HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/people/george-i Wed, 22 Nov 2023 11:19:47 GMT en hourly 1 The woman who gave birth to rabbits? How Mary Toft's hoax captured Georgian society https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/mary-toft-rabbit-birth-hoax-when-why-real/ Sat, 29 Aug 2020 09:08:33 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/mary-toft-rabbit-birth-hoax-when-why-real/ Karen Harvey speaks to BBC History Magazine's Ellie Cawthorne about her new book, which examines what a bizarre rabbit-based deception reveals about politics and prurience in 18th-century society Ellie Cawthorne: In 1726, a woman named Mary Toft perpetrated an extraordinary hoax that lasted several weeks and captured the imagination of the British public. What did it involve?

Karen Harvey: Essentially, Mary Toft claimed to have given birth to rabbits – an extraordinary claim that was supported by several people for several weeks. It turns out, of course, that it didn't quite happen as described because, spoiler alert, women can't gestate rabbits.

The trigger for the whole hoax was an incident that occurred when Toft, a poor agricultural day-labourer, was working in a field near Godalming in Surrey. She spotted a couple of rabbits and decided to chase one. Although she failed to catch it, the idea of that rabbit wouldn’t leave her head. Toft was pregnant at the time and a short while afterwards, she reported undergoing what was clearly a miscarriage. This went on for some weeks, and when it was concluded, she experienced a seemingly ‘monstrous birth’ in which she began to pass strange animal parts. Various doctors examined Toft, and then transported her to London for further study. She stayed there for a few weeks, during which time she appeared to give birth to several sections of animal flesh.

The whole thing collapsed when a worker at the bagnio [a type of lodging house] where Toft was staying admitted he had been asked by her family to provide them with rabbits. Several witnesses then confessed that they’d had similar requests. It’s clear that those animals were killed, skinned, dissected and then used in the hoax.

What interested you about the case?

Historians have previously studied the rabbit-breeder hoax from the perspective of the doctors, the public debate it triggered or the satire it produced. They haven’t really asked why and how a woman like Mary Toft would become involved in this kind of event. I wanted to shine a light on the woman at the heart of the case. If you do that, I think you can start to unpick some of the social, political and cultural conditions of the early 18th century. Themes begin to emerge, such as social exclusion, unrest and political tension, and the position of women.

You argue that rabbits were an incendiary political symbol at the time – how so?

Yes, rabbits were highly controversial animals at this time. They had long been a symbol of the wealthy, and many were still the property of the elite, valuable for their fur and meat. They were also often a source of tension in communities, because landowners’ rabbits would escape their warrens onto common land and eat the crops that the commoners might be harvesting or grazing their animals on. Rabbits really are a pest if you don’t own them. But taking or killing them was tantamount to theft, and was harshly punished.

As such, a number of protests across England at this time revolved around rabbits – as well as fish, deer and other animals – as a symbol of elite privilege. They were seen to represent the power of landowners as opposed to the complete lack of rights of the agricultural or rural poor, and became a focus for the grievances of those excluded from established forms of power-holding.

As well as providing some interesting background to the case, this is important context for Mary Toft’s family specifically. I discovered that her husband, Joshua, was actually involved in such a protest. Shortly before she hatched the hoax, Joshua took part in a mass trespass on a fish pond in Godalming with around 30 other men. I believe we can quite reasonably connect those two things. And I think contemporaries did.

Mary Toft described chasing the rabbit because she couldn’t afford to buy one, which suggests to me that she may well have been conscious of the political punch the hoax was going to have. In this society, a poor individual, particularly a woman, didn’t have many resources at their disposal to engage in politics and in public debate. One reading of the ‘rabbit-breeder’ hoax is that it was actually a very eloquent political protest on the part of an otherwise powerless poor woman, and I think there is evidence for that case.

Several notable doctors examined Toft. Why were they taken in by her story for so long?

