Queen Victoria and her Granddaughters
Many years ago, I wrote a book about Queen Victoria's granddaughters which wasn't published because my responses from publishing houses said, for the most part, that there were too many characters for people to take in. I kept the rough draft of the manuscript and, for the sheer pleasure I took in writing it, am going to put it here, post by post....
It began with the earlier post, "The Advice of a Mother of 9 Children": http://christinacroft.blogspot.com/2010/07/advice-of-mother-of-9-children.html
and so it continues:
In the quaint German Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, twenty-one-year-old Princess Alice received the reprimand with equanimity. She was used to raising eyebrows in England as well as in Hesse. It had taken the Hessians some time to accustom themselves to the sight of their future Grand Duchess wandering in and out of the homes of the poor or carrying out the most demeaning tasks in their hospitals. In aristocratic circles too, there were those who were quick to criticise the number of controversial characters she invited to her home to discuss her unorthodox views of feminism, politics, philosophy and religion. Even her husband found aspects of her character unfathomable and, much as she loved him, after two and a half years of marriage Alice doubted that he would ever be able to understand her.
When it came to raising her children, unconventional Alice was equally determined to go her own way. Unlike many princesses of the day, she was not content to abandon them to the care of nannies in remote nurseries, but intended to take personal responsibility for their welfare, education and upbringing. Aristocrats might gape askance and the Queen might rant and rave, but when infant mortality rates were so high, breast-feeding was the surest means of protecting her daughter from dysentery, and on this, as on so many matters, she refused to be swayed.
Moreover, as she constantly reminded her mother, life in Hesse was very different from the comfort of the English Court. The Queen could afford to employ numerous retainers to wait on her every need, but Alice, denied that luxury, had to keep her staff to the minimum.
By royal standards, she and Louis had never been wealthy. At the time of their wedding there were many in England who looked down on the paltry Grand Duchy, ruled by a mere serene highness,• considering it unworthy of a daughter of the British queen. Alice, very much in love with her dashing young husband, paid little attention to the criticism and had not objected to living first with her parents-in-law at Bessungen, nor afterwards in the damp old Schloss in Darmstadt until her mother sent sufficient contributions for the building of the New Palace in the town.
Now, with children of her own, even unworldly Alice was beginning to feel the strain of raising a royal family on a less than princely income. Much of her £30,000 dowry had gone in to the building of the New Palace, and her £5,000 annuity barely covered her expenditure on the numerous charitable institutions she had established. Irksome as it was to Queen Victoria, Alice’s frequent requests for more money were anything but selfish. Since childhood, her late father had instilled in her the belief that those in privileged positions had a duty to help the less fortunate and from the moment she arrived in Darmstadt she had, at great cost to herself both physically and financially, made a commitment to improving the lot of her husband’s people.
“I earnestly devote myself to the duties of my new life,” she had truthfully written to the Queen, “striving to act always as dear papa would wish.”
Inspired by Florence Nightingale and the housing reformer, Octavia Hill, she embarked upon numerous schemes for updating the medical services, founding hospitals and a ‘mental asylum’, establishing groups of district nurses, and instigating housing programmes and co-operatives of women workers. Though her projects were gradually winning the hearts of the Hessians, they were proving very expensive, and within eighteen months of Ella’s birth, Alice, pregnant for a third time, faced an even greater strain on her resources. In June 1866, the little Grand Duchy was about to become embroiled in the Austro-Prussian War.
The Hessians had neither the desire nor means to take on the might of Prussia but fearing that they would lose their independence to Bismarck’s ‘Prussian’ Empire, saw no alternative but to side with Austria. For Alice the prospect of a costly war was made all the more difficult by the knowledge that her elder and closest sister, the Crown Princess of Prussia, was now in effect her enemy. Still more disturbing, at a time when the spread of disease was an inevitable part of battle, she feared for the safety of her children from whom she could hardly bear to be parted. Nonetheless, she hastily dispatched Victoria and Ella to their grandmother in England, confident that:
“In your dear hands they will be so safe; and if we can give you a little pleasure in sending them, it would be a real consolation in parting from them, which we both feel very much.”
