Footnotes

• Beatrice was the youngest child of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdon (1819-1901) and Prince Albert (1819-1861) of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Prince Albert's sudden death from typhoid during the Christmas festivities of 1861, when Beatrice was just four years old, proved the dominant influence over her developing years. With many of her elder siblings having wed foreign powers, Beatrice alone was left to care for her mother in the shadow of the all-consuming grief that permeated the Royal Household.
  
  As her primary comfort, the Queen guarded Beatrice fiercely, and for many years appeared unwilling to part with her youngest daughter to any prospective suitor. When Beatrice became infatuated with Prince Henry of Battenberg (1858-1896) during a visit to Darmstadt, the Queen allegedly refused to speak to her daughter for seven months communicating with her only through written correspondence. Ultimately, however, the monarch was pressured by the Princess of Wales into allowing Beatrice to enter into the state of matrimony. Nevertheless, the Queen only permitted the match on the basis that Henry renounced his German allegiance and that her daughter remained on British soil, at Victoria's side. The couple had four children before Henry, who had quitted his wife's side to join the Anglo-Asante War, died of malaria overseas, his untimely death tragically echoing that of Beatrice's own father. Beatrice's relations with her children remained strained, it is thought, as a result of her unwavering deference to her mother.
  
  The death of Queen Victoria in 1901 devastated her youngest daughter. Beatrice's mother had left her the task of editing her extensive Journals, which she had begun as a young princess at Kensington Palace. In effect, Beatrice was so protective of her mother that she ruthlessly redacted vast sections of the Queen's diaries, with the result that only a third of the original material remains.

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Category: Fine Art / Portrait Miniatures

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