Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld

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Victoire, Duchess of Kent

Marie Louise Victoire von Sachsen-Coburg-Saalfeld (born August 17, 1786 in Coburg ; † March 16, 1861 in Frogmore House , Windsor ; in English: Mary Louise Victoria, Princess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Duchess of Kent ; in everyday German also Marie Luise Viktoria ) was a princess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld and through marriage successively princess of Leiningen and duchess of Kent. She was the mother of the British Queen Victoria .

Life

origin

Victoire was a daughter of Duke Franz Friedrich von Sachsen-Coburg-Saalfeld (1750-1806), from his marriage to Auguste (1757-1831), daughter of Count Heinrich XXIV. Reuss zu Ebersdorf . Her younger brother Leopold became King of the Belgians in 1831, her sister Juliane was a Russian Grand Duchess. Her eldest brother Ernst succeeded his father as Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld in 1806. The princess was considered beautiful and highly educated.

Princess of Leiningen

At the age of 17, she married the future Prince Emich Carl zu Leiningen in Coburg on December 21, 1803 , who was 23 years older than her and who died of pneumonia in 1814 after ten years of marriage. His first marriage was to an aunt Victoires. Victoire took over the reign for her eldest son in the Principality of Leiningen . According to the marriage contract, her Wittum consisted of a summer apartment in Amorbach , a winter apartment in Miltenberg and 20,000 guilders a year. Victoire's second husband, with whom she temporarily lived in Amorbach in order to pursue her duties as guardian and property manager there, repaired the residence of the financially weak princes of Leiningen.

Duchess of Kent

Victoire (1841, painting by John Lucas )
Victoire as Duchess of Kent (1861)

Encouraged by Victoire's brother Leopold, Eduard August, Duke of Kent and Strathearn wooed the widow, who spoke no English, but came from an equal family and had already had two healthy children. Eduard reiterated his interest after the death of the British heir to the throne Charlotte Augusta in 1817. On July 11, 1818, both married in Kew Palace (Surrey, England) according to the Anglican rite, the actual marriage had already taken place on May 29 of the same year in Coburg. At the wedding at Kew Palace, Edward's older brother Wilhelm and Adelheid von Sachsen-Meiningen were also married; The British heir to the throne was expected from these marriages. In the royal family, Victoire was met with rejection.

The couple initially lived in a palace belonging to the Princes of Leiningen , the Thalheimschen House in Eberbach, in 1818/19 . Before the birth of their child, their daughter Alexandrina Victoria , who was born on May 24, 1819, later Queen Victoria, the couple returned to England in order to secure the right to the throne for the child. The daughter's godfather was Edward's eldest brother Georg IV , who demanded that the child be given the name of his mother. Another godfather of the princess was Tsar Alexander I. The daughter was to remain the only child of the marriage. Unusually for the time, the princess was born in Kensington Palace with the help of the German obstetrician Charlotte von Siebold , vaccinated against smallpox immediately after the birth and breastfed by her mother herself . The father wrote to his mother-in-law in Coburg that the girl was " fat as a partridge " (plump as a partridge). Eight months after the birth of Victoria, Duke Edward of Kent died. His wife had watched on his deathbed for several days without undressing.

Due to the early death of her husband, Victoire, according to Edward's will, was solely responsible for the upbringing of their daughter. Heavily indebted and without support from her husband's family, she could only afford a life in England with the financial support of her brother Leopold , the future king of the Belgians. The British Parliament's Regency Bill made Victoire regent if her daughter came into government before she came of age.

