The Hanoverian Succession

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the intense political activity at the turn of the 18th Century, when many politicians in London went to great lengths to find a Protestant successor to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland and others went to equal lengths to oppose them. Queen Anne had no surviving children and, following the old rules, there were at least 50 Catholic candidates ahead of any Protestant ones and among those by far the most obvious candidate was James, the only son of James II. Yet with the passing of the Act of Settlement in 1701 ahead of Anne’s own succession, focus turned to Europe and to Princess Sophia, an Electress of the Holy Roman Empire in Hanover who, as a granddaughter of James I, thus became next in line to be crowned at Westminster Abbey. It was not clear that Hanover would want this role, given its own ambitions and the risks, in Europe, of siding with Protestants, and soon George I was minded to break the rules of succession so that he would be the last Hanoverian monarch as well as the first.

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Guests

• Professor Andreas Gestrich No other episodes
  Professor Emeritus at Trier University and Former Director of the German Historical Institute in London
• Professor Elaine Chalus No other episodes
  Professor of British History at the University of Liverpool
• Professor Mark Knights 4 episodes
  Professor of History at the University of Warwick

Reading list

• The English Court in the Reign of George I
  J.M. Beattie (Cambridge University Press, 1967) Google Books →
• The Hanoverians: The History of a Dynasty
  Jeremy Black (Hambledon Continuum, 2006) Google Books →
• Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture 1696-1722
  Justin Champion (Manchester University Press, 2003) Google Books →
• Britons: Forging the Nation 1707 - 1837
  Linda Colley (Yale University Press, 2009) Google Books →
• The Hanoverian Succession: Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Culture
  Andreas Gestrich and Michael Schaich (eds) (Ashgate, 2015) Google Books →
• George I: Elector and King
  Ragnhild Hatton (Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1979) Google Books →
• Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture
  Mark Knights (Oxford University Press, 2005) Google Books →
• Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell
  Mark Knights (Blackwell, 2012) Google Books →
• Queen Caroline: Cultural Politics at the Early Eighteenth-Century Court
  Joanna Marschner (Yale University Press, 2014) Google Books →
• Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788
  Paul Monod (Cambridge University Press, 1989) Google Books →
• Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture 1714-1760
  Hannah Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2006) Google Books →
• 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion
  Daniel Szechi (Yale University Press, 2006) Google Books →
• George II : King and Elector
  A.C. Thompson (Yale University Press, 2011) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m0025d6j

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0025d6j

Auto-category: 941.06 (History of Great Britain - 18th century)