Since I have some free time, I thought I'd share a little bit about the surprisingly diverging fates of a daughter-in-law and two grandchild of Victoria!
HSH Princess Helena of Waldeck-Pyrmont was born in 1861 into the reigning ruling family of that tiny German principality and was so keenly intelligent that her father put her in charge of that domain's infant schools while she was still a minor and she used that position to devise the students' educational curriculum. Anyway, with her elder sister Emma having married the elderly King William III of the Netherlands (and having borne their only child- the future Queen Wilhelmina), she caught the attention of the British royal family who wanted to help Prince Leopold's melancholy. Prince Leopold had been the one son of V&A who had been born with hemophilia and had been considered too frail to do more than be Vic's de facto secretary but he longed to have some normalcy. His condition was universally known among Continental royals and nobles but Helena's father agreed to them marrying on the grounds that it would be better for his daughter to have a brief happy marriage than a miserable lengthy one. So, they were wed in 1882 and at age 21, Helena became HRH the Duchess of Albany. To Vic's surprise, they conceived their firstborn straight away which Vic had thought would be impossible due to Leopold's frailty and all were delighted when their daughter Alice was born in February, 1883. Then, in February, 1884, to seek relief from his aching joints from the harsh English weather, he went to Cannes alone leaving Helena behind with their infant daughter. Alas, in late March, Leopold fell down some stairs which caused a hemmorage to happen and he died at age 30. The Duchess of Albany was 23 with an infant daughter and heavily pregnant! By all accounts, it HAD been a happy marriage -albeit brief. In July, the Duchess of Albany gave birth to his posthumous son Charles Edward who immediately succeeded his late father's title of Duke of Albany! Despite having been German-born with close ties to her family, the Duchess had become proudly English and did all she could to raise her two children to make their late father proud while eventually establishing the Deptford Fund to provide alternative work for laboring women. Oh, and they lived together in Clairmont- an estate which had been bestowed to Princess Charlotte of Wales and her new husband Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg Saalfeld in 1815 and the latter would live there long after his first wife's death until he became King of the Belgians in 1830 (and, yes, the Duke of Albany had been named for him). Anyway, Princess Alice of Albany and her younger brother the Duke of Albany were called 'the Siamese twins' due to their closeness as children and Princess Alice would remember visits with their paternal grandmother- especially her Jubilees!
Alas, this dynamic was forever altered to everyone's lasting regret in 1900. The late Prince Consort had been the only brother of Ernest the Reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha but it had been mandated , if Ernest didn't have any legit heirs, that the 2nd born son of V&A would become the new Reigning Duke. Ernest would live to 1893 but Vic wasted no time to have her 2nd born son Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh take up the mantle (in no small part to send away his annoying Russian-born wife Marie who had an endless hissing contest with Vic). Then in 1899, their only son Affie died quite suddenly of still questionable circumstances at age 25 then less than a year later, Alfred himself died. This left the Saxe-Coburg Dukedom vacant which, being the Prince Consort's birthplace and Vic's own maternal ancestral home, Vic wasn't going to stand for that. Vic's 3rd born son Arthur, Duke of Connaught was the next in line but he begged off that chance saying that he didn't want to give up his military life for that and didn't want to have to uproot his family but then said 'How about Charlie Albany?' (as the family called the Duke). Vic decided that this English-born 16-year-old Duke who had never been away from his mother or sister would be the ideal new Duke of Saxe-Coburg and had him sent to Germany to be put in a military academy under his eldest cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II's aegis! Of course, Vic herself would die in 1901 before it became evident how disastrous an outcome this would be.
In 1904, Alice married her distant cousin (and the future Queen Mary's brother), Prince Alexander of Teck while the Duchess Helena continued doing her good works and being a popular English Royal while the two did their best to keep close touch with Duke of Coburg now called Karl. No one thought this dynamic would change but in 1914, it totally did. The Great War (later called WWI) was declared and Karl, Duke of Coburg, (according to his cousin the Ernest,Grand Duke of Hesse), wasted no time in declaring his loyalty to his cousin the Kaiser and instantly sent back ALL his English medals and honors back to their mutual cousin George V. This got George V to take down all the banners of his German cousins from St. George's Chapel AND revoke their Garter and other honors! By 1917, George had enough of being accused of being a 'foreign' king and changed the name of the British dynasty from Saxe-Coburg Gotha to Windsor AND compelled any Germanic cousins living in the UK to follow suit (which is why the Battenbergs became Mountbattens) so Prince Alexander of Teck adopted the surname of Cambridge and become the Earl of Athone while continuing to serve in the British Army! 1918 came with the Allies defeating the Great Powers and they wasted no time in stripping Karl, Duke of Coburg of his title and he was not able to return to his birthplace having been stripped of his British subjecthood.
Ironically, his mother, the German-born Helena, Duchess of Albany was still a British Royal and able to travel to visit so at age 61, she decided to visit her son and his family to try to give them some comfort but, tragically, during this visit, on a jaunt to an Austrian Alpine resort in Tyrol, she suddenly died in September, 1922.
This appears to have completely unhinged Karl, for barely a month later, he met and immediately became entranced in October with what others had considered a local hothead and crackpot- one Adolf Hitler! Karl believed that Hitler could restore his Dukedom so he became an eager supporter with Coburg being the very first German town to have a NAZI mayor as a result.
Meantime, his sister, Princess Alice's husband, the Earl of Athlone got appointed as the British Viceroy of South Africa and she accompanied him on his assignment with their daughter and surviving son (yes, her younger son had died of the hemophilia that she had carried).
Despite his sister's pleas, Karl kept hitching his wagon to the NAZI star and would appall and shock her and the rest of their family (with the exception of Edward VIII) when he appeared at George V's funeral in 1936 wearing a NAZI Field Marshall uniform! Oh, and he was a big supporter of the new king who he believed could ALSO restore his English honors. Of course, Edward VIII abdicated by December,1936 and George VI wanted no part of that so that wound up for naught.
Princess Alice's husband then got appointed as Governor General of Canada from 1940 to 1946 but even with all that clout, they were unable to get Karl out of the Allied prison after WWII in which they discovered him scrounging about for scraps in garbage cans! Karl had been in the Reichstag and high up in the party (and had known what it was about from the beginning), yet Princess Alice couldn't help but feel sorry for her brother in ill health. Karl wound up being released but having to live in a caretaker's cottage with his wife since virtually all of his wealth had been confiscated. He made one small trip to the local cinema to see the newsreels of his sister participating in the Coronation of Elizabeth II but knew he would never have been permitted to go even had he had the monies to travel. Oh, and he wound up dying in the very same bed he had somehow kept all those years- his childhood bed from Clairmont AND he would take English tea whenever possible to his dying day in 1954!
Alice's husband retired and then died in 1957- and, as she wound up being the last surviving Grandchild of Vic as well as the then-oldest member of the Royal Family, she became somewhat of an icon to both the Royals and the British public before her death at age 97 in 1981.
Elizabeth II would visit West Germany then Germany many times during her long reign but, despite her direct paternal line originating from there and it being a favored spot her double-great -grandma Vic, Her Majesty has never ONCE visited Coburg- almost certainly due to embarrassment of her cousin Karl's NAZI ties!
