page_title: Victoria, Princess Royal
section_title: Last years
hierarchical_section_title: Victoria, Princess Royal / Empress dowager / Last years
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Statue von Kaiserin Friedrich im Kurpark in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, Deutschland English: Monument to former Empress Victoria by Joseph Uphues, 1902, in Spa gardens in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, Germany
context_page_description: Victoria, Princess Royal was German Empress and Queen of Prussia by marriage to German Emperor Frederick III. She was the eldest child of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and was created Princess Royal in 1841. She was the mother of Wilhelm II, German Emperor.
  Educated by her father in a politically liberal environment, Victoria was married at age 17 to Prince Frederick of Prussia, with whom she had eight children. Victoria shared with Frederick her liberal views and hopes that Prussia and the later German Empire should become a constitutional monarchy, based on the British model. Criticised for this attitude and for her English origins, Victoria suffered ostracism by the Hohenzollerns and the Berlin court. This isolation increased after the rise to power of Otto von Bismarck in 1862.
  Victoria was empress for only a few months, during which she had opportunity to influence the policy of the German Empire. Frederick III died in 1888 – just 99 days after his accession – from laryngeal cancer and was succeeded by their son William II, who had much more conservative views than his parents.
context_section_description: Victoria devoted part of her final years to painting and to visiting the artists' colony of Kronberg, where she regularly met with the painter Norbert Schrödl. In her last days she used to walk in the morning and spent long hours writing letters or reading in the library of her castle.
  In late 1898, physicians diagnosed the empress dowager with inoperable breast cancer, forcing her to stay in bed for long periods. The cancer spread to her spine by the autumn of 1900, and as she worried about her personal letters (in which she detailed her concern over Germany's future under her son) falling into the hands of the emperor, she requested that the letters be brought back to Great Britain in a cloak-and-dagger operation by her godson Frederick Ponsonby, the private secretary of her brother King Edward VII, who was making his final visit to his terminally ill sister in Kronberg on 23 February 1901. These letters were later edited by Ponsonby and put into context by his background commentary to form the book that was published in 1928.
  The empress dowager died in Friedrichshof on 5 August 1901, less than seven months after the death of her mother.
  She was buried next to her husband in the royal mausoleum of the Friedenskirche at Potsdam on 13 August 1901. Her tomb has a recumbent marble effigy of herself on top. Her two sons who died in childhood, Sigismund and Waldemar, are buried in the same mausoleum.
caption: Monument to former Empress Victoria by Joseph Uphues, 1902, in Spa gardens in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe
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