November 21, 1840: Birth of Victoria of the United Kingdom, Princess Royal, German Empress and Queen of Prussia. Part I.

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Augusta of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, German Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany, German Empress and Queen of Prussia, Great Exhibition of 1851, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Princess Royal, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, St. James Palace, Victoria of the United Kingdom

Victoria, Princess Royal (Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa; November 21, 1840 – August 5, 1901) was German Empress and Queen of Prussia by marriage to German Emperor Friedrich III. She was the eldest child of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and was created Princess Royal in 1841.

Princess Victoria was born on November 21, 1840 at Buckingham Palace, London. She was the first child of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and her husband, Prince Albert ofSaxe-Coburg-Gotha. When she was born, the doctor exclaimed sadly: “Oh Madame, it’s a girl!” The Queen replied: “Never mind, next time it will be a prince!”.

She was baptised in the Throne Room of Buckingham Palace on February 10, 1841 (on her parents’ first wedding anniversary) by the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley. The Lily font was commissioned especially for the occasion of her christening. Her godparents were Queen Adelaide (her great-aunt), the King Leopold I of the Belgians (her great-uncle), the Duke Ernst I of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (paternal grandfather, for whom the Duke of Wellington stood proxy), Prince Augustus Frederick, the Duke of Sussex (her great-uncle), Princess Mary, the Duchess of Gloucester (her great-aunt) and the Duchess of Kent (her grandmother).

As a daughter of the sovereign, Victoria was born a British princess. On January 19, 1841, she was made Princess Royal, a title sometimes conferred on the eldest daughter of the sovereign. In addition, she was heir presumptive to the throne of the United Kingdom, before the birth of her younger brother Prince Albert Edward (later King Edward VII) on November 9, 1841. To her family, she was known simply as “Vicky”.

Precocious and intelligent, Victoria began to learn French at the age of 18 months, and she began to study German when aged four. She also learned Greek and Latin. From the age of six, her curriculum included lessons of arithmetic, geography and history, and her father tutored her in politics and philosophy. She also studied science and literature. Her school days, interrupted by three hours of recreation, began at 8:20 and finished at 18:00. Unlike her brother, whose educational program was even more severe, Victoria was an excellent student who was always hungry for knowledge. However, she showed an obstinate character.

In the German Confederation, Prince Wiilhelm of Prussia and his wife Princess Augusta of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach were among the personalities with whom Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were allies. The British sovereign also had regular epistolary contact with her cousin Augusta since 1846. The revolution that broke out in Berlin in 1848 further strengthened the links between the two royal couples by requiring the heir presumptive to the Prussian throne to find shelter for three months in the British court.

In 1851, Wilhelm returned to London with his wife and two children (Friedrich and Louise), on the occasion of The Great Exhibition. For the first time, Victoria met her future husband, and despite the age difference (she was 11 years old and he was 19), they got along very well.

To promote the contact between the two, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert asked their daughter to guide Friedrich through the exhibition, and during the visit the princess was able to converse in perfect German while the prince was able to say only a few words in English. The meeting was therefore a success, and years later, Prince Friedrich recalled the positive impression that Victoria made on him during this visit, with her mixture of innocence, intellectual curiosity and simplicity.

It was not only his encounter with little Victoria, however, that positively impressed Friiedrich during the four weeks of his English stay. The young Prussian prince shared his liberal ideas with the Prince Consort. Friedrich was fascinated by the relationships among the members of the British royal family. In London, court life was not as rigid and conservative as in Berlin, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s relationship with their children was very different to Wilhelm and Augusta’s relationship with theirs.

In 1855, Prince Friedrich made another trip to Great Britain and visited Victoria and her family in Scotland at Balmoral Castle. The purpose of his trip was to see the Princess Royal again, to ensure that she would be a suitable consort for him. In Berlin, the response to this journey to Britain was far from positive. In fact, many members of the Prussian court wanted to see the heir presumptive’s son marry a Russian Grand Duchess. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who had allowed his nephew to marry a British princess, even had to keep his approval a secret because his own wife showed strong Anglophobic.

At the time of Friedrich’s second visit, Victoria was 15 years old. A little shorter than her mother, the princess was 4 feet 11 inches and far from the ideal of beauty of the time. Queen Victoria was concerned that the Prussian prince would not find her daughter sufficiently attractive.

Nevertheless, from the first dinner with the prince, it was clear to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert that the mutual sympathy of the two young people that began in 1851 was still vivid. In fact, after only three days with the royal family, Friedrich asked Victoria’s parents permission to marry their daughter. They were thrilled by the news, but gave their approval on condition that the marriage should not take place before Vicky’s seventeenth birthday.

