0521842220 cambridge university press the hanoverian dimension in british history 1714 1837 mar 2007

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The Hanoverian Dimension in British History,
1714–1837

For more than 120 years (1714–1837) Great Britain was linked to the
German Electorate, later Kingdom, of Hanover through Personal
Union. This made Britain a continental European state in many
respects, and diluted her sense of insular apartness. The geopolitical
focus of Britain was now as much on Germany, on the Elbe and the
Weser, as it was on the Channel or overseas. At the same time, the
Hanoverian connection was a major and highly controversial factor
in British high politics and popular political debate. This volume is the
first to explore the subject systematically by employing a team of experts
drawn from the UK, USA and Germany. They integrate the burgeoning
specialist literature on aspects of the Personal Union into the broader
history of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Never
before has the impact of the Hanoverian connection on British politics,
monarchy and the public sphere been so thoroughly investigated.
B R E N D A N S I M M S is Reader in the History of International Relations
at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Peterhouse. His previous publications include The impact of Napoleon: Prussian high politics,
foreign policy and the crisis of the executive, 1797–1806 (1997) and The
struggle for mastery in Germany, 1779–1850 (1998).
T O R S T E N R I O T T E is a Research Fellow at the German Historical
Institute London. His PhD thesis on Hanover in British policy,
1792–1815, has been published in German translation (2005). He has
produced a number of articles on the topic and is currently preparing a
study of George III and the Old Reich, 1760–1815.

The Hanoverian Dimension in
British History, 1714–1837
Edited by

Brendan Simms
and
Torsten Riotte


CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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© Cambridge University Press 2007
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of
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without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published in print format 2007
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ISBN-13
ISBN-10

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Contents

List of genealogical tables
List of tables
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
1

Introduction. Hanover: the missing dimension
BRENDAN SIMMS

2

5

6

8
9

TORSTEN RIOTTE

58

The Hanoverian dimension in early nineteenth-century
British politics
CHRISTOPHER D. THOMPSON

86

The end of the dynastic union, 1815–1837
111

The university of Go¨ttingen and the Personal Union,
1737–1837
THOMAS BISKUP

128

The confessional dimension
ANDREW C. THOMPSON

161

Hanover and the public sphere
BOB HARRIS

10

28

George III and Hanover

MIJNDERT BERTRAM

7

10

Pitt and Hanover
BRENDAN SIMMS

4

1

Hanoverian nexus: Walpole and the Electorate
JEREMY BLACK

3

page vii
viii
ix
xi

183

Dynastic perspectives

CLARISSA CAMPBELL ORR

213
v


vi

Contents

11
12

13

British maritime strategy and Hanover 1714–1763
RICHARD HARDING

252

Hanover in mid-eighteenth-century Franco-British
geopolitics
H. M. SCOTT

275

Hanover and British republicanism
NICHOLAS B. HARDING

301

Index

324


Genealogical tables

10.1 The House of Hohenzollern and its links to
the House of Brunswick
10.2 Saxon claims to Bavaria
10.3 Zweibru¨cken claims to Bavaria
10.4 Sulzbach and Palatinate links to Zweibru¨cken,
and claims to Bavaria
10.5 Hesse-Darmstadt links to Hohnzollern
(Prussia), Zweibru¨cken and Mecklenburg-Strelitz

page 222
239
240
240
241

vii


Tables

11.1 Disposition of ships, 1739–1741
11.2 Comparative fleet sizes, 1745, 1750, 1755

viii

page 262
268


Notes on contributors

is an independent author. The former Director of
the Boman Museum in Celle completed his PhD thesis on the
Hanoverian Diet in 1986. Since then he has published widely on
Hanoverian history including a biography of George II (2004) and a
history of the kingdom of Hanover, 1814–66.

