During Classical antiquity and the Migration Period, the progenitors of the populations of the United Kingdom and Germany consisted of the same Ingvaeonic and Elbe Germanic peoples.

Queen Victoria, known as the grandmother of Europe, married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and further diplomatic marriages would result in their grandchildren occupying both the British and German thrones.

Historians have long focused on the diplomatic and naval rivalries between Germany and Britain after 1871 to search for the root causes of the growing antagonism that led to World War I.

Contrastingly, relations between East Germany and the United Kingdom were poor owing to the former’s alliance with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Despite a slight reduction in trade afterwards, the amity between the countries remain strong in many areas, which has been reinforced by their joint response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The Hanseatic League was a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds, and its market towns dominated trade along the coast of Northern Europe.

Anne of Cleves was the consort of Henry VIII, but it was not until William III of England that a king of German origin came to reign, from the House of Nassau.

The personal link with Hanover finally ended in 1837, with the accession of Queen Victoria to the British throne, while obtaining Heligoland from Denmark.

He visited it often and was well-known in its higher circles, but he recklessly promoted the great expansion of the Imperial German Navy, which was a potential threat that the British government could not overlook.

In the hope that it would help improve British–German relations, he gave his notes, with Wilhelm's permission, to The Daily Telegraph, which wrote them up in the form of an interview.

The British had already decided that Wilhelm was at least somewhat mentally disturbed and saw the interview as further evidence of his unstable personality rather than an indication of official German hostility.

[14] The British Foreign Office at first was poorly served by a series of ambassadors who provided only superficial reports on the dramatic internal German developments of the 1860s.

British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, however, was always suspicious of Germany, disliked its authoritarianism and feared that it would eventually start a war with a weaker neighbour.

When public opinion and elite demand finally made him, in the 1880s, grab colonies in Africa and the Pacific, he ensured that conflicts with Britain were minimal.

[19][20] Relations between Britain and Germany improved as the key policymakers, Prime Minister Lord Salisbury and Chancellor Bismarck, were both realistic conservatives and largely both agreed on policies.

Coming to power in 1888, the young Wilhelm dismissed Bismarck in 1890 and sought aggressively to increase Germany's influence in the world (Weltpolitik).

Russia could not get Germany to renew its mutual treaties and so formed a closer relationship with France in the 1894 Franco-Russian Alliance since both were worried about German aggression.

German Foreign Minister Alfred von Kiderlen-Waechter was not opposed to that if Germany had compensation elsewhere in Africa, in the French Congo.

German historian Fritz Fischer famously argued that the Junkers, who dominated Germany, wanted an external war to distract the population and to whip up patriotic support for the government.

Germany saw its invasion of Belgium as a necessary military tactic, and Britain saw it as a profound moral crime, a major cause of British entry into the war.

[citation needed] A series of huge battles in September and October produced sweeping Allied victories, and the German High Command, under Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, saw it had lost and told Wilhelm to abdicate and go into exile.

[citation needed] In November, the new republic negotiated an armistice, hoping to obtain lenient terms based on the Fourteen Points of US President Woodrow Wilson.

Historians' assessments have ranged from condemnation for allowing Hitler's Germany to grow too strong to the judgement that it was in Britain's best interests and that there was no alternative.

In spring 1940, Germany astonished the world by quickly invading the Low Countries and France, driving the British army off the Continent and seizing most of its weapons, vehicles and supplies.

The Allied invasion of France on D-Day in June 1944 as well as strategic bombing and land forces all contributed to the final defeat of Germany.

Another was to rely primarily on American money, through the Marshall Plan, that modernised both the British and German economies, and reduced traditional barriers to trade and efficiency.

It was Washington, not London, that pushed Germany and France to reconcile and join in the Schumann Plan of 1950 by which they agreed to pool their coal and steel industries.

[65] After 1955, Britain decided to rely on relatively inexpensive nuclear weapons as a deterrent against the Soviet Union, and a way to reduce its very expensive troop commitments in West Germany.

In 1990, United Kingdom prime minister Margaret Thatcher at first opposed German reunification but eventually accepted the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany.

Similarly, the former leader of the Scottish National Party in the British House of Commons, Angus Robertson is half German, as his mother was from Germany.