When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, the resulting end of the Personal Union with Hanover occasioned little comment. The fact that Britain had been linked to a continental European state for over 120 years was easily forgotten in a nineteenth-century world whose horizons were now very much global, imperial and naval. If the centenary of the Personal Union in August 1814 had been marked by royal celebrations, by the time of the bicentenary, the mid-Victorian fascination with German culture had been replaced by industrial and commercial competition. In August 1914, in any case, Britain's leaders had other things on their minds. An era during which the royal family felt obliged to change its name from ‘Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’ to the anodyne confection of ‘House of Windsor’ was perhaps not best suited to an understanding of Britain's German heritage and continental links. The British story was, after all, an ‘island story’.

It has remained one, more or less, ever since. The importance, and sometimes the centrality, of the Hanoverian context to British history is still not fully recognised. For example, J. C. D Clark, himself an exponent of viewing eighteenth-century Britain in the framework of the European ‘ancien régime’, wrote nearly 600 pages on the 1750s without giving due attention to the fact that one of his major protagonists, the duke of Newcastle, was both a defender of the Hanoverian preoccupations of the crown and the most prominent exponent of engagement in Europe.