Victoria’s Grandchildren: Victoria Melita

Princess Victoria Melita...such a pretty, euphonious name. Unfortunately, it was probably one of the only euphonious things in an often tumultuous life.

Victoria Melita, nicknamed “Ducky”, was born in 1876, the third child of Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son, and his wife Marie, daughter of Tsar Alexander II of Russia. She was also the younger sister of the future Queen Marie of Romania, whom we have already met. She was born while her father, Queen Victoria’s second son Alfred, was stationed in Malta with the Royal Navy--hence the unusual second name. Unlike her sister Marie, Ducky seems to have been of a darker, more brooding, and often tempestuous temperament, but despite their differences, the sisters were close and would remain so throughout their lives...even when Marie was married off to Ferdinand of Romania in 1893 at 17.

Marriage for Ducky was not far behind. Queen Victoria had already decided that this grand-daughter would make the perfect wife for another of her grandchildren, Ernest, the new Grand Duke of Hesse and son of her daughter Princess Alice. Although Ernest and Ducky were great chums, Ducky had already fallen hard for another cousin, Grand Duke Kirill of Russia...but neither her grandmother or mother would hear of such a match...and though Ducky’s mother was not in favor, the wedding took place in 1894, an event almost overshadowed by the announcement of the engagement of the groom’s sister, Alix, to Nicholas of Russia.

Unfortunately, the marriage was doomed from the start. Ernest was homosexual, and though Ducky gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, before their first anniversary, they quickly arranged to live as much apart from each other as possible. A visit to Russia in 1896 for Alix and Nicholas’ coronation threw her back into the company of Grand Duke Kirill...and the pair fell in love. Although Ducky desperately wanted a divorce, her grandmother wouldn’t hear of it...and so Ducky and Ernest lived unhappily, occasionally attempting to reconcile, until the old Queen’s death in January 1901. By December, the pair had divorced, to the shock and horror of the royal families of Europe.

Ducky lived quietly with her mother for the next few years, but Kirill was never far from her mind...and in 1905, they married quietly in Germany, much to the fury of the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia (who, after all, was Ernest’s sister). Kirill was stripped of his imperial allowance and naval titles, and the couple went to live quietly in Paris. Only in 1910, when Kirill became third in line to the Russian throne, were they allowed to come back to Russia.

The new Grand Duchess took to her new life until revolution ended the monarchy in 1917. Ducky and Kirill and their children, including a newborn son, managed to flee to Finland, then after the end of WWI, to Germany. Now the pretenders to the defunct Russian throne, they remained in Germany until the mid-twenties, then settled in France, where they lived a very ordinary life, playing golf and bridge with their neighbors, while still insisting on being referred to as Tsar and Tsarina. Ducky died in 1936 after a stroke, and Kirill followed in 1938. Their descendents still to this day still claim their imperial titles.

Victoria’s Grandchildren: Queen Ena of Spain

Princess Victoria Eugenie Julia Ena was born at Queen Victoria’s beloved Balmoral Palace in Scotland on October 24, 1887. One can only hope that the Queen, who notoriously did not allow bedrooms at Balmoral to be heated above 60° F, made an exception for the baby’s mother!

As daughter of the Queen’s stay-at-home daughter Princess Beatrice and her husband, Prince Henry of Battenberg, little Ena (as she was called—the name is Scots Gaelic, in honor of her place of birth) and her three brothers grew up in close proximity to the Queen (whom they called “Gangan”), who doted upon them and was almost a second mother to them. This was a good thing: just like her grandmother and mother, Ena lost her father at an early age when he joined the Ashanti Expedition in 1896 and died of typhoid en route to Africa.

Ena grew into a pretty, golden-haired girl; her uncle, King Edward, was very fond of her as well and took an interest in her future. Her matrimonial possibilities were slightly tarnished; her father was not of royal blood as his mother had been a commoner. But that didn’t stop the young King Alfonso XIII of Spain from being very interested indeed when he met Ena on a visit to England in 1905. Alfonso was on the hunt for a bride; when his first choice, Princess Patricia of Connaught, another granddaughter of Victoria, turned him down, he set his sights on Ena. She accepted his proposal in January 1906, began to prepare herself to convert to Roman Catholicism (which angered both English Protestant extremists and Spanish Catholic extremists), and set herself to falling in love with her not-very-prepossessing but very royal husband-to-be.

