WI: The Hanoverians tried to stage a royalist coup?

[Makemakean]

So, in my research for this-other-thing-I'm-working-on, I couldn't help but be amazed how much efforts the Swedish monarchs put into trying to stage a royalist coup during the Age of Liberty. From the moment Queen-Consort Lovisa Ulrika arrived in Sweden proper in the 1740s, it seems that not a single day went by without her trying to figure out a way to overthrow the parliamentarian government whose Constitution left the monarch a pitiful figurehead and she once, in 1756 got pretty close. Later on, in the early 1760s, she was in secret negotiations with leading Hat politicians over a new constitutional deal, but fate would so have it that the Caps won a landslide in the election of 1764 and this never got anywhere. Finally, her son Gustav III did manage the long awaited coup in 1772, and by the time the 1790s came around, he had pretty much managed to rob the Riksdag of all its powers. In some aspects it's amazing how the Riksdag went from being the heart to the appendix of the Swedish government.

It got me to start thinking, what if the Hanoverians had tried to do what the Holsteinians successfully did in Sweden, and overthrow the Constitution of 1688 in favour of something far more absolutist in character?

It is highly doubtful that they would succeed if they tried (I could probably go on for ages to describe why the Riksdag of the 18th century was a such pitifully weak and inefficient tragedy of errors and why Gustav III:s coup in 1772 was such an easy affair to arrange), but I'm kind of curious as to what would be the consequences of the Hanoverians actually trying to this (and presumably failing)?

 

[Alex Richards]

OK, lets go through from the top:

George I: Couldn't speak English at all, dependent on Parliament to even govern the country.

George II: Spoke poor English. Faced the Jacobite threat at a time when it was still credible.

George III: Focused his attention on agriculture and science before becoming too mentally instable to actually get anywhere in even preparing for something like this.

George IV: Didn't care about power as long as he got money


Considering the Glorious Revolution and Hannovarian Succession was prompted by Stuart absolutism, this is very unlikely.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

OK, lets go through from the top:

George I: Couldn't speak English at all, dependent on Parliament to even govern the country.

George II: Spoke poor English. Faced the Jacobite threat at a time when it was still credible.

George III: Focused his attention on agriculture and science before becoming too mentally instable to actually get anywhere in even preparing for something like this.

George IV: Didn't care about power as long as he got money


Considering the Glorious Revolution and Hannovarian Succession was prompted by Stuart absolutism, this is very unlikely.

Exactly.

Even if you turned Georges III and IV into Stuart wannabes, Parliament is too strong by then. Britain was a 'nation of shopkeepers' and the middle class has to much wealth and power by then to lose political powere.

In fact if g3 or g4 seriously tried it, thered be a new king in Britain....

 

[Maniakes]

What if the POD is killing off Queen Anne earlier, so the first Hannoverian heir is Sophia rather than her son George?

If Anne dies in 1703 from complications from one more failed pregnancy, and Sophia lives about as long as IOTL, then that's 11 years of Sophia before George I succeeds to the throne. Sophia was much more politically skilled and much more activist than her son, and her reign might have both set the stage for a more active Hannoverian monarchy (not Stuart absolutism, but comparable to William and Mary) and given George time to build up connections and personal clout (and learn English) before succeeding to the throne himself.

Alternately, there's been some discussion in other threads a while back of George II somehow leaving no surviving descendants, at which point the British succession would run through George's sister to her son, Frederick the Great of Prussia.