Not technically a "token". These are game counters - 19th century play money, if you like. 1837 probably wasn't the actual year this piece was made; that was the year Queen Victoria became Queen, and these counters were struck for many years after this, all with the 1837 date.
The design of these counters is loosely based on the British gold sovereign. The reverse legend "To Hanover" is a reference to an obscure bit of British history.
Queen Victoria's ancestors, going back to George I in the early 1700's, came from the German country of Hanover, and the kings of Britain remained still the kings of Hanover even after the family packed up and moved to Britain - they were kind of like absentee landlords there, and the two countries were completely separate in government, language, culture etc. - they simply happened to share a monarch.
However, the laws of inheritance in Hanover were strictly males only, while the law in Britain allowed a woman to inherit the throne if she had no brothers. Thus, when Queen Victoria's father died in 1837, she
inherited the throne of Britain but she wasn't allowed to inherit Hanover as well. The title of King of Hanover went to the Queen's nearest male relative, her uncle,
Ernst August, the Duke of Cumberland.
It is this gentleman that we see on the reverse of your counter, riding off to Hanover with a kingly crown on his head. Instead of slaying the dragon beneath him, as St George does on the gold coin this was copied from, Ernst is leaping over the dragon in his haste to leave Britain as quickly as possible. The Duke wasn't popular in Britain, and the general public were quite pleased to have Victoria on their throne instead of him.
So the "political message" behind this little counter is this: "Hanover can keep that lousy Duke, if they want him, and good riddance to him; we'll keep our Queen, thank you very much".
The counters get a brief mention about halfway down the Wikipedia page I linked to above.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
Posted 07/09/2009 10:27 am
