When Queen Victoria’s half-sister Theodora died in 1841, the Queen wrote in her journal that her “dearly loved only sister” was gone, and that the loss felt like a bad dream from which she might awaken. The bond between the two women had been forged during a lonely childhood that kept them isolated from the outside world. Victoria was born on May 24, 1819, after a desperate succession crisis among the sons of King George III. The death of Princess Charlotte, the only legitimate child of the future George IV, had left Britain without a clear heir.
The race to produce a successor pushed Victoria’s father, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, into marriage with a German widow, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, with whom he had two children. Theodora was the daughter from her mother’s first marriage to Emich Carl, the Prince of Leiningen. When Emich Carl died of pneumonia in 1814, the then-10-year-old Carl succeeded his father, with the widowed Victoria serving as regent. The family’s fortunes became tied to Britain when Theodora’s uncle, Leopold, married Princess Charlotte, the heir to the British throne, in 1816, making him a potential future prince consort.
But after Charlotte’s death during childbirth, the devastated Leopold wrote to his sister that he was made “for a life of family intimacy. ” He remained in Britain, courting a woman who resembled the late princess, until 1831, when he became the first King of the Belgians after the country won its independence. Victoria’s own father, Edward, had his military career end in disgrace when his harsh methods in Gibraltar sparked a mutiny among his troops. His brother, the Duke of York, recalled him, and although Edward kept the honorary title of governor, he never returned to the post.
Edward and his wife moved to Devon to save money, and it was there that Victoria was born. He died of pneumonia on January 23, 1820, just six days before his own father, George III, passed away. The infant Victoria was then third in line to the throne, behind her two uncles. Inside Kensington Palace, Victoria and Theodora formed a close bond, taking walks in Kensington Gardens and sharing everything.
Yet the isolation took a toll. Theodora later wrote that she pitied herself for the “dismal existence” of those years, which she described as a form of imprisonment. In 1828, she escaped by marrying Ernst, the Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a union arranged with the help of the future Queen Adelaide. Though the two had met only twice before their engagement and Ernst had a modest income, Theodora was eager to leave Kensington.
Victoria and Theodora stayed in contact, sharing the grief of losing their husbands within a short time of each other. Theodora died on April 1, 1841, and Victoria wrote that her sister’s death felt like a “dismal existence” had finally ended. Their half-brother Carl, who had studied law and later served as head of foreign affairs in the German Empire, died in 1856, leaving Victoria the last survivor of her immediate blended family.
She reigned until her death on January 22, 1901, outliving them all by decades.