Saddest Royals

[Furienna]

Someone back in the thread mentioned Sofia Magdalena of Denmark (1746-1813), the queen of Gustav III of Sweden. She was indeed a woman, who had much bad luck in her life. Her marriage to King Gustav was a difficult one for her, because he paid very little attention to his more introverted wife. (Some people now believe that he was a homosexual, but I have also read a story about him being unhappily in love with a married lady.) People found it suspicious that Sofia had so many Danish people as her friends, despite how it was really difficult for her to make friends with Swedish people (most of them found her a bit boring).

It took a long time for Sofia Magdalena to become pregnant (rumors had it that the couple needed help from others, because they did not know how to "do it"). And when a heir finally was on his way, Sofia's mother-in-law Lovisa Ulrika (who had never approved of her in the first place) spread a vicious rumor that Gustav couldn't be that child's real father. Gustav himself was so angry with his mother about that mean stunt, that he wouldn't see her again until she was dying. It is also possible that Sofia had wanted to breastfeed her babies herself, but the king wouldn't let her do it. Either way, Sofia and Gustav were at best friendly to each other...

Sofia and Gustav still had two sons, but they would lose one of them (Karl Gustav) when he was only six months old. King Gustav was also shot by an assasin in 1792 and died from his wounds, which made it necessary for their fourteen-year-old son Gustav Adolf to become king (although his uncle Carl was the regent until he turned eighteen years old). Gustav IV Adolf (who might deserve an entry of his own in this thread) had to abdicate in 1809, because he got the blame for that Sweden had lost Finland to Russia in a war. So he and his family were forced to leave Sweden forever, and his poor mother was still around to see it happen. Sofia was never allowed to see her son again. She was only given a very special permission to write letters to him, which nobody else in Sweden had. And she only saw her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren one more time before they too were exiled. She died only four years after this happened...

 

[Lori138]

Denville, I agree with you that modern royals do not suffer anything like the past, but I still think that Henrik was sad, he may have been a bon vivant as Duc et Pair points out, but he was unhappy.

 

[Osipi]

Henrik may have been unhappy about one sticking point that he wasn't created equal to his Queen by title but that had little to no real effect on his day to day life. He lived it to the max. He had a wife and family that he adored and a passel of dogs that were his constant companions.

A man that was unhappy with his life would not be one that secretly planned an arrangement of flowers into a garden setting during his funeral to remind his wife of a romantic and loving time between the two of them. From what we know, Henrik had a deep, spiritual side to him. He embraced life and the people in his life. This was a man with an attitude and he expressed it freely.

Discouraging words sometimes do not an unhappy person make.

 

[Duc_et_Pair]

All the Prince's lifelong friends told that until he felt ill in Egypt, he enjoyed every bit of his life. A unhappy man would not find time to translate French poems in Danish, to investigate and write about the French gastronomy by French Chefs at the Danish Palaces, to inspect the process of restoration of old European heritage in the framework of Europa Nostra, to dress like harlequins for his latest Bal Masquerade where he challenged gentlemen to play a good game of bridge. No way that this was an unhappy man.

 

[Mbruno]

I think Carolina Matilda of Great Britain, the estranged wife of King Christian VII of Denmark, had a pretty sad life. To acknowledge my own ignorance about Danish royal history, I hadn't really read about her until I had the opportunity to see by accident the movie 'A Royal Affair' with Alicia Vikander and Mads Mikkelsen, which I recommend BTW.

 

[Denville]

Denville, I agree with you that modern royals do not suffer anything like the past, but I still think that Henrik was sad, he may have been a bon vivant as Duc et Pair points out, but he was unhappy.

I don't think so,. Maybe he had a grievance..but it was a silly one and if he did allow it to make him "really unhappy" he was foolish.

