by Theo Aronson
The ceremonies over, Princess Sophie changed into a dress of white and gold, and, with her husband standing beside her, drove to the little rented villa which was to be their home. They were vociferously acclaimed. The Greek crowd – so excitable, so patriotic, so proud and so superstitious – saw, in the marriage of this attractive young couple, the beginnings of the fulfilment of an old prophecy: when a Constantine shared his throne with a Sophie, Greece would once again rise to greatness. 'The Great Idea', that of a new Byzantium in which all the Greek people would once more be united, would become a reality. Greece would once again know glory.
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For Crown Princess Sophie, life in Athens was a far cry from life in Berlin. Although, since the accession of her brother Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German imperial court had become more showy, it was still extremely formal, hidebound and pompous. The German imperial family had always taken themselves very seriously. In contrast, the Greek royal family was charmingly informal. The dynasty was very new. Sophie's father-in-law, King George I, was the first of his line. Before him, and since the establishment of a monarchy in Greece after the War of Independence in 1830, the country had been ruled by King Otho I, who had been a Bavarian. After a turbulent, twenty-nine-year-long reign, King Otho had been overthrown. The finding of a monarch to replace Otho had been no easy task; not every prince had been prepared to face the caprices of Greek politics.
Amongst those whom the Greeks had fondly imagined would be prepared to do so had been Queen Victoria's second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. By a massive majority in a nation-wide plebiscite, Prince Alfred had been elected the new King of the Hellenes. The Greeks could have saved themselves the trouble. Britain announced that, according to an earlier agreement, no member of her reigning house was eligible for the Greek throne. So Prince Alfred withdrew from the scene. Not until over fifty years later, when Queen Victoria's granddaughter Sophie became Queen of the Hellenes, did one of her descendants come to sit on a Greek throne.
The crown was eventually accepted by Prince Wilhelm, the eighteen-year-old son of King Christian IX of Denmark. He was proclaimed King George I of the Hellenes on 30 March 1863. Thus his father, King Christian IX of Denmark, had the satisfaction of adding the Greek to the thrones which his children would one day occupy, for one of King George I's sisters was Alexandra, Princess of Wales and future Queen of England, and the other Dagmar, future Empress of Russia. If Queen Victoria was the Grandmother of Europe, then King Christian IX of Denmark was certainly the Grandfather.
At the age of twenty-two, King George I of the Hellenes married the sixteen-year-old Russian Grand Duchess Olga (she brought with her to Athens a trunkful of dolls) and during the following twenty years they raised eight children. The eldest of these was Crown Prince Constantine, who became the husband of Princess Sophie.
The royal family into which Sophie married was one of the most natural in Europe. King George I, still in his early forties, was a slender, blue-eyed, exotically moustached extrovert; sensible, unpretentious and full of fun. Queen Olga was a beauty, fair-skinned, plump and sweet-tempered. Their eight children had been brought up (and, indeed, were still being brought up) in the simplest possible fashion. The uncomfortable rooms of the palace in Athens and the grounds of their country place at Tatoi resounded to the noise of the royal children at play. They roller-skated through the ballrooms, they cycled along the corridors, they charged across the flower beds. They played elaborate practical jokes. The atmosphere, in other words, could hardly have been more different from that of Windsor or Potsdam.
Something of this same informality marked the family's public life. Athens – small, dusty, poor and provincial – was the most democratic of towns; there were few social distinctions and almost no formal entertaining. The relatively exclusive state banquets were usually followed by the far from exclusive court balls. To these, all and sundry crowded in. One of Crown Prince Constantine's brothers tells the story of a visitor to Athens who hired a carriage to take him to a ball at the palace: 'Do you mind going rather early,' asked the coachman, 'because I'm going to the court ball myself and shall have to go home and change?' And Prince Constantine, on having a young woman presented to him, recognized the vaguely familiar face as belonging to the daughter of his valet. She had married a naval officer and had every right to be presented.
To be granted an interview with the King, one had merely to write one's name in the audience book. The monarch would stroll about the streets of the capital attended only by an aide or one of his sons. 'Here comes Constantine' or 'Here comes Nicholas' the townspeople would call to each other as the princes walked by.
