Material items such as dress, jewellery, military regalia and other personal adornments can make an impression on viewers depending on their significance at the time.

These convey meaning through the physical bodies of the main protagonists: by looks, glances and gestures, the way royal persons are positioned in relation to others, and via materiality. Visuality relates to the social and cultural aspects of human visual experiences, a perspective that focuses attention on the communicative nature of seeing and looking, and the non-verbal systems of communication that come to the fore in social practices such as ceremonies and ritual. To answer these questions, I used a method in Visualising Protestant Monarchy rooted in the interdisciplinary field of visual culture that takes into account vision and visuality. Image Credit: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021 What did the public make of William and Mary Anne and George? How did audiences respond? I also wanted to explore the perspective of contemporary audiences. Were the same old images produced or did court painters and provincial artists engravers and print publishers based in England create fresh representations? How far did depictions of William produced in England differ from images of him created in the Dutch Republic? And what was going on in the realm of royal ceremony: did these monarchs and their partners perform in the same way as their predecessors or did they do anything differently? This was especially pertinent to William as he continued to hold high political office in the Dutch Republic and was on display in the European arena every summer and autumn. The artistic reaction to political events also interested me.

How William, Mary, Anne and George dealt with the shift from a traditional style of kingship, centred on ideas of divinely-appointed rule and hereditary right to one rooted in Protestantism and a firm commitment to Parliament. I wanted to find out how these monarchs presented themselves to a wider public. Queen Mary II was married to William of Orange (King William III) while Anne, who succeeded as Queen in 1702, was wedded to Prince George of Denmark. Its survival largely depended on the efforts of the royal family: two English queens, Mary and her younger sister Anne, a Dutch king and a Danish prince. A fledgling Protestant monarchy had to establish itself, while at the same time distancing itself, from James II’s Catholic, Stuart court-in-exile in France. The extraordinary events of 1688–9 were followed by a volte-face in foreign policy that quickly led to British involvement in continental warfare for twenty-four of the next twenty-eight years. A Convention Parliament decided that James had effectively abdicated, William and his wife Mary, James II’s elder daughter, were declared joint monarchs, and a minor foreign prince became King of England. In the months following James’s departure from England, established royal practices were overturned. Uprisings in the north soon followed, and by the end of 1688 Catholic James II had fled to France where Louis XIV offered the Stuart king-in-exile his protection. The Revolution began on 5 November 1688 when William of Orange, backed by a 21,000-strong army, took the unusual step of invading England the last successful foreign invasion. The years following the so-called Glorious Revolution (1688-9) were some of the most significant in British political history.

Royal order of protestant knights