MIJNDERT BERTRAM

is currently a Fellow of the Herzog August Bibliothek
Wolfenbu¨ttel. His main fields of interest are political communication in
eighteenth-century Germany and transnational networks of scholarship.
His publications include ‘The transformation of ceremonial in eighteenthcentury Germany: ducal weddings in Brunswick’, in Karin Friedrich (ed.),
Festive culture in Germany and Europe (2000) and ‘The hidden queen.
Elisabeth Christine of Prussia and Hohenzollern Queenship in the eighteenth century’, in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Queenship in Europe (2004).

THOMAS BISKUP

is Professor of History at the University of Exeter and
author of British foreign policy in the age of Walpole (1985). His most recent
publications on Hanoverian Britain include Parliament and foreign policy
in the 18th century (2004) and Continental commitment. Britain, Hanover

and interventionism, 1714–1793 (2005). He is currently completing a
biography of George III.
JEREMY BLACK

is a Senior Lecturer in History at Anglia
Ruskin University, Cambridge Campus. She has edited and contributed
to Queenship in Britain 1660–1837: royal patronage, dynastic politics, and
court culture (2002), and Queenship in Europe 1660–1815: the role of the
consort (2004).

CLARISSA CAMPBELL ORR

B . H A R D I N G received his doctorate from Columbia
University with a thesis on ‘Dynastic union in British and Hanoverian
ideology’. His most recent publication is a major study on Hanover and the
British Empire, 1700–1837 (2006).

NICHOLAS

ix


x

Notes on contributors

H A R D I N G is Professor of Organisational History at the
University of Westminster. He is author of Amphibious warfare in the
eighteenth century: the British expedition to the West Indies, 1740–1742
(1991); The evolution of the sailing navy (1995); and Seapower and naval

warfare (1991). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and
Chairman of the Society for Nautical Research.
RICHARD

is Professor of History at the University of Dundee. His A
patriot press: national politics and the London press of the 1740s (1993) is one
of the most influential books on the public sphere in Hanoverian Britain.
He has also published amongst others Politics and the rise of the press:
Britain and France 1620–1800 (1996) and Politics and the nation: Britain
in the mid-eighteenth century (2002).

BOB HARRIS

is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute,
London. His PhD on ‘Hanover in British policies, 1792–1815’ has been
published in German translation (2003). He is currently working on a
monograph on ‘George III and the Holy Roman Empire’.

TORSTEN RIOTTE

H A M I S H S C O T T is Professor of International History at the University of
St Andrews. He is the author of British foreign policy in the age of the
American Revolution (1990); The emergence of the eastern powers 1756–1775
(2001); and The birth of a great power system 1740–1815 (Harlow, 2006). He
is currently writing a study of aristocracy in Europe c. 1400–1750.

is Reader in the History of International Relations at
the Centre for International Studies, University of Cambridge, and a
Fellow of Peterhouse. His publications include the article ‘ ‘‘An odd
question enough’’. Charles James Fox, the crown and British policy

during the Hanoverian crisis of 1806’ (1995), and The impact of
Napoleon: Prussian high politics, foreign policy and the crisis of the
executive, 1797–1806 (1997). He is currently writing a study of British
foreign policy in the eighteenth century.

BRENDAN SIMMS

ANDREW C. THOMPSON

is a College Lecturer in History at Queens’
College, Cambridge. He is the author of several articles on British and
European history and a revised version of his PhD thesis recently appeared
as Britain, Hanover and the protestant interest (2006). He is currently writing
a biography of George II for Yale University Press.

CHRISTOPHER D. THOMPSON

is currently completing his PhD at
Christ’s College Cambridge on ‘Politics and state-building in Vorma¨rz
Hanover: the role of King Ernst August, c. 1837–51’. His research
interests are conservatism in nineteenth-century Britain and Germany
and the role of history in identity formation.


