Queen Anne died at Kensington Palace in London without a surviving child and became the last monarch of the House of Stuart. Under the Act of Settlement, the crown passed to George I of the House of Hanover. The succession altered court politics and reinforced the Protestant constitutional settlement.

Anne's reign coincided with the writing of Swift, Pope, Gay, Addison and Steele, whose satire captured its partisan politics. The Hanoverian succession supplied fresh targets for Jacobite poetry, political ballads and Augustan commentary.