Military Goals and Other Means

Abstract

Queen Anne had strong sympathy with traditional Anglican culture, being the last reigning monarch to use the Royal Touch (Samuel Johnson was one of the latest beneficiaries of this sacramental ritual). As a result of these elements in her character and politics, the Queen did not especially favour the Whigs, with their traditional guilt by association with the Civil War: ‘Save the Queen’s White Neck’ was a Tory electioneering slogan. As a consequence, the Whigs sought rather to curry favour with her successor: some even suggested the possibility of a Hanoverian invasion on one occasion.1 Given the hostility to the Hanoverian dynasty shown by even non Jacobite Tories, foreign policy differences, the High Church character of the party and the Jacobite equivocations of many of its supporters, it is perhaps not surprising that George I inclined on his accession towards the Whigs. The Tories, deeply suspicious of a Lutheran king’s intentions towards the Church of England, fought the 1715 election on the theme of the Church in Danger, with a degree of exaggerated scaremongering that might well have appeared crypto Jacobite.