Maria Feodorovna of Russia (Dagmar of Denmark) Conclusion

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In Kiev, Maria engaged in the Red Cross and hospital work, and in September, the 50th anniversary of her arrival in Russia was celebrated with great festivities, during which she was visited by her son, Nicholas II, who came without his wife. Empress Alexandra wrote to the Emperor: “When you see Motherdear, you must rather sharply tell her how pained you are, that she listens to slander and does not stop it, as it makes mischief and others would be delighted, I am sure, to put her against me…” Maria did ask Nicholas II to remove both Rasputin and Alexandra from all political influence, but shortly after, Nicholas and Alexandra broke all contact with the Emperor’s family.

When Rasputin was murdered, part of the Imperial relatives asked Maria to return to the capital and use the moment to replace Alexandra as the Emperor’s political adviser. Maria refused, but she did admit that Alexandra should be removed from influence over state affairs: “Alexandra Feodorovna must be banished. Don’t know how but it must be done. Otherwise she might go completely mad. Let her enter a convent or just disappear”.

Revolution and exile

Revolution came to Russia in 1917, first with the February Revolution, then with Nicholas II’s abdication on March 15. After travelling from Kiev to meet with her deposed son, Nicholas II, in Mogilev, Maria returned to the city, where she quickly realised how Kiev had changed and that her presence was no longer wanted. She was persuaded by her family there to travel to the Crimea by train with a group of other refugee Romanovs.

After a time living in one of the imperial residences in the Crimea, she received reports that her both of her sons, (Emperor Nicholas II and his brother Grand Duke Michael) her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren had been murdered. However, she publicly rejected the report as a rumour. On the day after the murder of the Emperor’s family, Maria received a messenger from Nicky, “a touching man” who told of how difficult life was for her son’s family in Yekaterinburg. “And nobody can help or liberate them – only God! My Lord save my poor, unlucky Nicky, help him in his hard ordeals!”

In her diary she comforted herself: “I am sure they all got out of Russia and now the Bolsheviks are trying to hide the truth.” She firmly held on to this conviction until her death. The truth was too painful for her to admit publicly. Her letters to her son and his family have since almost all been lost; but in one that survives, she wrote to Nicholas: “You know that my thoughts and prayers never leave you. I think of you day and night and sometimes feel so sick at heart that I believe I cannot bear it any longer. But God is merciful. He will give us strength for this terrible ordeal.”

Maria’s daughter Olga Alexandrovna commented further on the matter, “Yet I am sure that deep in her heart my mother had steeled herself to accept the truth some years before her death.”

Despite the overthrow of the monarchy in 1917, the former Empress Dowager Maria at first refused to leave Russia. Only in 1919, at the urging of her sister, Dowager Queen Alexandra, did she begrudgingly depart, fleeing Crimea over the Black Sea to London. King George V sent the warship HMS Marlborough to retrieve his aunt. The party of 17 Romanovs included her daughter the Grand Duchess Xenia and five of Xenia’s sons plus six dogs and a canary.

After a brief stay in the British base in Malta, they travelled to England on the British ship the Lord Nelson, and she stayed with her sister, Alexandra. Although Queen Alexandra never treated her sister badly and they spent time together at Marlborough House in London and at Sandringham House in Norfolk, Maria, as a deposed Dowager Empress , felt that she was now “number two,” in contrast to her sister, a popular queen dowager, and she eventually returned to her native Denmark. After living briefly with her nephew, King Christian X, in a wing of the Amalienborg Palace, she chose her holiday villa Hvidøre near Copenhagen as her new permanent home.

There were many Russian émigrées in Copenhagen who continued to regard her as the Empress and often asked her for help. The All-Russian Monarchical Assembly held in 1921 offered her the locum tenens of the Russian throne but she declined with the evasive answer “Nobody saw Nicky killed” and therefore there was a chance her son was still alive. She rendered financial support to Nikolai Sokolov, who studied the circumstances of the death of the Emperor’s family, but they never met. The Grand Duchess Olga sent a telegram to Paris cancelling an appointment because it would have been too difficult for the old and sick woman to hear the terrible story of murder of her son and his family.

