HRH The Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse and by Rhine
Very interested (thought by some to be TOO interested) in medical matters, Alice had nursed her Father, Prince Albert, and was a carrier of hemophilia. Alice and Louis had 7 children all together. Friedrich was hemophiliac and died from a fall at the age of two and a half. In 1878 diphtheria infected the whole family except for Elisabeth who was sent away in time. The youngest, Marie, died at the age of four and her Mother, who had nursed all her ill children and husband, succumbed to the disease a month later on the anniversary of her Father's death.
Five children therefore survived into adulthood.
Victoria
When her mother died while her brother and sisters were still young, a great deal of responsibility over her siblings was placed on Victoria's shoulders. However, she married her father's first cousin, Prince Louis of Battenberg, already a naturalised Briton and 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. She was perceived by her family as liberal in outlook, straightforward, practical and bright.
(Remarkably, even though he objected to Victoria's marriage, her Father secretly married his mistress, Countess Alexandrine Hutten-Czapska the same evening! His marriage, to a divorcee who was not of equal rank, 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!)
With the First World War, Victoria's husband Louis was forced to resign from the British Navy having become First Sea Lord only 2 years before and The King (George V) requested that they relinquish their German titles. They took on an anglicised version of their surname and became Mountbatten. They were 're-ennobled' as the Marquis and Marchioness of Milford Haven.
Victoria and Louis themselves had four children. The eldest, Alice, became Princess of Greece and the Mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. The next was Louise, who married King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden. The third child was George who succeeded his Father as Marquis but died at the relatively young age of 45 from bone marrow cancer. The fourth child was Lord Louis, Earl Mountbatten of Burma.
The central Coat of Arms above is of the elder Louis as Marquis combining Hesse and Battenberg (Mountbatten). The Shield is for Victoria and Louis's children and incorporates Princess Alice's Arms to emphasise their descent from Queen Victoria with the change of surname and the anglicisation of the family.
The Mountbattens were a formidable dynasty, especially in this generation, as we will see. They deserve a Blog of their own!
Elisabeth
Eliabeth was the only memeber of the Hesse Family to escape the diphtheria outbreak of 1878 having been sent away to her paternal Grandparents in time.
Elisabeth became famous in Russian society for her beauty and charitable works among the poor. After the Socialist Revolutionary Party's Combat Organization assassinated her husband with a bomb in 1905, Elisabeth publicly forgave Sergei's murderer, Ivan Kalyayev, and campaigned without success for him to be pardoned. She then departed the Imperial Court and became a nun, founding the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent dedicated to helping the downtrodden of Moscow.
She argued with her sister Alix, who had married Tsar Nicholas II, about the power rasputin had over her, but to little affect. In 1918 she was arrested and ultimately executed by the Bolsheviks.
Unfortunately, I can find no authoritative version of either Elisabeth or Sergei's Coat of Arms online.
Irene
As we saw in the previous Blog (Click here), Irene married her first cousin, Prince Heinrich of Prussia. It was a very happy marriage but the family was plagued with hemophilia, inherited through Alice. Their youngest son, Heinrich, died after a fall and a bump to the head at the age of four. Their eldest son, Waldemar, was always a cause for concern but survived until 1945 when he died for want of a blood transfusion at the age of 56. Their middle son, Sigismund, left to live in Costa Rica in the 1930s and never returned. Irene adopted his daughter, Barbara, as her heir as a consequence.
Being close to her siblings, Irene was one of the people consulted when Anna Anderson famously came on the scene in the 1920s claiming to be the long-lost and presumed assassinated Grand Duchess Anastasia, Irene's niece and daughter of the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia. Irene did not support Anna's claims.
Although no rendition of Irene's Coat of Arms seems to be available, it is not difficult to imagine that it would be her Father's Hesse Shield marshalled with Heinrich's Prussian Eagle with the black and white border.
Ernst Ludwig
(Ernst Ludwig's younger brother, Friedrich, was hemophiliac and died of a brain hemorrhage after falling from a window.)
Certainly a colourful character, he was 'forced' to marry his first cousin, HRH Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha/Edinburgh. It was an unhappy and volatile marriage. Ernst Ludwig and Victoria Melita did have a daughter, Elisabeth, who was the apple of Ernst Ludwig eye. Sadly, Elisabeth died of typhoid in 1903 aged 8.
Ernst Ludwig and Victoria Melita were divorced as soon after Queen Victoria died in 1901 as possible. Officially due to irreconcilable reasons, Victoria Melita always maintained that Ernst Ludwig was homosexual.
Ernst Ludwig went on to marry Princess Eleonore of Solms-Hohensolms-Lich in 1905. A much happier marriage which resulted in two sons - Georg Donatus, Hereditary Grand Duke, and Louis.
A patron of the Arts, Ernst Ludwig had a family mausoleum built in 1903 for descendants of Alice and Louis.
In 1918 he lost his Throne in the revolutions following the First World War, having refused to abdicate. He died in October 1937 and was buried in his mausoleum next to his daughter Elisabeth.
Alix
Alix first met Nicholas of Russia at her sister Elisabeth's wedding to Nicholas's Uncle Sergei in 1884. They fell in love when Alix returned to Russia for 6 weeks in 1889. Maybe because of many people's misgivings about Russia and conversion to the Orthodox faith, Nicholas had to propose twice before Alix accepted. Arrangements were made for the wedding but Nicholas's father, Tsar Alexander III, died before the grand ceremony took place. Alix, therefore, immediately became Tsarina on marriage, taking the name Alexandra Feodorovna. (Feodor Romanov became Patriarch of Moscow at the time his son Mikhail was elected the first Tsar of Russia of the Romanov Dynasty in 1613. By coincidence, Mikhail's mother, a nun called Xenia, blessed her son with a copy of the Feodorovskaya Icon as previous tsars had come to terrible ends. The icon became the protectoress of the Dynasty and Feodor was chosen for the patronymic or middle name when the bride's father's name couldn't easily be transliterated into Russian.)
Alix's reputation for influencing her husband's resistance to the surrender of autocratic power and her obsessive faith in the Russian mystic, Grigori Rasputin, are world famous and severely damaged her popularity and that of the Romanov monarchy in its final years. The obsession was centred around Alix's guilt of finally giving birth to a male heir, Alexis, after four daughters, only to have passed hemophilia on to him.
The Lesser Coat of Arms (above right) repeated the double-headed Eagle of the Inescutcheon on the Greater Arms, side-by-side again with Alix's Hessian Arms of the striped Lion. Both Shields were ensigned with the one Russian Imperial Crown and surrounded by the ribbons and insignia of the Order of St. Andrew and St. Catherine the Great Martyr.