THE HANOVERIAN KINGS, 1714-1789 The period during 1714-89 in British history has an essential and internal unity alike in politics, thought, and economic and social development, marked off from the 17th century which really ended in 1714, and the period of revolution and world-wide war which commenced with the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. It began with one bloodless British revolution, the accession of George I., which consummated the "Revolution of 1688" and it closed with the opening of a European revolution that left Great Britain intact, but convulsed the world in which the British State stood unshaken. The consolidation of the parliamentary State, i.e., a commonwealth governed by a limited and constitutional monarchy by and with an executive responsible to a parliament of two chambers, and with a judiciary independent of the executive and the legislature, is the main feature of this broad and unified period, called the i8th century, which correctly speaking closed in 1789. When George I. succeeded to Anne, in virtue of the statu tory definition of the succession laid down in the Act of Settle ment 0701), government by the Crown in and through parliament was an experiment that still had to make good. The French Revo lution of 1789 found parliamentary government in Great Britain established in principle, and proved efficient and acceptable in practice. The period of the Hanoverian kings, therefore, if it had accomplished nothing else, had laid an unshakeable foundation for the developments of the 19th century. This achievement was mainly the work of the Whig supremacy of the first 6o years of the i8th century. This supremacy rested on and expressed the aims of a virtual alliance between a majority of the aristocracy, with an overwhelming majority in the House of Lords, and a mas terly control of the representation in the House of Commons, the trading classes and the nonconformists. It was not until the mid dle of the reign of George III. that the country gentry and the Church of England definitely accepted the principles of the Whig system, and a new combination of the social forces of the com munity became possible. The result was a new Tory Party which had shed the principles of Jacobitism, of a divine right monarchy and of an executive not dependent on the legislature. The rise of the New Tories dissolved the Old Whigs and for 3o years Whiggism repeated the old formulae while it sought for a new faith and new convictions under the hammer strokes of the Ameri can and French Revolutions. The downfall of Bolingbroke in 1714 really ended the Toryism of the 17th century, and the water shed of Whiggism is crossed in the careers of Burke, the younger Pitt and Charles James Fox. Subordinate to this dominating polit ical movement are important moulding forces and movements— John Wesley and Methodism (qq.v.), the "Agricultural Revolu tion" (q.v.), which transformed the technique of agriculture (see AGRICULTURE; ENCLOSURES), the Industrial Revolution (q.v.) which transformed the parliamentary State into the industrial "workshop of the world," which dates from 177o, and the steady and continuous development of the Empire (see BRITISH EMPIRE), marked by the great disruption of '783. The Deist and Methodist movements belong more strictly to the history of thought and of the Church of England ; agriculture and industry make chapters by themselves in national development ; but the play of the purely political forces can only be fully understood if they are correlated to the internal political development and the "Expansion of England." Great Britain by 1789 was politically, socially and economically ripe for an era of fundamental reform. The French Revolution and the titanic struggle with Napoleon delayed the Reform movement (q.v.) for 3o years and very nearly trans formed it into a revolution.