Grandmama of Europe: The Crowned Descendants of Queen Victoria

by Theo Aronson

  An extremely sensitive person, Prince Wilhelm might, in childhood, have found his mother's obvious solicitude for his deformity somewhat embarrassing: the more she pitied him, the more conscious was he made to feel of his infirmity and the more he resented her concern. And then, as he grew older, so did he – a bright but by no means intellectual youth – begin to feel inadequate beside his brilliant, impatient and energetic mother. She wanted him to be a man in the mould of her father, Prince Albert; he wanted to be like his autocratic and soldierly grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I.

  With each passing year Prince Wilhelm's manner became more lordly and his views more reactionary. At the Military Academy at Potsdam he became so stuffed with the currently fashionable, audioritarian, nationalistic and anti-British sentiments that he became insufferable. Each time he returned from these agreeably martial surroundings to the artistic and enlightened atmosphere of his parents' home, there would be a row. The Crown Prince might hold his tongue but the Crown Princess was not nearly so longsuffering. And Wilhelm, who found her liberal outlook no less intolerable, was quick to answer back. There were innumerable scenes. It was, in fact, the old story of a parent and a child having similar personalities and opposing views.

  Queen Victoria, who was subjected to endless tirades against her grandson, did what she could in the way of giving her daughter good advice. When, during Wilhelm's schooldays, Vicky assured her mother that she watched over even 'the minutest detail of the boy's education', the Queen warned her that 'too great care, too much constant watching, leads to the very dangers hereafter which one wishes to avoid'. The Queen, no doubt, had her son Bertie in mind. She realized too, that her daughter's standards were probably too high and her approach too hectoring. But, as Wilhelm matured, so did Victoria come to appreciate that her daughter was grappling with an extraordinarily difficult situation. Wilhelm was clearly more than just a loutish young man.

  Another reason for Prince Wilhelm's attitude was that he had grown up during the years of Prussia's surge to greatness. As a boy he had thrilled to the military triumphs of the Franco-Prussian War and the inauguration of the German Reich. One of his most exciting memories was of his grandfather, the newly proclaimed Kaiser, taking the salute at the march-past of his victorious troops after the war. His country's greatness had been achieved, not by a spread of liberal ideas, but by military conquest. As the young man's hero, Prince Bismarck, had once said, the questions of the day had been solved, not by majority votes, but by blood and iron. To identify himself with his parents' views, reckoned Prince Wilhelm, would be not only distasteful but extremely short-sighted. He thus gave the Iron Chancellor his full support. 'Bismarck,' he once wrote in his effusive fashion, 'was the idol in my temple, and I worshipped him.'

  The Chancellor, of course, was delighted. Having always disapproved of the Crown Prince and Princess, he now made use of their son in his battle against them. He wanted to ensure that the young Prince, who would one day succeed his father as Kaiser, would rule according to the pattern laid down by Wilhelm I and himself. It did not need much to convince the old Kaiser of the need for this. Relieved to know that his son's liberalism had not been passed on to the next generation, Wilhelm I approved Bismarck's plans for involving young Wilhelm in affairs of state. For Fritz and Vicky, who had always been kept at arm's length, this was very galling.

  In the year 1880, at the age of twenty-one, Prince Wilhelm had become engaged to Princess Auguste Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein. The Princess was always known to the family as Dona. She was dispatched to Windsor for Queen Victoria's approval and the Queen pronounced her 'gentle and amiable and sweet'. That she was, and, as such, Dona suited the ebullient Prince Wilhelm very well. Unlike his mother, Dona would never involve herself in politics or try to influence her husband's policies. She was precisely the sort of submissive, church-going, childbearing Hausfrau of which the Prussians approved, but with enough physical presence to play her public role. Bismarck, who entirely approved of his protégé's choice, always referred to Dona as 'the cow from Holstein'.

  Thus, by the late 1880s, the German imperial family was split into two irreconcilable parts. On the one side stood the old Kaiser and his grandson Prince Wilhelm; on the other the Crown Prince and Princess, forming what Bismarck scathingly referred to as the Anglo-Coburg faction. Prince Albert's scheme, so optimistically initiated almost thirty years before, had been realized only in so far as that Germany had been unified. Of that model democratic state of the Prince Consort's imaginings, there was not a vestige in the militant, thrusting and powerful Second Reich.

