The English royal family from which Queen Victoria is descended had been closely connected with Germany for generations. She came from the House of Hanover, whose male members married, without exception, German princesses in the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. All 62 direct ancestors of the five generations before Victoria belonged to the German aristocracy. Although the House of Hanover had been ruling in England since George I's accession to the throne in 1714, it had never become really popular with the British before Victoria came to power in 1837. Throughout their lives the first two Georges remained quite foreign to their country, hardly understanding the language of their subjects and using every opportunity to dodge off to their native Hanover. This absenteeism reinforced long-term constitutional traditions: a progressive weakening of the monarch's political power and the simultaneous emergence of the prime minister as the key figure within the English power structure.