Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  Dante, like most of his educated contemporaries, was heir to the classical tradition where the Goddess Fortuna dispenses good luck and bad luck by turns. As a reader of Boethius, he was familiar with the image of Fortuna’s Wheel, whose four axes were marked with the words regno (‘I reign’), regnavi (‘I have reigned’), sum sine regno (‘I am without a kingdom’) and regnabo (‘I shall reign’). In the Inferno, he put his views into the mouth of his guide Virgil, whose exposition nevertheless assumes unexpected Christian overtones. Dante held that what unbelievers might call Chance is really the work of Divine Providence, whose dispensations govern the Wheel of Fortune no less than the motions of the universe. Lady Fortuna is praiseworthy, therefore, and men are foolish to ‘crucify her’ simply because the causes of her actions are not fully understood:

  per ch’una gente impera e l’altra langue

  seguendo lo giudicio di costei

  che è occulto, com’in erba l’angue.

  (‘For one nation rules and another languishes / according to her hidden judgement, / hidden like a snake in the grass.’)93

  * Florence’s district of Oltrarno, literally ‘on the other side of the Arno’, is the counterpart of Trastevere, ‘on the other side of the Tiber’, in Rome.

  * Like the names of the French Republic’s départements, all the names of republics created in Italy were based on geographical features. ‘Lombardic’ refers to the Plain of Lombardy; ‘Cispadane’ means ‘On this side of the River Po’; ‘Cisalpine’ means ‘On this side of the Alps’.

  † Not to be confused with San Miniato del Monte, which directly overlooks the city.

  * They inspired the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869): ‘ “Eh bien, mon prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family.” ’

  * Bought for a song by the Duke of Wellington in 1815, it is now housed in Apsley House, London.

  * More usually, the Congress of Prague, June–August 1813, when Napoleon had the opportunity of making peace with Russia and Prussia during an extended truce. After he rejected the terms offered, Austria joined the coalition against him, and he was forced into the unsuccessful campaign that led to his defeat at the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig.

  11

  Rosenau

  The Loved and Unwanted Legacy

  (1826–1918)

  I

  Coburg, sometimes spelled Koburg, is a tidy country town close to the dead centre of the German Federal Republic. It sits astride one of the streams that flow down from the Thüringian forest into the circle of Upper Franconia in northern Bavaria. It makes its living from woodworking and furniture-making, and is home to some 42,000 inhabitants. Its historical monuments include the medieval hilltop fortress, the Veste Coburg, and the ostentatious former ducal palace, the Schloss Ehrenburg.1 Bayreuth, the city of Wagner, lies some 40 miles distant.

  The town of Gotha, some two hours’ drive to the north, lies at the foot of the opposite slopes in the Free State of Thüringia, whose dense forests have given it the label of the ‘green heart of Germany’. It is a local administrative centre and, with 46,000 inhabitants, is slightly larger than Coburg; its name, meaning ‘Waters of the Goths’, appears as Gotaha in a document of Charlemagne’s era. Its principal modern attraction is the Friedenstein, a former ducal palace and ‘pearl of the early Baroque’.2 Eisenach, overlooked by the Wartburg castle where Martin Luther took refuge, lies only 16 miles to the west, and Erfurt, the Land capital, a similar short distance to the east.

  In the course of their long history, the towns of Coburg and Gotha and their dependent districts were sometimes ruled separately and sometimes together. Their part of Germany was famous for its teeming mass of small states, all of which had once claimed to be equal members of the Holy Roman Empire; Coburg and Gotha, on the borders of Saxony and Bavaria, usually fell within the Saxon political orbit. In the early nineteenth century, however, the two statelets were joined together in a territorial reorganization agreed among descendants of the kings of Saxony; and for the nine decades up to 1918, a sovereign duchy functioned there under a single line of ruling dukes.3 In that era, the principal ducal seat lay neither in Coburg nor in Gotha, but at Schloss Rosenau, near Rodenthal. The united duchy was broken up after the First World War, when the citizens of Coburg voted to join Bavaria. After the Second World War, from 1949 to 1990, Coburg found itself in West Germany, while Gotha belonged to the Communist-ruled German Democratic Republic.

