Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  Queen and consort would see Rosenau together only one more time, although Victoria would go there alone on five further occasions. During their visit in the summer of 1860, she waxed particularly eloquent. ‘If I weren’t the person whom I am,’ she said, ‘my home would be here,’ adding cautiously, ‘though it would be my second home.’ Albert broke down in tears. ‘I shall never see my birthplace again,’ he exclaimed prophetically. Within the year he was dead, struck down at the age of forty-two, officially by typhoid.

  Contrary to the legend of a perfect marriage, there is reason to suppose that Albert’s shockingly early death could indeed have been hastened by the unseen stresses of mounting matrimonial discord. After the birth in 1857 of their ninth child, Princess Beatrice, the queen’s doctors ruled that her life would be endangered by further pregnancy, and the couple were forced to make separate sleeping arrangements. She grew irritable, and occasionally hysterical; he became depressed, withdrawn and exhausted by overwork. In that same year he was deeply pained by the fact that his title of prince consort had to be granted through the queen’s personal intervention because no one else in authority had cared to take the initiative. The queen did not support him in his ill-concealed feud with Lord Palmerston. Albert felt unloved, and ashamed by the realization that his eldest son, the future Edward VII, was turning, like his own father and brother, into a brazen lecher. He was already weak and drained, therefore, when he set out in the cold, damp November weather of 1861 to visit the prince of Wales in Cambridge and to administer a paternal reprimand. He took Edward for a long walk and caught cold. Returning to Windsor with a high fever, he suffered complications and never recovered.32

  If this version of events is accepted, Queen Victoria’s descent into lifetime mourning was caused as much by guilt as by grief; her determination to perpetuate Albert’s memory in a worldwide array of monuments and memorials was certainly inconsistent with his wishes. She also felt compelled persistently to revisit the scene of their lost bliss in Germany. In the summer of 1863 the black-robed widow stayed with Albert’s aunt at Coburg, where she received the emperor of Austria, Franz-Joseph. Her ministers in London fretted at her absence. ‘Your Majesty,’ advised Benjamin Disraeli, ‘you cannot rule the Empire from Coburg.’

  By the mid-nineteenth century, the name of Saxe-Coburg had assumed continental proportions. Most of Albert and Victoria’s nine children were married into Europe’s most prestigious ruling families. They and their progeny were to occupy the thrones not only of the British Empire but also of Germany, Russia, Norway, Spain, Romania and Bulgaria. Uncle Leopold’s line of Saxe-Coburgs held its own in Belgium for five generations, and extended its tentacles as far as Mexico; the Saxe-Coburg-Koharys were prominent in Hungary, and gave rise to the Coburg-Braganzas who ruled Portugal until 1910. The Palais Coburg in Vienna, built between 1840 and 1845 for General Ferdinand Sachsen-Coburg-Kohary, was one of the architectural treasures of the Habsburg capital; and Saxe-Coburg soup, made from Albert’s favourite Brussels sprouts, was a worthy counterpart to the Brown Windsor soup on which the British Empire was said to have been built.

  Albert’s homeland did not enjoy the formal status of a kingdom, but it was a hereditary monarchy, and was accepted as a constituent member of the German Empire from 1871 to 1918. Like its neighbours, Saxe-Altenberg, Saxe-Meiningen and Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (where Goethe had served as chancellor), it was tiny, but clearly attractive:

  SAXE-COBURG-GOTHA (Ger. Sachsen-Koburg-Gotha), a sovereign duchy of Germany, in Thuringia… consisting of the two formerly separate duchies of Coburg and Gotha, and of eight small scattered enclaves… The total area is 764 sq. m., of which about 224 are in Coburg and 540 in Gotha. The duchy of Coburg is bounded by Bavaria, and by Saxe-Meiningen, which separates it from Gotha… The duchy of Coburg is an undulating and fertile district, reaching its highest point in the Senichshöhe (1716 ft.) near Mirsdorf. Its streams, the chief of which are the Itz, Biberach, Steinach and Rodach, all find their way into the Main. The duchy of Gotha, more than twice the size of Coburg, stretches from the borders of Prussia… to the Thuringian Forest, the highest summits of which (Der grosse Beerberg, 3225 ft. and Schneekopf, 3179 ft.) rise within its borders. The more level district on the north is spoken of as the ‘open country’ (das Land) in contrast to the wooded hills of the ‘forest’ (der Wald).33