  Whether or not, when the old Kaiser finally died, Fritz and Vicky would be able to inaugurate their long-delayed plans remained to be seen. To many, it seemed extremely doubtful. For one thing Bismarck was as firmly entrenched as ever. Could Frederick afford to dismiss him? After more than a quarter of a century in power, he had blunted almost all sense of individual freedom and independence of mind in Germany. For the majority of Germans, brute force had become the most important thing in the state. It was quite probable that Bismarck's institutions were too strong and the German people's attitudes too ingrained for Crown Prince Fredrick to alter.

  And in any case, with the heir, Prince Wilhelm, being so utterly opposed to everything his parents planned to do, would it be worth while making the effort? Would Fritz, already nearing sixty, be granted enough time to undo all Bismarck's work and set Germany along a different course? Would not Prince Wilhelm, on ascending the throne, simply nullify his father's efforts and revert to the autocratic rule of his grandfather's day?

  It was a difficult situation. And by the summer of Queen Victoria's Jubilee, it had become more difficult still. Admittedly the old Kaiser, already in his ninety-first year, could not be expected to last much longer, but from this Vicky could not take a great deal of comfort. A further blow had fallen. Her husband was seriously ill.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bertie of Great Britain

  1

  The Crown Princess's brother Bertie, the Prince of Wales, was also being kept waiting for a throne. He was waiting for it, however, in a far less anguished fashion. Indeed, not only in this, but in almost every possible way, did Bertie differ from his sister Vicky.

  Prince Albert Edward was forty-five at the time of his mother's Golden Jubilee. By this stage he had developed fully the looks, the manner and the life style that were to characterize him until the day he died. He was stout; a condition which neither cures at Continental spas nor superbly cut jackets could successfully minimize. Behind his back, he was sometimes referred to as 'Tum Tum'. His baldness was offset by a full, greying, but neatly trimmed beard and moustache. His eyes were pale, bulbous, heavy-lidded and sensuous looking. They could be caressing if he were talking to some attractive young woman, dull if he were bored and steely if he became aware of some lapse of taste in dress or behaviour. An erect carriage and dignified bearing gave him an unmistakable aura of majesty; his manners were faultless. Yet his air, for the most part, was far from ponderous or unapproachable; it was relaxed, genial and charming. He looked, and was, a bon viveur.

  By the 1880s, the Prince of Wales had established himself as the most fashionable figure in European society. He lived in great style. His clothes were elegant, his meals rich, his entertainments lavish. His wife, formerly Princess Alexandra of Denmark, had all the beauty, perfection and agelessness of a wax flower. His homes – Marlborough House in London and Sandringham in Norfolk – were comfortably and sumptuously furnished. He surrounded himself with the beautiful, the amusing, the wealthy and the worldly. Refreshingly free of racial, social or religious bigotry, he befriended anyone whom he considered interesting. He delighted in the company of financiers, men-about-town and actresses; he adored racing, shooting and gambling. Nothing pleased him so much as to be surrounded by smiling faces. Equally at home in London, Paris, the South of France or some Continental watering-place, he was renowned for his zest, his gregariousness and his licentiousness. As his d
isapproving mother only too frequently pointed out, the Prince of Wales lived purely for pleasure.

  Sipping champagne, puffing cigars and trailing clouds of scandal, Bertie moved through the beau-monde of the late nineteenth century like some plump and stately Dionysus.

  But there was another side to the coin. The Prince of Wales might have given the impression of an easygoing and warm-hearted rake, but his personality was not as resolved as it first appeared. Away from the café table or the roulette wheel, he was moody, irritable and impatient. His restlessness was a byword. Easily bored, he was the despair of his hostesses. Constant diversion was necessary to keep him from becoming depressed. Utterly without resources, he could not bear to be alone, even for a second. As he lacked application, nothing could hold his interest long; he seldom read a book and would merely skim through the newspapers. He was quick-tempered. For the most part, he would lose his temper over trivia: a decoration incorrectly worn, a hitch in an arrangement, a delay in some ceremony. Very conscious of his royal dignity, he was easily affronted. One never quite knew how far one could go with him. When a drunken friend once called him 'Tum Tum' to his face, he saw to it that the offender was ushered out of the company as soon as possible.

