Queen Victoria was very fond of her cousin (her father having been Victoria & Albert's 1st cousin and she was also first cousin to 'Foxy Ferdy' of Bulgaria)
to Vicky:
Oct 6 1861
'How pleased and happy I am to hear of dear Antoinette's success--and your opiinion and description quite tally with Uncle Leopold's....How I long to see her! We are so pleased at Prince Hohenzollern's being made RH.' [Royal Highness]
Dec 30 1865
'I must speak of Leopold and Antoinette. [They had just paid a visit to QV at Osborne] I must now say how charmed with her we are. How lovely she is and what a look of dear Aunt Victoire she has. How like her she is--only handsomer perhaps. And so simple and unaffected--and dear Leopold I am so fond of. Oh! if B. and Al [Bertie and Alix] were like them! Oh if Antoinette was in Al's place! She is so much more sympathique and grande dame. Our good Al is like a distinguished lady of society but nothing more.' [guess Alix was temporarily out of favor!]
Vicky to QV Jan 2 1866:
'I am so glad you are so charmed with Antoinette. I knew you would be--she has something like a Dove in her expression, and is a great darling, but if you were to live long with her you would not find her wiser than Alix--for she is still very childish and had been so superficially educated.'
QV to Vicky Jan 6 1866:
'What you say about dear Antoinette is I think quite just. I did not mean she was cleverer than Alix but she is softer, more affectionate, and a real Princess--which the other is not.'
Vicky to QV April 27 1867
[after Leopold's sister's marriage, referring to Antoinette] '...who is in the greatest beauty and invariably admired.'
Vicky must've shared QV's affection for after Waldie's death she wrote on March 28 1879 that: 'Antoinette Hohenzollern is the only relation except the Fritz Carls who have been allowed to vist us. '
Missy (her daughter-in-law) recorded that:
'Antonia, or Antoinette, had been one of the great beauties of her time; one of those old-fashioned, classic-featured beauties, whom one associates with the crinoline. Her profile was grecian, her shoulders slopoing, her hands long and delicate, her feet very small and useless. But her figure somehow could not fit in with the clothes of the day, there was a disproportion between the bust and the legs...Superbly aristocratic, she moved slowly with a curious swinging of the hips. She loved fine clothes and jewels and, though leading almost an invalid's life, was always very smartly dressed. For several years already her health had quite broken down, and Inever knew her except as an invalid who mixed only at certain hours with other members of the family...My future mother-in-law's look were a great disappointment to me. Having heard that she had been a great beauty, I was all eagerness to see her, but I could not reconcile myself to this pale-faced, pale-lipped, Grecian-nosed woman with the too small bust and too long legs. These proportions can occasionally be beautiful, but in her case, the hips being enormous, there was something about her figure which made you feel positively uncomfortable. Had I been older, I would no doubt have understood how handsome her features still were. She was most loving and charmingly kind to me, which I later realized must have been somewhat of an effort, because, being an ardent, not to say fanatical Catholic, it was a great distress to her to have a Protestant daughter-in-law...Ferdinand was her favorite son, there was a great affinity of character between the two...Infanta Antoinia had inherited some beautiful old Spanish and Portuguese objects from her father, furniture, china, glass, ancient statuettes and some magnificent old silver. She had great taste and had set up her treasures to their best advantage; I would wander about amongst them enjoying their mellowed perfection..My mother-in-law was an interesting, if not altogether a lovable personality. She was profoundly artistic, an excellent painter, and deeply learned on certain subjects, such as botany, biology and natural history. But in other ways she had remained very narrow and her religion cramped instead of widening her heart, mind and sympathies. She was one of those people who knew no forgiveness of sinners..She was a curious mixture of dignity and childish futility, vain, self-centered, small in her judgment of others; she had no wider sympathies. Life with its broader human understanding, lay outside her field of comprehension...It was her love of beauty in general and of flowers in particular that made her congenial to me. But I never dared touch up general subjects; human conflicts she was unable to grasp, she lived so protected...nursing her delicate health, everybody serving her, caring for her, spoiling her, that she was more like an old and very exigent child than a woman who had lived a real woman's life, with its temptations, conflicts, doubts, joys, passions and pain.'
I always tend to take Missy's judgments of others with a grain of salt--she wasn't exactly the best judge of character and she herself could be remarkably unperceptive of people's failings and weaknesses. I remember she once wrote of Vicky during the Jubilee that she seemed fairly condescending when playing with them and her smile didn't quite seem real, rather false, without ever once acknowledging (even in hindsight) the tremendous pressure and grief that was hanging over them with Fritz's terminal illness.It's one thing not to recognize it as a child but she made no allowance for it as an adult writing her memoirs as well. Plus Missy certainly didn't remark favorably on those who tried in anyway to curb her wild ways or disapproved of her passionate nature.