  Duke Ernst II was active in Germany’s court politics and in the German national movement, for whose benefit he was known for hosting prestigious shooting rallies. But his management of his own duchy was far from ideal, and there can be no doubt that its affairs exercised the hearts and minds of both Albert and Victoria throughout their marriage. Little, however, was done, and it was a great misfortune that Albert had been dead for more than thirty years before matters came to a head. By that time, the sons of Albert and Victoria had hearts and minds of their own, and the duchy had become a fully constitutional state. Coburg had possessed a constitution since 1821; Gotha followed suit during the ‘Springtime of Nations’ that swept Central Europe in 1848–9. Throughout those early years the two territories had been joined to their ruler in personal union; but from 1852 they were legally united under him, like the several parts of Britain’s United Kingdom:

  Constitution and Administration. – Saxe-Coburg-Gotha is a limited hereditary monarchy, its constitution resting on a law of 1852, modified in 1874. For its own immediate affairs each duchy has a separate diet, but in more important and general matters a common diet… meeting at Coburg and Gotha alternately, exercises authority. The members are elected for four years. The Coburg diet consists of eleven members and the Gotha diet of nineteen. The franchise is extended to all male taxpayers of twenty-five years of age and upwards… The united duchy is represented in the imperial Bundesrat by one member and in the Reichstag by two members… By treaty with Prussia the troops of the duchy are incorporated with the Prussian army. The budget is voted… for four years, a distinction being made between domain revenue and state revenue. The receipts… on behalf of Coburg were estimated for 1909–1910 at about £100,000 and those for Gotha at about £200,000, while the common state expenditure amounted to about the same sum. The civil list of the reigning duke is fixed at £15,000 a year, in addition to half the proceeds of the Gotha domains, and half the net revenue of the Coburg domains… The duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha [also] enjoys a very large private fortune, amassed chiefly by Ernest I., who sold the principality of Lichtenberg, which the Congress of Vienna had bestowed upon him in recognition of his services to Prussia.34

  Over the decades the name of Gotha came to be associated with three very different spheres of life: engineering, left-wing politics and aeronautics. All three derived from one source. The Gothär Waggonfabrik started producing rolling stock in the 1840s; it rapidly attracted a large industrial workforce that became one of the breeding grounds of German socialism. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was founded in the town in 1854, and its ‘Gotha Programme’ of 1875 became a central subject of debate within the movement. Karl Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme introduced the world to concepts such as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and ‘proletarian internationalism’, propagating the famous principle of ‘From all according to ability, to all according to need’.35 Its tardy publication in 1891, eight years after its author’s death, prepared the theoretical ground for the transition from Marxism to Marxism-Leninism. By that time, the Waggonfabrik was one of the Empire’s leading producers of electric trams. After the turn of the century, it would diversify still further when it moved into airplane construction. The Gotha Ursinus G-1 biplane was to become the mainstay of the imperial strategic bomber fleet.36

  Duke Ernest II of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha died in 1893. He had been Victoria’s brother-in-law for more than fifty years and was great-uncle to Kaiser Wilhelm:

  It appears the end was paralysis of the larynx caused by the state of the brain… which in its turn was the result of the terrible fast life he had led in Berlin from the time he
was seventeen; put into the 1st Prussian Corps, the fastest of all the regiments, with a thoroughly bad man to look after him. He simply had no chance whatever, and humanly speaking his life has just been drained away. How strange Royalties are, their children seem to lack the ordinary care bestowed on our own humblest middle class.37

  The duke’s death was greatly mourned in Berlin; he had been the first person to congratulate the Kaiser on his accession. He was buried in the Moritzkirche in Coburg.

