Queen Victoria's Descendants: The Grandmother of Europe, 1819 to 1918
Nine children, forty-two grandchildren, and most of the thrones of Europe married into one family. Each chapter follows one line of descent: Albert Edward in Britain and Norway, the Princess Royal in Prussia and Greece, Alice in Hesse and Russia, Alfred in Coburg and Romania, Beatrice in Battenberg and Spain, and the four children who stayed closer to home. Every person is a lifespan from birth to death, so the Spans view shows the generations overlapping; the Map shows the family spreading out from London. The tag haemophilia follows one gene from Victoria through three generations. The story ends in 1918, after four years in which her grandsons' countries had been at war with one another.
Queen Victoria (1819-1901)
The only child of the Duke of Kent, fifth in line at birth, queen at eighteen, and the ancestor of most of the royal houses of Europe. • Born: 24 May 1819, Kensington Palace, London • Died: 22 January 1901, Osborne House, Isle of Wight • Parents: Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld • Married: Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, 10 February 1840 • Children: 9. Grandchildren: 42 She came to the throne on 20 June 1837 because every legitimate child of the uncles ahead of her had died, and she reigned for sixty-three years and seven months, longer than any British monarch before her. The dynastic strategy was Albert's, and after his death she carried it on alone: marry the children into the reigning houses of the continent and Britain would have a relative at every court. By the end of 1914 a grandchild of hers, or a grandchild's husband, sat on the thrones of Britain, Germany, Russia, Spain, Norway, Greece and Romania.
Prince Albert (1819-1861)
Victoria's first cousin, husband and chief political adviser, and the architect of the family's marriage policy. • Born: 26 August 1819, Schloss Rosenau, near Coburg • Died: 14 December 1861, Windsor Castle, aged 42 • Parents: Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and Princess Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg • Married: Queen Victoria, 10 February 1840 He and Victoria were born three months apart and delivered by the same midwife, and the match had been planned by their uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, long before either of them was consulted. Albert organised the Great Exhibition of 1851 and ran the household, the estates and much of the correspondence of the Crown. His death, officially from typhoid fever, left a widow of forty-two who wore black for the thirty-nine years that remained to her.
The Wedding at St James's
10 February 1840, Chapel Royal, St James's Palace. Victoria, twenty, had proposed to Albert herself four months earlier, since no one could propose to a reigning queen. She wore white satin and orange blossom rather than robes of state, and the choice set a fashion for white wedding dresses that outlasted the reign. The couple had nine children in seventeen years. Each of the nine became a marriage, and each marriage an alliance.
Victoria, Princess Royal (1840-1901)
The eldest child, sent to Prussia to make it liberal and pro-British. It did not work. • Born: 21 November 1840, Buckingham Palace • Died: 5 August 1901, Friedrichshof, Kronberg im Taunus • Parents: Victoria and Albert • Married: Prince Frederick William of Prussia, 25 January 1858, Chapel Royal, St James's Palace • Children: 8, including Wilhelm II and Sophie, Queen of the Hellenes Albert's plan for her was political: a liberal English princess on the Prussian throne beside a liberal husband, and a constitutional Germany allied to Britain. She married at seventeen and waited thirty years. Her husband became Emperor Frederick III on 9 March 1888, already dying of cancer of the larynx and unable to speak, and reigned ninety-nine days. He was succeeded by their son Wilhelm, who admired Bismarck and resented his mother.
Edward VII (1841-1910)
The eldest son, kept waiting for sixty years and king for nine. • Born: 9 November 1841, Buckingham Palace • Died: 6 May 1910, Buckingham Palace • Parents: Victoria and Albert • Married: Princess Alexandra of Denmark, 10 March 1863, St George's Chapel, Windsor • Children: 6, including George V and Maud, Queen of Norway Victoria blamed him for his father's death, because Albert had travelled to Cambridge in November 1861 to confront him over an affair with an actress and came home ill, and she kept him out of state business for most of the forty years he waited. He was fifty-nine when he succeeded. His Danish marriage made him brother-in-law to two more crowns: Alexandra's sister Dagmar married the future Alexander III of Russia, and her brother became George I of Greece.
Princess Alice (1843-1878)
The second daughter, a nurse by temperament, and the carrier through whom haemophilia reached the Russian throne. • Born: 25 April 1843, Buckingham Palace • Died: 14 December 1878, New Palace, Darmstadt, of diphtheria • Parents: Victoria and Albert • Married: Prince Louis of Hesse, 1 July 1862, Osborne House • Children: 7, including Elisabeth (Ella) and Alix, Empress of Russia She nursed her father through his last illness and married six months after his death in a dining room at Osborne converted for the day, a ceremony her mother described as more funeral than wedding. In Darmstadt she organised military nursing and corresponded with Florence Nightingale. Her son Friedrich, a haemophiliac, died at two after a fall from a window in 1873. In November 1878 diphtheria went through the household; she nursed her children, lost her youngest daughter May, caught it herself, and died on the seventeenth anniversary of her father's death.