The doctors involved in this case weren’t quacks. They were highly regarded and highly qualified: very reputable medical men, some of whom even had a direct link to the royal household. But the fact that they took Toft’s claims seriously for so long doesn’t mean they were ignorant. Instead, it’s a demonstration of the Enlightenment in progress. These doctors were invested in cutting-edge scientific method and open-minded debate, which meant that they didn’t want to discount anything until they could prove beyond doubt that it was a hoax. So they underwent a series of scientific steps, conducting experiments on the various animal parts Toft expelled. It was only once a mass of evidence had been brought together and a consensus had been reached that they felt able to dismiss it as a hoax.

It’s important to remember that the idea of monstrous births was still a live debate at the time. Many respected intellectuals believed in the theory of the maternal imagination: the idea that a pregnant woman’s emotional responses to something she saw or felt could imprint physically onto her unborn child. For example, a woman might think of a peach and her child would be born with a reddened birthmark. That’s quite different from saying that chasing a rabbit could turn a woman’s foetus into a bunny, but it’s on the same continuum.

What motivated Toft to undertake the fraud?

Now there’s an interesting conundrum. An easy answer might be that she did it for money. But the problem with that explanation is that no money appears to have ever changed hands. If the ambition of Toft and those around her was to get rich, then the scheme was a complete failure. I think if they were solely after money, they’d have set the whole thing up differently – large groups of people visited Toft both in Guildford and London, and her family could have charged for the privilege.

So we have to look elsewhere for an explanation. The closest thing we get to an insider’s account of the hoax are three statements Toft gave to a doctor called James Douglas. From these sources, I make the case that she was persuaded, perhaps even forced, to go through with this difficult series of fake births by the women around her. Pregnancy and childbirth were still very female-dominated processes at the time, and Mary was surrounded throughout by older and more authoritative women – most notably her mother-in-law. She was clearly intimidated by them, and in her final statement, when she was asked who had put her up to it, Mary’s answer was unequivocal: her mother-in-law.

Mary was a young wife and mother living with her husband’s family, and had suffered an awful miscarriage as the hoax started to develop. She had failed in her reproductive duty, and I think that might have been at the heart of this affair for the women around her. I think that this tells us something about women’s reproductive roles and the ways female-dominated social spheres operated at the time.

So Toft didn't have much control over how the hoax went?

Even though she was at the centre of this maelstrom, my take is that she had barely any agency over what was happening to her and her body. Just think about the physical nature of the hoax. Without going into too much detail, Toft had animal parts inserted into her body and those parts were forced out in a process that went on for several weeks. It was a painful, uncomfortable and very risky affair. I find it hard to believe that a woman would do that willingly, all by herself. The evidence suggests that she was frightened and felt pressured at every turn. Once you start to read the historical documents, you see that at the centre of this was a woman who was almost entirely powerless, which is incredibly sad.

What does the public clamour that surrounded Mary Toft tell us about 18th-century society?

I think it exposes an undercurrent of smutty, bawdy humour running beneath the polite gentility we often associate with the 18th century. The sensation around this seemingly miraculous event tells us that there was a tremendous hunger for the extraordinary. Even after Toft had been exposed as a fraud, people still went to see her imprisoned in the Westminster House of Correction.

But there was definitely an unpleasant tenor to some of that interest. Mary became the focus of some unsavoury and rather nasty press, and there were incredibly prurient discussions around her body. The case was ripe for all kinds of innuendo – it provided great comedic ammunition for satirists, and the public lapped it up. This was partly down to blatant misogyny, but the fact that Toft was poor was also tremendously significant in the way she was treated by the press. When the hoax was exposed, they turned on her with vitriol. Where she had once been seen as a pitiable figure, now she was wicked. She was seen as a threat, both to the reputable doctors she made a mockery of, but also to the elites more generally – even to King George I himself. It was widely known that he’d had a real interest in the case, so its exposure posed a potential embarrassment for the monarchy.

Where did all of this leave Mary Toft? What happened to her after her deception was exposed?

