Princess Alice was the third child and second daughter to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. More importantly, she was the mother of Alexandra, who married the Czar of Russia Nicholas, and it was through Alice that hemophilia was passed onto that family. As most know, that was one of the reasons for the downfall and death of the Russian Imperial family during the Russian Revolution. She is also the maternal grandmother of Prince Philip husband of Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Victoria had pledged that her children would only marry for love and not politics, just as she did, so Alice was allowed to marry the impoverished minor German Prince Louis of Hesse, heir to the Grand Duchy of Hesse (the present day Darmstadt area).
Her married life started under a cloud when her father died a few months before the wedding (described as more of a funeral than a wedding) and her life wasn’t much better over the years. Hesse was involved in a lot of the wars started by Bismarck during the unification of Germany so her husband was away a lot and she was always fearing for his life. She was terribly homesick and was never accepted by the German people because of her English ways. Also, Hesse was a poor duchy so she was always complaining of money in her letters and the smallness of her house.
Her marriage was a love match until the death of her son Frederick, who suffered from hemophilia, and died from internal bleeding after a fall from an open window at the age of 2 and a half. Both of her sons were running around the room and while she was chasing after one the other was out of her sight for a few moments and fell out the window. A terrible ordeal for any mother to go through and she never got over the loss. After that she and her husband drifted apart and she suffered from terrible vague pains, weakness, migraines, etc. probably due to depression and the stress of being “the mother of her country” as she described it. In 1874 her whole family, children and husband, contacted diphtheria and she nursed them all through it. One child, Marie, died and she suffered from the stress of not being able to tell the her husband and children of the death of the favourite. When she did finally tell her son of the loss he became so upset that she broke the cardinal rule and kissed him on the brow. A few days later she contracted the disease and died, coincidently on the anniversary of her father’s death.
I say that the book was highly edited because the only letters printed were happy ones full of devotion to her mother and memories of her father. More than her other siblings, she was totally devastated by the death of her father and she, like her mother, had a morbid interest in death and mourning. Every death that happened to her servants, friends and family, which considering it was almost every royal house in Europe left her “prostrated on the couch for days with grief.” She regularly sent letters to her mother on the anniversary of her grandmother’s and father’s death and the tone was just as fresh as the first year they were mourning.
What’s not published is the hurtful letters that her mother sent back in later years. Queen Victoria was very jealous of Alice’s marriage because it was a happy one and she was a widow. She also hated the fact that Alice was always trying to cheer her up when she was perfectly happy to wallow in her widow’s misery. She also did not like Alice’s constant comments on her lack of money. Although they sure took a lot of trips!
She was not an easy mother to have in the first place. She begrudged each of her daughter’s marriages because they were leaving her. Some of her younger daughters had to fight her to get married as she thought it was their duty to stay a spinster and take care of her. It’s well known that she disliked Bertie because she blamed him for Prince Albert’s death and his frivolous lifestyle and yet, she would never give him any duties to counteract the lifestyle that she despised.
Alice was the caregiver of the family and was very interested in nursing. She set up numerous hospital and schools for women in Hesse. She took care of Victoria’s mother and her father on their deathbeds and took care of her bereaved mother after both incidents. She tended to her brother Bertie, later King Edward VII, when he almost died from typhoid, the same illness that took his father. This caused another rift between her and Victoria as the Queen felt that Bertie’s wife The Princess of Wales should have gotten the praise for nursing him instead of Alice.
The Queen’s cruelty is very obvious in this reply to a letter written two months after Frederick’s death. The Queen was focused on her son Prince Alfred's engagement to the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia (which turned into a disastrous marriage due to Maria’s haughtiness). The Tsar had refused to present his daughter for pre-marriage inspection in England, and instead invited the Queen to meet the family in Germany. Alice supported the suggestion and on the same day that she wrote to the Queen about missing her son, "I am glad you have a little coloured picture of my darling. I feel lower and sadder than ever and miss him so much, so continually..." the Queen coldly wrote to her grieving daughter, "You have entirely taken the Russian side, and I do not think, dear child, that you should tell me...what I ought to do." Not a mention of her dead grandson. Alice once complained to her husband over a letter Victoria had sent that "made me cry with anger...I wish I were dead and it probably will not be too long before I give Mama that pleasure." And yet, all her letters to her mother were full of loving and caring comments.
What I find interesting about reading old letters is how much things have changed and how much they hadn’t. She was a devoted mother who didn’t believe that her children should be seen and not heard and they were a large part of her life. She was one of the few royals who breastfeed, which did not sit well with her mother, and spent a large part of the day playing with them.
What I find odd is the amount of traveling the royals did. Everywhere that Alice went there were other relatives there to visit with. It appears that the Victorians were constantly at one bath or another drinking the waters for their health and it seems like they were always unhealthy. Many of her letters went into great detail of her ailments which were probably due to the cold, damp houses she lived in and the restrictive clothing they were all forced to wear. Her chief complaint was suffering from the heat. I think I’d have issues too if I had to wear a layers of clothing and a corset all day! But what also amazes me is the amount of activity they did in those restrictive clothing. To get to the baths was not easy. They had to go over the Alps in rickety coaches for days. Other times they were hiking for hours in the Alps in long dresses and parasols. I can’t do that with just wearing a t-shirt and shorts!
Another thing that fascinates me about the royals during this time period at the end of the 1800s is how they could separate family from politics. The complaints were always about the people not the head of the country. Prior to World War I there were a lot of minor but bloody wars in Europe. Bismarck was making war on the minor duchies in his quest to unify Germany and France, Austria and Germany were constantly at each other’s throats. England’s wars were mainly in the colonies at the time but she got involved in a few in Europe. So many times, siblings and cousins were fighting each other on opposite sides of a war. When Prussia went to war with Austria, Hesse sided with Austria. Alice’s sister was married to the Crown Prince of Prussia at the time and yet, there were loving letter sent back and forth between the sisters and family information passed through their mother. Alice blamed Bismarck, not her sister’s in-laws for the fighting. After the war the sisters visited each other as if nothing happened and Alice was on very good terms with Vicky’s in-laws, the King and Queen of Prussia. Although Alice was a bit upset when Vicky visited the site where many Hessian soldiers were killed soon after the war to lay a wreath for the Prussian victory. Later, Alice’s husband was an officer in the Prussian army and had no problem being under Prussian rule when he became the Grand Duke. The same with their Russian relations, Victoria didn’t trust the Russians and yet Alice’s husband was the nephew of the Empress of Russia. Alice made a few scathing comments about the Russian troops during a war they were involved in but did not connect the dots to her relatives. It was always the people. They also didn’t trust the French but Victoria was good friends with Emperor Napoleon II and let him and his wife live out their exile in England at her expense.
In all it was a very interesting book to read because it showed how, even though they were royals who lived more than a century ago, their lives was not that much different than ours in that they worried about their children, husband and other routine things. What was different was the amount of death they had to deal with because there was no antibiotics even the flu could kill someone and they had to deal with diseases we don’t see any more like scarlet fever and typhoid. It wasn’t uncommon for a family to lose a few children over the years. I’m glad that we don’t have to deal with that anymore.
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