Prince Alfred (1844-1900)
The second son, a sailor who married a Tsar's daughter and ended as ruler of his father's German duchy. • Born: 6 August 1844, Windsor Castle • Died: 30 July 1900, Schloss Rosenau, Coburg • Parents: Victoria and Albert • Married: Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia, 23 January 1874, Winter Palace, St Petersburg • Children: 5, including Marie, Queen of Romania A naval officer, he was the first member of the royal family to visit Australia, where in March 1868 he was shot in the back at a picnic near Sydney and survived. His wife was the only daughter of Tsar Alexander II to survive childhood. In 1893 he inherited the duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha from his father's brother, and died in the house where his father had been born.
Princess Helena (1846-1923)
The third daughter, married so that she could stay at her mother's side. • Born: 25 May 1846, Buckingham Palace • Died: 9 June 1923, Schomberg House, London • Parents: Victoria and Albert • Married: Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, 5 July 1866, Windsor Castle • Children: 4 who survived infancy The condition of the marriage was that the couple live in England, near the Queen, and Helena served as her mother's unpaid secretary for years. She was a founding president of the Royal British Nurses' Association. Her husband's claim to Schleswig-Holstein, lost by Denmark to Prussia and Austria in 1864, made the match unwelcome to her brother Bertie, whose Danish wife regarded the duchies as Denmark's.
Princess Louise (1848-1939)
A working sculptor, and the first daughter of a sovereign in more than three centuries to marry a British subject. • Born: 18 March 1848, Buckingham Palace • Died: 3 December 1939, Kensington Palace • Parents: Victoria and Albert • Married: John Campbell, Marquess of Lorne, later 9th Duke of Argyll, 21 March 1871, St George's Chapel, Windsor • Children: none Her marble statue of her mother in coronation robes still stands outside Kensington Palace. The last such marriage to a subject had been in 1515. Her husband was Governor General of Canada from 1878 to 1883, and the province of Alberta takes its name from her third name: she was Louise Caroline Alberta.
Prince Arthur (1850-1942)
The soldier son, named for his godfather the Duke of Wellington, and the last of Victoria's sons to die. • Born: 1 May 1850, Buckingham Palace • Died: 16 January 1942, Bagshot Park, Surrey • Parents: Victoria and Albert • Married: Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia, 13 March 1879, St George's Chapel, Windsor • Children: 3, including Margaret, Crown Princess of Sweden He was born on Wellington's eighty-first birthday. He made the army his career and was Governor General of Canada from 1911 to 1916. His daughter Margaret married the future Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden, and through her daughter Ingrid, later Queen of Denmark, Victoria's line also runs into the Danish royal house.
Prince Leopold (1853-1884)
The youngest son and the only one of the nine with haemophilia: the first visible sign of the gene. • Born: 7 April 1853, Buckingham Palace • Died: 28 March 1884, Cannes, aged 30 • Parents: Victoria and Albert • Married: Princess Helena of Waldeck and Pyrmont, 27 April 1882, St George's Chapel, Windsor • Children: 2: Alice, and Charles Edward, born after his death Victoria gave birth to him under chloroform administered by the physician John Snow, and her approval made anaesthesia in childbirth respectable. His illness showed that she carried the gene, which her daughters Alice and Beatrice would take into the royal houses of Russia and Spain. He died after a fall on a staircase at Cannes. His daughter Alice was a carrier too, and her son Rupert died after a car accident in 1928.
Princess Beatrice (1857-1944)
The youngest child, her mother's companion and, after her death, the editor who burned her diaries. • Born: 14 April 1857, Buckingham Palace • Died: 26 October 1944, Brantridge Park, Sussex • Parents: Victoria and Albert • Married: Prince Henry of Battenberg, 23 July 1885, St Mildred's Church, Whippingham • Children: 4, including Victoria Eugenie, Queen of Spain Victoria agreed to the marriage only on condition that the couple live with her. Henry died of malaria in January 1896, returning from the Ashanti expedition. After her mother's death Beatrice spent some thirty years preparing Victoria's journals, copying out the passages she chose to keep and destroying the originals. She was the last of the nine children to die.
Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859-1941)
Victoria's first grandchild, and the last German Emperor. • Born: 27 January 1859, Berlin • Died: 4 June 1941, Huis Doorn, Netherlands • Parents: Frederick III and Victoria, Princess Royal • Married: Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein, 1881; Princess Hermine Reuss, 1922 • Emperor: 15 June 1888 to 9 November 1918 He was delivered in a difficult breech birth, and the injury left his left arm about fifteen centimetres shorter than the right, which he spent his life concealing in photographs by resting the hand on a sword hilt or holding a pair of gloves. He built a navy to rival his grandmother's, admired and resented Britain in about equal measure, and was holding her when she died.
Elisabeth (Ella), Grand Duchess of Russia (1864-1918)
Alice's second daughter, widowed by a bomb, later a nun, killed the day after her sister. • Born: 1 November 1864, Darmstadt • Died: 18 July 1918, near Alapayevsk, Russia • Parents: Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, and Princess Alice • Married: Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, 15 June 1884 Her husband, governor-general of Moscow, was killed by a revolutionary's bomb inside the Kremlin on 17 February 1905; she visited the assassin in his cell and forgave him. She then gave away her jewels and founded the Convent of Saints Martha and Mary in Moscow, which she ran as a hospital and almshouse. The night after the killings at Yekaterinburg, Bolshevik guards threw her and seven others into a mine shaft. The Russian Orthodox Church later canonised her.
George V (1865-1936)
A second son who became king, and first cousin to both the Kaiser and the Tsar. • Born: 3 June 1865, Marlborough House, London • Died: 20 January 1936, Sandringham House, Norfolk • Parents: Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark • Married: Princess Mary of Teck, 6 July 1893 • King: from 6 May 1910 He was trained as a naval officer and became heir only when his elder brother, Prince Albert Victor, died of influenza in January 1892; he then married his brother's fiancée. Wilhelm II was his first cousin on his father's side and Nicholas II on his mother's, and Nicholas resembled him so closely that guests at his wedding mistook one for the other.
Maud, Queen of Norway (1869-1938)
A granddaughter who became queen of a country that had not existed as an independent kingdom when she married. • Born: 26 November 1869, Marlborough House, London • Died: 20 November 1938, London • Parents: Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark • Married: Prince Carl of Denmark, her first cousin, 22 July 1896 • Queen of Norway: from 18 November 1905 When Norway dissolved its union with Sweden in 1905, the Norwegian parliament offered the new throne to her husband, a younger son of the Danish crown prince, and he accepted after a referendum approved the monarchy. He took the name Haakon VII. Their only child, Olav, had been born in England in 1903, and became crown prince of Norway at the age of two.
Sophie, Queen of the Hellenes (1870-1932)
The Kaiser's sister on the throne of Greece, which the Allies would not forgive. • Born: 14 June 1870, Neues Palais, Potsdam • Died: 13 January 1932, Frankfurt • Parents: Frederick III and Victoria, Princess Royal • Married: Crown Prince Constantine of Greece, 27 October 1889, Athens • Queen: from 18 March 1913 Her conversion to Greek Orthodoxy in 1891 so angered her brother Wilhelm that he threatened to bar her from Germany. During the war the Allies distrusted Constantine as the Kaiser's brother-in-law, and in June 1917 they forced him from the throne. Three of her sons became kings of Greece: George II, Alexander and Paul.
Alexandra, Empress of Russia (1872-1918)
Alix of Hesse, the last Tsarina, raised in part by her grandmother. • Born: 6 June 1872, New Palace, Darmstadt • Died: 17 July 1918, Ipatiev House, Yekaterinburg • Parents: Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, and Princess Alice • Married: Tsar Nicholas II, 26 November 1894, Winter Palace, St Petersburg • Children: 5: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei Her mother died when she was six, and Victoria took a close hand in her upbringing and hoped she would marry Prince Albert Victor. She refused him. She married Nicholas a week after his father's funeral and became Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. She carried the haemophilia gene from Victoria by way of Alice, and her fifth child and only son inherited the disease.
Marie, Queen of Romania (1875-1938)
An English-born granddaughter who took a Hohenzollern kingdom into the war against the Hohenzollern Kaiser. • Born: 29 October 1875, Eastwell Park, Kent • Died: 18 July 1938, Pelișor Castle, Sinaia • Parents: Prince Alfred and Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna • Married: Crown Prince Ferdinand of Romania, 10 January 1893, Sigmaringen • Queen: from 10 October 1914 Her husband belonged to the same Hohenzollern family as the Kaiser, and when Romania entered the war in August 1916 it did so on the Allied side, in large part through her influence. Most of the country was overrun within months, and the court withdrew to Iași, where she worked in the typhus wards. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 she lobbied in person, and Romania came out of it roughly doubled in size.
