Victoria, Princess Royal, German Empress & Queen of Prussia

mtDNA haplogroup H (16111T, 16357C, 263G, 315.1C)

Name/title: Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Princess Royal of the United Kingdom.

Queen consort of Prussia German Consort Empress

Links:

• The Peerage
• Geneall
• Find a Grave
• Johann the Younger #1363 + # 1440
• Wikipedia: English Deutsch

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Victoria, Princess Royal was German Empress and Queen of Prussia by marriage to German Emperor Frederick 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. She was the mother of Wilhelm II, German Emperor.

Educated by her father in a highly politically liberal attitude, she was betrothed at the age of sixteen to the Prince Frederick of Prussia, and supported him in his views that Prussia and the later German Empire would become a constitutional monarchy on the British model. Criticised for this attitude and her English origins, Victoria suffered the ostracism of the Hohenzollerns and the Berlin court. This isolation increased after the arrival of Otto von Bismarck (one of her most staunch political opponents) to power in 1862.

Victoria was Empress and Queen of Prussia for only a few months, during which she had opportunity to influence the policy of the German Empire. Frederick III died in 1888 – just 99 days after his accession – from laryngeal cancer and was succeeded by their son William II, who had much more conservative views than his parents. After her husband's death, she became widely known as Empress Frederick (German: Kaiserin Friedrich). The Empress Dowager then settled in Kronberg im Taunus, where she built a castle, Friedrichshof, named in honour of her late husband. Increasingly isolated after the weddings of her younger daughters, Victoria died of breast cancer a few months after her mother in 1901.

The correspondence between Victoria and her parents has been preserved almost completely: 3,777 letters from Queen Victoria to her eldest daughter, and about 4,000 letters of the Empress to her mother are preserved and catalogued. These give a detailed insight into the life of the Prussian court between 1858 and 1900.