Sightless King

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30937, 18 December 1965, Page 5

Sightless King

especially written for "The by KENNETH ANTHONY.)

MORE than one King xu - George V is to be found in the stamp album. This one, less well-known to collectors than his famous British namesake, was the last King of Hanover, one of the more tragic figures of nineteenth century Europe. He never saw the stamps on which his profile appeared for this monarch was blind. And little more than seven years after the stamps were first issued, his country lost its independence to invaders from Bismarck's Prussia. The king died in exile. For more than a century Britain and Hanover were united under the same Royal family. But in Hanover the Salic Law was in force, preventing any woman from succeeding to the throne. When King William IV died in 1837, Queen Victoria succeeded him in Britain, but the crown of Hanover went to her uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, who became King Ernest Augustus. It was the hope of statesmen in both countries that his son, George, would marry Queen Victoria so reuniting Hanover and Britain. Queen Victoria, however, was not prepared to marry a blind man, and chose Prince Albert instead. In this way the long asso-

elation between the two countries was severed, and indirectly the fate of Hanover, sealed. George succeeded his father in 1851, but without the British connexion, Hanover was a small and weak nation in the international power politics of the time. Prussia had had designs on

Hanoverian Independence for some time. When war broke out in 1866 between Prussia and Austria. Hanover backed the losing side. Prussian forces occupied and annexed the country, the kingdom of Hanover disappeared from the map of Europe and their stamps were withdrawn in December, 1866, when the country became a province of Prussia. The stamp illustrated here, one of Hanover's 1858 issue which can still be obtained for only a few shillings, raises an interesting speculation. How differently would the whole cause of subsequent European history have run if this unhappy monarch had not lost his sight in an accident in his youth?