 

[Denville]

Somebody back in the thread briefly mentioned Sofia Magdalena of Denmark (1746-1813), the queen of Gustav III of Sweden. She was indeed a woman, who had much bad luck in her life. Her marriage to King Gustav was a very difficult one, because he paid very little attention to his more introverted wife. (Some people now believe that he was a homosexual, but I have also read a story about him being unhappily in love with a married lady.) People found it suspicious that Sofia Magdalena had Danish people as her friends, despite the fact that it was really hard for her to make friends with any Swedish people.

It took a long time for Sofia Magdalena to become pregnant (rumors had it that the couple needed help from other people, because they did not know how to do it). .

I've read (in a novel) that he was a homosexual, and that he divorced her secretly and she secretly married some nobleman and produced her children.....

 

[Duc_et_Pair]

I don't think so,. Maybe he had a grievance..but it was a silly one and if he did allow it to make him "really unhappy" he was foolish.

His grievance was not a silly but quite a justified one.
His solution however (name me King, like you name them Queen) was not practical.

But his analysis was spot on anyway.

 

[mdqxxx]

Diana...a girl so young has zero conception of the powerful, older, sophisticated, adulterous, ambitious world and women of Prince Charle's secret circle. Diana was shocked & devastated by the many lies, ways her innocence way betrayed and exploited, her helplessness to change or affect the situation. The worst nightmare of all time, a young girl with no tools against an entire clique holding onto power through connection with Charles.

 

[Duc_et_Pair]

King Baudouin of the Belgians. He was effectively widely known as Le Roi Triste (the sad King).


https://www.tijd.be/opinie/commentaar/le-roi-triste-overleed-tien-jaar-geleden/855491.html

 

[An Ard Ri]

King Baudouin of the Belgians. He was effectively widely known as Le Roi Triste (the sad King).


https://www.tijd.be/opinie/commentaar/le-roi-triste-overleed-tien-jaar-geleden/855491.html

His wife the queen Fabiola given all her terrible miscarriages would get my vote.

 

[Moonmaiden23]

I believe the late Queen Fabiola was essentially a happy and optimistic person despite the great sadness of being denied motherhood.

She said so herself a couple of years before her passing...that life was basically good.

She was never given to gloom or self pity and it's one of the reasons I remember her as one of my favorite Royals.

 

[Duc_et_Pair]

His wife the queen Fabiola given all her terrible miscarriages would get my vote.

Queen Fabiola was actually a quite lighthearted person with a good laugh. It was King Baudouin, who was already "le roi triste" before his marriage. This because of the eventful life: fatal accident of his mother, prisoner in the own residence in WWII, transported away in the last stage of WWII, the exile outside Belgium, the King's Crisis around his father, his father's abdication, the King's own nature and pessimistic worldview paired with a deep religiosity. And of course his dismay in how Belgium turned from a strong, unitary, wealthy Catholic state into a chaotic debt-laden inefficient federation where no one of the King's own christian morals survived the changing of times.

The marriage with Queen Fabiola was immensely happy. Their inability to have offspring was probably the least influence in the sadness of the King.

 

[Osipi]

I've been thinking about sad royals and I believe I'm going to have to go with Queen Victoria as being the "saddest" royal. Her Albert died at a relatively young age of 42 and Victoria mourned him for the rest of her life and for years wasn't even seen in public. She continued to wear mourning black until the day she died. She also made it a priority to put into action a lot of things that Albert would have wanted to happen.

 

[Dalriada]

His grievance was not a silly but quite a justified one.
His solution however (name me King, like you name them Queen) was not practical.

But his analysis was spot on anyway.

I agree. He renounced his Roman Catholic faith and in return he became more unequal to his Protestant queen.

 

[Denville]

I've been thinking about sad royals and I believe I'm going to have to go with Queen Victoria as being the "saddest" royal. Her Albert died at a relatively young age of 42 and Victoria mourned him for the rest of her life and for years wasn't even seen in public. She continued to wear mourning black until the day she died. She also made it a priority to put into action a lot of things that Albert would have wanted to happen.