Death and burial

In November 1925, Maria’s favourite sister, Queen Alexandra, died. That was the last loss that she could bear. “She was ready to meet her Creator,” wrote her son-in-law, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, about Maria’s last years. On October 13, 1928 at Hvidøre near Copenhagen, in a house she had once shared with her sister Queen Alexandra, Maria died at the age of 80, having outlived four of her six children. Following services in Copenhagen’s Russian Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Church, the Empress was interred at Roskilde Cathedral.

In 2005, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and President Vladimir Putin of Russia and their respective governments agreed that the Empress’s remains should be returned to St. Petersburg in accordance with her wish to be interred next to her husband. A number of ceremonies took place from September 23 to 28, 2006.

The funeral service, attended by high dignitaries, including the Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Mary of Denmark and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, did not pass without some turbulence. The crowd around the coffin was so great that a young Danish diplomat fell into the grave before the coffin was interred.

The reburial of Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia in St. Petersburg

On September 26th, 2006, a statue of Maria Feodorovna was unveiled near her favourite Cottage Palace in Peterhof. Following a service at Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, she was interred next to her husband Emperor Alexander III in the Peter and Paul Cathedral on September 28, 2006, 140 years after her first arrival in Russia and almost 78 years after her death.

Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia (Dagmar of Denmark). Part IV

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On November 1, 1894, Alexander III died aged just 49 at Livadia. In her diary Maria wrote, “I am utterly heartbroken and despondent, but when I saw the blissful smile and the peace in his face that came after, it gave me strength.” Two days later, the Prince and Princess of Wales arrived at Livadia from London. While the Prince of Wales took it upon himself to involve himself in the preparations for the funeral, the Princess of Wales spent her time comforting grieving Maria, including praying with her and sleeping at her bedside.

Maria Feodorovna’s birthday was a week after the funeral, and as it was a day in which court mourning could be somewhat relaxed, Nicholas used the day to marry Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, who took the name Alexandra Feodorovna.

As Empress Dowager, Maria was much more popular than either Emperor Nicholas III or Empress Alexandra. During her son’s coronation, she, Nicholas, and Alexandra arrived in separate carriages. She was greeted with “almost deafening” applause. A visiting writer Kate Kool noted that she “provoked more cheering from the people than did her son. The people have had thirteen years in which to know this woman and they have learned to love her very much.”

Richard Harding Davis, an American journalist, was surprised that she “was more loudly greeted than either the Emperor or the Empress.” Once the death of Alexander III had receded, Maria again took a brighter view of the future. “Everything will be all right”, as she said. Maria continued to live in the Anichkov Palace in St. Petersburg and at Gatchina Palace.

During the first years of her son’s reign, Maria often acted as the political adviser to the Emperor. Uncertain of his own ability and aware of her connections and knowledge, Emperor Nicholas II often told the ministers that he would ask her advice before making decisions, and the ministers sometimes suggested this themselves. It was reportedly on her advice that Nicholas initially kept his father’s ministers.

Maria herself estimated that her son was of a weak character and that it was better that he was influenced by her than someone worse. Her daughter Olga remarked upon her influence: “she had never before taken the least interest … now she felt it was her duty. Her personality was magnetic and her zest of activity was incredible. She had her finger on every educational pulse in the empire.

The fact that Russian court custom dictated that an empress dowager took precedence over an empress consort, combined with the possessiveness that Maria had of her sons, and her jealousy of Empress Alexandra only served to exacerbate tensions between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.

Sophie Buxhoeveden remarked of this conflict: “Without actually clashing they seemed fundamentally unable … to understand one another”, and her daughter Olga commented: “they had tried to understand each other and failed. They were utterly different in character, habits and outlook”. Maria was sociable and a good dancer, with an ability to ingratiate herself with people, while Alexandra, though intelligent and beautiful, was very shy and closed herself off from the Russian people.

1903. L to R. Princess Victoria, Queen Alexandra of the United Kingdom, Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia

In 1899, Maria’s second son, George, died of tuberculosis in the Caucasus. During the funeral, she kept her composure, but at the end of the service, she ran from the church clutching her son’s top hat that been atop the coffin and collapsed in her carriage sobbing.

