Bye Bye Birdie

Bye Bye Birdie was a 1963 movie. I'm pretty sure it was a Broadway play before that. This post is not about that movie/play.
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22 January, 1901. Osborne House, Isle of Wight. The family is gathered. The German Kaiser has just said his goodbyes to his loved Grandmama in private. For once he is subdued, behaving himself, sitting quietly and causing no trouble.

Ever since the death of her husband, she had been in mourning, dressed in black. Something I didn't know though, was that the she still had "them" lay out his clothes every morning, just as if he were still alive. Of course, being who I am, that made me wonder if they kept laying out the same suit of clothes each day, or if she selected his pretend wardrobe and let them know what to lay out. Further, I wondered if she still bought him new clothes so the latest fashions could be laid out for him. But that's just me. You may not think it is important. Nevertheless, it was probably good to have the wherewithal to be able to hire someone to do stuff like that.

There are several versions of what the last words the old queen uttered before she expired. The concensus is, "Bertie! Bertie!"

Well, she was looking into his eyes and perhaps holding his hand, so one assumes she was talking to her son during her final seconds. Bertie being the only name she had ever called him. She never had called her husband by that name, Bertie, by all accounts. So.

Others swear she said, "O! That peace might come. Bertie!" That sounds like royal PR for the press release. I will go with just, "Bertie! Bertie!"

Princess Elizabeth

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary. Born April 21, 1926 at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, to Prince Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI) and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the Dutchess of York.

The family called her Lilibet.

Princess Elizabeth was born 3rd in line to the British throne, behind her Uncle The Prince Edward, Prince of Wales, and her father.

Elizabeth had one sibling, a sister, Margaret, four years her junior.

Elizabeth's uncle became Edward VIII in 1936, when she was 10 years old. Upon his abdication 11 months later, she became heiress presumptive to the throne. Her father reigned as George VI until early 1952.

Elizabeth's mother had harbored hopes her daughter might be educated in a public school, for the social experience as well as for the education. This was not to be as her uncle, the king, decided it would not do for her to be educated with commoners. She therefore was educated entirely in private. She studied Constitutional History under the vice-provost of Eton College. She has a love of history. She also studied modern languages. Elizabeth speaks fluent French.

Princess Elizabeth at age 16

The Princess met her future husband, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, for the first time in 1934 when she was 8 years old. Later, in 1939 when she was thirteen, she fell in love with him and they began to exchange letters.

During WWII, in 1944, when she was 18, she convinced her father to let her join the Auxiliary Territorial Service to help the war effort. Second Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor was trained as a truck driver and in heavy vehicle maintenance. She later attained the rank of Second Commander. She is still a good driver today. She is, incidentally, the last surviving head of state to have served in uniform in World War II.

On VE day (the end of the war in Europe) celebratory crowds filled the streets of London. The two princesses mingled anonymously with that throng.

"We asked my parents if we could go out and see for ourselves. I remember we were terrified of being recognized... I remember lines of unknown people linking arms and walking down Whitehall, all of us just swept along on a tide of happiness and relief."

The princess changes a truck wheel.

In November of 1947, Princess Elizabeth married Philip. They are second cousins once removed on his side of the family and third cousins through Queen Victoria. The country had not yet recovered from the war and, oddly, the princess still had to present rationing coupons for the material for her wedding gown. The marriage was not universally approved in the family: Prince Philip had no financial standing, and, though a British subject, was foreign-born.

Philip renounced his Greek and Danish titles and converted to Anglicanism. He assumed the name Lt. Philip Mountbatten (his mother's family name, Anglicized) but was created the Duke of Edinburgh before the marriage.

The couple's first child, Charles, was born in 1948, and their second, Anne, in 1950. The Royal Family House is Windsor. Their descendants have the surname Mountbatten-Windsor. They were to have two more children after Princess Elizabeth became queen.

