HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2025-05-14T10:27:39.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00George II: 8 facts about the British king and German electorhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/george-ii-facts-hanover-british-king-german-elector-rule-reputation/2022-01-11T16:18:48.000ZThe man destined to be the second Hanoverian king George Augustus, or Georg August in German, was the only son of the future elector of Hanover and George I. A name is essentially the only thing the two men shared, as they had a fractious relationship – the elder George banished his son from court and kept his children, which he had with his wife Caroline, under guardianship.

George succeeded his father in 1727 and ruled as King of Great Britain, as well as a prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire, until his death in 1760. He was not overly popular among his subjects due to his periods away from Britain, so it was up to the queen to govern as regent. But he exerted his influence over foreign policy as Britain became involved in the Wars of Jenkins' Ear and Austrian Succession during his reign, and he defended the monarchy against the Jacobite rebellion of 1745.

George II: key dates and facts

Born: 10 November 1683, in Hanover, Germany Died: 25 October 1760, in London, England  Reigned: King of Great Britain and Ireland, Prince-Elector of Hanover, 1727-60 Parents: George I of Great Britain and Sophia Dorothea of Celle Spouse: Caroline of Ansbach (m1705–37) Children: Frederick, Prince of Wales, and seven others Religion: Protestant  Succeeded by: His grandson, George III

Here are eight facts about the king and elector, George II…

 

He is the last foreign-born British monarch

George Augustus was born on 10 November 1683 to George Louis of Brunswick-Luneberg and his wife Sophia Dorothea of Celle in the German city of Hanover. To date, he is the last British monarch not born in Britain. His eventual successor would be his grandson, another George, who was born in 1738 in Norfolk House, London. Every monarch since has been born in or around the capital, except for George VI (r 1936-52), who was born at Sandringham.

 

George’s first language was not English… or German

Growing up in Hanover, it is unsurprising that George’s first words weren’t in English. He was not expected to take the throne of Britain – that came about by his distant cousin, Queen Anne, dying without an heir and the Act of Settlement 1701 named George I as heir. But the young George did not learn German first, either. He grew up initially speaking French, seen as the noble language of the Hanoverian court and diplomacy, and started learning German second at the age of four. As part of his education, which included history and military tactics, he would then go on to be taught English and Italian.

George continued conversing in French, though, and that would be the language of choice for his letters to his wife Caroline.

Caroline of Ansbach

 

The rivalry with his father led to tensions with the prime minister

While he was Prince of Wales, George’s residence in London, Leicester House, turned into something of a rival court and the base for a dissident Whig faction opposed to George I’s policies. Among them was Sir Robert Walpole.

It was Walpole who encouraged a reconciliation between the king and his son, for which he was rewarded with royal favour and a ministerial position. He would be the first official prime minister. But the young George, who had agreed to the reconciliation reluctantly, came to believe that Walpole had tricked him in order to seize power for himself. When George became king, he wanted to dismiss Walpole entirely, but Caroline persuaded him not to. And he was surely thankful for that: Walpole, eager to earn the new king’s favour, granted an extravagant civil list (an annual allowance to the crown) of £800,000.

 

 

Music, architecture and education received his patronage

In 1737, George founded the first university in the Electorate of Hanover, which still bears his name as the Georg August University of Gottingen, and it was during his reign that the charter for two major US institutions were issued: King’s College in New York, which became Columbia; and the College of New Jersey, now called Princeton.

The Library of Columbia University

A lover of music, especially the opera, George became the patron for the German composer George Friedrich Handel. For George’s coronation in 1727, Handel composed Zadok the Priest – as well as three other so-called Coronation Anthems – which has been performed at the anointing of every new monarch since. George then commissioned Handel to compose another piece, Music for the Royal Fireworks, to celebrate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession and the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.

Both George and Caroline shared an interest in architecture. Under their direction, the gardens of Kensington Palace and Hyde Park were extended, which included the creation of the Round Pond and the Serpentine lake. Names like Charles Bridgeman, a pioneer of naturalistic landscape gardening, and William Kent, the architect involved in the refurbishment of Kensington Palace, would help define the Georgian architectural style.

 

George liked his elaborate wigs

While the Georgians are famous for their oversized powdered wigs, George II especially favoured elaborate hairpieces of long, white, curly locks that extended well below his shoulders. The style grew in popularity during his reign as a result. Wigs were a status symbol for the wealthy – the bigger the wig, the richer the owner.

Although, George was not always careful with his headgear: when throwing a tantrum, something he was liable to do, he would kick his hat or stamp on his wig. Once George’s grandson, George III, took the throne, wigs began to shrink to match the style seen in France.

Portrait of King George II

 

His marriage went ahead after he had visited his bride-to-be in disguise

In 1705, George became involved in marriage negotiations with Caroline of Ansbach, the former ward of his aunt. It was a sound match politically, but it seemed that George wished to know something about her first. He visited the Ansbach court under a false name so that he could see what she was like.

