Ernest Augustus, Crown Prince of Hanover 21/22 December 1878, he and Princess Thyra married at Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen. Queen Victoria appointed the Duke of Cumberland a colonel in the British Army in 1876 and promoted him to major general in 1886, lieutenant general in 1892 and general in 1898. Although he was a British peer and a prince of Great Britain and Ireland, he continued to consider himself an exiled monarch of a German realm and refused to disclaim his succession rights to Hanover, making his home in Gmunden, Upper Austria. The Duke of Cumberland was also first in the line of succession to the
House of Hanover to go into exile in Austria. The 1866 rift between the House of Hanover and the House of Hohenzollern was settled only by the 1913 marriage of Princess Viktoria Luise of Prussia to Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, the last king's grandson. At the end of the Thirty Years' War, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) awarded the Prince-Bishopric of Osnabrück alternately to a Catholic bishop and to a cadet branch of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Since the treaty gave cadets priority over heirs and reigning princes, Osnabrück became a form of appanage (in alternation) of the House of Hanover. Osnabrück was mediatized to