Within a fortnight of the children’s departure, Alice, almost nine-months pregnant, faced as a second wrench, as she watched her husband set out for battle at the head of his ill-equipped cavalry on their fourth wedding anniversary, 1st July 1866:
“The parting now was so hard!” she told the Queen, “and he feels it dreadfully. I can scarcely manage to write.”
In spite of the sweltering heat and her advanced pregnancy Alice immediately set to work, arranging hospitals to receive the wounded while assuring Louis that she would join him at the front as soon as her baby was born.
In the event, the plans proved unnecessary. After only seven weeks the triumphant Prussians marched into Hesse and, as the sound of their boots echoed on the palace walls, Alice gave birth to a third daughter, Irène, named after the goddess of peace.
By the terms of the peace treaty, the Hessians fared better than many of their neighbours in that they were permitted to retain their independence, but a large area of their land was appropriated by Prussia and the reparation payments virtually bankrupted the Grand Duchy - renamed Hesse-and-by-Rhine.
‘We are almost ruined and must devote all our energies to the reconstruction of our suffering country.’ Alice sighed to her mother with further requests for financial assistance – assistance that the volatile Queen was not always willing to give.
Notwithstanding the impecuniosities, Alice’s first experience of the horror of war gave even greater impetus to the her philanthropic schemes. As cholera and smallpox raged through Darmstadt, she applied herself with greater fervour than ever to improving the medical services. Wandering incognito through the slums of the poor, she tirelessly sought out new schemes to improve their lot. While, often unrecognised by her patients, she personally tended the sick in their own homes, on a larger scale she established a committee of trained nurses who would be immediately ready to tend the wounded in any future conflict.
But her commitment to the ‘reconstruction’ of the country, did not distract her from her responsibilities to her own children. All three little girls grew quickly - breast-fed Ella soon becoming quite ‘fat’ and very strong, while Irène thrived on donkey milk! - and Princess Alice devoted much of her time to their education and upbringing.
More enlightened than the majority of German princesses who viewed their daughters’ education primarily as a means of turning them into good wives, Alice firmly believed that ‘marriage for the sake of marriage is the worst mistake for a woman,’ and was determined to prepare her children to live independent lives.
“I strive to bring them up totally free from pride of position, which is nothing save what their personal worth can make it. I feel…how important it is for princes and princesses to know that they are nothing better or above others, save through their own merit; and that they have only the double duty of living or others and of being an example - good and modest. This I hope my children will grow up to do.”
Naturally, they had to master all the accomplishments expected of 19th century princesses - riding, painting, music and the art of making polite conversation with strangers of all classes. Alice, herself an accomplished musician who had once accompanied Brahms on the piano, inspired in them an appreciation of music, and many leading performers of the day were invited to the New Palace to introduce them to opera and literature. Alice devised the curriculum for the more academic subjects and the girls followed a strict regimen of study in a specially created schoolroom within the New Palace. Their lessons began early in the morning and continued throughout the day, broken only for physical exercise and meals. From their earliest years they were fluent in two languages, speaking German to their father and English to their mother, and tutors were employed to instruct them in religion and French. Though later their grandmother would complain that they sought any excuse to escape from their lessons, Victoria in particular proved a remarkably enthusiastic and gifted pupil, whose ‘facility in learning is wonderful,’ as Alice told her mother, ‘and her lessons are her delight. Her English history and reading she has learned from me. I give her a lesson daily…’ Her aptitude for languages and love of learning would continue throughout her life.
Though the academic curriculum was wide-ranging, Alice was equally keen to encourage them to develop practical skills. She herself taught them cookery, book-keeping and household management, and even at the age of three Ella displayed a ‘wonderful talent for sewing and, when she keeps quiet a little, sews quite alone and without mistakes.’ From their father they learned to tend the gardens and grow flowers and vegetables. “All my children are great lovers of nature,” Alice told the Queen, “and I develop this as much as I can…I bring up my children simply and with as few wants as I can, and above all teach them to help themselves and others so as to become independent.” To outsiders they were princesses, but within their own home, they cleaned the rooms, laid fires in the grate and made their own beds as their mother insisted that they must not expect servants to carry out duties which they could easily perform for themselves.
