Between the three of them they set the direction of French policy with respect to the Hanoverian dynasty and its early troubles.īut how well did they understand what was transpiring over the Channel? For all its sound and fury the English troubles of the spring and summer 1715 ultimately came to nothing, and some historians have argued as a consequence that French ambassadors' reports are of little value as sources with which to gauge opinion and mood in eighteenth-century London. There the king occasionally read the reports himself and more often listened to them being read by his old and trusted minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Croissy, marquis de Torcy. All of this was regularly reported back to France by the French ambassador to London, Charles François de la Bonde, marquis d'Iberville. More ominously, the English Jacobites were plotting to overthrow King George I and restore the exiled Catholic line of the Stuarts.
A new dynasty was barely settled on the throne, a new ministry was busy impeaching its predecessor, rioters were attacking Nonconformist chapels all over the country, and shocking slanders against the royal family were being sold on every street corner in London.
England in the spring and summer of 1715 was a nation in turmoil.
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