Where do the kings of Norway come from?

Factual Questions
41

[QUOTE=alphaboi867]
Victoria grew up speaking German at home (a custom she maintained after marrying Albert) and had a pronounced German accent when she first came to the throne. The accent grew less pronounced as she got older, but she still had little quirks in her speech (like thing the word “news” was a plural).
[/QUOTE]

The irony being, of course, that she didn’t speak german either when she met Albert. She did speak german at home as a little girl, since her mother (Leopolds sister Viktoria - I’ll spell it the German way to keep them apart) was german, and had barely lived a full year with her english husband when he died. Viktoria kept an iron grip on her daughter, and the only people they saw socially was her own family, since she was pissed at the british royals for leaving her with a mountain of debt (and possibly blamed them for her husbands unnecessary death). So they hung around with german Uncle Leopold, and Viktorias children from a pervious marriage - also german.

At some point, someone put their foot down (Leopold? The king?) and forced them to switch to english at home. However, little Victoria was kept isolated still - so she picked up her mothers heavily accented english. When she met Albert the first time, they had trouble speaking, as his english was bad, and her german was bad too. I think they spoke french for a while.

42

The recent Emily Blunt movie Young Victoria, which I enjoyed, doesn’t really go into the language issue.

43

Right - but if William of Orange hadn’t shown up with a big, battle-hardened army, Jimmy boy wouldn’t have turned tail and run. At the very least, it was a coup d’etat.

44

To answer the OP, the Kings of Norway – and in the 21st century, of much of the rest of the world, come from here. This is Castle Glucksburg, and it is located just south of the present German-Danish border. From it came a lineage that bids well to conquer a third of the world by marriage alliances and just plain old blood descent, without a single war of conquest being involved, in a way that makes the Habsburgs look like amateurs.

In the early 1800s, Glucksburg Castle was the seat of this chipmunk-cheeked individual, His Serene highness Friedrich Wilhelm, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, who looks like someone made up as Bernadotte for a masquerade. He was a somewhat minor aristocrat, living comfortably off the income from his lands in the traditional fashion, not a ruler of anything by a long shot. While he and his sons (he had seven, and three daughters) were technically in the line to inherit the Kingdom of Denmark and the Duchy of Slesvik-Holstein, held by the Danish crown, they were well down the line of succession – insofar as there was one. The problem here lay in the fact that the late King Frederik III had declared Danish royal inheritance to be subject to the Salic Law, and under that the only surviving members of the royal House of Oldenburg were the childless future King Frederik VII and his equally childless uncle. Old Fred the Third had provided what happened in such a case – it passed to his nearest female relative’s heirs – but in a way that left plenty of room for argument.

And argument there was – the Danes wanted a Danish heir,. not a German one; the majority of Slesvik-Holstein was German speaking (hence “Schleswig-”) and wanted a German heir, not a Danish one. And there were no shortage of claimants – the problem was that everyone acceptable to one side was unacceptable to the other. The one thing they were agreed on was that the union of Denmark and Slesvik-Holstein was not going to be broken up.

In 1831 Duke Friedrich Wilhelm died, succeeded by his eldest son, who was in turn succeeded later in the century by son #2. Sons #3, #5, #6, and #7 and daughters #1 and #2 hunkered down to live as typical 19th century aristocrats, kept by the benevolence of their older brother. (Daughter #3 became an abbess.) Son #4, however, was at hiws 1818 birth named Christian, after the crown prince of Denmark, his godfather, who became King Christian VIII. The elder Christian, realizing his only son and his brother would never beget a child, started massaging events to assure a sucession – in favor of his godson. The younger Christian in 1842 married Princess Luise, the heiress of old Frederik III’s eldest sister and hence a major candidate for the throne. Then the elder Christian had his son adopt the younger one. Prince Christian was acknowledged, with his wife, as heir to the throne in 1853, and duly inherited it when childless King Frederik VII died in 1863.

But there’s much more to the story…

45

When a mommy king and a daddy king love each other very, very much…

46

Christian and Luise were busy in the years after their marriage, popping out children, whom they married off very strategically. Their eldest child was a son who became Frederik VIII of Denmark after his father’s death. He in turn had four sons, the eldest of whom became in turn Christian X of Denmark, while the second was chosen to become King of the re-established Norwegian monarchy in 1905 as Haakon VII.

The eldest daughter married the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII of the U.K., and became the mother of King George V. Another child, Maud, married her cousin Haakon VII, and is the Queen Maud for whom the Antarctic area is named. Her son Olav V and grandson Harald became Kings of Norway in turn after her husband.

Son #2, Prince Christian William Ferdinand, was chosen, after Otto didn’t work out, to become George I of Greece. We’ll get back to him in a moment.

Daughter #2. Princess Dagmar, married Tsar Alexander III, adopting the style Maria Fyodorovna as Tsarina, and in due time became the mother of Nicholas II.

Daughter #3, Princess Thyra, married the heir to the Kingdom of Hannover, who was next in line for the Duchy of Brunswick as well. Bismarck, however, dethroned her father-in-law at the same time he took Schleswig-Hostelin from Denmark. (The Danes recovered Danish-speaking northern Slesvik in 1918; the rest of Schleswig and all of Holstein, incorporated into Prussia, became a Land of (West) Germany after World War II.

Prince Valdemar, the youngest son, married the daughter of the pretender to the French throne, and ended up in a naval career. He is notable for looking just like George V and Nicholas II.

===

But, getting back to George I of Greece, he reigned for 50 years (1863-1913) before being assassinated. The Greeks alternated enthroning and dethroning his descendants for half the 20th centuiry, ending up in an ostensible republic in 1967. His fourth son, however, was Prince Andrew,

Andrew’s marriage was unstable. He was a typical somewhat dissolute cadet member of an exiled royal family, his wife, Alice of Battenberg, was a devout woman who felt a calling to a religious order. They had one son, and then separated.

That son, however, became Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. Raised in England, he renounced his royal titles to join the British Navy, and adopted the Anglicization of his mother’s surname that her male relatives had already used from 1917 on, when he did, becoming Lt. Philip Mountbatten. And as fate would have it, he caught the eye of his cousin King George VI’s elder daughter Princess Elizabeth.

And when that venderable lady breathes her last, the Queen of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Bahamas, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, about a dozen other realms, and of course the United Kingdom of Gr4eat Britain and Northern Ireland, will be their son Prince Charles, in unbroken male descent from old Friedrich Wilhelm of Glucksburg.

47

Now that will take some serious surgery. :stuck_out_tongue:

48

Good Lord. There was enough confusion over George and Nicholas. :slight_smile:

49

I’m picturing a whacky time-travel story where George, Valdemar and Nicholas all get switched at birth . . . resulting in no changes whatsoever.

Can we even be sure they didn’t pull a parent trap at some point? George and Nicholas did meet. Although I have no idea if either ever met Valdemar.

50

I believe George V was much better at running the country that Nicholas II. It has been said that he would make an excellent fire chief or chief of police, but he fellated with astounding allacrity at ruling the Russian Empire.
I know nothing of Valdemar.

51

That’s a bit unfair - the russian empire was a steeper challenge by several degrees than Britain. The British monarchy was more or less the only crown not toppling at the time, in large part because whatever the monarch did, it couldn’t be worse than the generation before Victoria. As long as the monarch was sane, didn’t run up too outrageous debts and showed up more or less on time, the brits were going to be happy. And Historians sometimes joke that Cromwell served as a vaccine for republicanism in Britain - they’ve tried it, didn’t work. Not so Russia.

I’m not saying George V wouldn’t have pulled it off where Nicholas II failed - I just don’t think we can know that, or use the comparison to proclaim one “better” than the other. They really weren’t playing the same game.

52

Actually, Prince Phillip had several older sisters, only they were all born before WWI. His parents’ marriage didn’t start to fail until a little after he was born.

53

Goerge V was a true constitutional monarch whose powers were completely subordinate
to Parliament. Yes, I know about the Commons-Lords constitutional crisis of the early
1900s which was resolved by the King’s threat to create enough peers to override the votes
of the existing obstructionist House of Lords, but that threat was made at the direction
and behest of the leaders of the House of Commons, whose will was supreme.

Hence George V never ran the country, nor had any British monarch done so for generations;
I think George III was the last to make a serious try to, and the practice went down the drain
due largely to the events of 1775-1783, well before G3 went mad.

Nicholas II of Russia, in contrast, was truly an absolute monarch until the 1905 revolution,
even after which his powers were not effectively curtailed. It would take World War and a
2nd Russian Revolution to finally put an end to the hereditary version of absolutism there.

54

Where they were from was close to irrelevant, but it does seem that imported kings were usually members of royal families holding–or having recently held–thrones elsewhere. Presumably whatever aristocracy there was in the importing countries felt that this also gave their own status an extra shot of legitimacy.

In fact it’s reminiscent of how sitting royal families imported spouses for their children, back in the days before it became quite the thing for them to marry commoners. In the first half of the 20th century, young people marrying into the royal family of the UK seem often to have held Continental titles and styles, even if they had usually been raised up in England in the manner of English aristocrats–e.g. Mary of Teck and Prince Philip of Denmark and Greece.