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February 6, 1665. Birth of the future Queen Anne. Anne was born at 11:39 p.m. on February 6, 1665 at St James’s Palace, London, the fourth child and second daughter of the Duke of York (afterwards James II and VII), and his first wife, Anne Hyde. Her father was the younger brother of King Charles II, and her mother was the daughter of Lord Chancellor Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon. was the Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland between March 8, 1702 and May 1, 1707. On May 1, 1707, under the Acts of Union, two of her realms, the kingdoms of England and Scotland, united as a single sovereign state known as Great Britain. She continued to reign as Queen of Great Britain and Ireland until her death. Anne remained Queen of Ireland in the form of a personal union with the British Crown and wouldn’t be politically united with Great Britain until 1801.

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February 6, 1685. Death of King Charles II of England, Scotland and Ireland. Charles suffered a sudden apoplectic fit on the morning of February 2, 1685, and died aged 54 at 11:45 am four days later at Whitehall Palace. The suddenness of his illness and death led to suspicion of poison in the minds of many, including one of the royal doctors; however, a more modern medical analysis has held that the symptoms of his final illness are similar to those of uraemia (a clinical syndrome due to kidney dysfunction). In the days between his collapse and his death, Charles endured a variety of torturous treatments including bloodletting, purging and cupping in hopes of effecting a recovery. Charles was succeeded by his brother, the Duke of York, who became James II of England and Ireland and James VII of Scotland.

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February 6, 1840. Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was naturalised by Act of Parliament, and granted the style of Royal Highness by an Order in Council, four days before his marriage to Queen Victoria. The British Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, advised the Queen against granting her husband the title of “King Consort”; Parliament also objected to Albert being created a peer—partly because of anti-German sentiment and a desire to exclude Albert from any political role. Albert claimed that he had no need of a British peerage, writing: “It would almost be a step downwards, for as a Duke of Saxony, I feel myself much higher than a Duke of York or Kent.” For the next seventeen years, Albert was formally titled “HRH Prince Albert” until, on June 25, 1857, Victoria formally granted him the title Prince Consort.

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February 6, 1899. Prince Alfred of Edinburgh, Hereditary Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (October 15, 1874 – February 6, 1899), was the son and heir apparent of Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. He died aged 24 under circumstances still not entirely clear. The exact circumstances of Alfred’s death are not known, and varying accounts have been published. His sister Marie’s memoirs simply say his health “broke down”, and other writers have said that he had “consumption”. The Times published an account stating he had died of a tumor, while the Complete Peerage gives the generally accepted account that he “shot himself”. He was a first cousin of King George V of the United Kingdom, German Emperor Wilhelm II, Emperor Nicholas II of Russia and brother of Queen Maria a Romania.

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February 6, 1952. George VI of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland died and was succeeded by his elder daughter as Queen Elizabeth II. On the morning of February 6, at 07:30 GMT, George VI was found dead in bed at his Sandringham House in Norfolk. He had died from a coronary thrombosis in his sleep at the age of 56. Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh had just returned to their Kenyan home, Sagana Lodge, after a night spent at Treetops Hotel, when word arrived of the death of the King and consequently Elizabeth’s immediate accession to the throne. This marks her 68th year on the throne.

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February 6, 1981. Queen Frederica of Greece, was born Her Royal Highness Princess Frederica of Hanover, and of Great Britain and Ireland, and of Brunswick-Lüneburg on April 18, 1917 in Blankenburg am Harz, in the German Duchy of Brunswick, she was the only daughter and third child of Ernst August, then reigning Duke of Brunswick, and his wife Princess Viktoria Luise of Prussia, herself the only daughter of the German Emperor Wilhelm II. Both her father and maternal grandfather would abdicate their crowns in November 1918 following Germany’s defeat in World War I, and her paternal grandfather would be stripped of his British royal dukedom the following year. As a descendant of Queen Victoria, she was, at birth, 34th in the line of succession to the British throne.

Prince Paul of Greece (future King of Greece) proposed to her during the summer of 1936, while he was in Berlin attending the 1936 Summer Olympics. Paul was a son of King Constantine I and Frederica’s grand-aunt Sophia. Accordingly, they were maternal first cousins once removed. They were also paternal second cousins as great-grandchildren of Christian IX of Denmark. Their engagement was announced officially on September 28, 1937, and Britain’s King George VI gave his consent pursuant to the Royal Marriages Act 1772 on December 26, 1937. They married in Athens on January 9, 1938. Frederica became Hereditary Princess of Greece, her husband being heir presumptive to his childless elder brother, King George II.

Frederica died on February 6, 1981 in exile in Madrid of heart failure, reportedly following eyelid surgery (blepharoplasty), although a biographer has claimed the surgery was cataract removal. She was interred at Tatoi (the Royal family’s palace and burial ground in Greece). Her son, King Constantine II, and his family were allowed to attend the service but had to leave immediately afterwards.