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Suitors

Alice's mat­ri­mo­nial plans were begun in 1860 by her mother. Queen Vic­to­ria had ex­pressed her wish that her chil­dren should marry for love, but this did not mean that her choice of suit­ors would nec­es­sar­ily be ex­tended to any­body out­side the royal houses of Eu­rope. Rais­ing a British sub­ject to roy­alty, how­ever high their rank, was po­lit­i­cally ob­jec­tion­able, and also wasted any op­por­tu­nity for a use­ful for­eign alliance. The Queen in­structed her daugh­ter Vic­to­ri...

Engagement and wedding

Alice was en­gaged to Prince Louis of Hesse on 30 April 1861, fol­low­ing the Queen's consent. The Queen per­suaded the Prime Min­is­ter, Lord Palmer­ston, to vote Alice a dowry of £30,000 (£2.82 mil­lion as of 2021). Al­though the amount was con­sid­ered gen­er­ous at the time, Prince Al­bert re­marked that "she will not be able to do great things with it" in the lit­tle realm of Hesse, com­pared to the riches that her sis­ter Vic­to­ria would in­herit as fu­ture Queen of Prus­sia and Ger­ma...

Settling in Darmstadt

Alice and Louis ar­rived at Bin­gen on 12 July 1862 and were greeted by cheer­ing crowds gath­ered in spite of pour­ing rain. After being in­tro­duced to town of­fi­cials, they took a train to Mainz, where they had break­fast, be­fore tak­ing a steamer along the Rhine to Gus­tavs­burg. From there, they took a train to Darm­stadt, where they were greeted with great enthusiasm. Alice wrote back to her mother that "I be­lieve the peo­ple never gave so hearty a welcome", while her sis­ter He­lena...

Austro-Prussian War

In 1866, Aus­tria called for Prus­sia to hand over ad­min­is­tra­tion of Schleswig-Hol­stein, which had until that point been jointly ad­min­is­tered by the two pow­ers, to the Duke of Au­gusten­berg. Prus­sia re­fused, and Otto von Bis­marck sent troops into Aus­trian-ad­min­is­tered Hol­stein. This pro­voked war be­tween Aus­tria and Prus­sia, with Hesse sid­ing with the Aus­tri­ans, tech­ni­cally mak­ing Alice and her sis­ter Vic­to­riaen­e­mies. Alice, heav­ily preg­nant with her third ch...

Religious beliefs

Alice de­vel­oped a friend­ship with the the­olo­gian David Friedrich Strauss. He was a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure at the time; in 1835, he pub­lished The Life of Jesus, which ar­gued that the mir­a­cles of Jesus were non­fac­tual myths and that the Bible could not be lit­er­ally in­ter­preted as God's word, a view akin to heresy in or­tho­dox circles. Alice's view was sim­i­lar to Strauss's, and she be­lieved that con­tem­po­rary Vic­to­rian so­ci­ety was pre­sent­ing God in a way that would b...

Tragedy be­fell Alice on 29 May 1873, when her youngest and favourite son, Friedrich, called "Frit­tie", died after falling 20 feet from a window. The child suf­fered from haemophilia, and al­though he re­gained con­scious­ness, the in­ter­nal bleed­ing could not be stopped. Alice never re­cov­ered from Frit­tie's death, writ­ing to her mother two ...

In No­vem­ber 1878, the Grand Ducal house­hold fell ill with diph­the­ria. Alice's el­dest daugh­ter Vic­to­ria was the first to fall ill, com­plain­ing of a stiff neck in the evening of 5 No­vem­ber. Diph­the­ria was di­ag­nosed the fol­low­ing morn­ing, and soon the dis­ease spread to Alice's chil­dren Alix, Marie, Irene, and Ernest. Her hus­band...

Alice founded the Al­ice-Hos­pi­tal in Darm­stadt in 1869, to treat the city's sick and wounded. The or­gan­i­sa­tion con­tin­ued to flour­ish long after Alice's death, and in 1953, her grand­son Louis, Earl Mount­bat­ten of Burma gave a lec­ture on the hos­pi­tal. He spoke highly of Alice, say­ing "[for her] the point of de­par­ture al­ways re­mai...

Titles and styles

1. 25 April 1843 – 1 July 1862: Her Royal HighnessThe Princess Alice 2. 1 July 1862 – 13 June 1877: Her Royal HighnessPrincess Louis of Hesse and by Rhine 3. 13 June 1877 – 14 December 1878: Her Royal HighnessThe Grand Duchess of Hesse and by Rhine

Honours

1. 1 January 1878: Companion of the Order of the Crown of India

Arms

In 1858, Alice and the three younger of her sis­ters were granted use of the royal arms, with an in­es­cutcheon of the shield of Sax­ony, rep­re­sent­ing her fa­ther. The shield is dif­fer­enced by a label ar­gent of three points, demon­strat­ing that she is the child of a monarch; the outer points bore an er­mine spot each, and the cen­tre bore a rose gules, to dif­fer­en­ti­ate her from other mem­bers of the royal family. 1. Com­plete arms of Alice as a princess of the United King­dom 2. Sh...

References

1. Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse (1885). Letters to Her Majesty the Queen. London: John Murray. 2. Longford, Elizabeth (1964). Victoria R.I.. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0-297-17001-5. 3. Mager, Hugo (1998). Elizabeth: Grand Duchess of Russia. New York, USA: Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc. ISBN 0-7867-0678-3. 4. Noel, Gerard (1985). Princess Alice: Queen Victoria's forgotten daughter. London: Constable and Company Limited. ISBN 0-09-465980-X. 5. Packard, Jerrold M. (1998). Victoria'...