Acknowledgements

The volume contains the revised and expanded papers given at a
colloquium organised by the German Historical Institute London
and the Centre for International Studies at the University of Cambridge,
held at Peterhouse, in September 2004. The editors wish to express

their profound thanks to the Director of the Institute, Professor Hagen
Schulze, for providing the funding which made the colloquium and
thus this publication possible.

xi



1

Introduction. Hanover: the missing
dimension
Brendan Simms

When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, the resulting end of
the Personal Union with Hanover occasioned little comment. The fact
that Britain had been linked to a continental European state for over
120 years was easily forgotten in a nineteenth-century world whose
horizons were now very much global, imperial and naval. If the centenary
of the Personal Union in August 1814 had been marked by royal celebrations, by the time of the bicentenary, the mid-Victorian fascination
with German culture had been replaced by industrial and commercial
competition. In August 1914, in any case, Britain’s leaders had other
things on their minds. An era during which the royal family felt obliged to
change its name from ‘Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’ to the anodyne confection of
‘House of Windsor’ was perhaps not best suited to an understanding of
Britain’s German heritage and continental links. The British story was,
after all, an ‘island story’.1
It has remained one, more or less, ever since. The importance, and
sometimes the centrality, of the Hanoverian context to British history is
still not fully recognised. For example, J. C. D Clark, himself an exponent

of viewing eighteenth-century Britain in the framework of the European
‘ancien re´gime’, wrote nearly 600 pages on the 1750s without giving
due attention to the fact that one of his major protagonists, the duke
of Newcastle, was both a defender of the Hanoverian preoccupations
of the crown and the most prominent exponent of engagement in
Europe.2 Similarly, Kathleen Wilson and Linda Colley, despite their
1
2

Thus the title of H. E. Marshall’s hugely influential Our island story (1905), which was
reprinted by the think-tank Civitas in 2005.
J. C. D. Clark, The dynamics of change. The crisis of the 1750s and English party systems
(Cambridge, 1982). For the ancien re´gime debate see J. C. D. Clark, English society
1688–1832. Ideology, social structure and political practice during the ancien re´gime
(Cambridge, 1985); and Joanna Innes, ‘Jonathan Clark, social history and England’s
‘‘ancien re´gime’’ ’, Past and Present, 115 (1987), 165–200. Later Clark – reflecting the
early work of Jeremy Black – did address the Hanoverian dimension briefly in Revolution
and rebellion. State and society in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
(Cambridge, 1986), pp. 77–82.

1


2

Brendan Simms

interest in Toryism and Whig radicalism critiques, and in colonial and
popular issues, make virtually no reference to Europe, in Wilson’s case, or
Hanover, in both instances.3 Likewise, John Brooke’s as yet unsurpassed

biography of George III passes over the fact that his subject was also the
ruler of a German state, and at times a very committed one.4 On the other
side of the Atlantic, both Theodore Draper and Fred Anderson tend
to caricature the Hanoverian connection and its role in British grand
strategy.5 None of David Armitage’s various discussions of the British
problem and composite monarchies, which stress the need to consider
Scottish, Irish and imperial contexts, take the Hanoverian dimension into
account.6
There are exceptions. Foreign policy was not his forte, but
J. H. Plumb’s unfinished study of Walpole was seized of the importance
of the international and particularly the Hanoverian dimension to early
eighteenth-century British politics.7 More recently, both Julian Hoppit
and Paul Langford – who wrote an excellent though now inevitably dated
textbook on eighteenth-century British foreign policy – give some prominence to the Hanoverian dimension.8 There are also the general syntheses of Jeremy Black, who has contributed so much to our understanding
of foreign policy and the role of Hanover in British politics before 1760.9

*
There is, of course, a considerable and growing specialist literature on
British foreign policy and the role of the Hanoverian Electorate. Ragnhild
Hatton’s biography of George I – revealingly subtitled ‘Elector and
king’ – remains the standard work. Graham Gibbs has explored the role

