July 11, 1866: Birth of Princess Irene of Hesse and by Rhine. Part II.

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Anna Anderson, Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, Franziska Schanzkowska, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia, Hemophilia, Prince Henry of Prussia, Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Wilhelm of Sweden, Princess Alix of Hesse by Rhine, Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and By Rhine, Princess Irene of Hesse and By Rhine

Princess Irene, raised to believe in a proper Victorian code of behavior, was easily shocked by what she saw as immorality. In 1884, the same year that her elder sister Victoria married Prince Louis of Battenberg, another sister, Elisabeth, married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, and when Elisabeth converted from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy, in 1891, Irene was deeply upset.

Princess Irene ca. 1902

She wrote to her father that she “cried terribly” over Elisabeth’s decision. In 1892, Irene’s father, Grand Duke Ludwig IV, died, and her brother, Ernst-Ludwig, succeeded him as Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine. Two years later, in May 1894, Ernst-Ludwig was married off by Queen Victoria to a first cousin, Victoria-Melita of Edinburgh and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. It was amidst the wedding festivities that Irene’s youngest surviving sister, Alix, accepted the marriage proposal of Tsarevich Nicholas, a second cousin, and when Nicholas’ father, Emperor Alexander III, died prematurely in November 1894, Irene and her husband traveled to St. Petersburg to be present at both his funeral and the wedding of Alix, who had taken the name Alexandra Feodorovna upon her conversion to Orthodoxy, to the new Emperor Nicholas II.

Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine (1864–1918)

Despite the disagreement that she had over the conversion of her two sisters to Russian Orthodoxy, she remained close with all of her siblings. In 1907, Irene helped arrange what later turned out to be a disastrous marriage between Elizabeth’s ward, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia, to Prince Wilhelm of Sweden, Duke of Södermanland. Wilhelm’s mother, the Queen Victoria of Sweden, was an old friend of both Irene and Elisabeth. Grand Duchess Maria later wrote that Irene pressured her to go through with the marriage when she had doubts. She told Maria that ending the engagement would “kill” Elizabeth.

Prince Wilhelm was the second son of King Gustaf V of Sweden and his wife Victoria of Baden.

On May 3, 1908, in Tsarskoye Selo, the wedding between was Wilhelm of Sweden married Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia took place. The bride was a daughter of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich of Russia by his first wife Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark. Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna was a cousin of the reigning Russian Emperor Nicholas II and first cousin of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. The couple had only one son: Prince Lennart, Duke of Småland and later Count of Wisborg (1909–2004).

Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia

The marriage was unhappy. Their son, Lennart, later wrote an autobiography in which he revealed several details of the Swedish royal family. The autobiography tells of how Maria, like her aunt and namesake Maria, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, felt that she had married beneath herself in marrying a younger son of the King of Sweden, and this caused problems of ego between the couple.

Maria insisted that the servants address her by her correct style Your Imperial and Royal Highness, to the chagrin of her husband, who was merely a Royal Highness. When apprised of the matter, Wilhelm’s father King Gustaf V had no choice but to acquiesce with his daughter-in-law’s wish, which was perfectly valid in law, and ordered that the imperial style be used invariably for Maria.

Maria sought a divorce because of what she described as the horror she then felt toward the Swedish royal family, due to their unlimited support of Doctor Axel Munthe who had accosted her sexually. The divorce was granted in 1914, and Maria returned to Russia.

Prince Heinrich and Princess Irene

In 1912, Irene was a source of support to her sister Alix and her relationship with Grigori Rasputin when Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich nearly died of complications of haemophilia at the Imperial Family’s hunting lodge in Poland.

Princess Irene’s support stemmed from the fact that two of her children with Prince Heinrich of Prussia, princes Waldemar and Heinrich, were hemophiliacs, a disease which they inherited through Irene from the maternal grandmother of both of their parents, Queen Victoria, who was a carrier. Prince Sigismund was the only one of the three brothers who did not have the hemophilia.

