Kinlight · The British Royal Line

Alexandra of Denmark

1844 – 1925 · Generation XXXIV · Queen consort

Portrait of Alexandra of Denmark

Alexandra of Denmark was the wife of Edward VII, Princess of Wales for thirty-eight years and queen consort of the United Kingdom from 1901 to 1910. She was born on 1 December 1844 at the Yellow Palace, a town house beside the Amalienborg in Copenhagen, the eldest daughter of Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg and Louise of Hesse-Kassel. The family, a junior branch of the Danish royal house, lived modestly on her father’s army pay. Alix, as she was called at home, sewed her own clothes and slept in an attic room she shared with her sister Dagmar. Their fortunes changed in 1852, when the European powers agreed that her father should inherit the Danish throne from the childless Frederick VII.

By 1861 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were looking for a bride for their heir, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. A Danish princess was an awkward choice for a family with so many German relations, since Denmark and Prussia were at odds over Schleswig-Holstein, but they settled on Alexandra all the same. The prince proposed in September 1862 at Laeken in Belgium. She landed at Gravesend on 7 March 1863 to a welcome ode from Tennyson, and three days later the couple were married in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. In the same year her father became King Christian IX and her brother William was chosen King of Greece as George I. Dagmar later became Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia.

The marriage produced six children: Albert Victor, the future George V, Louise, Victoria, Maud, who became Queen of Norway, and Alexander John, who lived only a day in 1871. Prussia’s defeat of Denmark in 1864, which stripped her father’s kingdom of two-fifths of its territory, gave her a dislike of Germany that she never lost, and she distrusted her nephew Kaiser Wilhelm II in particular. In 1867, during the birth of her third child, rheumatic fever nearly killed her and left her with a stiff leg and a permanent limp. A hereditary deafness grew steadily worse and drew her back toward home, children and animals. Her husband kept company with other women throughout the marriage. She knew of most of these attachments, remained faithful herself, and allowed Alice Keppel to visit him as he lay dying.

The public adored her. Fashionable women copied her high collars and choker necklaces, worn to hide a small scar on her neck, and some even imitated her limp. Victoria relied on her to open bazaars and visit hospitals in the queen’s place. She took a special interest in the London Hospital, where she met Joseph Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man. Money she helped to raise paid for a river launch to carry the wounded in the Sudan campaign and for a hospital ship in the Boer War, and the army nursing service founded in 1902 carried her name. She was also an enthusiastic amateur photographer. Politics was closed to her. Her efforts to sway ministers in favour of Denmark and Greece came to little, and her warning in 1890 against ceding Heligoland to Germany was ignored.

When Victoria died in January 1901 Alexandra became queen. The coronation planned for June 1902 had to be put off when the king needed an operation on his appendix, and the two were crowned together in Westminster Abbey on 9 August. As queen she was still kept from state papers. Edward died on 6 May 1910, the day after she hurried back from visiting her brother on Corfu. She moved to Marlborough House, kept Sandringham, and lent her name to Alexandra Rose Day, on which artificial roses made by disabled workers were sold for the benefit of hospitals. She had already lost her eldest son, Albert Victor, in 1892, and said she had buried her happiness with him. The war years brought the murder of her nephew Nicholas II and his family in Russia.

Increasingly frail, she died of a heart attack at Sandringham on 20 November 1925, aged eighty. After a funeral service at Westminster Abbey she was buried beside her husband in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. No one before or since has been Princess of Wales for so long.

Place in the family

  • Alexandra of Denmark was a great-grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II.
  • Alexandra of Denmark was the eldest of 3 children of Christian IX of Denmark and Louise of Hesse-Kassel recorded in this archive.
  • The archive records 42 of her descendants, across 6 generations.

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Life

  • 1844 — Born
  • 1863 — Married Edward VII Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
  • 1925 — Died

Sources

  1. Alexandra of Denmark · Wikipedia
  2. Alexandra, queen consort of Great Britain · Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII · Westminster Abbey

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