The royal house which, beginning with George I, succeeded to the British throne when Queen Anne (of the House of Stuart) died in 1714 without an heir. The shape of modern British society—open, liberal, and cosmopolitan—and the politics of cabinet government (monarchy sans divine kingship) owes much to them. Though officially their reign ended with Queen Victoria, their descendants continued on the throne through the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (the name was changed to House of Windsor in 1910).
Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs, had had seventeen pregnancies in her lifetime but in 1701 her last surviving child died. A new line of monarchs had to be found for the British throne. Though there were many suitable candidates, the British Parliament passed an Act of Settlement in that year that required the new monarch should be 1) a Stuart, descended from James or Mary, and 2) Protestant. They found such a candidate in the person of Sophia of Hanover, a small kingdom in northern Germany. Sophia's qualification lay in the fact that she was the grand-daugher of Elizabeth, the daughter of James I, who had married Frederich of the Palatinate early the previous century. Sophia, however, died suddenly just two weeks before Anne. The British throne therefore fell to her son, George I.
Sophia, Matriarch of the Hanovarians
The six monarchs of the house include:
George I, 1714-27
George II, 1727-60
George III, 1760-1820
George IV, 1820-30
William IV, 1830-7
Victoria, 1837-1901
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