The Scandalous Life of Queen Victoria’s “Unstable” Granddaughter

The scandalous life of Princess Charlotte of Prussia, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, marked by royal intrigue, family tensions, and a lasting court scandal.

Key Takeaways

Royal family dynamics were deeply affected by personal health and temperament issues.
Marriage served both personal and political purposes within European royal families.
Scandals could have severe consequences on social standing and family relations in royal courts.
Mental health and difficult behavior were often misunderstood and harshly judged in aristocratic families.
Charlotte’s life exemplifies the intersection of personal struggles and public duties in monarchy.

What the video covers

Princess Charlotte of Prussia was the eldest daughter of Prince Frederick William and granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
Her difficult childhood was marked by a strained relationship with her strict mother and a restless temperament.
Charlotte’s engagement and marriage to Bernhard, Hereditary Prince of Saxe-Meiningen, strengthened dynastic ties within Germany.
She was involved in a scandal starting in 1891 involving anonymous letters, a court martial, and a fatal duel that shook the German royal court.
The scandal led to her effective exile from Berlin and restrictions imposed by her brother Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Charlotte’s health was fragile throughout her life, impacting her social and family roles.
Her daughter Feodora was Queen Victoria’s first great-grandchild and faced her own personal struggles.
The Letters Scandal caused lasting damage to family relationships and court reputation.
Charlotte’s life reflected the complexities of royal duties, personal struggles, and political intrigue in the German Empire.
Despite challenges, Charlotte became Duchess of Saxe-Meiningen and was recognized for her intelligence and social presence.

Chapters

Who was Princess Charlotte of Prussia?

Princess Charlotte was the eldest daughter of Prince Frederick William of Prussia and a maternal granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She was known for her difficult temperament and involvement in a major royal scandal.

What was the Letters Scandal involving Princess Charlotte?

The Letters Scandal began in 1891 with anonymous letters, a court martial, and a fatal duel, causing a major scandal in the German royal court that led to Charlotte’s exile and strained family relations.

How did Charlotte’s relationship with her mother affect her life?

Charlotte’s mother, Victoria, was very strict and often disappointed with Charlotte’s behavior and academic performance, which contributed to a difficult and tense family environment throughout Charlotte’s childhood.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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In January of 1891, a seemingly innocent gathering of German aristocrats at a hunting lodge outside Berlin would set off a scandal that lasted for years. What began that night would lead to a secret campaign of anonymous letters, a court martial,

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a fatal duel, and revelations that sent shockwaves through the German royal court. At the heart of it all was Princess Charlotte of Prussia, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and sister of the powerful Kaiser Wilhelm II. This is her story.

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Family Background & Early Life. Princess Victoria Elizabeth Augusta Charlotte was born at the New Palace in Potsdam in what was then the Kingdom of Prussia, though soon to be the German Empire, on the 24th of July 1860.

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She was the eldest daughter and second child of Prince Frederick William of Prussia, who would later become Emperor Frederick III. Her mother was Victoria, a Princess Royal of Great Britain. Thus, Charlotte was a maternal granddaughter of Queen Victoria,

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the great monarch who ruled over the British Empire at its height between 1837 and 1901.

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Charlotte’s older brother was the future Kaiser Wilhelm II. His birth had been difficult and had left him with a malformed left arm. This meant that in her early years, Charlotte was often overlooked in the family’s affairs as Wilhelm’s health condition took

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precedence as he was second in line to the throne and expected to become emperor one day.

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Charlotte’s mother, who was affectionately known as Vicky, was initially very close to her eldest daughter. But as Charlotte grew older, their relationship began to change.

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By the age of two, Charlotte had earned the nickname “sweet naughty little Ditta,” and she would go on to prove the most difficult of the family’s eventual eight children.

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As a young girl, she was often nervous and easily agitated, sometimes pulling anxiously at her clothes. She also developed a habit of biting her nails so severely that her parents resorted to making her wear gloves to stop it. But such measures offered only temporary relief.

