Margaret of Connaught

Princess Margaret of Connaught was crown princess of Sweden and died at thirty-eight, and the Swedish royal family descends from her. She was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, daughter of the Duke of Connaught, and married Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden in 1905 after a meeting in Cairo - a match the newspapers of both countries treated as a considerable coup for Sweden, since the alternative candidates for a British princess were German. She learned Swedish quickly, took up gardening seriously enough to redesign the grounds at Sofiero, painted, and became genuinely popular in a way that royal imports frequently are not. During the First World War, with Sweden neutral, she organised sewing and relief work and set up an information bureau at the palace that traced missing prisoners of war and passed letters between separated families across the belligerent lines - work that handled tens of thousands of enquiries and was one of the few things Sweden's neutrality was unambiguously useful for. She had five children. In May 1920 she was eight months pregnant and underwent surgery for a mastoid infection; she died a week later of an embolism. Her eldest son Gustaf Adolf was killed in an air crash in 1947, and her grandson Carl XVI Gustaf has reigned since 1973. Her husband became Gustaf VI Adolf and outlived her by fifty-three years. She wrote a book on gardening and was an early and skilled photographer. Her sister Patricia gave up her royal title on marrying a naval officer, which was then unusual. Sweden had not had a British-born consort before her.

• Lived: 1882 CE – 1920 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: royalty