I’d say it was Empress Elisabeth “Sisi” of Austria
She was never meant to be queen and never wanted to be, her sister was meant to be but Emperor Franz Joseph, who was 23 at the time, saw the 15 year old Sisi and demanded to marry her or no one. So she was sent away to be married to a man she didn’t love who lived in a world unlike her own to the point where simple things like staircases would give her awful panic attacks.
Her Aunt and Mother in law, Princess Sophie of Bavaria, proceeded to torment her for years afterwards, she took Sisi’s first daughter, and named and christened her without her input or knowledge and didn’t let her take care of any of her children. On top of that, everyone in the palace despised her for not yet having a male heir.
Once she was even left a nasty pamphlet that told her how useless she was for not having a son. She was also hated for begging her husband to show compassion to his Italian and Hungarian subjects because she was “meddling in politics.”
She was the only royal to treat Hungarians as humans and even went so far as to learn to speak Hungarian, which made her even more despised by the Austrian nobility. Her already deteriorating mental health was damaged more by the death of her first daughter from typhus and she was thrown into a deep depression, pulling away from everyone, including her living daughter, which destroyed their relationship.
She ended up focusing on her appearance, her beauty being the reason for her unhappy life in the first place. She was extremely anorexic and bulimic and on top of that, she wore a tight laced corset that had to be imported from France and had a 16 inch waist. Along with that, she had ankle length hair that’d take two hours to style each day and gave her horrible headaches.
She wrote poetry about her wanderlust and had a fixation with the treatment of the mentally ill, perhaps because of her own experiences. She finally had a son but was once again barred from raising him, shortly afterwards she caught tuberculosis, and her husband started an affair. But this time, she actively fought her husband and mother in law to have control of her son’s education.
She had a fourth child, Marie, in a successful attempt for Hungary to gain equal footing to Austria. Sisi finally got to take control of raising her fourth and final child, her Mother in Law Sophie’s influence in the court and Sisi’s children’s lives quickly began to fade, and she died shortly thereafter. Sisi then decided to start travelling and developed a passion for riding sports and shopping.
Things really were looking up for her, until the death of her only son, Rudolf, in what was likely a murder-suicide. She had to deal with the deaths of both her sisters, her parents, her son and her closest and only friend in just a few years. She never wore any color but black for the rest of her life. She continued to travel as an escape from her life. She was eventually murdered by an anarchist who’d originally planned to murder another royal, but failed.
I’ve seen someone else presenting Franz Joseph, her husband, as the answer to this question, but he was the one solely responsible for her misery. If he hadn’t demanded to marry her she would have lived out her life happily in Bavaria as it was planned. I have no sympathy for this man, he married a young child and condemned her to a sad and painful life. It was her great beauty that brought tragedy to her life.
Steve Ramsey