Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  The Titles Deprivation Act was peculiarly vindictive with regard to those members of the British royal family for whom, like Duke Carl-Eduard, much more was at stake than a mere name change. It was one thing to legislate for British royals at home, quite another to lay down the law for ‘all descendants of Queen Victoria’:

  We, of our Royal Will and Authority [proclaimed George V], do hereby declare and announce that as from the date of this Our Royal Proclamation Our House and Family shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor… And We do hereby further declare that We for Ourselves and… for all other descendants of Our… Grandmother Queen Victoria who are subjects of these Realms, relinquish and enjoin the discontinuance of the use of the degrees, styles, dignities, titles and honours of Dukes and Duchesses of Saxony and Princes and Princesses of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and all other German degrees, styles, dignities, titles, honours and appellations.44

  The Privy Council’s verdict was delivered in January 1919. Together with three other ‘enemy peers’, Carl-Eduard was to lose the dukedom of Albany, the earldom of Clarence, the barony of Arklow and the style of Royal Highness. His standards were removed from St George’s Chapel, Windsor. In short, he was turned into a pariah.*

  Meanwhile, as the German Empire folded, all the hereditary rulers in Germany were forced to abdicate. Carl-Eduard renounced his dukedom on 14 November 1918, five days after the announcement of the Kaiser’s own abdication. Then, as the Weimar Republic stuttered into life, the German populace took revenge on its aristocracy. The Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council of Gotha invaded the ex-duke’s castle at Rosenau, abolished his duchy and confiscated his lands. He was now a private citizen, a condemned man in his homeland, an outcast in his adopted country and a lodger in his own home. He had done nothing except to behave well and do what he was told. The humiliation was acute.

  It is not true, however, that the ex-duke was penniless. With some delay, he received a compensation settlement from the state, and possessed other sources of income that enabled him to sustain a comfortable family life. His mother, the dowager-duchess of Albany, came to visit him and his family for vacations, delighting in her grandchildren. They were all spending a family holiday together at Hinterreis in the Austrian Tyrol when she died there suddenly in September 1922.

  Inter-war Germany was a hotbed of radical politics and a cauldron of economic distress. Industrial production faltered, unemployment soared and the currency collapsed. The nation lost its established leaders, the middle classes lost their savings and large sections of the public lost all hope. The vacuum was filled by wild radicals from both the Right and the Left. Fascist and Communist Party gangs battled each other in the streets.

  On 14 October 1922 a little-known group of right-wing thugs from Munich decided to target the town of Coburg, which they knew to be, like Gotha, a nest of their left-wing opponents. Their leader, a former corporal called Adolf Hitler, announced that he was going to stage a ‘German Day’ in Coburg, and hired a train for the purpose. He arrived with a brass band and 800 flag-waving supporters (practically the whole National Socialist Party at the time), who promptly brawled with policemen attempting to maintain order. When a crowd of locals tried to bar the way, a general fracas ensued. Stones were thrown, insults hurled and bones broken. The Nazis then pressed on to the town centre, where Hitler held a rally, announcing that Coburg had been cleansed of ‘Red tyranny’. Back at the train station, the railwaymen refused to release the Nazis’ train. Hitler responded by threatening to kidnap every ‘Red’ in sight and to take them hostage to Munich. His bluster and brutality won the day. Seven years later, Coburg was the first city in Germany to give the Nazis an absolute majority of votes in a municipal election. In 1932 Hitler issued one of the most prized Nazi Party decorations, the ‘Coburg Badge’, showing a wreathed swastika. The inscription reads: ‘MIT HITLER IN COBURG, 1922–32’. 45

  It is not possible to say whether ex-Duke Carl-Eduard watched Hitler at work on the ‘German Day’ in Coburg; if not, he would certainly have heard first-hand reports. He was an example of those who cared little for the Nazis’ radical ideology, but who shared their outrage at Germany’s shabby post-war treatment; he would have approved of their hostility to the Communists, who had destroyed his duchy. At first he was associated with one of the more conservative groupings, the Harzburg Front, which sought to unify the German right-wing opposition, and which made a tactical alliance with the Nazis in the early 1930s. In 1932, however, when right-wing politics were in some disarray, he was persuaded to join the SA, the Nazi Brownshirts, and rose quickly to the high rank of Obergruppenführer. He may have been influenced by his wife’s brother-in-law, ex-Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, who had joined the Nazi Party before him.

