Prince George of Denmark stood at the window of his London residence and listened as the Danish envoy delivered the message that would split his life in two. It was early November 1688, and his brother-in-law, William of Orange, was preparing to invade England. William was furious at the open Catholicism flourishing at the court of King James II, and he meant to take the crown by force. The man George had married into—the king of England himself—was about to face a war for his throne, and George was expected to choose a side.

He already knew which way the wind was blowing. King James’s own army, George told the envoy, was as discontented with the monarch as everyone else. Under those circumstances, he would never take official command under the king. But neither was he ready to call himself a traitor.

Instead, George offered his services as a volunteer, a careful balancing act that would demand ever more agility in the weeks ahead. It was a strange fate for a man who had never expected to matter much in the world at all. George had been born in 1653 in Copenhagen, the youngest son of King Frederick III of Denmark, with a mother descended from a line of German dukes. When his elder brother Christian V took the Danish throne while George was still a teenager, the younger prince seemed destined to live out his days as a minor royal, comfortable and largely forgotten.

He was reportedly content with that prospect. But England had other plans. The country was shifting decisively toward Protestantism under King Charles II, and the king was looking for a suitably Protestant husband for his niece, Lady Anne. George’s faith made him an ideal candidate.

His wealth and pedigree helped. The marriage negotiations became a state secret, with Anne’s uncle, the Earl of Rochester, and an English secretary of state corresponding with the Danish government in utmost confidence to keep the Dutch from learning what was being arranged. In 1683, the secret could be kept no longer. George married Anne in the summer of that year at St.

James’s Palace in London. The match proved happier than most royal arrangements. George and Anne got along well from the start, and their relationship grew into one of genuine love and mutual admiration. Anne became pregnant within months of the wedding.

The English royal family was short on heirs, and courtiers watched the pregnancy with breath held. They let that breath out in a sob when Anne gave birth to a stillborn girl the following spring. It was a heavy blow, but not unusual for the age, and the couple bounced back. Anne was pregnant again the next year, delivering a daughter named Mary, followed by another girl, Sophia, the year after that.

Anne conceived again soon afterward. Then, in 1687, everything collapsed. Both George and his two young daughters caught smallpox. Anne, who had survived her own bout with the disease years earlier and had watched loved ones perish from it, was consumed with worry for her husband and children.

The stress triggered a miscarriage. George pulled through, but his two baby girls did not. Within days, his small, growing family had been whittled down to almost nothing. The effect on both parents was heartbreaking; as one courtier related, they took the deaths very heavily.

Amidst their grief, George’s political surroundings were also filling with danger. In 1685, just after little Mary’s birth, King Charles II had died, and the crown passed to Anne’s father, now King James II. As the son-in-law of a king, George’s profile rose considerably, but it also dragged him into the center of a power struggle that would bring the throne down. James, though the father of two Protestant daughters, had converted to Catholicism decades earlier, at first secretly and then openly.

His advisers and his family found this deeply uncomfortable. Parliament was unhappy. The peace of the realm, hard-won over centuries, seemed at risk. James’s Catholicism became increasingly impossible to ignore.

Then George and Anne’s public and private lives collided once more. Just after Anne’s miscarriage and the loss of her daughters to smallpox, she was pregnant again. At the end of 1687, she gave birth to a stillborn son. And then came the news of William’s invasion.

George accompanied the king’s troops as they moved to face the Dutch threat, apparently ready to defend the throne. But as the days passed, he saw defection everywhere around him. According to reports, George, who still held some faint hope for King James despite everything, cried out “Est-il possible? Is it possible?

” after every turncoat. Until, on November 24, 1688, barely weeks after the invasion began, he became a turncoat himself and threw in his lot with William of Orange. His desertion left a vicious mark. King James reportedly sneered that “Est-il possible is gone too.

” In his later memoirs, James downplayed the betrayal, but witnesses could see how deeply it affected him. They understood why. When the cordial Prince George abandoned him, it was the beginning of the end. In December, King James II fled to France, effectively surrendering his crown to his daughter Mary and his son-in-law William.

He never stopped hoping to win it back, but what was done was done. The following year, William and Mary became joint monarchs. They had no children, which made George’s wife Anne the heir presumptive. George, who had come to England expecting a quiet, comfortable life as a minor royal consort, now found himself married to the next queen of England, in the middle of a revolution.

There was no peace to come. William constantly had to defend his crown against the old King James and his supporters, the Jacobites. George wanted to join the fight. Paying his own way, he followed William’s troops on campaign, but William refused to give him any command.

If that was a snub born of mistrust of George’s military abilities, the next one was impossible to ignore. William kept George from his presence entirely, refusing to let him even ride in the royal coach, and reportedly ordered his Dutch guards to never salute Prince George if they saw him. George was a lover, not a fighter. In response to William’s possessiveness over the army, he tried the sensible alternative and sought to join the Navy instead.

It was no good. William took his absolute power seriously and barred George from the water as well. Defeated, George and Anne retreated from William and Mary’s court. But they had an ace up their sleeve.

