Princess Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg was the first English Queen of Spain in history, and she remains the last. Young King Alfonso XIII had obviously come to Britain in 1905 hunting for a bride, but Princess Patricia of Connaught rebuffed him and his second choice fell on the blonde, tall, handsome young Battenberger, grand-daughter of Queen Victoria. An anarchist bomb thrown at their wedding procession in Madrid killed many people and was an augury of what was to come: the haemophiliac sons she produced alienated her volatile husband, who consoled himself with numerous affairs, and by middle life the royal couple were permanently estranged. When Alfonso went into exile in 1931 after the major electoral defeat which produced the ill-fated Spanish Republic, Ena and her children followed him. She outlived her husband by many years and revisited Spain in the 1960s, dying happy in the knowledge that her grandson Juan Carlos would soon be King. A good read, both historically and on the "human interest" level.