Elizabeth Alice Wise, a great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, has died at age 89. Town & Country reported her death on August 3, 2026.

Wise was born at Kensington Palace in September 1936, the daughter of Princess Mary of Teck and Sir Henry Abel Smith. Her grandmother was Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria — which made Wise a cousin to the late Queen Elizabeth II, the monarch who reigned from 1952 until her death in 2022.

In 1965, Wise married shipping executive Peter Ronald Wise. The wedding drew senior royals: Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (the widow of King George VI and mother of Queen Elizabeth II), Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, and Queen Elizabeth herself — then 15 years into her reign — were all in attendance.

The couple had one daughter, Emma Charlotte Abel Wise. Emma died in infancy.

In 1974, Wise was charged with the murder of her nine-month-old daughter. A contemporary newspaper account identified her as a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II facing trial on that charge. Wise ultimately pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to twelve months' probation.

That sentence is the detail that stops a modern reader. A charge of killing an infant, resolved with a manslaughter plea and probation rather than prison time, would be examined very differently today. The 1970s British courts, however, handled such cases within a framework that could weigh a mother's mental state in ways that sometimes produced outcomes now seen as strikingly lenient. The record does not include further detail on the circumstances beyond the charge, the plea, and the sentence.

Wise is survived by her older sister, Anne Liddell-Grainger, along with several nieces and nephews.

Her life sat at the edge of the modern British royal family — close enough to be born in a palace and married before a queen, but far enough from the throne that her name carried little public recognition outside royal-genealogy circles. The British royal family's web of descendants from Queen Victoria, who died in 1901, runs into the hundreds. Most live private lives. A few, like Wise, carried connections that placed them inside palace walls for the milestones of their lives even as they spent most of those lives outside the public eye.

Her death closes a chapter that spanned the reigns of three monarchs — George VI, Elizabeth II, and Charles III — and that included one of the most quietly painful episodes in the extended royal family's modern history.