Victoria

(born Nov. 21, 1840, London, Eng.—died Aug. 5, 1901, Schloss Friedrichshof, Kronberg, Ger.) consort of the German emperor Frederick III and eldest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Great Britain.

Well-educated and multilingual from childhood (spent largely at Windsor and Buckingham Palace), Victoria remained all her life strongly devoted to England and, even after her marriage to the Prussian crown prince, Frederick William, in 1858, spoke English habitually in her German household.

Her English liberalism came to be shared by her husband (whom she tended to dominate) but was scorned by the conservative Prussians, especially the old emperor, William I, and Otto von Bismarck, with whom a mutual resentment developed. Within the constraints of her position, however, she encouraged philanthropic causes and the arts.

When her husband developed throat cancer and died only 99 days after becoming emperor (as Frederick III) in 1888, she lost all possibility of influencing a change of political climate. She was again subjected to estrangement, for her son, the new emperor William II, was thoroughly Prussianized. Although later somewhat reconciled to him, she semiretired to Kronberg in the Taunus hills, where she built a palatial country seat, Schloss Friedrichshof. She died there of cancer, outliving her mother by only six months.