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Portrait of George I

Monarchs · Hanoverian

George I

1660–1727

House of Hanover — the Protestant succession

In office: 1714–1727

A German prince who came to the British throne in 1714 under the Act of Settlement, passing over more than fifty Catholics with better hereditary claims, George I never mastered English and left much of the business of government to his ministers. His reign saw the first great Jacobite rising, the bursting of the South Sea Bubble and the rise of Sir Robert Walpole, conventionally called Britain's first prime minister.

How to spot them

  • ▸Elector of Hanover; great-grandson of James VI and I through Elizabeth of Bohemia and Sophia
  • ▸Spoke German and French; conversed with Walpole in Latin, or so tradition says
  • ▸His wife imprisoned for thirty years at Ahlden; his son and heir loathed him
  • ▸The last British sovereign to be buried outside Britain

In the reign

A rising for the Old Pretender fizzles out at Sheriffmuir and Preston (1715)

The Fifteen, led by the Earl of Mar — 'Bobbing John'

An act extending the maximum life of a parliament from three years to seven (1716)

The Septennial Act, which stood until 1911

A statute making it a felony for twelve or more people to refuse to disperse an hour after a proclamation is read (1715)

The Riot Act, hence 'reading the Riot Act'

Shares in a company trading to Spanish America rise tenfold and then collapse, ruining thousands (1720)

The South Sea Bubble; Isaac Newton was among the losers

A princess is caught in an affair with a Swedish count, divorced, and shut up in a castle for the rest of her life (1694)

Sophia Dorothea of Celle and Count Philip Christoph von Königsmarck, who vanished

The first minister to be called, in mockery, the prime minister takes charge of the Treasury (1721)

Sir Robert Walpole, First Lord of the Treasury from 1721 to 1742

A crown passes to a foreign elector under an act that had barred more than fifty closer Catholic claimants (1714)

The Hanoverian succession under the Act of Settlement of 1701

The Quadruple Alliance draws Britain into war with Spain, and a Spanish fleet is destroyed off Sicily (1718)

The Battle of Cape Passaro, won by Admiral Byng

Quick-fire facts

  • •Son of Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover, and Sophia, granddaughter of James VI and I; Sophia died on 8 June 1714, weeks before Queen Anne
  • •He landed at Greenwich on 18 September 1714 and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 20 October, amid riots in several towns
  • •He divorced Sophia Dorothea of Celle in 1694 and kept her confined at Ahlden until her death in 1726
  • •His principal mistresses were Melusine von der Schulenburg, created Duchess of Kendal, and Sophia von Kielmansegg
  • •His relations with his son, the future George II, were so bad that the Prince of Wales's household at Leicester House became a centre of opposition
  • •The South Sea Bubble of 1720 implicated ministers and the court, and Walpole's handling of the crash made his career
  • •Handel, his Hanover Kapellmeister, followed him to London; the Water Music was performed on the Thames in 1717
  • •He died of a stroke near Osnabrück on 11 June 1727 while travelling to Hanover, and was buried there — no later British monarch has been buried abroad

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Sources