Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  As the emperor’s health declined, ‘the gaze of Europe concentrated on one sick room’, observed the Daily Telegraph. For the British press it was as though Germany hovered at a crucial fork in the road, one path leading towards increased autocracy with all its dangers, the other towards greater liberalism and peace. ‘The heroic and much loved Emperor Frederick . . . has ever been a lover of liberty and progress’, who aimed to ‘gradually democratise the institutions of the fatherland’, claimed the Telegraph. His life was considered to be ‘the one guarantee still existing for the continuance of European peace’. Fearsome accounts of an increasingly skeletal emperor gasping for breath appeared to symbolise something more: the dying struggles of the fight for a liberal Germany.64

  In June 1888 the emperor moved to the Neues Palais at Potsdam – now renamed Friedrichskron – and anxious crowds gathered outside waiting for news. A reporter for The Times recorded the strange events of the night of 14 June. The little telegraph office at the station was open all night, the light streaming from its windows gradually ‘restricted to little more than that emitted by a few solitary lamps and tapers’. There was no sudden improvement in the emperor’s condition to report. Shortly after eleven o’clock the next morning the imperial standard ‘floating in the balmy morning breeze’ was suddenly lowered to half mast. ‘If it had been the blade of a guillotine’ its fall could not have been a more ‘painful shock’ to the grieving onlookers, continued The Times. ‘Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince.’65 Almost immediately the mourners were disturbed by the noise of fast-approaching horses. A squadron of the Hussars of the Guard in bright scarlet jackets rode up and ‘rapidly dispersed like the leaves of a fan to take possession of all the points of access to the huge palace area’. On the orders of the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, soldiers surrounded his mother’s palace. They had been waiting behind a colonnade near the palace even while his father lay dying. Just to be sure every point of access or exit was sealed up ‘hermetically’, the cavalry was soon reinforced by ‘a splendid company of infantry, pouring with perspiration’, which came ‘at the double . . . the ground almost shaking beneath the swift tramp of their feet’.66

  Inside the palace, Vicky fled to her apartments, ‘utterly broken hearted’.67 In her eyes, ‘Germany’s good angel – her guardian angel – her star of hope – has gone’, and with him the last vestiges of the Albertine dream for Germany. Her fleeting moment of power, for which she had been preparing all her life, perished with her husband. Not one piece of liberal reform had been enacted during her husband’s short reign. Her vision of a bright new Europe aspiring to the very best in human nature no longer existed. ‘Power now belongs to brute force – and to cunning,’ she predicted. Even so, it was a shock as she glanced through the windows that very morning to see furtive movements everywhere in the grounds. Fully armed soldiers emerged ‘from behind every tree and every statue!’ she wrote.68

  Wilhelm’s first act of absolute power was to make sure his mother understood that there was no tie of love to entrap him. Grieving and alone, she was the enemy now. In the eyes of the new emperor, his mother had shamed the House of Hohenzollern and brought the Reich ‘to the brink of ruin’.69 Insisting she was plotting against him, Wilhelm was convinced there would be documents in the palace that would incriminate his mother as a spy. ‘Of all that went on in our house I will not speak!’ Vicky wrote. She turned away ‘from the miserable spectacle with pride and disgust’.70

  For all the high hopes that Vicky’s marriage had once embodied, the accession of her twenty-nine-year-old son as Emperor Wilhelm II marked a turning point in Anglo-German relations. Feeling persecuted by his treatment, Vicky left the home she had shared with her husband and settled at their farmhouse nearby at Bornstedt, joined by their youngest daughters, Moretta, Sophie and Margaret, who remained loyal to her. Her political power vanished almost overnight. Queen Victoria, too, found her ties with the German court diminished. In a matter of weeks she lost the intimate links she had enjoyed through her daughter, her son-in-law Frederick, and his mother, Augusta, who was seriously ill.71 Instead the new German emperor found reason to take offence at his British relatives. While he was in Berlin for Emperor Frederick’s funeral, Bertie had rashly raised the highly charged issue of whether the Germans would return the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, won in the Franco-Prussian War, back to the French. Wilhelm found a way to vent his fury in a pointed snub to his uncle a few months later. Bertie arrived in Vienna only to be told he must leave at once because the German emperor was also expected and had priority. Wilhelm delighted in asserting his new-found seniority over his uncle and other British relatives, who he felt still treated him ‘like a little boy’ and not as a mighty German emperor.

