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
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