Victoria, Princess Royal

Biography

Victoria was born at Buckingham Palace in 1840, the eldest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and was created Princess Royal in January 1841. She was heir presumptive until her brother Albert Edward was born that November. Her father took charge of her unusually broad education, and she shared his liberal political views and his hope for a constitutional, unified Germany.

In 1858 she married Prince Frederick of Prussia at the Chapel Royal of St James's Palace and moved to Berlin, where her English origins and liberal opinions made her unpopular at the Hohenzollern court. Her husband became crown prince in 1861, and the couple's opposition to Otto von Bismarck, minister-president from 1862, left them politically isolated. She ran military hospitals during the wars of the 1860s and 1870-71, founded girls' schools and nursing schools, and publicly opposed the antisemitic agitation of the early 1880s.

Frederick succeeded as German Emperor and King of Prussia in March 1888 but was already dying of laryngeal cancer, and he died after 99 days. Under her conservative son Wilhelm II, the widowed Empress Frederick was excluded from public life. She built Schloss Friedrichshof at Kronberg im Taunus and spent her last years there, dying of breast cancer in August 1901, months after her mother. Her extensive correspondence with her parents survives as a major source on the Prussian court.