But while the house of Stuart was declining from mere corruption and decay, the almost alien house of Hanover was slowly and securely winning its way into English sympathies. This was natural enough as the successive sovereigns became more English in their feelings and their speech. Until the early Guelphs could speak freely and fully the language of the nation over which they were called to rule, until they were English born and had English ideas, there was, no doubt, ground for a certain amount of antagonism. Thackeray’s _Four Georges_ proves up to the hilt how slow these sovereigns were in learning the very patent fact that they must become English and cease to be German to get a firm hold on our insular mind. And this they did eventually. But, up to the ’45, their rule, which was still very foreign for years after that date, was rather endured as a necessity than loved, their personality regarded as alien rather than English. The one thing that made the nation, up to the first half of the eighteenth century, accept with little complaint, or hostility, princes who still were far too German to please the tastes of English-speaking peoples, was their own honesty of purpose and their personal courage and bravery. The house of Guelph lost nothing by actual want of success in the foreign wars about the time of the really serious Jacobite rising. Englishmen like pluck, and don’t mind a beating, provided good men do their best. This, then, is the story, as far as the army is concerned, of Dettingen and Fontenoy. They were not successes, certainly, but neither king nor soldier had shown want of the good old fighting spirit of Blenheim and Malplaquet. At the worst it was a healthy time, and showed that our mere bull-dog courage was not by itself the only thing by which battles are won. The causes of the war in which an English reigning sovereign led an army in the field were the guarantee of Great Britain, France, and other States, of the succession of Maria Theresa to the throne of the German Empire, known as the “Pragmatic Sanction,” and the attack upon Silesia by Frederick of Prussia. From this action France and Bavaria were drawn into the struggle against the Empress, and George II., possibly fearing the preponderating growth of his neighbour Prussia as a menace to his Hanoverian dominions, assembled a force of Danes, Hessians, Hanoverians, and British, under the Earl of Stair, numbering forty-four battalions, twenty of which were British, with fifty-three squadrons. This army, about 35,000 strong, met the French, some 25,000 in number, and composed of twenty-four battalions, and thirty squadrons, in position on the left bank of the Maine. The Allies were at Aschaffenburg and Klein Ostheim, and prepared to march through Dettingen on the right bank to join with a Hessian force at Hanau.