On February 25, 1904, Princess Irene left 4 year old Prince Heinrich unsupervised for a few minutes while she went to fetch something. The playful Prince climbed a chair, and then he climbed onto the table. As he heard his mother approaching, he attempted to quickly come down but stumbled while attempting to climb down the chair and fell on the floor headfirst.

Prince Heinrich started to scream, which immediately attracted Princess Irene’s attention. By the time she reached him, the child was almost unconscious. The doctor said the fall had not been that bad and the child would have survived had he not been a haemophiliac. However, suffering from this condition, it was certain the young Prince would die. He was suffering from a brain haemorrhage. He lingered for a couple of hours, but died the following day, on February 26. Prince Heinrich’s premature death would later very much affect the Princess, who would withdraw into herself.

Princess Irene with her husband Prince Heinrich of Prussia and their two surviving sons, Prince Sigismund, left, and Prince Waldemar.

Later life

Irene’s ties to her sisters were disrupted by the advent of World War I, which put them on opposing sides of the war. When the war ended, she received word that her sister Alix, and her husband and children along with her sister Elisabeth had been murdered by the Bolsheviks. Following the war and the abdication of her brother-in-law, Emperor Wilhelm II, Germany was no longer ruled by the Prussian Royal Family, but Irene and her husband retained their estate, Hemmelmark, in northern Germany.

Irene and Anna Anderson

When Anna Anderson surfaced in Berlin in the early 1920s, claiming to be the surviving Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, Irene visited the woman, but decided that Anderson could not be her niece that she had last seen in 1913. Princess Irene was not impressed.

Anna Anderson

I saw immediately that she could not be one of my nieces. Even though I had not seen them for nine years, the fundamental facial characteristics could not have altered to that degree, in particular the position of the eyes, the ear, etc. .. At first sight one could perhaps detect a resemblance to Grand Duchess Tatiana.”

Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, sister of the murdered Emperor, commented on the visit of Princess Irene, saying it was an unsatisfactory meeting, but the woman’s supporters said that Princess Irene had not known her niece very well and all the rest of it.”

Irene’s husband, Heinrich of Prussia, said that the mention of Anderson upset Irene too much and ordered that no one was to discuss Anderson in her presence.

Prince Heinrich, Irene’s husband, died of throat cancer, as his father Emperor Friedrich III had, in Hemmelmark on April 20, 1929.

Anna Anderson biographer Peter Kurth wrote that several years later, Irene’s son (Prince Sigismund) posed questions to Anderson through an intermediary about their shared childhood and declared that her answers were all accurate. Irene later adopted Sigismund’s daughter, Barbara, born in 1920, as her heir after Sigismund left Germany to live in Costa Rica during the 1930s. Sigismund declined to return to Germany to live after World War II.

Princess Irene died November 11, 1953 (aged 87) at Schloss Hemmelmark, Barkelsby, Schleswig-Holstein, West Germany.

End note:

In 1991, the bodies of Emperor Nicholas II, Irene’s sister, Empress Alexandra (Alix) and three of their daughters were exhumed from a mass grave near Yekaterinburg. They were identified on the basis of both skeletal analysis and DNA testing. The female bones matched that of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, whose maternal grandmother Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine was a sister of Alexandra and Irene. The bodies of Tsarevich Alexei and the remaining daughter were discovered in 2007. Repeated and independent DNA tests confirmed that the remains were the seven members of the Romanov family, and proved that none of the Emperor’s four daughters survived the shooting of the Romanov family.

A sample of Anderson’s tissue, part of her intestine removed during her operation in 1979, had been stored at Martha Jefferson Hospital, Charlottesville, Virginia. Anderson’s mitochondrial DNA was extracted from the sample and compared with that of the Romanovs and their relatives. It did not match that of the Duke of Edinburgh or that of the bones, confirming that Anderson was not related to the Romanovs. However, the sample matched DNA provided by Karl Maucher, a grandson of Franziska Schanzkowska’s sister, Gertrude (Schanzkowska) Ellerik, indicating that Karl Maucher and Anna Anderson were maternally related and that Anderson was Franziska Schanzkowska.

