Princess Irene of Hesse and by Rhine

Princesses Irene, Victoria, Elisabeth and Alix of Hesse in 1885.

She received her first name, which was taken from the Greek word for "peace", because she was born at the end of the Austro-Prussian War.[1] Alice considered Irene an unattractive child and once wrote to her sister Victoria that Irene was "not pretty."[2] Though not as pretty as her sister Elizabeth, Irene did have a pleasant, even disposition. Princess Alice brought up her daughters simply. An English nanny presided over the nursery and the children ate plain meals of rice puddings and baked apples and wore plain dresses. Her daughters were taught how to do housework, such as baking cakes, making their own beds, laying fires and sweeping and dusting their rooms. Princess Alice also emphasised the need to give to the poor and often took her daughters on visits to hospitals and charities.[3]

The family was devastated in 1873 when Irene's haemophiliac younger brother Friedrich, nicknamed "Frittie", fell through an open window, struck his head on the balustrade and died hours later of a brain hemorrhage.[4] In the months following the toddler's death, Alice frequently took her children to his grave to pray and was melancholy on anniversaries associated with him.[5] In the autumn of 1878 Irene, her siblings (except for Elizabeth) and her father became ill with diphtheria. Her younger sister Princess Marie, nicknamed "May", died of the disease. Her mother, exhausted from nursing the children, also became infected. Knowing she was in danger of dying, Princess Alice dictated her will, including instructions about how to bring up her daughters and how to run the household. She died of diphtheria on 14 December 1878.[6]

From left to right (back row): Irene's sister Alexandra Feodorovna (Alix of Hesse), and Princess Irene, (front row) Irene's cousins Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, Princess Charlotte of Prussia, and Princess Helena Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein in 1885

Princess Irene of Hesse and by Rhine, kneeling at left, with her grandmother Queen Victoria and, from left to right, her sister Elisabeth, brother Ernest Louis, sister Victoria and, sitting, her sister Alix in February 1879, two months after the deaths of her mother and sister Marie.

Following Alice's death, Queen Victoria resolved to act as a mother to her Hessian grandchildren. Princess Irene and her surviving siblings spent annual holidays in England and their grandmother sent instructions to their governess regarding their education and approving the pattern of their dresses.[7] With her sister Alix, Irene was a bridesmaid at the 1885 wedding of their maternal aunt, Princess Beatrice, to Prince Henry of Battenberg.[8]

Irene married Prince Henry of Prussia, the third child and second son of Frederick III, German Emperor and Victoria, Princess Royal on 24 May 1888 at the chapel of the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. As their mothers were sisters, Irene and Henry were first cousins.[9] Their marriage displeased Queen Victoria because she had not been told about the courtship until they had already decided to marry.[10] At the time of the ceremony, Irene's uncle and father-in-law, the German emperor, was dying of throat cancer, and less than a month after the ceremony, Irene's cousin and brother-in-law ascended the throne as Kaiser Wilhelm II. Heinrich's mother, Empress Victoria, was fond of Irene. However, Empress Victoria was shocked because Irene did not wear a shawl or scarf to disguise her pregnancy when she was pregnant with her first son, the haemophiliac Prince Waldemar, in 1889. Empress Victoria, who was fascinated by politics and current events, also couldn't understand why Heinrich and Irene never read a newspaper.[11] However, the couple were happily married and they were known as "The Very Amiables" by their relatives because of their pleasant natures. The marriage produced three sons.

Their descendants also include two grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and six great-great grandchildren.

Princess Irene of Prussia ca. 1902.

Irene transmitted the haemophilia gene to her eldest and youngest sons, Waldemar and Heinrich. Waldemar's health worried her from early childhood.[12] She was later devastated when the youngest child, four-year-old Heinrich, died after he fell and bumped his head in February 1904.[13] Six months after little Heinrich's death, Irene became an aunt to Tsarevich Alexei of Russia, son of her youngest sister, Tsarina Alexandra, who also had hemophilia. Two of her first cousins, Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain and Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, would also give birth to hemophiliac sons.

