Victoria, Princess Royal

Born 21 November 1840, Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa was briefly heir presumptive to the British throne until her brother's birth, then raised by Prince Albert in a politically liberal household. At 17 she married Prince Frederick of Prussia and brought eight children and a constitutional vision to Berlin - where the court and Otto von Bismarck treated her as a meddling English interloper. The isolation deepened through decades of waiting. When Frederick finally became emperor in 1888, laryngeal cancer killed him 99 days later. Their son Wilhelm II took the throne with none of his parents' liberalism. The widowed empress built Friedrichshof castle in Hesse and wrote thousands of letters home - a correspondence that survives nearly intact, mapping Prussian court life from 1858 to 1900. She died of breast cancer in August 1901, seven months after her mother.