“I have you in my eye, sir”

Witnessing the arrival of Charles II in London on May 29, 1660, John Evelyn marvels that after the long years of Civil War and Interregnum, the monarch returned peacefully “without one drop of bloud, and by that very army, which rebell’d against him.” ¹ The political upheavals of seventeenth-century England, so boggling to Evelyn’s imagination, have gone on to inspire numerous cinematic works, from Wilfred Noy’s 1913 silent King Charles through Mike Barker’s 2003 To Kill a King to Ben Wheatley’s 2013 hallucinatory epic A Field in England. By contrast, eighteenth-century England under the less turbulent, cabinet-style government of the House of Hanover has appeared far less frequently in film, with the dynasty most often referenced as a mere indicator of cultural context. We see George II, for example, more as a part of the milieu than as a developed character in King of the Wind (1990) and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011). George III, deemed “Farmer George” by satirists for his dull and thrifty interests, ² would likewise have eluded the camera’s eye had he not inadvertently provoked the most profound crisis in the monarchy since the seventeenth century, as Alan Bennett’s 1994 The Madness of King George ³ illustrates.