Unfortunately, it would not be a happy marriage. Ena’s wedding was nearly destroyed—literally—by an anarchist’s bomb; her wedding dress was soaked with the blood of her murdered guards. Within a year she bore a son and heir for Spain; but it was quickly found that the baby boy was a hemophiliac, as were several of Queen Victoria’s grandsons. The knowledge soured the relationship between Ena and Alfonso, and though she went on to bear him six more children (one was sadly a stillbirth), they were never again close and Alfonso became serially unfaithful. Also sadly, the Spanish people never took to their calm, phlegmatic, very British queen, who held herself as befit a granddaughter of Queen Victoria...but who never appealed to the dramatic Spanish temperament. Though she worked tirelessly on behalf of the Spanish Red Cross and for other causes such as poor relief and education, she was always regarded with suspicion by most of her subjects.

Moreover, European politics were in turmoil both during and after the first world war, and Spain was no exception; unrest through the twenties finally led to Alfonso’s voluntary exile (though not abdication) in 1931 after national elections swept the anti-monarchy Republicans into power. The family went to France; and soon after Ena and Alfonso separated.

Ena eventually settled in Switzerland after time in England and Italy. Her eldest and youngest sons, both hemophiliacs, died in car crashes in the late 1930s; her husband followed in 1941. Ena’s son Juan was the theoretical king of Spain, but the country itself remained firmly in the grip of Generalissimo Franco. Ena returned to Spain only once, a year before her death, to attend the christening of her great-grandson, son of Juan Carlos. She died a year later in spring of 1969, exactly 38 years to the day that she’d left Spain...but on her visit, she was gratified to be rapturously received by the Spanish people as La Reina...an acclamation she never received. Sadly, she didn’t live to see Franco declare her grandson Juan Carlos as his successor, nor to see him become King Juan Carlos I in 1975.

Victoria’s Grandchildren: Empress Alexandra of Russia

Along with Kaiser Wilhelm, Empress Alexandra of Russia is probably the most famous of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren...as well as one of the most tragic.

She was born in Darmstadt on June 6, 1872, the sixth child of Princess Alice and Grand Duke Louis of Hesse, and christened Victoria Alix Helena Louisa Beatrice (though her family nicknames were Alicky or Sunny, because of her cheerful disposition). The Hesse household was a close one; Princess Alice was a loving, involved mother who paid close attention to her children’s upbringing...until tragedy struck in 1878, when diphtheria raged through the ducal house, killing Alicky’s younger sister Marie...and her mother as well. Six year old Sunny underwent a radical personality change as a result, becoming withdrawn and brooding and able to relax only with her closest family members.

Louis loved his children, but he was a soldier and could not replicate his late wife’s care. So the Hesse children began to spend a great deal of time in England at their grandmother’s or various aunts and uncles’ houses. The Queen took a deep interest in their lives, minutely directing their education and upbringing. The Hesse girls grew to be attractive young woman, especially Alix, who drew the matrimonial attention of not only her cousin, the Duke of Clarence (and son of Bertie, Prince of Wales) but also of Ferdinand of Roumania. Both were refused, for Alix was in love with yet another cousin, Nicholas, Tsarevitch of Russia.

But when Nicky proposed, Alix refused, for marrying him would mean converting to the Russian Orthodox church and giving up her Lutheran faith. She suffered agonies of conscience, madly in love yet unable to say yes, until at her brother’s wedding in 1894, with most of the crowned heads of Europe gathered for the event, she relented. Alix and Nicky married just months later, following the death of Nicky’s father, Tsar Alexander III. The orphaned princess from a tiny German principality became Empress of Russia at the age of 22...and took the first steps on the road that would lead to tragedy 23 years later.

Life was difficult for Alix; she remained painfully shy and withdrawn in a country that admired showmanship and appearance. She kept as isolated as she could from the free-wheeling, licentious court and encouraged Nicky to withdraw too, absorbing herself in her children and a small number of trusted friends and, increasingly (and ironically in light of her initial reluctance) in religion. Nicky, kindly but almost painfully weak-willed, followed her lead. Multiple pregnancies (not only the birth of her four daughters and son, but miscarriages as well) undermined her health, and in time she became a semi-invalid, shutting herself away from public view (much as Queen Victoria had after Prince Albert’s death. Coincidence?) Her melancholy nature led her to the mystical end of the Orthodox church; the hemophilia of her long-awaited son pushed her further into withdrawal and religion, including her reliance on an uncouth peasant priest named Grigori Rasputin, who had an uncanny ability to ease her hemophiliac son’s suffering.