3

4
5

6
7
8

9

Kathleen Wilson, Politics, culture and imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge,
1995); Wilson, The island race. Englishness, empire and gender in the eighteenth century
(London, 2002); and Linda Colley, In defiance of oligarchy. The Tory party 1714–1760
(Cambridge, 1982). See also, most recently, Kathleen Wilson, ed., A new imperial history:
culture, identity and modernity in Britain and the empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004).
J. B. Brooke, George III (London, 1972).
Theodore Draper, A struggle for power. The American Revolution (New York, 1996); Fred
Anderson, Crucible of war: the Seven Years War and the fate of empire in British North
America, 1754–1766 (New York, 2000).
E.g. David Armitage, ‘Greater Britain: a useful category of historical analysis?’, American
Historical Review, 104, 2, (April 1999), 427–45.
See for example J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole. The king’s minister (London, 1960),
pp. 116–54 et passim.
See Julian Hoppit, A land of liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000); Paul Langford,
A polite and commercial people, England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989); Paul Langford, Modern
British foreign policy: the eighteenth century, 1688–1815 (London, 1976).
E.g. Jeremy Black, The politics of Britain, 1688–1800 (Manchester, 1993); and Black,
Walpole in power (Sutton, 2001).


Hanover: the missing dimension

3

of the Hanoverian connection in parliament for the first decade after
1714. Uriel Dann has looked closely at the Personal Union during the
wars of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War (1740–60).

The implications of the Hanoverian connection for British ‘high politics’
have been explored for the early eighteenth century by J. M Beattie,
J. J. Murray and – rather obscurely – H. J. Finke. More generally, the
period before 1760 has been covered in numerous articles and books by
Jeremy Black, while British foreign policy in the era of the American
Revolution has received masterful treatment from Hamish Scott.
Finally, T. C. W. Blanning has highlighted the importance of Hanover
during the Fu¨rstenbund and Regency crises of the 1780s.10
More recently, there has been a modest increase of interest in the
Hanoverian connection led by younger scholars such Andrew
Thompson, Nick Harding, and the editors, all of whom have contributed
to this volume.11 Andrew Thompson’s work on the early eighteenth

10

11

See J. M. Beattie, The English court in the reign of George I (Cambridge, 1967); J. J. Murray,
George I, the Baltic and the Whig Split of 1717. A study in diplomacy and propaganda
(London, 1969); Hans-Joachim Finke, ‘The Hanoverian Junta, 1714–1719’, (DPhil
dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1970); Ragnhild Hatton, George I.
Elector and king (London, 1978); Ragnhild Hatton, The Anglo-Hanoverian connection,
1714–1760 (London, 1982); G. C. Gibbs, ‘English attitudes towards Hanover and the
Hanoverian succession in the first half of the eighteenth century’, in Adolf Birke and Kurt
Kluxen, eds., England und Hannover. England and Hanover (Munich, 1986), pp. 33–50;
Uta Richter-Uhlig, Hof und Politik unter den Bedingungen der Personalunion zwischen
Hannover und England (Hanover, 1992); Walther Mediger, Mecklenburg, Russland und
England-Hannover (2 vols., Hildesheim, 1967); Uriel Dann, Hanover and Great Britain,
1740–1760 (Leicester, 1991); Jeremy Black, ‘British foreign policy in the eighteenth
century: a survey’, Journal of British Studies 26 (1987), 26–53; Jeremy Black, ‘The

British state and foreign policy in the eighteenth century’, Trivium 23 (1988), 127–48;
and the relevant sections on Hanover in Jeremy Black, British foreign policy in the age of
Walpole (Edinburgh, 1985); and Black, A system of ambition? British foreign policy,
1660–1793 (London and New York, 1991), pp. 31–42; Black, ‘The crown, Hanover
and the shift in British foreign policy in the 1760s’, in: Jeremy Black, ed., Knights Errant
and true Englishmen. British foreign policy, 1600–1800 (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 113–34;
H. M. Scott, British foreign policy in the age of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1990);
T. C. W. Blanning, ‘ ‘‘That horrid Electorate’’ or ‘‘Ma patrie Germanique’’? George III,
Hanover and the Fu¨rstenbund of 1785’, Historical Journal, 20 (1977), 311–44; and
T. C. W. Blanning and Carl Haase, ‘Kurhannover, der Kaiser und die Regency Crisis
von 1788/89’, Bla¨tter fu¨r Landesgeschichte 113 (1979), 432–49.
Andrew Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the protestant interest, 1688–1756 (Woodbridge,
Suffolk, 2006); Nicholas B. Harding, ‘North African piracy, the Hanoverian carrying
trade, and the British state, 1728–1828’, Historical Journal, 43, (2002), 25–47; and
Harding, ‘Dynastic union in British and Hanoverian ideology’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia, 2001); Brendan Simms, ‘ ‘‘An odd question enough.’’ Charles
James Fox, the crown and British policy during the Hanoverian crisis of 1806’,
Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 567–96 and Fox, The impact of Napoleon. Prussian high
politics, foreign policy, and the crisis of the executive, 1797–1806 (Cambridge, 1997),
especially pp. 201–18; and Torsten Riotte, Hannover in der britischen Politik


