The Children
Prince Albert’s and Queen Victoria’s Nine Children
Prince Albert and Queen Victoria had nine children, five girls and four boys, with 17 years between the oldest and the youngest. Each had their own interests and distinct personalities. She became pregnant with her first child, Victoria, only two months after her marriage.
The Queen was fond of her children, though her involvement with them was significantly less than might be expected of a modern mother. While she joyfully oversaw the bathing and bedding of Vicky, and to a lesser extent Bertie (the future King Edward VII), as her family grew, she spent less time directly overseeing the care of her kids, admitting in later letters to Vicky that she would only check in on them directly once every three months.
"The root of the trouble lies in the mistaken notion that the function of a mother is to be always correcting, scolding, ordering them about and organizing their activities. It is not possible to be on happy friendly terms with people you have just been scolding," Albert wrote to Victoria on her parenting.
As the children grew older, it was no secret that the Queen developed a complicated relationship with her children, and she garnered a reputation in posterity as not having much of a maternal instinct due to the publication of her many diaries and letters which expressed her loathing for being pregnant. Yet, many of her letters to her daughter Vicky express her fondness for children, "You are wrong in thinking that I am not fond of children. I am," explaining that her trouble with children came largely from the noise a group of children can make. (Recent historians have argued that some of Victoria’s most emotional writings, detailing her conflicted feelings about motherhood, may have been ignored by her earliest—all male—biographers, who were likely uncomfortable with traditional “women’s issues.”)
Albert believed that he and Victoria could maintain peace across Europe by marrying their children into continental royal families. As a result, their children and grandchildren were scattered across 20 royal families. By the time of her Golden Jubilee in 1887, Victoria was the most senior royal in Europe. Because of her nine children and 42 grandchildren, Victoria garnered the nickname “Grandmother of Europe.”
It was a hopeful plan but not successful. Three of Victoria’s grandchildren, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Kaiser Willhelm II of Germany and King George V of Great Britain fought against each other in the First World War. Willhelm II exclaimed, “To think that George and Nicky should have played me false! If my grandmother had been alive, she would never have allowed it.”
If you want to know more about what happened to each of the nine children, Sarah Mc Grath’s article, “The Royal Rundown on Queen Victoria's 9 Children,” provides a succinct and accurate biographical sketch on each of them.
FRANZ XAVER WINTERHALTER (1805-73)
Queen Victoria (1819-1901) with her Four Eldest Children Signed and dated 1845
