The Eighteenth-Century State System 391George I, the Hanoverian king of Great Britain who neverlearned English.
be admitted to Oxford or Cambridge Universities, or worship freely, at a
time when Protestant Dissenters—that is, Protestants not belonging to the
Church of England—were able to rise to respectable positions within the
British state.
The Hanoverian George I (1660-1727), a distant cousin of Queen
Anne, became king in 1714. He never learned English, brought some of his
own advisers from Hanover, was stubborn and obese (some of his subjects
referred to their monarch as “King Log”), and may have ordered the murder
of his wife’s lover in Hanover. All of this was more easily forgiven by wealthy
Englishmen than his apparent indifference toward the crown he wore,
seemingly demonstrated by the fact that he spent long periods in his beloved
Hanover.
The Hanoverian dynasty’s accession to the throne complicated British
foreign policy. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713), the first of two treaties that
concluded the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714, see Chapter 7),
confirmed Britain’s colonial supremacy, adding Newfoundland, Nova Sco
tia, the Hudson Bay territory, and New Brunswick, as well as Gibraltar and
the island of Minorca to the empire, and it also granted the right to trade in
Spanish colonial ports. But George I looked with disfavor on the treaty
because it had not advanced the interests of Hanover. Furthermore, some in
Parliament considered the compromise treaty as too much of a compromise
and thus humiliating for Britain. It was ratified by the House of Lords only
because Queen Anne had created enough new peers to assure passage.
The new Hanoverian dynasty was threatened by remaining support for
the Catholic Stuart dynasty. In 1715, the intransigent supporters (Jacobites)