When Ernest’s elder brother, John Frederick, died childless, and left him the principalities of Calemberg and Grubenberg, with Hanover or a ‘residenz,’ he hailed an increase of influence which he hoped to see heightened by securing the Duchy of Zell also to his family. He had determined that George Louis should succeed to Hanover and Zell united. In other words, he established primogeniture, recognised his eldest son as heir to all his land, and only awarded to his other sons moderate appanages whereby to support a dignity which he considered sufficiently splendid by the glory which it would receive, by reflection, from the head of the house. This arrangement by no means suited the views of one of Ernest’s sons, Maximilian. He had no inclination whatever to borrow glory from the better fortune of his brother, and was resolved, if it might be, to achieve splendour by his own. He protested loudly against the accumulation of the family territorial estates upon the eldest heir; claimed his own share; and even raised a species of domestic rebellion against his sire, to which weight, without peril, was given by the alleged adhesion of a couple of confederates, Count von Moltke and a conspirator of burgher degree. Ernest Augustus treated ‘Max’ like a rude child. He put him under arrest in the paternal palace, and confined the filial rebel to the mild imprisonment of his own room. Maximilian was as obstinate as either Henry the Dog or Magnus the Violent, and he not only opposed his sire’s wishes with respect to the aggrandisement of the family by the enriching of the heir-apparent, but went counter to him in matters of religion. In after-years he was not only a good Jacobite, but he also conformed to the faith of the Stuarts, and Maximilian ultimately died, a tolerable Roman Catholic, in the service of the Emperor.