The eldest daughter of the second marriage was named Charlotte, after his first wife (she afterwards married the unfortunate Archduke Maximilian, who assumed the title of Emperor of Mexico, and was shot by Juarez in 1867). When King Leopold knew he was dying, he desired that he might be buried at Windsor, by the side of the wife of his youth; but his wishes were not carried out.
The outbreak of diphtheria at Darmstadt in 1878, in which the Queen lost her dearly loved second daughter and one of her grandchildren, has been already referred to. In June, 1879, the Prince Imperial, only son of the exiled Empress of the French, was killed by the Zulus in a skirmishing expedition in South Africa. The Queen's feelings of grief were all the harder to endure because the young Prince had been serving with her army. Her sensibility on the point of national honor was deeply wounded. She was ashamed that the lad had not been defended by the Englishmen who were with him; her heart bled for the mother who had lost her only child. The same autumn, with her usual thoughtful kindness, she induced the widowed Empress Eugénie to accept the loan of Abergeldie Castle, near Balmoral; and nothing was spared which it was possible to do to console and cheer her aching heart.
The next great sorrow was the death of Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, which took place, almost suddenly, at Cannes, in March, 1884. The Prince had been delicate from his youth, and more than once had hovered between life and death. The Princess Alice wrote after one of his illnesses in 1868:—
"For a second and even a third time that life has been given again, when all feared that it must leave us. … Indeed, from the depth of my heart, I thank God with you for having so mercifully spared dear Leo, and watched over him when death seemed so near."