  In a throwback to the past, the new Kaiser grandly imagined himself as a guardian of the ancient notion of the divine right of kings with a duty to protect Germany by strengthening his own powers. Not for him a constitutional monarchy with a sovereign who reigned but did not rule. Emperor Wilhelm II wanted to increase his hold on power and Bismarck was soon worried by his disturbing ‘lust for war’.72

  After unifying Germany in ‘blood and iron’ during the 1860s, Bismarck had used diplomacy to maintain peace in Europe through an elaborate network of treaties. The most significant of these was the powerful ‘Triple Alliance’ forged in 1882 between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, a military alliance uniting the countries of central Europe. If a Triple Alliance country was attacked by another Great Power, the others would come to its aid. Recognising that Germany’s strong position in central Europe left it exposed to attack from Russia in the east and France in the west, Bismarck had skilfully navigated a path to court Russia and isolate France. After years of diplomacy to maintain the balance of power, he was appalled to discover the new Kaiser was behaving as though war was inevitable, claiming that Russia was looking for ‘a favourable moment to fall upon us and the armed forces of France now threaten us’.73 In his first speech as Kaiser, Wilhelm underlined his control of the army: ‘we belong to each other – I and the army – we were born for each other and will cleave indissolubly to each other . . .’74

  Wilhelm was not only quick to assert his power as emperor but also as the new head of the German family. Within days of coming to power, he intervened in the marriage plans of his sisters, starting with Moretta. Emperor Frederick had amended his will to support Moretta’s match to Alexander of Battenberg, but Wilhelm ignored this, saying his father had been coerced by his mother. Indeed, he claimed his German father had been placed under such unreasonable pressure by his English mother that on one occasion he witnessed his father’s gruesome protest to his wife as he ‘banged with his fists on the table’ and started to suffocate resulting in such violent coughing ‘he ripped open all things at his throat’.75 Such scenes have not been verified, but undoubtedly Vicky persisted with the match, even against Queen Victoria’s advice. It was almost as though she was trying to replace her son with her prospective son-in-law, hoping that Alexander of Battenberg would support her vision, take her side, and help her curb her son’s excesses. These hopes now evaporated as the new emperor ordered Prince Alexander to renounce his sister. Vicky and Moretta’s six-year dream came to a sudden end. Moretta was so distraught at the outcome and anxious about her much discussed marital prospects that her obsessive dieting appears to have started around this time. ‘Her one craze is to be thin,’ Vicky told her mother. ‘She starves completely, touches no milk, no sugar, no bread . . . nothing but a scrap of meat and apples.’76

  The new emperor also took action over the marriage prospects of another of his sisters. Princess Sophie had first met Constantine, the Crown Prince of Greece, at Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, and the attraction was mutual. This time Wilhelm could see the benefits to Germany of extending ties to the Mediterranean with his sister as a future queen of Greece. When Prince Constantine formally asked Wilhelm for Sophie’s hand in marriage, he received the Kaiser’s enthusia
stic support.

  Although this match had once been a part of Vicky’s grand vision of a liberal Germany spreading its enlightened influence across south-east Europe, now that the other parts of her plan had failed, Sophie appeared isolated. Vicky began to worry about sending her daughter so far away at a young age and the potential for conflict between Greece and its neighbours in the volatile Balkans. The Ottoman Empire, which had controlled the region for over 500 years, was weakening. Sophie risked being caught up in the ‘unsolved and dangerous eastern question!’ she told her mother. Queen Victoria saw no reason to oppose her grandson. The engagement was ‘a ray of sunshine in this sad time’.77 She believed ‘Tino’s’ good family was ‘a priceless blessing’ and his own ‘good heart and good character . . . go far beyond great cleverness . . .’78

  Queen Victoria took care not to thwart her German grandson’s views on matchmaking but she continued to feel deeply distressed by his behaviour and privately did not mince her words. ‘It is too dreadful for us all to think of Willy & Bismarck & Dona – being the supreme head of all now! Two so unfit and one so wicked,’ she confided to one granddaughter.79 Germany had fallen to ‘that dreadful tyrant Wilhelm’, who ‘makes rows about anything’.80