Unfortunately, the deteriorating political situation in Russia inspired her to encourage her husband to take a stand and oppose those of his ministers who wanted to curtail imperial powers and introduce some degree of democracy into government. The outbreak of World War I rang the death peal of many monarchies in Europe, Russia’s included. Nicholas abdicated in March 1917, making his younger brother Michael the actual last Tsar. The royal family were placed under house arrest; a plan to send them to a life of exile in England was discussed, nothing came of it. They were shuffled from one place to another as differing faction battled for control of Russia; in the fall the Bolsheviks gained the upper hand. Nicky and Alix were temporarily separated from their family, but reunited with them several weeks later near the city of Ekaterinburg. Their living conditions grew grimmer with each move; by the time of their stay in Ekaterinburg, they had little left and only a servant or two willing to stay with them.

In July 1918, with different factions still struggling for power in Russia, the Bolsheviks who held Nicky and Alix and their family decided that they were too dangerous to be left alive. The entire family—22 year old Olga, 20 year old Tatiana, 19 year old Marie, 17 year old Anastasia, and 14 year old Alexei—were horribly executed in the cellar of their house...on the site of which today stands a cathedral. The devout Alix and Nicky, as well as their children, were made saints in the Orthodox Church.

Victoria’s Grandchildren: Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein

So far, the grandchildren of Queen Victoria that we’ve met have lived fairly dramatic lives as heads of state or embroiled in tumultuous times. But some of them lived much quieter, though in their own way, equally dramatic existences. One of those was Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein.

Despite her Germanic sounding title, Marie Louise (christened Franziska Josepha Louise Augusta Marie Christina Helena) was born and raised in England, the fourth and last surviving child of Princess Helena and her husband, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, who (as you may recall) had consented to stay in England so that the Queen would not lose the services of Helena as a sort of glorified secretary. And so Marie Louise (born August 12, 1872) and her two older brothers and older sister Helena Victoria (called Thora--that's the two of them at right) grew up at Cumberland Lodge near Windsor, with the typical privileged upbringing of the time and an education focusing on speaking French and German nicely and a smattering of history and literature, with more focus on dancing, sketching, and deportment. There were visits to country houses, to Balmoral and Osborne to stay with Grandmama the Queen and to various relations in royal families around Europe—Marie Louise was especially close to her cousin Alix of Hesse, who would one day become the last Tsarina of Russia.

And then in 1889 when she was eighteen, Marie Louise went to Berlin for yet another cousin’s wedding and met a tall, handsome young cavalry officer, Prince Aribert of Anhalt. To the bedazzled girl’s delight he paid her a great deal of flattering attention, and she fell head over heels in love. Though her cousin Emperor Wilhelm tried to fix her up with another royal suitor, Ferdinand of Roumania (who would go on to marry another English Marie), Marie Louise had made up her mind, and Wilhelm good-naturedly arranged matters so that Aribert proposed the following year. They were married in July 1891.

Anhalt was a not-terribly important duchy in east-central Germany, and was delighted to get a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria (and cousin of Emperor William) as its future duchess. Marie Louise loved her new mother-in-law and was fond of her father-in-law the Duke, though she regarded him as not very bright. Etiquette was very strict in her new home and throughout Germany, which rather chafed the lively young woman, accustomed to a more relaxed family life at home in Cumberland Lodge. She took refuge in travel, sometimes with Aribert and sometimes without, and took extended visits to Italy, Tunis, and Algiers. That she traveled without Aribert became more and more common: almost from their wedding day, Aribert always seemed busy elsewhere, and weeks might pass without their seeing each other. It’s hardly surprising that the couple had no children, which might have reconciled Marie Louise to her loneliness—instead, she continued to travel and busy herself with her network of friends (and no, that did not include any romantic entanglements. Marie Louise remained a faithful wife.) So when on her doctor’s orders she took a long sea voyage to visit the United States and Canada, she went only with her lady-in-waiting…and was surprised to receive a curt telegram in Ottawa from her father-in-law, ordering her home at once. It was rapidly followed by one from Queen Victoria reading, “Tell my granddaughter to come home to me. VR.”

