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Further Reading

Saxe-Coburg-Gotha

The Victorian Era in England began in 1819 when Victoria was born, and ended with her death in 1901. Victoria was born at Kensington Palace, London, on 24 May 1819. She was the only daughter of Edward, Duke of Kent, fourth son of George III. Her father died shortly after her birth and she became heir to the throne because the three uncles who were ahead of her in succession - George IV, Frederick Duke of York, and William IV - had no legitimate children who survived.

On 22 January 1820, her father, the Duke of Kent died of an inflammation of the lungs contracted while walking in wet weather. Six days later, on 29 January 1820, her grandfather, King George III, who had long been blind and imbecile, passed away, and her eldest uncle, the Prince Regent, became King at the age of fifty-eight. Thus the four lives that had intervened between the Princess and the highest place in the State were suddenly reduced to two — those of her uncles, the Duke of York, who was fifty-seven, and the Duke of Clarence, who was fifty-five, now heir-presumptive to the crown. Neither Duke had a lawful heir, or seemed likely to have one. The Duke of York died without issue on 05 January 1827. Her uncle George IV died on 26 June 1830, and was succeeded by his brother William, Duke of Clarence, who had no legitimate children alive. The girl thus became heir-presumptive.

The way of the Princess to the throne seemed very clear, but there was one man in England who was determined that she should never reach it. He was the Duke of Cumberland, Victoria's uncle. He was the next younger brother of the Duke of Kent, and had it not been for the birth of his niece, the throne of England would have been his own. At that time the sovereign of England was also ruler of Hanover, but Hanover had a law called the Salic law, which forbade any woman to be its monarch. The Duke was in earnest, however—so much in earnest that he even ventured to allow his wishes to become known to King William IV. The Duke of Cumberland did not give up his wild scheme. He knew that he himself was by no means a favorite in England, and that he had no friends whose devotion would place him upon the throne; but he fancied that he could arouse opposition to the Princess and so open a way for himself to become sovereign.

She was crowned in 1837, and the other time period identified for Queen Victoria represents the duration of her reign. The death of William IV on June 20, 1837, terminated the personal union between Great Britain and Hanover. The Salic law rendered Victoria incompetent to succeed to the throne of Hanover, which British sovereigns had filled since George the Elector of Hanover became George I of England in 1714. Hanover had been elevated from an electorate to a kingdom by the congress of Vienna in 1814. Because of the Hanoverian Salic law prohibiting female succession if there was a male heir, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1771-1851) and brother of William IV, became king of Hanover upon William's death, while William's niece Victoria succeeded to the British throne.

The dissolution of the union between England and Hanover was acquiesced in readily by both countries. Ernest, the Duke of Cumberland, was now King Ernest of Hanover, but if the Queen died without children, he would come over to England and wear the English crown as well as that of Hanover. The severance of Hanover from England was, in the eyes of George III's surviving sons and daughters, one of the least agreeable results of their brother William's death, and of the succession of their youthful niece. A subordinate effect of the separation of Hanover from England was the extinction of the Royal Guelphic Hanoverian Order, a decoration which had long been at the personal disposal of the British Sovereign as a reward of meritorious military or civil services.

Victoria did not forgive the treasonable intrigues which her uncle, King Ernest Augustus of Hanover - the most universally hated of all the sons of George III - carried on with the Orange Tories to set up Salic law [barrring transmission of the throne in female line] in England, and usurp her throne. She had unpleasant memories of his arrogance in persistently conferring the Guelphic Order on Englishmen, not only without asking her permission, but in defiance of her prohibition, as if in suggestive assertion of an unsurrendered hereditary right of English sovereignty.

Sir John Conroy, who had been right-hand man both to the Duke of Kent and to the Duchess of Kent, had fallen into the faults so common to long service. He was too sure of his ground, too ready to assume responsibility, and he had never troubled to look upon the Princess as a force with which he should reckon. Thus he was entirely disliked by Victoria, and she determined that in her new household she would be freed from a man who, whatever his merits, was personally obnoxious to herself.

The Queen sent for Sir John — so runs one account — and asked him to name the reward he expected for his services to her parents. His reply was that he desired the Red Ribband [ie, the Order of the Bath], an Irish Peerage, and a pension of £3,000 a year. The Queen answered that the first two lay with her Ministers, and she could not promise for them, but the pension he should have. In another account she made him a baronet in addition to bestowing the pension, but that all connection with the Palace ceased, and that he was never distinguished by the slightest mark of personal favor.

The name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha came to the British Royal Family in 1840 with the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert, son of Ernst, Duke of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha. Queen Victoria herself remained a member of the House of Hanover. In 1837, the year of the Queen's accession, a bargain between the sovereign and Parliament was made by which the former renounced the hereditary revenues of the crown enjoyed by her royal predecessors in consideration of a civil list granted during the Queen's lifetime and occupancy of the throne. In 1837 this was an excellent bargain for the country.

The Prince Consort Albert died on December 14, 1861, at the early age of forty-two. In the twenty years from Victoria's marriage to her husband's death, when she was elaborating, by her own conduct, the traditions and duties of a Constitutional sovereign, the Prince Consort was her closest adviser. The Queen was profoundly affected by his loss. For ten years she remained in comparative seclusion.

It is notorious that for many years the provision made by Parliament for the Prince of Wales and his family was miserably inadequate to the obligations publicly imposed on him. Practically, the more costly social and public duties of monarchy had devolved almost entirely on the Prince of Wales, togetlicr with enormous charges for entertainment, hospitality, and charitable subscriptions compulsorily entailed on the leader of English society by the Queen's practical retirement from the public eye. For more than a generation the Prince had borne the larger part of the social and pecuniary burdens that naturally fall on the sovereign, and had sustained them on a modest Parliamentary grant of smaller proportions than the income of many Americans and Englishmen of private station.

The only British monarch of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was King Edward VII, who reigned for nine years at the beginning of the modern age in the early years of the twentieth century. King George V replaced the German-sounding title with that of Windsor during the Great War. The name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha survived in other European monarchies, including the current Belgian Royal Family and the former monarchies of Portugal and Bulgaria.