4

Brendan Simms

century shows just how central the confessional argument was, not just in
British domestic politics, but also in the diplomatic posture which
Britain-Hanover adopted in Europe, particularly the Holy Roman
Empire. Nicholas Harding has written a systematic study of the role
which the Personal Union played in eighteenth-century British political

thought and discourse. Brendan Simms drew attention to the periodic
centrality of Hanover in British strategy, and the importance of a
Hanoverian faction in British high politics, during the crisis of 1806.
Torsten Riotte has just published the first comprehensive study of the
role of Hanover in British policy throughout the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic period.
The Hanoverian dimension brings together the work of these and other
scholars working on the Personal Union or related fields and integrates
their findings into the history of eighteenth-century Britain as a whole. It
draws upon material – much of it never before used in this context – from
both British and German archives. The volume is structured in such a
way as to allow both chronological and thematic access. Chapters 2 to 5
will cover the entire period from 1714 to 1837, but they are also intended
to allow authors to organise the narrative around a particular individual or
theme, such as Walpole, the elder Pitt, the French Revolutionary Wars
and Napoleon, and the final stages of the Personal Union. The more
thematic chapters are designed to cover the full length of the Personal
Union, but generally contain a specific narrative ‘spine’.
In putting the Hanoverian dimension back into British history, this
collection attempts two things. First of all, by filling in many gaps in
our knowledge of the Personal Union, it makes an ‘additive’ contribution
to the secondary literature. For example, the chapter by Torsten Riotte
on George III and Hanover after 1760; Hamish Scott’s systematic
analysis of the role of Hanover in French strategy; Thomas Biskup’s
discussion of the intellectual legacy; Nicholas Harding’s dissection of
the role of Hanover in the development of British republicanism;
Clarissa Campbell Orr’s investigation of the dynastic ramifications; and
Christopher Thompson on the Personal Union after 1815, all put the
spotlight on neglected areas. Secondly, this volume is the first step in a
collective ‘substitutive’ project to persuade eighteenth-century British

(1792–1815). Dynastische Verbindung als Element au
enpolitischer Entscheidungsprozesse
(Mu¨nster, 2005). Jeremy Black has also kept up his interest in the area. Recent
publications include: ‘International relations in the eighteenth century: Britain and
Poland compared’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 13 (2002), 83–112; Black, ‘Hanover and
British foreign policy 1714–1760’, English Historical Review, 120 (2005), 303–39; and
Black, ‘ ‘‘George II and all that stuff.’’ On the value of the neglected’, Albion, 4 (2004),
581–607.


