Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine

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Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine
Marchioness of Milford Haven
Full name Victoria Alberta Elisabeth Mathilde Marie
Born 5 April 1863(1863-04-05)
Birthplace Windsor Castle, Windsor, Berkshire
Died 24 September 1950 (aged 87)
Place of death Kensington Palace, London
Buried Whippingham, Isle of Wight
Consort to Prince Louis of Battenberg
Issue Alice, Louise, George, Louis
Royal House House of Hesse
Father Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse
Mother Alice of the United Kingdom

Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, later Victoria Mountbatten, Marchioness of Milford Haven (baptised Victoria Alberta Elisabeth Mathilde Marie; 5 April 1863 – 24 September 1950), was the eldest daughter of Ludwig IV, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine (1837–1892) and his first wife Princess Alice of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1843–1878).

Her mother died while her brother and sisters were still young, which placed her in an early position of responsibility over her siblings. She married her father's first cousin, Prince Louis of Battenberg, an officer in the United Kingdom's Royal Navy, in a love match and lived most of her married life in various parts of Europe at her husband's naval posts and visiting her many royal relations.

During World War I she and her husband abandoned their German titles and adopted the British-sounding surname of Mountbatten, and two of her sisters who had married into the Russian royal family were murdered by communist revolutionaries. She was perceived by her family as liberal in outlook, straightforward, practical and bright.

She was the maternal grandmother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who is the consort of Queen Elizabeth II.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Victoria was born on Easter Sunday at Windsor Castle in the presence of her maternal grandmother, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. She was christened in the Lutheran faith in the arms of the Queen on 27 April.[1] Her early life was spent at Bessungen, Germany but when she was three years old the family went to live in the Neues Palais, Darmstadt, where she shared a room with her younger sister, Ella, until adulthood. During the Prussian invasion of Hesse in June 1866, she was sent to England, along with her sister Ella, to live with her grandmother until hostilities were ended by the absorption of Hesse-Kassel and parts of Hesse-Darmstadt into Prussia.[2] She was privately educated to a high standard, and was, throughout her life, an avid reader.[3]

During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, she remembered helping in the soup kitchens with her mother, being burned on the arm by hot soup, the military hospitals set up in the palace grounds, and the intense cold of the winter.[4] In 1872, Victoria's eighteen-month-old brother, 'Frittie' was diagnosed with haemophilia. The diagnosis came as a shock to the royal families of Europe; it had been twenty years since Queen Victoria had given birth to her haemophiliac son, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany. It was the first indication that the bleeding disorder in the royal family was hereditary.[5] The following year, 'Frittie' fell from a window onto stone steps and died. It was the first of many family tragedies to beset Victoria.

In 1878, Victoria contracted diphtheria. Ella was swiftly moved out of their room; she was the only member of the family to escape the disease. For days her mother nursed Victoria and the other members of the family; Victoria's sister, Marie, died. Just as the family seemed to have recovered, Victoria's mother fell ill. She died on 14 December, the anniversary of Prince Albert's death.[6] As the eldest child, Victoria partly assumed the role of mother to the younger children and of companion to her father.[7] She later wrote, "My mother's death was an irreparable loss…My childhood ended with her death, for I became the eldest and most responsible."[8]

[edit] Marriage and family

At family gatherings, Victoria had often met her first cousin once removed His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg, a minor German prince who had adopted British nationality and was serving as an officer in the Royal Navy. In the winter of 1882, they met again at Darmstadt, and were engaged the following summer.[9]

After a brief postponement because of the death of Prince Leopold,[10] Victoria married Prince Louis on 30 April 1884 at Darmstadt. Her father did not approve of the match; in his view Prince Louis had little money, and would deprive him of his daughter's company, as the couple would naturally live abroad in Britain. However, Victoria was of an independent mind and took little notice of her father's displeasure.[11] Remarkably, Victoria's father secretly married the same evening his untitled mistress, Alexandrine de Kolemine, the former wife of the Russian chargé d'affaires in Darmstadt. His marriage to a divorced commoner shocked the assembled royalty of Europe, and through diplomatic and family pressure Victoria's father was forced to seek an annulment of his own marriage.[12]

Over the next few years, Victoria had four children:

Name Birth Death Notes
Alice 1885 1969 Married 1903, to Prince Andrew of Greece; had issue. Mother of the Duke of Edinburgh.
Louise 1889 1965 Married 1923, to King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden (making this his second marriage); one stillborn daughter.
George 1892 1938 Married 1916, to Countess Nadejda Mikhailovna de Torby; had issue.
Louis 1900 1979 Married 1922, to Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley; had issue.