In 1892, Maria arranged Olga’s disastrous marriage to Peter, Duke of Oldenburg. For years Nicholas II refused to grant his unhappy sister a divorce, only relenting in 1916 in the midst of World War I. When Olga attempted to contract a morganatic marriage with Nikolai Kulikovsky, Maria Feodorovna and the Emperor tried to dissuade her, yet, they did not protest too vehemently. Indeed, Maria Feodorovna was one of the few people who attended the wedding in November 1916.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Maria was spending increasing time abroad. In 1906, following the death of their father, King Christian IX, she and her sister, Alexandra, who had become queen-consort of the United Kingdom in 1901, purchased the villa of Hvidøre. The following year, a change in political circumstances allowed Maria Feodorovna to be welcomed to England by King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, Maria’s first visit to England since 1873. Following a visit in early 1908, Maria Feodorovna was present at her brother-in-law and sister’s visit to Russia that summer.

A little under two years later, Maria Feodorovna travelled to England yet again, this time for the funeral of her brother-in-law, King Edward VII, in May 1910. During her nearly three-month visit to England in 1910, Maria Feodorovna attempted, unsuccessfully, to get her sister, now Queen Dowager Alexandra, to claim a position of precedence over her daughter-in-law, Queen Mary.

In 1912, Maria faced trouble with her youngest son, when he secretly married his mistress, much to the outrage and scandal of both Maria Feodorovna and Nicholas.

Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia (Dagmar of Demark). Part III.

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Empress Maria Feodorovna was active in philanthropic work. Her husband called her “the Guardian Angel of Russia.” As Empress, she assumed patronage of the Marie Institutions that her mother-in-law had run: It encompassed 450 charitable establishments. In 1882, she founded many establishments called Marie schools to give young girls an elementary education. She was the patroness of the Russian Red Cross. During a cholera epidemic in the late 1870s, she visited the sick in hospitals.

Maria was the head of the social scene. She loved to dance at the balls of high society, and she became a popular socialite and hostess of the Imperial balls at Gatchina. Her daughter Olga commented, “Court life had to run in splendor, and there my mother played her part without a single false step”.

A contemporary remarked on her success: “of the long gallery of Tsarinas who have sat in state in the Kremlin or paced in the Winter Palace, Marie Feodorovna was perhaps the most brilliant”. Alexander used to enjoy joining in with the musicians, although he would end up sending them off one by one. When that happened, Maria knew the party was over.

Alexander III had an extremely poor relationship with his brother Grand Duke Vladimir. At a restaurant, Grand Duke Vladimir had a brawl with the French actor Lucien Guitry when the latter kissed his wife, Duchess Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The prefect of St. Petersburg needed to escort Vladimir out of the restaurant. Alexander was so furious that he temporarily exiled Vladimir and his wife and threatened to exile them permanently to Siberia if they did not leave immediately.

As Tsarevna, and then as Empress, Maria Feodorovna had something of a social rivalry with the popular Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna (the eldest daughter of Grand Duke Friedrich Franz II of Mecklenburg-Schwerin by his first wife, Princess Augusta Reuss of Köstritz), wife of her Russian brother-in-law, Grand Duke Vladimir. This rivalry had echoed the one shared by their husbands, and served to exacerbate the rift within the family. While she knew better than to publicly criticise both the Grand Duke and Duchess in public, Maria Feodorovna referred to Marie Pavlovna with the caustic epithet of “Empress Vladimir.”

Nearly each summer, Maria, Alexander and their children would make an annual trip to Denmark, where her parents, King Christian IX and Queen Louise, hosted family reunions. Maria’s brother, King George I, and his wife, Queen Olga, would come up from Athens with their children, and the Princess of Wales, often without her husband, would come with some of her children from the United Kingdom.

In contrast to the tight security observed in Russia, the Emperor and Empress, and their children relished the relative freedom that they could enjoy at Bernstorff and Fredensborg. The annual family meetings of monarchs in Denmark was regarded as suspicious in Europe, where many assumed they secretly discussed state affairs.

