Princess Charlotte of Prussia

Born at the Neues Palais in Potsdam on 24 July 1860, Charlotte was a difficult child with a nervous disposition and little interest in study. Her relationship with her demanding mother, Victoria, Princess Royal, was strained from the start. At seventeen she married Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Meiningen in 1878, desperate to escape parental control, but her weak-willed husband had no effect on her eccentric personality. She spent her years enjoying Berlin society, frequently leaving her only child, Princess Feodora, with family members - the two shared the same strained dynamic Charlotte had known with her own mother. When her brother became Emperor Wilhelm II in 1888, her social influence sharpened, and she filled the decades with extravagant pursuits and illness in equal measure. She became Duchess of Saxe-Meiningen in 1914, a title her husband lost four years later with Germany's defeat. Charlotte died of a heart attack in Baden-Baden on 1 October 1919, her lifelong ill health now attributed by historians to porphyria, the genetic disease that ran through Queen Victoria's line.