They lived in a succession of houses at Chichester, Sussex, Walton-on-Thames, and Schloss Heiligenberg, Jugenheim. When Prince Louis was serving with the Mediterranean fleet, she spent some winters in Malta.[7] In 1887, she contracted typhoid but, after being nursed through her illness by her husband, was sufficiently recovered by June to attend Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee celebrations in London.[13] She was interested in science and drew a detailed geological map of Malta and also participated in archaeological digs both there and in Germany.[14] In leather-bound volumes she kept meticulous records of books she had read, which reveal a wide range of interests, including socialist philosophy.[15]

She personally taught her own children and exposed them to new ideas and inventions.[16] She gave lessons to her younger son, Louis, until he was ten years of age. He said of her in 1968 that she was "a walking encyclopedia. All through her life she stored up knowledge on all sorts of subjects, and she had the great gift of being able to make it all interesting when she taught it to me. She was completely methodical; we had time-tables for each subject, and I had to do preparation, and so forth. She taught me to enjoy working hard, and to be thorough. She was outspoken and open-minded to a degree quite unusual in members of the Royal Family. And she was also entirely free from prejudice about politics or colour and things of that kind."[17]

In 1906, she flew in a Zeppelin airship, and even more daringly later flew in a biplane even though it was "not made to carry passengers, and we perched securely attached on a little stool holding on to the flyer's back."[18] Up until 1914, Victoria regularly visited her relatives abroad in both Germany and Russia, including her two sisters who had married into the Russian royal family: Ella, who had married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, and Alix, who had married the Tsar, Nicholas II of Russia. Victoria was one of Alix's relatives who tried to persuade her away from the influence of Rasputin.[19] On the outbreak of war between Germany and Britain in 1914, Victoria and her daughter, Louise, were in Russia at Yekaterinburg. By train and steamer, they travelled to St Petersburg and from there through Tornio to Stockholm. They sailed from Bergen, Norway, on "the last ship" back to Britain.[20]

[edit] Later life

A 1917 Punch cartoon depicting King George V sweeping away the German titles held by members of his family.
A 1917 Punch cartoon depicting King George V sweeping away the German titles held by members of his family.

Prince Louis was forced to resign from the navy at the start of the war when his German origins became an embarrassment, and the couple retired for the war years to Kent House on the Isle of Wight, which Victoria had been given by her aunt Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll.[21] Victoria blamed her husband's forced resignation on the Government "who few greatly respect or trust."[22] She distrusted the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, because she thought him unreliable—he had once borrowed a book and failed to return it.[23] Continued public hostility to Germany led King George V of the United Kingdom to renounce his German titles, and at the same time on 14 July 1917 Prince Louis and Victoria renounced theirs, assuming an anglicised version of Battenberg—Mountbatten—as their surname.[24] Three days later Louis was re-enobled by the King as Marquess of Milford Haven. During the war, Victoria's two sisters, Alix, Tsarina of Russia, and Ella, Grand Duchess Sergei of Russia, were murdered in the Russian revolution, and her brother, Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, was deposed. On her last visit to Russia in 1914, Victoria had driven past the very house in Yekaterinburg where her sister, Alix, was murdered.[25] Alix's body was never recovered during Victoria's lifetime, but eventually, in January 1921, after a long and convoluted journey, the body of her sister, Ella, was interred in Jerusalem in Victoria's presence.[26]

Later that year, Victoria's husband died in London. After meeting her at the Naval and Military Club in Piccadilly, he complained of feeling unwell, and Victoria persuaded him to rest in a room they had booked in the club annexe. She called a doctor, who prescribed some medication, and Victoria went out to fill the prescription at a nearby pharmacist's. When she came back, Louis was dead.[27] On her widowhood, three years after the end of the war, Victoria moved into a grace-and-favour residence at Kensington Palace and, in the words of her biographer, "became a central matriarchal figure in the lives of Europe's surviving royalty."[28] In 1930, her eldest daughter, Alice, suffered a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed as schizophrenic.[29] In the following decade Victoria was largely responsible for her grandson Philip's education and upbringing during his parents' separation and his mother's institutionalisation. Prince Philip recalled, "I liked my grandmother very much and she was always helpful. She was very good with children…she took the practical approach to them. She treated them in the right way – the right combination of the rational and the emotional."[30]

In 1937, her brother, Ernie, died, and soon afterwards her widowed sister-in-law, nephew, granddaughter and two of her great-grandchildren all died in an air crash at Ostend. Further tragedy soon followed when her son, George, died of bone cancer the following year. Her granddaughter, Lady Pamela Hicks remembered her grandmother's tears.[31] In World War II Victoria was bombed out of Kensington Palace, and spent some time at Windsor Castle with King George VI. Her surviving son, Louis, and two of her grandsons served in the Royal Navy, while her German relations fought with the opposing forces. She spent most of her time reading and worrying about her children; her daughter, Alice, remained in occupied Greece and was unable to communicate with her mother for 4 years at the height of the war.[32] After the Allied victory, her son, Louis, was offered the post of Viceroy of India, but she was deeply opposed to his accepting, knowing that the position would be dangerous and difficult.[33] He accepted anyway.

