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A German princess and the mother of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. She married twice, first to Prince Emich Karl of Leiningen and then to Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, and served as regent of Leiningen and duchess of Kent.
A biography of Princess Victoria, the daughter of Ferdinand, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha-Koháry and Princess Maria Antonia Koháry de Csábrág et Szitnya. She married Louis, Duke of Nemours, and had four children, including Gaston, Count of Eu and Blanche, who died in childbirth.
Victoria, Duchess of Kent, was born Victoria Mary Louisa, Princess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, at Coburg on 17 August 1786. Her first marriage in 1803 was to the Prince of Leiningen, with whom she had a son, Charles, and a daughter, Feodora.
Jul 26, 2020 · Queen Victoria wrote down her recollections of her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, in 1872. She remembered her as a kind and loving woman who visited her at Claremont and scolded her for being naughty.
- Early Life and Education
- Engagement and Marriage
- Princess of Prussia
- Crown Princess of Prussia
- German Crown Princess
- German Empress
- Empress Dowager
- Archives
- Memorials, Dedications, and in Popular Culture
- Honours
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Princess Victoria was born on 21 November 1840 at Buckingham Palace, London. She was the first child of Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert. 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!" As a daughter of the sovereign, Victoria was born a British pr...
Engagement
Frederick had received a comprehensive education and in particular was formed by personalities such as the writer Ernst Moritz Arndt and historian Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann. According to the tradition of the House of Hohenzollern, he also received rigorous military training. In 1855 Prince Frederick 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...
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 William 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 German emperor was...
Domestic issues and marriage
To pay the dowry of the Princess Royal, the British Parliament allotted the sum of 40,000 pounds and also gave her an allowance of 8,000 pounds per year. Meanwhile, in Berlin, King Frederick William IV provided an annual allowance of 9,000 thalers to his nephew Frederick.The income of the second-in-line to the Prussian throne proved insufficient to cover a budget consistent with his position and that of his future wife. Throughout much of their marriage, Victoria relied on her own resources....
Maternal criticism
Victoria's move to Berlin began a large correspondence between the princess and her parents. Each week, she sent a letter to her father that usually contained comments on German political events. The majority of these letters have been preserved and have become a valuable source for knowing the Prussian court. But these letters also show the will of Queen Victoria to dictate her daughter's every move. She demanded that Victoria appear equally loyal to her homeland and her new country. But thi...
Official duties
At 17 years old, Victoria had to perform many tedious official duties. Almost every evening, she had to appear at formal dinners, theatrical performances or public receptions. If foreign relatives of the Hohenzollerns were located in Berlin or Potsdam, her protocolary duties widened. Sometimes she was forced to greet guests of the royal family at the station at 7:00 in the morning and be present at receptions past midnight. Upon the arrival of Victoria in Berlin, King Frederick William IV gav...
First childbirth
A little over a year after her marriage, on 27 January 1859, Victoria gave birth to her first child, the future German Emperor Wilhelm II. The delivery was extremely complicated. The maid responsible for alerting doctors to the onset of contractions delayed giving notice. Moreover, the gynecologists hesitated to examine the princess, who was wearing only a flannel nightgown. The baby was in breech, and the delayed delivery could have caused the death of both the princess and her son. Finally,...
Early issues and struggles
With the death of King Frederick William IV on 2 January 1861, his brother, who had acted as regentsince 1858, ascended the throne as King William I. Frederick was then the new crown prince of Prussia but his situation at court did not change much: his father refused to increase his allowance, and Crown Princess Victoria continued to contribute significantly to the family budget with her dowry and allowance. In a letter to the Baron von Stockmar, Prince Albert commented on the situation: In a...
Father's death and political crisis
On 14 December 1861, Prince Albert died of typhoid fever. Because of her very close relationship with her father, Victoria was devastated by the news. She went with her husband to England to attend the funeral. Shortly after this tragedy Frederick and Victoria, still in mourning, had to face the first major crisis of William I's reign, and they were not prepared to deal with it. The Prussian Parliament denied the king the money needed for his plan of reorganisation of the army. William I cons...
Increasing isolation
With the outbreak of the Prussian constitutional conflict, the opposition between liberals and conservatives in Berlin reached its peak. Suspected of supporting parliamentarians against William I, the Crown Prince and his wife were subjected to harsh criticism. The trip that the couple made to the Mediterranean in October 1862 aboard Queen Victoria's yachtserved as a pretext for conservatives to accuse Frederick of abandoning his father in a time of great political tension. They also emphasis...
Proclamation of the German Empire
On 18 January 1871 (the anniversary of the accession of the Hohenzollern dynasty to the royalty in 1701), the princes of the North German Confederation and those of South Germany (Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg and Hesse-Darmstadt) proclaimed William I as hereditary German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. Then they symbolically united their states within a new German Empire. Frederick and Victoria became German crown prince and crown princess, and Otto von Bismarckwas...
