Queen Victoria and Prince Albert

On 9 April 2021, Queen Elizabeth II became a widow with the passing of her husband of 73 years Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. 159 Years, 3 months and 26 days earlier in 1861, Queen Victoria was also widowed when her husband Prince Albert died. Like Elizabeth and Phillip, Victoria and Albert were cousins who married and had kids. Today something like that is frowned upon but it was another Tuesday in their day.
You see, Prince Albert's dad was the brother to Queen Victoria's mother. Prince Albert was born on 26 August 1819 in Schloss Rosenau in what is now Germany. Albert first met Victoria (who was known as Alexandrina before becoming queen) through an arrangement by Al's uncle King Leopold 1 of Belgium in May 1836 in England. The next time, they met, Vicky was now Queen and in October 1839, Victoria proposed to Albert. The pair were married in the Chapel Royal at St James' Palaces on 10 February 1840 and Prince Albert became Prince Consort (like Prince Philip). Together, they had nine children though three of them had been born with haemophilia (the bleeding disease as it's called as it prevents clotting) which resulted in her granddaughter Alexandra (through the couple's 2nd daughter Alice) giving birth to the haemophilic Tsarevich Alexei. However, it wasn't the fault of Albert but rather Victoria who was a carrier of the disease (women were and are usually the carrier of the gene that cause haemophilia in men).
Prince Albert wasn't quite popular when he arrived in England due to him being German (despite the fact that Victoria's ancestor King George 1 was German) but thanks to the Great Exhibition which was situated in Crystal Palace (a structure so called due it being a big glass building), he became popular! The Great Exhibition showcased a precursor to the fax machine, Maori made items like flax baskets, ell traps and fish hooks, Europe's first single cast iron frame for a piano, a rare pink diamond from India and a wake up machine that tilted the user out of bed (something similar can be seen in the Wallace and Gromit shorts and the film the Curse of the Were Rabbit).
Prince Albert is responsible for introducing the Christmas tree into our Christmas scenes which he did as a tribute to his boyhood in Germany.
The work toll as the spouse to the British monarch took a toll on Prince Albert in the 1850s and he had moments in his life where he was sick. In December 1861, Al became ill and died on 14 December 1861 of typhoid fever (at the time as modern physicians and medical professionals think it was also stomach cancer and Crohn's disease.) Vicky spent the remaining 39 years, 1 month and 8 days of her life as a widow, garbed in black except for her internment in Frogmore when she was buried in white instead so she could be reunited as a renewed bride.