connection with Hanover, with this additional advantage, that Hanover could lend us, without loss of self-respect, the aid of thirty thousand of the best troops in the world. It was worth, in a military sense, half-a-dozen Indias, and it might in 1815, when England was irresistible, have been considerably enlarged. Nor was it in any way lost when the accession of Queen Victoria once more, after a hundred and twenty-three years of mingled existence, divided the two crowns. The king of Hanover was still a member of the English royal family, and would still have been only too willing to regard himself as a British prince, and purchase support by a subordination of policy such as Portugal, when anxious for assistance, always promises, and in ordinary times — as witness the Delagoa Bay affair — always refuses to concede. The disjunction of the crowns need never have been noticed, if the British people had cared that Hanover should be theirs. So excellent, indeed, was the position, that Continental statesmen never quite believed in English feeling on the subject, treated the Britannic character of Hanover as a factor in European politics, and up to the moment of its extinction half believed that the kingdom would be saved by British interference. The British people, however, cared absolutely nothing about it. They were very sorry their kings should be Continental rulers, they were very glad when they ceased to hold the double position, and after the separation of the crowns they declined to think about Hanover at all. When the kingdom was extinguished, they were, on the whole, pleased. It must have been a very bitter pill for the Duke of Cambridge, who never forgot that he stood second in succession to the State; but no serious word of remonstrance was ever uttered in Parliament, and we never remember to have read a complaint, except against the sequestration of George V.'s private fortune. The ex-king, whose title to his territories was ideally perfect, he reigning at once by "right" and by con sent, had even among Legitimists no English adherents, and when he died, M. de Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia seemed a more natural mourner at the preliminary funeral ceremony than the Prince of Wales. The queen issued an order directing mourning to be worn for her cousin, and we are told that in a few London churches the order was obeyed; but the majority of the people were entirely indifferent, and indeed ignorant that with Prince Ernest's renunciation of the Hanoverian throne a chapter of English history will end. Neither the antiquity of the house of Guelph — an antiquity which so attracted Gibbon that he wrote on it a monograph, now unjustly forgotten — nor the benefits it has accidentally conferred on Great Britain, nor the unrivalled chance of Continental influence which the union of, the crowns might have opened, have moved the sensible, stolid, unhistorical islanders to care one jot what became of the English branche cadette. Of all Englishmen of rank, the one who is to Englishmen most shadowy is Prince Ernest of Cumberland, eldest male by German and French law of the English royal house. We doubt if there are ten men in England who could say what this prince is like, who ever bought his photograph, or who have the slightest idea why the Hanoverian minister who wrote "For Sceptre and Crown," holds him in such visible disdain.
So complete, indeed, is the indifference, that we scarcely know why we touch the subject, unless it be from an interest in the little-noticed sides of history, which some of our readers may share with us; but as we have touched it, we may notice another point, the entire extinction as an effective force of the idea of legitimacy. George V. had a much better title to Hanover than Henry V. has to France. The line is as old — having intermarried, Gibbon says, with that of Charlemagne — and though not seated in Hanover for more than five hundred years, it acquired the duchy rightfully, and has the immense advantage that it reigned up to the moment of its extinction with the full consent of its people, who even in émeute asked for a constitution, and not a déchéance. Nobody, not even Prince Bismarck, ever questioned the title of the family, or denied its right to fight in 1866, or claimed to expel it on any other ground than that its expulsion was to the interest of the body of the German people. That argument was sound, and was admitted not only by the Germans, but by all Europeans: but in that argument, so accepted, is the knell of all dynastic claims. If the welfare of the people is the governing rule in the distribution of thrones, then any throne may be abolished in the interest of that welfare, and as they themselves must be judges on the subject, they may expel their kings without reproach. That Prussia conquered Hanover is true. That it annexed Hanover, in the interest of all Germans, is also true. But if Prussia had the right to do this — which we do not dream of disputing — then, a fortiori,
