5 Thalers - William I

Hesse-Cassel had spent the Napoleonic years in a peculiar limbo — Elector Wilhelm I was driven into exile in 1806 when Napoleon dissolved the Electorate and folded its territory into the Kingdom of Westphalia under his brother Jérôme. Wilhelm spent nearly a decade in Danish Holstein waiting. The 1815 issue marks his restoration following Napoleon's defeat, one of the more emphatic political reversals any German prince managed to survive intact.

The Electorate itself was an anachronism by this point, its title a constitutional fiction within the emerging German Confederation.