Leopold Duke of Albany
1853 – 1884 · Generation XXXIV · House of Windsor
Leopold Duke of Albany (1853–1884). The youngest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert — at whose birth the queen took chloroform, lending her example to anaesthesia in childbirth — he inherited haemophilia from his mother and grew up a delicate child. Shut out of a military career, he turned a thoughtful, cultivated mind to study, entering Christ Church, Oxford, in 1872, and became a patron of the arts and of chess as well as his mother’s unofficial secretary. Victoria refused him the vice-regal posts he sought in Canada and in the colony of Victoria. After several courtships came to nothing, he married Princess Helen of Waldeck-Pyrmont at Windsor in 1882, and a daughter, Alice, followed. Sent to Cannes in 1884 for his joints, he slipped at the Villa Nevada, hit his head and died the next morning, apparently of a cerebral haemorrhage. His son Charles Edward, born four months later, inherited the dukedom.
Place in the family
- Leopold Duke of Albany was a son of Queen Victoria.
- Leopold Duke of Albany was the eighth of 9 children of Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Queen Victoria recorded in this archive.
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 → Leopold Duke of Albany.
Parents
- Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1819 – 1861)
- Queen Victoria (1819 – 1901)
Siblings
- Victoria Princess Royal (1840 – 1901)
- King Edward VII (1841 – 1910)
- Alice of the United Kingdom (1843 – 1878)
- Alfred Duke of Edinburgh (1844 – 1900)
- Helena of the United Kingdom (1846 – 1923)
- Louise Duchess of Argyll (1848 – 1939)
- Arthur Duke of Connaught (1850 – 1942)
- Beatrice of the United Kingdom (1857 – 1944)