For Princess Sophie, life was even less formal than it was for the King and Queen. The sovereigns, at least, lived in a palace; it was inconvenient, smelly, stifling in summer, freezing in winter and with not more than two bathrooms for its three hundred and sixty-five rooms, but it was undeniably a palace. Sophie and Tino, on the other hand, lived in a rented house in the town – a small, unpretentious villa hardly better than those of the bourgeoisie. But Sophie loved it. Shy, and somewhat ill at ease amongst the rough and tumble of King George's household, she was delighted to have a home of her own. The house, like those of most of Queen Victoria's descendants, was cheerfully and comfortably furnished. 'I cannot tell you how intensely happy I am here with my Tino,' she told her mother, 'and how I enjoy this dear little house, the lovely English furniture . . . .'
The Empress, always ready with advice, was soon giving her hints on how to improve it and run it. Indeed, there were few subjects on which the Empress Frederick was not anxious to advise her daughter and it was fortunate for Princess Sophie that this advice was always practical, sensible and gracefully tendered. In a steady stream, the Empress's ideas on such diverse subjects as drains, cookery, gardens, books, paintings, choirs, ladies' colleges, travel and the necessity of making oneself popular poured forth. As Princess Sophie had been blessed with neither her mother's boundless energy nor her wide-ranging intellect, one cannot altogether blame her for not acting on quite every one of the Empress's suggestions.
For the moment, Princess Sophie, who had inherited Queen Victoria's taste for domesticity, was happy enough to be running her little home and devoting herself to her husband. The better she knew him, the more she appreciated him. Crown Prince Constantine was an honest man – open, straightforward, incapable of insincerity or dissimulation. At times, this frankness could lead to difficulties: he was often outspoken, intolerant and undiplomatic. Yet he was never autocratic; like his father, the King, he was friendly, unaffected and thoroughly at ease with the least of his countrymen. With the army, he was especially popular; his vocabulary of Greek oaths, they say, had to be heard to be appreciated.
In addition, the Crown Prince had two qualifications which his father, no matter how capable or popular, could ever equal. To a people such as the Greeks, these were all-important. The one was Constantine's Orthodox faith, the other his Greek birth.
To escape the heat and dust of the town, Tino and Sophie would join the rest of the family at their country place at Tatoi. Here, on a forty-thousand-acre estate, some fifteen miles from Athens, King George had built a family home in what was claimed to be the 'English cottage style'. In fact, it was more like an English suburban villa. The house boasted a flower garden, a kitchen garden, a home farm, an orchard and an evergreen plantation. From the balconies of the house one could look out over the trees to a distant view of the shimmering Aegean. Life at Tatoi was even more informal than it was in Athens. Meals were served at the most unfashionable hours: luncheon at eleven and dinner at three. To the Greek royal family, Tatoi meant home. 'We children just loved it,' wrote one of Tino's brothers. 'It was the one place where we could live a real home life and forget, for a short time, that we were not supposed to be ordinary human beings!'
On 19 July 1890, almost exactly nine months after her marriage, Princess Sophie gave birth to a son. He was named George, after his grandfather. T
he event brought forth a positive avalanche of suggestions from the Empress Frederick. Prominent amongst them was the advisability of the mother surrounding herself with English faces – an English doctor, an English midwife, an English nanny and an English governess. On this score, the Empress need have had no fears. Very much Queen Victoria's granddaughter, Sophie was determined that her household should be run on English lines. Tino's family was confusingly cosmopolitan: his father was Danish, his mother was Russian; the parents spoke to each other in German and to their children in English. In addition to these four languages, the family spoke French, Italian and, of course, Greek. But it was as an English family that the Crown Prince and Princess raised their children.
Between 1890 and 1913, Princess Sophie bore six children; three boys and three girls. The language used in the home was English. The simple, almost spartan way of life was considered to be English. English furniture, from Maple and Liberty, filled the rooms. Princess Sophie, reported one German official, 'is the most English of all the Empress Frederick's children; she talks English to her husband and her own children, to whom that language comes more natural than any other. I had the opportunity of hearing the Greek children speak English many times at Friedrichshof and they seemed to me to have no foreign accent at all.' They had English governesses and English tutors and spent frequent holidays at that most English of resorts, Eastbourne. In time, some of them attended English schools.
