by Gillian Gill
Permitted, in a daring move, to drive out alone with the Emperor Napoleon, Bertie expressed the naive wish that he could be the emperor’s son. He and his sister begged Empress Eugenie to allow them to stay on a few more days. When she politely said this was impossible, as their parents could not do without them, the Prince of Wales blurted out: “Not do without us! Don’t fancy that, for there are six more of us at home, and they don’t want us.” Like his mother, the Prince of Wales was depressed to get home. He too determined to return to France as soon as possible for new pleasures and new discoveries. In 1855 the seed was sown of the chubby, elegant, bon viveur boulevardier Prince of Wales who makes cameo appearances as an acquaintance of Swann, the Jewish financier and aesthete, in Marcel Proust’s great novel.
For Vicky too the visit to Paris was a door opening onto an enticing world. For her, unlike her brother, that door immediately clanged shut. When Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie came to Windsor, the Princess Royal was allowed for the first time to attend dinners with the grown-ups. She developed a huge crush on the tall, slender, elegant empress, and Eugenie, sincerely grateful for the girl’s admiration, was very nice to her.
As the queen of chic in the world’s capital of fashion, Eugenie could see that her new friend the Queen of England chose the wrong clothes, not only for herself but for the teenage daughter who looked so much like her. There was nothing to be done for Victoria, so completely in thrall to her husband’s idea of fashion, and obliged to have clothes made by British dressmakers from British fabrics. But the empress devised a plan to help young Vicky realize her dream of coming out in style. Before leaving England, she took the measurements for a life-size doll of Vicky, and she then sent a set of exquisite Paris outfits as a gift “for the doll.” Here was diplomatic tact and womanly sympathy of the first order, and Queen Victoria understood it as such. Vicky, with her mother’s approval, rapturously wore the doll’s wardrobe in Paris.
Eugenie made other thoughtful preparations for Vicky’s visit. At home Vicky and her younger sister Alice always shared a bedroom, and the two girls were usually confined to a small room at the top of the house. In Paris, Vicky found that a whole suite had been prepared for her, on the reception floor at the Palace of Saint-Cloud with a glorious view. Again at the request of her hosts, the Princess Royal was allowed to attend the great final ball in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. There she danced with the emperor himself and had an eager crowd of young men waiting to claim her hand. It was every young girl’s dream.
Victoria, Princess Royal, was still three months short of her fifteenth birthday, but it was now apparent that she had become a woman. She was physically mature (her first period came in the spring of 1855), prettier than her mother had been at the same age, a little taller, her features better, her complexion clearer, her smile less gummy, her bosom fuller. Her formidable intellect, restless curiosity, and strong will were hidden behind the mask of blushing maiden modesty.
None of this was lost on her parents. They knew that Vicky had always been precocious and that she liked to have her own way. Ever since her infancy, it had been a struggle to discipline her and plane down her square edges to fit the round female hole. Now, almost overnight, she had entered the danger zone for young princesses, and it was obvious that she liked male company. Her father saw that the time had come to settle Vicky’s future before sexual desire could lead her astray. Luckily he had a husband already picked out for her: twenty-four-year-old Prince Frederick (Fritz) Hohen-zollern, son to the heir of the King of Prussia.
Within weeks of returning to England from Paris, the royal family was welcoming dear Fritz to Balmoral for a lengthy private visit. The purpose of the visit was clearly understood by the young man, his parents, and his royal English hosts. Fritz had come to take a long, second look at Vicky and decide whether or not he wished to marry her. Only Vicky herself was, quite deliberately, kept in the dark as to the purpose of the visit.