  After Hitler’s election to power in 1933, the ex-duke was singled out as an instrument for cultivating the British establishment and was made president of the Anglo-German Friendship Society. In this capacity he kept in close touch with the British ambassadors in Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps and Sir Nevile Henderson, and attended the funeral in London of his cousin George V in January 1936. Limping along far behind the late king’s coffin as the official German emissary, he was completely ignored by his British relatives. A solitary figure, he shuffled along painfully, shoulders stooped and feet splayed, struggling to keep pace with the procession. Incongruously, he wore a green, German-style trenchcoat bereft of insignia and a stormtrooper’s iron helmet. His influence, such as it was, came to an end less than a year later with the abdication of his cousin’s son, Edward VIII, of whom the Nazis had entertained high hopes.

  Whatever the ex-duke’s exact opinions, there is no doubt that he and his distinguished lineage were exploited by the Nazis, even though they may have seen him more as a victim of ‘the Reds’ than as an enthusiast for ‘the Browns’. In 1932, for example, when Carl-Eduard’s daughter Sibylla was married in Coburg to Prince Gustav Adolf of Sweden, Hitler sent a personal telegram of congratulations. In the evening, during a torchlight procession by the local branch of the Nazi Party, the revellers marched round the statue of Prince Albert that stood in the town square.46 Carl-Eduard also contrived to hold on to some of his aristocratic privileges, continuing to award medals and decorations to his ‘House Order’ of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. As a wartime aviation ace, Hermann Göring was awarded the Order’s Commander’s Cross.

  During the Second World War the ailing Herr von Saxe-Coburg lived with his family in seclusion. Though he kept his honorary presidency of the German Red Cross, on whose behalf he visited the United States and Japan in 1940, henceforth he played little active part in public life. One of his sons was killed on the Eastern Front; two others served in the armed forces. Allegedly, he received another telegram in April 1945 from the Führer, urging him to avoid the invading Americans. By then, most of his remaining property had been seized by the Soviet army, which also smashed the presses of the Almanach de Gotha and carried off their priceless archives. The husband of his much-loved sister, Princess Alice, was now the governor-general of Canada,47 yet none of the ex-duke’s connections would save him. He was arrested in 1946 by the American Military Administration of Bavaria and hauled before a de-Nazification court. The prosecution argued that he could not possibly have been unaware of Nazi atrocities. He denied the accusation and pleaded not guilty, but was given a crushing fine, and further detained. By early 1947, sick and undernourished, he was succumbing to the rigours of a prison camp. ‘Crippled by arthritis, the old man stumbled painfully round a rubbish dump, scrabbling in the rotting refuse until he found an old tin can. Starving, he pulled up grass to add to the thin soup which his American captors allowed him.’48 That same year, his sister Princess Alice and her husband the earl of Athlone travelled to Germany and successfully effected his release.

  Ironically, the Americans then assigned the ex-duke and ex-duchess a servant’s lodging in the stables of Schloss Callenberg, the scene of his great-grandfather’s orgies. According to his granddaughter, ‘
he thought it was wonderful’.49 He had contracted cancer, and had lost the sight of an eye. But he lived long enough to buy a ticket to a public cinema at Gotha in June 1953, and to watch the coronation of Elizabeth II in Technicolor. ‘That must have been the worst moment’50 – the young British queen was his nephew’s daughter, and he was the second most senior living member of her father’s family. He died in 1954 aged sixty-nine. His eldest son and heir, Johann Leopold, had renounced all rights of inheritance. Carl-Eduard’s only consolation was that he died in a bed that had been brought from his birthplace at Claremont House, Esher, in Surrey. It was, he said, ‘his little bit of England’.

  III

  When the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was founded in 1826, European monarchy was at its peak. All the leading powers – France, Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia – were monarchies; and every time that a new state was formed, like Greece in 1828 or Belgium in 1831, new monarchs were selected and installed. Republicanism appeared discredited. The revolutionary Corsican general who terrified Europe for twenty years had abandoned his original principles by crowning himself emperor of the French and king of Italy in the middle of his career. After France’s defeat, the victorious monarchs thanked God for His blessings, and forgot why the Revolution had happened.

