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 the family was able to quickly move to Marienburg Castle (Hanover) with all their furniture, transported by British army trucks, on the order of King George VI. Duke Ernest Augustus died at Marienburg Castle in 1953. His Herrenhausen Palace in Hanover had been completely destroyed during World War II. His eldest son, Prince Ernest Augustus, sold his remaining property at Herrenhausen Gardens in 1961, but kept the nearby "Princely House", a small palace built in 1720 by George I for his daughter Anna Louise. It is now his grandson Ernest Augustus's private home, along with Marienburg Castle. The later heads