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The reports from letters and diaries at the time record a very difficult relationship between mother and daughter that did not soften as the months and years went by. At just 21 months old, for instance, which was obviously hardly an advanced age,

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Victoria was writing in a concerned manner about her daughter’s tantrums. Then, when she was three years old, she complained of hyperactivity and sudden mood swings, while later she continued to argue that she was a difficult child. From London, Queen Victoria

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urged her daughter to be more patient with her granddaughter, though with little success. Yet, as we will soon see, there may have been more to this behavior than simply a difficult temperament. Some historians have suggested that Charlotte may have inherited a medical

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condition from her British ancestors, one that could be traced back to the eighteenth century.

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But her behavior was not Victoria’s only source of frustration. Charlotte was also an indifferent student, which disappointed her mother, who placed great importance on education.

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Nevertheless, it wasn’t just Charlotte who received this harsh treatment. Victoria was extremely strict with her three eldest children. These were Wilhelm and Charlotte as mentioned, and Henry who was born in 1862. After Henry came two more boys and three girls. Sadly, the boys, Prince Sigismund and Prince Waldemar,

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died in childhood. Sigismund died in 1866, before his second birthday, while Waldemar died in 1879, at the age of eleven. Their deaths devastated Victoria, and over time, a noticeable difference emerged in the way she treated her children. She

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remained strict with Wilhelm, Charlotte, and Henry, while becoming more affectionate and indulgent toward her three youngest surviving daughters: Viktoria, Sophia, and Margaret.

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The difference did not go unnoticed. Wilhelm, Charlotte, and Henry could sense their mother’s disappointment, and they grew increasingly resentful as they watched her shower their younger siblings with the affection they felt they had been denied.

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For Charlotte, these tensions would leave a lasting mark. Her difficult relationship with her mother, combined with her own restless temperament, made her childhood far from easy. But childhood could not last forever and soon Charlotte would enter a new world.

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Engagement and Marriage. In January 1871, the German Empire was formed under Prussian domination, and Charlotte’s grandfather became Emperor Wilhelm I. Simultaneously, the Second Industrial Revolution was transforming Germany into an economic behemoth, and the new imperial power had quickly

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emerged as one of the world’s great powers. This newfound status meant that royal daughters like Charlotte were suddenly being courted by the governments of many of Europe’s royal houses as potential marriage partners by any country that wanted closer ties to the German Empire.

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Thus, the details of Charlotte’s engagement, which was announced on the 1st of April 1877, just before her seventeenth birthday, were perhaps a little surprising. She would not marry a foreign prince. Instead, she was to wed her second cousin, Bernhard, the Hereditary Prince of Saxe-Meiningen,

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a soldier who had fought in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 to 1871 and who was also a scholar.

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While the marriage didn’t unite Germany to a foreign power it did serve a broader dynastic purpose. By marrying the heir to Saxe-Meiningen, Charlotte would strengthen the ties between the Prussian royal family and another German ruling house. This was particularly significant within

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the newly established German Empire, where Prussia dominated the imperial structure, but the individual German states and their ruling families still retained considerable influence.

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Also, this was not an entirely arranged match between strangers. Charlotte already knew Bernhard, and their courtship had begun during a fairground trolley ride in Berlin.

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Charlotte’s older brother decided to speed up the ride, and when his frightened sister clung to Bernhard, an unlikely romance was set in motion.

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During her teenage years, however, her difficult behavior had taken new forms. She was known for flirting, spreading malicious gossip, and stirring up trouble, traits her mother had hoped she would eventually outgrow. Victoria now hoped that marriage might give her daughter some direction,

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writing that “at least her wicked qualities will not be able to cause any harm.” Perhaps, then, Bernhard seemed like a suitable match. Charlotte was strong-willed and knew what she wanted, while Bernhard was considerably more reserved. But not everyone believed the

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marriage was simply a good dynastic match. Princess Catherine Radziwill, who was familiar with the imperial court, later claimed that Charlotte herself had pushed for the marriage, despite her young age, because she wanted to escape her mother’s influence.

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The journey from engagement to marriage took roughly a year. The wedding took place on the 18th of February 1878 at the chapel of the Berlin Schloss. Charlotte was 17 while Bernhard was 26.

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Strangely, some guests remarked on how well Charlotte looked, but behind closed doors she was said to have been quite ill and fainted several times during the day. It was a sign of how fragile her health always was.

