On the day of her wedding, May 31, 1906, Queen Victoria Eugenie of Spain was riding through the streets of Madrid beside her new husband, King Alfonso XIII, when a bomb disguised as a floral bouquet was thrown from a hotel window at the royal procession. The young queen and king escaped unharmed, but twenty-four bystanders were killed and more than a hundred were injured. The assassination attempt by a Spanish anarchist was a brutal beginning to a marriage that would be marked by personal tragedy and political collapse, and it foreshadowed the unrest that would eventually tear Spain apart. The woman at the center of these events was born Princess Victoria Eugenie Julia Ena of Battenberg, on October 24, 1887, at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.
She was the daughter of Prince Henry of Battenberg and Princess Beatrice, the youngest daughter of Queen Victoria. Because her father’s parents had entered into a morganatic marriage, Henry had not inherited any of his father’s principalities and instead bore the title of Prince of Battenberg, which he passed on to his daughter. Victoria Eugenie, known to her family as Ena, was born during the fiftieth year of Queen Victoria’s reign, earning her the nickname the Jubilee Baby. The aging queen was so attached to her youngest daughter, Beatrice, that she had allowed Beatrice to marry Prince Henry only on the condition that the couple continue to live with her.
As a result, Victoria Eugenie spent her childhood in Queen Victoria’s household, moving between royal residences in England and Scotland and developing a close relationship with her grandmother. When Queen Victoria died in 1901, after sixty-four years on the throne, Princess Beatrice moved with her children to Kensington Palace in London. Her husband had died in 1896, having contracted malaria while on military service in Africa. The question of Victoria Eugenie’s marriage arose in 1905, just before her eighteenth birthday, when King Alfonso XIII of Spain visited Britain.
Alfonso was only a year and a half older than Victoria Eugenie, but he had already been king of Spain for nearly two decades. His father, Alfonso XII, had died a few months before his birth, making the unborn child king at the moment he entered the world. It was well known that the young king was seeking a bride, and rumors had linked him to Princess Patricia of Connaught, a first cousin of Victoria Eugenie’s. But at a state dinner at Buckingham Palace, it was Victoria Eugenie who caught his eye.
Several obstacles stood in the way of the union. Victoria Eugenie was an Anglican Protestant, and her religion would be problematic for a queen of deeply Catholic Spain. There was also the possibility that she carried hemophilia, the rare blood disease that ran through the British royal family after Queen Victoria had been the first carrier. If Victoria Eugenie was a carrier, the disease could be passed on to any children she might have.
These problems were overcome when Victoria Eugenie agreed to convert to Roman Catholicism, and Alfonso chose to accept the risk concerning the family history of hemophilia. Early in 1906, Victoria Eugenie visited Spain with her mother, where Alfonso hosted them and formally arranged the marriage between the British and Spanish governments. The wedding was set for May 31, 1906, in Madrid, and it was on that day that the anarchist’s bomb was thrown at the royal couple, an ominous start to their reign. The new queen struggled to adjust to her adopted homeland.
She was unpopular among her subjects, who viewed her with suspicion as a Protestant interloper who had converted only for convenience. Less than a year after the wedding, on May 10, 1907, Victoria Eugenie gave birth to a son, named Alfonso after his father. The joy of the arrival soon turned to concern. When the baby prince was circumcised, the doctor reported that the wound kept bleeding.
It became clear that the infant had inherited his mother’s hemophilia. The condition, in which the blood does not clot properly, is caused by a genetic mutation that prevents the body from producing the clotting proteins needed to stop bleeding. Even small injuries could cause extensive bleeding, and surgery or serious injury could be fatal. The severity of the disease varies depending on how much of the clotting factor an individual produces, and in the case of the eldest son of Alfonso and Victoria Eugenie, it proved particularly acute.
The news drove a rift between the king and queen. Alfonso blamed his wife for passing on the disease, but the couple continued to have children. In total, they had five sons and two daughters. Their second son, Jaime, was born deaf in 1908.
While their daughters, Beatrice and Maria, appeared to have escaped the inheritance of hemophilia, the family was plagued by health difficulties. In the years that followed, Victoria Eugenie threw herself into charitable work, patronizing the Red Cross in Spain and supporting educational reform. In 1929, the city of Barcelona honored her with a statue showing the queen in a nurse’s uniform. In 1923, Pope Pius XI bestowed upon her the Golden Rose, a major honor of the Roman Catholic Church.
While the queen’s charitable work progressed through the 1910s and 1920s, Spain itself was becoming increasingly unstable. Throughout the nineteenth century, the country had experienced political turmoil between reformers and conservatives who supported a society dominated by the monarchy and the Catholic Church. This was further complicated by the growing influence of the Spanish armed forces, which became a major factor in Spanish politics during a series of conflicts in North Africa, where Spain was trying to protect its remaining colonies. By the 1920s, the opposing groups were broadly split between pro-monarchy army elements, or nationalists, and their republican opponents.
To maintain his position, Alfonso had supported Miguel Primo de Rivera as military governor from 1923 onward, under the platform of country, religion, and monarchy. But in 1930, Rivera’s grip on power slipped. An economic collapse in Spain, following the Wall Street crash in the United States, caused him to lose the support of the military. In 1931, elections were held that brought the republicans to power across Spain.
Within weeks, they deposed Alfonso and created the Second Spanish Republic. Alfonso and Victoria Eugenie were suddenly no longer king and queen. They left Spain entirely, believing that their continued presence would prove contentious and could provoke a civil war between the republicans and those who wanted a restoration of the monarchy. They went into exile in France in the early 1930s, but their departure did not halt the unrest.
In 1936, Spain descended into civil war between the left-leaning republicans and the right-wing nationalist movement. The war lasted three years and ended with the seizure of power by General Francisco Franco and his Falange movement. Alfonso and Victoria Eugenie moved from France to Italy, holding onto the hope that Franco might restore the monarchy after the civil war, but that hope never materialized. Their personal tragedies continued.
Their fourth son, Gonzalo, died in 1934 as a result of a car accident. The injuries he sustained were minor, but he suffered extensive internal bleeding because of his hemophilia, which led to his death shortly afterward. Four years later, in 1938, the exact same fate befell their eldest son, Alfonso, who died from internal bleeding after a minor car accident. In 1941, the old king, who was in poor health, renounced his claim to the Spanish throne in favor of his third son, Juan.
Alfonso died shortly afterward. Victoria Eugenie’s problems continued after her husband’s death. The couple had been living in Italy, a country allied with Germany during the Second World War and therefore at war with Britain. Victoria’s support for her homeland was evident to Italian society, and in 1942 she was asked to leave the country.
She relocated to Switzerland, a neutral nation, where she spent much of her later years. In 1968, as the Franco regime was liberalizing during the dictator’s final years in power, Victoria Eugenie briefly returned to Spain for the first time in thirty-seven years. When Franco died on November 20, 1975, there was widespread popular support for the restoration of the monarchy. Just two days later, on November 22, Victoria Eugenie’s grandson, Juan Carlos, became King Juan Carlos I of Spain.
She did not live to see that moment. Victoria Eugenie died in the Swiss city of Lausanne on April 15, 1969, at eighty-one years of age. Because the Franco regime was still in place, she was buried in Lausanne. In 1985, her grandson ensured that her remains were returned to Spain and interred in the royal vault at the Escorial Palace outside Madrid, next to her husband and their children.
Her great-grandson, Felipe VI, is today the reigning Spanish monarch.