  So seemingly a man of the world, Bertie was alarmingly immature in many ways. His indiscretions were always causing trouble. More than once his mother, or her Ministers, were obliged to cover up for him. He was too partisan, too impressionable and too susceptible to the influence of others. Often he simply reflected the opinions of the last person with whom he happened to have spent some time.

  He had no intellectual curiosity and distrusted clever people. Of art and music he knew nothing and cared less. His taste, if not exactly vulgar, was philistine. His political creed was an unthinking conservatism, his religious beliefs those of a schoolboy, his sense of humour utterly unsophisticated. 'Anything approaching a practical joke,' his pedantic father had once decreed, would be impermissible for the Prince of Wales; the fact was that Bertie came to adore practical jokes. Dummies in the bed, champagne down the neck, donkeys in nightshirts – all these were a source of side-splitting hilarity to the Prince of Wales. Something of this same boyishness was revealed in his passion for uniforms: he could never have enough of them – the brighter, the better. He was forever changing his clothes.

  In a way, it was as though the Prince of Wales – and his beautiful wife, Princess Alexandra – were transfixed in eternal youth. To the end of her days, almost, the Princess of Wales looked and thought like a girl, while the Prince retained the tastes and habits of a young man. In middle age he was still living, as Queen Victoria once complained, 'in a whirl of amusements'; spending, for want of any more worthwhile occupation, the idle, frivolous and self-indulgent life of a young blood.

  An example of his juvenile behaviour was provided during that Jubilee season of 1887. One night the Prince took a party of friends to supper in a public restaurant. Amongst them was Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, a young man hardly notable for his prudishness. At about two in the morning Bertie asked the orchestra to play the famous can-can from La Belle Hélène; with the beautiful Duchess of Manchester as his partner, he flung himself into the dance with embarrassing abandon.

  'Tell the waiters to go,' whispered Crown Prince Rudolf to one of the company, 'they must not see their future King making such a clown of himself.'

  2

  That Bertie was leading so worthless an existence was not entirely his own fault. His upbringing had all but ensured this regrettable result.

  Prince Albert, egged on by that high-minded éminence grise of the Coburgs, Baron Christian von Stockmar, had approached the problem of his eldest son's education with characteristic earnestness. To best control the rising tide of democracy, Albert and Stockmar had decided that it would be necessary to rear a set of enlightened princes: men who, by their breadth of vision, unimpeachable morals and high sense of duty, would win the respect and love of their people. They would be the examples of what could well be termed the Coburg ideal of constitutional monarchy: a race of wise, impartial and influential sovereigns, raised high above the hurly-burly of daily political life.

  Of this proposed race of paragons, none would occupy a more important position than the prince who was destined to become the King of England. It was therefore essential that he be moulded, from babyhood almost, into a model constitutional sovereign.

  With this ideal in mind, Prince Albert mapped out Bertie's future. The boy's character was to become an amalgam of all the virtues; he was to be fashioned, said Stockmar, into 'a man of calm, profound, comprehensive understanding'. Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, was prepared to go even further. 'The great object in view,' declared his lordship solemnly, 'is to make him the most perfect man.'

  To this end Bertie was subjected to a rigorous course of training. He was isolated from boys of his own age, surrounded by a team of upright, well-educated and serious-minded tutors, kept at his lessons from morning to night, bombarded with information and advice – usually in the form of ponderous memoranda – from his well-meaning father. Even his periods of relaxation were watched over by a keen, and usually disapproving eye. If the Prince were not turned into the beau ideal of a constitutional monarch, it would be through no lack of honest intention on the part of his elders.