When it all unravelled, public feeling against Toft turned vicious and she was imprisoned for imposture. She was eventually released without charge, and it’s very difficult to trace what happened to her after that. When she left the House of Correction she was reported to have been considerably weakened by the whole experience. Within a year she went on to have another child, but then she seems to have fallen back into a certain amount of obscurity. Interestingly, though, there is a remarkable entry on the parish register recording her burial. On a page where everybody else is just referred to by their name, Toft is named as the “Imposteress Rabbit Breeder”. This reputation clearly followed her, and even 40 years after the case there was an enduring memory of the hoax and her role in it.

If we look at early 18th-century Britain through the lens of the Mary Toft hoax, what kind of society is revealed?

The picture that I take away from this case is one of a society riven with inequality and social conflict. Part of that hinged on tensions between social ranks. But another set of inequities and hierarchies were also thrown into that already unequal world: gender.

In the rabbit-breeder hoax, we see all of these tensions played out between elite men (whether the doctors or those who represented the criminal justice system) and a poor woman. For me, it’s those social tensions that are really at the heart of this extraordinary affair.

Karen Harvey is professor of cultural history at the University of Birmingham. She has published widely on gender and the body in 18th-century Britain, and is director of Birmingham Eighteenth Century Centre

The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England by Karen Harvey (Oxford University Press, 224 pages, £16.99) is out now.

This article was first published in the February 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine

]]> Taxing Catholics: how one Georgian government targeted a religious community https://www.historyextra.com/membership/taxing-catholics-how-one-georgian-government-targeted-a-religious-community/ Tue, 08 Sep 2015 04:00:00 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/taxing-catholics-how-one-georgian-government-targeted-a-religious-community/ When the British government discovered a plot to kill George I, it responded by demanding money from an entire religious community. Ted Vallance describes what happened next... In April 1722, Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole received news of a plot to restore the exiled Stuart dynasty to the British throne. The conspirators, a horrified Walpole learned, hoped to seize power through a series of co-ordinated local risings in England. Meanwhile, leading Jacobites, such as the exiled Irish soldier the Duke of Ormond, would land invasion forces in Scotland and south-west England.

Walpole acted fast, ordering the opening of post to smoke out further evidence of the conspiracy. However, it was not until the summer that he discovered any substantial evidence of the plot, in the form of a series of letters penned by Christopher Layer, a Norfolk lawyer who acted as an agent for the Jacobite lord William North. These letters contained detailed plans for the rebellion and the assassination of King George.

The authorities arrested Layer and other leading plotters – including Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester, after whom the plot would derive its name – and had the lawyer hanged, drawn and quartered for treason on 17 May 1723 (his severed head was reportedly later sold to the antiquary Richard Rawlinson).

Yet Layer’s intransigence – he repeatedly refused to implicate his co-conspirators, despite having the possibility of a reprieve repeatedly dangled before him – meant that there was not enough evidence to put Atterbury himself on trial. Instead, Walpole forced through parliament a special act designed to inflict severe punishments less than death on an individual deemed guilty of serious offences. As a result, Atterbury was stripped of his bishopric and sentenced to perpetual banishment.

Walpole’s prosecution of the plot, however, did not end with the punishment of the leading Jacobites. Habeas Corpus – a writ that was often seen to offer protection from arbitrary imprisonment – probably pre-dated Magna Carta, and was enshrined in statute law in 1679. Walpole, however, successfully suspended this important legal safeguard on the grounds of national security. He also gave the military greater powers to guard against further invasion attempts and domestic insurrections.

Most extraordinary of all was how Walpole decreed that these new powers should be paid for – through a £100,000 tax on Catholics’ estates. The legislation laid out fixed sums that each county was required to raise as part of their contribution to the levy – and any Catholics who refused the oaths of allegiance, supremacy and abjuration (denying the title of the Stuart Pretender to the throne) were deemed liable to pay.

Enemies of the state

The tax was given royal assent in May 1723. Yet by then Catholics were already bearing the brunt of existing punitive legislation. Local officials were soon gathering lists of ‘disaffected persons’ (a description usually interpreted as being synonymous with Catholicism), and seizing and itemising Catholic holdings of horses and weapons.

