Christian IX of Denmark

Christian IX grew up a minor prince in Schleswig, a younger son of a junior branch, nowhere near the Danish throne. After his father died in 1831, he was raised in Denmark, trained at the Military Academy of Copenhagen, and in 1842 married Princess Louise of Hesse-Kassel. Ten years later, with the senior royal line dying out, he was named heir presumptive. He became king in 1863 and immediately lost the Second Schleswig War, forfeiting Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg - a defeat that made him deeply unpopular. The next decades brought bitter clashes over the balance of power in Denmark's new constitutional monarchy, with the king on one side and much of the public on the other. But his six children married into the ruling houses of Britain, Russia, Greece, and beyond, and by the time he died in 1906 after forty-three years on the throne, he had become a national symbol - less for his reign than for the web of European royalty that descended from him.