The Hessian Princess: Childhood and Formation (1864–1884)

The early life of Elisabeth Alexandra Luise Alice of Hesse and by Rhine — “Ella” — born November 1, 1864, granddaughter of Queen Victoria and daughter of Princess Alice, whose plain, charitable, Lutheran household formed the future Grand Duchess before any thought of Russia. This file traces the Hessian court’s documented simplicity, the catastrophic losses of 1878, the English summers, and the suitors — including the refused courtship of the future Kaiser — down to the threshold of her 1884 marriage.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (New Martyr; glorified ROCOR 1981, Moscow 1992)

Birth and Lineage (1864)

Elisabeth Alexandra Luise Alice was born on November 1, 1864, at Bessungen, near Darmstadt, in the Grand Duchy of Hesse and by Rhine (Hesse-Darmstadt) — the second child of Prince (from 1877 Grand Duke) Louis IV of Hesse and Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, the second daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (Lubov Millar [Maria Lubov], Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, ch. 1; Christopher Warwick, Ella: Princess, Saint and Martyr, 2006, ch. 1). She stood thus among the most closely connected royal children in Europe: Queen Victoria was her grandmother, the future German Emperor Wilhelm II her first cousin, and her younger sister Alix — born in 1872 — would become Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia (Hugo Mager, Elizabeth: Grand Duchess of Russia, New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998, ch. 1). Within the family she was always “Ella.”

The Hessian Court and Princess Alice’s Formation

The household into which Ella was born was, by the standards of nineteenth-century royalty, conspicuously modest, and this simplicity was deliberate. Princess Alice — the most intellectually serious and socially engaged of Victoria’s daughters — ran a court marked by economy and earnestness rather than display. The Hessian children wore plain dresses, ate simple meals, swept their own rooms, and lit their own fires; Alice held that her daughters should know how to work with their hands and should not be insulated from the realities of ordinary life (Mager, Elizabeth, ch. 1; Warwick, Ella, ch. 2).

Decisively for Ella’s later trajectory, Alice’s Christianity was a practical, philanthropic Lutheranism turned outward toward the sick and the poor. She founded and patronized hospitals and women’s nursing and charitable organizations in Hesse, drew on the example of Florence Nightingale, and made a habit of taking her children with her on visits to hospitals and to the wounded during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 (Mager, Elizabeth, ch. 1; Warwick, Ella, ch. 2). Ella’s biographers are unanimous that this maternal pattern — a faith expressed as organized service to the suffering — was the deepest formative influence of her childhood and the direct seed of the charitable vocation that defined her adult life (Mager, Elizabeth, ch. 1). Alice was also touched by a vein of religious questioning; her correspondence with the liberal theologian David Friedrich Strauss is documented, though the children were raised within conventional Lutheran piety (Warwick, Ella, ch. 2).

The Losses of 1878

In the late autumn of 1878 a diphtheria epidemic swept the Hessian palace. Ella — then fourteen — had been sent away and so escaped infection, but the household around her was devastated. Her youngest sister, the four-year-old Princess Marie (“May”), died on November 16, 1878, and her mother, Princess Alice, having nursed the family through the outbreak and reportedly contracted the disease after kissing her stricken son Ernst, died on December 14, 1878, at the age of thirty-five (Mager, Elizabeth, ch. 1; Warwick, Ella, ch. 3). At a stroke Ella was left, at fourteen, motherless and the eldest effective daughter of a grieving household. The double loss drew Queen Victoria into the role of surrogate mother to her Hessian grandchildren, and the bereavement is consistently read by Ella’s biographers as the event that deepened her early seriousness and her sense of the nearness of death (Warwick, Ella, ch. 3; Mager, Elizabeth, ch. 2).

The English Summers and Queen Victoria

After Alice’s death the Hessian children spent extended periods under their grandmother’s eye — at Windsor, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, and Balmoral. Ella and Alix, raised partly in English and most at ease in that language, became particular favorites of the Queen, who took a close and exacting interest in their upbringing, their reading, and above all their eventual marriages (Mager, Elizabeth, ch. 2; Warwick, Ella, chs. 3–4). The bond between grandmother and granddaughter, formed in these summers, would matter greatly a decade later: when Ella’s conversion to Orthodoxy divided her family, Queen Victoria — for all her dislike of the Russian match — proved among her most understanding supporters (see The Decision).

The Suitors and the Refused Courtship

Ella was widely regarded as one of the great beauties of European royalty, and she did not lack for suitors. The best-documented courtship was that of her own first cousin, Prince Wilhelm of Prussia — the future Kaiser Wilhelm II. As a student at Bonn, Wilhelm pursued Ella with a youthful intensity recorded in his own letters and poems; he is reported to have written that “if God grants that I may live till then, I shall make her my bride” (Mager, Elizabeth, ch. 2; Warwick, Ella, ch. 4). Ella firmly declined him, and his suit came to nothing. Other names canvassed in the dynastic marriage market — including a Baden prince — likewise came to nothing (Warwick, Ella, ch. 4).

What did succeed was the suit of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, fifth son of Emperor Alexander II and brother of the reigning Alexander III. To Queen Victoria’s open dismay — she distrusted Russia and feared for any granddaughter sent into the gloom and danger of the Romanov court — Ella accepted him (Mager, Elizabeth, ch. 2; Warwick, Ella, chs. 4–5). The engagement carried her out of the plain Hessian world of her mother’s making and toward the splendor, and the eventual martyrdom, of the Russian Empire. Her formation, however, went with her: the daughter of Alice’s hospital visits would, in Russia, become the foundress of a convent of mercy.

References

Mager, Hugo. Elizabeth: Grand Duchess of Russia. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998.
Warwick, Christopher. Ella: Princess, Saint and Martyr. Chichester: Wiley, 2006.
Millar, Lubov [Maria]. Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia: New Martyr of the Communist Yoke. Redding, CA: Nikodemos Orthodox Publication Society, 1991.
Kuchmaeva, I. K. Zhizn’ i podvig velikoi kniagini Elisavety Feodorovny [The Life and Labor of Grand Duchess Elisaveta Feodorovna]. Moscow, 2004.
“Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine.” Wikipedia (used to locate dates; birth November 1, 1864, at Bessungen, and the 1878 diphtheria deaths of Princess Marie [Nov. 16] and Princess Alice [Dec. 14], cross-checked against Mager and Warwick).