  The succession passed automatically to the late duke’s Germano-British nephews. The snag was that none of them really wanted it. Victoria and Albert’s eldest son, Edward, renounced his claim, having better things to do as prince of Wales. Their second son, Alfred, duke of Edinburgh (b. 1844), who had pursued a successful career in the Royal Navy and sailed the world, accepted it reluctantly. He was probably motivated by the interests of his only son, Prince Alfred (‘Alfie’), the wayward offspring of an unhappy marriage to a Russian princess. Having sworn allegiance to the duchy’s constitution, Duke Alfred (r. 1893–1900) settled in at Rosenau, busying himself with his music-making and his ceramics collection, bringing order to the duchy’s finances, and slowly overcoming the locals’ resistance to a ‘foreigner’. He was rewarded the following year by his mother’s last visit and by one of the most inclusive gatherings of European royalty ever staged. In addition to the Queen-Empress Victoria, he acted as host to Kaiser Wilhelm II, to the future Tsar Nicholas II and to the future British kings Edward VII and George V. His reign was also enlivened by the presence in Coburg of Johann Strauss II, the ‘Waltz King’, who had left Vienna following his third marriage to a Protestant. Strauss’s opera The Gypsy Baron (1885) and his famous ‘Kaiser-Waltzer’ (‘Emperor Waltz’, 1889) were both composed in Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

  Deaths in the ruling family then struck a double blow. In 1899 the heir apparent, Prince ‘Alfie’, who was both syphilitic and haemophiliac, shot himself during his parents’ silver wedding celebrations, despairing both at his medical condition and at the implications of his secret marriage to a commoner.38 Barely a year later, Duke Alfred died at Rosenau of throat cancer, exactly as his uncle had done. News of his death made world headlines:

  DUKE OF SAXE-COBURG DEAD

  Expired Suddenly at Rosenau Castle on Monday

  QUEEN VICTORIA’S SECOND SON

  was afflicted with cancer, but did not know of his malady39

  A few weeks earlier, the next step in the saga of succession had been settled in the most unsatisfactory manner imaginable: by hunting for the least unwilling candidate. Victoria and Albert’s third son, Arthur, duke of Connaught, already a general in the British army, was not going to endanger his chance of receiving a field marshal’s baton, and Connaught’s own son, Prince Arthur (b. 1883), a schoolboy at Eton College, was apparently terrified of the inheritance. Victoria and Albert’s fourth son, Leopold, duke of Albany (1853–84), another haemophiliac, was already dead, struck down by a botched injection following a fall at Cannes. So the royal courtiers’ search moved with awful inevitability to another Eton schoolboy: Leopold’s helpless and posthumous son, Queen Victoria’s youngest grandson, Prince Charles Edward (b. 1884). Rumours surfaced that the elder prince, Arthur, had given his younger cousin, Charles Edward, a good public-school thrashing in order to deflect the hand of fate. The ultimate decision would have been taken by Queen Victoria herself.

  The Diet of the duchy made a rare show of dissatisfaction. As reported in the New York Times, which could take liberties unthinkable in London, the atmosphere had turned sour:

  The Diet of the Duchy as well as the people at large is protesting most energetically against this intention of the British Royal Family, and declare that they will not allow these British princes to shake the dice for the ducal crown of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The Diet has proclaimed its right to say the directing word about the succession to the throne.40

  The protesters were presumably told to mind their own business.

  Thus began the sad public career of Prince Charles Edward (Carl-Eduard), the last duke of Albany and the last duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In theory, like his uncles and cousins, he could have tried to renounce the claim. In practice, he was trapped. Despite having a German mother, the former Princess Helena of Waldeck-Pyrmont, he was exceptional in the family for speaking no German; it had been assumed that he would have to earn his living in England. He knew of no one to whom he might have passed the burden of his succession, and had no means of gauging how poisoned the chalice would prove to be. His mother told him, or so his descendants would say, that to acquiesce in his fate was the most dutiful way of honouring his dead father’s memory.41

  At first, the prospects did not seem too bad. Carl-Eduard was allowed to finish his English education, and to begin with he reigned in name only under joint regents. He would have known that his predecessor, Duke Alfred, an accomplished musician, had won his subjects’ confidence and that in seven years’ occupancy of the throne had managed to flit happily between Rosenau and his London residence at Clarence House.

