| W. & D. Downey Princess Alice n.d. Carte de visite Paul Frecker LL/12020 Paul Frecker provides the following comments:
"Princess Alice, seen here in riding habit, was the third child and second daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. In July 1862, a few months after the death of her father, she married Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt. The bride wore a black trousseau and the marriage, the Queen herself said, was more like a funeral than a wedding.
Though Lord Clarendon considered him 'a dull boy' coming from 'a dull family in a dull country', and the Duchess of Cambridge thought it 'an insignificant match', Alice was delighted with her partner.
She died of diphtheria at the age of thirty-five on 14 December 1878, the seventeenth anniversary of her father's death, a loss which occasioned a letter from her elder sister to their mother of thirty-nine pages.
Photographed by William and Daniel Downey of 4, Eldon Square, Newcastle."
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