Welcome to this website, which outlines my current research project on German writers in Stuart Britain, generously funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. You will find pages with information about various aspects of the project, and I’ll add posts over the year that address early modern German responses to key British events: the Gunpowder Plot, the execution of Charles I, and the Great Fire of London.
Links with German lands existed at the highest level of Stuart society: when James VI of Scotland acceded to the English throne as James I in 1603, he brought with him as consort Anne of Denmark, who had links through her mother and sisters with several Protestant German dynasties. In 1613 Anglo-German connections were strengthened when Anne and James’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, was married with much pomp and ceremony to Frederick V, Elector Palatine, the future — and short-lived — King of Bohemia (1619-20). In 1701, when it became clear that the Stuart dynasty was drawing to close, Parliament began to make plans for the succession of a German Protestant monarch: Sophia, Dowager Electress of Hanover, daughter of Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart. In the event she died shortly before her kinswoman, Queen Anne, in 1714, and her son Georg Ludwig was crowned George I, heralding in a new era of Anglo-German connections.
Long-established trading links, as well as a shared Protestantism, made Britain an appealing destination for many seventeenth-century Germans and Bohemians, especially after the defeat of Protestant hopes early in the Thirty Years War, a bloody series of conflicts which ravaged the Holy Roman Empire from 1618-1648. Some German speakers came to work, others to visit, and some chose to settle for personal reasons. Some, such as the civil servant Georg Rudolf Weckherlin and the Pansophists Samuel Hartlib and Theodor Haak, occupied positions of influence, political and scientific, whilst others, such as the poet and millenarian Quirinus Kuhlmann, remained dangerous outsiders, albeit with strong links to nonconformist sects.
Anna Linton, King’s College London
German Writers in Stuart Britain 