The Kingdom of Hanover had been ruled by the kings of Britain until 1837, but fortuitously the accession of Queen Victoria, who as a woman was debarred from becoming a German monarch by the Salic Law, effectively severed Hanover’s ties with the world’s leading commercial and naval power. Bismarck thus saw the opportunity to join up the different bits of Prussia into a single state. The key, Bismarck realized, lay in engineering the destruction of the German Confederation.