Marie Louise went home to Grandmama—and found out to her shock that in her absence, her father-in-law had declared her marriage to Aribert annulled, because Aribert felt he could no longer live with her. There has been speculation that he was perhaps gay, but no one will ever know…and now, for all intents, poor Marie Louise was once again single. Though legally her marriage had been dissolved, Marie Louise still regarded herself as a married woman in the eyes of the church, and never remarried—nor did Aribert.

And that was that. She moved home again, continued to travel extensively (that's her at right on a trip to the Gold Coast in the 1920s), took up enameling and jewelry making as a hobby, and gave generously of her time to various charitable endeavors, including nursing and hospital work, a home for lepers, a Girls’ Club in a poor section of London, and other poor relief projects. She also headed up the doll house project for her childhood friend, Queen Mary. After her parents’ deaths, she and Thora (who never married) lived together, busy with their friends and family and charitable activities. Marie Louise lived long enough to see the present queen, Elizabeth, crowned in 1953, published a charming memoir called My Memories of Six Reigns, and died in 1956.

Victoria’s Grandchildren, Part 2: Ella of Russia

Queen Victoria was not fond of Russia, despite having fallen a little in love with the young Tsarevitch Alexander (later Tsar Alexander II) when he paid a state visit to the young queen’s court in 1838 (they danced a great deal, which must have been a sight with the queen so petite and tsarevitch so tall). But two of her favorite grandchildren would marry Alexander’s son and grandson…with disastrous outcomes.

Elizabeth Alexandra Louise Alice was born on November 1, 1864, the second child and second daughter of Princess Alice, Victoria’s second daughter, and her husband, Prince Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine. Princess Alice was a devoted mother to her family, which eventually numbered seven, and little Elizabeth’s (her nickname in the family was “Ella”) life up to her early teens was a happy one…until the unexpected and shocking death of first a younger sister, and then her mother, during a diphtheria outbreak in 1878.

Queen Victoria came to the rescue, and from then on Ella and her remaining brother and sisters spend at least as much time in England living with their grandmother as they did in Hesse, becoming especially close to their uncle Leopold, Victoria’s youngest son and a partial invalid who lived with his mother well into his twenties.

Ella grew in, by all accounts, a lovely young woman. All princesses are supposed to be beautiful, but in her case, it actually seems to have been true: she had delicate features, a porcelain complexion, and a graceful, slender figure. Royal suitors began to flock around her after she made her debut, including her cousin Wilhelm, who became quite besotted with her but whom Ella politely refused. Instead, she eventually fell for a very different suitor: Grand Duke Sergei Romanov, son of Tsar Alexander II and his wife, a princess from Hesse-Darmstadt. Sergei was an enigmatic figure: educated and cultured, yet stiff and reserved and with a difficult temper. But he seems to have been fond of his young wife (they married in 1884, when Ella was not quite yet twenty), and the marriage, if not a blissfully happy one, was yet a content one.

Ella threw herself into her new country, studying Russian language and history diligently as a young bride and eventually converting to the Russian Orthodox faith, which she embraced wholeheartedly (much to the dismay of most of her staunchly Protestant family. She and Sergei did not have children, though they did semi-adopt the children of one of Sergei’s brothers, who had been exiled.

Sergei was close to his brother, Tsar Alexander III, and accepted the role of Governor of Moscow, where his stiff, unbending attitude and deep conservatism made him enemies. He remained an influential advisor to his nephew, Tsar Nicholas II, who came to the throne in 1894 (at the same time that he married Ella’s younger sister, Alix of Hesse), and grew to be a deeply hated man…so much so that in 1905, as unrest grew in Russia in the wake of the humiliating Russo-Japanese War, Sergei was assassinated by a revolutionary’s bomb tossed into his carriage in the streets of Moscow.

A devastated Ella slowly began to draw away from her old life at court…and in 1909, withdrew even more, giving away some of her fabulous art and jewelry collection to relatives and selling the remainder, then using the proceeds to buy an estate on the Moscow River. Here she founded a religious order, a convent dedicated to Saints Mary and Martha. She became its abbess, taking the veil and dedicating herself to a life of charity, something she’d learned at the feet of her late mother: Princess Alice had been deeply interested in improving the nursing profession and providing health care for the poor, and in turn her daughter’s new enterprise included a large charity hospital and outreach to the poor of Moscow.

