Alpha Book

] but its real importance rested on the
fact that its first elector, through his mother's family, became in
1714 George I of Great Britain, the founder of the Hanoverian dynasty
in that country. This personal union between the British kingdom and
the electorate of Hanover continued for over a century, and was not
without vital significance in international negotiations. Both George I
and George II preferred Hanover to England as a place of residence and
directed their primary efforts towards the protection of their German
lands from Habsburg or Hohenzollern encroachments.
Enough has now been said to give some idea of the distracted condition
of the Germanies in the eighteenth century and to explain why the Holy
Roman Empire was an unimportant bond of union. Austria, traditionally
the chief of the Germanies, was increasingly absorbed in her non-German
possessions in Hungary, Italy, and the Netherlands. Prussia, the rising
kingdom of the North, comprised a population in which Slavs constituted
a large minority.


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