Otto von Bismarck nicknamed Fredensborg “Europe’s Whispering Gallery” and accused Queen Louise Denmark of plotting against him with her children. Maria also had a good relationship with the majority of her in-laws, and was often asked to act as a mediator between them and the Emperor. In the words of her daughter Olga: “She proved herself extremely tactful with her in-laws, which was no easy task”.

During Alexander III’s reign, the monarchy’s opponents quickly disappeared underground. A group of students had been planning to assassinate Alexander III on the sixth anniversary of his father’s death at the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg. The plotters had stuffed hollowed-out books with dynamite, which they intended to throw at the Emperor when he arrived at the cathedral. However, the Russian secret police uncovered the plot before it could be carried out. Five students were hanged in 1887; amongst them was Aleksandr Ulyanov, older brother of Vladimir Lenin.

The biggest threat to the lives of the Emperor and his family, however, came not from terrorists, but from a derailment of the imperial train in the fall of 1888. Maria and her family had been at lunch in the dining car when the train jumped the tracks and slid down an embankment, causing the roof of the dining car to nearly cave in on them.

When Maria’s eldest sister Alexandra visited Gatchina in July 1894, she was surprised to see how weak her brother-in-law Alexander III had become. At the time Maria had long known that he was ill and did not have long left. She now turned her attention to her eldest son, the future Nicholas II, for it was on him that both her personal future and the future of the dynasty now depended.

Nicholas had long had his heart set on marrying Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, a favourite grandchild of Queen Victoria. Despite the fact that she was their godchild, neither Alexander III nor Maria approved of the match. Nicholas summed up the situation as follows: “I wish to move in one direction, and it is clear that Mama wishes me to move in another – my dream is to one day marry Alix.”

Maria and Alexander found Alix shy and somewhat peculiar. They were also concerned that the young Princess was not possessed of the right character to be Empress of Russia. Nicholas’s parents had known Alix as a child and formed the impression that she was hysterical and unbalanced, which may have been due to the loss of her mother, Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, and youngest sister, Marie, to diphtheria when she was just six. It was only when Alexander III’s health was beginning to fail that they reluctantly gave permission for Nicholas to propose.

Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia, the former Princess Dagmar of Denmark. Part II

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Maria Feodorovna was beloved by the Russian public. Early on, she made it a priority to learn the Russian language and to try to understand the Russian people. Baroness Rahden wrote that “the Czarevna is forming a real, warm sympathy for that country which is receiving her with so much enthusiasm.” In 1876, she and her husband visited Helsinki and were greeted by cheers, most of which were “directed to the wife of the heir apparent.”

Maria rarely interfered with politics, preferring to devote her time and energies to her family, charities, and the more social side of her position. She had also seen the student protests of Kiev and St. Petersburg in the 1860s, and when police were beating students, the students cheered on Maria Feodorovna to which she replied, “They were quite loyal, they cheered me. Why do you allow the police to treat them so brutally?” Her one exception to official politics was her militant anti-German sentiment because of the annexation of Danish territories by Prussia in 1864, a sentiment also expressed by her sister, Alexandra.

Prince Gorchakov remarked about that policy that ‘it is our belief, that Germany will not forget that both in Russia and in England [sic] a Danish Princess has her foot on the steps of the throne”. Maria Feodorovna suffered a miscarriage in 1866 in Denmark while she was horseback riding.

Maria arranged the marriage between her brother George I of Greece and her cousin-in-law Grand Duchess Olga Constantinovna of Russia. When George visited St. Petersburg in 1867, she contrived to have George spend time with Olga. She convinced Olga’s parents of her brother’s suitability. In a letter, her father Christian IX of Denmark praised her for her shrewd arranging of the marriage: “Where in the world have you, little rogue, ever learned to intrigue so well, since you have worked hard on your uncle and aunt, who were previously decidedly against a match of this kind.”

On May 18, 1868 Maria gave birth to her eldest son, Nicholas. Her next son, Alexander Alexandrovich, born in 1869, died from meningitis in infancy. She would bear Alexander four more children who reached adulthood: George (b. 1871), Xenia (b. 1875), Michael (b. 1878), and Olga (b. 1882).