In the summer of 1689, a miracle happened. Anne finally gave birth to a healthy boy, Prince William, Duke of Gloucester. With King William and Queen Mary still childless, the little prince carried all the hopes for Protestantism and the Glorious Revolution. Though still on the fringes of the ruling couple’s court, Anne and George received a serious upgrade in the eyes of the government.

But something was seriously wrong. Just before Prince William’s birth, Anne had suffered yet another miscarriage, her sixth pregnancy to produce no living child. George and Anne must have been overjoyed when their breathing baby boy arrived at Hampton Court Palace, and terrified when they saw how sickly he was. At three weeks old, the infant began experiencing horrible convulsions.

Modern historians believe the prince contracted meningitis during his birth, which triggered the convulsions and likely also gave him hydrocephalus, a condition where spinal fluid builds up in the brain, increases pressure on the skull, and can swell the head. Prince William was not an heir to hang a dynasty on. So George and Anne kept trying. As their son grew, Anne was almost continually pregnant and continually bereaved.

She lost a premature daughter in 1690, an infant son in 1692, gave birth to a stillborn girl in 1693, and suffered a miscarriage in 1694. Four more pregnancies, and George was still the father of one sickly boy. Sickly or not, Prince William did bring his parents closer to King William and Queen Mary over the years. In 1694, smallpox returned and carried away Queen Mary, leaving England without its queen and Anne without her sister.

With Mary’s line firmly set in the succession, Anne went from heir presumptive to heir apparent, all but guaranteeing her the crown. Before she could take it, she and her husband would endure unimaginable pain. With Mary gone and King William aging, it had never been more important for George and Anne to produce children. Their desperation was plain, and their misfortune turned exponential.

George watched Anne become pregnant twice in 1696 and miscarry twice. The very same thing happened the next year. Possibly two of those miscarriages were of twins. Hearts plainly breaking, they kept going.

In total, Anne would suffer at least seventeen pregnancies, with only one producing a child who kept growing. In the summer of 1700, George and Anne tried to lift their spirits. Their son Prince William celebrated his birthday with a party, dancing for much of the night. Then everything went sideways.

Suddenly fatigued from the physical strain, William took to his bed and developed a sore throat, chills, headache, and fever. There was no coming back. His health plummeted until he expired after midnight on July 30, 1700, just a week after his eleventh birthday, with his devastated parents by his side. The young heir likely fell victim to smallpox or bacterial meningitis.

Perhaps saddest of all, the culprit was somewhat immaterial. Most experts believe he would have perished eventually anyway due to complications from his hydrocephalus. That hardly comforted George and Anne. The couple was overwhelmed with grief, but they did not have the luxury of processing their emotions.

The monarchy was now in crisis, and their own succession was the only answer. In 1702, George’s brother-in-law William of Orange died of pneumonia at the age of fifty-one, turning Anne into Queen Anne and George into her consort. It was a long time coming, and nothing either of them particularly relished. George was forty-nine, Anne thirty-seven, and both carried a lifetime of grief with little prospect of a royal legacy.

But they did get some payback. George had spent much of his time in the English court on the outside looking in, but his personal tragedies had eclipsed his concerns for his royal status. Now Anne gave him everything he had ever asked for. She made him Generalissimo of the English military and Lord High Admiral of the Royal Navy, two positions William of Orange had never let him touch.

Their partnership differed sharply from William and Mary’s. William had been an equal, if not the driving force, in his marriage to Anne’s sister. George was happy to sit back and let his wife hold all the power during her reign. He followed her lead in voting on policies and, except for the fact that he never converted to the Church of England and maintained his Lutheran faith, he was her man to the core.

As historian Anne Somerset put it, almost by accident, George achieved a major advance for feminism. George had long and quietly suffered from asthma. By 1706, his health was failing rapidly, and on October 28, 1708, Prince George of Denmark breathed his last. His power over his wife only increased in death.

One courtier described how, having lost so much already, Anne’s sadness was unspeakable, and that she continued kissing him the very moment his breath went out of his body. Throughout their marriage, George of Denmark and Queen Anne suffered eighteen devastating pregnancy losses and the death of their young son. At the time, doctors offered various interpretations for what plagued them, but none could truly explain or solve it. Years later, modern historians believe they know the disturbing cause that silently haunted the royal couple for decades.

Perhaps the most likely culprit is the autoimmune condition lupus, which can cause painful physical symptoms. Others believe Queen Anne could have suffered from the lesser-known autoimmune disorder antiphospholipid syndrome, which is often marked by miscarriages. George of Denmark only deserves his reputation as a footnote in history if you’re not looking closely enough. Neither as flashy nor as feisty as his predecessor, King William III, his life was nonetheless heavy with scandal, revolution, and a dynasty in its last gasps.

For that alone, he is worthy of study. But if, as Winston Churchill said of him in the 1930s, George married very little except to Anne, well, especially given all they endured together, isn’t that enough?