The story stems right back to 1714. This was the year that Britain’s Queen Anne died, after a literally painful reign during which she was crippled by gout and suffered 17 or 18 failed pregnancies. Historians quibble on the exact number, but the upshot is the last Stuart monarch – described by one onlooker as “gross and corpulent” from illness and inactivity – did not have an easy time of it, and died without an heir.

This was an era of intense religious tensions. Anne’s Catholic father, James II, had been kicked off the throne by the “Glorious Revolution”, which saw the Protestant hero William of Orange and his wife, Anne’s sister Mary, installed in his place. Anne had inherited the crown after William died in 1702, and her own death in 1714 meant a new Protestant monarch was required. That meant ignoring the dozens of Catholic contenders with much stronger claims to the throne and plucking the nearest viable Protestant instead: a man called Georg Ludwig, who was every bit as German as he sounds.