Hanover: the missing dimension

5

historiography to take more account of the Hanoverian dimension in
general.
In the first chapter, Jeremy Black highlights the controversial nature of
the Hanoverian succession in 1714. He reminds us that although
Britain’s links to the continent long predated the Personal Union, the
Hanoverian connection was a major high-political and foreign-political
bone of contention during the twenty-year ascendancy of Robert
Walpole. It was, moreover, an issue ‘in the context not of an established
constitution with clear conventions but of the testing out of new arrangements’. Hanover became a focal point around which the ‘national interest’ could be articulated. As Bob Harris shows, this had profound impact
on the development of the British ‘public sphere’, particularly in the
absence of other issues around which opinion could polarise. There was
a huge outpouring of anti-Hanoverian pamphlets, prints, ballads centred
on but not confined to London. The quality of the material varied, but
some of it was very sophisticated. Harris notes that ‘Europe and
European power politics [were] at the very centre of public attention’ in
the period before 1760, and in this context the question of Hanover

gained particular popular salience. Indeed, Harris writes that at times
‘the issue of Hanover and its influence dominated press and political
debate, for long periods completely overshadowing consideration of
other political issues’. Attacks on the Hanoverian connection not only
served to highlight the corrupt and foreign nature of the Walpolean
oligarchy, but also enabled opposition writers to burnish their own patriotic credentials.
Alongside, this ‘low’ debate, there was also a vibrant and no less
impassioned ‘high’ debate in the sphere of political thought. Nicholas
Harding’s chapter documents how attacks on the Personal Union were
driven by a British republicanism of both ancient and recent provenance.
Here the Hanoverian link was seen as a continental absolutist Trojan
Horse, designed to smother English liberties with the help of a standing
army and German mercenaries. In some cases, such as that of
Bolingbroke, this camp shaded into that of Jacobitism; but it also
embraced many radical Whigs.
In the republican critique, the Lutheranism of the Hanoverians was
akin to popery and thus of no comfort. Yet as Andrew Thompson stresses
in his chapter on confessional dimensions, the Protestantism of the
Hanoverians was what made them attractive to the political nation: contemporaries, after all, spoke of the ‘protestant’ not the Hanoverian succession. Religious solidarity with the victims of popish aggression was also
an important part of British foreign policy, particularly in the 1720s;
Thompson sees this as an example of British ‘soft power’ in the eighteenth


6

Brendan Simms

century. The Hanoverian link was thus a central plank in the defence both
of British domestic liberties and the European balance of power against
attempts to erect a universal monarchy. Here Thompson adds a new spin

to the debate on the British ‘confessional state’, initiated by Jonathan
Clark some twenty years ago.
The eighteenth century also saw the emergence of strong intellectual
ties. Hanover, as Thomas Biskup shows in his chapter, played a central
role in the growth of British involvement in the ‘international republic of
letters’, by producing a ‘unique framework for scholarly curiosity’
focused on the new electoral university of Go¨ttingen. This compensated
for the weaknesses of British academic institutions particularly in the
fields of natural sciences, oriental studies and philology. Interestingly, it
was the British who were the mere ‘collectors’ and ‘gatherers’ while the
Hanoverians concentrated on analysis. In this way, as Biskup puts it,
‘Go¨ttingen . . . helped England to make sense of her own imperial experiences’. Here the Hanoverian connection and the imperial project were
not contradictory but complementary.
This theme is picked up by Brendan Simms. He shows that the Elder
Pitt’s relationship to Hanover provides a valuable prism through which to
view his political career and strategic vision. A complex, sometimes paradoxical and yet essentially coherent picture emerges. Pitt undoubtedly
used the Hanoverian stick to beat his political rivals and to massage his
‘popular’ constituency; this stance earned him the hatred of George II
and nearly cost him high office. And yet it was the very fact that Pitt – as
Newcastle so starkly put it – could ‘do the King’s business’ over
Hanover that finally speeded his rise. At the same time, Pitt’s commitment to the defence of Hanover in the Seven Years War should not be
seen as an opportunistic sop to George, but as part of an integrated
‘continental’ strategy against France, which was intended to secure
British colonial and naval dominance through the diversion of French
resources.
For, as the naval historian Richard Harding explains, the European and
maritime theatres of war should not – pace much of the anti-Hanoverian
critique – be seen as distinct and separate, but rather as two sides of the
same coin. ‘Flanders and Hanover’, he writes, ‘could not be divorced
from a maritime policy. They were parts of the same policy.’ It is true that

in the early years of George I’s reign, the Royal Navy was used to further
Hanoverian interests in the Baltic. But by the mid-eighteenth century,
Harding identifies ‘an essential link’ between the defence of Hanover,
which tied down French forces, and ‘aggressive action in the Americas’.
‘Britain’s essential European interests, including Hanover’, he reminds us,
came first; the shift to maritime and colonial priorities only came after 1760.


