"I was amply rewarded and forgot all I had gone through when I heard dearest Albert say, 'It's a fine child, and a girl'"Beatrice Mary Victoria Feodore, 1857-1944. The last of the litter.
The youngest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, she is the connection to the royal family of Spain. The current Spanish monarch is Beatrice's great-grandson.
Queen Victoria didn't want her youngest daughter to get married at all and refused to even discuss it at first. The widower of Beatrice's sister Alice was advanced as a candidate, but nothing came of it. (Beatrice was groomed to be the constant companion of the queen, and seemed to be resigned to that kind of life, at least at first.)
Beatrice fell in love with Prince Henry of Battenburg (another of the Hessian royal folk of Darmstadt) and her mother finally consented to the marriage a year later on the condition the couple live with her. Upon the loss of her husband 10 years later (I mean "death", not "loss" - Beatrice didn't actually misplace him), Beatrice continued to be her mother's unofficial secretary and edited the queen's diaries over the next 30 years. Beatrice lived to be 87 and outlived all her siblings.
The name Battenburg was later anglicized to Mountbatten following the anti-German sentiment of World War One. Admiral of the Fleet, the Right Honorable Louis Mountbatten, First Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who was killed in 1979 by Irish terrorists, was the uncle of the current British monarch's consort. I acknowledge that the word terrorist is relative to one's political beliefs.
One of Beatrice's children was Queen Eugenie of Spain, the grandmother of the current king Juan Carlos.
She was a very possessive mother, Victoria. Beatrice looks the most normal somehow, or maybe it's just the men who were odd.
ReplyDeleteI now realise, because I tend not to think about these things, where some of the more recent princesses got their names.
Please tell me you're using all these blog posts to write history books. Because you have the most interesting history lessons ever.
ReplyDeleteIt IS interesting. I never paid much attention to Victoria's brood, other than noting the hemophilia thing.
ReplyDeleteI love learning.
@A. - Victoria was possessive. And spoiled, I say. She acted like she could get whatever she wanted. Wait...
ReplyDeleteSo you think Beatrice was normal? Aside from the hemophila thing, she was also a bank robber. I didn't put that part in. And held seances in the basement of Buckingham. At least that is what someone said.
@Janet - Thank you. But I don't think anyone would buy them. :( I hope you are working on a post. :)
@Stephanie Barr - See? See? I told you so.