While the Catholic tax did become law, the bill faced significant opposition in parliament, passing by only 16 votes. Historian Eveline Cruickshanks has suggested that the government may have deliberately delayed reintroducing the bill – to a point when numbers in the house had thinned – as a way of overcoming parliamentary opposition. One Tory MP claimed that “had not many of our friends been gone into ye country… we had rejected it”.

Opponents of the tax pointed out that it seemed unfair to penalise Catholics when those involved in Atterbury’s plot had largely been Anglican Tories (opponents of the ruling Whig administration in parliament). Others felt that the measure bore unflattering comparison with the system of ‘compounding’ and ‘sequestration’ used by the parliamentarian regime to exploit the estate of royalists. Some Whigs objected to the measure too as an assault on liberty of conscience, often seen as one of the key principles that the revolution of 1688 (when the Protestant William III and II had overthrown the Catholic James II and VII to become king of England, Scotland and Ireland) had sought to defend.

Yet the government minister Lord Carteret was having none of it, arguing that the tax was perfectly compatible with religious liberty. In a series of letters to the British ambassador Lord Polwarth, Carteret declared that it was “known throughout Europe that there is nothing so alien to the spirit of this nation than persecution for the sake of religion.” But the tax and other penal legislation against Catholics had been made neither to “force their consciences or to persecute them”, but because Catholics had been involved in conspiracies and rebellions against the crown. Even when Catholics had not been implicated in plotting, they had still withheld recognising the government by swearing allegiance “which cannot be justified by any principle of religion”.

Carteret’s letters defending the tax were intended to justify the measure to Britain’s European Catholic allies. However, while Catholics had been involved in the 1715 Jacobite rebellion (when James Francis Edward Stuart’s attempt to regain the throne for the House of Stuart ended in bloody failure), many Catholics were prepared to swear allegiance to George I. The problem was that they were not prepared to take the oath of supremacy or the declaration against transubstantion incorporated into the so-called ‘Test Acts’, which involved repudiating the authority of the pope and core elements of Catholic doctrine.

The difficult situation Catholics found themselves in was explained clearly in a statement made by Henry Englefield of Shinfield, Berkshire in the wake of the 1715 rebellion when required to register his estate. Englefield stated that he would “willingly take an oath of fidelity to King George” but “the real presence of the body and blood of our saviour in the sacrament of the Eucharist was always believed by the holy Catholic church”.

Catholics continued to protest their loyalty to the crown, among them Edward Elwall of Wolverhampton, who in 1724 declared: “God almighty bless King George and all his royal family… All good Christians love the king as does Edward Elwall.”

As the research of Eamon Duffy and Gabriel Glickman has shown, these individual declarations of loyalty fitted in with broader schemes by the Catholic leadership after 1715 to devise an oath of allegiance that would be acceptable both to the Catholic community and to the government. These proposals were given short shrift by Walpole, who told a deputation of Catholic lords that he “found fault with their religion which procured interest abroad, and it was fit they should suffer for it”.

And they certainly did suffer: Nicholas Blundell of Little Crosby, Lancashire recorded that the “Grand Tax”, as he called it, had cost him £14 17s 2d (about £2,000 in modern terms). Despite this, historians have usually viewed the £100,000 tax as a failure, as did many of Walpole’s contemporaries. Sir Richard Coxe warned the prime minister that the “difficulties we are meeting with in laying the tax on papists are insuperable without directions from above”. The tax never raised the anticipated amount and counties were slow to return payments. The last to pay, Devon, only did so in 1743, two decades after the tax had first been imposed.

Yet the intention of the tax, as Walpole revealed in his response to the Catholic peers, was not simply to milk a religious community for money. He wanted primarily to exert pressure on Catholics, especially the aristocracy and gentry, and deter foreign states from harbouring exiled Jacobites.

The records of the tax made at a local level reveal that in this respect it was highly effective. Yet, returns of ‘papists’, such as those for the City of London held at the London Metropolitan Archives, reveal that it wasn’t just the wealthy who suffered. Charles Matison of Bishopsgate Ward, London was entered into the lists despite being of “peasable behavier and of little or noe substance suposed”.