Hanover: the missing dimension

7

Throughout the first fifty years or so of the Personal Union, therefore,
British strategy was obsessed with the protection of Hanover against first
Russian, then Austrian, periodically Prussian and then French attack.
The fear was that the king would be made, as George II put it, as
‘Hanoverian Elector . . . [to] pay for the King of England’. British ministries, in turn, feared that Britain would have to pay for the elector of
Hanover at the peace agreement. It is certainly true that at key moments
in the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, French
strategists regarded the Electorate as a hostage to be traded for losses
overseas.
Yet as Hamish Scott shows in a highly original analysis, ‘the direct
military threat which France posed was consistently exaggerated by
British statesmen’. Large French formations had never before operated
so far from their bases and the logistical obstacles were considerable. If
one also takes into account the political costs of violating the constitution
of the Holy Roman Empire, French willingness to countenance the
neutralisation of Hanover rather than its straightforward occupation
becomes more understandable. Scott concludes that practical considerations prevented the French from applying more than temporary military
pressure for most of the eighteenth century. It was only the revolutionary

transformation in warfare after 1792 which changed this calculus and
cleared the way for longer-term occupations under Napoleon.
The accession of George III in 1760 is often taken to mark the beginning of a completely new phase in which the importance of the Personal
Union was played down by a monarch who ‘gloried in the name of Britain
[sic]’. It is certainly true that George III broke with the tradition of royal
visits to Germany; and the Hanoverian issue lost much of the political
currency it had enjoyed for more than four decades since 1714. Yet, as
Torsten Riotte shows, George III took a keen interest in the welfare of
the Electorate. In some ways, George was more of a German prince than
his grandfather: he sought to protect Hanover not so much by Britishsponsored great-power alliances as through the institutions of the Holy
Roman Empire. Riotte’s George III is therefore much more ‘German’
than the conventional picture allows.
The German interests and identity of the royal family are the theme of
Clarissa Campbell Orr’s chapter on the dynastic context. She adopts a
broad – ‘polycentric’ – approach which looks not just at the ruler but also
at the consort, siblings, offspring, their respective marriage partners and
the sometimes competing strategies of the elder branch of the Guelph
family. This enables her not only to stress the very contingent nature of
dynastic permutations, but also to bring out the existence of a coherent
Hanoverian dynastic strategy designed to promote British interests and


8

Brendan Simms

enhance the security of the Electorate. Yet if George II – who married his
daughters off to actual or prospective British allies – was relatively successful in this regard, Campbell Orr shows George III to have been a
dynastic failure. He proved unable to marry off his thirteen unruly offspring in any systematic way. All the same, George retained a keen
interest in the German dynastic scene. This was reinforced by the activities of his own consort, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, whom

Campbell Orr shows to have been a quietly determined ‘lobbyist’ during
the War of the Bavarian Succession.
Nor did royal interest in the Personal Union die with George III in
1820. The Prince Regent and later King George IV was in close physical
and political touch with the Hanoverian envoy in London, Count
Mu¨nster, as the chapter by Mijndert Bertram shows. Both shared a firmly
conservative outlook. At the same time, with the dispatch of the duke of
Cambridge as governor general, the monarchy was represented in person
in Hanover for the first time since the recall of the Prince of Wales in
1728, albeit by a cipher since Mu¨nster continued to pull all the strings
from London. The links were more than just political: Bertram reminds
us that Hanover functioned as a ‘bridgehead for British trade in
Germany’, which received preferential, though unreciprocated, tariff
treatment.
Moreover, as Christopher Thompson shows, Hanover ‘remained a
significant foreign policy factor’ in Britain after the Napoleonic War,
and thus also played a major role in high politics. George IV was able to
use his Hanoverian diplomatic and intelligence service – which by all
accounts was far superior to the British one – to support British strategy
and to bypass the hated Canning. Moreover, as Christopher Thompson
adds as a parting shot, the Personal Union enjoyed a controversial afterlife in nineteenth-century Britain: so long as Queen Victoria remained
childless, there was every prospect that her sybaritic and (allegedly)
despotic uncle, the king of Hanover, would renew the Personal Union
on her death.
The emerging picture is of an eighteenth-century Britain which was
very much a European state, strategically, dynastically, confessionally,
intellectually linked to the continent. The German connection also profoundly influenced many spheres of what one might otherwise regard as
purely domestic politics. Hanoverians were powerful players in British
high politics not just in the early eighteenth century but, periodically,
during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period and, as the case of

