This book fills a crucial gap in our understanding of the history of monarchy and the development of the eighteenth-century state in Britain. It argues that the first two Georges were far more interesting and popular than the uninspiring constitutional stopgaps portrayed by the Victorians and that “there existed a flourishing, dynamic, and variegated culture of monarchy which endorsed and promoted” their rule (2). Hannah Smith concedes to previous historiography that George I was largely uninterested in royal spectacle, courtly ceremony, or crowd-pleasing public appearances. While George II famously enjoyed “all the pageantry and splendour, badges and trappings of royalty” (Lord Hervey, quoted by Smith, 100), which he and his consort embraced both before and after their accessions, court spectacle diminished again after Caroline's death in 1737. Indeed, while Smith compares Caroline to the charming Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, consort of the shy George VI, an even more interesting parallel can be drawn with Mary II. By their affability, piety, and social skill, both earlier consorts did much to reconcile the nation to their respective husbands’ lack thereof and imperfect claim to the throne. Caroline's efforts notwithstanding, neither early Georgian king attempted to create a baroque monarchy to overawe the nation and draw the elite to his house.

But this, Smith argues in chapters 1 and 2, is to miss the point. Rather, the early Hanoverians represented a Protestant and enlightened alternative to Catholic baroque monarchy, much better suited to the British eighteenth century. She offers plenty of evidence that the first two Georges and Queen Caroline were widely portrayed as Protestant champions. She also makes a case that neither sovereign was hostile to the Enlightenment, and, as previous historians have demonstrated, Caroline and her daughters were positively in favor of it, patronizing living philosophes and commemorating dead forebears alike.

No wonder that the baroque excesses of the courts of Louis XIV and even Charles II held little appeal to “pudding George” or his son. To the enlightened mind, the representational courts of the seventeenth century had been discredited by Louis’ military and Charles's sexual incontinence. The original Hanoverian state and its British counterpart opted for a desacralized, military model of kingship that emphasized action and thrift. Both of the Georges in question had battlefield experience and took an active role in army patronage. Both filled household positions near their persons, the bedchamber in particular, with military men. Nevertheless, in Smith's formulation, the early Hanoverians tried to keep their household expenditures small, their patronage of the visual arts—central to baroque monarchy—minimal.

Unfortunately, the monarchs in question left so little evidence of their personal views on such matters and withdrew so completely from the effort of constructing a monarchical program that the reader is left wondering whether their seeming indifference to royal splendor was more a matter of natural indolence than conscious choice. The case for thrift is particularly difficult to make. As Smith admits, the court grew in size under the early Hanoverians, from just under nine hundred servants in 1714 to over one thousand by 1760. But she fails to note that, in an era of relatively light inflation, it also grew in expense, from an annual average under Queen Anne of £238,891 to £269,582 under George I and £318,848 under George II. Moreover, these reigns saw the nadir of household administrative rectitude for the long eighteenth century, compelling George III and Lord Talbot to launch the most extensive reform and retrenchment of the court since James II within months of the former's accession (see Officials of the Royal Household 1660–1837, comp. J. C. Sainty and R. O. Bucholz I [London, 1997], lxvi–lxxii, xcii, xcvii–xcviii). Smith believes that historians have been too concerned with such bureaucratic trivia, but surely the “cultural turn” (13) she advocates requires her to address the deafening charges of official corruption leveled at every branch of the Hanoverian regime from the printing presses, stage, and street. At this point, it might be worth recalling that the age of the first two Georges is more often remembered—and not just by the Victorians—as the Age of Walpole and Newcastle.

This book is most innovative and convincing in its middle chapters, which demonstrate clearly how the early Georgian monarchy—or, more accurately, its interested adherents—constructed a Hanoverian Royalist culture in the localities, generally without much help from the occupant of the throne. Here Smith breaks free from the center, examining an impressive array of local records, including newspapers, municipal records, and churchwardens’ accounts, to determine how the country responded to royal birth, accession, and coronation days; the incidence of Hanoverian statuary and arms; and so on. It is perhaps in the nature of her evidence that she has uncovered more obligatory encouragement by local authorities than spontaneous local enthusiasm, but she leaves no doubt that popular Jacobitism and hazy Stuart nostalgia had their Hanoverian responses.

Finally, in chapter 5, based on a previously published article, Smith challenges those historians who have posited a decline in the significance of the court for British public life in the eighteenth century. She argues, not implausibly, that such an impression derives from an excessive focus on the household as an institution. When viewed less formally, the court remained a central—if perhaps not the central—market for the trading of interest, the solicitation of favor, the peddling of influence, and, therefore, the distribution of honors, lands, titles, and all the other goodies that remained in the royal gift. But previous historians have never doubted this. They have, nonetheless, seen decline in the fact that, as Parliament and its attendant political clubs and party organization took center stage, people who had opted to live their lives at court seemed to matter less in political maneuvers and calculations—a point that Smith seems to accept. Historians of the Restoration—court or otherwise—know well the political significance and cultural notoriety of relatively minor household servants, like the esquire of the body, Andrew Newport; the yeoman of the Robes, Tobias Rustat; the equerry, Sir Nicholas Armorer; and, above all, grooms of the bedchamber like William Chiffinch, Henry and Thomas Killigrew, and Edward Progers. No such figures emerge in Smith's work: while many of the household servants of George I and George II have made the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, they almost invariably fall under the heading “army officer.” They made their marks, but not at court.

Previous historians have equally argued that the eighteenth-century court became a subordinate partner in the social and cultural life of the nation—participating in these spheres but no longer leading them. Smith is too good a historian to push her evidence too far in the other direction. She offers compelling evidence of the court's role as a theater of status and as a dramatic, literary, and musical patron, in particular in the formation of the Royal Academy of Music. But royal interest and initiative were intermittent, royal style (with a few exceptions, like church music), derivative. Artists and impresarios liked and benefited from the court's seal of approval, but, in the end, she admits, “That the court could not compete with what the town had to offer, that it was dependant on the public sphere for entertainment, are points not in doubt” (233). In fact, this echoes the situation for much of Anne's reign: strangely, while the book is very good at contrasting the early Georgian monarchy with its very different Restoration predecessor, it almost religiously avoids seeing the many continuities with the last Stuart (see 119). Anne was, after all, Protestant, thrifty, an intermittent patroness of the arts most interested in music, and respectful of constitutional proprieties. Her court seems to have been every bit as unexciting as her successors’. Perhaps the Hanoverians did not invent a new style of monarchy but, rather, drove the royal carriage along tracks forged by a woman who could be argued to have been Britain's first successful constitutional monarch.

In the end, despite Smith's worthy efforts, one comes back again and again to the sheer fecklessness of the Hanoverians. At times, the book reads like a catalog of missed opportunities, of things that George I and George II did not do. Still, it is beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and well produced. It demonstrates convincingly how the early Hanoverian regime forged a viable monarchy out of Protestantism, militarism, and practicality. It is more than worthy of its occasionally desultory subject.