Birth of Princess Alice of the United Kingdom
Birth of Princess Alice of the United Kingdom
Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, was born on 25th April 1843, at Buckingham Palace.
She was the third child & second daughter of Queen Victoria & Prince Albert.
When her father Prince Albert, became fatally ill in December 1861, it was Princess Alice who nursed him until his death.
When Albert died, Queen Victoria entered a period of intense mourning, and Alice spent the next six months acting as her mother’s unofficial secretary.
Alice became Her Royal Highness Princess Louis of Hesse and by Rhine following her marriage to Prince Louis of Hesse.
Tragedy befell Alice on 29th May 1873, when her youngest & favourite son, Friedrich, called “Frittie”, died after falling 20 feet from a window.
Frittie suffered from haemophilia, and although he regained consciousness, the internal bleeding could not be stopped.
After Frittie’s death, Alice attached herself more closely to her only surviving son Ernest, & her newborn daughter Marie.
During this time, relations with her husband deteriorated.
In November 1878, the Grand Ducal household fell ill with diphtheria.
Alice’s eldest daughter Victoria was the first to fall ill, complaining of a stiff neck in the evening of 5th November.
Diphtheria was diagnosed the following morning.
The disease quickly spread to Alice’s children Alix, Marie, Irene, & Ernest.
Marie became seriously ill on 15th November, and Alice was called to her bedside, but by the time she arrived, Marie had choked to death.
A distraught Alice wrote to her Mama Queen Victoria, that the “pain is beyond words”.
Alice kept the news of Marie’s death secret from her children for several weeks, but she finally told Ernest in early December.
His reaction was even worse than she had anticipated; at first he refused to believe it.
As he sat up crying, Alice broke her rule about physical contact with the ill, reached in and comforting her son, she gave him a kiss….
On 14th December 1878, on the anniversary of her father’s death, Princess Alice became seriously ill with the diphtheria caught from her son.
Her last words were “dear Papa”, and she fell unconscious, and passed away at 8.30am.
Alice was just 35.
Alice was buried on 18th December 1878 at the Grand Ducal mausoleum at Rosenhöhe outside Darmstadt, with the Union Flag draped over her coffin.
She was the first child of Queen Victoria’s to die – with her mother outliving her by more than 20 years.
Shocked by grief, Victoria wrote to her eldest daughter, Princess Victoria:
“My precious child, who stood by me and upheld me
seventeen years ago on the same day taken, and by
such an awful and fearful disease…
She had darling Papa’s nature, and much of his
self-sacrificing character and fearless and entire
devotion to duty!”
Alice’s descendants went on to play significant roles in world history.
Her fourth daughter Alix, married Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, passing her mother’s gene for haemophilia on to her only son, the Tsarevich Alexei.
Alice’s second daughter Elizabeth, married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia.
She became a nun after his assassination in 1905, by the Bolsheviks – the day after the former tsar and tsaritsa.
Louis Mountbatten, the son of Alice’s eldest daughter Victoria, was the last Viceroy of India.
He was assassinated by the IRA in 1979.
Prince Philip of Greece her great-grandson, married Elizabeth II.