A fresh and violent constitutional battle was, notwithstanding these precautions, fought in Hanover, where Adolphus Frederick, duke of Cambridge, had, in the name of his brother, William IV., king of England, established a new constitution, which had received many ameliorations notwithstanding the inefficiency of the liberals, Christiani, Luntzel, etc., to counteract the overpowering influence of the monarchical and aristocratic party. William IV., king of England and Hanover, expired in 1837, and was succeeded on the throne of Great Britain by Victoria Alexandrina, the daughter of his younger and deceased brother, Edward, duke of Kent, and of the Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg; and on that of Hanover, which was solely heritable in the male line, by his second brother, Ernest, duke of Cumberland, the leader of the Tory party in England. No sooner had this new sovereign set his foot on German soil[2] than he repealed the constitution granted to Hanover in 1833 and ordained the restoration of the former one of 1819, drawn up in a less liberal but more monarchical and aristocratic spirit. Among the protestations made against this _coup d'état_, that of the seven Göttingen professors, the two brothers, Grimm, to whom the German language and antiquarian research are so deeply indebted, Dahlmann, Gervinus, Ewald, Weber, and Albrecht, is most worthy of record. Their instant dismission produced an insurrection among the students, which was, after a good deal of bloodshed, quelled by the military. In the beginning of 1838, the Estates were convoked according to the articles of the constitution of 1819 for the purpose of taking a constitution, drawn up under the dictation of the king, under deliberation. Many of the towns refused to elect deputies, and some of those elected were not permitted to take their seats. The city of Osnabruck protested in the federal assembly. Notwithstanding this, the Estates meanwhile assembled, but declared themselves incompetent, regarding themselves simply in the light of an arbitrative committee, and, as such, threw out the constitution presented by the king, June, 1838. The federal assembly remained passive.[3] In 1839, Schele, the minister, finally succeeded, by means of menaces and bribery, and by arbitrarily calling into the chamber the ministerial candidates who had received the minority of votes during the elections, in collecting so many deputies devoted to his party as were requisite in order to form the chamber and to pass resolutions. The city of Hanover hereupon brought before the federal assembly a petition for redress and a list of grievances in which Schele's chamber was described as "unworthy of the name of a constitutional representative assembly, void of confidence, unpossessed of the public esteem, and unrecognized by the country." The king instantly divested Rumann, the city director, of his office, but so far yielded to the magistrate, to whom he gave audience in the