The most excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dowager of Hanover [...] and the heirs of her body, being Protestants.
The Act of Settlement, 1701, naming the line that would bring George I to the throne
George I
parents: Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover, and Sophia of the Palatinate
date and place of birth: 28 May 1660 (Old Style) at Hanover
wife: Sophia Dorothea of Celle (divorced 1694)
date of marriage: 22 November 1682 at Celle
children: George (later George II), Sophia Dorothea (later Queen in Prussia)
years of reign: 1714-1727
date of coronation: 20 October 1714 at Westminster Abbey
date and place of death: 11 June 1727 at Osnabrück
place of burial: Leineschloss, Hanover; since 1957 at Herrenhausen, Hanover
When Queen Anne died on 1 August 1714, more than fifty people had a stronger hereditary claim to her throne than George Louis, Elector of Hanover. Nearly all of them were Catholics. The Act of Settlement of 1701 had barred Catholics from the crown and settled it instead on the Protestant descendants of George's mother, Sophia, a granddaughter of James I through his daughter Elizabeth, the "Winter Queen" of Bohemia. Sophia died in June 1714, aged eighty-three, less than two months before Anne. Her son became King George I of Great Britain at the age of fifty-four.
Hanover
George was already an experienced ruler and soldier. He had fought the Turks at the siege of Vienna in 1683 and commanded imperial armies against the French in the War of the Spanish Succession. He succeeded his father as Elector of Hanover in 1698. He was dutiful, shy, honest and dull, happiest hunting or at the opera, and he never pretended to enjoy public ceremony.
His marriage had ended in scandal. In 1682 he married his cousin Sophia Dorothea of Celle, for her dowry and to unite two branches of the family. They had a son and a daughter, and then drifted apart. George kept a mistress, and Sophia Dorothea fell in love with a Swedish soldier, Count Philip Christoph von Königsmarck. On the night of 1 July 1694 Königsmarck walked into the Leineschloss palace in Hanover and was never seen again. He was almost certainly murdered, and his body was never found. George divorced his wife that December and had her confined at the castle of Ahlden, where she remained for the last thirty-two years of her life. She never saw her children again.
A German King
George landed at Greenwich on 18 September 1714. He brought with him his German ministers, two Turkish servants named Mehmet and Mustapha, and his long-standing mistress, Melusine von der Schulenburg, whom he later made Duchess of Kendal. She was tall and thin; his half-sister Sophia von Kielmansegg, who also came, was stout, and Londoners nicknamed the pair "the Maypole" and "the Elephant." Gossip assumed both women were his mistresses.
The story that George spoke no English is exaggerated. He spoke it poorly and preferred French, the language of European courts, which most of his ministers also spoke. He spent long periods in Hanover, returning there several times during his reign, and he never warmed to his new subjects, who did not warm to him. But the British got what they wanted from him: a Protestant king who would keep the Catholic Stuarts out.
The Fifteen
George's first test came within a year. Anne's half-brother James Francis Edward Stuart, the Catholic "Old Pretender," had never given up his claim, and many Tories had flirted with him before Anne's death. George trusted the Whigs, gave them nearly every office, and drove the Tories into opposition. In September 1715 the Earl of Mar raised the Stuart standard at Braemar in Scotland. The rising was badly led. At Sheriffmuir in November Mar's army fought an indecisive battle with the government forces under the Duke of Argyll, and the next day an English Jacobite force surrendered at Preston. James himself landed in Scotland only in December, after the rising had failed, and left again in February 1716. Two Jacobite lords were beheaded on Tower Hill; a third, the Earl of Nithsdale, escaped from the Tower the night before his execution dressed in women's clothes smuggled in by his wife.
The Whig government used the scare to pass the Septennial Act of 1716, which extended the life of a Parliament from three years to seven. The Whigs then held power for most of the next half century.
Father and Son
George and his son, the Prince of Wales, disliked each other, and they fell out in public in 1717. At the christening of the prince's newborn son, the king chose the Duke of Newcastle as a godparent against the prince's wishes. The prince shook his fist at Newcastle and said something the Duke understood as a challenge to a duel. The king placed his son under arrest, then expelled him from St James's Palace but kept his grandchildren in his own custody. The prince set up a rival court at Leicester House, which became the meeting place of the opposition. The two were officially reconciled in 1720, but the quarrel set a pattern: George II fell out just as badly with his own eldest son, and George III with his.
Handel and the Water Music
George Frideric Handel had been George's court composer in Hanover before he moved to London. On 17 July 1717 the king held a party on the Thames, sailing upstream from Whitehall to Chelsea with a barge of about fifty musicians alongside playing Handel's new suite. According to the Daily Courant, George liked it so much he had it played three times. We know it as the Water Music.
The South Sea Bubble
In 1720 the South Sea Company offered to take over a large part of the national debt in exchange for its own shares. The company's directors talked up its prospects in the South American trade, bribed ministers and royal mistresses with shares, and watched the price rise from about £128 in January to over £1,000 by the summer. Hundreds of other schemes floated on the same excitement, including, according to legend, one "for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." In the autumn the bubble burst. Thousands of investors lost their savings, including many aristocrats and, it was said, Isaac Newton, who reportedly remarked that he could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies but not the madness of people. George himself was governor of the company.
Walpole
The man who cleaned up the mess was Robert Walpole, a Norfolk squire who had warned against the scheme. He protected the king and the leading ministers from the parliamentary inquiry, which earned him the nickname "Skreen-Master General," and by 1721 he was First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He held both offices for twenty-one years and is usually counted as Britain's first prime minister. George's absences in Hanover and his limited English meant he stopped attending meetings of the cabinet, and ministers learned to run the government among themselves. Historians still debate how far this shaped the modern cabinet system, but it happened under George I.
Death at Osnabrück
In June 1727 George set out on another visit to Hanover. On the road, near Delden in the Netherlands, he suffered a stroke. He insisted on pressing on to Osnabrück, where his father had once ruled as prince-bishop and where George had spent part of his childhood, and died there in the early hours of 11 June, aged sixty-seven. He was buried in Hanover, the last British monarch to be buried outside Britain. His son succeeded him as George II. Sophia Dorothea had died at Ahlden seven months before him, still a prisoner.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "George I" https://englishhistory.net/house-of-hanover/george-i/, September 30, 2026