Queen Victoria Is The Grandmother Of Europe, As Most Royalty Is Descended From Her
With the popularity of the PBS series Victoria, people are getting a bigger picture of how many of today’s European royals are related to the 19th-century queen and to each other. While her link to Queen Elizabeth is well known, she is also the great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother of several other notable royals (including the queen’s husband, Prince Philip).
Town & Country says that Victoria is more than just a popular costume drama, as the woman herself is the beginning point of a legacy that touches almost every major royal house in Europe. Queen Victoria had nine children, 42 grandchildren, and so on, meaning that the two sides of her family, combined with that of her husband Prince Albert’s family, link the continent’s royals together.
Queen Victoria passed the crown to her son, King Edward VII, who left it to King George V (Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather), which explains the English connection, but the other European royals and their links are a bit more involved. Prince Philip, for example, is the descendant of Queen Victoria’s third child, Princess Alice. She married into the German noble family (Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse) and had a daughter, who they named Victoria. She married into the Battenberg family (later Anglicized to Mountbatten) and gave birth to Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice, who married Prince Andrew of Greece.
Queen Victoria's Descendants Reign Over Europe – How is Queen Elizabeth Related to Queen Victoria? https://t.co/hRv2iTSkhx #victoria #history
— K (@MamaBear11_13) February 18, 2019
King Felipe VI of Spain is also a direct descendant of Queen Victoria through her youngest child, Princess Beatrice, on his father’s side, but is also related directly to Queen Victoria on his mother Queen Sofia’s side of the family, according to T & C.
“On her mother’s side, Sofia is the great-granddaughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II, while on her father’s side, she’s the granddaughter of Sophia of Prussia. Both Wilhelm II and Sophia of Prussia were children of Victoria, Princess Royal, meaning that Sofia is both the great-great-great-granddaughter and the great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria.”
Then there is King Harald V of Norway, who is perhaps the closest non-English relative of Queen Elizabeth who also happens to be a European monarch. King Harald is descended from the same Victorian line as the current British monarch, and the Norwegian king is also the great-grandchild of King Edward VII of England, which makes King Harald V and Queen Elizabeth second cousins.
But perhaps the most ill-fated line linked to Queen Victoria is the Romanovs of Russia, which also once again link Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip together. Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Princess Alice’s sixth child with Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse was a daughter named Alix. Alix married Czar Nicholas II of the house of Romanov and became Alexandra Feodorovna, Czarina of Russia. Both were killed along with their children by the Bolsheviks before the Russian Revolution.
Queen Victoria also links the royal families of Sweden, Denmark, Greece, Romania, Germany, and Yugoslavia together and to Queen Elizabeth.
