Few twists of political fortune are as discombobulating as the youngest child making off with the family inheritance. Richard III, George W. Bush, Ed Miliband: monsters all three. Sophia, Electress of Hanover — bright, lively and self-indulgent — left a no less divisive legacy. The 12th child of an exiled Mittel Europa princeling, Sophia had scarce prospects when she was born in The Hague in 1630. Yet through her mother Elizabeth, daughter of James I, Sophia was able to pass the newly unified British crown to her son George I. (She missed out on the throne herself when she predeceased her cousin Queen Anne by less than two months.) To many Catholics, she remains a symbol of the Protestant chauvinism that drove Britain’s parliamentarians to exclude 57 Catholic cousins ahead of her. To centuries of Whig historians, Sophia was the dynastic guarantor of the bloodless revolution and the democratic rights of Englishmen, free from the grip of Rome.
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