In late 1951, Elizabeth and Philip toured Canada and visited U.S. President Harry S. Truman in Washington. The king's health was failing, and the princess carried with her a draft accession declaration just in case the king died while she was outside the UK. As it happened, in February of 1952, the couple found themselves in a remote area of Kenya when news arrived that her father had died. Philip gave her the news.

Her private secretary, Martin Charteris, discreetly asked her what name she intended to use as monarch. She replied, "Elizabeth, of course."

And so it was.

"This disease is not in our family!": Queen Victoria upon the discovery Leopold was a hemophiliac

Hemophilia is a disease in which the afflicted person has an impairment of his blood-clotting ability, so that he doesn't stop bleeding rapidly like the rest of us do. Sometimes he doesn't stop bleeding at all, and he dies. Often, this uncontrolled bleeding occurs in the person's joints, such as a knee if he falls down on it, but it can occur at whatever site the injury is located. Often, when the joint or other area finally fills up with blood and pressurizes, the bleeding will stop. This may take days of agony (if a joint) and is a living nightmare for the afflicted one. Of course, I am talking about the past - today we have coagulants that can be administered.

Women don't get hemophilia*, only males. Women, however, are the carriers of the recessive X-chromosome, which they can pass along to some of their sons. The daughters of hemophiliacs (should those hemophiliacs survive long enough to reproduce) may or may not become carriers. It is a genetic thing and therefore dependent upon the genetic odds.

Hemophilia has been called the disease of royals, due to its stubborn propensity to affect people of royal blood. This is not, I hasten to add, because they have different blood than commoners, but, rather, due to the fact that royals tend to intermarry with close relatives such as first cousins, and this makes their chances of passing on a defective (recessive) chromosome more likely. And, of course, the defect does not have to be hemophilia, but that is the one this post is about.

It would be a bit difficult to trace the incidence of hemophilia in ALL the royal houses of Europe, but since this series of posts are about Queen Victoria and her descendants, there are plenty enough incidents right there to keep us busy in this post.

*[I want to pause here and make a note, just to be technically correct. In reality it is possible for a female to have hemophilia, though ever so rare. A woman has two X chromosomes and a man has one X (female) and one Y (male). When the woman is a carrier, one of her X chromosomes is recessive but the other X chromosome compensates for her own blood clotting. So you can see that she would have to have both of her X chromosomes recessive in order for her to actually be a hemophiliac herself. Not bloody likely, if you'll forgive the unfortunate pun. And, with both chromosomes recessive, hemophilia would probably be the least of her problems. Of course, she would not have survived puberty in the old days anyway.]

In a link at the bottom of this post, I will put up a chart of Victoria's descendants which will show more clearly how the disease was spread throughout her family. When the first case of the disease showed up (in her son Leopold), the queen was shocked and was said to have protested, "This disease is simply not in our family!" Obviously it was.

Here are the cases of hemophilia in the three generations after Queen Victoria:

(Queen Victoria was a carrier)

1. Queen Victoria's daughter Alice was a carrier

2. Queen Victoria's son Leopold was a hemophiliac

3. Queen Victoria's daughter Beatrice was a carrier

4. Alice's daughter Irene was a carrier

5. Alice's son Friedrick was a hemophiliac

6. Alice's daughter Alix was a carrier

7. Leopold's daughter Alice was a carrier

8. Beatrice's daughter Eugenie was a carrier

9. Beatrice's son Leopold (Lord Mountbatten) was a hemophiliac

10. Beatrice's son Maurice was a hemophiliac

11. Irene's son Waldemar was a hemophiliac

12.Irene's son Henry was a hemophiliac

13. Alix's son Alexei was a hemophiliac

14. Alice's (daughter of Leopold) son Rupert was a hemophiliac

15. Eugenie's son Alfonso was a hemophiliac

16. Eugenie's son Gonzalo was a hemophiliac

HERE IS THE CHART I MADE UP WHICH SHOWS A BIT CLEARER. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO SEE IT.

Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom

"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.

Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany

Leopold George Duncan Albert was born at Buckingham Palace in 1853, the 8th child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

Prince Leopold was diagnosed with hemophilia as a baby. He lived to be 30 years old.

