Throughout the mid-1870s it was clear to Princess Alice that the effort she had put into her children’s upbringing had proved worthwhile. High-spirited and boisterous as they were, she confidently informed her mother, that they were also considerate, well-behaved and ‘very unspoilt in their tastes, and simple and quiet children, which I think is of the greatest importance.’ While the younger girls, Irène, Alix and May remained in the nursery in the charge of a kindly English nanny, Mary Anne Orchard (‘Orchie’), their elder sisters, Victoria and Ella were making rapid progress in the schoolroom. Victoria’s enthusiasm for learning was undiminished and her mother was soon observing that she was ‘immensely grown and her figure is forming. She is changing so much - beginning to leave the child and grow into the girl.’
For Victoria, on the brink of adolescence, life in Darmstadt was also on the brink of change. In March 1877 the death of Louis’ father cast a cloud over the New Palace and brought him one step nearer to inheriting responsibility for the Grand Duchy. A month later, the gloom was broken by a visit from ‘Aunt’ Vicky and the Hohenzollern cousins - an event which the Hessian princesses had anticipated with excitement. It was some time since they had met and they ‘wished they knew [their cousins] better’ but it not did not take long to realize that Charlotte and Willy were no more companionable now that they had been in seven and a half years earlier in Cannes.
With a sudden air of sophistication, Charlotte strolled flirtatiously through the New Palace, puffing away at her cigarettes; her show of worldly-wisdom and boasts of her imminent marriage making her appear far older than her sixteen years. Willy, a student at the University of Bonn, was as arrogant and insufferable as ever and, as they played tennis or boated on the lake, twelve-year-old Ella was more unnerved than flattered by his sudden, excessive attention and promises that he would visit more often.
Barely had the Prussians left, when Alice and Louis were urgently summoned to Seeheim where Louis’ uncle, Grand Duke Louis III was dangerously ill. With great trepidation they set out from Darmstadt, fearing the worst:
“I am so dreading everything,” Alice wrote to the Queen, “and above all the responsibility of being the first in everything and people are not being ‘bienveillant.’”
By the time they reached Seeheim the eccentric old man was dead leaving Louis and Alice as the new Grand Duke and Duchess of Hesse-and-by-Rhine. Along with the title and responsibilities came several castles and hunting lodges and for the first time since their marriage they had money to spare. Typically Alice threw herself with greater devotion than ever into her new responsibilities, establishing the ‘Alice Nurses’ and a home for unmarried mothers, and struggling to ease her boyish husband into his new role. The work load was immense and years of childbearing, depression and commitment to her numerous causes frequently left the thirty-four-year-old princess exhausted.
“I have been doing too much lately,” she confessed to her mother that autumn, “and my nerves are beginning to feel the strain, for sleep and appetite are no longer good. Too much is demanded of one; and I have to do with so many things. It is more than my strength can stand in the long run.”
By New Year, 1878, Alice was too exhausted even to travel to Berlin for Charlotte’s wedding•. It was clear that she desperately needed a holiday and so that summer, Louis decided to use his new-found wealth to take the whole family on a Grand Tour of Europe. They paid another visit to Vicky before enjoying a restful cruise through the Baltic with the Duke and Duchess of Baden. When they arrived in England in July, Queen Victoria was delighted by Alice’s ‘truly beautiful children’ but was deeply disturbed by how pale and drawn their mother appeared. She hoped that the fresh sea air at Eastbourne and the Isle of Wight might help restore her vigour but even a month later had to concede that ‘she still looks very weak and delicate & is up to nothing.’
In autumn, when the Hessians had returned home, Alice enjoyed a series of visits from her brothers and sisters, and life appeared to be sinking into its usual routine when suddenly the unthinkable happened. One evening in early November, as Victoria was reading to her sisters she felt a swelling in her throat. What was initially believed to be a cold or mumps was soon diagnosed as diphtheria. One of the great killers of the age, the disease spread rapidly through the family affecting each of the children in turn. Only Ella was spared and, for her own protection, she was sent to stay with her paternal grandmother in nearby Bessungen. Throughout Hesse prayers were said for the children’s recovery and a series of telegrams flew to England, keeping Queen Victoria informed of their progress and Alice’s increasing anxiety. Night and day she nursed her children, adhering to the doctors’ instructions that to prevent further contagion she must neither touch nor kiss them. In spite of all the precautions the youngest of her daughters, four-year-old May, died in mid-November.
