There’s much debate about the roles that the grandchildren of King Charles III and Queen Camilla might play at their Coronation which takes place on May 6th 2023. A quick delve into the history books shows that very few kings and queens have been grandparents at the time they were crowned. But those that were often found themselves welcoming new grandchildren in the same year as their coronations. Royal babies tend to follow crowns.
George, Duke of Kent
King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra were the most recent monarch and consort to be grandparents at the time of their coronations. They were crowned on August 9th 1902 at Westminster Abbey and just months later, they had a new reason to celebrate in the form of another grandson.
Their second son, George, and his wife, Mary, welcomed a fourth son just before Christmas that year. George Edward Alexander Edmund was born on December 20th 1902 at York Cottage, Sandringham. His mother, then Princess of Wales, had been around five months pregnant with him at the time of the Coronation although her fitted dress with epic train gave no real hint of her state of great expectations.
George went on to be made Duke of Kent following his father’s accession as King George V. The coronation year prince died in a plane crash in 1942.
Augusta Kennedy-Erskine
William IV was the oldest person ever to accede to the throne until Charles III became king in 2022. The monarch known as Sailor Bill was 64 when the crown fell to him on June 26th 1830. By then, he had a dozen grandchildren, adding another to his brood the day after he became king. And just months before his coronation, he welcomed another new member to his family.
William had had a long relationship with actress, Dorothea Jordan, who died five years after they separated and long before her former partner became king. They had ten children together and all of William’s grandsons and granddaughters came from this family.
On May 11th 1831, his daughter, Augusta, gave birth to a daughter. Her husband, John Kennedy-Erskine, had died several months before and never met the little girl who was named Augusta Anne Millicent. She ended up living near her grandpapa who doted on her and her siblings, William and Mina.
However, little Augusta was far too young to attend grandpapa’s coronation. By a strange quirk of fate, William IV was crowned on September 8th 1831, exactly 191 years before the accession of King Charles, the man who overtook him as the oldest ever to take the throne.
Friederike Luise of Prussia
The first King of the House of Hanover arrived in England in the late summer of 1714 having inherited the throne of a country he knew barely anything about. He had become king on August 1st that year and just weeks later, as he settled into his new role, he became a grandfather again.
His new granddaughter, Friederike Luise, was born on August 29th 1714 in Berlin to the King and Queen of Prussia. Friederike’s mother, Sophia Dorothea, was George I’s only legitimate daughter and she had become a queen in 1713 on the accession of her husband as Frederick William I of Prussia. Friederike grew up alongside an older brother who would go down in history as Frederick the Great. The coronation year princess followed a far more typical path for her family, marrying unhappily and ending up living apart from her husband and estranged from her only surviving child.
Three monarchs who were grandparents at the time of their Coronation and three Coronation year grandchildren to go with them. Only time will tell if the reign of the newest grandpapa king will follow the same pattern.
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