Above all, Alice was determined to instil in the children her own unstinting sense of duty. From the first they participated in fund-raising schemes for her charitable institutions, sewing clothes for the poor and donating many of their own toys to the less fortunate children of Hesse. They accompanied their mother, too, on her regular visits to hospitals and the homes of the sick, where they assisted in rolling bandages and talking freely with patients of all classes. “It is good to teach them early to be generous and kind to the poor.” Alice wrote, and her efforts would prove far-reaching. Witnessing her mother’s willingness to carry out the most menial chores, inspired Ella with ‘a longing to help those who suffer,’ – a longing that many years later would come to fruition in a most remarkable manner.
Notwithstanding the long hours in the school room and the time devoted to the poor, life was not all duty and study for the little Hessian girls. With their mother they shared a quick sense of humour and delighted in each other’s company, playing tennis, riding through the parklands, caring for their pets and boating on the lake. As the eldest Victoria soon gained a dominance over her younger sisters, but while Ella was happy to let her sister take the lead, she could be as intransigent as her mother when it came to matters of principle. Princess Alice confessed to Queen Victoria that at times she found Ella less biddable and more difficult to manage than her elder sister, but her stubbornness was balanced by a deeply spiritual nature that made her ‘the personification of unselfishness, always ready to do anything in order to give pleasure to others.’
While the sisters were devoted to one another and to their parents, the birth of a brother, Ernie, in 1868 brought them additional joy. Visitors to the New Palace were touched by the tranquillity of the bright, airy rooms decorated in the ‘English style’ and the obvious devotion of the close-knit family whose boisterousness was commented on by everyone who met them.
“On the same floor as the nurseries,” wrote Baroness Buxhoeveden, “were [Princess Alice’s] rooms, and there the little Princesses brought their toys and played while their mother wrote or read…Sometimes all the old boxes containing their mother’s early wardrobe were brought out for dressing up. The children strutted down the long corridors in crinolines, and played at being great ladies, or characters from fairy tales, dressed in bright stuffs and Indian shawls, which their grandmother, Queen Victoria, could not have imagined being put to such a use…The children were full of fun and mischief.”
There were regular dinners with their father’s eccentric uncle, the Grand Duke of Hesse, and visits from their numerous royal relations including their father’s sickly aunt, Tsarina Marie Feodorovna of Russia. Although money was scarce, holidays were plentiful. There were trips to the seaside in Belgium, and annual holidays in England, staying - when Alice was in favour - at one of their grandmother’s palaces or in a hotel at Eastbourne where the girls played on the sand while their mother toured the poorest fishermen’s cottages. There were visits to romantic Heiligenberg, the summer residence of their father’s Battenberg relations, and occasional trips to Potsdam, near Berlin, the home of Aunt Vicky and their Prussian Hohenzollern cousins.
In spite of the delight that Alice took in her children and the evident happiness that filled the new palace, the princess’s frequent confinements, and her work for the Grand Duchy were quickly taking their toll. Since contracting scarlet fever in childhood, she had never been physically strong, and the stress of the Austro-Prussian War had left her so frail that Queen Victoria feared: ‘for her nerves, which were already so terribly irritated after and before each child was born.’
By the late 1860s Alice’s ‘nervous’ problems, exacerbated by exhaustion were leading her with increasing frequency into bouts of depression. It did not help to watch her boyish and well-meaning husband enjoying the company of their children, for his contentment in childish pursuits merely highlighted her awareness that, for all his good intentions, ‘dear good Louis’ was totally incapable of understanding her spiritual and emotional needs. While he willingly supported her charities and welcomed reformers into their home, there was another more enigmatic side to her character which he could never quite reach. A talented artist and accomplished musician, she longed for someone with whom she could discuss her aesthetic feelings but deep conversation bored Louis; he fell asleep during musical evenings; and his inability to empathise with her spiritual doubts left her lonely and unfulfilled.
