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Hello.
At the turn of the 18th century, Westminster politicians went to extraordinary lengths to find a Protestant successor to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland.
Queen Anne had no surviving children and following the old rules, there were at least 50 Catholic candidates ahead of any Protestant one.
Yet by passing the act of settlement in 1701, focus turned to Europe and the Protestant Princess Sophia, an electress of the Holy Roman Empire in Hanover, who became next in line to be crowned at Westminster Abbey.
With me to discuss the Hanoverian succession are Andreas Gestrich, Professor Emeritus at Trier University and former director of the German Historical Institute in London, Elaine Challis, professor of British History at the University of Liverpool, and Mark Knights, professor of History at the University of Warwick.
Mark Knights, why was there a need for the act of settlement in 1701?
The act of Settlement was needed to secure the Protestant succession.
And in order to understand that, we need to go back a little bit, because Britain had been racked by succession crises for 25 years.
James, Duke of York, who became James II, was the subject of an enormous amount of controversy in the late 1670s and the early 1680s, when there were attempts to exclude him from the succession, they failed.
He did become king.
He became James ii, and he fulfilled all the worst nightmares of his opponents by pursuing Catholic policies, triggering revolution in 1688.
And one of the outcomes of that revolution was the Bill of Rights.
And the Bill of Rights laid down that no future king should be a Catholic.
Indeed, they weren't even allowed to have a Catholic wife.
So, as you were saying in the introduction, with the prospect of no Protestant heir from either William or from Anne, it became increasingly necessary to settle the succession in the Hanoverian line, all the more so because England's arch enemy, France, had recognised James II's son, James Francis Edward, as the legitimate heir.