George I (1660-1727) of Britain became king when his distant cousin Queen Anne died in 1714. After Anne’s last surviving child had died in 1700, many people claimed that only her half brother James Francis Edward Stuart, a Roman Catholic and son of King James II, had the right to succeed her. In 1701, however, Parliament passed an Act of Settlement that made sure that no Catholic would become monarch. The act provided that Princess Sophia, a Protestant, would succeed Anne as ruler of England unless Anne had another child. Sophia was a granddaughter of King James I of England and electress of the German territory of Hanover (see Hanover). Sophia’s son George became heir to the throne after her death in June 1714 and became king after Anne’s death in August.
George was born in Hanover on May 28, 1660. He became elector of the territory of Hanover in 1698. George was ignorant of British politics and did not speak English well. But he kept in close touch with his ministers, of whom the most famous was Sir Robert Walpole (see Walpole, Sir Robert). The two most dramatic events of George’s reign were the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, which attempted to restore the Stuart family as rulers of Britain, and the bursting of the “South Sea Bubble,” a great financial scandal, in 1720. George died on June 11, 1727.
