Hanover

Hanover, former state of northwestern Germany, first an electorate (1692–1806) of the Holy Roman Empire, then a kingdom (1814–66), and finally a Prussian province (1866–1945). After World War II the state was administratively abolished; its former territory formed about 80 percent of the Land (state) of Lower Saxony.

Hanover grew out of the early 17th-century division of territories of the Welf house of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Created in 1638 as the principality of Brunswick-Calenberg-Göttingen, it came to be named after its principal town, Hanover. Ernest Augustus I (1630–98), duke from 1680, united the principality with that of Lüneburg, marrying his son George Louis to Sophia Dorothea of Celle, only daughter of George William, duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg; upon the latter’s death in 1705 the two states were formally joined. Ernest Augustus in 1692 had obtained from the Holy Roman emperor Leopold I the designation of his principality as the ninth electorate of the empire, called officially Brunswick-Lüneburg but commonly Hanover.

Ernest Augustus had married Sophia of the Palatinate, granddaughter of James I of Great Britain. The British Act of Settlement (1701) designated her heiress of the British crown after Queen Anne, but, because Sophia died shortly before Anne in 1714, her son George Louis succeeded as George I, the first of five monarchs of the house of Hanover to rule both Hanover and Great Britain. The court of the electress Sophia had been a cultural centre, embellished especially by George Frideric Handel and G.W. Leibniz. George I (died 1727) and George II (died 1760) frequently visited their homeland; but George III (died 1820) never did so, and George IV (died 1830) and William IV (died 1837) did so only once each. The electorate was ruled well in their absence by a ministry in Hanover, associated with the German chancellery in London.

Hanover was expanded to the North Sea by the addition of Bremen and Verden in 1715 and the bishopric of Osnabrück in 1803. Called Britain’s “Achilles’ heel” in continental Europe, Hanover suffered invasions during Britain’s wars, especially during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars from 1793. 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. It was the fourth largest German state after Austria, Prussia, and Bavaria. The constitution imposed on Hanover by George IV in 1819 did little to alter the nobles’ domination of the state, and only after a rising in 1830 did William IV (in 1833) grant a new charter extending political power to the middle class and (to a minor extent) to the peasantry and submitting state finances and royal revenues to parliamentary control.

The death of William IV on June 20, 1837, terminated the personal union between Great Britain and Hanover. Because of the Hanoverian law prohibiting female succession if there was a male heir, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1771–1851) and brother of William IV, became king of Hanover upon William’s death, while William’s niece Victoria succeeded to the British throne. A reactionary, Ernest Augustus overthrew the Hanoverian constitution, but the revolution of 1848–49 forced him to grant a new one. In 1851 Hanover joined the German Customs Union (Zollverein).

George V (1819–78), blind from the age of 14, became king on his father’s death in 1851. The rise of Prussia undid his kingdom: he tried to remain neutral in the Seven Weeks’ War in 1866 between Austria and Prussia but was driven from Hanover by Prussian forces. The kingdom was then annexed by Prussia (September 20, 1866) and accorded limited self-government. The German Hanoverian party continued to demand a separate status for Hanover in the Reichstag throughout the period of the German Empire (1871–1918), but Hanover remained part of Prussia until 1945.

Hanover was briefly reestablished as a state in August 1946, but on November 1 of that year it was united with Oldenburg, Brunswick, and Schaumburg-Lippe to form the Land (state) of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen). The name Hannover now applies to a district within that state.