King George I
1660 – 1727 · Generation XXVIII · King of Great Britain and Ireland (r. 1714–1727) · House of Hanover
George I (1660–1727). King of Great Britain and Ireland (r. 1714–1727). Married Sophia Dorothea of Celle in 1682; the marriage was dissolved in 1694. The first Hanoverian king, called to the British throne at fifty-four. Ruler of the Electorate of Hanover from 1698, he came to the British throne as the senior Protestant descendant of his great-grandfather James VI and I, after the deaths in a single year of his mother Sophia and Queen Anne. Jacobites tried and failed to depose him in favour of Anne’s Catholic half-brother, James Francis Edward Stuart. During his reign the monarchy’s powers diminished and Britain began its shift toward cabinet government led by a prime minister — by his final years real power rested with Robert Walpole, now recognised as the first de facto holder of that office. He died on a journey to his native Hanover and was buried there, the most recent British monarch laid to rest outside Britain.
One of 34 people of House of Hanover (from 1700) in this archive. Called from Germany by the Act of Settlement; the Georges, then Victoria.
Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → Margaret Tudor → King James V of Scotland → Mary Queen of Scots → King James I → Elizabeth Stuart → Sophia of Hanover → King George I.
Parents
- Ernest Augustus of Hanover (1629 – 1698)
- Sophia of Hanover (1630 – 1714)
Partners
- Married Sophia Dorothea of Celle (1666 – 1726) in 1682; the marriage was dissolved in 1694 — 2 children together
Children
- King George II (1683 – 1760)
- Sophia Dorothea of Hanover (1687 – 1757)
Life
- 1660 — Born
- 1682 — Married Sophia Dorothea of Celle
- 1694 — Separated from Sophia Dorothea of Celle
- 1714 — George I, the first Hanoverian King, succeeds his distant cousin, Anne.
- 1717 — Townshend is dismissed from the government by George, causing Walpole to resign
- 1727 — Died
- 1727 — George I dies in Hanover, aged 67.