1 - Prehistory

Summary

When English and Hanoverian observers began to contemplate their prospective union, both did so with reference to their most recent respective imperial experiences. For England, this had been conquest and reconstruction at the hands of William III and the Dutch state. Although most Englishmen and women continued to support the Revolution settlement against the French-supported Stuarts, they were uneasily aware that it had been imposed by another foreign power. And they extended their ambivalence to the prospect of yet another union with a foreign country. For their part, Hanoverians viewed union with Britain through the prism of the Holy Roman Empire. They approved of the post-1648 Empire, and hoped union with Britain would establish a similar status quo on the European level. Imperial conceptions of the Anglo-Hanoverian union dominated from the beginning.

Britain's union with Hanover was made possible by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Although historians have often emphasized the Revolution's British origins, it was primarily a Dutch conquest. Jonathan Israel has shown that the invasion served the interests of the Dutch state as well as those of William III, thereby foreclosing an entirely dynastic (and mostly domestic) account of the Glorious Revolution. The Dutch estates signed off on the expedition in order to bring England into their commercial war against France. The war bequeathed two peculiarly Dutch phenomena to England. The need to reassure a religiously diverse coalition led to England's first lasting religious toleration. The war also consolidated the already perceptible Dutch influence over English public finance, where long-term debt came to supplement the excise tax. Israel also dated the rise of the English parliament to its reaction against Dutch power, once the pacification of Ireland allowed William III to transfer his Dutch army to the continent in 1691. This reaction peaked during the standing-army controversy of1697–9, when parliament frustrated the king's plan for a peacetime standing army and sent his Dutch bodyguard back to the United Provinces. The Dutch union was an important interlude in the European history of British empire in its own right, but it also colored Britain's later imperial relationship with the continental electorate of Hanover. Union with Hanover followed from the Dutch invasion, as naturally as the Angevin empire issued from an earlier William's conquest.