The peaceful accession of the electoral house of Brunswick-Lüneburg to the throne of Great Britain was roundly greeted with astonishment. The widespread reports of ‘such general joy’, as one observer put it, ‘nothing but Bonefires, letting out of Guns, and huzzaing, and drinking of King George’s health all night’, seemed to dispel at once the morbid apprehensions of insurrection and invasion, civil war and sectarian bloodshed that had long pervaded British politics. The American-born Henry Newman, secretary of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, likened it to waking from a dream. Many naturally attributed such a turn of events to divine intervention. And as another public manifestation of the heavenly superintendence of the Protestant monarchy of Great Britain, Newman proclaimed the events of 1 August 1714, ‘not less miraculous, nor less seasonable than our late Happy Revolution was’. The comparison is, at once, both obvious and curious. Britons seldom felt the regard of providence as publicly and as tangibly as when it was confounding popery. And for a second time in living memory, the nation imagined itself preserved from the ruin of the Catholic Stuarts and their Bourbon sponsors. And yet, whether divinely engineered or not, the events of 1688–89 and those of 1714 represented rather different species of deliverance. The Glorious Revolution required an upending of law and dynastic right, the virtual annulment of a public theology that had for more than a generation immunised hereditary monarchy from resistance or critique. The Revolution might have been experienced immediately as an ‘appeal to heaven’ (in John Locke's famous phrase) simply because it seemed to occur so far out beyond the edges of legality and orthodoxy. The Hanoverian Succession, by contrast, embodied the fulfilment of the royal will, statutory law, international treaties, and even, for many, Anglican orthodoxy as it had been reformulated in the decades since 1689. A strange providence, indeed, that intervened to ensure the ordinary course of events.

That the death of the last Stuart monarch Queen Anne at age forty-nine and the accession of her second cousin, once removed Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover seemed to partake of the miraculous, in spite of all the international and domestic forces long at work to guarantee its consummation, illuminates something of the tensions and contradictions besetting British politics in the early eighteenth century.