Mu¨nster shows, well into the second decade of the nineteenth century
as well. We are also left with a strong sense of the contingency of British
history. As Jeremy Black points out, it was the dynastic accident of a


Hanover: the missing dimension

9

regular supply of legitimate protestant male heirs from the Hanoverians,
which spared Britain a return to the travails of the seventeenth century,
and indeed the eighteenth-century wars of succession. The Personal
Union, Clarissa Campbell Orr reminds us, ‘began partly and ended solely
for dynastic purposes’. Had it not so concluded, Mijndert Bertram
muses, the history of nineteenth-century Germany would have looked
very different. For in 1866, Bismarck would have come up not only
against the king of Hanover, who proved intractable enough, but also
against the king of Great Britain (as he would have been).
Of course, this volume can only be a first step and it is by no means
comprehensive. Ideally, it should have included a systematic discussion
of the Hanoverian faction at court; of the role of Hanover in the formation
of British identity; and the ramifications of the Personal Union within the
framework of composite statehood. These themes could only be hinted
at: they require further investigation and elaboration. All this volume can
hope to do is to remind historians of the importance of the Hanoverian
dimension and to suggest an agenda for further research.


2

Hanoverian nexus: Walpole
and the Electorate
Jeremy Black

Much of the problem in assessing the implications of the Hanoverian
relationship comes from the tension between considering short periods
and, on the other hand, assessing the relationship over the longer term.
The former appears the most desirable approach, because it restricts
coverage to a period for which it is simpler to carry out the necessary
archival research. It is also flawed, however, both because it limits the
experience of contemporaries and because it removes the comparative
element, which is valuable for scholarly analysis, just as it was useful for
contemporary debate about foreign policy. ‘Walpole and Hanover’ as a
topic provides a good instance of this. While it focuses attention on the
failure in existing treatments of Walpole to devote much attention to
Hanover, this approach underrates the importance of considering
Walpole at least in part in the light of developments after his fall from
office in 1742. Not only did Walpole, from then 1st earl of Orford,
maintain links with George II and also continue to influence the
Pelham brothers until his death in 1745, but, in order to assess Walpole
it is necessary to consider his policies in the light of the events of subsequent years as they provide a way of probing the alternatives. Hence this
chapter closes in 1760. The accession of George III led, at least in the
short term, to a different degree of royal commitment to the Electorate,
and, certainly, to the cause of its aggrandisement, while the political
parameters within which Walpole had operated – the relatively assured
ascendancy of the Old Corps Whigs – came to a close. The period can
therefore be seen as a unity, but it is one in which the role of Hanover has
not received systematic treatment, a task that this volume valuably sets
out to attempt.1
1

For earlier discussion, G. C. Gibbs, ‘English attitudes towards Hanover and the
Hanoverian succession in the first half of the eighteenth century’, in: A. M. Birke and
K. Kluxen, eds., England und Hannover (Munich, 1986), pp. 33–51; J. M. Black, ‘Hanover
and British foreign policy 1714–60’, English Historical Review, 120 (2005), 303–39; and
Black, Continental commitment. Britain, Hanover and interventionism 1714–1793 (London,
2005).

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