Enlightened princess
Despite being named field marshal because of his military performance in the wars of the 1860s, Frederick did not receive the command of any troops after the Franco-Prussian War. In fact, the emperor did not trust his own son and tried to keep him away from state affairs because of his "too English" ideas. The crown prince was appointed "Curator of the Royal Museums", a task that raised some enthusiasm in his wife. Following the advice of her father, Victoria had continued her intellectual fo...
Mother of a large family
Victoria's eldest son went through various treatments to cure his atrophied arm. Strange methods, such as the so-called "animal baths" in which the arm was immersed in the entrails of recently dead rabbits, were performed with some regularity. In addition, William also underwent electroshock sessions in an attempt to revive the nerves passing through the left arm to the neck and also to prevent his head tilting to one side. Victoria insisted that he become a good rider. The thought that he, a...
Agony of William I and Frederick III's disease
In 1887, the health of the 90-year-old William I declined rapidly, indicating that the succession was close. However, the crown prince was also ill. Increasingly sickly, Frederick was told that he had laryngeal cancer. To confirm his suspicions, Frederick was examined by British physician Morell Mackenzie, who after a biopsydid not find any sign of illness. With the agreement of his physicians, Frederick went with his wife to Great Britain for the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in June 1887...
Empress of 99 days
Immediately after accession, Emperor Frederick III appointed his wife as Lady of the Order of the Black Eagle, the highest order of chivalry in the Kingdom of Prussia. However, after her return to Berlin, she realised that she and her husband in fact were really "shadows ready to be replaced by William". Gravely ill, Frederick III limited his political actions to some symbolic measures, such as declaring an amnesty to all political prisoners and the dismissal of the reactionary Interior Minis...
Death of Frederick III and consequences
Frederick III died about 11:00 on 15 June 1888. Once the emperor's death was announced, his son and successor William II ordered the occupation of the imperial residence by soldiers. The chambers of Frederick and Victoria were carefully checked for incriminating documents. However, the search was unsuccessful because all the couple's correspondence had been taken to Windsor Castle the previous year. Several years later, William II stated that the purpose of this research was to find state doc...
Resettlement
Once widowed, Empress Frederick had to leave the Neues Palais in Potsdam because her son wanted to settle his residence there. Unable to settle in Sanssouci, she acquired a property in Kronberg im Taunus, in the old Duchy of Nassau. There, she built a castle that was named Friedrichshof in honour of her husband. Having inherited several million marks after the death of the wealthy Maria de Brignole-Sale, Duchess of Galliera, the empress dowager was able to finance the construction and expansi...
Solitude
In October 1889, Princess Sophia, the empress dowager's penultimate daughter, married the future King Constantine I of Greece, leaving the maternal residence. The following year, Princess Viktoria, after the ending of her hopes to wed the ruler of Bulgaria, in the end married Prince Adolf of Schaumburg-Lippe, the future regent of the Principality of Lippe. Finally, in 1893, Princess Margaret married Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse, who in 1918 was elected to the throne of the ephemeral King...
Later years and death
Empress Frederick devoted part of her final years to painting and to visiting the artists' colony of Kronberg, where she regularly met with the painter Norbert Schrödl. In her last days, she used to walk in the morning and spent long hours writing letters or reading in the library of her castle. In late 1898, physicians diagnosed the empress dowager with inoperable breast cancer, forcing her to stay in bed for long periods. Cancer had spread to her spine by the autumn of 1900, and as she worr...
Victoria's entire correspondence, which she left to her youngest daughter Margaret, is preserved in the Archive of the House of Hesse, which is kept in Fasanerie Palace in Eichenzell, Germany.
Geography
1. The Mount Victoria in Jervis Inlet, British Columbia, Canada, was named in honour of the Princess Royal. 2. The Princess Royal Reach is a fjordof Jervis Inlet also named after Victoria in 1860. 3. The Princess Royal Colliery in the Forest of Deanwas named in her honour.
Monument
1. The Kaiserin-Friedrich-Gymnasium, secondary school in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, Hesse, named after the empress.
Transport
1. 3073 Princess Royal was a GWR 3031 (Achilles) Class locomotive, built by the Great Western Railway. 1. The 1861 steamship Princess Royal was a British merchant ship that became part of the Union Navyduring the American civil war.
Arms
With her style of Princess Royal, Victoria was granted use of the royal arms, as then used: with an escutcheon of the shield of Saxony, the whole differencedby a label argent of three points, the outer points bearing crosses gules, the central a rose gules.
Victoria was the eldest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and the wife of Frederick III, German Emperor. She was the mother of Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor, and the empress dowager from 1888 to 1901.
Learn about the life and role of Victoria, Duchess of Kent, the mother of Queen Victoria. Discover how she influenced the young princess's upbringing, education and succession to the throne.
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Learn about the key events and moments in the life of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who ruled Britain through a period of great change. See how they met, married, had children, and influenced the arts, politics and society.