Women as well as men were included in these lists and, as the use of descriptions such as “lives very handsom[e]” or “in mean circumstances” implied, the state used the evidence of informers, as well as existing tax records, to identify Catholics and calculate their wealth. The pressure on the Catholic community was such that Bishop Bonaventura Giffard feared that his co-religionists would be reduced to an “extremity of want”.

However, the £100,000 tax, as with other punitive laws against Catholics, operated, as the chief justice Lord Mansfield later put it, in terrorem, through the threat of implementation rather than via actual enforcement. The aim was to subdue the Catholic community and make it do the British government’s bidding, not to annihilate it.

The readiness of many Catholics to pledge obedience to George I reveals the difficulty of viewing, as government ministers such as Carteret did, England’s small Catholic community as a dangerous ‘fifth column’. Rather, the refusal of Walpole’s government to countenance the loyalist overtures made by leading Catholics left the mostly peaceful Catholic community excluded from English public life for another 50 years. It is a historic reminder, perhaps, of the difficulties that can arise from equating the actions of a few individuals with an entire religious group.

Pope-burnings, land grabs and “half-citizens”

Five ways in which Catholics were made to suffer in Georgian Britain

 

A war on worship

The 18th century began badly for England’s Catholic community. In 1700, ‘An Act for Further Preventing the Growth of Popery’ systematised existing anti-Catholic legislation, continuing Elizabethan and Jacobean restrictions on Catholic worship, and on educating children in the Catholic religion. The act was enforced via a system of payments to informers.

 

Prison awaits

Even pieces of legislation that appeared to take the heat off Catholics were in fact intended to do the opposite. The translation of the death penalty to life imprisonment for Catholic priests was really designed to ensure its effectiveness: it was believed that more judges would convict Catholic priests if a custodial rather than a capital sentence was imposed.

 

Paying double

Post-revolutionary laws also targeted Catholics economically: the Land Tax first imposed in 1692 was levied at a double rate on Catholic estates. After the 1715 rebellion, Catholics were forced to register their property in land, and those judged popish ‘recusants’ could be subject to the confiscation of two-thirds of their estate.

 

Chapels under attack

Although these penal laws were rarely enforced, their impact on Catholics was far from minimal. As historian Colin Haydon has argued, they left Catholics as “half-citizens”, while the state’s hostile attitude towards them gave anti-Catholic prejudice and violence (such as a series of attacks on Lancashire chapels in 1715) the stamp of official approval.

 

Riots erupt

Fed by the enduring literary tradition of Protestant ‘martyrology’ and by festivals such as the ‘pope-burnings’ held in English towns every 5 November, ‘anti-popery’ remained a powerful force in public life. This was starkly revealed in the wake of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which removed the penalties of the 1700 legislation for Catholics who were prepared to swear a modified oath of allegiance to the crown. In 1780, following a demonstration against the act, the Gordon Riots erupted in London, leaving nearly 300 dead and 200 wounded.

In context: The Atterbury Plot

Though he had ruled Britain for seven years, in 1721 King George I’s grip on the throne remained far from secure. Ever since the Protestant William of Orange had ousted the Catholic Stuart James II as king in 1688, the so-called Jacobites had dreamed of returning a Stuart ruler to the throne – and had launched a series of failed uprisings to achieve that aim. In the early 1720s, they continued to cast a long shadow over the monarchy.

The year 1721 was also a perilous one for Britain’s Whig government, which fiercely opposed the prospect of a Catholic king. Having just presided over the ‘South Sea Bubble’ financial crisis – when stocks in the South Sea Company crashed, ruining thousands of investors – it found itself deeply unpopular with the British public.

In an attempt to capitalise on this disaffection, a group of conspirators – a combination of Jacobites and Tories (the Whigs’ opponents in parliament) –  conceived the Atterbury plot to assassinate George I and replace him with James II’s son, James Francis Edward Stuart.