The life of Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine (1895–1903)

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Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, Grand Duke Ernst-Ludwig of Hesse and by Rhine, Princess Alix of Hesse by Rhine, Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and By Rhine, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, Typhoid, Victoria Melita of Edinburgh

Her Grand Ducal Highness Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine (Elisabeth Marie Alice Viktoria; March 11 1895 – November 16, 1903) was a German Hessian and Rhenish princess, the only daughter of Ernst-Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine and his first wife, Princess Victoria-Melita of Edinburgh and Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

She was named after her paternal great-grandmother, who was born Princess Elisabeth of Prussia, the second daughter of Prince Wilhelm of Prussia and Landgravine Marie Anna of Hesse-Homburg and a granddaughter of King Friedrich-Wilhelm II of Prussia. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh is her great-great-grandson.

Birth

Princess Elisabeth’s parents, nicknamed ‘Ernie’ and ‘Ducky,’ were first cousins who married at the instigation of their common grandmother, Queen Victoria. The marriage was an unhappy one from the start. Princess Victoria-Melita was eighteen at the time of Elisabeth’s birth. She was fond of Elisabeth, but found it hard to compete with Ernst’s devotion to their daughter.

Ernst was convinced even before Elisabeth could speak that he alone could understand her. At the age of six months, she was scheduled to move to a new nursery and her father ‘consulted’ her on her color preferences. He claimed that she made ‘happy little squeals’ when he showed her a particular shade of lilac material. Ernst then decorated her nursery in shades of lilac. He later had a playhouse built for his daughter that stood in its own garden. Adults were forbidden to enter “much to the frustration of royal nurses and tutors, who could be seen pacing up and down impatiently outside as they waited for their high-spirited young charges to stop their games and emerge.”

Childhood

Margaretta Eagar, a governess for the daughters of Emperor Nicholas II, described Elisabeth as “a sweet and pretty child, with wide blue-grey eyes and a profusion of dark hair. She was much like her mother, not only in face, but also in manner.” The four-year-old Elisabeth wanted a baby sister and tried to persuade her aunt and uncle to let her parents adopt one of her paternal first cousins, Tatiana or Maria (daughters of Nicholas II). Her parents had only one other child together, a stillborn son, in 1900.

She was a favorite with her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, who called the little girl “my precious.” Queen Victoria refused to permit the unhappily married Victoria and Ernst to divorce for the sake of Elisabeth. It was Elisabeth whom Queen Victoria asked to see first and to receive eightieth birthday greetings from in 1899. When the child heard Queen Victoria’s pony cart approaching on the road below Windsor Castle, the four-year-old Elisabeth ran out on the balcony, waving and calling, “Granny Gran, I’m here!” Elisabeth’s playfulness made the queen laugh out loud.

Princess Elisabeth with her great-grandmother Queen Victoria

Elisabeth’s grandmother, Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia, the Duchess of Edinburgh, (married to Queen Victoria’s second son, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) brought five-year-old Elisabeth to see Queen Victoria on her death bed on January 22, 1901. After the queen died, the child was taken in to see her body and told that her great-grandmother had gone to be with the angels. “But I don’t see the wings,” Elisabeth whispered.

Elisabeth sat next to her second cousin, Prince Edward of York (called David by family and friends, later to become King Edward VIII) during Queen Victoria’s funeral. “Sweet little David behaved so well during the service,” wrote his aunt Maud, “and was supported by the little Hesse girl who took him under her protection and held him most of the time round his neck. They looked such a delightful little couple.

In his memoirs, written more than thirty years after her death, her father wrote of Elisabeth’s “deep sensitivity” and “very large heart.” He wrote that “I never knew a child who had so much influence on adults. Her inner personality was very strong, and she had a natural quality that protected her from being spoiled.”

Grand Duchess Victoria-Melita and her daughter Princess Elisabeth

In October 1901, after the death of Queen Victoria, Elisabeth’s parents finally divorced. Her mother had rekindled a previous romance with another cousin, her future husband, Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich of Russia. Her father, according to letters written by her mother, had been caught cavorting with domestic servants.