“The pain is beyond words,” Alice telegrammed her mother, “but God’s will be done!”
By now Louis too had contracted diphtheria and a heart-broken Alice had to attend her daughter’s funeral alone. Such was her grief that, having prayed by the tiny coffin, she could not bear to see it carried from the house and watched only through a mirror. The strain was enormous and the reports reaching Queen Victoria caused further alarm:
“Darling Alice’s courage and resignation…are quite wonderful,” she wrote to Vicky at the end of November, “but she looks too dreadfully ill and they all tremble for what will follow! She is so weak.”
Victoria and her father recovered but her younger siblings remained dangerously ill and when Ernie asked daily for reports of May’s progress, his mother could not bring herself to tell him that his little sister had died. Only when he began to improve did she break the sad news. Ernie was so distraught that Princess Alice could restrain herself no longer and, disregarding all precautions, took him in her arms to kiss him. Within days she too, had succumbed to the disease.
As soon as the news of Alice’s illness reached England, Queen Victoria dispatched her own doctor, William Jenner, to Darmstadt but, worn out by weeks of worry and sorrow, the princess had no strength left to fight.
“At times,” wrote her sister, Lenchen, “she spoke in a most touching manner about her household, also enquiring kindly after poor and sick people in the town. Then followed hours of great prostration.”
Whispering her final instructions for her children’s upbringing, she lapsed into semi-consciousness and died at the age of thirty-five on Saturday 14th December 1878 - the seventeenth anniversary of Prince Albert’s death. Her final words were a whispered, ‘Dear Papa!’
As the rest of the family gradually recovered, Ella returned to Darmstadt to find the household in mourning:
“It was a terribly sad meeting, no one daring to speak of what was uppermost in their thoughts. Poor Papa looked dreadfully miserable - Ernie very pale but otherwise calm, he does not realize it yet, as none of us can do yet. It seems like a horrible dream. Would that it were.”
From an upstairs window, the girls, clothed in black mourning, watched their mother’s coffin draped in the British flag, carried through the streets of Darmstadt, followed by their father, Uncle Leo, Uncle Christian, Uncle Bertie and crowds of weeping Hessians. Messages of condolence poured in from all over the world - from Prussia to Russia, and from Canada to England, where a devastated Queen wrote of her terrible grief at the loss of her ‘dear, talented, distinguished, tender-hearted, noble-minded, sweet child.’ All past disagreements forgotten, in a letter to Vicky she gave Alice the greatest accolade of all - a comparison with her angelic father:
“She had darling Papa’s nature, and much of his self-sacrificing character and fearless and entire devotion to duty!” ’
The only sour note came from Berlin where the heartless Queen Augusta callously gloated that Alice’s death had been a blessing since, had she lived, she would have turned her children into atheists .
Noticeable for her absence among the mourners in Darmstadt was Alice’s closest sister and confidant. To Vicky’s great sorrow, her father-in-law, the Kaiser, fearing she might bring the contagion back to Berlin, forbade her to go to Hesse for the funeral. In the event, his precautions proved futile. Within months, the epidemic spread through Prussia, claiming Vicky’s son, eleven-year-old Waldemar, among its victims.
Waldemar’s illness, coming so soon after the death of Alice and May, was a great blow to his sisters. The brightest and most loveable of the Hohenzollern brothers, his cheerful good nature had been an endless source of amusement for all the family. Now, only too aware of the fate of their aunt and cousin in Darmstadt, the girls could only wait and pray.
The Crown Princess, nursing her son herself, adopted all the precautions that Alice had taken. She wore protective clothing, bathed him in carbolic and sprayed herself before leaving the room. For a while he seemed to be improving: ‘The doctors feel quite cheerful about him,’ she told her mother on the 26th March, ‘but of course all cause for anxiety is not over yet!’
The note of caution was well founded. At three-thirty the following morning, Waldemar died. ‘The grief of my parents for the loss of this splendid son was unspeakable;’ wrote Willy, ‘our pain deep and cruel beyond words.’
Even so, the Prussian journalists used the tragedy to further denigrate the Crown Princess. Accusing her of neglecting her children, one newspaper went so far as to state that God had sent her this punishment for her cold-heartedness. At least, as her second son, Henry, now a sailor in the Prussian Navy, hurried home from Hawaii, she could find some consolation in the knowledge that her often-divided family was for once united in grief.
