Princess Alice of the United Kingdom
Princess Alice Maud Mary of Great Britain and Ireland ( born April 25, 1843 in London, † December 14, 1878 in Darmstadt ) was a member of the British royal family and by marriage Grand Duchess of Hesse and by Rhine.
Life
Alice was the second daughter of Queen Victoria (1819-1901) and her husband, the Prince Consort Albert of Saxe- Coburg and Gotha (1819-1861), second son of the reigning Duke Ernst I. and Princess Louise of Saxe-Gotha - Altenburg. Her maternal grandfather was the fourth son of the British king George III. , Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent and Strathearn. Alice was named in honor of Queen Victoria's first Prime Minister William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, who had once told Victoria that this was his favorite name for a girl.
Princess Alice married in 1862 in Osborne House on the Isle of Wight later Grand Duke Ludwig IV of Hesse and by Rhine ( 1837-1892 ), the eldest son of Prince Karl Wilhelm Ludwig of Hesse and Princess Elizabeth of Prussia. From the marriage seven children were born:
- Victoria Alberta Elisabeth Mathilde Marie (1863-1950)
- Elisabeth Alexandra Luise Alice (1864-1918), later Elizabeth Feodorovna
- Irene Luise Maria Anna (1866-1953)
- Ernst Ludwig Karl Albert Wilhelm (1868-1937), the last Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine
- Friedrich Wilhelm (1870-1873), died after a lintel
- Viktoria Alix Helena Luise Beatrice (1872-1918), later Alexandra Feodorovna
- Marie Victoria (1874-1878), died of diphtheria
From 1863 to Alice committed to public health care and in particular to improve the hygienic conditions have recently given birth. In Darmstadt she founded in 1867 together with Luise Büchner the named after her sick and the poor care association ( Alice Women's Association ). Grand Duchess Alice and Luise Büchner developed the profession of nurse without denominational loyalty, and there was the Alice Club of Nursing, which spawned the free Alice sisterhood. With the active involvement of the princess emerged after first test in the hospitals of the wars of 1866 and 1870/71 the Alice - Hospital Darmstadt. 1872 took place at Alice's invitation in Darmstadt hold the first " German Women and acquisition teams " instead, which is dealt with were female employment at the post office, the railway and the telegraph service.
1873 Alice's youngest son died after falling out of a window to internal bleeding ( hemophilia). In the same year she translated the treatise On the Homes of the London Poor by Octavia Hill from German. Your plan to establish an artists' colony, she could no longer put themselves into action. This fully led her son Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig and Mathilde height. In November 1878, the children, with the exception of Ella diseased, at the infectious disease diphtheria. Alice used sacrificially the suffering children and died barely a month after her youngest daughter Marie on December 14, 1878, the date of death of their father Prince Consort Albert, in Darmstadt. She was buried in the mausoleum of the Grand Ducal family on the Rosenhöhe in Darmstadt.
- Grand Duchess Alice of Hesse- Darmstadt, 1870
- Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse and by Rhine
- Alice Memorial in Darmstadt, Wilhelminenplatz (1902 )