1/ OTD in 1878 Lord Beaconsfield--Benjamin Disraeli--officially announced the death of Princess Alice to the house of Lords in one of the most emotional moments in the House during the 19th Cent. Disraeli assumed--wrongly as it turned out--that most of the peers already knew

2/ what had happened. Shouts of disbelief and "no!" and "no no!" interrupted him. Peers started crying. British aristocrats, many of whom were war veterans mind you, did not cry in public. Some put their faces in their hands. It was the nineteenth century's equivalent in some

3/ ways to Princess Diana dying. Alice was never mega popular but EVERYONE liked her. She was Queen Victoria's most "chill" child and the fact that she died on the same day as Prince Albert made it that much more emotional.

4/ The official court circulars identified Alice as Grand Duchess of Hesse--she married a German prince but Disraeli redacted that and rhetorically turned her back into Princess Alice of the United Kingdom. Unlike the other announcements he also chose to not whitewash her death.

5/ Her whole family got diphtheria. She was a well-regarded and trained nurse. She tried to save her daughter Marie's life but to no avail; she literally had to watch her own daughter choke to death. She decided to tell her infected son instead of delegating it to his nurse.

6/ The boy, Ernst, quite naturally, was inconsolable. She broke the family's rule about not touching; she hugged and kissed her grieving son. Two weeks later, she was dead. By 1878, a good number of her childhood friends were in the House of Lords. That wasnt the last tragedy to

7/ happen to Princess Alice's family. Her daughter Alix survived diphtheria only to be murdered in Russia in 1918. We know Alix as Empress Alexandra of Russia, who with her husband Nicholas and their five children are now officially passion bearers in the Orthodox Church.