Queen Victoria's Children by John Van der Kiste

Author:John Van der Kiste
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752473246
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

The months leading up to the Connaught wedding should, therefore, have been a happy time for the family. Instead they were destined to be overshadowed by tragedy in Darmstadt.

In June 1877 Louis had succeeded to the Grand Duchy of Hesse and the Rhine. Alice was now therefore Grand Duchess and Landesmutter (mother of the country). It proved an insupportable burden for her, already worn out by years of personal sorrow and unremitting overwork. Since her wedding in 1862 Hesse had seen the flowering of many organisations for the improvement of health services and education, all owing their existence to the tireless efforts of Alice. In addition to maintaining these, she now had to assist her husband with additional duties of administration and the ceremonial round. Too much, she said wearily, was being demanded of her. Moreover, she had become bitterly disillusioned with her kind but dull husband. In October 1876 she admitted in a long letter to Louis how disappointing her life in Darmstadt had been. She would have been perfectly happy living in a cottage, she said; ‘if I had been able to share my intellectual interests, and intellectual aspirations with a husband whose strong, protective love would have guided me round the rocks strewn in my way by my own nature, outward circumstances, and the excesses of my own opinions.’ So many times she had tried to talk to him about more serious matters, but ‘we have developed separately – away from each other; and that is why I feel that true companionship is an impossibility for us – because our thoughts will never meet.’9

Even her mother, with whom she had had her differences, was not always much of a comfort. About a year later, she wrote an undated letter to Louis referring to some correspondence with her Mama, ‘so unfair that it makes me cry with anger . . . I wish I were dead – and it probably will not be too long before I give Mama that pleasure.’10

Ironically it was Queen Victoria who recognized that her frail, exhausted daughter was badly in need of a complete rest. She therefore paid for the family to come and spend a holiday in Eastbourne in the summer of 1878. Yet Alice, who was judged by the royal household to have become increasingly German, could not and would not relax. She spent her time in a ceaseless routine of visiting hospitals and charity organisations. She opened a bazaar for the building fund of All Saints Church, inspected the Christ Church schools and gave away prizes at the college. But she could not hide her intense weariness of spirit. Before going north to Balmoral, she wrote apologetically to her mother that: ‘I don’t think you quite know how far from well I am, and how absurdly wanting in strength . . . I am good for next to nothing and I fear I shan’t be able to come to dinner the first evenings. I hope you won’t mind. I have never in my life been like this before.

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