Princess Victoria of Hesse and By Rhine - Marriage and Family

Marriage and Family

At family gatherings, Victoria had often met Prince Louis of Battenberg, who was her first cousin once removed and a member of a morganatic branch of the Hessian Royal Family. Prince Louis had adopted British nationality and was serving as an officer in the Royal Navy. In the winter of 1882, they met again at Darmstadt, and were engaged the following summer.

After a brief postponement because of the death of the Duke of Albany, Victoria married Prince Louis on 30 April 1884 at Darmstadt. Her father did not approve of the match; in his view Prince Louis had little money and would deprive him of his daughter's company, as the couple would naturally live abroad in Britain. However, Victoria was of an independent mind and took little notice of her father's displeasure. Remarkably, Victoria's father secretly married the same evening his untitled mistress, Alexandrine de Kolemine, the former wife of the Russian chargé d'affaires in Darmstadt. His marriage to a divorced commoner 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.

Over the next few years, Victoria had four children:

They lived in a succession of houses at Chichester, Sussex, Walton-on-Thames, and Schloss Heiligenberg, Jugenheim. When Prince Louis was serving with the Mediterranean fleet, she spent some winters in Malta. In 1887, she contracted typhoid but, after being nursed through her illness by her husband, was sufficiently recovered by June to attend Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee celebrations in London. She was interested in science and drew a detailed geological map of Malta and also participated in archaeological digs both on the island and in Germany. In leather-bound volumes she kept meticulous records of books she had read, which reveal a wide range of interests, including socialist philosophy.

She personally taught her own children and exposed them to new ideas and inventions. She gave lessons to her younger son, Louis, until he was ten years of age. He said of her in 1968 that she was "a walking encyclopedia. All through her life she stored up knowledge on all sorts of subjects, and she had the great gift of being able to make it all interesting when she taught it to me. She was completely methodical; we had time-tables for each subject, and I had to do preparation, and so forth. She taught me to enjoy working hard, and to be thorough. She was outspoken and open-minded to a degree quite unusual in members of the Royal Family. And she was also entirely free from prejudice about politics or colour and things of that kind."

In 1906, she flew in a Zeppelin airship, and even more daringly later flew in a biplane even though it was "not made to carry passengers, and we perched securely attached on a little stool holding on to the flyer's back." Up until 1914, Victoria regularly visited her relatives abroad in both Germany and Russia, including her two sisters who had married into the Russian royal family: Ella, who had married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, and Alix, who had married the Tsar, Nicholas II of Russia. Victoria was one of Alix's relatives who tried to persuade her away from the influence of Rasputin. On the outbreak of war between Germany and Britain in 1914, Victoria and her daughter, Louise, were in Russia at Yekaterinburg. By train and steamer, they travelled to St Petersburg and from there through Tornio to Stockholm. They sailed from Bergen, Norway, on "the last ship" back to Britain.