Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine

Born 1 November 1864 into the House of Hesse-Darmstadt, Elisabeth was Queen Victoria's granddaughter and older sister to Alexandra, who would become Russia's last empress. She married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the fifth son of Emperor Alexander II, on 15 June 1884; the couple had no children but fostered Sergei's niece and nephew and filled their Ilyinskoye estate with children's parties. After the Socialist Revolutionary Party killed Sergei with a bomb in 1905, Elisabeth publicly forgave the assassin, Ivan Kalyayev, and petitioned for his pardon without success. She left royal society, took vows, and opened the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent to serve Moscow's destitute. The 1917 revolution forced her brother-in-law Nicholas II to abdicate, and though monastic life continued briefly, she kept contact with Alexandra even during the family's exile to Tobolsk. Arrested in 1918, she was murdered by Bolsheviks that July - canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in 1981 and by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1992.