Christian IX of Denmark

Christian was born on April 8, 1818 at Gottorf Castle in Schleswig, the fourth son of Duke Friedrich Wilhelm of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg and Princess Louise Caroline of Hesse-Kassel ^[1]. His family belonged to a junior branch of the House of Oldenburg, the dynasty that had ruled Denmark since 1448, but the connection was distant. As a younger son of a minor duke with ten siblings, the boy had no obvious claim to any throne and no fortune to speak of ^[2].

His father died in 1831, when Christian was thirteen. King Frederick VI of Denmark, a kinsman by marriage, took an interest in the orphaned prince and brought him to Copenhagen, where he was educated at the Military Academy and raised largely at the Danish court ^[1]. The move proved decisive. Christian grew up speaking Danish, absorbed Danish loyalties, and came to think of himself as Danish rather than German, a distinction that would matter enormously in the nationalist storms ahead.

As a young man he pursued a conventional military career, receiving a commission in the Royal Horse Guards. He also studied for a period at the University of Bonn. In 1842 he married Princess Louise of Hesse-Kassel, a niece of King Christian VIII of Denmark. The match was affectionate rather than merely dynastic, but Louise's bloodline placed the couple close to the heart of the Danish succession question ^[2].

The Danish royal house faced a slow-motion crisis in the 1840s. King Frederick VII, who came to the throne in 1848, had no children despite three marriages, and the male line of the ruling family was about to die out ^[3]. The problem was tangled up with the status of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, where different succession laws applied and where German nationalists hoped a break in the Danish line would pry the territories loose from Copenhagen.

Christian had reasons to hope and reasons to doubt. He had unsuccessfully courted the young Queen Victoria of Britain in the late 1830s, and his own hereditary claim to Denmark was weak ^[2]. His wife Louise, however, held a strong claim through her mother, and she transferred her rights to her husband. After years of diplomacy among the European powers, the London Protocol of 1852 designated Christian as heir presumptive to the whole Danish monarchy, and the Danish law of succession of 1853 confirmed the arrangement ^[3].

The choice was not universally popular. Danish national liberals distrusted Christian as too conservative and too cautious on the Schleswig question, while German opinion regarded the settlement as a Danish trick. For a decade the prince waited in an awkward position, formally accepted yet politically isolated, until Frederick VII died suddenly on November 15, 1863 and Christian became king ^[1].

Christian IX's reign opened with the worst crisis in modern Danish history. Days before Frederick VII's death, the Danish parliament had passed the November Constitution, which bound Schleswig more tightly to Denmark in violation, as the German powers saw it, of earlier international agreements ^[4]. The new king believed signing it would provoke war, but refusing would have triggered a domestic revolt against a monarch already suspected of German sympathies. Under intense pressure he signed on November 18, 1863.

The consequences came fast. Prussia under Otto von Bismarck, joined by Austria, demanded the constitution's withdrawal and invaded Schleswig in February 1864 ^[4]. Danish forces fought stubbornly at Dybbøl but were overwhelmed by superior numbers and artillery. No European power intervened. By the Treaty of Vienna in October 1864, Denmark surrendered Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg, losing roughly two fifths of its territory and about a third of its population ^[3].

The defeat scarred the country and the king alike. Christian was blamed by many Danes, and rumors even circulated that he had secretly explored joining the German Confederation to keep the monarchy whole, an episode historians still debate ^[4]. Denmark turned inward, adopting the motto associated with the era that what was lost outwardly must be won inwardly, a spirit expressed in the reclamation of the Jutland heaths and in agricultural reform.

For most of his reign Christian IX fought a long defensive action against parliamentary democracy. He held to the view that the king, not the elected lower chamber, chose the government, and he consistently appointed conservative ministries drawn from the landowning Right even after the liberal Venstre party won repeated majorities in the Folketing ^[5].

The conflict hardened after 1875, when Christian appointed Jacob Brønnum Scavenius Estrup as prime minister. Estrup governed for nineteen years, ruling for long stretches through provisional finance laws issued without parliamentary approval, a practice the opposition denounced as unconstitutional ^[5]. The standoff, remembered in Denmark as the constitutional struggle, poisoned political life for a generation, and the king's steady support for Estrup made him a target of liberal anger.

