Status Updates From Queen Alexandra (Biography ...

Queen's fav brother (George I of Greece) assassinated. A Danish friend sent her an outsized laurel wreath, asking her to have it laid on the king's grave. The Queen's fav pekinese had also recently died. "Faced with the problem of the laurel wreath's transportation to Greece she rang for her butler: 'You see that wreath? Too much trouble to send it out to Greece; put it on dear little Beauty's grave in the garden.'"

"Dighton Probyn did his very best to keep some sort of control over [Queen Alix's] charitable giving but she had ways and means of evading his vigilance. On one occasion she sent for Holland and, with a great display of secrecy, fished out from beneath her sofa cushions a crumpled envelope containing a cheque for £1000 and a further £1000 in notes, which she pressed into his hand as a gift for the London Hospital."

"The Edwardian age, for all its bravura, was essentially a mediocre one, a plain between two mountain ranges. Neither its personalities nor its events are of the first order of importance....The great Victorians have gone; the giant catastrophe is yet to come. Our chief interest in the Edwardians is an ironic one--'Alas, regardless of their doom the little victims play.'"

"Her letters faithfully reflect the life and thought, if thought it can be called, of the typical Edwardian Society lady...Had she been more serious or intellectual...she would not have personified as well as she did the Edwardian ideal of womanhood. The very mediocrity of her mind, flitting, impermanent, butterfly-like, made her the more typical of her generation."

Princess Alix gives Mayor of London $ for a dinner for the poor in honor of Diamond Jubilee.T homas Lipton wrote a check "to cover the considerable deficit between the amount subscribed and the amount actually required. The Princess was naturally grateful to him for coming to the rescue of her scheme; when he received a knighthood in the next Honors list it was rumored that it had been given him at her request."

My personal conspiracy theory: a time traveler came back to murder Prince Eddy to prevent someone so manifestly unlikely to be a good king from ever taking the throne. His death is just so convenient. Counterpoint: there are so many other princes that should've been done away with if time travelers were roaming around doing so! Counter-counterpoint: Agreed, but maybe the royalty we got was the best of a bad lot.

Prince Eddy falls in love with Princess Helene d'Orleans, Roman Catholic daughter of pretender to French throne. While waiting for Pope to change mind re: letting her convert, Princess Alix says Eddy will '"go on corresponding and loving one another from a distance."
Prince Eddy may have gone on loving Princess Helene from a distance but meanwhile he was loving someone else at closer quarters.'

This author is fire!

Princess Alix writes memorandum on subject of ceding Heligoland which talks capably about what this will mean in terms of political&legal precedent in regards to other tiny islands held by European powers and naval&military logistics. Even includes little note in her hand that says at all costs Germany must be prevented from fortifying Heligoland. In the end Heligoland was given to Germany, fortified, used in WWI.

Her philandering but loving husband the Prince of Wales has typhoid fever and on brink of death. Alix refuses to leave his side for weeks. "At one point, when the doctors told her that her presence excited their patient too much, she crawled into his room on her hands and knees so that he would not see her."

Alix is in Egypt, adopted "a small Nubian orphan whom she attached the party as a kind of mascot. When he arrived in England he was baptised in the little church at Sandringham, the Prince and Princess standing as godparents. Unfortunately his Christian teaching failed to impress upon him the desirability of keeping his hands from picking and stealing. Nothing was safe from his thieving fingers..." wtf?

So much terrible poetry being written in this time. ex
"Hurrah! her little feet have trod
For the first time on Irish sod.
Oh, flags and blossoms, wave and nod
To welcome such a traveler!
Hurrah, she comes to Erin's isle;
Our very hearts she did beguile;
And treason vanished at her smile,
And we would give our lives for her."

Alix is pregnant for 3rd time in as many years. Has severe attack of rheumatic fever that caused acute and constant pain in her leg&hip, and had to go into labor without any anesthetic, "the doctors thinking it wiser not to administer chloroform, although as the Prince wrote pathetically, 'she wished for it very much'."

How younger nephew of King of Denmark became King of Greece: 1 night at Marlborough House, Palmerston &Lord John Russell asked Prince William if he would like to be King of Greed. The 18yr old naval cadet answered jokingly that there was nothing he would like better, as then he would have no tiresome exams to pass. The English Foreign Office then formally nominated him as King (w/out ever even asking him seriously!)