Yet, before they could strike, the Duke of Orleans, regent of France, revealed to Lord Carteret, secretary of state for the south, that the Jacobites had asked him to send 3,000 men in support of a coup d’etat. As a result, the plot collapsed.

Ted Vallance is professor of early modern British political culture at the University of Roehampton

This article was first published in the September 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> The delightfully dysfunctional Georgians https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-delightfully-dysfunctional-georgians/ Tue, 20 May 2014 17:42:33 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-delightfully-dysfunctional-georgians/ The Tudors might steal the limelight, but the reigns of Georges I and II were just as scandalous – and key to Britain's emergence as a global power – according to Lucy Worsley Sometimes it’s a depressing business being a historian of the 18th century. It seems that the Tudors, the Victorians and the Nazis get all the glory, with their beheadings, bicycles and frequent appearances in the National Curriculum. It's time for Georgian monarchs to fight back.

In reality, though, the Georgians don’t need to fight: they charm their way into our affections with their love of ice cream, tea parties, gin, classical architecture, satire and sparkling fashions. They experienced the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as the birth of the novel and the office of prime minister. ‘The Georgian Age’, for many people, is synonymous with the pleasing images of the stately homes of England and Keira Knightley as the Duchess of Devonshire.

While the Georgian aesthetic is known and loved, though, the Georges themselves, our Hanoverian monarchs, evoke a less positive response. All too often George I and George II are seen as grumpy, German and indistinguishable. The Horrible Histories TV series covers the Georges with its celebrated boy-band performance of ‘Born 2 Rule’, with “Georges One, Three, Four and Two” singing about how they were “born to rule over you… just because our blood was blue”. The song depicts the Hanoverians as unattractively “bad”, “sad”, “mad” and “fat”. And they’ve been neglected by historians too. George II, in particular, “can rightly be described as a forgotten king,” says his most recent biographer, Andrew Thompson.

In reality, George I and George II were just as excitingly dysfunctional as Henry VIII. Theirs was truly a dynasty, with plenty of children, giving us enough characters to fill out a whole soap opera. They were also reasonably good kings. They weren’t flashy or showy, but under them Britain could truly claim to have become ‘Great’.

George I, born Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, was an unlikely king of Great Britain. He only came into line for the throne with the passing of the Act of Settlement in 1701. This was parliament’s solution for what to do if Queen Anne died with no surviving heirs. She did just that, in 1714, having gone through 17 ill-fated pregnancies including many miscarriages, all in a futile attempt to produce a future king.

Fate’s finger fell upon Georg because his mother Sophia, Electress of Hanover, a direct descendent of James I and VI, turned out to be Anne’s nearest Protestant relative. Roughly 50 nearer relatives of Anne’s were passed over, as the Act of Settlement had decreed, due to their Catholicism. Sophia herself would have been Britain’s queen if she had not died only a few weeks before her distant cousin Anne, meaning that the crown went to her son instead.

Georg Ludwig ruled the little Electorate of Hanover, so-called because he and his fellow electors had a say in electing their collective overlord, the Holy Roman Emperor. His family had recently risen rapidly up through the ranks of their fellow princely rulers through canny marriages. George I was known by some of his British subjects as ‘Lucky George’ because of his unexpected inheritance of the British crown at the age of 54, but he was in a pretty lucky position already. Once in Britain, he would openly pine for his homeland, and take every opportunity to return.

When Georg arrived in London in September 1714 to be crowned George I, he was seemingly accompanied by his two German mistresses – one fat, one thin – known as the Elephant and the Maypole. Or at least, this is what the British wanted to believe. This was not the least of many communication problems between George I’s subjects and their new ruler. As George had learned French, German and Latin before even embarking upon English, it was understandable that he spoke it haltingly, and in a thick German accent. In fact, the truth about George I’s supposed mistresses is stranger than fiction, for the ‘fat’ mistress was really his illegitimate half-sister.