Queen Victoria used chloroform during Leopold's birth, and women used the drug widely after she thus "sanctioned" it.

Leopold attended Oxford and received an honorary doctorate in civil law. He traveled to Canada to visit his sister Louise (who was wife of Canada's Governor-General) and toured there, and in the United States.

Leopold couldn't pursue a military career so he became a patron of the arts. He served as unofficial secretary to his mother, as did his sisters. He wanted to be appointed to a governorship in either Canada or Australia, but was rejected because of his health.

Prince Leopold became understandably stifled by his mother's desire to keep him close to her. He began to see marriage as a way out of that situation. Of course, he had difficulty finding a wife, due to his hemophilia. Alice Liddell, daughter of the vice-chancellor at Oxford (and the subject of the book Alice in Wonderland) was one prospect, but that didn't work out.

After this and several other rejections, Leopold's mother stepped in and procured (suggested, I mean) Princess Helene Frederike of Waldeck and Pyrmont. The couple were married in 1882. They had a happy, though brief, marriage. They had a daughter Alice (I find that insulting to the Princess, but that is only my opinion) and a son, Charles Edward, born a few month's after Leopold's death.

Royal hemophiliacs often are surrounded by resident doctors (and even guards) to make sure they don't get hurt, but they always do anyway. Leopold was no different, and suffered many childhood (and later) bleeding episodes. In the end, he slipped on a yacht (in Cannes, France) and fell, injuring his knee. He died the next morning, though some say it was from the overzealous amount of morphine he was given. Other stories say it was his head that was injured and that he died of a brain hemorrhage.

Leopold is the great-grandfather of the current king of Sweden.

Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught

Arthur William Patrick Albert, born 1850 at Buckingham Palace, was the seventh child and third son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

Arthur spent 40 years in the British Army at various posts in her majesty's empire. He was appointed viceroy (Governor General) of Canada by his nephew George V and served there in World War One. Then he returned to the United Kingdom, and there and in India, performed various royal duties until his retirement in 1928. He died in 1942 at the age of 91.

It is said he became the queen's favorite child. While in the army stationed in Canada, he attended balls and garden parties and visited towns in Ontario and Quebec. These things were all documented by photographs which were sent back for his mother to enjoy. Someone told Queen Victoria that the Canadians hoped Arthur would someday return as their Governor General. He did.

Arthur married a Prussian princess and they had three children.

In addition to his 40 years of military service, during which he rose to the rank of general, then field marshall, he also:

was elected Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England, and

commissioned a stained glass window in his family's memory which he had placed in St. Bartholomew's church, where his family attended services.

Earlier, in Canada, Arthur had laid a cornerstone to a new government building.

In later life, Arthur became president of the Boy Scouts Association and performed the official opening of the 3rd World Scout Jamboree.

The duke retired from all this in 1928.

Princess Helena of the United Kingdom

The Princess Helena (Helena Augusta Victoria) was the fifth child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, born in 1846 at Buckingham. She was known in the family as "Lenchen" (Helena in German is Helenchen.)

Queen Victoria lined up the much older Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein for Helena to marry. This caused bad feelings between the queen and the Princess of Wales, as well as the Prince of Wales and the queen's daughter Alice. Remember the Prussian wars to unify Germany and their war with Denmark and seizure of Schleswig-Holstein. Don't make me go through that again. Prince Christian didn't really have anything to be prince of, but he was willing to marry the ummmm dowdy Princess Helena and be kept by Queen Victoria, so the marriage was a go. In the end, they were devoted to one another.

"What shall I do with Christian now that I have him?" must have flitted briefly through the monarch's grieving consciousness from time to time. Queen Victoria's only goal was to have Helena stay close to her beck and call, and that necessitated a husband who had nothing to do and no land to rule.

