Princess Louise of Wales

A carte-de-visite portrait of Princess Louise Victoria Alexandra Dagmar of Wales (1867-1931), the eldest daughter of Edward, Prince of Wales and Alexandra of Denmark. She was born at Marlborough House on 20 February 1867 during her mother’s bout of rheumatic fever.

Together with her younger sisters Victoria and Maud, Louise was educated by governesses along conventional lines. The girls were always with their mother, who was much the strongest influence in the lives of all her children, known to them all, always, as ‘Darling motherdear’.

At the age of twenty-two, on 27 July 1889, Louise married Alexander William George Duff (1849-1912), Earl of Fife, a forty-year-old, rich Scottish landowner with a sound head for business, who also happened to be a grandson of William IV through his mother, one of the King’s illegitimate children. Fife was one of the few friends of the Prince of Wales of whom Queen Victoria approved, and on his marriage to her granddaughter, the Queen made him a duke. She would not, however, consent to granting the children of the union the style of ‘Highness’ and held firm in the face of much argument. After her death, the Fife children, Princesses Alexandra and Maud (a boy was stillborn) were eventually accorded the title in 1905 by their grandfather, now Edward VII. At the same time, Louise took the title ‘Princess Royal’. She died at her home in Portman Square on 4 January 1931 and was buried at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor.

Photographed by William and Daniel Downey of London and Newcastle.