Victoria Eugenie, Queen of Spain (1887-1969)
Ena of Battenberg, through whom every Spanish monarch since 1975 descends from Victoria. • Born: 24 October 1887, Balmoral Castle • Died: 15 April 1969, Lausanne • Parents: Prince Henry of Battenberg and Princess Beatrice • Married: Alfonso XIII of Spain, 31 May 1906, Church of San Jerónimo el Real, Madrid • Children: 7, including Alfonso, Prince of Asturias, and Juan, Count of Barcelona Her first son, born in May 1907, bled when he was circumcised, and the diagnosis of haemophilia, carried from Victoria through Beatrice, cooled the marriage for good; her youngest son, Gonzalo, had it too. She left Spain with the royal family when the Republic was proclaimed in 1931 and never lived there again. Her grandson Juan Carlos became king in 1975.
Death at Osborne
22 January 1901, Osborne House, Isle of Wight. Victoria died in the early evening, aged eighty-one. Her eldest grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, had come from Berlin without being asked and stayed, against the wishes of some of her children, and for the last hours he knelt by the bed and supported her with his good arm. Her eldest son became Edward VII that evening. Her eldest daughter, dying of cancer in Germany, was too ill to travel, and was dead herself in August.
Tsarevich Alexei (1904-1918)
Great-grandson of Victoria, heir to the Russian throne, and a haemophiliac. • Born: 12 August 1904, Peterhof • Died: 17 July 1918, Ipatiev House, Yekaterinburg • Parents: Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna The disease was recognised within weeks of his birth, when his navel bled for days, and it was kept a state secret. In 1912, at Spała in Poland, a haemorrhage nearly killed him, and his mother's conviction that the peasant healer Grigori Rasputin had saved him gave Rasputin an access to the imperial family that did lasting damage to the dynasty's standing.
The Wedding Bomb in the Calle Mayor
31 May 1906, Calle Mayor, Madrid. On the way back from the wedding, a bomb hidden in a bouquet was thrown from a fourth-floor balcony at the royal carriage. The anarchist Mateu Morral killed more than twenty soldiers and spectators and wounded about a hundred. The king and queen were unhurt, and the bride's dress was spattered with blood. Morral escaped, and two days later, recognised near Torrejón de Ardoz, he shot a guard and then himself.
Nine Kings at Windsor
20 May 1910, Windsor Castle. Nine reigning monarchs posed together on the morning of Edward VII's funeral. • Standing: Haakon VII of Norway, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Manuel II of Portugal, Wilhelm II of Germany, George I of Greece, Albert I of Belgium • Seated: Alfonso XIII of Spain, George V, Frederick VIII of Denmark Four of the nine were Victoria's grandsons or married to her granddaughters: George, Wilhelm, Haakon and Alfonso. Within eight and a half years four of the nine had lost their thrones or their lives: Manuel deposed that October, George of Greece assassinated in 1913, Ferdinand and Wilhelm gone in the autumn of 1918.
The Cousins at War
4 August 1914. Britain declared war on Germany, three days after Germany declared war on Russia. In the last week of peace Wilhelm and Nicholas exchanged telegrams in English signed Willy and Nicky, and Wilhelm's brother Prince Henry of Prussia called on George V in London and came away believing Britain would stay neutral. George was first cousin to Wilhelm and to Nicholas; the Tsarina was first cousin to both George and Wilhelm. None of it altered the mobilisation timetables.
The House of Windsor
17 July 1917. George V proclaimed that his house would henceforth be called Windsor, dropping Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the name Albert had brought from Germany. German Gotha bombers had been raiding London since June, and the name of the royal house was the name painted on the aircraft. On the same occasion the Battenbergs became Mountbatten and the Tecks became Cambridge. Wilhelm is said to have remarked that he would go to see The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
The Ipatiev House
17 July 1918, Yekaterinburg. In the early hours the former Tsar, the Tsarina, their five children and four members of their household were shot in the cellar of the house where they were held. In the spring of 1917 the British government had offered the family asylum and then withdrawn the offer, at the urging of George V, who feared that sheltering the Tsar would endanger his own throne. Alexandra was Victoria's granddaughter, and her husband was George's first cousin. The house was demolished on Soviet orders in 1977.
Abdication at Spa
9 November 1918, Spa, Belgium. At army headquarters Wilhelm II was told the army would no longer follow him, and in Berlin his abdication was announced before he had agreed to it. He crossed into the neutral Netherlands the next morning and signed the formal renunciation at Amerongen on 28 November. The Dutch refused Allied demands to hand him over for trial. He spent the last twenty-two years of his life at Huis Doorn, chopping wood, and did not see Germany again.