Her education was devised by Prince Albert's close friend and adviser, Christian Friedrich, Baron Stockmar, and included practical activities such as needlework and woodwork and languages such as French and German.

Following his death, Queen Victoria entered a period of intense mourning and Alice spent the next six months acting as her mother's unofficial secretary.

When Hesse became involved in the Austro-Prussian War, Darmstadt filled with the injured; the heavily pregnant Alice devoted much of her time to the management of field hospitals.

Her sex was greeted with mixed feelings from the public, and even the Privy Council sent a message to Albert expressing its "congratulation and condolence" on the birth of a second daughter.

At Osborne, Alice and her siblings were taught practical skills such as housekeeping, cooking, gardening and carpentry, as well as daily lessons in English, French and German.

[5][6] Victoria and Albert favoured a monarchy based on family values; Alice and her siblings, who wore middle class clothing on a daily basis, slept in sparsely furnished bedrooms with little heating.

On one occasion, she escaped from her governess at the chapel at Windsor Castle and sat in a public pew, so she could better understand people who were not strict adherents to royal protocol.

Alice had spent much of her time at her grandmother's side, often played the piano for her in Frogmore's drawing room, and nursed her through the final stages of illness.

"[14] The Queen wrote to her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, that "dear good Alice was full of intense tenderness, affection and distress for me".

Queen Victoria had expressed her wish that her children should marry for love, but this did not mean that her choice of suitors would necessarily be extended to anybody outside the royal houses of Europe.

Both were invited to Windsor Castle in 1860, ostensibly so they could watch the Ascot Races in the company of the royal family, but in reality, the visit was a chance for the Queen to inspect her potential son-in-law.

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.

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.

[28] The Queen wrote to her eldest daughter, Victoria, that the ceremony was "more of a funeral than a wedding", and remarked to Alfred, Lord Tennyson that it was "the saddest day I can remember".

[29] The ceremony—described by Gerard Noel as "the saddest royal wedding in modern times"[30]—was over by 4 pm, and the couple set off for their honeymoon at St Claire in Ryde, a house lent to them by the Vernon Harcourt family.

[38] Alice, heavily pregnant with her third child, saw Louis depart to command the Hessian cavalry against the Prussians, and sent her children to stay with Queen Victoria in England.

On 11 July, she gave birth to Princess Irene; Prussian troops were on the verge of entering Darmstadt, she begged the Grand Duke to surrender on Prussia's terms.

This provoked fury from the fiercely anti-Prussian Prince Alexander, but Alice realised that the conquered German states would likely form a union which she, like her sister Victoria, supported.

The facts that the Emperor's wife was the Grand Duke's aunt, and Alice's sister being also the Prussian Crown Princess are likely to have influenced Prussia's generosity.

However, Alice was angered by an untactful visit by Princess Victoria to the conquered region of Homburg, originally part of Hesse, shortly after it became Prussian territory.

In late 1876, she travelled to England for treatment due to an internal complaint caused by a backward curvature of the womb, and remained at Balmoral while she recovered.

Her continued unpopularity in Darmstadt, however, coupled with her mother not wanting her in England, caused strain, and she and her children spent July and August in Houlgate, Normandy, where Louis often visited them.

[65] At first, however, Alice did not fall ill. She met her sister Victoria as the latter was passing through Darmstadt on the way to England, and wrote to her mother with "a hint of resumed cheerfulness" on the same day.

"[70] Shocked by grief, she wrote to her daughter Princess Victoria: "My precious child, who stood by me and upheld me seventeen years ago on the same day taken, and by such an awful and fearful disease...She had darling Papa's nature, and much of his self-sacrificing character and fearless and entire devotion to duty!"

The Times wrote: "The humblest of people felt that they had the kinship of nature with a Princess who was the model of family virtue as a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother...Her abundant sympathies sought for objects of help in the great unknown waste of human distress".

The organisation continued to flourish long after Alice's death, and in 1953, her grandson Louis, Earl Mountbatten of Burma gave a lecture on the hospital.

Her fourth daughter, Alix, married Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, passing her mother's gene for haemophilia on to her only son, the Tsarevich Alexei.

[78] Alix, her husband, and her children were killed by the Bolsheviks in the city of Ekaterinburg in the summer of 1918, sixteen months after the February Revolution forced Nicholas to abdicate.

[79] Alice's second daughter, Elizabeth, who had married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, and had become a nun after his assassination in 1905, met a similar fate, being killed by the Bolsheviks the day after the former tsar and tsaritsa.

[81] Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, her great-grandson through Victoria's daughter Princess Alice of Battenberg, married Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.