The transplantation of a tight-knit group of Germans into the heart of the British court was bound to cause jealousy and xenophobia. George’s German supporters were seen to monopolise all the best jobs. One particularly striking example was Mohammed von Königstreu (literally, ‘True to the King’), the monarch’s Turkish valet, who had followed George across the North Sea. His duties ranged from helping the king to dress in the morning to treating his hemorrhoids. Content with his Turk, George failed to appoint a groom of the stool, traditionally one of the most valuable and intimate court offices. He therefore disappointed a number of would-be grooms among the British courtiers. Incensed, they put it about that the king “keeps his Turk for abominable uses”.

In the light of these sexual slurs, the reality of George’s intimate life is a little disappointing: he had just his single, skinny, long-term official mistress, Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenburg. But there had been fireworks in the past: in Hanover in the 1690s, George had divorced his wife for adultery and locked her up in a remote German castle. More torrid accounts of the affair claim that he’d had his wife’s Swedish lover assassinated, and the corpse thrown into the river outside the family’s palace in the city of Hanover.

It was far too good a story to be forgotten, especially as George I arrived in Britain with a notable gap by his side where his wife should have been, and it left him with a lasting image problem. This was somewhat typical. Much of the initial attraction of the Hanoverian dynasty rested upon not who they were, but who they weren’t. They weren’t Catholic. They weren’t absolutist and despotic like the French kings. William Thackeray (a hundred years later) thought that George I, “cynical, and selfish, as he was […] was better than a king out of St Germains, with the French king’s orders in his pocket, and a swarm of Jesuits in train”.

The nearest blood claimant to the British throne was James Stuart, the would-be King James III, who had to gnash his teeth in France while George I peacefully strolled into his new realm. His supporters, the Jacobites, waged a propaganda war, claiming that their man was the truly British alternative to these interlopers from Hanover, a place associated with yokels and the farming of turnips. During the new king’s coronation a spectator was arrested for brandishing a turnip on a stick to make exactly that point.

George I also, in terms of personality, did very little to help himself. Because he was shy, his new subjects did not really feel that they knew him, and so gossip filled the gaps.

Another way in which the king’s influence has been minimised is through the argument that he was the tool of his Whig politicians. “The Whigs said George I was king,” says WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman’s old favourite 1066 and All That (1930). The Whiggish argument runs that Britain, and particularly its system of constitutional government, was the wonder of the western world, somewhat at the expense of its king. This proposition that there was a uniquely British respect for liberty implies that the Georgian monarchs were not very powerful, engaged or even fluent in English. It’s a well-worn canard that George I had to communicate with his first minister, Sir Robert Walpole, in bad Latin, as their best common language. In fact George I did read English newspapers, and is recorded as having spoken in English. More recently, Hannah Smith’s Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (2009) pointed out that the Hanoverians were far more warmly welcomed by the British people than the somewhat snide accounts of their courtiers would suggest.

One boon that the Hanoverians presented to their new subjects was the endless amusing gossip provided by their private lives. The problem with the Tudors, and then the Stuarts, had been a lack of heirs. Now, with such a fecund family on the throne, there were almost too many of them. Each Georgian king in turn had a terrible relationship with his successor-in-waiting, his eldest son.

And all this was revealed in a press that was much more free than in the more absolute days of the 17th century. Due to an administrative mistake in the 1690s, parliament failed to renew the Licensing Act that had controlled the press, and one result was a profusion of newspapers, pamphlets and parody. No wonder that Voltaire, fleeing the restrictive, patron-based literary sphere of France, found Britain a haven for free speech. Writers rejoiced. This was the age of satire.

George I’s notoriously poor relationship with his son was partly a clash of personality: he was as taciturn as his son was volatile and passionate. But their personal difficulties were heightened by politics. Figures of influence flocked to the rival court of the Prince of Wales rather than his father.

And yet, as so often with the Hanoverians, there was an upside to this too. The very presence of rival camps within the court – that of the king and his son – allowed the concept of ‘His Majesty’s loyal opposition’ to be born. You didn’t need to take up arms to express displeasure with the regime. You could just go to the prince’s parties instead. And because both George I and George II loved to go back to Hanover for summer holidays, their politicians had to get on with government even when their king was away. The concept of cabinet responsibility emerged in these frequent royal absences.