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Afterwards the newly-weds settled at Potsdam, where, on the 12th of May 1879, Charlotte gave birth to her one and only child, a daughter whom they named Feodora. Notably, she was Queen Victoria’s first great-grandchild. Charlotte had come to relish Berlin’s glittering high society.

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where she was admired for her fashion, lively parties, and sharp tongue. She resented anything that risked this freedom, and pregnancy had been something she particularly disliked. After Feodora’s birth, Charlotte appears to have made a private decision: she would have no more children.

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Before long, she was back enjoying society life in Berlin and taking long holidays. However, in the coming years, a dangerous scandal would ruin her reputation and bring her lifestyle crashing down.

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The Letters Scandal In March 1888, Charlotte’s father finally ascended the German throne as Emperor Frederick III. Tragically, his reign would last just 99 days before he died of throat cancer. His death brought Charlotte’s brother to the throne as Wilhelm II, and Charlotte’s position at the imperial court became even more prominent.

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However, it was a fateful event a few years later that would truly cement Charlotte’s notorious legacy. In January 1891, she hosted what was supposed to be an ordinary skating party and dance at the Jagdschloss Grunewald hunting lodge outside Berlin. The exclusive guest list included top-tier German aristocracy,

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notably Duke Ernst Günther of Schleswig-Holstein and Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse. Much of what happened that night has been obscured by rumour and legend.

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What is clear is that heavy drinking and various, simultaneous illicit extramarital affairs to put it lightly, turned a wild social gathering into the beginning of a scandal that lasted for years.

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In the days that followed the gathering, dozens of individuals began receiving blackmail letters, presumably from someone who had attended the event writing anonymously. These described what had happened, dragged up salacious old gossip about some of the attendees, threatened to reveal the

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details of who had been present, and in some cases even included very explicit collages and images.

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Soon, word of the letters spread beyond the royal court, and suspicion quickly fell on Charlotte. Her reputation for sharp-tongued gossip led some contemporaries to believe that she was behind them. She herself had received letters from the anonymous sender,

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though several people believed at the time that she had merely sent these to herself in order to cover up her actions. The scandal escalated over a period of months and dragged on intermittently in the years that followed. There was even a debate in the Reichstag on the Letters Scandal.

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Eventually, in June 1894 Leberecht von Kotze, a master of ceremonies at the imperial court, who had attended the gathering that started the whole affair in January 1891, was arrested after suspicions emerged that he was at least responsible for the collages

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included with some of the letters. Blotting paper was found in his desk and an examination determined that the handwriting was nearly identical, though late nineteenth-century handwriting made it difficult to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt. He protested his innocence and was exonerated after being court-martialled. Eventually Kotze reacquired

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his position at court, though not before fighting several duels against his accusers. Despite the heavy suspicion on Charlotte, investigators eventually pinned the case on a different suspect. They concluded, perhaps wrongly, that the letters had been written by Ernst Günther’s mistress, who was deported to France and became an easy scapegoat.

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But Charlotte was far from escaping unscathed. The letters’ author had somehow obtained her private diary, which contained intimate secrets about the imperial family and the court. Charlotte may not have written the letters, but her own carelessness had helped make the scandal possible.

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Wilhelm never fully forgave his sister. Bernhard was transferred to a regiment in Breslau, effectively exiling the couple from Berlin, while Wilhelm restricted their ability to travel abroad without giving up their royal privileges. And the damage went far beyond Charlotte herself;

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the scandal had struck at the reputation of the German monarchy. Yet for Charlotte, another nightmare was taking root at home: a torment of mental breakdown, agony, and a terrifying royal disease.

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Feodora and the Porphyria Theory The Letters Scandal, or the Kotze Affair as it is also sometimes known, was not the only difficulty for Charlotte in the 1890s. Her relationship with her daughter was also increasingly tense. Charlotte was, by all accounts, not exactly a

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naturally affectionate mother. She had been happy to leave Feodora to be raised by her grandmother for protracted periods of time while she socialised in Berlin. Like mother, like daughter, Feodora began seeking out a husband so that she could escape her unhappy family environment.

