which served to embitter Austro-Italian relations. On the 9th of January 1878, Victor Emmanuel died of fever in Rome, and was buried in the Pantheon. He was succeeded by his son Humbert.
Bluff, hearty, good-natured and simple in his habits, yet he always had a high idea of his own kingly dignity, and his really statesmanlike qualities often surprised foreign diplomats, who were deceived by his homely exterior. As a soldier he was very brave, but he did not show great qualities as a military leader in the campaign of 1866. He was a keen sportsman and would spend many days at a time pursuing chamois or steinbock in the Alpine fastnesses of Piedmont with nothing but bread and cheese to eat. He always used the dialect of Piedmont when conversing with natives of that country, and he had a vast fund of humorous anecdotes and proverbs with which to illustrate his arguments. He had a great weakness for female society, and kept several mistresses; one of them, the beautiful Rosa Vercellone, he created Countess Mirafiori e Fontanafredda and married morganatically in 1869; she bore him one son.
Bibliography.— Besides the general works on Italy and Savoy see V. Bersezio, Il Regno di Vittorio Emanuele II. (8 vols., Turin, 1869); G. Massari, La Vita ed il Regno di Vittorio Emanuele II. (2 vols., Milan, 1878); N. Bianchi, Storia della Diplomazia Europea in Italia (8 vols., Turin, 1865). (L. V.*)
VICTOR EMMANUEL III. (1869–), king of Italy, son of King Humbert I. and Queen Margherita of Savoy, was born at Naples on the 11th of November 1869. Carefully educated by his mother and under the direction of Colonel Osio, he outgrew the weakness of his childhood and became expert in horsemanship and military exercises. Entering the army at an early age he passed through the various grades and, soon after attaining his majority, was appointed to the command of the Florence Army Corps. During frequent journeys to Germany he enlarged his military experience, and upon his appointment to the command of the Naples Army Corps in 1896 displayed sound military and administrative capacity. A keen huntsman, and passionately fond of the sea, he extended his yachting and hunting excursions as far east as Syria and as far north as Spitsbergen. As representative of King Humbert he attended the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II. in 1896, the Victorian Jubilee celebrations of 1897, and the festivities connected with the coming of age of the German crown prince in 1900. The prince's intellectual and artistic leanings were well known; in particular, he has made a magnificent collection of historic Italian coins, on which subject he became a recognized authority. At the time of the assassination of his father, King Humbert (the 29th of July 1900), he was returning from a yachting cruise in the eastern Mediterranean. Landing at Reggio di Calabria he hastened to Monza, where he conducted with firmness and tact the preparations for the burial of King Humbert and for his own formal accession, which took place on the 9th and 11th of August 1900. On the 24th of October 1896 he married Princess Elena of Montenegro, who, on the 1st of June 1901, bore him a daughter named Yolanda Margherita, on the 19th of November 1902 a second daughter named Mafalda, and on the 15th of September 1904 a son, Prince Humbert.
VICTORIA [ALEXANDRINA VICTORIA], Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India (1819–1901), only child of Edward, duke of Kent, fourth son of King George III., and of Princess Victoria Mary Louisa of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (widow of Prince Emich Karl of Leiningen, by whom she already had two children), was born at Kensington Palace on the 24th of May 1819. The duke and duchess of Kent had been living at Amorbach, in Franconia, owing to their straitened circumstances, but they returned to London on purpose that their child should be born in England. In 1817 the death of Princess Charlotte (only child of the prince regent, afterwards George IV., and wife of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, afterwards king of the Belgians), had left the ultimate succession to the throne of England, in the younger generation, so uncertain that the three unmarried sons of George III., the dukes of Clarence (afterwards William IV.), Kent and Cambridge, all married in the following year, the two elder on the same day. All three had children, but the duke of Clarence's two baby daughters died in infancy, in 1819 and 1821; and the duke of Cambridge's son George, born on the 26th of March 1819, was only two months old when the birth of the duke of Kent's daughter put her before him in the succession. The question as to what name the child should bear was not settled without bickerings. The duke of Kent wished her to be christened Elizabeth, and the prince regent wanted Georgiana, while the tsar Alexander I., who had promised to stand sponsor, stipulated for Alexandrina. The baptism was performed in a drawing-room of Kensington Palace on the 24th of June by Dr Manners Sutton, archbishop of Canterbury. The prince regent, who was present, named the child Alexandrina; then, being requested by the duke of Kent to give a second name, he said, rather abruptly, “Let her be called Victoria, after her mother, but this name must come after the other.”[1] Six weeks after her christening the princess was vaccinated, this being the first occasion on which a member of the royal family underwent the operation.
In January 1820 the duke of Kent died, five days before his brother succeeded to the throne as George IV. The widowed duchess of Kent was new a woman of thirty-four, handsome, homely, a German at heart, and with little liking for English ways. But she was a woman of experience, and shrewd; and fortunately she had a safe and affectionate adviser in her brother, Prince Leopold of Coburg, afterwards (1831) king of the Belgians, who as the husband of the late Princess Charlotte had once been a prospective prince consort of England. His former doctor and private secretary, Baron Stockmar (q.v.), a man of encyclopaedic information and remarkable judgment, who had given special attention to the problems of a sovereign's position in England, was afterwards to play an important rôle in Queen Victoria's life; and Leopold himself took a fatherly interest in the young princess's education, and contributed some thousands of pounds annually to the duchess of Kent's income. Prince Leopold still lived at this time at Claremont, where Princess Charlotte had died, and this became the duchess of Kent's occasional English home; but she was much addicted to travelling, and spent several months every year in visits to watering-places. It was said at court that she liked the demonstrative homage of crowds; but she had good reason to fear lest her child should be taken away from her to be educated according to the views of George IV. Between the king and his sister-in-law there was little love, and when the death of the duke of Clarence's second infant daughter Elizabeth in 1821 made it pretty certain that Princess Victoria would eventually become queen, the duchess felt that the king might possibly obtain the support of his ministers if he insisted that the future sovereign should be brought up under masters and mistresses designated by himself. The little princess could not have received a better education than that which was given her under Prince Leopold's direction. Her uncle considered that she ought to be kept as long as possible from the knowledge of her position, which might raise a large growth of pride or vanity in her and make her unmanageable; so Victoria was twelve years old before she knew that she was to wear a crown. Until she became queen she never slept a night away from her mother's room, and she was not allowed to converse with any grown-up person, friend, tutor or servant without the duchess of Kent or the Baroness Lehzen, her private governess, being present. Louise Lehzen, a native of Coburg, had come to England as governess to the Princess Feodore of Leiningen, the duchess of Kent's daughter
- ↑ The question of her name, as that of one who was to be queen, remained even up to her accession to the throne a much-debated one. In August 1831, in a discussion in parliament upon a grant to the duchess of Kent, Sir M. W. Ridley suggested changing it to Elizabeth as “more accordant to the feelings of the people”; and the idea of a change seems to have been powerfully supported. In 1836 William IV. approved of a proposal to change it to Charlotte; but, to the princess's own delight, it was given up.