She fell ill with bronchitis (she had smoked since the age of sixteen) at her son Louis's home at Broadlands, Hampshire in the summer of 1950. Saying "it is better to die at home",[34] Victoria moved back to Kensington Palace, where she died. She was buried four days later in the grounds of St. Mildred's Church, Whippingham on the Isle of Wight.[7]

[edit] Legacy

Victoria in later life: Portrait by Philip de László
Victoria in later life: Portrait by Philip de László

With the help of her lady-in-waiting, Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, Victoria wrote an unpublished memoir, held in the Mountbatten archive at the University of Southampton, which remains an interesting source for royal historians.[7][35] A selection of Queen Victoria's letters to Victoria have been published with a commentary by Richard Hough and an introduction by Victoria's granddaughter, Patricia Mountbatten.[36]

Victoria's son remembered her fondly: "My mother was very quick on the uptake, very talkative, very aggressive and argumentative. With her marvellous brain she sharpened people's wits".[37] Her granddaughter thought her "formidable, but never intimidating…a supremely honest woman, full of commonsense and modesty."[38] Victoria wrote her own typically forthright epitaph at the end of her life in letters to and conversation with her son: "What will live in history is the good work done by the individual & that has nothing to do with rank or title…I never thought I would be known only as your mother. You're so well known now and no one knows about me, and I don't want them to."[39]

[edit] Titles from birth to death

  • Her Grand Ducal Highness Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine (1863–1884)
  • Her Grand Ducal Highness Princess Louis of Battenberg (1884–1917)
  • Lady Mountbatten (14–17 July 1917)
  • The Most Honourable The Marchioness of Milford Haven (1917–1921)
  • The Most Honourable The Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven (1921–1950)

[edit] Ancestry

[edit] References

  1. ^ Hough, Richard (1984). Louis and Victoria: The Family History of the Mountbattens. Second edition. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, p.28. 
  2. ^ Hough, p.29
  3. ^ Hough, p.30
  4. ^ Hough, p.34
  5. ^ Hough, p.36
  6. ^ Hough, pp.46–48
  7. ^ a b c d Vickers, Hugo (2004), “Mountbatten, Victoria Alberta Elisabeth Mathilde Marie, marchioness of Milford Haven (1863–1950)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press) 
  8. ^ Hough, p.50
  9. ^ Hough, p.57
  10. ^ Hough, p.114
  11. ^ Ziegler, Philip (1985). Mountbatten. London: Collins, p.24. ISBN 0002165430. 
  12. ^ Hough, pp.117–122
  13. ^ Hough, pp.158–159
  14. ^ Hough, p.169
  15. ^ Hough, pp.213–214, 372 and 375
  16. ^ Hough, p.177
  17. ^ Terraine, John; Foreword by Lord Mountbatten (1980). The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten. London: Arrow Books Ltd., p.6. ISBN 0099226308. 
  18. ^ Victoria Milford Haven quoted in Hough, p.215
  19. ^ Hough, p.264
  20. ^ Hough, p.289
  21. ^ Hough, p.274
  22. ^ Vickers, Hugo (2000). Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece. London: Hamish Hamilton, p.113. ISBN 0241136865. 
  23. ^ Terraine, p.10
  24. ^ Eilers, Marlene A. (1987). Queen Victoria's Descendants. Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing Co, p.187. 
  25. ^ Hough, p.288
  26. ^ Kerr, Mark (1934). Prince Louis of Battenberg. London: Longmans, Green and Co, p.261. 
  27. ^ Hough, p.333
  28. ^ Hough, p.338
  29. ^ Vickers, p.200–205
  30. ^ Prince Philip quoted in Hough, p.354
  31. ^ Hough, p.365
  32. ^ Hough, pp.375 and 382
  33. ^ Ziegler, p.359
  34. ^ Ziegler, p.506
  35. ^ An extract can be read on-line here: http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/victoriarussia.html
  36. ^ Victoria; edited by Hough, Richard (1975). Advice to a grand-daughter: letters from Queen Victoria to Princess Victoria of Hesse. London: Heinemann. ISBN 0434348619.
  37. ^ Earl Mountbatten of Burma quoted in Hough, p. 339
  38. ^ Lady Pamela Hicks quoted in Hough, p.373
  39. ^ Quoted in Hough, p.387

[edit] Further reading

  • Massie, Robert K. (1995). The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. New York: Ballantine Books.

[edit] External links

Persondata
NAME Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Victoria Mountbatten, Marchioness of Milford Haven
SHORT DESCRIPTION European royalty
DATE OF BIRTH 5 April 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Windsor Castle, Windsor, Berkshire
DATE OF DEATH 24 September 1950
PLACE OF DEATH Kensington Palace, London