  Nowadays, Rosenau Castle is owned by the Bavarian government. Originally founded in the fourteenth century as the hunting lodge of a rich merchant, the castle was bought by a duke of Saxe-Gotha in 1721 and remained in the possession of his descendants for two hundred years. It was twice allowed to fall into rack and ruin, once during the Napoleonic Wars and again after the Second World War. Having ceased to be a private property in 1918, it was taken over during the Third Reich by the National Socialists’ Women’s Service and then by the Luftwaffe. After the war, when General Eisenhower’s headquarters was located for a time at Gotha, it was used by the US army. By the 1970s, it became a derelict ‘national monument’.

  The more recent restoration of Rosenau by Bavaria’s Schlösser- und Gärtenverwaltung, the ‘Castle and Garden Administration’, was started in 1990, and completed by the turn of the century. The aim was to bring the house and park back to the prime condition which they had enjoyed in the 1840s. ‘The palace, basically a medieval structure, had been rebuilt from 1808 to 1817 in the neo-Gothic style,’ explains the English website of the ‘Bavarian Palace Department’:

  Particular highlights are the Marble Hall with its three aisles, and the residential apartments with their colourful wall decoration and original Biedermeier furniture from Vienna. Among the structures that have survived in the landscaped park with its ‘Swan Lake’ and ‘Prince’s Pond’ are the orangery, the tea-house (today the park restaurant), the Jousting Column (sundial), and parts of the hermitage.4

  Once the restoration was in progress, Rosenau attracted interest from connoisseurs of art and architecture the world over. British magazines sent experts out to report: ‘Today, after years of neglect, Rosenau has become once more the perfect Biedermeier dream of a little Gothic castle. Its small but pretty interiors full of stained glass, brightly colored painted and papered walls, and elaborately decorated ceilings are all now exquisitely restored to their former glory after a decade of patient work.’5 Guided tours are provided every hour on the hour.6 Visitors are impressed by the fact that Rosenau has been rescued from ruin twice over. Art and architecture, however, do not explain everything. Fascination with ‘the perfect Biedermeier dream’ far exceeds the intrinsic merit of Rosenau’s romantic views or its fine Marble Hall. Much of the excitement derives from its connections with a world-famous man and wife who loved each other deeply and who both loved Rosenau. In 2011, the 150th anniversary of the husband’s death provided the pretext for a series of exhibitions, concerts and readings, not only at Rosenau but also at the Callenberg and Ehrenburg palaces. The festivities were modestly billed ‘Coburg Commemorates One of its Famous Inhabitants’.7

  II

  Franz Albrecht Karl August Immanuel (1819–61) was not a king. But he was definitely royal, both by birth and later by marriage. He was the second son of Ernst III, duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and of Louise, princess of the neighbouring Duchy of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, and as such a scion of the senior, Ernestine branch of the Wettins, the royal House of Saxony.* As he grew up, his relatives long pondered the possibility of exploiting their links with leading foreign monarchies.

  The prince was born and raised at Rosenau. The day following his birth, his paternal grandmother, the dowager duchess of Coburg-Saalfeld, wrote to her married daughter in England:

  Rosenau, August 27, 1819

  [Louischen] was yesterday morning safely and quickly delivered of a little boy. Siebold, the accoucheuse, had only been called at three, and at six the little one gave his first
cry in this world, and looked about like a little squirrel with a pair of large black eyes. At a quarter to 7 I heard the tramp of a horse. It was a groom, who brought the joyful news. I was off directly, as you may imagine, and found the little mother slightly exhausted, but gaie et dispos. She sends you and Edward [the duke of Kent] a thousand kind messages…8

  ‘The little boy is to be christened tomorrow’, his grandmother continued. ‘The Emperor of Austria, the old Duke of Saxe-Teschen, the Duke of Gotha, Mensdorff, and I are to be sponsors.’ Baptism into the Lutheran Protestant faith was performed by an archbishop in Rosenau’s Marble Hall. Since the Austrian emperor was Catholic, he was appointed ‘sponsor’ rather than godfather; it was in his honour that the infant’s first given name was Franz. But for everyday purposes, his parents intended to call him Albrecht after the duke of Saxe-Teschen.

