Princess Alice of Great Britain and Ireland, the second daughter of Queen Victoria, was engaged to Prince Louis of Hesse on 30 April 1861, following the Queen's consent.
The Queen persuaded the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, to have Parliament vote Alice a dowry of £30,000 (£2.57 million as of 2018). Although the amount was considered generous at the time, Prince Albert remarked that "she will not be able to do great things with it" in the little realm of Hesse, compared to the riches that her sister Victoria would inherit as future Queen of Prussia and German Empress.
Furthermore, the couple's future home in Darmstadt, the Grand Ducal seat, was uncertain. Although Queen Victoria expected that a new palace would be built, the people of Darmstadt did not want to meet that expense, and the resulting controversy caused resentment there. This meant that Alice was unpopular in Darmstadt before she even arrived.
Between the engagement and the wedding, Alice's father Prince Albert died on 14 December 1861.
On her marriage the Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, received an very expensive imperial present, from the Empress Maria Alexandrovna of Russia nee Princess Marie of Hesse and by Rhine, the sister of the Grand Duke of Hesse.
A diamond rivière with 35 collets of large fine diamonds
From the early 1860s through the 1870s, Maria Alexandrovna the Empress of all Russia began to pay extended visits to her homeland Hesse.
Usually accompanied by her husband, children and a Russian entourage, she stayed at Schloss Heiligenberg, the small castle of her brother Alexander of Hesse, who lived with his morganatic wife the Princess of Battenberg and their children at Jugenheim, outside Darmstadt.
There she met Princess Alice, second daughter of Queen Victoria and wife of her nephew, Prince Louis of Hesse.
Princess Alice made reference to another precious jewelry gift she received on the birth of her daughter Victoria in a letter of June 3, 1863 to her mother the Queen: "I have received a magnificent bracelet from the Empress of Russia, for baby's picture.
The Empress resisted Alice's suggestion that her brother Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, marry her only daughter Maria, but the couple would wed anyway in 1874.
After Grand Duchess Alice died in 1878, Marie invited the motherless children to visit during the holidays she spent with Alexander's family at Heiligenberg. It was during these visits that her second youngest son, Grand Duke Sergei, met his future wife, Alice's second daughter, Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine. It was also here that Maria met Elisabeth's youngest surviving sister, Princess Alix, who would eventually become the devoted, though ill-fated, wife of Maria Alexandrovna's eldest grandson, Emperor Nicholas.
Sources:Liverpool Mercury; „In der neuen Heimat“;Alice Großherzogin von Hessen und bei Rhein(Briefe an ihre Mutter Königin Victoria)Verlag Arnold Bergsträsser, Darmstadt, 1884; Hessian Tapestry;
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