It was after eleven o'clock at night on April 15, 1969 when Queen Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg died at her home on Vieille Fontaine in Lausanne. She had been in exile since 1931, when the Second Republic was proclaimed and her husband and she had to quickly leave the country for France. She had only set foot in Spain a year before she died, in 1967, when she came to Madrid for the baptism of her great-grandson, the then Infante Felipe, today King of Spain.

At that time the head of state was Franco and it is said that, during the baptism, the Queen and the caudillo met alone in a small room in the Zarzuela. "Good, General," she is supposed to have said. “Now you have all three here, the father, the son and the grandson. Choose”. She was referring, of course, to don Juan de Borbón, his son Juan Carlos and his grandson, Felipe. And with the verb elect she was understood "successor".

Victoria Eugenia wanted to somehow force Franco to name her successor as king. As revealed by Cayetana de Alba, Victoria Eugenia's goddaughter, the Queen explained to her shortly after that "Franco has assured me that he will be the prince." That is, Juan Carlos. So it was. We tell you here a few more anecdotes of her eventful life.

Her mother was the favorite daughter of Queen Victoria of England.

Victoria Eugenia Julia Ena of Battenberg was born in 1887. Her mother was Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom, Queen Victoria's youngest daughter and her favourite. Queen Victoria had nine children. The first of hers was named Victoria after her mother, although for the family she would always be Vicky. Then came the long-awaited heir, Albert, known privately as Bertie.

Seven more children followed, practically a new baby every year and a half: Alice, Alfred, Helena, Louis, Arthur, Leopold, and Beatrice. When the youngest, Beatrice, was born on April 14, 1857, Vicky was about to get married. Beatrice was actually called Beatrice Mary Victoria Feodore, but since her birth she was always called Baby.

Queen Victoria did not want her daughter Beatrix to marry

When Beatrix grew up and announced that she wanted to marry Prince Henry of Battenberg, Liko for the family, Queen Victoria was furious. According to the tradition of the time, one of her daughters had to stay single to keep her mother company in her old age, and Victoria had decided that she would be Baby. For this reason, although in the end she reluctantly accepted the commitment, she decreed that the couple would always live with her, so after a discreet wedding in the parish of Whippingham, on the Isle of Wight, the new couple had to settle in the palace with the queen Victoria.

Victoria Eugenie was the first member of the British royal family to be born in Scotland since 1600.

Beatriz and Liko immediately had offspring. Alexander, known as Drino, came into the world first. Then, on October 24, 1887, Victoria Eugenia Julia Ena was born. Leopoldo was born in 1889 and Mauricio, in 1891.

Victoria Eugenia was born in the Scottish castle of Balmoral, her grandmother's summer residence. In fact, she was the first member of the British royal family to be born in Scotland since Charles I, who was born there in 1600. To celebrate such a historic milestone, the little girl was given a Gaelic name, Ena, with which she would always be known to her family and also in England.

Eugenia comes from Eugenia de Montijo

Victoria Eugenia was named after her grandmother, Queen Victoria, and Empress Eugenia de Montijo, who was her baptismal godmother. At that time, the Granada-born Eugenia de Guzmán y Palafox de Portocarrero Kikpatrik, better known as Eugenia de Montijo, was already the widow of the Emperor of France Napoleon III and had lived in exile in England, in Chislehurst Castle, since 1870. The queen She and Victoria were very close friends. Eugenia was also given the name Julia as a tribute to her maternal grandmother, the Polish Countess Julia von Hauke.

She called her grandmother Gangan

Despite the fact that as her mother she was distant and that for the rest of her grandchildren Queen Victoria was somewhat cold, with the little Battenbergs she was always close, even funny. Her children called her Gangan and the monarch allowed them to play inside the palaces, even she ignored the fact that her screams could be heard in the corridors, something that would have horrified her a few decades before. But she now enjoyed herself with that innocent bustle, to the point that she wrote in her diary “little Drino and Ena are delightful and so much fun”.

Gangan imposed great discipline on him

Although she allowed them certain liberties, the Queen also required her grandchildren to be brought up with proper manners and imposed strict discipline. Ena herself would remember years later that her grandmother “was very good but very strict, with old-fashioned ideas about how children should be raised; she above all she insisted that the children be seen and not heard”. She also ordered her grandchildren to be very aware of her royal position and to behave accordingly. Once, when she was little, Ena said “I think it's time for me to go to sleep” and her grandmother corrected her: “Young lady, a princess should say, “I think it's time to go to bed”.

She was about to die as a child

Ena grew up surrounded by animals, especially dogs and ponies. However, her enthusiasm gave him the odd scare. In 1894, when she was six years old, she Ena Ella fell off her pony at Osborne House and struck her head on the floor, causing dangerous bleeding that kept her in bed for days. Queen Victoria was very distraught: "I love these lovely children as if she were their own mother," she noted in her diary.