  After the duke of Gotha’s death, when Albrecht was six, the two families of Coburg and Gotha decided to merge their duchies in a personal union. The result from 1826 was a united Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha – in German, Das Herzogtum Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha – whose two parts were separated by a substantial band of territory belonging to the Kingdom of Saxony. Albrecht’s father changed his title, becoming Duke Ernst I; and his elder brother, also Ernst, became the heir apparent. The new duchy’s attractive bicolour standard, the Landesflagge, displayed two horizontal halves: the upper half in apple green, the lower half in white.9

  Rosenau during Albrecht’s boyhood was basking in the glory of its first renovation. A local almanac noted the stark contrast with its condition only a few years earlier: ‘The busy court ladies enjoy views of beautiful nature, where not so long ago pigeons and swallows, owls and bats nested… When the present re-shaping of the castle began it was just the dirty and uncomfortable dwelling of boorish tenants; the fine Marble Hall was a dust-tip and wood-store.’10 The Duchess Louise was particularly pleased with her own quarters: ‘I live on the second floor… I have a little living room, where if there are not too many visitors we generally drink our tea. The wallpaper is gold with dark blue vine leaves… My sitting-room… is grey, dark blue and gold.’11

  A more extensive description can be found in the volume compiled long afterwards by Albrecht’s widow:

  Distant about four miles from Coburg, it is charmingly placed on a knoll that rises abruptly… from a range of wooded hills which divide the lovely valley of the Itz from the broad and undulating plain… The knoll on which the house stands… falls precipitously on the east side to the Itz, and by a very steep descent on the other three sides to the plain…

  The top forms a small plateau, on the southern edge of which stands the house, a solid oblong building… with high gable-ends. The entrance is in a round tower on the west side of the house, to which the approach ascends through a thick grove of young spruce firs… A broad winding staircase in the tower leads upwards to the principal rooms on the first floor, and downwards to the Marble Hall, or dining-room…

  A small terrace-garden at the north end… commands a lovely view of the Itz, beyond which… the country is broken up into a succession of wooded hills and picturesque valleys, with… smiling, tidy villages standing in the middle of rich meadows and orchards, the hills gradually rising up to the highest points of the Thüringerwald…

  The Marble Hall… opens on a small gravelled space, bounded by a neatly trimmed hedge of roses, and communicating… by a long and irregular flight of stone steps, with the walk along the banks of the [river] below. Standing on this space in the early morning… or in the afternoon… it is difficult to imagine anything more bright or enjoyable.

  Prominent amongst the trees which grow and thrive at the Rosenau is the Abele poplar, of which there are many very good specimens here… This accounts at once for this tree having always been a favourite one with the Prince, for surely no man was ever endowed with a stronger feeling of love for all the recollections and associations of his youth, and of his native place.12

  Albrecht would tell his wife that his childhood at Rosenau had been ‘paradise’. He and his older brother had been handed over at an early age to the care of a tutor called Christopher Florschütz, who attended the boys night and day, being responsible for all aspects of their upbringing:

  The children soon discovered that Florschütz’s stern exterior hid a heart of gold. Although only twenty-five, he had already been… tutor to the two youngest sons of duke [Ernst]’s eldest sister, Alexander and Arthur Mensdorff. Many of duke [Ernst]’s old-fashioned friends deplored the choice of a man of known liberal principles… (later on, some of them even blamed Florschütz for letting them attend lectures in philosophy at Bonn, on the ground that such studies might lead to anarchy!) Mathematics and Latin formed the basis of Florschütz’s teaching… together with wide reading of modern literature in German, French and English. Florschütz spoke English well, so that [his younger pupil] was familiar with it from the age of four…

  Florschütz… was a born teacher who [imparted] a love of learning for its own sake, and there is no doubt that [Albrecht]’s passionate interest in science was a direct result of having physics and chemistry presented to him in an interesting way as a boy… Above all, Florschütz taught them to go to the root of everything, to accept nothing at second hand, to use their eyes and to look about them for beauty in nature, art, literature and humanity.13

  By speaking English with Florschütz, Albrecht would have learned for the first time to think of himself sometimes as Albert, and of his brother as Ernest; it was an important transition. He would have known from an early age that his paternal aunt, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, his father’s widowed sister, was now duchess of Kent and living in London with her three children. Having cousins in London, he would have seen the point of giving English an equal place in his studies with the more usual French. His diligence, aged fourteen, may be gauged from a timetable that he prepared for himself in 1833 (see p. 548).

