This year, 2014, marks an important historical anniversary. Or rather two, although one has a substantially lower profile than the other. As you can’t have failed to notice from the newspaper supplements, special exhibitions and television documentaries, it is a hundred years since the outbreak of the First World War. But two hundred years before Britain crossed the channel to go to war against German imperial might, the ruling family of a small principality in Lower Saxony travelled in the opposite direction in order to sit on the British throne.
Superficially, the Hanoverian accession is a good deal less cataclysmic and a great deal more bizarre than a global war – no armies were involved, and instead George Louis, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, was ushered onto the throne by a long chain of coincidences. However, it is no less worthy of commemoration or re-examination, for it was under the rule of these unlikely monarchs that Britain took the first steps towards becoming the nation it is today.
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