by The Laird o’Thistle
March 19 2010

So, I begin this month with an old joke. When King George V officially changed his House’s name from “Saxe-Coburg-Gotha” to “Windsor” in 1917 his cousin, the Kaiser, is said to have acerbically commented that he would, in turn, attend a performance of Shakespeare’s “Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg” at the earliest opportunity. Poor old Kaiser Willy had a point, of course, but in fact, the Saxe-Coburgs were a long way from disappearing at that point or even today.

Most of today’s surviving royal houses, and many of the former royal houses are fairly closely inter-related through a cord of three strands. Two of the strands are the families of Queen Victoria and her Albert, and of King Christian IX of Denmark… the Houses of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and of Oldenburg. The third strand is actually also Saxe-Coburg, but is comprised of the collateral lines descended in particular from two uncles of Victoria and Albert, Ferdinand and Leopold.

The emergent Saxe-Coburg dynasty, rooted in the far more ancient House of Wettin, stemmed from Francis, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield, who lived from 1750 to 1806. (Saalfield was traded for Gotha in an 1826 territorial exchange.) Though not a very prominent family at the time, the offspring of this Duke of Saxe-Coburg made a series of brilliant marriages that brought them onto several thrones in the course of a couple of generations. The children of Duke Francis and his wife, Augusta of Reuss-Ebersdorf, were:

Sophie (1778-1835), who became the wife of Emmanuel, Count von Mensdorff-Pouilly. One of their sons, Alexander von Mensdorff-Pouilly, was Foreign Minister and then Prime Minister of Austria in the 1860s.

Antoinette (1779-1824), who became the wife of Alexander of Wurttemberg, a member of the ducal branch of that dynasty. He served as a diplomat in Russia. Their daughter married her uncle Ernst, as his second wife, and was thus the stepmother of Prince Albert. A son was the ancestor of the current claimant to the Wurttemberg Dukedom.

Juliane (1781-1860), who married Grand Duke Constantine of Russia (brother of Tsar Alexander I). They were estranged for much of their marriage and eventually divorced. She had two illegitimate children by other men, but no legitimate issue.

Ernst I (1784-1844), Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. He was the father of Prince Albert, and thus the ancestor of the current British royal family and its descendants in the royal houses of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, etc. The current Duke of Coburg also descends in this line, via Victoria and Albert’s son Leopold, Duke of Albany.

Ferdinand (1785-1851), who became an officer in the Austrian Imperial Army. He married Princess Maria Antonia Kohary, an heiress with extensive estates in Hungary and Slovakia. Their son Ferdinand married Mary II, Queen of Portugal.  From them were descended the last four Kings of Portugal and, via a daughter, the current Romanian royal family. The last Austrian Emperor, Karl, and his descendants in the senior line of the Hapsburg dynasty headed by the deeply respected Dr. Otto von Hapsburg, also tie back into this Portuguese royal line.

Another son of the elder Ferdinand and Princess Kohary, August, was the father of Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, ancestor of Bulgaria’s former King and sometime Prime Minister, Simeon Saxe-Coburg. There was also a Saxe-Coburg-Kohary daughter, Victoria, who married the Duke of Nemours, a son of King Louis-Philippe of France.

Victoria (1786-1861), who first married Charles, Prince of Leiningen (d. 1814), and had two children. She then married Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, by whom she was the mother of Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria’s two half-siblings, Prince Charles of Leiningen and Princess Feodora of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, both had children. Feodora was particularly close to Queen Victoria. She had numerous descendants, including a great-grandson who married Prince Philip’s sister, Margarita.

Leopold (1790-1865), who first married Charlotte, Princess of Wales, the daughter of George IV. After the death of Princess Charlotte and their stillborn son in 1817, Prince Leopold stayed on in Great Britain for many years and became a virtual foster father to his niece, Victoria. In 1831 he was chosen as the first King of the Belgians, and the current royal houses of Belgium, Luxembourg, and Italy are descendants of Leopold’s second marriage (1832) to Louise, a daughter of King Louis-Philippe of France. The tragic Empress Carlotta of Mexico (named for Princess Charlotte) was Leopold and Louise’s daughter; and the similarly tragic Stephanie, wife of Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, was a granddaughter. The current Prince Napoleon, head of the Imperial Bonaparte dynasty, is also a descendant of this line.

Two other children of old Duke Francis and Augusta died young.

Beyond the merely genealogical and dynastic interest, a knowledge of the web of Saxe-Coburg connections begins to make more sense of some of the diplomatic occurrences during Queen Victoria’s reign. Having a first cousin as Foreign Minister and Prime Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for instance, was highly important. Relations with Portugal, and the warm friendship with King Louis-Philippe were similarly interwoven with family ties. (Four of Louis-Philippe’s ten children married into the Saxe-Coburg family.) The Saxe-Coburg network also makes later marriages of Victoria’s descendants into the Romanian and neighboring royal families rather more comprehensible. Glamorous Queen Marie of Romania was, in fact, a third cousin to her husband Ferdinand I.

One mystery that is not resolved by an examination of the Saxe-Coburg lineage is the source of the hemophilia that afflicted a number of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s descendants. It does not show up either in the Saxe-Coburg family or among the Hanoverians prior to Victoria’s offspring. Though some have speculated that Queen Victoria might NOT actually have been the child of Edward, Duke of Kent, the better guess is that there was a genetic mutation that occurred in Victoria herself. (Photographs of Victoria too clearly resemble portraits of her father and other Hanoverians to give any credence to speculations about her paternity.) In any event, that particular malady seems to have now passed out of the gene pool.

Yours aye,
Ken Cuthbertson