  The bonny little boy who had once adored his grandmother had become an intimidating bully, beyond control, bloated with aggressive ambitions. Even Bismarck, who had done most to fashion the semi-autocratic powers of the mighty emperor of late nineteenth-century Germany, now privately conceded the danger. Too late he understood ‘the young man seemed bent on war’ and the magnificent edifice of German governance he had built was unstable. ‘Woe unto my poor grandchildren,’ he said.81 The great marital alliance that ensured Queen Victoria’s grandson should become the German emperor appeared to have become the exact opposite of what was intended: a liability, even a danger.

  3

  Ella and Sergei

  ‘Russia I could not wish for any of you . . .’

  Queen Victoria to Victoria of Hesse, January 1883

  The momentous events in the German court frustrated Queen Victoria’s ability to implement Albert’s grand vision of matchmaking that she had faithfully followed as she guided six of their children into alliances with German royal houses. She had trusted in the wisdom of her late husband and felt his ideals to be her ‘law’. But twenty-five years after his death, as she now looked to the marriages of their grandchildren, her ability to fulfil his grand plan for the dynasty was more uncertain, her faith in foreign matches less sure.

  Queen Victoria reacted with pragmatism, guided almost by instinct and convention rather than a carefully worked-out master plan. As her influence in the German court waned, her attention turned to the future of the British throne. The search to find the right consort for her British grandson, Albert Victor, known to his family as ‘Eddy’, was a delicate undertaking. The future British heir to the throne formed a marked contrast to the new German emperor. For all his flaws, Kaiser Wilhelm highlighted the youthful vigour and strength of the German regime. By the time he came to the throne in 1888, Dona had already given him four sons; a fifth was on the way, the virility and succession of the mighty Hohenzollerns proved beyond doubt. In press photographs the new German emperor invariably struck a defiant pose: the warrior dressed in full military regalia, eyes fixed, full-grown moustache stiff and upturned, the whole crowned with the distinctive Pickelhaube, or spiked helmet, a symbol of military success complete with eagle frontplate. Next to this, Wilhelm’s British cousin, ‘drawing-room Eddy’, with his swan-like neck, delicate physique, and that look he had of not being quite awake even in the most martial pose, appeared immature and enfeebled.

  Queen Victoria hoped to bring out Eddy’s more regal attributes. She did not require a spouse for her British grandson who would help to shape the future of Europe like her daughter, Vicky. This spouse needed only to shape Eddy, to mould his lethargic, unformed character into something more traditionally kingly. There was not a great deal of choice because in the queen’s eyes it was essential that an heir to the British throne should marry from within the elite circle of European royalty. The queen did not have to search long for a suitable bride. Amongst her thirty-four grandchildren, there was one candidate who appeared to fit the post perfectly.

  Discreetly bypassing Vicky’s two unmarried daughters in the warring German ruling house, Queen Victoria looked to the children of her second daughter, Princess Alice, the Grand Duchess of Hesse. The queen had strongly protective feelings towards her Hessian grandchildren that were intimately bound up with the misfortunes of their mother. Alice had followed her older sister, Vicky, to Germany in 1862, after marrying Prince Louis of Hesse, the heir to the small German Grand Duchy of Hesse and by Rhine centred around the town of Darmstadt. Alice and Louis had had a large family but their happiness had been destroyed in a few short weeks in 1878 when a diphtheria epidemic swept through central Germany. Their beloved youngest daughter, four-year-old May, succumbed to the disease, followed swiftly by thirty-five-year-old Alice. She died on exactly the same day – 14 December – as her father, Albert, seventeen years before; this coincidence chilled the queen as though it were an enigmatic portent.

