Death of Prince Albert
Helena's father, Prince Albert, died on 14 December 1861. The Queen was devastated, and ordered her household, along with her daughters, to move from Windsor to Osborne House, the Queen's Isle of Wight residence. Helena's grief was also profound, and she wrote to a friend a month later: "What we have lost nothing can ever replace, and our grief is most, most bitter...I adored Papa, I loved him more than anything on earth, his word was a most sacred law, and he was my help and adviser...These hours were the happiest of my life, and now it is all, all over."
The Queen relied on her second eldest daughter Princess Alice as an unofficial secretary, but Alice needed an assistant of her own. Though Helena was the next eldest, she was considered unreliable by Victoria because of her inability to go long without bursting into tears. Therefore, Louise was selected to assume the role in her place, Alice was married to Prince Louis of Hesse in 1862, after which Helena assumed the role—described as the "crutch" of her mother's old age by one biographer—at her mother's side. In this role, she carried out minor secretarial tasks, such as writing the Queen's letters, helping her with political correspondence, and providing her with company.
Read more about this topic: Princess Helena Of The United Kingdom
Famous quotes containing the words death of, death and/or prince:
“I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating; but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us; perhaps we shall have to colonize the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there.”
—R.J. Hollingdale (b. 1930)
“For, surely, surely, where
Your voice and graces are,
Nothing of death can any feel or know.”
—Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864)
“Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)