigs keep saying, well, just because nothing happened doesn't mean nothing was ever going to happen. Right, people. Actually, I encountered this metaphor in multiple sources. People talk about it like waking up from a dream. They talk about the Hanoverian succession like waking up from a dream, that there was this tremendous anxiety that was just weighing on everything. And then you wake up and it's gone and it was all imaginary, it was all in your head.
- [42:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It reminds me of the year 2000 and all the absolute worries that everyone had about everything melting down at the turn of the millennium.
- [42:45]
Dr. Greg Sirota
It is like that. And what's interesting is that you get both right, because of course, nothing happens. But then a year later, you do have a Jacobite rebellion. You do have it, and it's belated and it's, I think, different than what everybody thought was going to happen, but you do have something. And so the Whigs get to come back and say, we told you so. They've just been biding their time, they've been waiting in the shadows, and here it is.
- [43:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So you've already alluded to this, but Diorg Ludwig, how well suited was he to become the monarch of Britain? What sort of king was he? What were his interests, his allegiances?
- [43:19]
Dr. Greg Sirota
That's a good question. I mean, George is a very distant figure, both historically and in his own time, in the sense that there was. He was this very kind of unknowable figure, everybody. He's constantly described as cold, he's constantly described as stiff or rigid. As I said, he speaks very, very limited English. And because he speaks very limited English, he tends to recede from a lot of the everyday processes of government. I think you alluded to this at the very beginning, that when we think about the Hanoverian succession, we think about the kind of consolidation of cabinet government and ultimately the rise of kind of recognizable role of Prime Minister under Robert Walpole. A lot of that takes place because George is seen to be a kind of step back from the day to day operations of governance. Add to that, as I said, his very limited facility with England means that he doesn't go to plays all that often. He does go to opera, but he doesn't go to English theater all that much. And then, perhaps most importantly, he is divorced from his wife, who is a virtual prisoner back in Celle, back in Hanover, and so while he has numerous mistresses, he comes with no queen. And people recognize that this affects the kind of the face of the court. And so I do think that he's just removed from everyday life in a way that Anne and even William, who was also a foreigner, were not. I think their court was a kind of recognizable form, force and presence in not just political life, but kind of cultural life in a way that George's is really seeming to kind of recede.
- [45:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what were the immediate challenges that the Hanoverian monarchy faced?
- [45:05]
Dr. Greg Sirota
Well, so the immediate challenges are, in the first instance, just the fact of party strife in England or really in Britain at this point, no monarch wants to be held captive by a single party. Invariably, that happens to all of them. Since the Revolution, George comes to the throne with an antipathy toward the Tories, largely because the Tories engineered the piece of Utrecht, which left all of the allies hanging. And so there is this real sense that. That they were unsympathetic toward the Grand Alliance. There is this residual anxiety that the Tories are all closet Jacobites at heart, when they are, you know, they were always only reluctantly in favor of the Protestant succession. Certainly the leading figure in the final days or years of Anne's reign. Bolingbroke is openly treating with the Stuarts. The Hanoverians know this, and they're going to tar the entire Tory party with this. And so while George doesn't want to just become a kind of Whig king, he really does not trust the Tories. And so he offers a few token positions to Tories in the ministry. And only one accepts, which is Nottingham, who is, I believe, the Lord President of Privy Council. The rest refuse office because they sort of realize that these are token positions and they're just being included to make it look like it's a kind of mixed government, even though it's clearly a Whig government and they all go into opposition. And so whether he intended to or not, George basically delivers himself into the hands of the Whigs, who are determined to revenge themselves on the Tories for the final years of Anne's reign. Particularly for the peace of Utrecht. So immediately there is an election in 1715. It is a Whig landslide. And their first order of business is impeaching the leaders of the Tory ministry under Anne, that is Robert Harley, the Earl of Oxford, Henry St John, the Viscount Bolingbroke, and the Duke of Ormond, who is the Captain General that replaces Marlborough. Bolingbroke and Ormond flee to the pretender, thus confirming that they are, on some level, Jacobites perhaps at least in the public mind. Harley Oxford sticks it out and fights the charges, eventually successfully. But the Whigs are not willing to let bygones be bygones. They are absolutely determined to revenge themselves, as I said, on the Tories. And I think this is the first problem of George's reign, is basically just trying to extricate British politics from this rage of party. And the way that he ultimately does that is, is essentially by banishing the Tories into a kind of rump opposition. Right. I mean that really, for the next 50 years, Tories are not going to have any kind of meaningful hold on the government. And we commence what's known as the Whig ascendancy, in which we have something that looks like one party rule. The second problem is, of course, eventually Jacobitism hasn't gone away. There is going to be an insurrection. And while George, who is a military man and the Whig ministry believe very much that if this is a kind of Scottish affair, that there should be no problem in crushing it, which eventually there isn't, there is a real worry that if a foreign power gets involved, that we might have a kind of war of the British succession. And again, the peace is so fragile. The peace is so new. You're talking about a year, two years after the Treaty of Utrecht. It was only four years between the end of the Nine Years War and the beginning of the war, the Spanish Succession. There's no guarantee that another European conflict between Britain and the Netherlands and France won't ensue.
