This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1701 Leibniz helped draft the reasoning behind the Act of Settlement, the English law that would one day hand the British throne to his own employer's family, the House of Hanover. He spent years arguing, in print and in private memoranda, for the House of Hanover's claim. When the moment actually arrived, in August 1714, it did him no good at all. Queen Anne died, the Elector Georg Ludwig became King George I of Great Britain, and the court that had employed Leibniz for nearly four decades packed up for London without him. He was, by his own account, ordered to stay behind and finish a commissioned history of the House of Brunswick he had been dragging his feet on for years. He never saw London. He never saw the king he had helped put there again in any capacity that mattered. What he did instead, in that same year, alone in Hanover with a project nobody at court cared whether he finished, was write the Monadology: ninety numbered paragraphs distilling a lifetime of metaphysics into their most compressed form. It was not published in his lifetime. Leibniz had spent his career defending a world in which nothing happens without a sufficient reason, in which even the smallest event fits a rational, providential order that a sufficiently penetrating mind could in principle discern. The year of his own professional exile, spent finishing a dynastic history for the family that left him behind, does not obviously look like part of that order. He wrote the Monadology anyway, still holding, or at least still arguing, that it was.