Her parents’ divorce meant that Elisabeth divided her year between Darmstadt and her mother’s new home in Coburg. Elisabeth was at first mistrustful of her mother and resented the divorce, although Victoria-Melita did her best to mend her relationship with her daughter during her visit with Elisabeth in the spring of 1902. She was only partially successful, though Victoria enjoyed turning her daughter into an outstanding horsewoman.

In his memoirs, Ernst said he had difficulty persuading Elisabeth to visit her mother. Before one visit, he found the child “whimpering under a sofa, full of despair.” He assured Elisabeth that her mother loved her too. “Mama says she loves me, but you do love me,” Elisabeth replied. Margaret Eagar thought the child’s eyes were the saddest she had ever seen. “Looking at her I used to wonder what those wide blue-grey eyes saw, to bring such a look of sadness to the childish face,” she wrote.

On October 6, 1903, Ernst hosted a large family gathering at Darmstadt for the wedding of his niece, Princess Alice of Battenberg, to Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, (parents of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh).

A few weeks later he took Elisabeth to stay with his younger sister, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, her husband, Emperor Nicholas II, and their family. At the imperial family’s hunting lodge in Skierniewice, Poland, Elisabeth went on long walks and had picnics in the forest with her cousins.

Her nanny, who called Elisabeth “my baby,” woke Elisabeth in the middle of the night and settled her in a window seat of the nursery so that she might look out on the game spread out upon the grounds below.

Grand Duke Ernst with his daughter Princess Elisabeth

One morning, the eight-year-old awoke with a sore throat and pains in her chest, which the Russian Court doctor put down to too much excitement with her cousins the previous day. Her fever rose to 104 degrees. The imperial party didn’t believe her illness was a serious one and went ahead with their plans for the day and attended the theater as planned. By the evening Elisabeth was in even more severe pain and had started gasping for breath. A specialist was summoned from Warsaw. The specialist gave her injections of caffeine and camphor to stimulate her slowing heart, but without success.

“Suddenly she sat up in her bed and looked from one to the other of us with wide, frightened eyes,” wrote Eagar. “She cried out suddenly, ‘I’m dying! I’m dying!’ She was coaxed to lie down again, but remained agitated. “The child turned to me, and said anxiously, ‘Send a telegram to mama.'” Eagar promised it would be done. “She added, ‘immediately.’ … We continued to fan the feeble spark of life, but moment by moment it declined.

She began to talk to her cousins, and seemed to imagine she was playing with them. She asked for little Anastasie and I brought the wee thing into the room. The dying eyes rested on her for a moment, and Anastasie said, ‘Poor cousin Ella! Poor Princess Elizabeth!’ I took the baby out of the room.” Doctors told Alexandra that the child’s mother should be notified, but the telegram did not arrive until the following morning, when Elisabeth had already died. An autopsy following her death confirmed that she had died of virulent typhoid, although it was rumored she had eaten from a poisoned dish intended for the Emperor.

Grand Duke Ernst with his daughter Princess Elisabeth

Elisabeth’s body was placed in a silver casket, a gift from Nicholas II, for the journey back to Darmstadt. Her father arranged a white funeral, with white instead of black for the funeral trappings, white flowers, and white horses for the procession. The Hessian people came out by the thousands to view the funeral procession and “sobbed in unison so that I could hear it,” Ernst wrote.

A cousin, German Emperor Wilhelm II, expressed shock at the child’s death in a letter to Emperor Nicholas II on the day after. “How joyous and merry she was that day at Wolfsgarten, when I was there, so full of life and fun and health … What a terrible heartrending blow for poor Ernie, who doted and adored that little enchantress!”

Elisabeth was buried in the Rosenhöhe with other members of the Hessian Grand Ducal family. A marble angel was later installed to watch over her grave. In a final gesture to Elisabeth and Ernst, Victoria Melita placed her badge of the Order of Hesse, granted to her upon her marriage, into Elisabeth’s coffin.

Ernst was still devastated by the memory of his daughter’s death thirty years later. “My little Elisabeth,” he wrote in his memoirs, “was the sunshine of my life.”