- [48:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Brent, you're making me want to go far deeper into looking at the reign of George I and the Jacobite rebellions and the threats that are faced. Maybe I can persuade you back on to talk about that. But for today, should we try to wrap up this question of the Hanoverian succession by thinking about how did it come to define the country? And do you think, more generally speaking, perhaps more controversially, this period is key in the kind of creation of a British identity?
- [49:32]
Dr. Greg Sirota
Yeah, that's a great question. You know, it used to be the case that there was this recognizable field in British history called Tudor Stewart History. Right. And it, I imagine that this is something along the lines of what the podcast is devoted to, but, you know, it starts in 1485 and it ends in 1714. Right. I mean, it's, it's, it. And it, perfect, almost perfectly encapsulates these two centuries. And I don't know if that field is still intact anymore. I really don't. I certainly don't think of myself as a Tudor Stewart, HISTORIAN I think there's a lot of people who work on the late 17th and 18th century really think of themselves as in this other field that we sometimes call the long 18th century, which is sort of 1660, maybe even into the 19, you know, certainly into the French Revolutionary era, but maybe even into 19th century and into sort of the reform period. And if you start to punctuate the field that way, then 1714 sort of disappears as a kind of meaningful moment. Right. It really is just part of the. Exactly as you said. These party energies that emerge in the exclusion crisis in the 1670s and 80s are still going. They provide the key to a lot of the kind of just domestic politics that carries through straight through the 18th century. So when people and friends of mine, when we started working on this, there was a sense of rescuing the Hanoverian succession from some obscurity that I think it had fallen into. I guess I can ask you the question. I mean, in 2014, the 300th anniversary of the Hanoverian succession did not elicit all that much celebration in the uk. I remember one article in the Guardian and not much else.
- [51:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
No. And I don't remember marking it myself, I have to confess.
- [51:14]
Dr. Greg Sirota
Yeah, well, there was. I mean, interestingly enough, there was two other things going on, because obviously August 2014 is the 100th year anniversary of the beginning of World War I, which obviously is much more important. It's also, if anybody was going to be thinking about the early 18th century in 2014, they were going to be thinking about the Union. Right. Because this was the Scottish independence referendum that year as well. So nobody was thinking about the Hanoverian succession or what it meant. And if you read some of the little op EDS that got written, you could see that the authors were kind of struggling to say anything good or important about what the Hanoverians had brought. Right. But that having been said, I think there is a real argument to be made that the Hanoverian succession, or certainly as a placeholder for really, let's say the events of 1714 to the early 20s, or even just the reign of George the First, which ends in 1727, is the moment at which British politics becomes recognizably 18th century. You know, we start to see a really different set of concerns from the ones that I imagine dominate your podcast. Right. There is an enormous lowering of the religious temperature in terms of the way religion had become this. This central point of contention in party politics and in dynastic politics that begins to recede the fear of absolutism, which is obviously the kind of dominant point of English politics for the entirety of the 17th century, for really the entire kind of Stuart era that begins to recede and it's replaced by this entirely new language which is the fear of absolutism gives way to this other fear, which is of course the fear of corruption. And so the danger to the British polity is not tyranny and popery, but is this kind of corruption that comes with cabinet government and patronage and the rise of this commercial society and this ever increasing British state which spends enormous amounts of money and has all these financial interests that people who play their cards right can make a lot of money on. And that, that carries you clear into the, the American Revolution. Right. I mean, we're still going to be debating corruption and virtue and what kind of state by the time you get to, you know, the 1760s and 1770s. So I do really think that there's a way in which just the entire kind of face of British politics begins to change in that decade after the Hanoverian succession. And it begins to look, I don't quite want to say more modern, but certainly more 18th century at that point.
- [53:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you so much for introducing us to the Hanoverian succession and its importance and I'd be delighted if you came back and took us off into the 18th century.
- [54:00]
Dr. Greg Sirota
Absolutely. Anytime. Yeah, good luck with it.
- [54:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History hit. Thank you also to my researcher Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving leaving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors from History. Hit.
- [54:42]
Dr. Greg Sirota
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Dr. Greg Sirota
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Dr. Greg Sirota
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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- [54:54]
Dr. Greg Sirota
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