This chapter considers the importance of royal heirs in the process of militarising the monarchies of nineteenth-century Europe. It gauges the significance of the crowns’ military performance for their attempts to generate loyalty and popular endorsement. Royal heirs, and crown princes in particular, had a significant part to play within this context – if only as military actors, but even more so if they could demonstrate real military achievements. The chapter culminates in an assessment of the experiences and contributions of three royal heirs who assumed military roles during the First World War.

This chapter investigates the political effects and means of royal heirs in constitutional systems. It asks how they contributed politically to the process of monarchical persistence in the Long Nineteenth Century and concentrates in particular on instances where they were opposed to the course championed by their predecessors and on the process of generating ‘soft power’ for their dynasties by committing themselves to visibility, mobility and ‘civic publicness’.

As the First World War was reaching its end, the crowned heads of Germany were staring into the abyss. The fateful course of the war and, in particular, the leadership provided by Emperor Wilhelm II during these difficult years did not bode well. The end of all of Germany’s monarchies hung in the air. In October 1918, Grand Duke Friedrich August, who had ruled his half million Oldenburg subjects since 1900, uttered a grim prophecy on behalf of his fellow princes: ‘We are in no doubt that the emperor has ruined the empire, that he will be sent packing and that we will share his fate. Wilhelm will bring us down, to that we have resigned ourselves.’ For his part, Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse did not attribute the guilt for what occurred in November 1918 wholly to the emperor. He reckoned that the German monarchs shared the blame: ‘They were swept aside leaving nothing behind because they were complete nonentities,’ he would later record in his memoirs. ‘They did not even understand that one must move with the times if one does not wish for the times to pass one by in the end.’

The introduction engages the reader with the central question of the survival of monarchies within an age of dramatic change and makes a case for exploring succession as an important political resource available to monarchical systems under pressure.

This scene-setting chapter charts out the challenges Europe’s monarchies had to face in the wake of the French Revolution and the key means they employed to achieve their survival – among them an alliance with nationalism and imperialism, constitutional development and public relations techniques. It also introduces royal heirs as individual agents – and the process of succession more widely – as an essential part of this political arsenal. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the main contexts within which the lives and functions of a nineteenth-century heir had to unfold: the constitution, the royal family, the public sphere and the court.

This chapter assesses the importance of educating royal heirs in the nineteenth century. It traces the development of ideas of princely education and explains how this topic moved from being an internal, dynastic matter to being a political issue of public concern and public debate – another weapon in the arsenal of monarchical adaptation and self-defence. The chapter leads to a comparison between the educational programmes imposed upon the several generations of royal heirs in nineteenth-century Britain and Prussia/Germany.

This chapter focuses on the crucial importance of familial relationships within the ruling dynasties – both in terms of securing a successful transition from one generation of rulers to the next and with regard to the individual wellbeing of the royal heirs. Two key relationships are identified and explored through selected case studies: the relationship between the monarch and his or her successor (through the prism of the relationships between Queen Victoria, Emperor Wilhelm I and Emperor Franz Joseph and their oldest sons) and the relationship between the royal heir and his wife – through an analysis of the marriages of Prince Umberto of Savoy, Prince Wilhelm of Württemberg and Prince Friedrich August of Saxony.