Sophia of Hanover

The basic premise of this film is that Alec Guinness' character, the main character, is a young man who's been sort of denied his birthright.

Well, I think technically it was his mother who was denied her birthright and defaulted to him being denied his.

Yeah, she marries a poor Italian opera singer and is then kind of cut off from the family.

And so he grows up poor, not that poor, but to his mind, poor.

Really?

Yeah.

And they choose a German prince named George who barely spoke English because his mother Sophia of Hanover, who was the granddaughter of James I, was Protestant.

Huh.

Only 15 years earlier, Anne's father, James II, had been kicked off the throne for converting, and his Protestant people wouldn't stand for another Catholic king.

The succession skipped over 41 closer relations until they got to the nearest living Protestant, Sophia, Electress of Hanover.

The Act of Settlement of 1701 declared that all future British monarchs must be her descendants.

She ended up dying before Anne and the throne went to her son, George I.

Next, we go up three generations to Charles I's siblings.

He had an older brother, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, who would have been king had he not died of typhoid fever at 18.

Charles had a younger brother, Robert, and four sisters, Elizabeth, Margaret, Mary, and Sophia.

Most died in infancy, his only sibling who lived to have children.

Many wanted to reinstate James II's son, James Stuart.

Others wanted a Protestant heir, but from a different line than Sophia of Hanover, thus separating from England.

But after seven years of famine and a failed attempt to colonize Panama, the Scottish economy was ravaged and they were in a weak position to make demands.

The Parliament in London threatened that if Scotland refused to be united with England, all Scots would be treated as aliens south of the border.

Anne supported the Hanoverian succession in public, but it was rumored that she secretly hoped her half-brother would succeed her.

She refused to allow any of her German heirs to visit England.

Sophia of Hanover was 83.

She was determined to outlive sickly 49-year-old Anne, but a letter from Anne accusing her of plotting to take the throne so shocked her that she died in June 1714.

Doubtless King William III, the very soul of the earlier Grand Alliance, approved of the price paid, though at that time so many stood nearer in the English succession than the princes of the House of Hanover that there seemed no probability that the Electorate would prove for that family only a step to the higher dignity, the throne of England.

The mother of George I was Sophia, usually known as the Electress Sophia.

The title was merely one of honour, and only meant wife of an elector.

This princess was twenty-seven when she married Ernest Augustus, afterwards first Elector of Brunswick-Luneburg, and she was as famous for her beauty and her wit as he was for his courtly manner.

The marriage took place a couple of years before the Restoration of the Stuarts to England, and amid the general joy with which that event was hailed in England, no notice was there taken of the birth of a little prince, great-grandson of one English king, son of the first cousin of the restored monarch.

The Electress Sophia was the daughter of Elizabeth, daughter of King James I, and Frederick the Elector Palatine.

The Princess Elizabeth was one of the most beautiful of women.

She inspired enthusiasm in the breasts of English poets and of German princes.

As Lord Stanhope has justly remarked, the country with wonderful blindness resolutely adhered at the same time to a Protestant king and to Jacobite ministers.

They prayed devoutly for the Electress Sophia and burnt in effigy the Pope, the devil, and the pretender.

Yet they supported a parliament that suffered no step to be taken to the disadvantage of the most dangerous member of the Trinity.

On the other hand, Bolingbroke saw that the Hanoverian succession meant his own banishment from power and the final overthrow of his whole Church and Tory policy.

Having lost her father early, the young princess was partially brought up in Berlin.

There, in the society of Sophia Charlotta, the friend of Leibniz, and so inquisitively curious that as Leibniz said of her, she would know even the why of a why, she acquired the keenness of mind for speculative subjects and that respect for learning and learned men which distinguished her from the rest of the gross and unlettered representatives of the Hanoverian stock in England.

She possessed by nature the same cheerful, brisk, curious, acute, and stirring character as both the queen, Sophia Charlotta, and her mother, the old Electress Sophia.

She sometimes recalls to Charlotta Elizabeth of Bavaria, the niece of the Electress Sophia and cousin therefore of George II, who married the brother of Louis XIV, became the mother of the Regent d'Orleans, and watched for so many years with shrewd, honest, amazed eyes the strange distractions and devilries of her vile husband and her corrupted son.