From the moment that Queen Victoria was told of Alice’s death, her heart went out to her Hessian granddaughters.
‘Oh! dear children,’ she wrote at once, ‘dearest beloved Mama is gone to join Grandpapa & your other dear Grandpapa & Frittie & sweet little May where there is no more sorrow or tears or separation …”
For all her complaints about Alice, she knew that she had been a devoted mother whose absence would be keenly felt in the happy Hessian household, and she promised that from now on:
“Poor old Grandmama…will try to be a mother to you.’
When the gloomy Christmas was over and the children were well enough to travel, she invited the family to Osborne for an extended holiday. The sea air, she hoped, might aid their recuperation and the meeting would give her the opportunity to prove that her promise was more than mere words.
In January 1879, when the young princesses arrived with their father and brother on the Isle of Wight, the effects of the loss of Princess Alice were immediately apparent. Victoria, thrust from childhood into the role of mother to her younger siblings, prepared to take over many of the Grand Duchess’s duties and within a short time would adopt many of her charities. Ella, too, had taken to heart her grandmother’s exhortation to be ‘truly worthy of her, to walk in her footsteps - to be unselfish, truthful, humble-minded, simple and try to do all you can for others as she did.’
But it was six-year-old Alix who seemed most deeply affected by the tragedy. The child whose exuberance had earned her the pet name ‘Sunny,’ was suddenly withdrawn and tormented by nightmares. Desperately shy, her reserved manner would often be mistaken for arrogance, and her once cheerful nature gave way to a nervousness that manifested itself in a variety of physical symptoms. Until the horrific end of her tragic life, she would be constantly tortured by thoughts of impending doom.
Queen Victoria, the doyenne of mourners, empathised completely with her bereaved son-in-law, Louis. Her own grief at the death of the Prince Consort had almost led to a nervous breakdown and rendered her incapable of continuing with her duties. Now, seeing Louis wearily wandering around the island where, sixteen years before he had spent his honeymoon, the Queen began to have doubts about his ability to raise adolescent daughters unaided. Girls, she decided, needed a mother and for their sake as much as his own, it was imperative that Louis should remarry as soon as possible.
Of course, the bride would have to be carefully chosen - not only must she be prepared to build on Alice’s foundations, but she must be equally willing to ensure that the girls spent a good deal of time under their grandmother’s supervision in England. Casting her eyes around the Court, it did not take long for the Queen to select an ideal candidate - her own youngest daughter Princess Beatrice.
Since Beatrice was only five years older than her eldest Hessian niece, and twenty-one years younger than her prospective groom, the suggestion was hardly appealing. Nor had Louis ever shown the least romantic interest in Beatrice and it must have come as a relief to them both to discover that the Church of England forbade marriage between a brother and sister-in-law. Aggrieved that her scheme had been thwarted, Queen Victoria pompously suggested that the rule could be altered, but her proposal was tactfully declined and grudgingly she had to abandon the plan. Beatrice remained at home with her mother and, in time, Louis consoled himself with a mistress - a Polish divorcée named Alexandrine de Kolomine - and a new hunting lodge at Wolfsgarten, about an hour’s drive from Darmstadt.
In time Wolfsgarten became the scene of many family reunions and holidays as cousins from all over Europe came to visit.
“The Schloss was surrounded by a collection of one-storied houses forming a square…” wrote Marie Louise, “..In the centre of this square was a small fountain where we used to go and dabble our hands and to catch the goldfish.”
Before the Hessians returned to Darmstadt at the end of February, the Queen appointed them a new governess who had strict instructions to keep her informed of every detail of their progress and development. Uncle Leopold joined them on their homeward journey and, after a break of several weeks at the new hunting lodge, Wolfsgarten, they returned the New Palace to face the reality of life without Princess Alice.
“The first months after her mother’s death were untold misery and loneliness for Princess Alix,” wrote Baroness Buxhoeveden, “[she] long afterwards remembered those deadly sad months when, small and lonely, she sat… in the nursery, trying to play with new and unfamiliar toys (all her old ones were burned or being disinfected)…The two elder Princesses tried to take their mother’s place as their father’s companions, and were constantly with him. The sixteen-year-old Princess Victoria looked after her brother and sisters, and acted as mistress of the house.”