In the summer of 1869 the aging and controversial Swabian theologian, David Strauss, arrived in Darmstadt. His contentious work ‘La Vie de Jesus,’ had horrified the established Church by claiming that the Scriptures could not be taken literally, but Alice, fascinated by reports of his unorthodox opinions eagerly invited him to the New Palace. Unused to the company of royalty, Strauss accepted the invitation with some trepidation and yet, from his first encounter with the princess, he was amazed not only by her ‘friendly manner’ but also by her ‘rare intellectual qualities.’ Disregarding the raised eye brows of the Hessian aristocracy, their meetings became more frequent and with each conversation Alice fell deeper under the philosopher’s spell, delighted that at last she seemed to have found the soul mate that her husband could never be. Yet Strauss’s cynical opinions did little to alleviate Alice’s own spiritual doubts as, according to the French Ambassador, Maurice Paleologue:
‘…[He] at once obtained a great influence over her. But the romance of their minds and hearts was still wrapped in a deep mystery, though it is impossible to doubt that he shook her faith to the depths and that she passed through a terrible crisis.”
In the midst of her ‘terrible crisis’ - during which Vicky’s mother-in-law, the superficial Queen Augusta branded Alice an atheist - Alice sought the support of the one person who might best empathise with her doubts: her elder sister, Vicky, Crown Princess of Prussia. The Austro-Prussian War had not damaged the relationship between the sisters and through their regular correspondence they remained as close as ever. In the summer of 1869, the Hessians enjoyed a holiday in Potsdam where the sisters planned a second holiday later on in the year. That autumn their husbands were to travel together to Egypt for the opening of the Suez Canal, and in their absence the princesses seized the opportunity of embarking on a trip of their own. In the early winter Alice and Vicky arrived with their children in the French resort of Cannes where, as the young cousins played together, their mothers shared memories of a childhood in England, their various experiences of marriage and the effect that their now very different lives were having on their children.
It began with the earlier post, "The Advice of a Mother of 9 Children": http://christinacroft.blogspot.com/2010/07/advice-of-mother-of-9-children.html
and so it continues:
In the quaint German Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, twenty-one-year-old Princess Alice received the reprimand with equanimity. She was used to raising eyebrows in England as well as in Hesse. It had taken the Hessians some time to accustom themselves to the sight of their future Grand Duchess wandering in and out of the homes of the poor or carrying out the most demeaning tasks in their hospitals. In aristocratic circles too, there were those who were quick to criticise the number of controversial characters she invited to her home to discuss her unorthodox views of feminism, politics, philosophy and religion. Even her husband found aspects of her character unfathomable and, much as she loved him, after two and a half years of marriage Alice doubted that he would ever be able to understand her.
When it came to raising her children, unconventional Alice was equally determined to go her own way. Unlike many princesses of the day, she was not content to abandon them to the care of nannies in remote nurseries, but intended to take personal responsibility for their welfare, education and upbringing. Aristocrats might gape askance and the Queen might rant and rave, but when infant mortality rates were so high, breast-feeding was the surest means of protecting her daughter from dysentery, and on this, as on so many matters, she refused to be swayed.
Moreover, as she constantly reminded her mother, life in Hesse was very different from the comfort of the English Court. The Queen could afford to employ numerous retainers to wait on her every need, but Alice, denied that luxury, had to keep her staff to the minimum.
By royal standards, she and Louis had never been wealthy. At the time of their wedding there were many in England who looked down on the paltry Grand Duchy, ruled by a mere serene highness,• considering it unworthy of a daughter of the British queen. Alice, very much in love with her dashing young husband, paid little attention to the criticism and had not objected to living first with her parents-in-law at Bessungen, nor afterwards in the damp old Schloss in Darmstadt until her mother sent sufficient contributions for the building of the New Palace in the town.
