Prince Albert and Queen Victoria had five daughters and four sons, including the future King Edward VII and Empress Victoria, the mother of German Emperor Wilhelm II.
Public DomainAn 1846 portrait by Franz Xaver Winterhalter of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their five oldest children.
When Prince Edward, the fifth child of England’s King George III, welcomed a daughter with his wife, Princess Victoria, in 1819, he had no idea that the little girl would go on to become the Queen of England. With three older brothers, Edward was fourth in the line of succession himself. And in a time when male heirs had priority, he had no reason to think that his daughter, Victoria, would come close to the throne. He had even less reason to believe that Queen Victoria’s children would populate monarchies across Europe for generations to come.
But Edward’s brothers all died without any surviving children. So, upon the death of Victoria’s uncle, King William IV, in 1837, she became the Queen of England at age 18. She would go on to rule for over 63 years and have an entire era in British history named after her.
In 1840, Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and they welcomed their first child — also a daughter named Victoria — later that year. They had eight more children over the next 17 years.
All but one of Queen Victoria’s children had kids of their own, many of whom became rulers of their own or married other royals across Europe, and their bloodlines are still found in royal families today. These are the stories of the nine children of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, from their privileged upbringings to the tragedies their descendants faced.
Victoria: The First Child Of Queen Victoria
Public DomainVictoria was the oldest of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s nine children.
On Nov. 21, 1840 — nine months and 11 days after marrying Prince Albert — Queen Victoria gave birth to her first child: Victoria, or “Vicky,” as she was called by her family. Until the birth of her younger brother, Edward, a year later, Vicky was the presumptive heir to the British throne.
Vicky shared her father’s intellect and received a liberal education. This upbringing would influence her later unfulfilled ambitions to form a constitutional monarchy in Prussia and the German Empire, where she would briefly become empress and queen consort.
Young Victoria’s parents wanted to cement closer ties with the Germans, and they used the princess to achieve this goal. She was engaged to Prince Frederick of Prussia when she was just 14. He was nine years her senior, and they wed in January 1858, two months after Victoria turned 17.
Public DomainVictoria circa 1855, around the time she was betrothed to Prince Frederick of Prussia.
Both Victoria and Frederick faced criticism for their politically liberal views in the conservative royal court of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Nonetheless, the couple tried to raise their son, Wilhelm, with their beliefs. Victoria wrote on Jan. 27, 1872:
“Today is Wilhelm’s thirteenth birthday. May he grow up a good, upright, true, and trusty man, one who delights in all that is good and beautiful, a thorough German who will one day learn to advance further in the paths laid down by his grandfather and father for the good governance of our noble Fatherland, working without fear or favor for the true good of his country.”
In 1888, Frederick took the throne as the Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia, making Victoria empress and queen consort. However, this wouldn’t last long, as Frederick died from laryngeal cancer just 99 days later.
Their son would go on to rule Germany as Wilhelm II, the last German emperor, who abdicated in 1918 at the end of World War I. Despite his mother’s wishes for him, he did not embrace her desire to transform his empire into a constitutional monarchy.
Victoria died of breast cancer in August 1901, not long after her mother’s death. She was 60 years old.