  By 1919, when the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was abolished, monarchy was in serious decline. The Romanovs had been toppled and savagely murdered; the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs had been forced out; France had reached its Third Republic. Both Austria and Germany were in the process of adopting republican regimes. Among the states formed by the post-war settlement, republics outnumbered monarchies by four to one. The minority of monarchs who had not lost their thrones, in countries like Britain or Italy, feared for their future.

  European monarchy was deeply bound up with the mystical registers of Christian religion. The example of the United States was not yet strong enough for Europeans to accept that republican ideals were compatible with a religious society. Kings and emperors were not just crowned; they were anointed with holy oil and installed amid oaths, prayers, anthems, divine invocations and clouds of incense. In 1914 they had all received the Almighty’s blessing for prosecuting war against each other and for sending millions of their subjects to the slaughter. Monarchists did not notice the discrepancy, doing their utmost to convince the world that monarchy was God-given and virtuous, that republicanism was godless and morally deficient.

  Yet the systemic vindictiveness with which the last duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was treated by his own kind, suggests that there is little to choose in terms of morality between royalty and republicans. When dynastic interest or national pride are at stake, the Sermon on the Mount counts for little, and common human decency is set aside. Generally speaking, British attitudes have followed suit. Whenever Carl-Eduard’s name crops up in the British press, all the old epithets about the ‘traitor peer’ resurface, and new ones are added: ‘a scandalous life’, one of ‘Hitler’s most fervent supporters’, ‘a top Nazi official’ and ‘a convicted Nazi’.

  After Carl-Eduard’s death, his offspring were divided over what to do. Some of them retreated into private life; his daughter Sibylla became mother to the king of Sweden. His widow, the ex-Duchess Victoria Adelaide, lived on until 1970. But his fifth child, Friedrich Josias (1918–98) decided to revive his late father’s claims, and it is Friedrich Josias’s son, Andreas von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (b. 1943), who now heads the line descended from the duke of Albany. The outcome of a short-lived wartime marriage, the self-styled ‘Prince Andreas’ is the grandson of Albert and Victoria’s grandson.51 The heir apparent, ‘Prince Hubertus’, was married to Kelly Rodestvedt in Coburg on 23 May 2009.52

  Using a variety of strategies, other members of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha clan fared better than the luckless Carl-Eduard. One branch, for example, had been raised in 1878 to the throne of Bulgaria. Their last representative, the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon (b. 1937), started his reign in 1943 aged six, only to be driven out after a couple of years by the Soviet-backed Communists, who shot his uncle, the regent, and abolished the monarchy. He lived in Spain, graduated from a US army cadet school and prospered in business. Then, when the Communist regime in Bulgaria collapsed, he reinvented himself, formed a democratic political party and in 2001–5 served as Bulgaria’s prime minister under the unlikely name of ‘Sakskoburggotski’.53

  Further branches of the family strove to survive by disguising their identity. The Saxe-Coburg-Gothas of Belgium, for example, simply stopped using their family name in the correct belief that it would soon be forgotten.54 Their British relations, in contrast, embarked on an elaborate strategy of concealment, marshalling a mixture of legal ploys, image-management and historical propaganda. They repeatedly changed their family name by proclamation or by Acts of Parliament, successfully masking the fact that the Windsor-Mountbatten wedding of 1947 would otherwise have seen a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha marrying a Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. The bride’s father, as seen above, had changed his surname before she was born, and changed his first name from Albert or ‘Bertie’ to George on ascending the throne; the bridegroom had assumed an Anglicized form of his mother’s name. A future queen, of course, could not stay as ‘Mrs Mountbatten’ for long, so after her marriage her surname was changed back to ‘Windsor’ (despite her husband’s displeasure) and in 1960, for the benefit of the children, it was modified again to ‘Mountbatten-Windsor’.55 Through all of this, the royals honed their upper-class English accents, threw themselves into patriotic and charitable activities, spoke no German in public, deflected awkward questions, avoided their German relatives and, in a sustained campaign of genealogical legerdemain, massaged their family tree beyond recognition. Most of their subjects do not know that Lady Diana Spencer (1961–97) was the very first person of primarily English descent who ever came near the British throne in the whole of its 300-year history. They had to wait until the twenty-first century before Camilla Parker-Bowles, by a civil marriage, and Kate Middleton, in a grand church wedding, were allowed to follow her example.

