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.

With

Andreas Gestrich Professor Emeritus at Trier University and Former Director of the German Historical Institute in London

Elaine Chalus Professor of British History at the University of Liverpool

And

Mark Knights Professor of History at the University of Warwick

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

J.M. Beattie, The English Court in the Reign of George I (Cambridge University Press, 1967)

Jeremy Black, The Hanoverians: The History of a Dynasty (Hambledon Continuum, 2006)

Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture 1696-1722 (Manchester University Press, 2003), especially his chapter ‘Anglia libera: Protestant liberties and the Hanoverian succession, 1700–14’

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707 – 1837 (Yale University Press, 2009)

Andreas Gestrich and Michael Schaich (eds), The Hanoverian Succession: Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Culture (‎Ashgate, 2015)

Ragnhild Hatton, George I: Elector and King (Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1979)

Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Mark Knights, Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell (Blackwell, 2012)

Joanna Marschner, Queen Caroline: Cultural Politics at the Early Eighteenth-Century Court (Yale University Press, 2014)

Ashley Marshall, ‘Radical Steele: Popular Politics and the Limits of Authority’ (Journal of British Studies 58, 2019)

Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788 (Cambridge University Press, 1989)

Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture 1714-1760 (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Daniel Szechi, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (Yale University Press, 2006)

A.C. Thompson, George II : King and Elector (Yale University Press, 2011)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production