Celebrating the Hanoverian Succession

[Geee]

National Review:

Three hundred years ago, on August 1, 1714, by the Julian calendar (August 12 by the Gregorian calendar we use now), Queen Anne died. She was just 49 years old, but was weakened by obesity, gout, and the effects of 17 pregnancies, from which only one child lived beyond infancy — William, Duke of Gloucester, who died of smallpox at age eleven in 1700.

 

That posed a constitutional crisis in an era when monarchs actively led governments and religion was inextricably intertwined with government. Who would succeed the Protestant Anne as king of England, Scotland, and Ireland?

 

Just 25 years earlier, Anne’s father, King James II, a Catholic, was driven out of England in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. One of his major offenses: He appointed Catholics to local offices and made them military officers, claiming he could suspend the act of Parliament that required they be members of the Church of England.

The fear was that James would set up an absolutist government, ruling without Parliament, just as the most powerful monarch of the day, Louis XIV, had done in France. James had not called a parliament in three years and abolished the colonial legislatures in what would become the United States.