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He met Alfonso XIII in London

Victoria Eugenia met who would be her husband, the King of Spain Alfonso XIII, at a gala ball at Buckingham Palace. Alfonso had left on a trip to several European countries and no one was unaware that one of the objectives was to find a wife. For this reason, ABC organized a contest among its subscribers to find out which foreign princesses enjoyed the most popularity among the people. The winner was, coincidentally, Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg.

But Alfonso XIII was in London to meet Patricia de Connaught

Unlike the readers of the ABC, initially King Alfonso XIII was more interested in Patricia de Connaught, a much better match than Ena. However, she ended up rejecting him and then the King noticed Victoria Eugenia. During the ball in the palace, Alfonso XIII asked her if she collected postcards. She told him yes (so all young girls of good birth did it) and he told her that she would send him one of hers every day. And so it was: Ena and Alfonso XIII began an epistolary relationship for several months.

Their engagement was announced in San Sebastian

After a while, the young people met again at the Mouriscot villa in Biarritz. There it became clear that the king loved her deeply and, therefore, after a few days they moved, together with their respective mothers, to the Miramar Palace in San Sebastián, where the engagement was officially announced.

Victoria Eugenia had to become a Catholic

It was also in San Sebastián that the bride had to abjure her Anglican faith and embrace Catholicism. As far as is known, the ceremony was quite unpleasant for the English princess.

Her fiancé gave her a fabulous tiara for her wedding

She is the famous Flor de Lis tiara, the most lavish of the royal jeweler and that Letizia now enjoys, although she only wears it on rare occasions. Created by Ansorena jewelry, it included 450 diamonds and ten pearls mounted on a platinum structure. Victoria Eugenia herself would have it “fixed” years later so that “she would look even more spectacular”. Specifically, she sent it to Cartier to put more diamonds in the central part.

All of Madrid was decked out for the wedding

Especially the Equitativa building, on Sevilla street, which was adorned with colored lights that formed columns and arches and illuminated signs that welcomed in English that foreign princess who that day was going to become queen of Spain. . Calle Mayor was also very decorated: there were arches with garlands and more than three thousand lanterns that climbed up columns and formed the letters A and V, A for Alfonso and V for Victoria Eugenia.

The bride was very late for the wedding

The wedding was celebrated in the Madrid temple of San Jerónimo, on March 31, 1906. He was 20 years old and she was eighteen. The bride arrived very late at the church: she had been told that she should get dressed at the Ministry of the Navy and wait for the prime minister, Segismundo Moret. But this one was quite late and the bride could not leave until well after when it was scheduled.

Her wedding dress was sewn by Julia de Herce

Julia de Herce ran one of the best fashion workshops in Madrid and attended to some of the highest-ranking women in the capital. For this reason, and because she had worked in the past a few times for her queen mother, Queen Maria Cristina of Habsburg, she was chosen to make the wedding dress for the English princess. Forty officers were needed to have it in time and lace brought from England was used. The veil she wore had belonged to her mother-in-law and was embroidered with fleurs-de-lis and the imperial eagle, symbol of the Austrian imperial family.

She suffered an attack on her wedding day

After the wedding, the couple got on a carriage and headed towards the Orient Palace. When they were passing through Calle Mayor at the height of San Nicolás, a heavy bouquet of flowers was seen falling from the balcony of an adjoining hostel. He fell between the horses that were pulling the carriage. Upon hitting the ground, a tremendous detonation was heard. A thick cloud of smoke covered the center of the great avenue, while cries of panic were heard throughout the city. Miraculously, the kings escaped unharmed.

The terrorist was Mateo Morral

He had been born in Sabadell in 1880 and was the son of a textile businessman, Martin Morral, who had given him a careful education. By the age of sixteen he had already mastered English and French, and was then sent to study in France and then Leipzig, where he learned German and specialized in mechanical engineering. But on the way back it was immediately clear that that quiet, shy and applied boy had changed. Basically, because he started giving rallies at his father's factory where, loudly, he harangued the stunned workers to go on strike.

He made wedding cakes fashionable

The wedding of Victoria Eugenia and Alfonso XIII was the first in Spain in which a wedding cake was served, that is, a wedding cake, an English tradition that had never been seen here before. So much expectation aroused that innovation that even the newspapers dedicated special chronicles to it. The ABC correspondent in London explained that “the wedding cake has just been finished, and it is leaving for Madrid. It will be the first wedding cake that has been seen in Spain”. And then the details of that culinary novelty were specified. It was made with sponge cake, currants, icing cream and whipped cream. "It is six feet tall, weighs 300 kilos and measures 46 inches in diameter at its base," he told himself. It also explained how it was going to be cut: “On the solid silver plate on which the monumental cake will be served, a two-foot-long gold-bladed knife with a silver handle will be placed. On the day of the wedding, Princess Victoria will solemnly plunge the knife into the cake."

