Kinship

How was George V related to Wilhelm II and Nicholas II?

First cousins to both — to Wilhelm II through Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and to Nicholas II through Christian IX of Denmark and Louise of Hesse-Kassel. With Wilhelm he was a third cousin as well, through Francis of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld and Augusta Reuss.

George’s two cousinships came through different parents. On his father’s side, Edward VII was the eldest son of Victoria and Albert, while Wilhelm’s mother, Victoria, the Princess Royal, was their eldest daughter; her son would become German emperor. On his mother’s side, Alexandra of Denmark and Nicholas’s mother, Dagmar — known in Russia as Maria Feodorovna — were sisters, both daughters of Christian IX, and Dagmar married the future Alexander III. George thus stood where the two family networks traced in the diagram meet: the British one through his father, the Danish one through his mother.

The web was tighter still. Victoria and Albert were first cousins themselves, so George and Wilhelm each descended from Francis of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld and Augusta Reuss twice, through both grandparents — which makes them third cousins too. Nicholas’s wife, Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, was another grandchild of Victoria and so another first cousin of George’s; he stayed on in Russia for their wedding, a week after the funeral of Nicholas’s father. Wilhelm and Nicholas were not first cousins; they are described as second cousins once removed and as third cousins, through ancestors outside this story. In 1913 all three monarchs were guests at the Berlin wedding of Wilhelm’s only daughter.

The war that followed set George against one cousin and alongside the other, and it ended with both of their empires fallen. In 1917 George renamed the British royal house Windsor, dropping the German name Saxe-Coburg and Gotha that had come down from Albert; Wilhelm answered with a joke about seeing “The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha”. When Nicholas lost his throne that same year, the British government was ready to shelter the Romanovs, but George, uneasy about hardship and the threat of revolution at home, came to think their arrival would look wrong. Nicholas was killed in 1918.

Computed from every recorded line in The British Royal Line on Kinlight; written 29 September 2026.