The queen gave the newlyweds a gift of £100,000 plus she requested £6,000 a year from parliament for the couple, which she got, of course. Helena became the queen's sort of personal secretary. The queen made Christian the Ranger of Windsor Great Park, which came with a house to live in. Shades of Yogi Bear. The queen also made Christian High Steward of Windsor. Both positions were merely figurehead in nature, so Christian was left free to play with his dog Corrie and feed his numerous pigeons. That's about it. (Not to demean his manhood or anything.)

Helena and her younger sister Beatrice catered to the queen, with Beatrice being in charge and Helena doing what Beatrice didn't have time to do.

Helena was not in good health. Actually, she was in pretty good health (for her size) but was a hypochondriac. She was addicted to opium and laudanum. Queen Victoria didn't believe she was sick and said as much in letters to her other daughter Vicky in Prussia. To which Vicky replied... ah, well, who cares what Vicky thought, eh?

The devoted couple (the dope fiend and the pigeon guy) had six children, four of whom survived. None of the four, boys or girls, were what you would call beauties (the princess Helena Victoria, child number three of the devoted couple, was called "Thora" within the family, but everyone called her "Snipe" due to her sharp features. I'm not making this up.)

Besides needlepoint and serving meals to the poor (which made her very popular with the poor, but which I am going to gloss over in this account) she also liked to write, especially translations (German to English.) Perhaps her most famous translation was entitled, rather redundantly, "First Aid to the Injured."

In 1916, Helena and Christian celebrated their golden wedding anniversary. Despite the two countries being at war, German Kaiser Wilhelm II sent a congratulatory telegram to his aunt and uncle. George V was present when the telegram arrived and was not wholly amused. Christian died the next year. George V changed the family name to Windsor and disposed of all the British royal family's German titles. So Christian was just plain old Christian. They still called him prince up until his death, though.

Helena has been described as "...plump and dowdy... placid..." But also businesslike and authoritarian. Go figure.

Her daughter, Princess Marie Louise, described her as, "... very lovely, with wavy brown hair, a beautiful little straight nose, and lovely amber-coloured eyes... She was very talented: played the piano exquisitely, had a distinct gift for drawing and painting in water-colours... Her outstanding gift was loyalty to her friends... She was brilliantly clever, had a wonderful head for business..."

Helena was also fearfully devoted to The Queen - to the point where she did not have a mind of her own. But, in the end, her name was the last one written in the queen's 70-year-old diary before she died.

Helena herself died in 1923.

Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha

The fourth child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert was Alfred (Alfred Ernest Albert.) He was born in 1844 at Windsor Castle. He was originally the Duke of Edinburgh, but towards the end of his life he ruled Saxe-Coburg and Gotcha in the German Empire, so he ended up being known as the Duke of ... well, you know.

He was known in the family as Affie. "Affie", not "Alfie." As in "Affable." (Or "Affluent.")

When he was born, he was second in line of succession to the British throne, but as his older brother married and began having children he dropped so far down he lost all interest. In all likelihood, I mean.

He had an interesting and honorable life. He joined the Navy at age 12 and stayed in for some 40 years. He worked his way up through the officer's ranks until, in 1893, he was awarded his baton as Admiral of the fleet.

In 1862, Prince Alfred was chosen by Greece to take their throne, upon the abdication of King Otto. However, the British government (not his mother) told him to send the Greeks his regrets, so he just stayed in the Navy.

Alfred was the first English prince to visit Australia, stopping there nearly 5 months during one of his naval voyages. (My source says "English prince" rather than "British prince", so I am doing the same here - although I don't have a clue what Scottish prince might have preceded him. Maybe one was transported. Sorry, Adullamite.)

On the (then) Duke of Edinburgh's second visit to Australia, in March of 1868, he was the victim of an assassination attempt. While picnicking, he was shot in the back by one Henry James O'farrell. The bullet was just to the right of the prince's spine. He was nursed by six Florence Nightingale-trained nurses, led by matron Lucy Osburn. He recovered.

The assailant was arrested at the scene and hanged 40 days later. Back then, if you were caught in the act, they just got it over with. Moral: don't embarrass the Aussies. I could find no record of O'farrell's final words, but I imagine them to be along the lines of, "Holy Mackerel! - the bloke didn't even DIE, fer chrissake!"