Now, with children of her own, even unworldly Alice was beginning to feel the strain of raising a royal family on a less than princely income. Much of her £30,000 dowry had gone in to the building of the New Palace, and her £5,000 annuity barely covered her expenditure on the numerous charitable institutions she had established. Irksome as it was to Queen Victoria, Alice’s frequent requests for more money were anything but selfish. Since childhood, her late father had instilled in her the belief that those in privileged positions had a duty to help the less fortunate and from the moment she arrived in Darmstadt she had, at great cost to herself both physically and financially, made a commitment to improving the lot of her husband’s people.
“I earnestly devote myself to the duties of my new life,” she had truthfully written to the Queen, “striving to act always as dear papa would wish.”
Inspired by Florence Nightingale and the housing reformer, Octavia Hill, she embarked upon numerous schemes for updating the medical services, founding hospitals and a ‘mental asylum’, establishing groups of district nurses, and instigating housing programmes and co-operatives of women workers. Though her projects were gradually winning the hearts of the Hessians, they were proving very expensive, and within eighteen months of Ella’s birth, Alice, pregnant for a third time, faced an even greater strain on her resources. In June 1866, the little Grand Duchy was about to become embroiled in the Austro-Prussian War.
The Hessians had neither the desire nor means to take on the might of Prussia but fearing that they would lose their independence to Bismarck’s ‘Prussian’ Empire, saw no alternative but to side with Austria. For Alice the prospect of a costly war was made all the more difficult by the knowledge that her elder and closest sister, the Crown Princess of Prussia, was now in effect her enemy. Still more disturbing, at a time when the spread of disease was an inevitable part of battle, she feared for the safety of her children from whom she could hardly bear to be parted. Nonetheless, she hastily dispatched Victoria and Ella to their grandmother in England, confident that:
“In your dear hands they will be so safe; and if we can give you a little pleasure in sending them, it would be a real consolation in parting from them, which we both feel very much.”
Within a fortnight of the children’s departure, Alice, almost nine-months pregnant, faced as a second wrench, as she watched her husband set out for battle at the head of his ill-equipped cavalry on their fourth wedding anniversary, 1st July 1866:
“The parting now was so hard!” she told the Queen, “and he feels it dreadfully. I can scarcely manage to write.”
In spite of the sweltering heat and her advanced pregnancy Alice immediately set to work, arranging hospitals to receive the wounded while assuring Louis that she would join him at the front as soon as her baby was born.
In the event, the plans proved unnecessary. After only seven weeks the triumphant Prussians marched into Hesse and, as the sound of their boots echoed on the palace walls, Alice gave birth to a third daughter, Irène, named after the goddess of peace.
By the terms of the peace treaty, the Hessians fared better than many of their neighbours in that they were permitted to retain their independence, but a large area of their land was appropriated by Prussia and the reparation payments virtually bankrupted the Grand Duchy - renamed Hesse-and-by-Rhine.
‘We are almost ruined and must devote all our energies to the reconstruction of our suffering country.’ Alice sighed to her mother with further requests for financial assistance – assistance that the volatile Queen was not always willing to give.
Notwithstanding the impecuniosities, Alice’s first experience of the horror of war gave even greater impetus to the her philanthropic schemes. As cholera and smallpox raged through Darmstadt, she applied herself with greater fervour than ever to improving the medical services. Wandering incognito through the slums of the poor, she tirelessly sought out new schemes to improve their lot. While, often unrecognised by her patients, she personally tended the sick in their own homes, on a larger scale she established a committee of trained nurses who would be immediately ready to tend the wounded in any future conflict.
But her commitment to the ‘reconstruction’ of the country, did not distract her from her responsibilities to her own children. All three little girls grew quickly - breast-fed Ella soon becoming quite ‘fat’ and very strong, while Irène thrived on donkey milk! - and Princess Alice devoted much of her time to their education and upbringing.