At least they could rely on the unwavering support of the Queen who had by no means forgotten her promise to ‘be a mother’ to them. She wrote regularly to Victoria with instructions to pass on to her sisters. The pages were filled with assurances of her affection and practical guidance on all manner of subjects. In one letter she could advise them to ‘remember at dinnernot to talk too much and too loud and especially not across the table’ before reminding them of the necessity of hard work, a sensible diet and making suggestions about their choice of religious reading.
The Queen was particularly sensitive to Victoria’s position as the eldest child and frequently urged her to ensure that her younger siblings did not neglect their lessons - particularly Ernie who, according to his tutor, was becoming rather lazy. Not content to watch their progress from a distance, she encouraged other members of the family, particularly Lenchen and Leo, to make regular visits to Darmstadt and each year she invited the Hessians for extended holidays in England where her affection and admiration for each of them deepened. Victoria’s good sense and intelligence constantly impressed her; Irène was ‘a dear good child’, Alix was beautiful beyond words and Ella:
“Is sweet, sensible and also very intelligent and most lovely – indeed I rarely saw a more lovely girl and so loving and affectionate and with such charming manners.”
When it came to considering the girls’ future, the Queen was equally determined to intervene. In 1880 she wrote to Victoria, warning her not to rush into marriage ‘in the German fashion’ and yet she herself was already reviewing prospective husbands for the young princesses. It had come as pleasant news to the Queen to hear from Aunt Vicky that while Henry of Prussia was displaying a marked affection for Irène, his twenty-year-old brother Willy was paying a great deal of attention to her elder sisters. He launched Victoria on her lifelong addiction to cigarettes (no doubt concealing the fact from his mother and grandmother, both of whom detested the habit), but was still more attentive to Ella. In recent months he had been making regular excursions from Bonn to Darmstadt and before long, in his typically impulsive fashion he was declaring his love for his pretty young cousin.
Vicky was pleased to hear it. During his early adolescence, alternating between despising and adoring his English mother, Willy had developed an unhealthy fixation with her and had taken to writing her letters filled with passionate descriptions of his dreams about her. While his mother made little of his strange obsession, she was relieved to discover that had fallen in love with someone eminently more suitable. Queen Victoria, too, was elated - who better to calm the reckless boy than his gentle cousin, Ella?
Fourteen-year-old Ella was aghast. More horrified than thrilled by his overbearing attention, she confessed to Victoria that she thought him ‘absolutely horrid.’ Yet she was too polite to be openly rude to him and the more she demurred, the greater became his ardour. He followed her everywhere, hanging on her words, gazing at her photograph and writing her romantic poems. But Ella was not to be swayed and when at last Willy realised that his suit was hopeless, he could not forgive her. Even years later he could hardly bare to remain in the same room as her, but to the end of his life he kept her photograph beside that of his beautiful Aunt Alix, Princess of Wales, on his desk.
For Willy’s paternal grandmother, Queen Augusta, Ella’s refusal was seen as a personal insult for which there was no excuse. In response she voiced loud criticisms of Alice’s daughters and on one occasional even snubbed them in public. Queen Victoria, on the other hand, though equally disappointed to the extent that years later she would sigh when she thought of ‘what might have been,’ accepted Ella’s decision and consoled herself with the thought that her granddaughter’s Hessian good looks and charming manner were sure to win the attention of several other equally eligible suitors.
With so many children and grandchildren across Europe, it was impossible for the Queen to attend every family celebration but for Princess Alice’s daughters she made an exception. In 1881, she was in Darmstadt for Victoria and Ella’s confirmation - a ceremony that also marked a girl’s entry ‘into society.’ The following year Ella arrived in England for her first ‘season’ and as she accompanied her grandmother to the theatre and ballet, British newspapers were eagerly speculating on the marriage prospects of the beautiful princess. Aware of the dangers facing stunning but naïve and motherless young women, the Queen advised them not to mix too freely with young people outside the family and was gratified when Victoria replied that she and Ella were content in each other’s company, enjoying the delights of the opera at Wolfsgarten and attending to their mother’s charities, and considered themselves too young to attend balls. Victoria, as tomboyish as ever, preferred galloping apace on fast horses and watching, or even to her grandmother’s horror, participating in the shoot, to consider a future outside Darmstadt. But, in spite of their repeated reassurances, it was clear to Queen Victoria that it could not be long before such beautiful girls would be receiving proposals of marriage.
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