  Pretence, therefore, is an essential part of the royal performance; some might call it adaptability. Albert and Victoria would have understood perfectly, both having embarrassing relatives to dispel. They would also have known (since the operation started in their own times56) that royal genealogists can achieve wonderful results through imaginative misrepresentation; vulgar forgery is unnecessary. By the skilful use of Englished forms, by an emphasis on titles as opposed to surnames, and above all by the selective filtration of unwanted bloodlines, dedicated family-tree-surgeons have transformed the dominant flavour of their product. No doubt with the best patriotic motives in mind, they have persuaded the unsuspecting public that British royalty’s closest ancestral ties are with English and Scottish monarchs all the way back to William the Conqueror and beyond.57 In the process, they have sidelined the royal family’s far closer ties with the Hanovers, the Tecks, the Brandenburg-Ansbachs, the Brunswick-Wolfenbüttels, the Württembergers and the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburgs. If only the truth were known, the degree of consanguinity between the ‘Mountbatten-Windsors’ and the Normans, Plantagenets, Tudors and Stuarts is almost astronomically remote.

  Anyone wishing to reconstruct the basic kinship group of the British queen and her consort only needs to list the parents and grandparents of their respective forebears. In addition to the Bowes-Lyons, the Cavendish-Bentincks, the Smiths (of Blendon Hall), the Burnabies and the Romanovs, they will soon discover their most intimate connections to be with the Anhalt-Zerbsts, the Altenbergs, the Barby-Mühlingens, the Battenbergs, the Braunschweig-Lünebergs, the Castell-Castells, the Castell-Reinlingens, the Dohna-Schlobittens, the Erbach-Ehrbachs, the Erbach-Schönbergs, the Ebersdorfs, the Hesses, the Hesse-Darmstadts, the Hesse-Kassels, the Hesse-Philippstals, the Hohenzollerns, the Holstein-Gottorps, the Jülich-Kleve-Bergs, the Kiz-Rheides, the Lehndorffs, the Leiningen-Dagsburgs, the Lippes, the Mecklenburg-Strelitzes, the Nassau-Usi
ngens, the Nassau-Weilbergs, the Neubergs, the Oettingen-Oettingens, the Pfalz-Zimmerns, the Reuss von Ebersdorfs, the Saxe-Altenbergs, the Saxe-Coburg-Saalfelds, the Saxe-Eisenachs, the Saxe-Gothas, the Saxe-Hildeburghausens, the Saxe-Lauenbergs, the Saxe-Weimars, the Saxe-Weissenfels, the Sayn-Wittgensteins, the von Schliebens, the Schönburg-Glauchaus, the Schwarzburg-Rudolfstadts, the Schwarzburg-Sonderhausens, the Solms-Laubachs, the Solms-Sonnenwalde und Pouches, the Stolberg-Gederns, the Waldecks, the Waldeck-Eisenbergs, the Wettins and three times over with the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas.

  None of which, one hastens to add, implies that Germans make undesirable relatives; international match-making cannot be reduced to any such crude formula. What it does show, thanks in no small part to Albert and Victoria, is that British public opinion adopted markedly pro-German sympathies for much of the nineteenth century, but, thanks to two world wars, decidedly Germanophobe antipathies for most of the twentieth. To navigate a path of survival through the minefield of these shifting prejudices, Britain’s royal family decided to pretend that it was something it wasn’t, and isn’t. The late Princess Diana was thus perhaps more right than she knew when she regretted ‘having married into a German family’.58 Prince Albert, of course, never had such regrets.

  * Saxe is the French name for Saxony, as opposed to Sachsen in German. Since the German aristocracy had the habit of speaking French, however, they often wrote their titles in the French form, and it was the French form that passed into English usage. ‘Saxe Coburg’ stands for ‘Coburg Saxony’ and ‘Saxe Gotha’ for ‘Gotha Saxony’.

  * By a curious coincidence, the same midwife, Frau Siebold, had attended Victoria’s birth at Kensington Palace three months before officiating at Albert’s birth at Rosenau. The Kents’ wedding had taken place at the bride’s home in the Ehrenburg Palace at Coburg in May 1818. Shortly after, the duchess of Kent announced her pregnancy and promptly left for England to ensure that her child would be British-born, taking Frau Siebold with her.