In January of 1874, the Duke of Edinburgh married the Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna of Russia, daughter of Tsar Alexander II. To commemorate this marriage, a small English bakery made the now famous Marie biscuit (with her name on them). So, that was pretty nice.

Marie herself was somewhat less than nice. She insisted on taking precedence over the Princess of Wales (Alexandra of Denmark) because her own family (so they all thought) was much higher in rank than the lowly Danes. Her own mother was Hessian, you see. (Remember the rule: Denmark or Hesse.) Queen Victoria smacked her down, though, and granted her precedence right after Alexandra. I'm sure you care. To soothe her feelings, her father gave her the staggering sum of £100,000 for a dowry and granted her another £28,000 per annum for life. So the cookie princess was able to survive her humiliation.

Oddly, the Duke's flagship, when he was an admiral, was named "Alexandra".

Marie and Alfred had six children (one was stillborn), but only one son, another Alfred, the Hereditary Heir to Saxe-Coburg and Gotcha. Gotha. I have to tell you this story: while his parents were busy celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, the 24-year-old prince shot himself over a scandal involving his mistress-cum-unauthorized-bride (shades of Rudolf of Austria, eh?) and died a few days later. I think I will leave out the syphilis part.

The Duke himself died of throat cancer on 30 July, 1900.

Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse

The third child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert was Alice. Alice Maud Mary. Maud is the Anglo-Saxon version of Matilda. (For those of you writing down these names.)

At first I was not going to devote too much time here to Alice: she didn't really do anything earthshaking; she was hardly her mother's favorite; she was a bit of a rebel and feminist, given more to mingling with the common folk than suited her mother's taste; she actually stood up to her mother and married whom she wanted; she didn't live very long. But the more one researches Alice, the more interesting she becomes - so much so that I find I need to break this account into two posts. This is the first.

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Princess Alice married the Duke of Hesse, one of the many German states that Prussia was trying hard to unite (and dominate.) She left the UK shortly after her father's death. (You may recall St. Albert had been killed by the Prince of Wale's shocking behavior.)

Usually Hesse was a prime source of queens for Europe, along with Denmark, but Alice moved there instead of out.

Hesse was a Grand Duchy. Might still be. So Her husband was Grand Duke Louis IV of Hesse and she was the Grand Dutchess of Hesse. It wasn't nearly as well-paid a job as being a princess of the United Kingdom, and Alice was always complaining of being poverty-stricken in her letters to her mother. Frankly, Alice was not all that high on Queen Victoria's list of children to begin with, so this complaining didn't set well with her, and the relationship became even more strained.

During the wars of German unification, Hesse sided with Austria and Prussia attacked Hesse, so (technically) Alice was at war with her sister Vicky. As you might imagine, Hesse fell to Prussia even faster than France did in WWII. The Prussians moved into Hesse and took over their railroads and telegraphs and strutted around for a while and socked Hesse with a 3 million florin levy for war reparations and... well, Alice just couldn't take it anymore (since they didn't have that much money to start with) and wrote off to her mother the queen to MAKE VICKY JUST STOP IT!

Queen Victoria shot off a letter to her eldest daughter, passing along Alice's request that her sister intercede and tell the Prussians to PLEASE BACK OFF HESSE. Vicky wrote back to her mother, reminding her that she was now married into the Prussian Imperial chain of command, and that Alice would just have to DEAL WITH IT and next time not choose to be on the losing side. Or words to that affect.

But, in the end, Prussia did back off, and Louis was allowed to keep his thronette. Obviously the fact that Alice was the sister of the German Empress had something to do with it. Not to mention that she was the daughter of the ruler of the British Empire. Also, the fact that the Russian Tsar put in a good word didn't hurt. So Hesse survived and Alice got to keep the house she was always complaining about.

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Alice and Louis had 7 children. Those that survived childhood all played their own parts in the saga that was the European royal houses, but I only want to mention three of them here.

