The Duchess of Saxe-Meiningen, "once the most feared woman in Germany, and in her younger days beautiful, died a little while ago at Baden-Baden," reports the Washington Post, which received a special cable from the Times (London.)
The cable stated that the Duchess died "unwept, unhonored and unsung."
HRH Princess Viktoria Elisabeth Auguste Charlotte of Prussia was born July 24, 1860, at the Neues Palais, the second child of the then Crown Prince Friedrich of Germany and his British-born wife, Princess Victoria, the eldest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
She married Duke Bernhard II of Saxe-Meiningen on February 18, 1878 at Berlin. It was a double wedding with her second cousin, Princess Elisabeth Anna of Prussia to the Hereditary Duke Friedrich August of Oldenburg.
Charlotte "once swayed" the court of her older brother, Wilhelm II, who succeeded his father, Friedrich III, in 1888, as she had a "hand in the famous Harden trial, which broke the notorious Eulenburg camarilla." This action "left open the way for the generals' camarilla, which made the war."
She was seen as the "tool which broke the two successive rings of Count von Waldersee and Eulenberg after their kind opposed the war."
Charlotte was "long banished" from her brother's court, and it was not until a "year or two before the war" that she and Wilhelm had a "sort of public reconciliation."
The Duchess of Saxe-Meiningen died at Baden-Baden on October 1. She was 59 years old. She is survived by her husband, who renounced his throne in November 1918, and their daughter, Princess Feodora, who was born in 1879.
Princess Feodora married in 1898 to Prince Heinrich XXX Reuss. They have no children.
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