However the name of the intended Russian candidate he wrote this about has not been mentioned a lot.
At first i thought it might have been about the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, only daughter of Alexander II but as she was born in 1853 and the visit was in 1860 it's unlikely the 7 year old Grand Duchess was the potential bride.
I've come up with several other candidates that might fit the bill better when it comes to age. Wiwill was born in 1840 meaning that two granddaughters of Nicholas I and nieces of Alexander II were in the right age: Marie and Eugenie both daughters of the Grand Duchess Maria Nicholaevna and her first husband Maximilian de Beauharnais, Duke of Leuchtenberg.
All their children were made imperial highnesses and Prince or Princess Romanovski/aya. So either would have been options.
Two others might have been Alexandra and Catherine of Oldenburg. Their father Peter of Oldenburg was the half-brother of Queen Sophie sharing Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna as their mother. Sophie described her brother's bride Theresa of Nassau-Weilburg as not very attractive so the fact that her son was not very positive about the appearance of his first cousin would fit in with that feeling within the family.
Im curious if anyone knows who the actual Russian candidate to be the Princess of Orange was?
Queen Sophie wanted either Alice or Helena of Great-Britain to become her daughter-in-law. Their sister-in-law Alexandra of Denmark was another option, one who might have been best suited for Wiwill. Her happy family home might have given him the refuse his own unhappy childhood had denied him. Besides Alexandra was very pretty and with her limited intellectual interests she might have pleased his father King Willem III a lot more than his own blue-stocking wife Queen Sophie.
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