More enlightened than the majority of German princesses who viewed their daughters’ education primarily as a means of turning them into good wives, Alice firmly believed that ‘marriage for the sake of marriage is the worst mistake for a woman,’ and was determined to prepare her children to live independent lives.
“I strive to bring them up totally free from pride of position, which is nothing save what their personal worth can make it. I feel…how important it is for princes and princesses to know that they are nothing better or above others, save through their own merit; and that they have only the double duty of living or others and of being an example - good and modest. This I hope my children will grow up to do.”
Naturally, they had to master all the accomplishments expected of 19th century princesses - riding, painting, music and the art of making polite conversation with strangers of all classes. Alice, herself an accomplished musician who had once accompanied Brahms on the piano, inspired in them an appreciation of music, and many leading performers of the day were invited to the New Palace to introduce them to opera and literature. Alice devised the curriculum for the more academic subjects and the girls followed a strict regimen of study in a specially created schoolroom within the New Palace. Their lessons began early in the morning and continued throughout the day, broken only for physical exercise and meals. From their earliest years they were fluent in two languages, speaking German to their father and English to their mother, and tutors were employed to instruct them in religion and French. Though later their grandmother would complain that they sought any excuse to escape from their lessons, Victoria in particular proved a remarkably enthusiastic and gifted pupil, whose ‘facility in learning is wonderful,’ as Alice told her mother, ‘and her lessons are her delight. Her English history and reading she has learned from me. I give her a lesson daily…’ Her aptitude for languages and love of learning would continue throughout her life.
Though the academic curriculum was wide-ranging, Alice was equally keen to encourage them to develop practical skills. She herself taught them cookery, book-keeping and household management, and even at the age of three Ella displayed a ‘wonderful talent for sewing and, when she keeps quiet a little, sews quite alone and without mistakes.’ From their father they learned to tend the gardens and grow flowers and vegetables. “All my children are great lovers of nature,” Alice told the Queen, “and I develop this as much as I can…I bring up my children simply and with as few wants as I can, and above all teach them to help themselves and others so as to become independent.” To outsiders they were princesses, but within their own home, they cleaned the rooms, laid fires in the grate and made their own beds as their mother insisted that they must not expect servants to carry out duties which they could easily perform for themselves.
Above all, Alice was determined to instil in the children her own unstinting sense of duty. From the first they participated in fund-raising schemes for her charitable institutions, sewing clothes for the poor and donating many of their own toys to the less fortunate children of Hesse. They accompanied their mother, too, on her regular visits to hospitals and the homes of the sick, where they assisted in rolling bandages and talking freely with patients of all classes. “It is good to teach them early to be generous and kind to the poor.” Alice wrote, and her efforts would prove far-reaching. Witnessing her mother’s willingness to carry out the most menial chores, inspired Ella with ‘a longing to help those who suffer,’ – a longing that many years later would come to fruition in a most remarkable manner.
Notwithstanding the long hours in the school room and the time devoted to the poor, life was not all duty and study for the little Hessian girls. With their mother they shared a quick sense of humour and delighted in each other’s company, playing tennis, riding through the parklands, caring for their pets and boating on the lake. As the eldest Victoria soon gained a dominance over her younger sisters, but while Ella was happy to let her sister take the lead, she could be as intransigent as her mother when it came to matters of principle. Princess Alice confessed to Queen Victoria that at times she found Ella less biddable and more difficult to manage than her elder sister, but her stubbornness was balanced by a deeply spiritual nature that made her ‘the personification of unselfishness, always ready to do anything in order to give pleasure to others.’
While the sisters were devoted to one another and to their parents, the birth of a brother, Ernie, in 1868 brought them additional joy. Visitors to the New Palace were touched by the tranquillity of the bright, airy rooms decorated in the ‘English style’ and the obvious devotion of the close-knit family whose boisterousness was commented on by everyone who met them.