Her 4th child was Ernest Louis (Uncle Ernie) who succeeded his father as the next Grand Duke of Hesse.

Alice's second child was Elisabeth and her sixth child and fourth daughter was Alix. Both were to walk in the highest circles of power, and both were destined for tragic ends.

Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine (called Ella in the family) married Grand Duke Sergei of Russia, a younger brother of Tsar Alexander III (father of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia.)

Alix, of course, became the tragic last Empress of Russia, wife of Tsar Nicolas II, mother of the hemophilic tsarevich, desperately susceptible to the demonic monk Rasputin, who seemed to be able to abate her son's hemophilia. Born Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine (called Sunny by her mother, Alice - and a darling favorite of her gran, Queen Victoria) she married Tsar Nicholas II and ruled with him as Empress Alexandra Fedorovna for 24 years (including their time of captivity) until the Russian Revolution, when the imperial family was taken prisoner by the Bolsheviks. She was executed with her husband and all her children in that gunsmoke-filled Ekaterinburg cellar on that terrible impossible July night in 1918.

The Russian imperial family in 1913 [click to enlarge] Alix (Empress Alexandra), daughter of Alice, was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. The children are great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria. The Tsar was a cousin (and look-alike) of George V - the Tsar's mother was the sister of Alexandra of Denmark, Queen Consort of Edward VII. Clear? Back row: the Grand Duchesses Marie, Olga, and Tatiana; Right, Grand Duchess Anastasia; Front: the tsarevich Alexei; Nicholas and Alexandra.

As Lenin and Sverdlov and the Cheka continued their purge of the Russian aristocracy, Ella (by then a nun) was arrested a few days later and, along with other members of the extended royal family, was beaten and thrown into an abandoned iron mine pit. Though the Cheka expected them all to be killed by the fall, singing and praying were heard from the shaft. Hand grenades were thrown in and brush pushed down and set ablaze. When the White Army later exhumed the bodies of Ella and the others, they found young prince Ioann's injuries had been bandaged by Ella before he died. Ella herself finally had died from injuries from the initial fall. All in all a horrible and lengthy death for the lovely Ella, who had meant so much to her little sister Alix.

Ella was canonized by the Orthodox church outside Russia in 1981, and in 1992, following the fall of communism, she was canonized by the Russian Orthodox church inside Russia as well.

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The Tsar and Tsarina, like all the other royals of the day throughout Europe, kept diaries and made entries for every day of their lives since they were old enough to write. It was the fashion of royalty to do this. So did all their children, of course. The Russian family all wrote in English in their diaries. After they were murdered, the final books of their diaries were recovered. The last entry in the diary of the young Grand Duchess Olga Nicholaevna has become legend, still printed on plaques and T-shirts even today:

"Remember that the evil which is now in the world will become yet more powerful, and that it is not evil which conquers evil, but only love."

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Next: Alice, the early years.

Victoria, Empress Frederick

Well it is a few days past "tomorrow" but I would like to continue with highlighting queen Victoria's children, beginning with her eldest daughter Victoria, called "Vicky" within the extended royal family. But first a little set-up if I may.

When I say the "extended" royal family, I refer to the royal houses in Europe at the time, all pretty much related, and thus all "family".

There were many countries in Europe in the 19th century that still had monarchs, or constitutional monarchs, but (Since this series of posts is about Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom) I will be referencing mainly the royal households of the UK, Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Russia. These were the big players in the 19th century, and up until World War I.

Born in late 1840 at Buckingham, Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa was soon created Princess Royal by her mother, since there were real prospects the little girl might become queen. As it turned out, she would become an Empress, but not of the British Empire.

Unlike her younger brother, who would become king of the United Kingdom, Vicky was intelligent and vivacious. When she was only 14, her mother and father arranged for her to be married to prince Frederick William of Prussia (Fritz) who was then second in line to the Prussian throne (and later the German Empire) behind his father. They were married 2 years later when Vicky was 17 years old.

