CHAPTER 11EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
DYNASTIC RIVALRIESAND POLITICSKing George III (ruled 1760-1820) proclaimed that he ‘‘gloried
in the name of Britain.” Indeed during his reign, despite his personal fail
ings, a nationalist cult developed around the British monarchy, significantly
after the empire suffered its biggest loss, that of the thirteen American
colonies.
The king projected the image of an ordinary family man, surrounded by
his homely wife and fifteen children. Less interested in goings-on in
Hanover, his family’s dynastic home, than his predecessors, he won popular
affection in Britain. “This young man,” assessed the writer Horace Walpole,
“don’t stand in one spot with his eyes fixed royally on the ground, and drop
ping bits of German news; he walks about and speaks to everybody.” The
king’s domesticity also made him a target for the gentle spoofs of caricatur
ists. His nervousness led him to bombard almost everyone he encountered
with questions, ending with “hey, hey?” By the last decade of the century,
symptoms of a hereditary disease made George III appear to be quite mad.
Early in his reign, King George III held strongly to royal prerogatives,
even within the context of the British constitutional monarchy. Yet not
only did British nationalism develop rapidly with him on the throne, but
the idea developed in and beyond Parliament that a party of opposition
formed an essential part of the parliamentary system of representation.
The nature of the European state system itself also underwent funda
mental change in the eighteenth century as the rivalries between Great
Britain, France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic (the United Provinces)
broadened to a global scale. Whereas Europe in the period of Louis XIV
had been marked by frenetic war-making—much of it at his instigation—
and the pursuit of alliances against France, Europe’s dominant state, the
wars fought between the great powers in the middle of the eighteenth cen