Maud of Wales

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Maud of Wales bigraphy, stories - Dynasty

Maud of Wales : biography

26 November 1869 – 20 November 1938

Maud Charlotte Mary Victoria of Wales (26 November 1869 – 20 November 1938) was Queen of Norway as spouse of King Haakon VII. She was the youngest daughter of Edward VII of the United Kingdom and Alexandra of Denmark. Maud of Wales was the first queen of Norway since 1380 who was not also queen of Denmark or Sweden.

Princess of Denmark

Wedding of Princess Maud of Wales and Prince Carl of Denmark On 22 July 1896, Princess Maud married her first cousin, Prince Carl of Denmark, in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace. Prince Carl was the second son of Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark, Queen Alexandra’s elder brother, and Princess Louise of Sweden. The bride’s father, the Prince of Wales, gave her Appleton House on the Sandringham Estate as a country residence for her frequent visits to England. It was there that the couple’s only child, Prince Alexander, was born on 2 July 1903. Tor Bomann-Larsen suggested that the birth of the couple’s only child after seven years of marriage may have been the result of an early form of artificial insemination.

Prince Carl was an officer in the Danish navy and he and his family lived mainly in Denmark until 1905. In June 1905 the Norwegian parliament, the Storting, dissolved Norway’s 91 year old union with Sweden and voted to offer the throne to Prince Carl. Maud’s membership of the British royal house had some part in why Carl was chosen. Following a plebiscite in November, Prince Carl accepted the Norwegian throne, taking the name of Haakon VII, while his young son took the name of Olav. King Haakon VII and Queen Maud were crowned at Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim on 22 June 1906, that being the last coronation in Scandinavia.

Legacy

Queen Maud Land and Queen Maud Mountains in Antarctica, and Queen Maud Secondary School in Hong Kong are named after her. Queen Maud Gulf in Nunavut, Canada, is also named after her.

Maud’s great-granddaughter, Princess Märtha Louise, named her eldest daughter after the queen.

Early life

Louise (left) and Victoria (right).]] Princess Maud of Wales was born at Marlborough House, London as the daughter of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Queen Victoria and at that time heir apparent to the British throne. Her mother was Princess Alexandra of Denmark.

Princess Maud was christened at Marlborough House by John Jackson, Bishop of London, on 24 December 1869. Her godparents were her paternal uncle Prince Leopold (for whom the Duke of Cambridge stood proxy); Prince Frederick William of Hesse-Kassel (represented by Prince Francis of Teck); Count Gleichen; the Duchess of Nassau (represented by Princess Francis of Teck); the King of Sweden and Norway (who was represented by Baron Hochschild, the Swedish minister); the Princess of Leiningen (represented by Claudine Rhédey von Kis-Rhéde); her maternal aunt the Tsarevna of Russia (represented by the Baroness de Brunnow, the Russian ambassador’s wife); the Crown Princess of Denmark (represented by Madame de Bülow, the Danish Minister’s wife); and her great-great aunt the Duchess of Inverness.

Princess Maud was a high-spirited child, a quality that earned her the nickname Harry. She was brought up with relative freedom, which was somewhat disliked by her grandmother, Queen Victoria. Maud took part in almost all the annual visits to the Princess of Wales’s family in Denmark and later accompanied her mother and sisters on cruises to Norway and the Mediterranean. She was a bridesmaid at the 1885 wedding of her paternal aunt Beatrice to Prince Henry of Battenberg,NPG: Prince and Princess Henry of Battenberg with their bridesmaids and others on their wedding day http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw145863/Prince-and-Princess-Henry-of-Battenberg-with-their-bridesmaids-and-others-on-their-wedding-day?LinkID=mp89748&role=art&rNo=2 and at the wedding of her brother George V to Mary of Teck in 1893.

Maud, along with her sisters, Victoria and Louise, received the Imperial Order of the Crown of India from Queen Victoria on 6 August 1887. Like her sisters, she also held the Royal Order of Victoria and Albert (First Class) and was a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem.