Royal Grief: Part IV

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Edward VII, grief, Kaiser Friedrich III of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, The Duke of Clarence

Within seven months of the death of his mother, King Edward VII suffered the death of his sister, Victoria, Princess Royal, The Empress Frederick of Germany, eldest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Princess Victoria was born on 21 November 1840. She married Friedrich-Wilhelm of Prussia in 1858, a love match but also a dynastic alliance in the hope of helping liberalize Prussia. However, her father-in-law (Kaiser Wilhelm I) lived to be 90 and her husband was already terminally ill with throat cancer when he finally became Kaiser Friedrich III in March of 1888. Kaiser Friedrich III reigned for just 3 months and was succeeded by his eldest son Wilhelm II, a militaristic ruler in the mold of his grandfather. Victoria, who now styled her self The Empress Frederick,  and her son did not get along, and she was marginalized for the rest of her life, finally dying in 1901, a few months after Queen Victoria.
In the summer of 1900 Edward VII, then still Prince of Wales, spent much of the summer in Berlin with his sister, the Empress Frederick, as her health began to deteriorate. Edward VII had regular visits at the spa at Bad Homburg. He would not see his sister once again until February of 1901, a month after his succession to the throne. When he came to see his sister, it was not known how much longer she had to live. Edward brought with him his private secretary, Sir Frederick Ponsonby, and a couple of English doctors to help treat his sister.
Vicky did not have a great relationship with German doctors. She felt that they were partly responsible for the difficult delivery of her son, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, and they mismanaged and treated her husbands (Kaiser Friedrich III) throat cancer. Indeed the Empress Frederick was kept in such pain because the German doctors gave her so little morphine for her pain. The English doctors were able to giver more pain relief much to the resentments of the German physicians in attendance.
When Kaiser Friedrich III died in 1888 his son, the new Kaiser Wilhelm II, surrounded the palace with his troops in order to secure any of his father’s documents and other writings and letters. It seemed history would repeat itself when the Empresses Frederick died. This was the main reason Sir Frederick Ponsonby was there. The letters and documents of the Empress Frederick were smuggled out of Germany in Ponsonby’s luggage and kept in his own private estates instead of the archives at Windsor in an attempt to out manouver the Kaiser.
The Empress Frederick died in Friedrichshof on 5 August 1901 ending a long illness that began in late 1898 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer that would eventually metastasize to her spine. She was buried next to her husband in the royal mausoleum of the Friedenskirche at Potsdam on 13 August 1901.
Edward VII and Vicky had been close all their lives. Altogether their parents had differing views of each child, Vicky was Prince Albert’s favorite child, while Bertie (Albert-Edward) was a great disappointment to his mother, this did not seem to affect their relationship.
This concludes the King’s year of grief…the loss of a nephew in 1899 then between July 30, 1900 to August 5, 1901 the King lost his brother, mother and sister. If we expand the time back ten years or so, the King lost his eldest son (Prince Albert-Victor, Duke of Clarence) in 1892 and another nephew, Prince Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein in October of 1900. That is a lot of grief and loss for one person in that span of time.

Royal Grief: Part III

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Death, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, grief, King Edward VII of Great Britain, Nellie Clifden, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria, United Kingdom

With the death of Prince Alfred, reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha on July 30, 1900, his older brother, Prince Albert-Edward, The Prince of Wales, slipped into a depression over the death of his brother. Six months later would come an even larger and more life changing loss. On January 22, 1901 the Prince of Wales’ mother, Queen Victoria, passed away after a reign of 63 years  making him King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

I could find no recording of the grief he must have felt at the time. Was he conflicted? The new king, aged 59, had waited his entire life for this moment. On the one hand it was his mother that died. On the other hand he now could assume the role for which he was born into, which he had been waiting all of his life. I am sure the moment was bitter sweet.

Their relationship, mother and sun, was not easy. Queen Victoria had an almost worshipful view of her Husband, Prince Albert, and had hoped and expected that her son and heir would be a carbon copy of esteemed husband. She was very disappointed in him. In 1861, shortly before his death, Prince Albert confronted his son, the Prince of Wales, after his affair became public.

