Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine (1895–1903)

Elisabeth's parents, nicknamed ‘Ernie’ and ‘Ducky’, were first cousins who married at the instigation of their common grandmother, Queen Victoria. The marriage was an unhappy one from the start. Princess Victoria Melita was eighteen at the time of Elisabeth’s birth. She was fond of Elisabeth, but found it hard to compete with Ernest’s devotion to their daughter. Ernest was convinced even before Elisabeth could speak that he alone could understand her. At the age of six months, she was scheduled to move to a new nursery and her father "consulted her" on her color preferences. He claimed that she made "happy little squeals" when he showed her a particular shade of lilac material. Ernest then decorated her nursery in shades of lilac. He later had a playhouse built for his daughter that stood in its own garden. Adults were forbidden to enter "much to the frustration of royal nurses and tutors, who could be seen pacing up and down impatiently outside as they waited for their high-spirited young charges to stop their games and emerge." ==Childhood==

Margaret Eagar, a governess for the daughters of Tsar Nicholas II, described Elisabeth as "a sweet and pretty child, with wide grey-blue eyes and a profusion of dark hair. She was much like her mother, not only in face, but also in manner". The four-year-old Elisabeth wanted a baby sister and tried to persuade her aunt and uncle to let her parents adopt one of her paternal first cousins, Tatiana or Maria. Her parents had only one other child together, a stillborn son, in 1900. She was a favorite with her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, who called the little girl "my precious". Queen Victoria refused to permit the unhappily married Victoria and Ernest to divorce for the sake of Elisabeth. It was Elisabeth whom Queen Victoria asked to see first and to receive eightieth birthday greetings from in 1899. Elisabeth’s maternal grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, brought five-year-old Elisabeth to see Queen Victoria on her death bed on 22 January 1901. After the queen died, the child was taken in to see her body and told that her great-grandmother had gone to be with the angels; "but I don’t see the wings", Elisabeth whispered. Elisabeth sat next to her second cousin Prince Edward of York (called David by family and friends, later to become King Edward VIII in 1936) during Queen Victoria’s funeral. "Sweet little David behaved so well during the service", wrote his aunt Maud, "and was supported by the little Hesse girl who took him under her protection and held him most of the time round his neck. They looked such a delightful little couple." In October 1901, after the death of Queen Victoria, Elisabeth’s parents finally divorced. Her mother had rekindled a previous romance with another cousin, her future husband, Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich of Russia. Her father, according to letters written by her mother, had been caught cavorting with domestic servants. Her parents’ divorce meant that Elisabeth divided her year between Darmstadt and her mother’s new home in Coburg. Elisabeth was at first mistrustful of her mother and resented the divorce, although Victoria did her best to mend her relationship with her daughter during her visit with Elisabeth in the spring of 1902. She was only partially successful, though Victoria enjoyed turning her daughter into an outstanding horsewoman. Margaret Eager thought the child’s eyes were "the saddest she had ever seen". "Looking at her I used to wonder what those wide grey-blue eyes saw, to bring such a look of sadness to the childish face", she wrote. Eagar wondered if Elisabeth had a premonition of her own death because she often told her cousin, Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, that "I shall never see this again". However, despite Elisabeth’s sad eyes, she was generally a sweet, happy child who was a peacemaker when her cousins had a dispute. ==Death==

and Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia, taken in 1900.'' On 6 October 1903, Ernest hosted a large family gathering at Darmstadt for the wedding of his niece, Princess Alice of Battenberg, to Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark. A few weeks later he took Elisabeth to stay with his younger sister, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, her husband, Tsar Nicholas II, and their family. At the imperial family’s hunting lodge in Skierniewice, Poland, Elisabeth went on long walks and had picnics in the forest with her cousins. Elisabeth's nanny, who called her "my baby", woke Elisabeth in the middle of the night and settled her in a window seat of the nursery so that she might look out on the game spread out upon the grounds below. An autopsy following her death confirmed that she had died of virulent typhoid, although it was rumored she had eaten from a poisoned dish intended for the Tsar. ==Funeral and legacy==

commemorative relief for Princess Elisabeth in the Herrngarten in Darmstadt with inscription: "To our little Princess, the children of Darmstadt" (1903) Elisabeth’s body was placed in a silver casket, a gift from Nicholas II, for the journey back to Darmstadt. Her father arranged a white funeral, with white instead of black for the funeral trappings, white flowers, and white horses for the procession. The Hessian people came out by the thousands to view the funeral procession and "sobbed in unison so that I could hear it", Ernest wrote. A cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II, expressed shock at the child’s death in a letter to Tsar Nicholas II on the day after. "How joyous and merry she was that day at Wolfsgarten, when I was there, so full of life and fun and health ... What a terrible heartrending blow for poor Ernie, who doted and adored that little enchantress!" Elisabeth was buried in the Rosenhöhe with other members of the Hessian grand ducal family. A marble angel was later installed to watch over her grave. In a final gesture to Princess Elisabeth and Grand Duke Ernest, Victoria Melita placed her badge of the Order of Hesse, granted to her upon her marriage, into Elisabeth’s coffin. Ernest was still devastated by the memory of his daughter’s death thirty years later. "My little Elisabeth", he wrote in his memoirs, "was the sunshine of my life." ==Archives==

Documents about Elisabeth’s death, including telegrams and letters from relatives and a Hessian employee to Elisabeth’s aunt, Princess Alexandra of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, are preserved in the Hohenlohe Central Archive (Hohenlohe-Zentralarchiv Neuenstein), which is in Neuenstein Castle, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. ==Ancestry==