Age and political reality eventually forced a change. In 1901, with the conservatives reduced to a small rump in the lower house, the 82-year-old king accepted what Danes call the Change of System, appointing a cabinet based on the parliamentary majority for the first time ^[3]. The 1901 shift established the principle that Danish governments must command the confidence of the Folketing, the foundation of the country's parliamentary democracy. It is one of the quieter ironies of Christian IX of Denmark's biography that a king so opposed to the principle presided over its final victory. His reign also saw important social legislation, including old-age pension and sickness insurance laws passed in the early 1890s ^[5].

Whatever his political frustrations at home, Christian IX achieved an extraordinary dynastic reach abroad. He and Queen Louise had six children, and their marriages redrew the family map of European royalty ^[6]. The eldest son succeeded him as Frederick VIII of Denmark. Their daughter Alexandra married the Prince of Wales in 1863 and became queen consort of the United Kingdom beside Edward VII. Another daughter, Dagmar, married the future Tsar Alexander III of Russia, took the name Maria Feodorovna, and was the mother of Nicholas II, the last tsar.

The second son, Wilhelm, was elected King of the Hellenes in 1863 as George I of Greece, founding the dynasty that ruled Greece for more than a century. The youngest daughter, Thyra, married the Duke of Cumberland, heir to the deposed Hanoverian claim, and the youngest son, Valdemar, remained in Denmark after declining the Bulgarian throne ^[6]. Contemporaries called Christian the 'father-in-law of Europe', and the label stuck.

Each summer the sprawling clan gathered at Fredensborg Palace north of Copenhagen, where the tsar of Russia, the future king-emperor of Britain, and the king of Greece met informally as sons-in-law and grandchildren under one roof ^[2]. Queen Louise, intelligent and ambitious for her children, is generally credited as the chief architect of these marriages. The reunions gave Copenhagen a diplomatic significance out of proportion to Denmark's reduced power, since family conversation at Fredensborg could reach every major court in Europe.

Queen Louise died in 1898 after fifty-six years of marriage, a heavy personal loss for the aging king ^[1]. Christian continued his duties with the disciplined routine of an old soldier, riding daily in Copenhagen well into his eighties and receiving citizens with a formality that had gradually softened into familiarity.

Public feeling toward him had changed remarkably over four decades. The suspect German prince of 1863, blamed for the disaster of 1864 and resented during the Estrup years, had become a fixture of national life, respected for his simplicity, his devotion to duty, and his sheer endurance ^[3]. His golden jubilee approached with genuine popular warmth, and the peaceful transfer to parliamentary government in 1901 removed the last great source of friction between crown and people.

Christian IX died quietly at Amalienborg Palace in Copenhagen on January 29, 1906, at the age of 87, after a reign of 42 years ^[1]. He was buried in Roskilde Cathedral, the traditional resting place of Danish monarchs, and was succeeded by his son Frederick VIII.

Anyone asking who was Christian IX of Denmark confronts a double reputation. Judged by his own aims, much of his reign was a failure: he could not prevent the loss of Schleswig and Holstein, and he lost the constitutional battle he waged for decades. Judged by outcomes, he presided over Denmark's transformation into a stable, prosperous parliamentary state and left the monarchy more secure than he found it ^[3].

His genetic legacy is unmatched among modern monarchs. Through his children and grandchildren, Christian IX is an ancestor of the present royal families of Denmark, the United Kingdom, Norway, Spain, Belgium, and Luxembourg, as well as of the deposed royal lines of Greece, Russia, and Romania ^[6]. Historians often pair him with Queen Victoria, the 'grandmother of Europe', as one of the two great dynastic hubs of the nineteenth century.

Among Christian IX of Denmark's achievements, Danish historians usually count his eventual acceptance of the Change of System of 1901 as the most consequential, since it settled the question of parliamentary rule without violence ^[5]. The basic Christian IX of Denmark facts, a minor prince who inherited a wounded kingdom, endured its worst defeat, and died the patriarch of European royalty, explain why his statue still stands in Copenhagen and why his name attaches to Christian IX's Palace at Amalienborg, the residence of the Danish regent's family in later generations ^[2].