Kinlight · The British Royal Line

King Edward VII

1841 – 1910 · Generation XXXIV · King of the United Kingdom (r. 1901–1910) · House of Windsor

Portrait of King Edward VII

Edward VII was heir to the throne for almost sixty years and king for nine. He was born at Buckingham Palace on 9 November 1841, the eldest son and second child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and was christened Albert Edward. His family called him “Bertie”. From the age of seven he followed a demanding programme of study devised by his father, for which he showed little aptitude, though he later studied at Edinburgh, at Christ Church, Oxford, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1860 he made the first tour of North America by a Prince of Wales, a four-month journey during which he laid the cornerstone of the Parliament buildings in Ottawa and stayed at the White House with President James Buchanan.

In 1861, while attending army manoeuvres in Ireland, he spent three nights with an actress, Nellie Clifden. Albert, already unwell, travelled to Cambridge to reprimand him and died that December. Victoria blamed her son, and for decades she gave him no real part in government, allowing him summaries of state papers but not the originals. He married Princess Alexandra of Denmark in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on 10 March 1863. They made Marlborough House and Sandringham their homes and had six children, one of whom died a day after birth.

Shut out of politics, Edward threw himself into society and public ceremony. He set the fashion in men’s dress, popularising tweed, the Homburg hat and the dinner jacket worn with a black tie. His horse Persimmon won the Derby in 1896, and he had many mistresses, among them Lillie Langtry and Alice Keppel. He was twice called as a witness in court cases that caused scandal, a divorce suit in 1870 and the baccarat affair of 1891. He also pioneered royal public engagements of the modern kind, opening the Thames Embankment in 1871 and Tower Bridge in 1894. His near-fatal attack of typhoid in 1871 and his successful tour of India in 1875–1876 won back much public affection.

He became king on 22 January 1901. Two days before his coronation, set for 26 June 1902, he was found to have appendicitis and underwent emergency surgery, and he was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 9 August instead. He revived ceremonies his mother had let lapse, such as the state opening of Parliament, and founded the Order of Merit. Fluent in French and German and related to most of Europe’s monarchs, he became known as the “uncle of Europe”. His official visit to Paris in May 1903 helped create the goodwill behind the Entente Cordiale with France, agreed in 1904, and earned him the name “Peacemaker”. With his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II, however, he was never on good terms. At home he backed the reorganisation of the army after the Boer War and supported Admiral Sir John Fisher’s modernisation of the navy.

His last year was overshadowed by a constitutional crisis after the House of Lords rejected the Liberal government’s “People’s Budget” in November 1909. A heavy smoker, he suffered increasingly from bronchitis, and he died at Buckingham Palace on 6 May 1910, aged 68, after several heart attacks. Hundreds of thousands filed past his coffin in Westminster Hall, and his funeral on 20 May brought together what the historian Barbara Tuchman called “the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place”. He was buried in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and his son succeeded him as George V. The crisis he left unresolved was settled by the Parliament Act 1911.

Place in the family

  • King Edward VII was a son of Queen Victoria.
  • King Edward VII was the second of 9 children of Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Queen Victoria recorded in this archive.
  • The archive records 42 of his descendants, across 6 generations.

Images

One of 53 people of House of Windsor (from 1917) in this archive. The present house — it renamed itself Windsor in 1917, setting aside the German title Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → Margaret Tudor → King James V of Scotland → Mary Queen of Scots → King James I → Elizabeth Stuart → Sophia of Hanover → King George I → King George II → Frederick Prince of Wales → King George III → Edward Duke of Kent → Queen Victoria → King Edward VII.

Read more on Wikipedia

Parents

Siblings

Partners

Children

Life

  • 1841 — Born
  • 1863 — Married Alexandra of Denmark
  • 1901 — Edward VII becomes King on the death of his mother, Queen Victoria.
  • 1902 — Edward VII institutes the Order of Merit.
  • 1907 — Edward VII visits his cousin Tzar Nicholas II of Russia
  • 1910 — Died
  • 1910 — Edward dies of pneumonia at Buckingham Palace.

Sources

  1. Edward VII · Wikipedia
  2. Edward VII (r. 1901–1910) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
  3. Edward VII · Westminster Abbey

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