This sex-fuelled British royal became the Queen of Spain. But she was 'sacked' ... trends now
A party animal weighed down with great big jewels and fabulous furs.
Caught up in a love-triangle with a duchess and her husband, kicked out of Britain, Spain and Italy, she was nearly murdered on her wedding day and ended her days living off royal handouts.
It wasn't all beer and skittles being Queen Ena of Spain.
Born at Balmoral, she was the grand-daughter of Queen Victoria (the daughter of Princess Beatrice) and spent her happy childhood years at Kensington Palace.
Later she'd be remembered as the great-great grandmother of the present King of Spain, Felipe VI - but only after a turbulent life which embraced haemophilia, the Spanish flu pandemic, the Spanish Civil War, and exile.
The children of Princess Beatrice and Prince Henry of Battenberg. Princess Victoria Eugenie, (Ena), the future Queen of Spain is on the left
Princess Beatrice, the youngest child of Queen Victoria, is pictured with her four children. From the left, the are: Ena, Leopold, Maurice (in the sailor suit) and Alexander, 1st Marquis of Carisbrooke
Queen Victoria surrounded by members of the Royal Family at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight including Princess Ena, third from right
Possessed of startling aquamarine eyes, she was 'licentious and very bawdy in her conversation' according to the diarist Chips Channon.
In other words, more than a bit naughty.
But tragedy stalked her footsteps. She inherited the 'royal disease', haemophilia, through her grandmother Victoria, which she was to pass on to her sons once she married.
Nobody took account of that possibility when she was sized up by the 20-year old King Alfonso of Spain when he came to London looking for a bride.
Ena – or Princess Victoria Eugenie as she'd been born – caught his eye and within a short time the couple were engaged.
Later Ena would complain, 'the British hated me because I converted to Catholicism; the Spanish hated me because I wasn't born a Catholic'.
That turned out to be the least of her worries.
On her wedding day in 1906, an anarchist tossed a bomb concealed within a bouquet at the royal carriage as it rode past.
Ena and her new husband were uninjured, but the blood from the fatally-injured mounted escort splashed across her wedding dress, a terrible augury for the future.
Revolution was already in the air in Spain, and much more was waiting around the corner.
A year after the marriage the couple's first child, Alfonso, Prince of Asturias, was born - but almost immediately it was discovered he suffered from haemophilia which meant the inability to stop bleeding from any accidental wound.
The effect on the king was shattering, and in a valiant effort to rectify the situation Ena allowed herself to become almost immediately pregnant - the following year she gave birth to a second son. Alas by his fourth year, this child could
