Reasons Against the Succession of the House of Hanover: With an Enquiry How Far the Abdication of King James, Supposing It to Be Legal, Ought to Affect the Person of the Pretender
1713
Reasons Against the Succession of the House of Hanover: With an Enquiry How Far the Abdication of King James, Supposing It to Be Legal, Ought to Affect the Person of the Pretender
1713
In 1713, Britain stood at a precipice. The Act of Settlement had named the House of Hanover as future rulers, but the Jacobite shadow loomed, and Daniel Defoe here turns his formidable pen to the question that kept the political class awake at night: what makes a monarch legitimate? Written in the anxious years before George I's arrival, this pamphlet argues that importing a foreign German dynasty onto an already fractured nation court disaster. Defoe probes the uncomfortable question the establishment preferred to sidestep: if James II's 'abdication' was legal, what claim does the Hanoverian line truly have? If it was illegal, why should the Pretender be denied what was taken from his father? With characteristic pragmatism, Defoe argues not for any claimant but for unity first. The factions that tore England apart during the Civil War and the Exclusion Crisis, he warns, would devour a new foreign king as surely as they devoured the old. This is Defoe the political operator, not the novelist: sharper, more dangerous, and wrestling in real time with the constitutional questions that would explode into the 'Fifteen just four years later.
