Princess Beatrice of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha - Marriage Prospects

Marriage Prospects

In 1902, Princess Beatrice had a romance with Russian Grand Duke Michael, the younger brother of Tsar Nicholas II, and at that time the heir presumptive to the Imperial Throne. She began receiving letters from him in September 1902 and, although he was a Russian Grand Duke and she now a German Princess, they corresponded in English, and he nicknamed her "Sima". However she was prevented from marrying the Grand Duke as the Russian Orthodox Church forbade the marriage of first cousins. Although such marriages had been allowed previously in the House of Romanov (Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna, whose hand was denied to Napoleon I, was twice allowed to wed first cousins; her descendants became the Russian branch of the Dukes of Oldenburg), the devout Nicholas II, the official head of Russia's church, refused to bend the rules for his brother's sake.

In November 1903, Michael wrote to Beatrice telling her that he could not marry her. The situation was aggravated by a letter Beatrice then received from her elder sister Victoria Melita ("Ducky"), in which Michael was blamed for having callously initiated the doomed romance (when, a couple of years later Ducky, having divorced her first cousin Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, was told that re-marriage to another first cousin, Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich Romanov, would likewise be forbidden by the Tsar, she refused to take no for an answer; the couple eloped into exile). The humiliated Beatrice was sent to Egypt to recover from heartbreak, but pined and wrote reproachful letters to Michael until 1905.

Beatrice was then rumoured to be going to marry Alfonso XIII of Spain, but this proved to be a false rumour also as he married her cousin Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg in 1906. It was at their wedding that Beatrice met a cousin of King Alfonso, Alfonso de Orleans y Borbón (12 November 1886 Madrid, Spain–10 August 1975), Infante of Spain, 5th Duke of Galliera. The Spanish government objected to an infante's proposed match with a British Princess who, unlike Queen Victoria Eugenie, had not agreed to convert to Roman Catholicism: the King was obliged to make clear that, should the wedding take place, the couple would have to live in exile.

Nonetheless, Beatrice and Alfonso married in a Roman Catholic and Lutheran ceremony at Coburg on 15 July 1909. The couple settled in Coburg, until, in 1912, Alfonso and Beatrice were allowed to return to Spain, and his rank of Infante was restored.

In August 1913 Beatrice was received into the Catholic Church.