One of the most epic episodes of Hanoverian dysfunctionality took place at Hampton Court in 1737. George II, by then king for a decade, was at loggerheads with his son Frederick Prince of Wales. Frederick, whose wife, Augusta, was pregnant, was determined to deprive his hated parents of their traditional right of attending the royal birth. “At her labour I positively will be,” George II’s wife Caroline had said. “Let her lie-in where she will.”

But when his teenage wife’s labour pains began at Hampton Court in the middle of the night on Sunday 31 July, Prince Frederick bundled her into a carriage and drove her through the night to St James’s Palace. Augusta “cried and begged not to be carried away in her painful condition”. Frederick’s response was to use such force to hold her down in the coach that he hurt his back, while his wife’s skirts were soaked with “the filthy inundations which attend these circumstances”. The baby was finally born in the early morning at St James’s Palace. A lack of preparation at the sumptuous royal dwelling meant that the little girl had to be wrapped in a table napkin.

The king and his son exchanged indignant letters that angrily complained about each other’s conduct, all of which were very entertainingly published in The Gentleman’s Magazine. This was high theatre. George II’s perceived cruelty to his son, and his neglect of his popular queen, Caroline, in favour of mistresses, meant that his reputation sank low. A Thames waterman travelling past Hampton Court by boat yelled curses at the king “and all his Hanover dogs” as the monarch walked in the palace’s riverside garden.

And yet despite all the sniping, George II stayed secure on his throne. The troublesome Frederick ended up predeceasing his father and George II came into his own, as a fiery-tempered commander at the victorious battle of Dettingen in 1743, part of the War of the Austrian Succession. He also took decisive action to defeat a Jacobite rebellion (forever to his disfavour with the people of Scotland), sending his second, soldier son, the ‘Butcher’ Duke of Cumberland, to dispatch Bonnie Prince Charlie and his rebellious Highlanders at the battle of Culloden in 1746. After this dramatic engagement, he must have felt at last secure: “I never saw the king in such glee,” one courtier said. As Andrew Thompson puts it, “effective leaders are not necessarily nice people”.

But how effective was George II? The 18th century has often been painted as the age of the people – A Polite and Commercial People (1992), as Paul Longford’s influential social history had it (although he also charted the ways in which the Georgians were unruly, sentimental and often poverty-stricken). There is a beguiling narrative of the 18th century – recently respun in the British Library’s  Georgians Revealed exhibition – in which something like a middle class pushed forwards all the key developments in art, architecture, culture and music, while the court itself was a barren backwater, presided over by the anti-culture George II, who would claim, in his German accent, that he hated all “boets and bainters”.

Yet this is to overlook the fact that the Hanoverians were enthusiastic participants in culture. Both George I and George II, for example, often visited London’s theatres and operas alongside their subjects. Indeed, Caroline, the wife of George II, was a royal patron of intellectuals on a scale not seen since the clever king Charles II. She came from a German tradition of lively, intelligent, liberal royal women that was far removed from the British approach that gave us the poorly educated and relatively unimpressive Queens Mary and Anne.

The Hanoverians may not have exactly been splashing the cash that drove the cultural life of the country, but they certainly created the conditions in which it was possible for it to thrive.

Their courtiers may well have thought them dull and generations of students may have struggled to remember which king was which. Yet these uncharismatic Hanoverian monarchs were certainly unafraid to fight when it mattered. While Culloden and the profits of the slave trade form dark stains on their reigns, it was on their watch that many of the institutions and attitudes of what we now recognise as modern British were made.

Complex, colourful, contradictory and conflict-filled, the Georgian age has so many good stories. It’s surprising that those of the individual Hanoverian monarchs are not better known.

Lucy Worsley is chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, as well as a successful history writer and broadcaster

This article was first published in the May 2014 issue of BBC History Magazine

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