  Joint regent for the boy-Duke, with his mother, was… Prince Hohenlohe. But it was the Kaiser himself who superintended his education, and ‘Charlie’ and his sister Alice spent many holidays with the imperial family… There was, occasionally, some embarrassment about the young people’s divided loyalties, but they solved it in their own way: during the Boer War the Crown Prince [of Prussia] bet Alice a diamond brooch against a diamond pin that the Boers would win – he duly paid up when the British were victorious. A few years later… the new Coburgs’ link with the imperial family was tightened, when Duke Charlie married [the Empress’s niece] and the couple divided their time between Coburg and Berlin… Princess Alice, on the other hand, had reforged the link with Britain by marrying Prince Alexander of Teck… whose sister Mary had married Prince George, the future George V. Alexander largely had been educated in Britain and was an officer in the British army.42

  Duke Carl-Eduard’s accession to Saxe-Coburg-Gotha at the age of twenty-one took place in July 1905. His entry into his duchy was attended by much ceremony, and much unguarded comment. He was received at the railway station at Gotha with full military honours, before proceeding to the Friedenstein Palace, where his mother was waiting. He swore the constitutional oath in the throne room of the palace, watched by representatives of the Kaiser and King Edward VII, by ministers of the duchy’s government, and by an array of officials and their ladies. Some of the press reports, while sympathizing with the new duke, did not mince words about the manner of his succession:

  UNWILLING PRINCE IS NOW A GERMAN DUKE

  Charles Edward of Saxe-Coburg Attains his Majority

  HIS HEAD WAS NOT PUNCHED

  Cousin to whom the Dukedom was also offered

  Threatened to Whip Him if he refused it43

  One small source of satisfaction arose from Carl-Eduard’s right to a magnificent, newly designed personal standard, the Herzogstandarte, neatly combining his British and Saxon connections. The design showed the royal banner-of-arms of Saxony – a field of ten black and gold horizontal stripes – surmounted by a diagonal Rautenkranz or ‘crancelin’, and a heraldic canton. The crancelin, running from upper left to bottom right, took the form of a crenellated garland in deep green. The heraldic canton placed in the top-left corner was made up from the quartered arms of a royal British prince ‘defaced’ by a white ‘label’ bearing red hearts and red crosses.

  Very soon the first international storm clouds appeared on the horizon. The ‘Dreadnought race’ was driving a wedge between Britain and Germany, and the young duke’s chief patron and cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm, was proving particularly bullish. The Kaiser had already nominated the duke’s bride, Princess Victoria Adelaide of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg – a relative both of Britain’s Queen Alexandra and of Prince Andrew of Greece (father of the yet-unborn Prince Philip) – and he now ordered his protégé to attend an officer school of the Prussian army. This assignment m
ust have been especially uncomfortable. Carl-Eduard had been taking German lessons, but, as a lifelong sufferer from rheumatoid arthritis, he had no military ability or inclination. Fortunately, his marriage was a happy one. He married his bride at Glücksburg in Holstein – in the ‘Lucky Castle’. His wife and five children provided a source of solace in a life that was to grow increasingly bleak.

  The First World War saw the duke raised to the rank of general, yet abruptly removed from his nominal command. Though he volunteered to fight on the Eastern Front, he saw no active service. No doubt to mask this embarrassment, a medal was struck in 1916 to celebrate his non-existent military record. The Diet of his duchy revived the issue of the succession, voting that ‘all foreigners’ and ‘persons who have waged war on the German Empire’ should be excluded; at the same time, in Britain, he was struck off the list of Knights of the Garter. In July 1917, nearly three years into the war, his British relatives abandoned the German family name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha by an Order in Council, and were magically transformed into ‘Windsors’. His sister Alice and her husband, the duke of Teck, were reinvented as the countess and earl of Athlone, but he was not offered the same option. Still worse, since he was judged to have ‘adhered to His Majesty’s enemies’, Britain’s Titles Deprivation Act (1917) empowered the Privy Council to investigate his alleged treason and to decide on the punishment.