51cm (20in) x 16cm (6.2in) x 13cm (5.2in)
Provenance: Sotheby's, London, 2002,
Patinated bronze. Modelled full length looking left in the uniform of a General of the Hanoverian Hussars, and wearing the Order of St. George (Hanover) and resting his left hand on the pommel of his sabre. The front of the integral rectangular base engraved 'Ernst August’; the back engraved 'Bernstorff und Eichwede Fud’ for the bronze foundry in Hanover, and the supporting tree trunk signed and dated ‘Hesemann / fec. 5-6-47’.
Prince Ernest Augustus, King of Hanover (1771-1851) was born at Buckingham House, the fifth child and fifth son of King George III and his wife Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. He studied at the University of Göttingen where he was a keen student, and received military training in Germany under Captain von Linsingen of the Queen's Light Dragoons. He proved an excellent horseman, as well as a good shot.
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In March 1792, the George III commissioned him as a colonel in the 9th Hanoverian Light Dragoons. He served in the Low Countries in the War of the First Coalition, under his elder brother Frederick, Duke of York, then commander of the combined British, Hanoverian and Austrian forces. Seeing action near the Walloon town of Tournai in August 1793, he sustained a sabre wound to the head, which resulted in a disfiguring scar. During the Battle of Tourcoing in northern France May 1794 his left arm was injured by a cannonball and he afterwards went blind in his left eye. He returned to England in 1796 to seek treatment for his eye without success. Not wanting to rejoin the Hanoverian forces, as they were not then involved in the fighting, he repeatedly sought permission to join the British army on the Continent, even threatening to join the Yeomanry as a private, but both the George III and the Duke of York refused him permission.
In April 1799 his father created him Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale and Earl of Armagh. He married Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in his twice widowed and first cousin, Duchess Frederica of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in Germany in May 1815. Queen Charlotte strongly disapproved but the union was a happy one.
Ernest was an active member of the House of Lords, where he maintained an extremely conservative record. There were persistent allegations, reportedly spread by his political enemies, that he had murdered his valet. In the early hours of 31 May 1810, Ernest, by his written account, was struck in the head several times while asleep in bed. He ran for the door, where he was wounded in the leg by a sabre. He called for help and one of his valets, Cornelius Neale, responded and aided him. Neale raised the alarm and the household soon realised that Ernest's other valet, Joseph Sellis, was not among them and that the door to Sellis's room was locked. The lock was forced and Sellis was discovered with his throat freshly cut, a wound apparently self-inflicted. Ernest received several serious wounds during the apparent attack and required over a month to recover from his injuries.
The social reformer and anti-monarchist Francis Place managed to join the inquest jury and became its foreman. Place went to the office of a barrister friend to study inquest law and aggressively questioned witnesses. Place also insisted that the inquest be opened to the public and press, and so cowed the coroner that he basically ran the inquest himself. Despite a unanimous verdict of suicide against Sellis, much of the public blamed Ernest for Sellis's death. The more extreme Whig papers, anti-royal pamphleteers, and caricaturists all offered nefarious explanations for Sellis's death, in which the Duke was to blame. Some stories had the Duke cuckolding Sellis, with the attack as retaliation, or that the Duke was the gay lover of Sellis or Neale or both, and that blackmail had played a part in the valet’s death. Moreover others suggested the Duke fathered a son by one of his sisters and intended to take the British throne by murdering his niece, Victoria.
None of these allegations were ever proven. In 1837, upon the death of his brother, King William IV, who rule both the United Kingdom and Hanover, their niece Princess Victoria acceded the English throne. However, in Hanover under Salic Law, women were barred from the succession, thus ending the union between Britain and Hanover and Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale became King of Hanover. He was the first resident ruler of Hanover since George I. At his death in 1851, Ernst August he was much mourned in Hanover. He was buried in a mausoleum in the Berggarten of Herrenhausen Gardens in Germany.
Christian Heinrich Hesemann (1814-56) was born in Hanover and spent much of his short career in that city, as court sculptor to Ernst August and his son King Georg V (1819-78). He trained in Berlin as a pupil of the sculptor Christian Daniel Rauch (1777-1857). Hesemann made a number of bust portraits of Georg V, whilst his final project, in collaboration with the sculptor Albert Wolff, was for a monumental equestrian statue of Ernst August, which was completed in 1861 and is located in the square outside the central station in Hanover. Hesemann’s part in this project was curtailed by his early death, before which he was nevertheless able to model the king’s hussar’s uniform and head.