“On the same floor as the nurseries,” wrote Baroness Buxhoeveden, “were [Princess Alice’s] rooms, and there the little Princesses brought their toys and played while their mother wrote or read…Sometimes all the old boxes containing their mother’s early wardrobe were brought out for dressing up. The children strutted down the long corridors in crinolines, and played at being great ladies, or characters from fairy tales, dressed in bright stuffs and Indian shawls, which their grandmother, Queen Victoria, could not have imagined being put to such a use…The children were full of fun and mischief.”
There were regular dinners with their father’s eccentric uncle, the Grand Duke of Hesse, and visits from their numerous royal relations including their father’s sickly aunt, Tsarina Marie Feodorovna of Russia. Although money was scarce, holidays were plentiful. There were trips to the seaside in Belgium, and annual holidays in England, staying - when Alice was in favour - at one of their grandmother’s palaces or in a hotel at Eastbourne where the girls played on the sand while their mother toured the poorest fishermen’s cottages. There were visits to romantic Heiligenberg, the summer residence of their father’s Battenberg relations, and occasional trips to Potsdam, near Berlin, the home of Aunt Vicky and their Prussian Hohenzollern cousins.
In spite of the delight that Alice took in her children and the evident happiness that filled the new palace, the princess’s frequent confinements, and her work for the Grand Duchy were quickly taking their toll. Since contracting scarlet fever in childhood, she had never been physically strong, and the stress of the Austro-Prussian War had left her so frail that Queen Victoria feared: ‘for her nerves, which were already so terribly irritated after and before each child was born.’
By the late 1860s Alice’s ‘nervous’ problems, exacerbated by exhaustion were leading her with increasing frequency into bouts of depression. It did not help to watch her boyish and well-meaning husband enjoying the company of their children, for his contentment in childish pursuits merely highlighted her awareness that, for all his good intentions, ‘dear good Louis’ was totally incapable of understanding her spiritual and emotional needs. While he willingly supported her charities and welcomed reformers into their home, there was another more enigmatic side to her character which he could never quite reach. A talented artist and accomplished musician, she longed for someone with whom she could discuss her aesthetic feelings but deep conversation bored Louis; he fell asleep during musical evenings; and his inability to empathise with her spiritual doubts left her lonely and unfulfilled.
In the summer of 1869 the aging and controversial Swabian theologian, David Strauss, arrived in Darmstadt. His contentious work ‘La Vie de Jesus,’ had horrified the established Church by claiming that the Scriptures could not be taken literally, but Alice, fascinated by reports of his unorthodox opinions eagerly invited him to the New Palace. Unused to the company of royalty, Strauss accepted the invitation with some trepidation and yet, from his first encounter with the princess, he was amazed not only by her ‘friendly manner’ but also by her ‘rare intellectual qualities.’ Disregarding the raised eye brows of the Hessian aristocracy, their meetings became more frequent and with each conversation Alice fell deeper under the philosopher’s spell, delighted that at last she seemed to have found the soul mate that her husband could never be. Yet Strauss’s cynical opinions did little to alleviate Alice’s own spiritual doubts as, according to the French Ambassador, Maurice Paleologue:
‘…[He] at once obtained a great influence over her. But the romance of their minds and hearts was still wrapped in a deep mystery, though it is impossible to doubt that he shook her faith to the depths and that she passed through a terrible crisis.”
In the midst of her ‘terrible crisis’ - during which Vicky’s mother-in-law, the superficial Queen Augusta branded Alice an atheist - Alice sought the support of the one person who might best empathise with her doubts: her elder sister, Vicky, Crown Princess of Prussia. The Austro-Prussian War had not damaged the relationship between the sisters and through their regular correspondence they remained as close as ever. In the summer of 1869, the Hessians enjoyed a holiday in Potsdam where the sisters planned a second holiday later on in the year. That autumn their husbands were to travel together to Egypt for the opening of the Suez Canal, and in their absence the princesses seized the opportunity of embarking on a trip of their own. In the early winter Alice and Vicky arrived with their children in the French resort of Cannes where, as the young cousins played together, their mothers shared memories of a childhood in England, their various experiences of marriage and the effect that their now very different lives were having on their children.
