ABSTRACT
As Queen Anne lay ill and dying, the nation’s political classes were (as they often are) feverish with uncertainty: should they bring back the expelled Stuarts in the shape of the ‘Old Pretender’, or stick with their earlier determination to bring in the Elector of Hanover? In the event, while the Tories dithered, the Whigs imported the ageing George I, his poor English, his two mistresses, one fat, one thin and all. At his coronation there were protests, but here was a battle-hardened soldier who fought the Turks in the 1690s and who shared a name with England’s patron saint. The fact that he always preferred Germany to his new kingdom only gradually became apparent.