As a mother, she doted on and was quite possessive of her sons. She had a more distant relationship with her daughters. Her favorite child was Nicholas, and Olga and Michael were closer to their father. She was lenient towards George, and she could never bear to punish him for his pranks. Her daughter Olga remembered that “mother had a great weakness for him.”

Maria’s relationship with her father-in-law, Alexander II of Russia, deteriorated because she did not accept his second marriage to Catherine Dolgorukov. She refused to allow her children to visit their grandfather’s second wife and his legitimized bastards, which caused Alexander’s anger. She confided in Sophia Tolstaya that “there were grave scenes between me and the Sovereign, caused by my refusal to let my children to him.”

At a Winter Palace reception in February 1881, she refused to kiss Catherine and only gave Catherine her hand to kiss. Alexander II was furious and chastised his daughter-in-law: “Sasha is a good son, but you – you have no heart”.

In 1873, Maria, Alexander, and their two eldest sons made a journey to the United Kingdom. The imperial couple and their children were entertained at Marlborough House by the Prince and Princess of Wales. The royal sisters Maria and Alexandra delighted London society by dressing alike at social gatherings. The following year, Maria and Alexander welcomed the Prince and Princess of Wales to St. Petersburg; they had come for the wedding of the Prince’s younger brother, Alfred, to Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, daughter of Emperor Alexander II and the sister of the tsarevich.

Empress of Russia

On the morning of March 13, 1881, Maria’s father-in-law Alexander II of Russia was killed by a bomb on the way back to the Winter Palace from a military parade. In her diary, she described how the wounded, still living Emperor was taken to the palace: “His legs were crushed terribly and ripped open to the knee; a bleeding mass, with half a boot on the right foot, and only the sole of the foot remaining on the left.” Alexander II died a few hours later.

After her father-in-law’s gruesome death, she was worried about her husband’s safety. In her diary, she wrote, “Our happiest and serenest times are now over. My peace and calm are gone, for now I will only ever be able to worry about Sasha.” Her favorite sister, the Princess of Wales, and brother-in-law Prince of Wales, stayed in Russia for several weeks after the funeral.

Alexander and Maria were crowned at the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin in Moscow on May 27, 1883. Just before the coronation, a major conspiracy had been uncovered, which cast a pall over the celebration. Nevertheless, over 8000 guests attended the splendid ceremony. Because of the many threats against Maria and Alexander III, the head of the security police, General Cherevin, shortly after the coronation urged the Emperor and his family to relocate to Gatchina Palace, a more secure location 50 kilometres outside St. Petersburg.

The huge palace had 900 rooms and was built by Catherine the Great. The Romanovs heeded the advice. Maria and Alexander III lived at Gatchina for 13 years, and it was here that their five surviving children grew up.

Under heavy guard, Alexander III and Maria made periodic trips from Gatchina to the capital to take part in official events.

Maria was a universally beloved Empress. Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin wrote that Maria’s “bearing, her distinguished and forceful personality, and the intelligence which shone in her face, made her the perfect figure of a queen… She was extraordinarily well-loved in Russia, and everyone had confidence in her… and [was] a real mother to her people.

HM King Christian IX of Denmark

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This is the last of the three part series on King Christian IX of Denmark. In this section I will examine his reign and the vast family connections that lead to the sobriquet “the Father-in-law-of-Europe.”

Immediately after he succeeded to the throne the question of the Schleswig-Holsein duchies came to a head. The issue lead to a short war with Prussia resulting in a loss of the duchies from Denmark. I will not relate the long complex history of the war here for in many ways it is more for the story on the unification of Germany than that of the reign of King Christian IX. The initial defeat tainted the early days of Christian’s reign and for a while made him unpopular. Increasing his unpopularity was his support of the authoritarian Prime Minister Estrup who ruled Denmark as a virtual dictator between 1875 and 1894. This occurred in an era when Parliamentary democracies were on the rise throughout Europe. His first step toward constitutionalism was when in 1874 he granted Iceland, a Danish possession at the time, its own constitution. It wasn’t however, given its independence.

