Princess Victoria of Hesse and By Rhine - Early Life

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. 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. She was privately educated to a high standard, and was, throughout her life, an avid reader.

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. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, military hospitals were set up in the palace grounds, and she helped in the soup kitchens with her mother. She remembered the intense cold of the winter, and being burned on the arm by hot soup. 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, and it was the first indication that the bleeding disorder in the royal family was hereditary. The following year, 'Frittie' fell from a window onto stone steps and died. It was the first of many tragedies to beset the Hesse family.

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. As the eldest child, Victoria partly assumed the role of mother to the younger children and of companion to her father. 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."