  The paradise, however, had its dark side. Albert’s immediate family could not give him the warmth and encouragement on which children thrive. His father, the duke, was a shameless syphilitic rake, said to organize orgies in one of his other residences at Callenberg. He had brought a mistress from France, Mme Panam, whose insufferable son used the self-styled name of ‘prince de Coburg’, and whose memoirs, published in 1823, brought shame on all concerned.14 Albert’s mother, the Duchess Louise, disgusted by her husband’s debauchery, chose a formal separation, even though this most cruelly forced her to abandon her children. When she was leaving, a large crowd of well-wishers gathered at Rosenau to see her off. Her sons, confined in the nursery with whooping cough, could not join them. In due course, she divorced and remarried, but died young, of cancer. She was replaced at Rosenau by the duke’s cousin and second wife, Antoinette-Marie of Württemberg, who failed to establish a warm relationship with her stepsons. Worse still, though they rarely quarrelled openly, Albert did not really find a soulmate in the elder brother, who shared his fate for more than twenty years:

  These brothers, born in 1818 and 1819, were so dissimilar in character and appearance that there were mischievous rumours that the younger one was illegitimate… Almost from the day of his birth Albert’s beauty was remarked upon. ‘Lovely as a little angel,’ his mother recorded in his infancy. His eyes, like his mother’s, were deep blue and his curly hair was at first fair.

  Albert’s brother Ernest ‘was as unattractive as Prince Albert was attractive. His complexion,’ ran [one] harsh description, ‘was sallow with liver spots, his eyes were bloodshot, and his lower teeth, like those of a bulldog, protruded far above his upper ones.’ He was ‘a mighty hunter of wine, women and song’. Even from their infancy, it was plainly evident that the elder son took after his father… while Albert strongly resembled his mother…

  [Another relative] found it puzzling that [Prince Albert] turned out to have so fine a character ‘with such a father and such a brother, both equally unprincipled’. When Albert was still on
ly four, his mother suddenly disappeared from his life for ever… it was typical of the boy, and later of the man, that he never uttered a bitter comment on this occurrence, and always thought of his mother with great tenderness.15

  Table 3. Albert’s timetable16

  The ‘mischievous rumours’ were generated by speculation that his mother may have indulged in a secret liaison before his birth, possibly with an army lieutenant or with a Jewish chamberlain at Coburg.17 Closer examination of the circumstances leads to the unproven hypothesis that the child’s biological father could have been Prince Leopold, the future king of the Belgians and the most likely source of allegations designed to cover his own tracks.18

  Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Victoria of Kent were introduced to each other in May 1836 by their hopeful relatives. He was still sixteen; she had just passed her seventeenth birthday. ‘Uncle Leopold’, who by now was King Leopold, was brother both to Albert’s father and to Victoria’s mother; and it was he who arranged for his two Saxon nephews to travel to London to meet their cousin, already the heiress to the British throne. The scheme worked to perfection. Victoria wrote to her uncle thanking him for ‘the prospect of great happiness… in the person of dear Albert’. There was no question at this stage of an engagement. The old king, William IV, disapproved. But the emotional bond, at least on the girl’s side, was sealed.

  Victoria’s family, the Hanoverians, were no less German than Albert’s, having consistently imported brides from Germany for all their heirs apparent, and they were even more painfully dysfunctional. Victoria, who had been conceived in Saxony and born in England,* was surrounded by German women in her infancy and only began English lessons from the age of five. She never knew her father, the duke of Kent, who died young; indeed, cruel gossip hinted that she, too, was not her father’s biological child.19 Three of her four surviving paternal uncles, including the king, were estranged from their wives; bastard cousins proliferated;20 sexual and hereditary diseases, especially porphyria, were rampant; premature deaths were commonplace.21 Victoria had only become heir apparent in 1830 because all three of her father’s older brothers died without legitimate issue. Her mother, the duchess of Kent, never gained a proper grasp of English; she had two older, German-speaking children from a previous marriage, and lived in London with a lover thinly disguised as her household comptroller;*† she was jealous and overprotective of her latest offspring, preventing Victoria making friends and subjecting her to a repressive daily regime. Fearful of the illicit liaisons with which the royal court was riddled, she even forced her adolescent daughter to sleep with her in the same room. The lonely teenager, locked up in Kensington Palace for longer than she could remember, sought solace with her spaniel, Dash, and with her beloved governess, Louise Lehzen, a Coburger.