Queen Victoria's favourite son became the 51st chief of the Six Nations
Prince Arthur, named after the Duke of Wellington who shared his birthday, went to Canada as a young army officer in 1869. The Iroquois of the Grand River gave him a seat on their council, breaking a centuries-old rule of 50 chiefs, and four decades later he returned as the only British prince ever to be Canada's governor general.
Born at Buckingham Palace on 1 May 1850, the seventh child of Victoria and Albert was reportedly her favourite. He entered the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich at 16 and was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1868, then served some 40 years across the empire, in Egypt in 1882 and in India as head of the Bombay Army, rising to field marshal in 1902. He had hoped to lead the whole British Army and was denied, and when posted to command in Ireland in 1900 he regretted missing the Boer War.
His first Canadian stay mixed soldiering and society. Stationed with the Rifle Brigade in Montreal, he helped repel Fenian raiders from the United States at Eccles Hill in May 1870, met President Grant in Washington, and became the first royal to attend the opening of parliament in Ottawa. The Six Nations named him Kavakoudge, a name describing the sun crossing the sky westward led by the Great Spirit, and gave him a vote in tribal governance.
Other thrones and offices came his way. After Serbia's 1903 coup ended the Obrenović line, some anglophile Serbs proposed him as king. He gave up his and his son's rights to the German duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, opened the Aswan dam in December 1902, and inaugurated the first parliament of the Union of South Africa in 1910. As Grand Master of England's Freemasons from 1901 he was re-elected 37 more times, until he was nearly 90.
Sworn in as governor general on 13 October 1911, he represented the King through the first years of the First World War, and in 1917 he laid on the rebuilt Centre Block in Ottawa the same cornerstone his brother Edward VII had set in 1860. His younger daughter became hugely popular with Canadians. He retired from public life in 1928 and died in 1942, Victoria's last surviving son.
Source: Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn
