Queen Victoria had many children and grandchildren, and among those grandchildren, the most beautiful was Princess Elizabeth of Hesse.
She was born to Princess Alice, Queen Victoria's second daughter, and her father was the fourth Grand Duchy of Hesse in the German Confederation.
When she was in the boudoir, her parents liked to call her nickname "Ella", which shows how favored she is.
Among Victoria's grandchildren, she was the most beautiful.
Although her younger sister Alex was most favored by her maternal grandmother, Queen Victoria, she was not as beautiful as her.
A photograph taken in 1887 perfectly preserves the peak of her appearance.
Emei is slender, with deep eyes, a high nose, and a perfect jawline and a slender neck, the whole person is as elegant and beautiful as a swan.
In 19th-century Europe, she was known as the Four Great Beauties along with Queen Edward VII, her aunt Queen Alexandra, Princess Sissi, and Empress Eugenie of France.
Although she is beautiful, the Hessian royal family is extremely poor, and the sisters are princesses who have to clean their own rooms and make their own food. The clothes she wore were also ordinary fabrics, but they still couldn't hide Ella's beauty.
Because of her beauty, Maria, a relative in Russia, the aunt of her father Ludwig, and the empress of Alexander II, fell in love with her when she was a child, and always wanted to make this little beauty her daughter-in-law.
Moreover, her cousin of her German aunt's family, who would later be Wilhelm II, was also very fond of her. When he was in college, he used to get drunk and run away from Hesse, when Ella was only 14 years old.
Cousin William regarded her as the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and he said that she was the only one who could calm his heart and heal his restless nature.
Ella's mother, Princess Alice, was also happy to facilitate the marriage. After all, William is the future king, and what a beautiful thing it is for his daughter to marry.
But William himself was so uncompetitive that when he saw Ellamune, he would only read the Bible incoherently in front of her to express his love. As for Ella's younger siblings, he showed unprecedented domineering, but he bullied them.
Of course, the marriage had to fall through.
In 1878, a diphtheria disease took Ella's mother and little sister away.
Maternal grandmother, Queen Victoria, was distressed that several granddaughters had lost their mothers, and took the Ella sisters to the United Kingdom to take care of them personally, and they only then got rid of the image of local girls.
Mother Alice's best friend, Louise, the Grand Duchess of Baden in Germany, that is, the aunt of Wilhelm II, who once pursued Ella, took a fancy to Ella again, and her son Archduke Baden pursued Ella frantically.
Baden was rich and high-status, and Queen Victoria felt that her granddaughter would not be wronged in the slightest if she married her, and she also wanted to make things good. But Ella didn't feel it at all, and refused.
In 1882, Ella finally waited for her prince, the Grand Duke Sergei of Russia, the fifth son of Queen Maria, a Russian relative who had been thinking of making her her her daughter-in-law.
When they were children, the two often played together, and they were childhood sweethearts.
But what makes Ella even more excited is that the two have so many common hobbies, such as jewelry, clothing, painting, decoration, and so on. I really suspect that Sergei's hobbies are for the sake of flirting with girls.
When the two were engaged, Sergei arrogantly took the jewelry to make his fiancée happy, and pinned the jewelry accessories to Ella's clothes with his own hands, and the jeweled love made Ella's Hessian taste completely disappear.
The wedding of 1884 was full of real money. Ella's dowry was 60,000 marks, and Sergey offered her 50,000 rubles.
Sergei's brother, Tsar Alexander I, directly deposited 100 million rubles for her, which is now almost equivalent to 700 million pounds. And give her 40,000 rubles of pocket money every year.
She became Grand Duchess Elizabeth, the most beautiful Grand Duchess in Russian history. Surrounded by love and jewels and palaces all day long, she also became a flaunting of wealth and status.
Clever and studious, she soon learned to speak Russian, and the whole court knew that Grand Duchess Elizabeth was beautiful and sociable, and she charmed many people.
In order to alleviate her loneliness, she also tried her best to facilitate the marriage of her sister Princess Alex and her nephew Russian Crown Prince Nicholas. That is, Alexandra, the last empress who was called the "Hessian fly" and "followed the coffin into Tsarist Russia".
The couple's life is happy, the only drawback is that they have no children, but this also prevents their offspring from suffering from hemophilia.
Her sister Alessandra's hemophilia was successfully passed on to her only son, Alexei, which led to the queen being manipulated by Rasputin and the royal family quickly falling apart.
However, rumors spread in the outside world that the two had no children because Sergei only loved men.
The source is with his German cousin, Wilhelm II. He can't marry a beauty, and he will never forget Ella for the rest of his life, and her photo is put on his desk to die.
The Grand Duchess naturally ignored these, but even if she put all her energy into dressing up, she couldn't alleviate the pain of not having children.
For this reason, Sergei adopted a son and a daughter of his younger brother's family.
I thought that this would ease the emotions of my beloved wife, but who knew that she would be jealous because her husband doted on the children too much, and the relationship with her two children, especially her daughter, was very tense.
In 1905, Sergei was blown up in the street by opponents. The Grand Duchess was so grief-stricken that she knelt in front of the coffin for hours throughout the funeral.
However, after that, her relationship with her adopted son improved, and she personally arranged the marriage of her adopted daughter, married her to Prince Wilhelm of Sweden, and also married a rich dowry.
As a widow, she removed all the ornate furniture from her home, painted the walls white, and placed her husband's relics on the cross.
After a serious illness, she changed her temperament and gave all her jewelry to her adopted daughter and relatives, and the artwork was given to the museum. Then he used the rest of the money to set up a monastery to help the poor.
She was once found in the poorest part of Moscow, where she personally cared for the sick. During World War I, she cared for the wounded on the front lines and also funded large quantities of medicines.
In 1917, Wilhelm II, who was far away in Germany, was still thinking about her and warned her that she should take refuge in Germany if she was in danger, but she refused.
So in 1918, after the fall of the Russian imperial family, she and the other members of the imperial family were imprisoned, and they were all killed three months later. She was the first to be thrown into a well.
Her body was buried in the Church of Santa Mary in Jerusalem in 1981.