And, of course, presiding over the entire household like some distant but all-powerful deity was that personification of all things English – the children's great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.
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A few months after the birth of their first son, Tino and Sophie travelled to Berlin for the wedding of Sophie's sister, Moretta. With Moretta's old love, Prince Sandro of Battenberg, having married a far less illustrious bride – a singer by the name of Joanna Loisinger – Moretta had accepted the proposal of a much less glamorous suitor, Prince Adolf of Schaumburg-Lippe. It was while in Berlin that Princess Sophie told her family that she had decided to enter the Orthodox Church. The announcement precipitated a violent crisis.
Sophie's brother, the Kaiser, was furious. His wife, the pious and narrow-minded Dona, was even more outraged. Sending for Sophie, Dona (about to give birth to a sixth strapping son) primly announced that Wilhelm would never stand for the change of religion. If Sophie persisted in this headstrong course, she would end up in Hell. Flaring up, Sophie told Dona to mind her own business and slammed out of the room. At this the pregnant Dona became so excited that the doctors were sent for and her baby was born three weeks prematurely. 'If my poor baby dies it is solely Sophie's fault and she has murdered it,' wrote the agitated Kaiser to his grandmother, Queen Victoria, who was, of course, following this fracas between her grandchildren with deep concern.
But the baby flourished and Sophie, ignoring her brother's disapproval, returned to Greece determined to embrace the Orthodox faith. Wilhelm, suddenly alive to his sacred duties as Head of the Church, threatened to expel her from both Germany and the Hohenzollern family.
His high-handed behaviour led to a positive snowstorm of family letters. From Grandmama at Windsor, from the Empress Frederick at Homburg, from Crown Princess Sophie in Athens, even from Princess Moretta, honeymooning in Cairo, the indignantly worded reactions criss-crossed Europe.
'Good gracious, have they gone clean mad?' asked Moretta of Wilhelm and Dona. 'To think of sweet Sophie and Tino having these disreputable scenes makes me boil with indignation. The audacity of Dona to speak like that.'
The threat of expulsion caused a violent scene between Wilhelm and his mother. 'William is convinced that I tried to persuade you to become Greek,' reported the Empress to Sophie. 'He is so firmly convinced that I am always in some "intrigue" against him . . .' Her arguments had no effect. The Kaiser sent King George of the Hellenes a telegram announcing his decision to cut Sophie off if she defied him.
The Empress described her son's telegram as 'preposterous'. 'It makes me quite furious,' she went on to say to Sophie, and yet I am obliged to laugh. He seems to be copying Peter the Great, Frederick William I, Napoleon or some such conspicuous tyrant. To a free-born Briton, as I thank God I am, such ideas, so little in harmony with the XIX Century and personal liberty and independence, are simply abhorrent; and this my own son!'
Queen Victoria was less vehement but no less disturbed. 'I cannot say how grieved and upset I am at what has happened, and which was so entirely unnecessary and uncalled for,' she wrote, with customary sagacity, to Vicky. 'I think it was all Dona's love of interference . . . I myself do not understand such narrow-mindedness. I could not, even though I may be against a person changing their religion, if they do it willingly and out of conviction and without compulsion, I could not blame them or be angry with them for it.'
Sophie, in a final effort to smooth things over, wrote her brother a long conciliatory letter, explaining her reasons for entering the Orthodox Church and asking him to retract the ban. He refused. 'Received answer,' Sophie informed her mother in an open telegram, sent through the post offices at Athens and Homburg. 'Keeps to what he said in Berlin. Fixes it to three years. Mad. Never mind. Sophie.'
Princess Sophie was received into the Greek Orthodox Church in the spring of 1891. A few months later, defying Wilhelm's ban, she visited her mother at Freidrichshof. The Kaiser made no move to stop her. He was about to pay his first state visit to Queen Victoria; for all his arrogance, Kaiser Wilhelm II did not dare incur the wrath of his formidable grandmother.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Marie of Romania
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Few of Queen Victoria's grandchildren were to prove more exotic than Princess Marie, eldest daughter of the Queen's second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. Having, at the age of sixteen, rejected a proposal of marriage from her cousin Prince George of Wales, and so missed the opportunity of one day becoming Queen of England, Princess Marie, or Missy, accepted a second proposal and ended up as the Queen of Romania instead.