Their marriage was, of course, a dynastic alliance, but (happily) it was a love match as well. Off to Germany the young girl went with her young husband. Soon thereafter, his father became king (Kaiser William I) and she suddenly found herself Crown Princess of Prussia.

These were war years as Prussia fought to consolidate all the German states into one Germany. Some of the fighting was with Denmark, and this caused strife within the British royal family because of their close ties to Denmark, but life went on. The monarchs of Europe never seemed to let wars stand in the way of family reunions.

Germany became a very militaristic state, run by aristocrats with saber scars above their eyes from fencing at university - quite the rage, even though sometimes self-inflicted. Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, was the real power, overseeing the unification of Germany, and the old king went along, keeping his nose clean, sleeping in his metal soldiers' cot, pretending he was in charge, honestly believing his crown came from God, listening to Bismarck whisper visions of grandeur in his ear. He would be another Frederick the Great, would the old soldier. But Bismark called the shots.

When William I died, much of the country envisioned the dawn of a new era. Fritz and Vicky were modern-minded and forward-thinking, a much-needed breath of fresh air. Finally, change would come to Germany.

But by then it was too late. By the time he took the throne, Frederick III had advanced throat cancer and was already breathing through a tube. His reign lasted only 99 days.

When Vicky's son took the throne as Kaiser Wilhelm II, there was no doubt about there being any peace and quiet in Germany. Forget that dream.

William was an odd child. His grandmother, queen Victoria, never seemed to really like him. Vicky tried to exert a proper British influence on him through his early childhood teachings, but his heroes and final influences were the German aristocracy and the military. He would wear a uniform as long as he was in power. When the other royal children would visit - from England, from Russia, they would recall Cousin Willy as always bossing them around, deciding what they would play, making them sit while he read the Bible to them. A psychopath? You be the judge. He was the last king of Germany.

The Dowager Empress lived out her life in relative seclusion, known officially as the Empress Frederick. Vicky had 8 children and lived to 60 years old, dying just 7 months after her mother. She died of inoperable breast cancer. Her servants and maids asked to be moved farther away from Vicky's room so that her screams would not disturb them in the night.

Vicky always kept in close touch with other members of the British royal family, especially her younger brother, the future king Edward VII. There are some 3777 letters cataloged to her from her mother, queen Victoria, and over 4000 letters from Vicky to the British queen.

Queen Victoria's precocious firstborn was buried at Potsdam, next to her beloved husband and her two children who had died in childhood.

The nine children of Victoria and Albert

In the 19th century, the main royal houses of Europe were well stocked with queen Victoria's offspring and her grandchildren. Her nine children were:

Victoria

Albert (later Edward VII)

Alice

Alfred

Helena

Louise

Arthur

Leopold

Beatrice

You may already see some namesakes of the current royal family.

Tomorrow: Victoria, Empress of Prussia

Victoria and Albert

From Victoria's diary (24 May 1837):

"I was awoke at 6 o'clock by Mamma...who told me the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham were here and wished to see me. I got out of bed and went into my sitting-room (only in my dressing gown) alone, and saw them. Lord Conyngham then acquainted me that my poor Uncle, the King, was no more, and had expired at 12 minutes past 2 this morning, and consequently that I am Queen..."

She was to have reigned as Alexandrina Victoria, but the first name was withdrawn at her request.

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Victoria had met her future husband when she was only seventeen. Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was her first cousin. The queen proposed to Albert in October of 1838, and they were married early in 1839. Apparently he said yes.

Albert became not only Victoria's companion, but her close advisor as well. Victoria's mother was then evicted from Buckingham Palace, as the young queen, now married, was no longer required to live with her. Her mother was thereafter seldom visited.

Fun fact: Victoria was taught only in German until she was 3 years old, then in English and French, becoming virtually tri-lingual. (Tri-lingual means she had three tongues, to Albert's delight, tho' some say it contributed to his early demise. Some, not I.) Her seldom-visited mother spoke to her daughter in German, though she approached proficiency in English. Is that cool, or what?

[Next: 9 children, the future movers and shakers of all of Europe]