She had some sadness certainly but there were surely a lot of other royals in the past who had pretty awful lives in terms of tragedy and disaster. Mary queen of Scots for instance or Mary Tudor. the queen had a large family and all survived to adulthood. It was sad that some predeceased her but she did live a long life in good health...a nd was a success as queen

 

[Biri]

You may tell the same about Zita of Bourbon Parma, last Empress of the Austria-Hungary.

 

[Moonmaiden23]

She had some sadness certainly but there were surely a lot of other royals in the past who had pretty awful lives in terms of tragedy and disaster. Mary queen of Scots for instance or Mary Tudor. the queen had a large family and all survived to adulthood. It was sad that some predeceased her but she did live a long life in good health...a nd was a success as queen

I agree that Victoria"s life seems a fairy story compared with Mary Tudor's, who seems to have been marked from the cradle
for misfortune.

The same applies to Mary's mother Catherine of Aragon.

 

[wartenberg7]

King Baudouin of the Belgians. He was effectively widely known as Le Roi Triste (the sad King).

https://www.tijd.be/opinie/commentaar/le-roi-triste-overleed-tien-jaar-geleden/855491.html

wasn´t this "title" bestowed on him by the media in his first years of his reign before he got married?!
Yes, his childhood was doomed, but he had a very loving grandmother trying to do every thing to replace his mother.
Later in life he was happily married, he had a pretty untroubled reign as a head of state. I gather his life wasn´t that sad....!

 

[wartenberg7]

You may tell the same about Zita of Bourbon Parma, last Empress of the Austria-Hungary.

She was a matriarch and absolutely in charge - also after her husband´s untimely death. She was much too strong and dominant to be pathetic or depressed! Beyond that her deep faith helped her through a lot!

Many photos, her public appearances or in the interviews she gave as a widow she never made me feel pity for her. Of course Karl´s death and the exile was tragic. But I guess she coped and moved on beautifully.

 

[Denville]

I don't know much about Zita.. but I think that Baudoin and Fabiola had some sadness, certainly.... He had a difficult childhood and there was the fact that they longed for children and could nto have them.. but I think they had long lives, were a happy couple and good King and Queen.. and they accepted and lived with the sadness of not having a family...
Certianly not as tragic as many royals from earlier times

 

[wartenberg7]

the last Tsarina comes to my mind. Of course she did a lot, unconsciously, to make things from bad to worse. But I guess when you are made like that (and remember she had tragic losses in her own childhood, too) you just cannot say "Oh, that was bad. I try something better!"
However world-forgotten and neurotic she was, witnessing your child suffering like the Tsarevich did, must have been unimaginable hard!


And after having watched "The Favourite", don´t know if everything portrayed in the movie is historically accurate - but, after all, losing all your 18 children (!!!) and remaining completely alone in a court full of intrigue, one of the most sorrowful and pathetic historic royal persons was Queen Anne.
I just thought, my goodness, if only half of the things being portrayed in this film are true, it is unspeakably sad. The pain, the grief, her feeling of loneliness, her helplesness, her constant craving for love and consolation, the rabbits replacing the dead children ... - it was heartbreaking.

 

[Moonmaiden23]

wasn´t this "title" bestowed on him by the media in his first years of his reign before he got married?!
Yes, his childhood was doomed, but he had a very loving grandmother trying to do every thing to replace his mother.
Later in life he was happily married, he had a pretty untroubled reign as a head of state. I gather his life wasn´t that sad....!

Duc et Pair summed it up very well...though blessed with the happiest of marriages, King Baudouin carried the burden of the memory of profound childhood trauma...the sudden and violent loss of a mother he adored when he was 5, imprisonment by the Nazis as an adolescent, the public repudiation of his father Leopold III which compelled Baudouin to accept the Crown before he was ready to do so. He was barely out of his teens when Leopold was forced to abdicate.