But despite the good work she accomplished for the poor of her adopted land, Ella was never accepted by a certain segment…and it was that segment that came into power with the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the rise of the Bolshevik party. They regarded her as a foreigner and a German sympathizer, and she was arrested early in 1918 and shuttled from location to location, depending on the whim of her captors and the fortunes of the varies parties struggling for power in Russia in those chaotic months. She eventually wound up in Alapaevsk, a town in the Ural Mountains, along with a few other members and connections of the Romanov family. In July, members of Lenin’s secret police, Cheka, came to Alapaevsk with orders to execute the prisoners. They were beaten and thrown down a mine shaft, but somehow survived this brutal treatment until desperate Cheka operatives threw hand grenades into the mine and finally set fire to it.

However, a few months later her body was found and removed from the mine, then smuggled out of Russia for burial in Jerusalem. Sixty-three years later, Queen Victoria’s pretty grand-daughter was canonized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Victoria’s Grandchildren, Part 1: Kaiser Wilhelm II

Queen Victoria’s most famous (or perhaps infamous) grandchild was probably her first one, son of eldest daughter Vicky and her husband Fritz (Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia). I am speaking, of course, of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who led his country into the maelstrom of World War I, and lost his throne as a result.

Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert was born on January 27, 1859, in Berlin. It was a long and difficult labor for his 18-year-old mother; a clumsy delivery injured the baby’s left arm, which would be weak and withered his entire life. Some historians conjecture that his difficult birth (he was not breathing and had to be rubbed and slapped into drawing breath) and physical imperfection had a profound effect on the boy; from an early age it was noted that he was clever but hyperactive, aggressive and emotionally unstable.

Willy’s parents loved him dearly (that's him with his father on a visit to Balmoral in 1863), but few of the decisions around the boy’s upbringing were left to Vicky and Fritz. As third in line to the throne of Prussia (and eventually, to the imperial throne of Germany), Willy’s care and education were dictated by his grandfather, the arch-conservative Wilhelm, and indirectly by his Grandfather’s chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who did not want the child influenced by Fritz’s and especially Vicky’s well-known liberalism. Nor was Vicky necessarily the best parent of a difficult child: herself the child of hypercritical parents, Vicky in turn was a hypercritical mother. Trapped between her and the sycophantic courtiers who surrounded him, there is little wonder that Willy had a deeply confused relationship with her that lasted until her death. He respected his father’s sterling record as a soldier, but it was his reactionary grandfather he idolized, and his grandfather’s reactionary view of the world he adopted…though all his life he was fascinated by his English grandmother, Queen Victoria, and by England’s global domination (which he felt should have belonged to Germany).

The Prussian royal family was a strongly military one, and Willy was no exception. Though he spent a few years dabbling at Bonn University (where most of his time was spent at the Borussa, the university’s most exclusive drinking and dueling club), Willy’s main love was the army, in which he was enrolled at age 18; it seems, however, that he was more concerned with the niceties of uniforms and decorations than of actual military science. An Englishwoman who had married into a prominent German family described him as “a high spirited, sensitive boy who had a ready brain and a quick but not profound intelligence…He always thought he knew everything and no one dared to tell him he was sometimes wrong. He hated to be told the truth and seldom, perhaps, never, forgave those who insisted on telling him.”

At the age of 22 he married a distant cousin, Augusta Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sondersburg-Glucksburg, a rather lackluster young woman who worshipped Willy and obeyed him unquestioningly. They had seven children together—six sons and a daughter.

In 1888, his grandfather Wilhelm I died, to be followed only 99 days later by his father Fritz, who died of throat cancer...and at age 29, Willy became Emperor Wilhelm II. Though he had long been a disciple of his grandfather’s chancellor, Bismarck, a few short years later he dismissed Bismarck to rule on his own, with weak chancellors to serve as yesmen.

Willy’s obsession with England continued; he longed to have a navy and colonial possessions to rival England’s and spent the next decades trying to building both up, to England’s dismay. He also became increasingly paranoid, sure that England, in the form of his uncle, Edward VII, was out to grind him and Germany into the dust. It was this paranoia, combined with the militarism of the Prussian ruling class, that would lead down the road to the first world war.

This is, necessarily, a very brief overview of a complex person and complicated times. For a deeper and fascinating (and very readable!) look at Willy’s life and how it led to the war, I highly recommend Miranda Carter’s George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I. Happy reading!