This mezzotint shows the elderly Princess Sophia, Electress of Hanover. The death of William, Duke of Gloucester in 1700 deprived the nation of a Protestant heir to his mother, Princess (later Queen) Anne. The Act of Settlement was therefore introduced to guarantee the Protestant succession, and named as Anne’s successor the seventy-year-old Princess Sophia, the dowager Electress of Hanover, whose mother had been the ‘Winter Queen’ Elizabeth, daughter of James VI and I. Princess Sophia died two months before Queen Anne, and on Anne’s death the crown thus passed to Sophia’s eldest son, who became the first Hanoverian King of Britain, George I.