He was by nature cautious, shy, conservative...and deeply religious. He has been described by one biographer as a "Catholic bigot". Under those circumstances it was difficult, painful even, to watch Belgian social mores slide toward what he probably considered moral decay(even though Belgium is/was no different than much if the West in that regard). Toward the end of his life he took a personal interest in trying to help rescue women from sex slave trafficking and attempted to "evangelize" prostitutes on the streets of Antwerp.("A THRONE FOR BRUSSELS " Paul Belien)

Even his beloved Fabiola was sometimes unable to get him to lighten up, though she tried. He was overheard gently reproaching her ("Tu parles trop"!)

He was in considerable back pain from his early 20's that curtailed his ability to indulge his passion for golf, and then there was the onset of heart problems in his 40's that would sadly lead to a premature sudden death at 63.

I agree with Duc...his failure to become a father was probably the least of it.

 

[Biri]

And Holy Roman Emperor Charles V Habsburg fell into melancholy after his wife's death; didn't remarry (although he had only one heir) wore a murning the rest of his life and finally abdicated and settled in a monastery in Extremadura.

 

[Duc_et_Pair]

wasn´t this "title" bestowed on him by the media in his first years of his reign before he got married?!
Yes, his childhood was doomed, but he had a very loving grandmother trying to do every thing to replace his mother.
Later in life he was happily married, he had a pretty untroubled reign as a head of state. I gather his life wasn´t that sad....!

Pretty untroubled Reign? It started with the King's Crisis, the independence of the Congo which turned into a heavy military operation with the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba. The Taalstrijd (the Language Troubles) which saw the unitary state falling apart and the two language blocs drifting apart, the terror of the CCC (Cellules Communistes Combattantes) and of the Bende van Nijvel (Tueurs fous de Brabant), the unstoppable destruction of the once breathtakingly beautiful city of Brussels into a megalomaniac concrete urban horror, the disasters at the Heysel Stadium and with the Herald of Free Enterprise. The 35 governments in 40 years of Reign (!)... It all shows his kingship was far from untroubled. Especially the "parasitng" of the crumbling central state by Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels caused the King feeling disgust for the politicians whom, in his eyes, destroyed Belgium and all what once was worth preserving.

 

[maria-olivia]

I disagree King Baudouin being sad after his Wedding.
A Belgian Royal who was sad during her whole wedding was our second Queen Queen Marie Henriette and certainly when her only Son leopold passed away when he was 10 years old..

 

[Denville]

Bauodon certainly had his troubles.. but he was a religious man and had a good marriage.. which was Im sure a comfort to him.

 

[An Ard Ri]

The Empress Eugenie has plenty of reason to be sad given the personal tribulations and tragedy's in her family,the last Empress of the FRench spent her remaining years in mourning.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Empress_Eugenie_1880.jpg

Her only sibling the Duchess of Alba died in 1860
Overthrow and flight from France 1870
Death of her husband,Napoleon III in 1873
Death of her mother the Dowager Countess of Montijo died in 1879
Death of her only surviving child ,Napoléon, Prince Imperial in 1879

 

[Moonmaiden23]

Denville.. Baudouin's prime minister, and I cannot remember his name right now- once observed that Queen Fabiola was "His Majesty's sole source of happiness in this world"...which was why he refused to consider an annulment of their marriage after her fifth and final miscarriage.

Very sweet...but also rather sad imo

I agree An Ard Ri and maria-oliva ...poor Empress Eugenie! Poor Marie-Henriette....

 

[theroyalfly]

One living person I could think of is Tsaritsa Margarita of Bulgaria. On the outset of the Spanish Civil War, at a very young age of 1, both her parents and maternal grandmother Mercedes were arrested by communists and were executed after a 3-month prison detention, leaving her with her only brother, Jose-Luis (who was only 6 years old at that time.)

Because of this trauma and suffering in their motherland, both Margarita and Jose-Luis received the Suffering for the Motherland Medal by Francoist Spain.