Kingdom of Hanover years of George III's reign and the reigns of kings George IV and William IV from 1816 to 1837, was Adolph Frederick, George III's youngest surviving son. When Queen Victoria succeeded to the British throne in 1837, the 123-year personal union of Great Britain and Hanover ended. Salic law operated in Hanover, excluding accession to the throne by a female while any male of the dynasty survived; thus instead of Victoria, her uncle in the male-line of the House of Hanover, Ernest Augustus, now the eldest surviving son of George III, succeeded to the throne of the new kingdom as
Constitution of the United Kingdom Brown. The monarch formerly enjoyed the power to dissolve Parliament (normally on the request of the prime minister). However, this power was explicitly removed from the monarch by the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. The last monarch to dismiss a prime minister who had not suffered a defeat on a motion of confidence in the House of Commons, or to appoint a prime minister who clearly did not enjoy a majority in that House, was William IV who in 1834 dismissed the Government of Lord Melbourne, replacing him with Robert Peel (the Duke of Wellington briefly heading a caretaker ministry as