Princess Alice (full name Alice Maud Mary) was born on 25th April 1843. She was the third child and second daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. During her childhood and adolescence she formed a much closer bond with Bertie, the Prince of Wales who would eventually become King Edward VII, than with her elder sister Vicky, the Princess Royal. For one thing, the age gap was smaller (Vicky was two and a half years older than Alice, whereas Bertie was only a year and a half older); for another, Vicky tended to overshadow her sister, who was paid little attention in court circles. However, when Vicky married the Crown Prince of Prussia in 1858, Alice became the eldest daughter still in the family home and thus the close companion of her mother. Prince Albert also formed a closer relationship with her as she became interested in his political ideas and his plans to support the arts and sciences. Plans were in train for her own marriage, to Prince Louis of Hesse, when two deaths struck the royal family in 1861. The first was of Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, to whom Victoria had become reconciled after a stormy few years earlier in her reign. The Queen had barely recovered from this when a worse tragedy occurred with the sudden illness and death of her husband, Prince Albert. This led her to retire from public life for several years. Princess Alice had been much more aware of the seriousness of Albert’s condition than had been her mother, and was in constant attendance on him as she continued to be on the Queen in the months following Albert’s death. It was Alice who insisted on Bertie being summoned to his father’s bedside, which Victoria had not thought necessary. The young Princess, aged 18, was now virtually in charge of the royal household, acting as go-between for her mother in matters of state, and attracting considerable praise for her common sense and devotion to duty. Victoria’s grief was all-consuming, and Alice was the only person who could persuade her to think of anything other than her lost husband. However, Alice’s own wedding still went ahead as planned, on 1st July 1862, although it was a joyless affair given the circumstances. Victoria wanted her daughter to stay in England, and therefore continue in her role as her mother’s companion, but this was not possible. Alice moved to Darmstadt in Hesse (now part of western Germany) and thereafter visited Britain much less frequently than her mother would have wished. The marriage was stable and affectionate, but the couple were not well matched either emotionally or intellectually. Alice also found the protocol at the royal palace in Darmstadt to be stifling, and she tended to make herself unpopular with the court officials by her refusal to stick to all the rules. There was also a breach between Alice and her mother when she expressed her disapproval of her sister Helena’s proposed marriage to Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, which took place in 1866. There were political reasons why the marriage was ill-advised, which were to do with the status of Schleswig-Holstein which was claimed by the King of Denmark, the father of the Princess of Wales, but Alice was also concerned about her mother’s insistence on the couple living in England and therefore close to her, Helena having taken on the role of confidante that Alice had vacated. Alice had been able to escape her mother’s influence by marrying; she did not want her younger sister to fall into this trap. Alice had seven children, two sons and five daughters, most of whom had short or otherwise tragic lives. Alice transferred the haemophilia gene from her mother to her own son Friedrich, who died after an accident at the age of two. The gene also passed through her daughter Alexandra to the Tsarevich Alexei of Russia, and through her daughter Irene to the Prussian royal family. Princess Alice became deeply involved in welfare issues in her new home state of Hesse. She opened a home for the mentally ill in 1869 after several years of fundraising. She was very active in improving nursing standards, especially when war casualties from the 1866 Austro-Prussian War arrived in Darmstadt. To further this cause she corresponded with Florence Nightingale and instituted the reforms that were suggested to her. In 1867 she set up the “Alice Women’s Guild” to train professional and auxiliary nurses. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 she turned the royal palace into a medical depot. Princess Alice was also keen to promote the ability of women to earn their own living, and to this end she set up the “Alice Guild for the Education and Training of Women”. Her own health began to decline during the 1860s, brought on by her unceasing hard work coupled with being pregnant for most of the time. She also underwent a crisis of faith in that she found the sentimentality of Victorian Christianity not to be to her liking. She developed a close friendship with the theologian Dr David Friedrich Strauss, of Darmstadt, and was greatly influenced by his rationalism and “demythologising” of the Christian story. He dedicated a book on Voltaire to her. The tragic death of her son Friedrich in 1873, which resulted from a fall from a window while playing with his older brother, affected her deeply and she never really recovered from the loss. Princess Alice became the Grand Duchess of Hesse on 13th June 1877 when her husband succeeded to the throne as Grand Duke Louis IV. However, she did not have long to enjoy her new status. In 1878 an epidemic of diphtheria swept through Hesse and reached the royal family. Only one of the seven children escaped the infection which was also caught by their father. Alice nursed her family members round the clock. The youngest child, Marie, died from the disease on 14th November but Alice kept the news from her other children for as long as she could. When she eventually told Prince Ernest Louis, aged 10, he was inconsolable and Alice comforted him by hugging him close, thus contracting the infection herself. Being weakened by her non-stop efforts on behalf of her family, Alice’s body had little defence against the disease, and she died on 14th December 1878 at the age of 35. She thus became the first of Queen Victoria’s children to die, 22 years before her mother. Princess Alice can be seen as the first of the “modern royals” of the British royal family, in that her life was devoted in equal measure to her family and to public service. She was hard-working, intelligent, full of common sense, practical, and a free thinker who was unwilling to take things on trust simply because “that was the way these things were done”. One of her points of disagreement with her mother, for example, was over breast-feeding; Alice insisted on suckling her own children, which was not what aristocratic women did in an age of “wet nurses”. It is of interest to note that one of Princess Alice’s direct descendants (through her eldest daughter Victoria) is Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, the consort of Queen Elizabeth II. His forthrightness and practicality may perhaps be in the blood, put there by his great-grandmother **Eleanor of Aquitaine** Owner
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 19:35:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015