The century between the Civil War and the reign of George II saw the

transformation of English political, social, and religious life. The scale of

these changes may become apparent if we put our late twentieth-century
selves into the picture for a moment. We would surely find mid seventeenthcentury England strange and alien, violent, authoritarian, credulous,
poverty-stricken; confident that virtue and responsibility were inherited by
gentlemen and monarchs; cowering in the face of a hostile environment
and universe; absorbed in a religious fundamentalism which included hairraising
beliefs about salvation, other denominations, and the cosmic
purpose of history. Mid eighteenth-century England, on the other hand,
although not "modern," would be full of familiar sights and institutions.
For all its inexplicable addiction to the periwig, this was a world comfortingly
like our own in many ways: with newspapers and tea-tables, concerts
and public parks, insurance policies and sales taxes, a post office and
bureaucrats; a world which held a place for "the ladies," "the consumer,"
"the citizen," and "the middle class." This society of shopkeepers and
professional people valued diversity and regarded competition and social
mobility as natural, yet it also respected politeness and restraint and feared
"enthusiasm." Even to compare the England of Charles I and George II in
this way is to reinforce the common perception that England progressed
from chaos to stability, from traumatized victim of "intestine" civil wars to
a self-confident trading and maritime power. Certainly Hanoverian
England seemed a stable society: the political system weathered storms;
trade boomed and the wealth it generated led to the sophisticated urban life
whose architectural expression is still visible in the squares and terraces of
cities like Bath, Cheltenham, Bristol, Edinburgh, and York. England was on
the way to becoming Great Britain - a Union was achieved with Scotland
in 1707 - and Great Britain was well on her way to imperial grandeur. In
the seventeenth century England had been a weak and peripheral European
state, but after 1688 she became a leading actor on the continental stage