Christian IX of Denmark
Christian IX was the Glucksburg prince from Schleswig whom the powers had chosen in 1852 to succeed the childless Frederick VII, who came to the throne in November 1863 with a constitution to sign that he knew would bring war, signed it under threat of the crowd, lost Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg to Prussia and Austria within eight months, and reigned for forty-two years over the small country that remained, unpopular for a generation as the German who had lost the duchies and at the end the patriarch whose children sat on the thrones of Britain, Russia, Greece and Norway, so that he was called the father-in-law of Europe. He was born at Gottorp castle in 1818, a younger son of a minor ducal line, brought up in Copenhagen as a ward of the king, and married Louise of Hesse, whose claim to the succession was better than his. The London Protocol of 1852 settled the Danish crown on him to keep the duchies and the kingdom under one head. He was a conservative and a German-speaker by upbringing who thought the national liberals' Eider policy folly, and when they presented him with the November Constitution three days after his accession he signed it because refusal would have cost him the throne. Bismarck used it. Prussian and Austrian troops crossed the Eider in February 1864, stormed the Danevirke and Dybbol, and the peace of Vienna in October took two-fifths of the monarchy. He spent the rest of the reign keeping out of European quarrels and, at home, refusing for twenty years to give the Liberal majority in the lower house a government, backing Estrup's ministry that ruled by provisional finance laws from 1885 to 1894, until in 1901 he gave in and appointed the first parliamentary cabinet, the change of system that made Denmark's constitution real. His daughter Alexandra married the Prince of Wales, his daughter Dagmar the tsarevich Alexander, his son Vilhelm became George I of Greece, and his grandson Carl became Haakon VII of Norway in 1905. The family gatherings at Fredensborg in the 1880s brought half the crowned heads of Europe to a Danish country house. He died in Copenhagen in January 1906 at eighty-seven.
- Lived: 1818 CE – 1906 CE
- Nationality: Danish
- Roles: king, monarch
