16/10/2026
Born in 1630, Sophia of Hanover. She was seven weeks from the crown when rain fell in the gardens at Herrenhausen. Every British monarch since has been her descendant.
She died in the Herrenhausen gardens during a sudden downpour. She had been walking, felt ill, collapsed, and was gone within minutes, aged eighty-three, on 8 June 1714. Queen Anne of Great Britain died seven weeks later. Had Sophia lived those seven weeks, she would have become queen. Instead, the crown passed to her son George, who became George I and founded the British royal line that continues to the present day. She came within seven weeks of being Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and history has largely filed her as a footnote to her son’s accession.
Sophia was born at The Hague on this day in 1630, the twelfth child of Frederick V, Elector Palatine and briefly King of Bohemia, and Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England, whose story appears in this series. Her parents lost the Palatinate and Bohemia during the Thirty Years’ War and lived in exile in the Netherlands. She grew up speaking five languages, fluent in English, French, German, Dutch, and Italian, and was courted in her twenties by her cousin Charles II before his restoration. She married Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg in 1658 and watched him build Hanover into an Electorate by 1692, making her Electress.
The Act of Settlement of 1701, passed to secure the Protestant succession after the death of Anne’s last surviving child, named Sophia heir to the British throne as the nearest Protestant descendant of James I. She spent her final years in philosophical correspondence with Leibniz and watchful attention to English politics, eager to come but restrained by her son who wanted no complications. An angry letter from Anne three days before her death may have contributed to her final collapse.