Once this condition was accepted, the engagement of Victoria and Friedrich was publicly announced on May 17, 1856. The immediate reaction in Great Britain was disapproval. The English public complained about the Kingdom of Prussia’s neutrality during the Crimean War of 1853–1856. The Times characterized the House of Hohenzollern as a “miserable dynasty” that pursued an inconsistent and unreliable foreign policy, with the maintenance of the throne depending solely on Russia.

In the German Confederation, the reactions to the announcement of the engagement were mixed: several members of the Hohenzollern family and conservatives opposed it, and liberal circles welcomed the proposed union with the British crown.

Preparation for the role of Prussian princess

The Prince Consort, who was part of the Vormärz, had long supported the “Coburg plan”, i.e., the idea that a liberal Prussia could serve as an example for other German states and would be able to achieve the Unification of Germany. During the involuntary stay of Prince Wilhelm of Prussia in London in 1848, the Prince Consort tried to convince his Hohenzollern cousin of the need to transform Prussia into a constitutional monarchy following the British model. However, the future King of Prussia and German Emperor was not persuaded; he instead kept very conservative views

Convinced that the marriage of a British princess to the second-in-line to the Prussian throne would be regarded as an honour by the Hohenzollerns, Prince Albert insisted that his daughter retain her title of Princess Royal after the wedding. However, owing to the very anti-British and pro-Russian views of the Berlin court, the prince’s decision only aggravated the situation.

The question of where to hold the marriage ceremony raised the most criticism. To the Hohenzollerns, it seemed natural that the nuptials of the future Prussian king would be held in Berlin. However, Queen Victoria insisted that her eldest daughter must marry in her own country, and in the end, she prevailed. The wedding of Victoria and Friedrich took place at the Chapel Royal of St. James’s Palace in London on January 25, 1858.

November 4, 1677: Marriage of Prince William III of Orange and Princess Mary of England, Scotland and Ireland

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Anne Hyde, Bishop Henry Compton, James Duke of York, King Charles II of England, Louis of France Prince of Orange, Mary of England, Mary Princess Royal, Scotland and Ireland, St. James Palace, Stadtholder of the Netherlands, William III of Orange

Mary II (30, April 1662 – December 28, 1694) was Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, from 1689 until her death in 1694, co-reigning with her husband, William III-II King of England, Scotland and Ireland, Stadtholder of the Netherlands and Prince of Orange.

Mary, born at St James’s Palace in London on April 30, 1662, was the eldest daughter of the Duke of York (the future King James II-VII), and his first wife, Anne Hyde. Mary’s uncle was Charles II, who ruled the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland; her maternal grandfather, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, served for a lengthy period as Charles’s chief advisor.

William III (William Henry; Dutch: Willem Hendrik; November 4, 1650 – March 8, 1702), also widely known as William of Orange, was the sovereign Prince of Orange from birth, Stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic from the 1670s, and King of England, Ireland, and Scotland from 1689 until his death in 1702. As King of Scotland, he is known as William II.

Mary was baptised into the Anglican faith in the Chapel Royal at St James’s, and was named after her ancestor, Mary I, Queen of Scots. Her godparents included her father’s cousin, Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Although her mother bore eight children, all except Mary and her younger sister Anne died very young, and Charles II had no legitimate children. Consequently, for most of her childhood, Mary was second in line to the throne after her father.

William was the only child of Willem II, Prince of Orange, and Mary, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange, the daughter of Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

William’s mother showed little personal interest in her son, sometimes being absent for years, and had always deliberately kept herself apart from Dutch society. William’s education was first laid in the hands of several Dutch governesses, some of English descent, including Walburg Howard and the Scottish noblewoman, Lady Anna Mackenzie. From April 1656, the prince received daily instruction in the Reformed religion from the Calvinist preacher Cornelis Trigland, a follower of the Contra-Remonstrant theologian Gisbertus Voetius.

Marriage

During the war with France, William tried to improve his position by marrying in his first cousin Mary, elder surviving daughter of the Duke of York. Mary was eleven years his junior and he anticipated resistance to a Stuart match from the Amsterdam merchants who had disliked his mother (another Mary Stuart), but William believed that marrying Mary would increase his chances of succeeding to Charles’s kingdoms, and would draw England’s monarch away from his pro-French policies.

As previously mentioned William was the son King Charles II’s sister, Mary, Princess Royal, and thus fourth in the line of succession to the three kingdoms after James, Duke of York, and his daughters Mary, and Anne.

At first, Charles II opposed the alliance with the Dutch ruler—he preferred that Mary wed the heir to the French throne, the Dauphin Louis, thus allying his realms with Catholic France and strengthening the odds of an eventual Catholic successor in Britain; but later, under pressure from Parliament and with a coalition with the Catholic French no longer politically favourable, he approved the proposed union. Therefore King Charles II relented to the match.