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In September 1898, the nineteen-year-old princess married thirty-three-year-old Prince Heinrich XXX Reuss, a man who was neither wealthy nor particularly high-ranking. Because of this, the imperial family considered the match beneath her, causing a serious rift between Charlotte and Feodora. This split grew increasingly bitter in the years that followed. By 1900, Feodora

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was telling friends that her mother was actively spreading malicious gossip about her at court, including rumours that Feodora had contracted a venereal disease from her husband. In truth, Feodora was simply enduring a heartbreaking inability to conceive, undergoing a series of painful and dangerous procedures in a desperate bid to have a child.

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What makes the feud between mother and daughter especially peculiar is that both women were seemingly quite ill in ways that were affecting their behaviour towards each other. Charlotte’s catalogue of health issues was recorded in detail over the years in her letters to her doctor.

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These included psychological symptoms such as fits of depression combined with physical issues like severe itching, rashes, swelling, nausea and dizziness. Later she even reported occasional partial paralysis of her limbs, while her urine colour darkened. One night in 1909 she began screaming and ranting for hours until her doctor sedated her.

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Feodora suffered from many of the same symptoms, the only difference being that her condition appeared to be even more advanced at a younger age than it was with her mother.

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Late nineteenth-century medicine tended to characterise behaviour like this as “hysteria”, especially when it was displayed by women, but modern analysis has looked at Charlotte and Feodora’s wider family background, in particular the case of their maternal ancestor, King George III of Great Britain, to understand what was wrong with them.

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George had suffered from bouts of hysteria and mania on and off from 1788 onwards and had spent the last ten years of his life between 1810 and 1820 in a world of his own.

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The most likely cause of what used to be termed “the madness of King George” was porphyria. This is a metabolic disorder whereby an enzyme deficiency creates porphyrins in the body that poison the system over time and lead to an array of both psychological and physical symptoms.

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There is a convincing, though unprovable case, that both Charlotte and Feodora suffered from a hereditary form of porphyria and that it explains both their tense relationship and Charlotte’s more problematic behaviour throughout her adult life.

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Later Life and Death Charlotte’s health continued to deteriorate through the 1900s and into the 1910s. These were difficult years for the German imperial family as a whole. Her brother, the emperor, for instance, suffered a quasi-psychological breakdown in the late 1900s owing to the impact of the Eulenburg Affair at court,

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which had seen questions raised about his own sexuality. His reckless foreign policy also drove Germany towards conflict with Britain and France and contributed in no small part to the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914. Right before that conflict erupted,

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Charlotte’s husband succeeded as Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. The New York Times would subsequently run a story with the headline “The Kaiser’s Cleverest Sister Is Now On a Throne.” Charlotte’s health carried on declining during the war years. By the winter of 1917 she was reporting

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increased kidney pain and digestive disorders, and her mobility had become quite restricted. A lot of her time was spent in a clinic where she was reliant to a growing degree on morphine for pain relief. She lived long enough to see her brother abdicate his throne at the

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start of November 1918 and Germany’s defeat in the war. As the German Empire and its old system collapsed, her husband Bernhard relinquished his title under pressure from the Meiningen Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council as the German Revolution erupted.

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Charlotte spent the next year between clinics and moving houses before suffering a heart attack on the 1st of October 1919. She was 59 years of age. Her husband did nine years later aged 76 and was buried next to Charlotte at Schloss Altenstein in Thuringia. Sadly, there is no evidence that

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she and Feodora had ever reconciled after their earlier difficulties. Despite her own poor health, Feodora lived down to 1945 when she, like her mother before her, died not long after a world war had ended. Despite Charlotte’s participation and contribution, the identity of the anonymous

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blackmailer in the Letters Scandal of the early 1890s has never been proven beyond a doubt.

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Thank you so much everyone for watching this video on Charlotte of Prussia. I hope you found it interesting. Let me know what you thought of life down below in the comments. And if you want more videos like this of late 19th century princesses, also let me know down below in the

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comments. If you have any suggestions, also let me know. And I hope all of you are subscribed and have notifications turned on to get all of my videos as soon as I upload them. Anyway, that's all from me. So, I'll see all of you in the next Forgotten Life. Thanks.

Topics:Princess Charlotte of PrussiaQueen VictoriaGerman EmpireKaiser Wilhelm IISaxe-Meiningenroyal scandalLetters ScandalGerman aristocracy19th century royaltyroyal family dynamics

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