ON THIS DAY: PRINCESS ALICE – WHO MARRIED AT OSBORNE AND HONEYMOONED IN RYDE – DIED 145 YEARS AGO TODAY

Princess Alice – reputedly Queen Victoria’s prettiest daughter – died in Darmstadt, Germany on 14th December 1878. The 3rd child and 2nd daughter of Victoria, Alice was the 1st of her 9 children to die at the comparatively young age of 35. It was the birth of Alice in 1843 that prompted Queen Victoria and her husband Albert to purchase Osborne House as a larger family home, as Buckingham Palace was not equipped with the private apartments the growing Royal Family required. Alice was considered the most beautiful of Victoria’s 5 daughters. Her older sister Vicky once sent a photograph to their mother with the following comment:

“The ugly sister & the pretty one (the 1st of course myself).”

Alice became the family caregiver. In 1861, she nursed the Queen Mother (also named Victoria) through her final illness. Tragically, that very same year, she was at her father Albert’s bedside when he died. Following the death of Prince Albert, Alice took on many of her mother’s duties, as the Queen was distraught at being widowed. Alice married Prince Louis of Hesse in 1862 in the dining room of Osborne House, which had been converted into a temporary chapel. The recently widowed Queen fought back tears throughout the ceremony. Alice was required to wear black mourning clothes both before and after the service.

Queen Victoria remarked to her eldest daughter that the ceremony was “more of a funeral than a wedding”. She also told the poet Lord Tennyson it was “the saddest day I can remember”. Princess Alice honeymooned at St Clare in Ryde, which became first Warner St Clare Holiday Camp and then Harcourt Sands. Now, it is a derelict waste ground. Alice and Louis were initially very happily married. They had 7 children: Victoria, Elizabeth, Irene, Ernest, Friedrich, Alexandra and Marie. Queen Victoria – who was more enamoured with conceiving than nursing her children – was horrified by Alice’s choice to breastfeed. She considered breastfeeding to be an animal function and told her daughter that the ideal wet nurse should be ‘like an animal’ herself. Queen Victoria wrote:

“[A] child can never be as well nursed by a lady of rank and nervous and refined temperament – for the less feeling and more like an animal the wet nurse is, the better for the child.”

The Queen subsequently named a cow in the royal dairy at Barton ‘Alice’ in her honour.

Sadly, Alice passed on her mother’s haemophilia gene to her children and grandchildren. In 1873, her youngest and favourite son Friedrich died from internal bleeding after falling 20ft from a window. Further tragedy followed in 1878 when Alice’s family was struck down by diphtheria. Her daughter Marie choked to death from the deadly disease. Alice caught diphtheria herself by breaking her rule of avoiding physical contact with those afflicted by it when she kissed her surviving son, Ernest. Princess Alice died on 14th December 1878 – on the anniversary of her father Albert’s untimely death. Her final words were “Dear Papa”. Her loss was keenly felt by the nation. The Times wrote:

“The humblest of people felt that they had the kinship of nature with a Princess who was the model of family virtue as a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother.”

Alice’s descendants went on to play major roles in world history. Her daughter Alix married the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II. Unhappily, she passed her mother’s haemophilia gene on to her son, the Tsarevich Alexi. The Russian Royal Family were murdered by Communists in 1918. There is a monument to Alice’s 2nd daughter, Saint Elizabeth, at Jubilee Recreation Ground, East Cowes.

Elizabeth married the Tsar’s younger brother Sergei to become a Grand Duchess. After her husband’s assassination in 1905, she gave away all her worldly goods, devoted herself to good works, and became a nun. Elizabeth was also murdered by Communists in 1918. She was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church and is now known as Holy Martyr Elizabeth Feodorovna. Louis Mountbatten – Governor of the Isle of Wight – was Princess Alice’s grandchild. Princess Alice was the grandmother of Prince Philip – husband of the late Queen Elizabeth II. Princess Alice herself has been commemorated by a memorial in St Mildred’s Church, Whippingham.