Victoire, who was considered a friend of the Whigs , later developed a very close relationship with John Conroy , who wanted to gain power and influence through her position as the future Queen Mother. The deliberate isolation of the daughter, later referred to as the Kensington System , ensured that the young heir to the throne grew up without playmates of the same age and was insufficiently prepared for her future role as monarch. Even Wilhelm IV's accession to the throne , who would have liked to see his niece at court more often, did not change this situation. The adolescent princess, however, increasingly resisted the attempts of John Conroy and her mother to gain power and influence over them. Her tutor Louise Lehzen , a Coburg pastor's daughter, who had already brought up Victoires daughter from her first marriage, Feodora zu Leiningen, helped her. The manipulation culminated in Conroys' attempt to have the young princess confirm in writing that she would appoint him as private secretary after her accession to the throne. When Princess Victoria refused to allow him to sign, both her mother and John Conroy put considerable pressure on her. In 1835 the mother and her 17-year-old daughter broke up. Sometimes mother and daughter hardly talked to each other. Their relationship should only normalize when Victoria had children herself, but the young queen also suspiciously kept her husband Albert von Sachsen-Coburg and Gotha away from all government affairs at first.

Victoire died in Frogmore House in 1861 and was buried there in a mausoleum built for her.

progeny

Victoire with her daughter Victoria

From her first marriage to the Prince of Leiningen, Victoire had the following children:

⚭ 1829 Countess Maria von Klebelsberg (1806–1880)
⚭ 1828 Prince Ernst I of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (1794–1860)

With the Duke of Kent, Victoire had a daughter:

⚭ 1840 Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819–1861)

See also

literature

  • Dr. Macaulay (di: James Macaulay): Victoria RI Her Life And Reign. The Religious Tract Society, London 1887, pp. 14 ff. (New edition. Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish MT 2005, ISBN 1-4179-6423-5 ).

Web links

Commons : Victoire von Sachsen-Coburg-Saalfeld  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wilderich Weick: The ducal house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Its history and present position in Europe. C. Macklot, Karlsruhe 1842, p. 261 .
  2. ↑ Tom Levine: The Windsors. Splendor and tragedy of an almost normal family. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2005, ISBN 3-593-37763-2 , p. 20.
  3. ^ Elisabeth Koch: Relationships under marriage law between members of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty. In: Franz Bosbach , John R. Davis (ed.): Windsor - Coburg. Shared inheritance - common inheritance. A dynasty and its collection. = Divided estate - common heritage (= Prince Albert Studies. Vol. 25). Saur, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-598-21425-7 , pp. 167-183, here p. 168.
  4. ^ Greg King: Twilight of Splendor. The court of Queen Victoria during her diamond jubilee year. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken NJ 2007, ISBN 978-0-470-04439-1 , p. 28.
  5. ↑ Edgar Feuchtwanger : Viktoria (1837-1901). In: Peter Wende (Ed.): English kings and queens of modern times. From Heinrich VII. To Elisabeth II. (= Beck'sche series. Vol. 1872). 1st, updated edition. CH Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-57375-0 , pp. 268–286, here p. 270.
  6. ↑ Anna Kirwan: Victoria. May blossom of Britannia. Scholastic Inc., New York NY 2001, ISBN 0-439-21598-6 , p. 205.
  7. ↑ Tom Levine: The Windsors. Splendor and tragedy of an almost normal family. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2005, ISBN 3-593-37763-2 , p. 21.
  8. ↑ Wilderich Weick: The ducal house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Its history and present position in Europe. C. Macklot, Karlsruhe 1842, p. 263 .
  9. ↑ Hannah Pakula: Victoria. Daughter of Queen Victoria, wife of the Prussian Crown Prince, mother Wilhelm II. , Marion von Schröder-Verlag, Munich 1999, p. 7 and p. 8.
  10. ↑ Carolly Erickson: Queen Victoria. A biography. Piper, Munich 2001, p. 51.
  11. ↑ Erickson, pp. 54–59 and Hans-Joachim Netzer: Albert von Sachsen-Coburg and Gotha , CH Beck Verlag, Munich 1995, pp. 122–123.
personal data
SURNAME Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Duchess of Kent
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Mother of the British Queen Victoria and the aunt of the Prince Consort Albert
DATE OF BIRTH 17th August 1786
PLACE OF BIRTH Coburg
DATE OF DEATH March 16, 1861
Place of death Frogmore House , Windsor