It was a halcyon time. Göttingen seemed a half forgotten kingdom of the past. The state of Hannover, of which it was a part, had been defeated and annexed by Prussia in 1866; but forty years later the remnants of the Hannoverian nobility still quietly resisted the rule of the victor. The mark of George II's adopted country remained on his German university as thoroughly as his own guttural accent had remained on his English. The houses that lined Prinzenstrasse were those of dukes and princes of Hannover, but their titles were given in English rather than in German. The scientific society of Göttingen was officially known in the English fashion as "die Königliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften" — the Royal Society of Science. The British minister of war regularly spent his summers in Göttingen. To the young people who had been drawn there from all over the world because of their love of mathematics, it seemed that they had "all time". But it did not always seem so to their elders.