  It was all to no purpose. From the beginning Bertie revealed himself as an affectionate and amiable creature but one with whom very little could be done. He was lazy, he was slow, he was stupid. He was also completely unpredictable. At times his habitual geniality would give way to a mule-like obstinacy or screaming rage. The sad fact was that Bertie, unlike his sister Vicky, simply did not have the mental ability to cope with this intensive course of instruction. He was bored, bewildered and overworked. Naturally gregarious and fun-loving, he was starved for company of his own age. Nor, once his weaknesses were exposed, was any attempt made to tailor his education to his personality. He was simply driven harder. A lighter touch might have encouraged him; the heavier hand crushed his initiative.

  With each passing year his parents became more disappointed. Albert complained that the only thing in which the adolescent Bertie showed the slightest interest was clothes, while the Queen, who was never very relaxed in his company, could only beg the boy to try and be more like his father – if only in some ways. In no way, in fact, did Bertie resemble his father; he was very much his mother's son. 'Bertie . . .' the Queen once wrote to her daughter Vicky, 'is my caricature. That is the misfortune, and, in a man, this is so much worse. You are quite your dear, beloved Papa's child.' The Queen understood only too well that her son was developing into what she might have become had it not been for Albert's uplifting influence. In the tug-of-war between Coburg and Hanoverian for control of the boy's character, his Hanoverian ancestry was winning hands down. Every year these regrettable characteristics were becoming more and more pronounced.

  Proof positive of what his parents considered his bad blood came in Bertie's twentieth year. By then, that nightmarish education almost completed (he was at Cambridge) the Prince was doing a spell of military training at the Curragh camp near Dublin. Here he was introduced to an easy-going actress named Nelly Clifden. Not unnaturally (and despite the fact that not until a mere two years earlier had he had the sex act fully explained to him) he slept with her.

  When the news of this escapade reached the Prince Consort's ears, that high-principled man was appalled. The average Victorian father would have laughed, or at least shrugged the matter off, but Prince Albert saw it in the blackest possible light. His great dream of fashioning the perfect, unsullied heir had been finally shattered: Bertie was obviously about to go the way of Queen Victoria's unspeakable uncles. Could such a prince, having forfeited the respect of his future subjects, weather the democratic storms of the nineteenth century? Prince Albert did not think so. Assuring Bertie that he had inflicted on his father 'the greatest pain I have yet felt in this life', Prince Albert treated him to
one of his most sanctimonious, if anguished, literary outpourings. He was too broken-hearted, he wrote, even to see his son.

  After Bertie had expressed due contrition for his lapse, the Prince Consort forgave him. He even went so far as to pay his son a visit at Cambridge. The Prince Consort came back from this visit in a state of exhaustion. A week later he collapsed with typhoid fever. Less than a fortnight after this – on 14 December 1861 – he died.

  The Prince Consort's death caused the Queen's long-simmering dissatisfaction with her eldest son to boil over. She was convinced that his 'fall' had killed her husband. The belief became an obsession. "I never can or shall look at him without a shudder . . .' she admitted in a letter to Vicky; indeed, she could not bear to look at him at all. Her antipathy towards him was such, she cried out, that 'I feel daily, hourly, something which is too dreadful to describe.'

  Quite clearly, the Prince would have to be more or less permanently separated from his grief-demented mother. In her determination to adhere to every plan laid down by her late husband, the Queen was able to ensure this separation. The Prince Consort had decreed that his son should round off his education with a long journey to the Near East and, with that accomplished, to get married as soon as possible. Bertie duly made his journey and, on 10 March 1863, at the age of twenty-one, he married Princess Alexandra of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, daughter of the heir to the Danish throne. She, too, had been approved by the late Prince Consort.

  In the years that followed Bertie's marriage, the widely divergent ways of life of his mother and himself became an established part of the British scene. She withdrew from public life almost completely; he flung himself into an almost frenetic social round. From her seclusion at Windsor – or Osborne or Balmoral – she sent off a steady stream of letters in which she upbraided him for his extravagance, his frivolity, his idleness and his indiscretions. Tactfully – for until the day she died he was in awe of her – he would counter her strictures by pointing out that someone had to fulfil the social and ceremonial role of the monarchy.