From my book, Queen Victoria's Descendants.
"Vicky was mother to four daughters, but her relations with her eldest daughter, Charlotte, were difficult. Charlotte became imbued with the ideas of Bismarck, which displeased her mother. In 1891, Empress Friedrich wrote to another daughter, Sophie: "Charlotte is coming here at Whitsuntide. I do wish I could look forward to her coming with unmixed pleasure but I cannot, considering that she and Bernhard take the reverse of what I do on almost every subject and abuse me right and left behind my back." Later, in 1893, she wrote: "It does grieve me to see her so 19th century, thinking so much of her clothes and appearances and smoking so much. She is looking well, but her complexion is so yellow and she smells like a cigar shop, which for ladies is not the thing."
Charlotte is particularly interesting genealogically. Her marriage in 1878, and the birth of a daughter, Feodora, the following year, made Queen Victoria a great-grandmother at 59. The Queen lived long enough to see her great-granddaughter marry in 1898, but the marriage was childless and Victoria died before her first great-great-grandchild was born.
A veteran U.S. diplomat described the Duchess of Saxe-Meiningen "remarkable for her independence of character." He thought she "possessed a gift of repartee, that is Gallic rather than Teutonic or English, with a tendency to amusing satire.""
