Prince Charles Edwards a royal duke, the grandson of Queen Victoria, a Knight of the Garter, and the first cousin of kings and emperors. He was born at Claremont House, Surrey, on July 19, 1884 and was Queen Victoria's favourite grandson.
World War I was known as the biggest family feud of all time as King George V , Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and Russia's last Czar, Nicholas II were all related.
Queen Victoria who wanted everything kept in the family so there would be more control over the power decided that Charlie should become Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the German principality from which the Queen's husband Albert had come.Up until then Charlie was a happy boy and he didn't know anything about Germany. He couldn't even speak the language and didn't want to go but you tell that to Queen Victoria. A right old battle-axe and the only woman to make Old Knudsen pee himself with just a harsh stare.
At the age of 16, Charles Edward was forced to leave his home and became Carl Eduard, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, with 13 castles in Germany and Austria, hunting lodges, hotels, a power station, tens of thousands of hectares of rich arable farmland in Bavaria and a duchy with an income worth £17million in today's value.
He was enrolled at Germany's top military academy and was married to the Kaiser's niece, Victoria, by whom he had three sons and a daughter.
What a complete bummer. In 1914, war was declared following the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Charlie found himself fighting for the Kaiser against the country of his birth. He was ostracised by ostriches and his royal relations and branded a traitor to his country.
King George V, in a bid to distance himself from the enemy and to prove he was an English king to the people dumped the German name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and adopted Windsor as the new title of Britain's royal dynasty.Nothing German was acceptable.
Princess Elisabeth (now the queen) was smitten by Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten who had changed his own name from the German sounding family name of Schleswig-Holstein- Sonderburg-Glucksburg.
Queen Elizabeth who later became the Queen Mother was horrified by this match.
One of her brothers, Captain Fergus Bowes-Lyon, had been killed fighting at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Queen Elizabeth had a dislike of Germans, and this had increased through the scenes of destruction she had witnessed during her visits to the blitzed areas of Britain in fact in private she referred to Prince Philip as 'The Hun".Philip had nieces and nephews, the children of his sisters, whose husbands were German officers, in some cases with strong Nazi connections.
Philip's youngest sister, Princess Sophie of Hanover, had married Prince Christopher of Hesse-Cassel, who was an SS Colonel attached to Heinrich Himmler's personal staff and became head of the sinister Forschungsamt - a security service under Hermann Goering's command that carried out surveillance on anti-Nazis , they had even named their eldest son Karl Adolf in Hitler's honour.
Christopher's brother, Prince Philip of Hesse-Cassel, had joined the National Socialist party in 1930, becoming the Nazi governor of Hesse in 1933, and later acted as the liaison between Hitler and Mussolini.
Philip's sisters and their husbands were excluded from his 1947 marriage ceremony only his mother, Princess Alice was invited .
Charlie had returned to Britain in 1936 to attend George V's funeral, but because he no longer had the right to wear a British uniform because all his titles were taken after 1918 , he wore German military attire, complete with a stormtrooper's metal helmet.
The next king was the pro-German King Edward VIII, but he couldn't keep the snake in the cage and abdication only 11 months later which put rest to any plans of a German/Anglo agreements..
The new King, George VI, and his German hating consort Queen Elizabeth, they wanted no part of him.
Hitler made him president of the German Red Cross, in which he presided over the horrific programme of enforced euthanasia, in which some 100,000 mostly disabled people, including children, judged by the Nazis unworthy of life, were murdered. The extent of his involvement in this barbarism was never really established.
I must point out how they did this in Rome thousands of years before this.
In 1939 his three sons were sent to fight for the Germans, and one of them, Prince Hubertus, was killed on the Eastern front.
Hitler tried to make the game 'Flankenluptshrewdal' popular and was not happy when they changed the name to the Jewish sounding 'yo yo'.
He claimed he had acted honourably and did not know of any crimes by the regime. He was not believed.
Though he was exonerated of complicity in actual war crimes, he was judged to have been "an important Nazi".
His houses and estates were confiscated, and he was almost bankrupted by heavy fines.
Now a penniless, convicted criminal his failing health saved him from remaining in prison, he was given a chauffeur's cottage in the stables of one of his estates.
He was happy again. Not in prison he had his wife and little dog but he had cancer,was crippled by arthritis and blind in one eye.
In 1953 he made one last journey from his house to a cinema in Coburg, to watch a colour film of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey.He died in bed on March 6, 1954, at the age of 69. To this day because of Queen Victoria's manipulations he is never mentioned in the British Royal Family and has been airbrushed from the history of the House of Windsor.
Another thing they would probably like to forget.
Not my caption but I wish it was. An interesting story I thought and one that shows how you can become trapped in a life that isn't yers. Rather than fight against it and lose everything you go along no matter what.
Duty over anything you want even if it fucks you royally.
If Edward VIII didn't marry Mrs Simpson would Britain have sided with Germany? there was a strong Nazi movement in the UK. I know the Americans who disagreed with the war in Iraq fled to Canada but I tend to think the British troops would do as ordered.
I think Germany and all the ties he grew there made Prince Charles Edward a different person.
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