George I of Great Britain
George I became King of Great Britain in 1714 as the fifty-eighth person in line by strict hereditary right, and the fifty-seven ahead of him were Catholic. Born in Hanover in 1660, he was a German prince who had fought against the Turks and the French, ran his electorate competently, and had no expectation of a foreign throne until the English parliament passed the Act of Settlement in 1701, which excluded Catholics from the succession and vested it in his mother Sophia and her Protestant descendants. She died two months before Queen Anne. He arrived at fifty-four speaking no English, having divorced his wife for adultery in 1694 and imprisoned her in a castle for the remaining thirty-two years of her life, and brought two German mistresses whom Londoners nicknamed the Elephant and the Maypole. He was never popular and it did not much matter. The Jacobite rising of 1715 in favour of the Old Pretender collapsed within months. His reign is where the modern shape of British government begins, largely by default. He depended on the Whigs, who alone accepted the settlement; he attended cabinet less and less; and Robert Walpole emerged from the wreckage of the South Sea Bubble in 1720 as the minister who managed both the Commons and the king, and is counted as the first prime minister. The dynasty's German interests kept dragging Britain into continental politics. He died of a stroke on a journey to Hanover in 1727 and is buried there. The Hanoverian succession also settled the question the seventeenth century had fought two wars over. Parliament had chosen a king from a list of its own making, which established beyond argument that the crown was held on statutory terms rather than by divine right.
- Lived: 1660 CE – 1727 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: king, elector, ruler