Besotted by her charming character, good manners and beauty, he agreed to the marriage contract within a month and the pair were married in Hanover in September 1705. Despite having several mistresses during his life, it could be said that George was devoted to Caroline. When she became gravely ill with smallpox in 1707, George stayed by her bedside even though that meant he contracted the disease himself.

The king and queen had a son, Frederick, and then five daughters and two more sons, but complications with the final birth in 1724 would eventually lead to her death, when her strangulated bowel burst, in 1737. When she urged George to remarry after she was gone, he reportedly exclaimed: “No! I shall have mistresses!” Indeed, the king never remarried.

 

Like his relationship with his father, George II did not get on with his heir

When George and Caroline came to Britain in 1714, their eldest son Frederick remained in Hanover. They did not meet again for 14 years, until George was king. The 21-year-old Frederick quarrelled openly with his father and became the leader of a faction at court that opposed the administration. By 1742, the opposition had gained enough popularity that it was able to force Prime Minister Robert Walpole to resign.

George was not along in his dislike for Frederick. It was an opinion shared with the boy’s own mother Caroline too, allegedly once saying of him: “There he goes, that wretch, that villain! I wish the ground would open this moment and sink the monster to the lowest hole in hell.”

 

George does not have a major monument celebrating his reign

After 33 years on the throne, George II died on 25 October 1760 shortly before turning 77. Frederick had predeceased him, so his grandson George inherited the throne. Despite the poor reputation of his usual historical legacy, George II made some considerable achievements during his reign, such as being the last reigning British sovereign to lead an army personally when he fought at the battle of Dettingen in 1743.

Also, the monarchy survived the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, when the ‘Young Pretender’ Charles Edward Stuart, better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, invaded England to overthrow the Hanoverian regime.

Yet no grand or magnificent memorial exists for the second King George. Inside Westminster Abbey is a large statue of Handel, a recipient of George’s patronage, but for George himself is nothing other than a small tile on the floor of the Lady Chapel. Below that spot he is buried alongside his wife, Caroline. It was his wish that the sides of their coffins be removed so that their remains could mix and be together forevermore.

These facts were partially excerpted from an interview with Norman Davies, Professor Emeritus of the University of London, who authored George II: Not Just A British Monarch (2021), part of the Penguin Monarchs series

]]>George II: reassessing a much-forgotten monarchhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/george-ii-reassessing-forgotten-monarch-podcast-norman-davies/2021-07-31T11:34:29.000ZNorman Davies introduces a long-maligned and overlooked monarch, George II, King of Great Britain and Ireland and Elector of Hanover, considering the legacy of his rule, the familial rifts that characterised his reign, and his role in the trade of enslaved people.

Norman Davies is the author of George II: Not Just a British Monarch (Penguin, 2021)

]]>"The picture of George III’s family is often sad – these are genuinely thwarted lives": Janice Hadlow on the private lives of George III and his familyhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/books-interview-with-janice-hadlow-the-private-lives-of-george-iii-and-his-family/2014-08-13T12:32:52.000ZHow did George’s predecessors inform his outlook on life?

I started by thinking I could write just about King George III and his direct family, but I soon realised that I had to say something about George’s predecessors in order to understand how he defined himself. He thought that he could make a clean break from his own family’s history, and had a very conscious sense that he wanted to live differently.

His grandfather, George II, had a very complex, passionate relationship with his wife, Caroline of Ansbach, but they were at huge odds with their eldest son, Frederick – George III’s father. Even now, the rancour and hatred that George and Caroline felt for Frederick is quite shocking. So George III definitely had a sense that his grandfather’s family life was somehow wrong and corrupt, that there was something quite damaging about it – both to the humans caught within that world, and to the idea of monarchy itself.

What sense do we get of George as a young man?

The young George had what I think was a terror of the destiny of kingship, and a deep sense that he might not be up to the job. He retreated into an almost catatonic state, from which he was rescued by a very charismatic mentor: John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, a friend of both George’s father and mother. Bute was an intellectual, handsome man, with smouldering, dark-eyed looks and legs that were said to be the best in London.

He liked George as a young man, and I don’t think that many people had liked George before. He also provided the tentative, diffident young man with a new vision of what kingship meant in a modern world in which kings were no longer called upon to be leaders in battle.

Part of this vision was political: the idea that the king’s job was to be above party divisions and to say something different and larger about the importance of the state. But Bute also stressed the value of goodness – that a king’s moral values are as important as cleverness and bravery. Because, although the young George often had doubts about whether he was clever or strong enough to be king, he always thought that he might be morally good enough. Bute taught him that one of the ways to show that he was worthy of the role was by the way that he lived – not just what he did as a king, but also as a father, a brother and a husband.

What do we make of the relationship between George and Charlotte?

There was a lot of worry, when George and Charlotte married, about whether she was properly prepared for the role. But George was always very confident, and it soon turned out that he’d picked well. For a long time their marriage worked very well, at least superficially, because they were similar in character.

Charlotte was dutiful, obedient, with a strong sense of personal duty, and happy to be guided by a more powerful man. She also shared George’s desire to live a quiet domestic life and to have a retreat from the hurly-burly of society that felt like it was theirs and not owned by the rest of the world.

