The accession of George I at Greenwich

A dynasty is rarely founded by the fifty-four-year-old German Elector landing at a small Thames waterfront after a six-week sea-crossing in a vessel he had never previously sailed on. The 1714 Hanoverian-accession was the constitutional-novelty of the post-Restoration English political-settlement: the English-Crown-succession had been settled by the 1701 Act of Settlement on the constitutional-Protestant-only basis, the senior surviving Stuart-claimant James Francis Edward Stuart (the Old Pretender) had been excluded by the Catholic-Stuart constitutional-disqualification, and the succession had been transmitted through the female-line to the junior Hanoverian-Lutheran branch.

THE ACT OF SETTLEMENT 1701

The English constitutional-crisis of 1700-01 had been triggered by the death of the only-surviving Stuart-heir Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, the eleven-year-old son of Queen Anne, on the thirtieth of July 1700. The death left the English-and-Scottish-Crown without a clear Protestant-successor after Queen Anne (who would succeed William III in 1702 on his death) and had triggered the political-and-constitutional-crisis of late 1700-01 in the English Parliament. The Tory-and-Whig parliamentary-consensus across the 1700-01 session was that the Stuart-Catholic-line (the James II's son James Francis Edward Stuart, then-thirteen at the time-of-the-crisis, in exile at the French court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye) could not be permitted to succeed under the 1689 Glorious-Revolution-constitutional-settlement on the Protestant-only succession-basis, and that the successor must be identified through the Protestant-female-line of the Stuart-Hanover-descent.

The Act of Settlement 1701 (passed by the English-Parliament on the twelfth of June 1701 under the Tory-Whig parliamentary-consensus, and given the Royal Assent on the same day) named the Sophia of Hanover (the seventieth-year Electress of Hanover, granddaughter of James I through his daughter Elizabeth Stuart who had married the Frederick V, Elector Palatine, in 1613) as the heir-after-Queen-Anne, and named the Sophia's Protestant-descendants as the succession-line. The Act-of-Settlement excluded all Catholic-successors and all foreign-marriage-Catholic-conversions in the succession-line. The Act-of-Settlement-1701 has been the constitutional-basis of the British-monarchical-succession from 1714 to the present and is the constitutional-instrument that brought the Windsor-dynasty to the modern-British-Crown.

THE STANDING-1714 SUCCESSION-CRISIS

Sophia of Hanover died on the eighth of June 1714 at the Herrenhausen-palace outside Hanover, two months before Queen Anne's 1714-death. The effect of Sophia's pre-Anne-death was that the Act-of-Settlement-1701 succession passed to Sophia's eldest-surviving-son Georg Ludwig, the fifty-four-year-old Elector of Hanover and Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, who was the immediate Protestant-successor to the British-Crown.

Queen Anne died at Kensington Palace at the 7:45 AM of the first-of-August 1714 at the forty-nine-year of her age. The Privy-Council met immediately at Kensington Palace under the Lord Chancellor Simon Harcourt and proclaimed Georg Ludwig as the King George I of Great Britain at the formal Privy-Council-proclamation of the same-day. The Privy-Council-proclamation was carried to Hanover by the 1st-Earl of Dorset (the Lord Lieutenant of Sussex) and his courier-team in the six-day courier-crossing from Hampton-Court to Hanover via Hellevoetsluis on the Dutch-side. The proclamation reached the Herrenhausen-palace outside Hanover at the 6 AM of the seventh of August 1714.

THE STANDING-CROSSING

George I prepared the British-crossing across the six-week August-to-September 1714 Hanover-preparation period. The crossing-fleet was assembled at the Dutch-port of Hellevoetsluis under the Hanoverian-court-administrator Andreas Gottlieb von Bernstorff (the Minister of Hanover who would become the King-George-I-Chief Minister-and-Treasury-Secretary in the London-court-period from late 1714). The Hanover-court-party was the large Hanoverian-court-staff-and-family-and-mistress-and-courtier-and-bodyguard-party (approximately three-hundred-and-twenty people in the full crossing-fleet), including the court-mistress Madame Melusine von der Schulenburg (later Duchess of Kendal), the court-mistress Sophia Charlotte von Kielmansegg (later Countess of Darlington), the court-translator and the court-musicians.

The North-Sea-crossing began at Hellevoetsluis on the thirty-first of August 1714 in the Royal-Yacht Peregrine and the accompanying-fleet of eight Royal-Navy ships. The crossing was interrupted by the North-Sea-storm of the 3-to-5 September 1714 that forced the crossing-fleet to shelter at the Texel-anchorage off the North-Holland coast; the second-crossing-attempt across the 15-to-18 September 1714 brought the crossing-fleet to the Thames-mouth on the evening of the seventeenth of September 1714.

THE STANDING-EIGHTEENTH-OF-SEPTEMBER LANDING

The Royal-Yacht Peregrine anchored at the Greenwich royal-waterfront at the 1:30 PM of the eighteenth of September 1714. The Privy-Council-delegation under the 1st Earl of Wharton (Lord Privy Seal) and the 1st Earl of Halifax (First Lord of the Treasury) was at the Greenwich royal-waterfront-landing-stage, with the additional-presence of the 1st Earl of Marlborough (the John Churchill, the victor of Blenheim 1704, who had been recalled from his 1712-political-exile in the Hanoverian-favour) and the future-Prime-Minister Sir Robert Walpole (the Whig-member-of-Parliament who would become the King's-Chief-Treasury-Minister in the 1715-court-arrangement). The Greenwich-landing-ceremony was the formal Privy-Council-reception-and-Royal-acknowledgement at the Greenwich-royal-waterfront, with the Royal-Anthem played by the Hanoverian-Royal-Bandsmen who had crossed with the court-party.

George I processed from Greenwich to St James's Palace across the evening of the eighteenth-of-September 1714 in the Royal-State-Coach with the Royal-Escort. He took the residential-apartments at the St James's Palace, took the formal-Coronation at Westminster Abbey on the twentieth-of-October 1714 in the traditional-English-Coronation-ceremony, and held the British-Crown across the next thirteen years to his death at Osnabrück on the eleventh of June 1727 at the sixty-seven-year of his age.

THE STANDING-HANOVERIAN-DYNASTY

The Hanoverian-Dynasty ran the British-Crown for 187 years across six monarchs from George I (1714-1727) to Queen Victoria (1837-1901), produced the constitutional-development of the modern-British-cabinet-and-parliamentary-system across the Walpole-and-Pelham-and-Pitt-and-Liverpool-and-Gladstone-and-Disraeli ministerial-periods, oversaw the acquisition of the British-imperial-territories from the North-American-and-Indian-and-African-and-Pacific-colonial-acquisitions, and laid the constitutional-foundation of the modern-Westminster system that became the template of the parliamentary-democracy-export-model across the Commonwealth-and-international Westminster-system-adoption of the twentieth-century. The Hanover-name passed to the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line at the accession of Edward VII in 1901 (on the paternal-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha line of Prince Albert) and was renamed Windsor in the July-1917 royal-proclamation. The Hanover name in modern British constitutional history carries the weight of the Greenwich royal-waterfront landing of the eighteenth of September 1714.