James, Duke of York was not inclined to consent, but Charles II pressured his brother to agree. Charles wanted to use the possibility of marriage to gain leverage in negotiations relating to the war with France but William insisted that the two issues be decided separately.

The Duke of York eventually agreed to the marriage, after pressure from chief minister Lord Danby and the King, who incorrectly assumed that it would improve James’s popularity among Protestants.

Therefore, the age of fifteen, Mary became betrothed to her first cousin, the Protestant Stadtholder of Holland, William III of Orange. When James told Mary that she was to marry her cousin, “she wept all that afternoon and all the following day”.

Bishop Henry Compton married William and a tearful Mary in St James’s Palace on November 4, 1677, which was also William’s birthday.

The bedding ceremony to publicly establish the consummation of the marriage was attended by the royal family, with the King Charles himself drawing the bedcurtains. Mary accompanied her husband on a rough sea crossing to the Netherlands later that month, after a delay of two weeks caused by bad weather. Rotterdam was inaccessible because of ice, and they were forced to land at the small village of Ter Heijde, and walk through the frosty countryside until met by coaches to take them to Huis Honselaarsdijk. On December 14, they made a formal entry to The Hague in a grand procession.

Mary became pregnant soon after the marriage, but miscarried. After a further illness later in 1678, she never conceived again.

Throughout William and Mary’s marriage, William had only one reputed mistress, Elizabeth Villiers, in contrast to the many mistresses his uncles openly kept.

September 29, 1766: Birth of Charlotte, Princess Royal and Queen Consort of Württemberg. Part I.

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3rd Duke of Portland, Anne Princess Royal, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz., Charlotte Princess Royal, Frederick I of Württemberg, George III of Great Britain, George III of the United Kingdom, Lord Chamberlain, Queen of Württemberg, St. James Palace, William Cavendish-Bentnick

Charlotte, Princess Royal (Charlotte Augusta Matilda; September 29, 1766 – October 5, 1828), was Queen of Württemberg as the wife of King Friedrich I. She was the first daughter and fourth child of King George III of the United Kingdom and his wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

Princess Charlotte was born on September 29, 1766 at Buckingham House, London, to British monarch, King George III and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. She was christened on October 27, 1766 at St James’s Palace by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Secker, and her godparents were her paternal aunts Caroline Matilda and Louisa, along with Caroline Matilda’s husband King Christian VII of Denmark and Norway, Lord Chamberlain William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland, and the Dowager Countess of Effingham, stood proxy for the King and Queen of Denmark.

Charlotte was officially designated as Princess Royal on June 22, 1789. The previous Princess Royal, Anne, was the second child and eldest daughter of King George II of Great Britain and his consort Caroline of Ansbach. She was the spouse of Willem IV, Prince of Orange. Princess Anne died on January 12, 1759 leaving the title Princess Royal vacant for thirty years.

After the birth of three sons in a row, her parents were delighted to have a Princess in the nursery. Like all of her siblings, Charlotte was inoculated, in her case, in December 1768 along with her brother William. As the eldest daughter of the monarch, Charlotte was assumed to be destined for an important marriage on the continent, and her education was considered to be of the utmost importance, beginning when she was only eighteen months old.

Since French was the official language in every European court at the time, the little Princess was given a Frenchwoman to be her tutor, in order that she should have no accent. She was taught to recite little verses and stories, and as a result had an almost uncanny ability to recall detail for the rest of her life.

Her early childhood was not all scholarly pursuits. When she was almost three years old, she took place in her first tableau dressed like Columbine, where she danced with her seven-year-old brother George, Prince of Wales. She was not a naturally musical child and later abhorred such displays of children, declaring that they made children vain and self-important.

However, this did not stop her parents from continuing to show her off. In late 1769, she and the Prince of Wales were once again displayed, this time to the public in a “junior drawing room” in St James’s Palace. Charlotte was dressed in a Roman toga and lay on a sofa.

Though this type of thing was common in German courts, it was considered vulgar in England, where in reaction a London mob drove a hearse into the Palace courtyard. Afterward, the Prince of Wales told Lady Mary Coke that the whole event had made Charlotte “terribly tired”. Wisely, the King and Queen decided to never repeat the experience.

Though she was the eldest daughter, Charlotte was constantly compared to her sister Augusta Sophia, only two years younger than she. When Augusta was a month old, Lady Mary Coke called her “the most beautiful baby I have ever seen” while she considered that Charlotte was “very plain”.

Passing judgment once again three years later, Charlotte was now “the most sensible agreeable child I ever saw, but in my opinion far from pretty” while Augusta was still “rather pretty”. Although the Princess Royal was never as beautiful as her younger sister, she did not share in Augusta’s primary flaw: painful shyness. Charlotte also had a stammer that her attendant Mary Dacres tried to help her young charge manage.