For me, the most interesting thing about Queen Charlotte is how clever she was, and what a voracious intellect she had underneath a quite compliant exterior. Both Charlotte and George never stopped reading, and the picture of their court as being stupid and dull is simply not accurate – certainly not in the early years, when they were both healthy.

What else do we know about Charlotte?

There’s no doubt that there was another side to Charlotte, revealed in her letters to her brother: she was very lonely. Right from the beginning, when she first arrived, George made it very clear that she was to keep herself separate from a lot of the people at court, and that she was not to make close friends. He was worried about people flattering her, and about potentially difficult alliances forming. Charlotte understood all of these worries, but it left her a very lonely, isolated figure.

The other key thing about her is that she became pregnant very quickly, and did what, even in the 18th century, was most required of a queen – provide an heir. Not just one, either, but a positive richness of heirs.

This went on to cause problems. The face she always presented was that she saw this as part of her duty, and that she was proud of her large and healthy family. But in later life, when she’d spent the better part of 20 years having many, many babies, she wrote to her brother saying that she wished her “long campaign” could be over. She found life very constraining: she was perpetually pregnant, isolated and not free to do the things that she wanted, and found the requirements of appearing in public exhausting.

She wondered, in these letters, whether she could sustain that life. In the end, of course, she did, because she was a very dutiful person. But the fact that she had a much darker, bleaker perception of her role for many years is a genuinely new thing to understand about her.

What impact did George’s moral ideals have on the running of the family?

It went brilliantly when the children were small. There’s no doubt that George loved small babies, and was a very loving father: there are many accounts of him carrying his naked little son around, and of him playing on the floor with his children – losing what was seen as all of the dignity of a king.

So when the children were young it was a very positive picture, and a great improvement on the situation with George’s predecessors. It got far more complicated as the children got older, though. The idea that the children might have desires or wishes that conflicted with George’s vision of the future created tensions.

Boredom was also a factor, mostly for the women: there’s no doubt that Charlotte was bored a lot of the time. She tried to bring clever women into the household with whom she could form relationships of the mind. This was partly for her own intellectual stimulation, but also because she wanted her daughters to see how important it was in the court world, with all its requirements and potential for dullness, to have an intellectual life for yourself.

It’s interesting, though, that none of those women stayed: they all, in the end, found the pressure of life in the spotlight, the endless etiquette and ceremony, just too dull – and so they left. But Charlotte couldn’t leave, and that’s one of the key themes of their lives.

What was life like for the children?

This was a period in which ideas of childhood were changing rapidly, and George and Charlotte tried to introduce many of these ideas to their own household. The children were required to have their own agricultural pursuits, for instance, and were dressed very simply, in open-necked shirts and loose clothes. But right from the start there was a contradiction between the idea of them as free, natural children, and their formal status as princesses and princes. That’s another of the faultlines in this world – between the private, intimate life and the one on public display. It’s the one that the whole family, in the end, found it most difficult to deal with.

At what point did George’s illness first manifest itself?

The first serious illness came in 1788/89. George had previously been remarkably healthy for an 18th-century man, which is why it came as such a shock to everyone. I think it was a shock from which, actually, neither he nor the family ever quite recovered.

For reasons no one could understand, the illness affected his behaviour. George had previously always been very controlled, and regarded it as very important that he mastered emotions that weren’t required of his public role. To lose control, and to know that he’d lost control, was the great tragedy of the early phases of all of his illnesses.

All of this would have been bad enough for anyone to deal with in the 18th century, but the fact that his illness was regarded as shameful, and that it could not be concealed – that it was being debated, dissected and thought about in the public world – added an extra dimension of horror for the family. The tension that always existed between their public and private lives is perhaps most apparent during his illness.

What new impression did you get of the family while writing this book?

A lot of this story is about good intentions. Everyone went into this project hoping for the best, and they all wanted to make something better for themselves. The picture we have of the family is often sad: their lives were quite dull, and they lived these very limited experiences. These were genuinely thwarted lives, yet George and his family saw it as their duty to try and make the best of them.

But there’s also a sense of the liveliness of the family. George is often portrayed as a stolid, uninteresting character, but I think he was more complicated and varied, and combined lots of apparently contradictory characteristics: generous but unforgiving, thoughtful but obstinate, loving but sometimes not terribly sympathetic.

Charlotte was a person of contradictions, too. In later life she became a little like the negative caricatures of herself: strict, unloving, self-centred, embittered and frustrated by the experiences of her husband’s illnesses. But before that there was another Charlotte: clever, lively, intellectually curious and very interested in the world around her. These aspects of her personality got darker and darker as time went on – but how interesting to see that they were there in the first place.

Born in Lewisham, south-east London, Janice Hadlow has overseen the history output of both Channel 4 and the BBC, where she worked as controller of BBC Four and, later, BBC Two. She is currently the BBC’s controller of Seasons and Special Projects and the author of The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians by Janice Hadlow (William Collins, 704 pages, £25)

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

]]>The delightfully dysfunctional Georgianshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-delightfully-dysfunctional-georgians/2014-05-20T17:42:33.000ZSometimes 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

]]>