The wedding menu was intense

Given the terrorist attack they had just suffered, it was decided that the planned dance was canceled, but not so the dinner with the guests that same night. Nilson consommé and Perigueux eggs were served, followed by a Colbert sole, and then sherry beef short ribs with asparagus and Valois sauce and roasted Pau capon with lettuce salad.

Victoria Eugenia made tea at five fashionable

The new Queen of Spain softened the customs of the Spanish court, until then accustomed to the rigorous rules established by the Queen Mother María Cristina de Habsburgo. She also introduced changes in the palace: she ordered to improve the central heating and installed a cinematograph in the hall of columns to be able to project films at night. Her personal tastes were also all the rage: the new Queen drank tea, played sports and also smoked, something that was a scandal in Spain.

She had several children with hemophilia

Victoria Eugenia and Alfonso XIII had six children: Alfonso, Jaime, Beatriz, Cristina, Juan and Gonzalo. The first-born and Gonzalo were born with hemophilia, a disease that was then known as "German disease" and that was transmitted by women but suffered by men. The infant Don Jaime did not suffer from it, but he did suffer from deaf-mutism from a very young age as a result of a badly operated mastoiditis.

Although it has often been said that Alfonso XIII knew in advance that his wife could be a carrier of the disease, the truth is that it does not seem very likely, since the marriage was seriously damaged after the discovery of the disease of the Prince of Asturias . The estrangement was growing between them and he had many mistresses (and he was not exactly discreet). After the First World War, they were already practically separated, and once they went into exile, each one chose to live in different countries.

He loved Santander

From 1921, the Kings began to spend their summers in the Magdalena Palace, in Santander, a place that Queen Victoria Eugenia loved because it reminded her of England. In Santander, moreover, she could practice many sports: she played golf and tennis, went horseback riding and went sailing.

She did a lot for nursing in Spain

Queen Victoria Eugenia developed a very important care work, especially in the field of nursing. She was key to the formation of a professional nursing career and gave herself body and soul to the education of women. Among other important successes, the reorganization of the Spanish Red Cross, the creation of the School of Nursing, the improvement of the Anti-Tuberculosis League and the formation of the so-called Auxiliary Ladies of Military Health stand out, which would have a very active role in the attention to those wounded in the war in Morocco. She also collaborated in the information and aid office for the populations affected by the First World War that was organized in the Palacio de Oriente.

She never had the feeling of being popular in Spain

Victoria Eugenia was always stuck with the thorn that the Spanish did not want her, despite the fact that she always tried to do charity work and never got into politics. But the monarchy was living low hours (her husband made many mistakes) and she was one of the first to sense that the Republic was imminent.

She first she went into exile in Paris

Victoria Eugenia left Spain a day after her husband. Almost at dawn she left the palace by car with her children. She took a train at El Escorial station, went to Irún and, from there, to Paris, where she met Alfonso XIII.

She then she was in London and finally settled in Lausanne

After spending a season in Paris, King Alfonso XIII left for Rome and she went to London. Her contact with her family was minimal for many years and she did not go to Jaime, Beatriz or Juan's wedding. She, too, barely saw her husband, who died in February 1941. After World War II, she settled permanently in Lausanne, Switzerland.

In her house of exile, gazpacho or potato omelette was always served

To make it clear that she was the Queen of Spain even though she lived in exile, she always served herself a glass of sherry as an aperitif and many times the menu included gazpacho or potato omelette.

To get ahead, she had to sell quite a lot of jewelry.

And also to help defray part of the expenses of the wedding of her grandson, Juan Carlos, with Sofía. Specifically, it is believed that Queen Victoria got rid of a fabulous emerald necklace and that they ended up in the hands of Farah Diba, the third wife of the Shah of Persia.

She did not return to Spain until 1968

She went for the baptism of her great-grandson, the then infant Felipe and today king. She believed that no one would remember her in Spain, but when she stepped into her airport, she was in for a big surprise: hundreds of people had gathered to welcome her.

While she was in Madrid, Queen Victoria Eugenia stayed at the Liria Palace, owned by her goddaughter, Cayetana de Alba. Although it was not planned, a handshake was organized in one of the palace halls and whoever wanted to enter could enter. About 20,000 people showed up, including Pastora Imperio. In principle, many had discouraged the organization of such an event, because they feared that the Falange would appear to burst the act, but Cayetana de Alba remained firm: "Even if they destroy the palace, the kissing is celebrated."

Her mortal remains were transferred to Spain years after her death.

After she died in Lausanne in 1969, she was buried in Switzerland. It was not until 1985 that her mortal remains were repatriated to Spain. She is buried in El Escorial.