—THE INDEPENDENT WHIG George III and Queen Charlotte had thirteen children who lived to be adults, among them seven sons, including Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. As the fifth son, Ernest was too far down in the line of succession to rule Britain. Nevertheless, he did inherit the throne of Hanover—his family’s German kingdom—in 1837 (after the deaths of his four older brothers), and ruled there until his own death in 1851. Before assuming the Hanoverian crown, though, the duke was deeply involved in a murder mystery that remains unsolved. While most historians believe that it was a hereditary disorder known as porphyria that plunged George III into babbling fits of insanity, the behavior of his large brood of debauched sons no doubt contributed mightily to the king’s unsettled state of mind. The royal dukes were a troublesome lot indeed—“the damnedest millstones about the neck of any government that can be imagined,” the Duke of Wellington said of them. Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, was a particularly loathsome fellow—a tyrannical military officer known to torture his men, and a lecher who reportedly seduced his own sister.
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