The Coronation riots was a series of Jacobite riots that occurred in southern and western England in response to the coronation of King George I of Great Britain in October 1714.
On the death of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, in August 1714, Elector Georg Ludwig of Hanover succeeded to the throne of Great Britain in accordance with the Act of Settlement 1701. Whigs and Hanoverian Tories had made Georg Ludwig the heir to the throne to guarantee a Protestant succession, as Anne's half-brother James Francis Edward Stuart was a Roman Catholic and was thus viewed by diehard Protestants as inevitably tyrannical. Jacobite Tories, however, supported the restoration of the House of Stuart, fearing that Georg Ludwig's Lutheran faith and support for British intervention in European conflicts would mean that he favored the Whigs and thus the disestablishment of the Church of England. King George punished the Tories for their disloyalty by purging them from government and replacing them with a Whig ministry.
On George's coronation in October 1714, High Tories rioted in twenty towns across southern and western England, and many Tory aristocrats skipped the coronation in favor of partaking in the disturbances. In Bristol, Taunton, Birmingham, Tewkesbury, Shrewsbury, Dorchester, and Nuneaton, Jacobite mobs invoked the name of the Tory preacher Henry Sacheverell as they protested. Mobs also destroyed Dissenter places of worship and murdered a Quaker in Bristol.
After the riots abated, the government attempted to bring arrested rioters to London for trial, but most got off scot-free, with whippings, with fines, or brief prison sentences. In 1715, the Whigs won a majority in Parliament as a result of King George's purges, and the ensuing 1715 England riots led to the passage of the Riot Act and the forcible suppression of any further Jacobite unrest.