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
History of the British peerage in the House of Commons. Parliament passed the Act of Settlement 1701, which devolved the Crown, after Anne's death, upon George, Elector of Hanover, the Queen's closest Protestant relative, bypassing about 50 others in the line of succession. As the power of the monarch slowly shifted to Parliament, peerage dignities came to be conferred at the behest of ministers, not at the pleasure of the Crown. King George III's reign is of particular note in the history of the Peerage. Increases to the Peerage during the time were totally unprecedented: almost four hundred peers were created during his reign. Lord