The Prince of Wales attended manoeuvres in Ireland, during which he conducted a three-day affair with actress, Nellie Clifden. Prince Albert, clealrly ill, was angered and disgusted with his sons behavior and visited Albert-Edward at Cambridge to reprimand him. Two weeks after the visit Albert died on December 14, 1861. Queen Victoria was inconsolable, wore mourning clothes for the rest of her life and blamed her son, Albert-Edward for his father’s death.  She wrote to her eldest daughter, Crown Princess Victoria of Prussia, “I never can, or shall, look at him without a shudder.”

Though relations did improve between mother and son, she was was very relieved when the Prince of Wales recovered from a bout of typhoid (which took the life of Prince Albert) in 1871, but she often refused to give her son proper work as heir to the throne feeling that he was not up to the task.

Upon succeeding to the throne Prince Albert-Edward chose to reign under the name Edward VII, instead of Albert Edward the name his mother had desired him to use^. declaring that he did not wish to “undervalue the name of Albert” and diminish the status of his father with whom the “name should stand alone”.

Part IV tomorrow! I promise!!

 

Royal Grief…Part I

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British Royalty, Conspiracy Theories, Duke of Edinburgh, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Edward VII, Emperor of Russia, grief, Hereditary Prince Alfred, History, Queen Victoria

 

With my interest in royalty I often peruse genealogy charts and biographies to look at the history and events in people’s lives to see if I can capture an accurate picture of who these people were and the times in which they lived. That is what I do when I wear the hat of an historian. I also have a background in psychology and despite having these high and lofty titles they are still human and can and do suffer all the ills associated with the human condition and that includes grief.

When I examine genealogy charts and notice that there are deaths that come close after one another I realize that certain royal family members may be caught up in grief. Often their biographies may detail their grief, as the case with Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, however, there are times when nothing is mentioned. This past July I noticed that King Edward VII of the United Kingdom went through many losses in one year. I envision that it may have been a very difficult time for him.

In 1892 he lost his eldest son and heir, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale (1864-1892) to pneumonia. It has been reported that Prince Albert Victor’s mother, Princess Alexandra, Princess of Wales (at that time) never fully recovered from her son’s death and kept the room in which he died as a shrine. This was typical of those in the Victorian era that made grief seem like an Olympic sport. I suspect that the future King Edward VII also never recovered from the death of his son…what parent ever truly recovers from such a tragedy?

However, it is the year 1899 that we turn to in examining the difficult year for Edward VII. On February 6, 1899 came the death of his nephew, HRH Alfred, Hereditary Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (October 15-February 9, 1899), the only son and  heir of HRH Prince Alfred, reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Duke of Edinburgh and brother of King Edward VII. The Hereditary Prince’s mother was, Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia the fifth child and only surviving daughter of Emperor Alexander II of Russia and his first wife Princess Marie of Hesse and by Rhine.

The Hereditary Prince was aged 24 and his death was under circumstances still not entirely clear.Was it due to health reasons such as consumption or was it suicide? He is alleged to have secretly married Lady Mabel Fitzgerald, granddaughter of the 4th Duke of Leinster, and it has been claimed that this caused friction between young Prince Alfred and his parents and was the cause of his suicide. One report is that Alfred shot himself with a revolver while the rest of the family was gathered for the anniversary celebration of his parents marriage, January 23rd 1899. Prince Alfred survived the initial self-inflicted gun shot and was taken to Schloss Friedenstein in Gotha for three days before being sent to the Martinnsbrunn Sanatorium in Gratsch in the South Tyrol (Austria, now part of Italy). Alfred died there at 4:15 pm on February 9, 1899.

Technically this part of the story belongs more to the grief of the Duke and Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha than to Edward VII himself, after all, it wasn’t his son that died. I only relay this story here because it was the start of a string of deaths in the British Royal Family that would run from 1899 until August of 1901 that would have had an emotional impact on the future Edward VII.

In keeping my desire to have these posts be not too length and therefore easily digestible, I will stop here and post the next entry next Friday.