Mary II died childless in 1694, and so on the death of William III in 1702, the crown passed to Mary’s younger sister Anne, who ruled alongside her consort Prince George of Denmark. Despite 17 pregnancies only one of Anne’s children survived infancy, William, Duke of Gloucester, and he had died in 1700. Faced with the extinction of the Protestant Stuart line, Parliament offered the throne on the death of Anne in 1714 to her nearest Protestant relative – the Elector of Hanover, Georg Ludwig, who ruled as George I, the first Hanoverian monarch of Great Britain.