Of the characters of the two royal houses represented by Marie's parentage – matter-of-fact British and mystical Russian – the Princess took her colour, almost entirely, from her mother's side of the family. In the Coburg aviary, she was to be a very rare bird indeed.
Her father, the Duke of Edinburgh, was a bluff, handsome, uncomplicated and unquestioningly patriotic Englishman. Having made a career of the Navy, he spent long periods away from home. Her mother was the Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna, the only daughter of Tsar Alexander II of Russia. The Duchess of Edinburgh's plump figure and softly pretty face belied the strength of her character: she was an energetic, proud, autocratic and masterful woman, spartan in her way of life, fanatically religious and devoted to her native Russia. Even in surroundings as uncompromisingly British as Clarence House and Eastwell Park, she carried with her the flavour of imperial Russia. Her private rooms glittered with jewelled icons; she was never without a Russian priest and two chanters. England, she never liked. To her, English was an ugly language and, after the gorgeous, almost barbaric splendours of the Russian court, life in various British naval stations seemed strange indeed. Nor was she, the daughter of the Tsar of all the Russias, satisfied with her British rank. She was obliged to give precedence, not only to all Queen Victoria's daughters, but to the Danish Princess of Wales.
As a result, the Duchess of Edinburgh kept very much to herself, living amongst her icons and bringing up her family of five children (one boy and four girls) strictly, simply and – for all the apparent haughtiness of her manner – not unkindly.
But not even the stand-offish Duchess of Edinburgh could hope to live a life quite independent of her mother-in-law, Queen Victoria. Grandmama Queen was the sun around which her life, and the lives of her children, revolved. The girls were taken to visit their grandmother in her fascinating rooms at Windsor; they breakfasted with her on the lawns at Osborne; they drove out with her at Balmoral. In the summer the Queen would lend t
he family Osborne Cottage; in the autumn, they moved into Abergeldie, on the Balmoral estate. The old Queen followed her grandchildren's careers, says Missy, 'with grandmotherly affection, but also with the anxious severity of one who wished that those of her House should do it every honour, no matter where they were placed.' For all the smallness of her stature, the dowdiness of her clothes and the softness of her voice, Queen Victoria was 'a tremendous, sometimes almost a fearful force' in their lives. 'Even Mamma, who, according to us, was omnipotent,' says Princess Marie, 'had to count with Queen Victoria, had to listen to her, and if she had not exactly to obey, had anyhow to argue out all differences of opinion. But as she was strong-willed and autocratic, I can imagine that these arguments were tough.'
By the end of the 1880s, a complicated dynastic issue, known as the Coburg Succession, finally ensured that the Duchess of Edinburgh need live under the shadow of Queen Victoria no longer. At that time, the dukedom of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was held by the Prince Consort's only brother, Ernest. Duke Ernest was everything that Prince Albert had not been: he was an ugly, uncouth and licentious old roue, whose life had by now been given over, almost entirely, to the seducing of young women. He had a wife – a sad, faded creature – but no children. An heir to what Queen Victoria looked upon as this most precious of duchies had therefore to be provided and it had long ago been decided that the dukedom would go to the Queen's second son, the Duke of Edinburgh. Already, the Edinburghs' only son was being educated in Coburg; now the Duke moved his entire family there. They took up residence in the mock-Gothic, ochre-coloured Schloss Rosenau (once so beloved of the Prince Consort) and there sat waiting for terrible old Duke Ernest to die.
Happy at last amidst the simple formalities of this little German court, the Duchess of Edinburgh was able, as her daughter Marie puts it, 'to live entirely according to her desires, uncontrolled by Grandmama Queen and uncriticized by those who were inclined to find her ways foreign and out of keeping with British traditions'. She could also put her children in the care of German tutors and governesses so that, according to her sister-in-law, the Princess of Wales, 'they won't even know that they have ever been English'.
