Princess of Prussia
Alexandra Feodorovna was born on 13 July 1798 at the Charlottenburg Palace, as Princess Frederica Louise Charlotte Wilhelmina of Prussia. She was the eldest surviving daughter and fourth child of Frederick William III, King of Prussia, and Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and a sister of Frederick William IV of Prussia and of Wilhelm I, German Emperor.
Princess Charlotte's childhood was marked by the Napoleonic Wars. After the French defeat of the Prussian army, Princess Charlotte and her whole family were forced to flee to East Prussia, where they were given protection by Tsar Alexander I. Soon, Berlin fell under Napoleon’s control, and Princess Charlotte grew up in war-torn Memel, Prussia. Her mother died in 1810 shortly after Charlotte’s twelfth birthday, and for the rest of her life she treasured her mother’s memory. From her early childhood, Princess Charlotte occupied the first female rank in Prussia as the eldest daughter of her widower father. She would remain attached to Prussia and her family all of her life.
In the fall of 1814, Grand Duke Nicholas Pavlovich of Russia, the future Tsar Nicholas I, and his brother Grand Duke Michael, visited Berlin. Arrangements were made between the two Royal families for Nicholas to marry Princess Charlotte, and on the second visit the following year, Nicholas fell in love with the then-seventeen-year-old Princess Charlotte. The feeling was mutual, "I like him and am sure of being happy with him." She wrote to her brother, "What we have in common is our inner life; let the world do as it pleases, in our hearts we have a world of our own." Hand-in-hand, they wandered over the Potsdam countryside, and attended the Berlin Court Opera. By the end of his visit, Grand Duke Nicholas and Princess Charlotte were engaged. They were third cousins, as they were both great-great-grandchildren of Frederick William I of Prussia. The wedding would not take place for another two years.
On 9 June 1817 Princess Charlotte came to Russia with her brother William. After arriving in St. Petersburg she converted to Russian Orthodoxy, and took the Russian name Alexandra Feodorovna. On her nineteenth birthday, 13 July 1817, she and Nicholas were married in the Chapel of the Winter Palace. "...I felt myself very, very happy when our hands joined..." she would later write about her wedding. " With complete confidence and trust, I gave my life into the hands of my Nicholas, and he never once betrayed it."
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—Jennie Jerome Churchill (1854–1921)
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