Page:The life and times of King Edward VII by Whates, Harry Richard 1.djvu/36

18 CHAPTER II THE ANCESTRY OF THE GUELPHS The House of Brunswick Plight of James II. The Wars of Religion Powers of the Bill of Rights Queen Anne and Sophia, Electress of Hanover A Crown in the Balance Why the Pre- tender Failed The Coming of the House of Guelph George I. and His Descendants A Match-making King Threatened Opposition Girlhood of Victoria Early Days at Rosenau A Character Sketch of Prince Albert The Cousins Together Cares of a Crown A Determined I^over Marriage of Victoria and Albert. THE House of Brunswick, through which the infant Prince was descended through his mother, Queen Victoria, claimed to be the oldest princely family in Germany. The sur- name of Guelph was traced by the learned Leibniz the "union of Leibniz with Newton " was a phrase synonymous with the union of England and Hanover to the dawn of civilisation in Europe. One tradition, indeed, derives the name from a general who held command in the army of Belisarius. In the Middle Ages the family won vast possessions, which were divided and subdivided among its members on so many occasions that the record becomes too complicated for clear and brief exposition. It had, however, fol- lowed two main lines of division, the Lune- burg Dukes and the Brunswick Dukes, who together asserted an influence unsur- passed by that of any other House in Northern Germany. In the Wars of Religion they took the Protestant side, and in the sixteenth century were at the height of their political power. The link with the destinies of England, apart from their common interest in the struggle against the Papacy and the Catholic Powers, was forged by the marriage of Sophia, granddaughter of James I and youngest daughter of the Princess Eliza- beth of England that sister of Prince Rupert whose short tenure of the throne of Bohemia with her husband Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, and whose long years of exile form a romantic story which is told in countless biographies. Sophia married Ernest Augustus, one of the Dukes of the Luneburg branch of the House of Brunswick, whose inheritance comprised the kingdom of Hanover. To that principality he succeeded in 1679. In 1688 the year of the flight of James II. the eldest son of Ernest Augustus and Sophia, George Lewis, afterwards George I., was a man of eight-and- twenty, with a son, George Augustus, afterwards George II., and a daughter, whose destiny it was to become Queen of Prussia. There were also other sons and daughters of Ernest and Sophia, and the succession was thus abundantly assured. It had, moreover, been rendered yet more secure by the determination of certain family issues in a testamentary disposition laying down the principle of succession by primogeniture. The soli- darity of the dominions of the House was also established, and further divisions of the territories barred. Thus Ernest Augustus was enabled to claim the status of Elector of the German Empire, though on this there was a controversy delaying 18