As the British royals don't appear to be planning to celebrate the 300th centenary of the arrival of their German ancestors from Hanover in 1714, the British Library has stepped in with a stylish exhibition of their own on the Georgians.
Maybe it is the German origin of their family that has put the current royals off. After all, the family changed their name to that of the Windsors after World War I to avoid the connection. Or perhaps it's simply that the Georges were a relatively undistinguished lot. George I arrived without a wife because she was in prison back home for planning to elope with her Swedish lover (who was brutally disposed of). George II's main claim to fame was that he was the last British monarch to lead his troops into battle. George III went mad while his son George IV was a spendthrift and voluptuary who would put any of the present crop of European royals to shame.
Not that the increasingly scabrous attacks on the Hanoverians through the 18th century sees much light in this exhibition. But then it has little of the sheer rumbustiousness of an age that Hogarth depicted with such vividness in his scenes of drunken debauchery and gambling excess.
This was the era when the press turned to celebrity gossip, popular prints took to extreme satire and when violence, on the street at home as on the battlefield abroad, was never far away. Georgians Revealed may be the title of the show but what is displayed here is a sanitised version, with barely a mention of the horrors of the slave trade that underpinned its West Indian wealth nor the brutality of its penal system that ensured order at home.
And yet, as this show amply illustrates, the Georges presided over, and were active patrons of, a century of unparalleled elegance and taste. Through a succession of galleries set against walls of social images from the popular prints, the exhibition displays just how cultured as well as internationally powerful the country became. If the 17th century was the age of the aristocracy and the 19th century the time of the industrial working classes, then the 18th century was when the middle classes held sway in terms of taste and consumption.
