Hanover suffered invasions during Britain’s wars, especially during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars from 1793. When its prince-elector George Louis became king of Great Britain in 1714, the electorate gained the status of a personal union with the United Kingdom.
Until 1708, Hanover had been a minor principality within the Holy Roman Empire. In 1708, its lands were combined with most of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg and became an electorate (essentially, a voting member state) of the Holy Roman Empire.
The Prussians seized it in 1801 and 1805 and the French in 1803 and 1806, after which part of it was incorporated into the French empire and the rest into the Kingdom of Westphalia, created by Napoleon I for his brother Jérôme Bonaparte.
After the fall of Napoleon in 1814, Hanover was reconstituted as a kingdom largely because of British influence and acquired Hildesheim, Eichsfeld, East Frisia, Bentheim, Lingen, and Emsland. The Kingdom of Hanover (Hannover) was founded in 1814 at the Congress of Vienna as the successor state of the Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg.
The two areas, England and Hanover, were kept separate and the Hanover electorate was governed by a council and by the German chancellery in London.
From 1814 until 1837 the King of Hanover was the same man as the King of Britain (George III, George IV, and William I).
Succession to the Hanoverian throne was regulated by semi-Salic law (agnatic-cognatic), which gave priority to all male lines before female lines, so that it passed not to Queen Victoria. Therefore in 1837 the Kingdom of Hanover passed to Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland.
Although the size of the kingdom of Hanover caused it to rank below such German states as Bavaria and Wiirttemberg, its territorial size belies its importance and influence in European history. By the nineteenth century Hanover, under the guidance of the royal family, had established many ties, political and dynastic, with the nations of Europe.
The kingdom was then annexed by Prussia (Sept. 20, 1866) and accorded limited self-government. It became a part of the German Empire in 1871 although not totally assimilated by Prussia.
Kingdom of Hanover in history
