Albert, the second son of Duke Ernest I. of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and his wife, the Princess Louise, daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, was born at the Rosenau, a charming summer residence belonging to the Duke, about four miles from Coburg, on the 26th of August, 1819. His mother is described as handsome, though of very diminutive proportions, fair, with blue eyes; and her son Albert, whom she idolised, closely resembled her. She was clever and entertaining; yet her marriage was an unhappy one, and a separation took place by mutual consent in 1824, after which date the Duchess never saw her children. Two years later the separation was turned into a divorce. The Prince never forgot her, but spoke of her to his dying day with much tenderness, and the very first gift which he ever made to the Princess Victoria was a little pin which his mother had given him. Not until the Prince was almost a young man did his mother die. When she died her race became extinct, save in the persons of her two sons. Many years later, her remains were brought to Coburg, and laid in the family mausoleum beside the Duke and his second wife. This mausoleum was not completed until 1860, in which year Queen Victoria deposited a votive wreath on the tomb of the mother of her husband. Prince Albert's paternal grandmother, the Duchess Dowager of Coburg, in writing to her daughter, the Duchess of Kent, announcing Albert's birth, lauded his beauty, and--little thinking how the fortunes of the two infant cousins were to be intertwined hereafter--thus concluded her communication:--"How pretty the _May Flower_ (the Princess Victoria, born the preceding May) will be when I see it in a year's time. Siebold cannot sufficiently describe what a dear little love it is. Une bonne fois, adieu! Kiss your husband and children." Siebold was an accoucheuse who had attended at the births of both the children. On the 19th of September the Prince was christened, and thus named:--Francis Charles Augustus Albert Emmanuel.