nish throne as Christian VIII. The Liberal party had high hopes of "the
giver of constitutions," but he disappointed his admirers by steadily
rejecting every Liberal project. Administrative reform was the only reform
he would promise. He died of blood-poisoning on the 20th of January 1848.

See Just Matthias Thiele, _Christian den Ottende_ (Copenhagen, 1848);
Yngvar Nielsen, _Bidrag til Norges Historie_ (Christiania, 1882-1886).

CHRISTIAN IX. (1818-1906), king of Denmark, was a younger son of
William, duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluecksburg (d. 1831), a
direct descendant of the Danish king Christian III. by his wife Louise,
a daughter of Charles, prince of Hesse-Cassel (d. 1836), and
grand-daughter of King Frederick V. Born at Gottorp on the 8th of April
1818, Christian entered the army, and alone among the members of his
family served with the Danish troops in Schleswig during the
insurrection of 1848; but he was a personage of little importance until
about 1852, ten years after his marriage with Louise (1817-1898),
daughter of William, prince of Hesse-Cassel (d. 1867), and cousin of
King Frederick VII. At this time it became imperative that satisfactory
provision should be made for the succession to the Danish throne. The
reigning king, Frederick VII., was childless, and the representatives of
the great powers met in London and settled the crown on Prince Christian
and his wife (May 1852), an arrangement which became part of the law of
Denmark in 1853. The "protocol king," as Christian was sometimes called,
ascended the throne on Frederick's death in November 1863, and was at
once faced by formidable difficulties. Reluctantly he assented to the
policy which led to war with the combined power of Austria and Prussia,
and to the separation of the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and
Lauenburg from Denmark (see SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN QUESTION). Within the
narrowed limits of his kingdom Christian's difficulties were more
protracted and hardly less serious. During almost the whole of his reign
the Danes were engaged in a political struggle between the "Right" and
the "Left," the party of order and the party of progress, the former
being supported in general by the _Landsting_, and the latter by the
_Folketing_. The king's sympathies lay with the more conservative
section of his subjects, and for many years he was successful in
preventing the Radicals from coming into office. The march of events,
however, was