Sibylla of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha

Princess Sibylla was widowed at thirty-nine with five children and died a year before her son became king of Sweden. She was a daughter of Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha - a grandson of Queen Victoria who had been born British, was sent to Germany at fourteen to inherit the duchy, lost his British titles in 1919 for fighting against Britain, and became an enthusiastic Nazi, an SA general and head of the German Red Cross under a regime that used it. Her marriage to Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden in 1932 was a considerable event in Coburg and was attended by Nazi dignitaries, which followed her for the rest of her life and made her position in Sweden during the war uncomfortable. There is no evidence she shared her father's politics and a good deal that she was reserved to the point of severity about everything. She had four daughters and then, in April 1946, a son. Her husband was killed at Copenhagen nine months later, leaving her to raise the heir to the throne in a court that had not expected the succession to skip a generation. She carried out official duties as the senior royal woman for twenty-five years, never remarried, and was never entirely accepted publicly. She died of cancer in 1972. Her son Carl XVI Gustaf came to the throne the following September. Her father was tried by a German denazification court after the war, fined, and left in poor health and near ruin; she was not permitted to attend the British coronation of 1953 without difficulty on his account. Her four daughters all married commoners and left the royal house. The Swedish succession law was changed in 1980 to admit women, eight years after her death, which would have made her eldest daughter queen had it come sooner.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history