Princess Beatrice, The Youngest Child Of Queen Victoria
Public DomainPrincess Beatrice was the baby of the family and heavily favored by both of her parents.
Princess Beatrice, the ninth and final child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, was born on April 14, 1857. Her oldest sister, Victoria, was 16 at the time.
Albert died only four years after Beatrice’s birth, so much of her childhood was shrouded in her mother’s sadness. Her older siblings were marrying and moving away, leaving her in the constant company of the grieving queen.
Initially, Queen Victoria did not want Beatrice to wed. But as fate would have it, Beatrice fell in love with Prince Henry of Battenberg. She was determined to marry him, and when she told her mother, the queen reportedly refused to speak to her for seven months, communicating only in writing. However, Victoria eventually agreed on the condition that Beatrice and Henry live with her and that Beatrice continue to act as her unofficial secretary.
Public DomainThe five daughters of Queen Victoria (with Beatrice in the center) mourning the death of their father.
Beatrice and Henry wed in 1885 and went on to have four children, but their marriage lasted just 10 short years. Henry died of malaria while fighting in Ghana in 1896.
As a widow, Beatrice continued to act as her mother’s secretary, staying by the queen’s side until the monarch’s death in 1901.
For the next three decades, Beatrice worked to edit and transcribe Queen Victoria’s many journals. She removed any confidential or hurtful passages — which amounted to two-thirds of the content. She finished these edits in 1931, and she lived a relatively private life until her death at age 87 in 1944. She was the last of Queen Victoria’s children to die.
After reading about the lives of Queen Victoria’s children, discover these 25 facts about Queen Victoria you never knew. Then, learn about these 9 historically inaccurate television shows.
