Prince Ernst August of Hanover (born 1954) - Name and Ancestry

Name and Ancestry

Ernst August was christened, Ernst August Albert Paul Otto Rupprecht Oskar Berthold Friedrich-Ferdinand Christian-Ludwig.

As the senior male-line descendant of George V of Hanover (and hence also of George III of the United Kingdom) Ernst August is head of the House of Hanover (and the House of Welf). As such he is the pretender to the former thrones of the Kingdom of Hanover and of the Duchy of Brunswick. In Prussia (which had annexed Hanover in 1866), "the privileges of former noble status" were dispensed with on 23 June 1920 in execution of the 1919 mandate of the Weimar Constitution, titles being retained only as surnames.

The title of Prince of Great Britain and Ireland was accorded ad personam to his father, Ernest Augustus, Prince of Hanover (1914–1987), and his father's siblings by King George V of the United Kingdom on 17 June 1914. His father was not deprived of that title under the Titles Deprivation Act 1917, but the hereditary Dukedom of Cumberland and Teviotdale and the Earldom of Armagh, borne in 1917 by his paternal great-grandfather, were suspended. However, on 29 August 1931, his grandfather Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, as head of the House of Hanover, declared the formal resumption, for himself and his dynastic descendants, of use of his former British princely title as a secondary title of pretense.

As heir of the last Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale and Earl of Armagh, Ernst August has the right to petition under the Titles Deprivation Act 1917 for the restoration of his ancestors' suspended British peerages, but to date he has not done so. His father, also called Ernst August, did, however, successfully claim British nationality after World War II by virtue of a hitherto overlooked (and since repealed) provision of the Sophia Naturalization Act 1705 (Attorney-General v HRH Prince Ernest Augustus of Hanover 1 All ER 49).

Ernst August is also a great-grandson of the last German emperor, Wilhelm II. Until his marriage to Princess Caroline, he was 385th in the line of succession to the British throne. Upon his marriage to Princess Caroline, a Roman Catholic, he was excluded from the line of succession under provisions of the Act of Settlement 1701. His three children remain in the line of succession since they were not raised as Catholics.

He was also a nephew of Frederica of Hanover, queen consort of the Hellenes. This, in turn, makes him a first cousin of Sophia, Queen of Spain and Constantine II of Greece, whose consort, Queen Anne-Marie of Greece, is the younger sister of Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. He was also the nephew of Prince George William of Hanover, whose wife was Princess Sophie of Greece and Denmark, an elder sister of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, the husband of Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.