Hanover and Göttingen,1837

Abstract

1837, the death of King William IV brought the personal union between the United Kingdom and Hanover (1714-1837) to an end. The practice of one dynasty ruling over two separate states was not uncommon in medieval and early modern European history, and eighteenth-century Great Britain was no exception, as it established personal unions with Ireland ( 17071801 ) and with Hanover, following the accession of George I to the British throne in 1 7 14. Following Salic law and its requirement of male rulership, however, Guelph dynastic custom barred Queen Victoria from ascending to Hanover's throne, thus concluding the 123 -year monarchical link between the two kingdoms. The impact of this complex relationship remains understudied. Whether examining Britain's relations with continental powers, its alignments during the Years War, its strategy in the Napoleonic wars, or its policies toward Metternichian Germany, Britain's personal union with a central European kingdom (situated in the larger political framework of the Holy Roman Empire and the German Confederation) complicated its geopolitical strategies. A superb recent reassessment of the dimension in British political life should reconfigure current discussions about Britain's empire, national identity, and political culture.1 But one might equally ask how the personal union an institutional and cultural instance of British rule beyond its shores affected Hanover and the political world of the German Confederation, within which Hanoverian politics operated. Given its status as an outpost of English civilization, how did Hanover's personal union with the United Kingdom affect its public affairs (Biskup 128)? To examine this large question, this brief essay examines the last years of the union. In particular, it examines the political crisis surrounding King William IV's constitution of 1833. When his successor, King Ernst August, dissolved the constitution four years later, seven professors of University protested the king's decision and refused to take a new oath. In response, Ernst August dismissed them from their university posts, an action that became a political sensation. In 1837, the cause celebre of the Gottingen Seven unleashed a four-year constitutional crisis in Hanover, strengthened Germany's public sphere as an autonomous force in civil society, and constituted a signal moment in forming moderate constitutional liberalism as an oppositional front in German politics. In 1833, King William IV, the last of the Hanoverian line, promulgated a new constitution in the Kingdom of Hanover, replacing a royal patent from 1819 that allowed an anti-constitutional aristocratic party to govern through provincial diets and an absentee foreign chancellery in London (Huber, Deutsche 86). By contrast, the constitution of 1833 provided the kingdom with a bicameral