  Alice was survived by one son, Ernest, and four beautiful daughters. The oldest, Victoria of Hesse, named after her grandmother, was followed by Elisabeth, Irene and lastly Alexandra or Alix. At the time of Kaiser Wilhelm’s accession in 1888, only the youngest daughter remained unattached: Queen Victoria’s favourite, Alix, who was still free and available for Eddy. ‘My heart & mind are bent on securing dear Alicky for either Eddie or Georgie,’ the queen wrote on 2 March 1887 to the oldest daughter, Victoria of Hesse. ‘I hope to live to see one of darling Mama’s girls here.’1 Such a view, from Queen Victoria herself, whether expressed as a wish, an expectation or a demand, undoubtedly carried weight. The queen ‘was a tremendous, sometimes almost a fearful force’, observed another granddaughter, Princess Marie of Edinburgh. Members of the family ‘had to count with Queen Victoria, had to listen to her, and if . . . not exactly to obey, had anyhow to argue out all differences of opinion’.2

  As Princess Alix of Hesse turned sixteen in June 1888 she certainly looked the part of a future queen. There was widespread agreement on her uncommon beauty. She was tall and elegant and on the cusp of maturity, her even features were finely chiselled, the rich colouring of her red-gold hair and blue eyes a striking combination. Her personality, too, seemed to fit. There was nothing gushing or trivial about Alix. She had an air of self-possession that made her appear slightly older than she was; at heart she was serious-minded, even intense. While Alix herself felt held back by her shyness, to the casual observer her reserve appeared to add to her regal manner. Occasionally her nervousness overwhelmed her, such as when the queen asked her to play the piano in front of a large gathering at Windsor. Alix’s flawless complexion coloured as she endured the unwelcome attention of being centre stage; she felt as though her ‘clammy hands’ were literally ‘glued to the keys’.3 But such youthful awkwardness did not seem out of the ordinary. Alix had many attributes in common with her grandmother; she could be self-willed, independent, and she came into her own in the close-knit family circle where she could let down her guard. From Queen Victoria’s point of view, Alix possessed many admirable qualities that formed something of a contrast to Eddy’s immaturity.

  First among these was her sound education, which Queen Victoria had personally supervised. At the time of her mother’s death, six-year-old Alix was still too young to join her older sisters in the schoolroom. She remained in the nursery under the care of the devoted Mary Orchard, or ‘Orchie’, who endeavoured to fill the void, but Alix sometimes found her ‘silently crying’.4 The little girl once nicknamed ‘Sunny’ by her mother on account of her joie de vivre now understood that something fundamental in her life was missing. She described that period in her life later as ‘perpetual sunshine, then of a great cloud’.5 Queen Victoria tried at a distance to be the mother tha
t her Hessian granddaughters had lost, especially for the youngest. ‘How I love you darling children, how dear you are to me & how I look on you as my own I can hardly say,’ she wrote in July 1880 to Victoria of Hesse. ‘You are so doubly dear as the children of my own darling Child . . .’6 Queen Victoria was not noted for being motherly when her own children were born, but as a grandmother the tragedy of the motherless family far from maternal help was hard to bear, and Alix became her special favourite.

  From an early age Alix was encouraged to write regularly to her grandmother. Her letters bearing news of birthdays or pets were neatly written out on pencil-drawn lines with scrupulous attention to such details as large loops on the ‘G’ and ‘d’ of ‘Grandmama’.7 Unlike her sisters, Alix invariably signed herself ‘your loving and grateful child’, rather than grandchild, with a generous scattering of circles and crosses for hugs and kisses, underlining the closeness of the bond.8 As she progressed to the schoolroom, accounts of her progress contained much to please her grandmother. Under her English governess, Margaret Jackson, she applied herself energetically, perhaps aware of the thorough monthly reports demanded by the queen. With her serious approach, her retentive memory and a natural fluency in both English and German, Alix made good progress. Lessons started as early as 7 a.m. and covered a wide range of academic subjects including history, mathematics and literature, as well as all the expected accomplishments including painting and the piano – for which Alix had an instinctive flair. The Hesse children were exposed to a wide range of ideas; their intellectual mother had studied such controversial works as the French Enlightenment philosopher, Voltaire, the German theologian, David Strauss, and the English art critic, John Ruskin, whose essay Unto This Last challenged the inequalities of capitalism.9 Alix’s oldest sister, Victoria, remembered once lecturing bemused relatives on ‘the advantages of socialism’.10 As a child Alix was taught to think of others and proudly told her grandmother at Christmas 1879 that she was ‘learning to knit mittens for poor people’.11 In the schoolroom she wrestled with such texts as François Guizot’s History of the Republic of England and of Cromwell and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.