It wasn’t until 1901 when the king began allowing these types of transformations in Denmark. He begrudgingly asked Johan Henrik Deuntzer to form a government which resulted in the creation of the Cabinet of Deuntzer that included members of the Venstre Reform Party and was the first Danish government not to include the conservative party. This began the tradition of a Parliamentary style government and from then on until his death a few years later the poularity of Christian IX grew. Højre, even though Højre never had a majority of the seats in the Folketing. This was the beginning of the Danish tradition of parliamentarian democracy and this improved his reputation for his last years.

Similarly to Queen Victoria, the Children and grand-children of King Christian IX and Queen Louise linked the Danish Royal Family to many other royal families of Europe. Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, King Albert II of Belgium, King Harald V of Norway, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg. The consorts Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and Queen Sofía of Spain are also agnatic descendants of Christian IX, as is Constantine II of Greece (the former and last King of the Hellenes).

The eldest son, future King Frederik VIII of Denmark, was married to Princess Louise of Sweden & Norway the daughter of King Carl XV of Sweden & Norway and his wife Princess Louise of the Netherlands. They had eight children and the first two became kings in their own right. The eldest, Prince Christian, became King Christian X of Denmark in 1912 and the second son, Prince Carl was elected to the throne of Norway when that country won its independence from Sweden in 1905. Prince Carl of Denmark married his paternal first cousin, Princess Maud of Wales, and upon accepting the throne of Norway he changed his name to Haakon and became King Haakon VII of Norway. Haakon & Maud are the grandparents of Norway’s current king, Harald V.

Christian IX’s eldest daughter, the lovely Princess Alexandra, married Prince Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales on 10 March 1863 married at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. With Queen Victoria still in official mourning for the Prince Consort the wedding was more like a funeral than a wedding. They had six children. The eldest son, Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, died from pneumonia in 1892. The second eldest son became King George V of the United Kingdom and is the grandfather of the present queen, Elizabeth II. Their daughter Maud, married, as we have seen, her cousin, King Haakon VII of Norway.

The next son, Prince Wilhelm of Denmark, entered the Danish Navy at the age of 17 and soon found himself elected to the throne of Greece. The unpopular King Otto of Greece was deposed in 1862 but Greece wanted to remain a monarchy. One of the first choices was Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, second son of Britain’s queen Victoria, but this offer was declined. The choice then fell to Prince Wilhelm of Denmark who ascended the Greek throne as King George I of the Hellenes. Christian IX’s son became a king a few months before Christian himself inherited the Danish throne! King George I married Grand Duchess Olga Constantinovna of Russia, the daughter of Grand Duke f Grand Duke Constantine Nikolaievich and his wife Princess Alexandra of Saxe-Altenburg. George and Olga were the paternal grandparents of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, consort to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.

The next child was Princess Dagmar. Initially she was betrothed Czarevich Nicolas Alexandrovich of Russia eldest son of Czar Alexander II of Russia. He did before the wedding and upon Nicholas’ wishes she married his younger brother in 1866 who became Czar Alexander III of Russia in 1881. She converted to the Russian Orthodox faith and was renamed Maria Feodorovna. They were also the parents of the ill-fatted and tragic Czar Nicholas II of Russia. At the start of the Russian Revolution she was able to leave Russia and return to Denmark where she died there in 1828. On September, 28 2006 the remains of Empress Maria Feodorovna were returned to Russia and after a service at Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, she was interred next to her husband Alexander III in the Peter and Paul Cathedral, 140 years after her first arrival to Russia.

The last two children of Christian IX and Louise, Thyra and Waldemar, did not make as notable of marriages as their older siblings. Thyra married, Ernst August II, Duke of Cumberland, Prince of Hanover and the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Ernst August was heir to the defunct throne of Hanover which lost its throne in the war against Prussia during the time of German Unification. Thyra’s and Ernst’s son, Ernst August III, married Victoria-Louise of Prussia, the only daughter of German Emperor Wilhelm II, as a means of mending fences. Their descendents did marry into both the Greek and Spanish thrones. Waldemar married Princess Marie d’Orleans in 1885. Princess Marie d’Orleans was the daughter of Prince Philippe VII, Comte d’Paris, pretender to the French throne.

King Christian IX died on February 15, 1906 at the age of 87 and after a reign of 43 years. An interesting King who lived through very interesting times and whose descendants still occupy the thrones of Europe.