Irene, raised to believe in a proper Victorian code of behaviour, was easily shocked by what she saw as immorality.[14] In 1884, the same year that her elder sister Victoria married Prince Louis of Battenberg, another sister, Elizabeth, married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, and when Elizabeth converted from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy, in 1891, Irene was deeply upset. She wrote to her father that she "cried terribly" over Elizabeth's decision.[15] In 1892, Irene's father, Grand Duke Louis IV, died, and her brother, Ernest, succeeded him as Grand Duke of Hesse. Two years later, in May 1894, Ernest Louis was married off by Queen Victoria to a first cousin, Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. It was amidst the wedding festivities that Irene's youngest surviving sister, Alix, accepted the marriage proposal of Tsarevich Nicholas, a second cousin, and when Nicholas' father died prematurely in November 1894, Irene and her husband travelled to St. Petersburg to be present at both his funeral and the wedding of Alix, who had taken the name Alexandra Feodorovna upon her conversion to Orthodoxy, to the new tsar, Nicholas II. Despite the disagreement that she had over the conversion of two of her sisters to Russian Orthodoxy, she remained close with all of her siblings. In 1907, Irene helped arrange what later turned out to be a disastrous marriage between Elizabeth's ward, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia, to Prince Vilhelm, Duke of Södermanland.[16] Wilhelm's mother, the Queen of Sweden, was an old friend of both Irene and Elizabeth.[16] Grand Duchess Maria later wrote that Irene pressured her to go through with the marriage when she had doubts. She told Maria that ending the engagement would "kill" Elizabeth.[17] In 1912, Irene was a source of support to her sister Alix when Alexei nearly died of complications of haemophilia at the Imperial Family's hunting lodge in Poland.[18]

Prince Henry and Princess Irene of Prussia.

Irene's ties to her sisters were disrupted by the advent of World War I, which put them on opposing sides of the war. When the war ended, she received word that Alix, her husband and children and her sister Elizabeth had been killed by the Bolsheviks. Following the war and the abdication of the Kaiser, Germany was no longer ruled by the Prussian Royal Family, but Irene and her husband retained their estate, Hemmelmark, in northern Germany.

When Anna Anderson surfaced in Berlin in the early 1920s, claiming to be the surviving Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, Irene visited the woman, but decided that Anderson could not be the niece she had last seen in 1913.[19] Princess Irene was not impressed.

I saw immediately that she could not be one of my nieces. Even though I had not seen them for nine years, the fundamental facial characteristics could not have altered to that degree, in particular the position of the eyes, the ear, etc. .. At first sight one could perhaps detect a resemblance to Grand Duchess Tatiana.”[20]

Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, sister of the murdered tsar, commented on the visit of Princess Irene,

It was an unsatisfactory meeting, but the woman's supporters said that Princess Irene had not known her niece very well and all the rest of it."[21]

Princess Irene with her husband Prince Heinrich of Prussia and their two surviving sons, Prince Sigismund, left, and Prince Waldemar.

Irene's husband, Heinrich, said that the mention of Anderson upset Irene too much and ordered that no one was to discuss Anderson in his presence.[22] Heinrich died in 1929. Anna Anderson biographer Peter Kurth wrote that several years later, Irene's son (Prince Sigismund) posed questions to Anderson through an intermediary about their shared childhood and declared that her answers were all accurate.[23] Irene later adopted Sigismund's daughter, Barbara, born in 1920, as her heir after Sigismund left Germany to live in Costa Rica during the 1930s. Sigismund declined to return to Germany to live after World War II.[24]

•  Kingdom of Prussia:[25]
  • Dame of the Order of Louise
  • Dame of the Wilhelm-Orden
  • Gold Red Cross Medal, 1st Class
•  Kingdom of Bavaria: Merit Cross for Volunteer Nurses[26]
•  Austria-Hungary: Dame Grand Cordon of the Order of Elizabeth[26]
•  Russian Empire: Dame Grand Cordon of St. Catherine[26]
•  United Kingdom: Royal Order of Victoria and Albert, 2nd Class[27]

• Kurth, Peter (1983). Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson. Little, Brown, and Company. ISBN 0-316-50717-2.
• Grand Duchess Marie (1930). Education of a Princess: A Memoir. Viking Press.
• Mager, Hugo (1998). Elizabeth: Grand Duchess of Russia. Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc. ISBN 0-7867-0678-3
• Massie, Robert K. (1995). The Romanovs: The Final Chapter. Random House. ISBN 0-394-58048-6
• Mironenko, Sergei, and Maylunas, Andrei (1997). A Lifelong Passion: Nicholas and Alexandra: Their Own Story. Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-48673-1.
• Pakula, Hannah (1995). An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick: Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-684-84216-5.
• Queen Victoria (1975). Advice to my granddaughter: Letters from Queen Victoria to Princess Victoria of Hesse. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-22242-2
• Vorres, I, The Last Grand Duchess: Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, Charles Scribners and Sons, New York, 1964.