The Prussian Alliance
…
HE IDEA THAT VICTORIA, PRINCESS ROYAL, SHOULD MARRY THE HEIR presumptive to the king of Prussia was apparently hatched by Prince Albert, King Leopold, and Baron Stockmar when the prospective bridegroom, Prince Frederick William of Hohenzollern (Fritz), was a sad, gangly, silent schoolboy of eleven and the prospective bride was a vivacious toddler, already babbling in three languages. A new Germany, united under Prussia, the strongest of the German states, was Prince Albert’s great dream. His personal mission as a diplomat was to convert the ferociously conservative, obsessively militaristic, and fanatically Anglophobic Prussian ruling class into the kind of enlightened autocracy that Great Britain and Belgium had pioneered. The Prussian alliance was to be the capstone of his European foreign policy.
Prince Albert’s intention to cozy up to the Prussians became apparent as early as January 1842. To the rage of his father the Duke of Coburg, of his wife’s uncle the king of Hanover, and of his uncle the king of the Belgians, Albert chose King Frederick William IV of Prussia to be the first baptismal sponsor to the newborn Prince of Wales. Prince Albert wrote, begging His Prussian Majesty to attend the christening in person. The king of Prussia rarely got farther from Berlin than Potsdam, but on this occasion he traveled to London, bearing a magnificent present for his godson, and prepared to be gracious.
For Albert, this visit was a dream come true. As a youth, he had spent a few days at the Prussian court in Berlin, but such was the force of hierarchy in Germany that a king of Prussia could not be expected to converse with a second son of a duke of Saxe-Coburg. Now Prince Albert was playing host to the king in the magnificent medieval English castle over which he presided. He and His Majesty looked each other in the eye, chatted over breakfast, and rode out side by side in the afternoons. The prince’s adviser, Baron Stockmar, was granted personal audiences with the king of Prussia, and, to His Majesty’s obvious amazement, ventured to disagree with him.
After the christening of his first son, Albert felt empowered to start a regular correspondence with the king of Prussia. He also welcomed the Prussian minister (ambassador) in London, Chevalier Bunsen, into his exclusive family circle. All was plain sailing until the Queen and the prince paid a visit to Prussia and had a chance to see the Prussian court firsthand. By the 1840s, with the immense improvement in the speed and reliability of communications, the English political establishment was willing for Queen Victoria to travel abroad, and she was eager to visit Germany. For his part, Albert longed to show his wife Coburg and Gotha, where both he and her mother had lived as children, and Bonn, where he had been so happy as a student.
Thus in 1845 the Queen and the prince crossed to Antwerp in the royal yacht. There they were greeted by King Leopold, toured Belgium, carefully skirted the Queen’s ancestral Hanover (still ruled by awful Uncle Ernest), and crossed into Prussia. They spent several days on the Rhine and touring various Prussian cities, accompanied by their royal hosts. King Frederick William put on a glittering array of dinners, balls, and concerts, including one featuring Franz Liszt and the new Swedish soprano sensation Jenny Lind. The English royal party then proceeded to Coburg and Gotha, where cheering crowds turned out everywhere for the English Queen with flowers and songs and folk dances. The German relatives, including the Duchess of Kent and King Leopold and Queen Louise, descended en masse. It was hardly a vacation for Victoria, but she glowed with happiness and pride. How she would love to spend her life in a little German hunting lodge like Albert’s beloved Rosenau, she confided to her diary.
The one blot on the royal couple’s pleasure came at the Prussian king’s castle of Stolzenfels. There King Frederick William IV refused to give Prince Albert precedence over an Austrian archduke, the younger son of an uncle of the Austrian emperor. Victoria was separated from her husband, and her discontent was writ large on her face. The Prussian court took notice, and, to Victoria’s dismay, critical accounts of the Queen of England’s ungracious ways appeared in the press. Albert, whose nostalgia for his beloved Ge
rmany had received a reality check, affected stoicism and advised his wife to do the same. In a telling little scene witnessed by the royal governess Lady Lyttelton, Prince Albert put on a Cheshire cat smile and did a neat entrechat, demonstrating to his wife how she should feign pleasure and thus avert adverse criticism in the future. If only for him it had really been that easy!
At last permitted to spend days in the company of the rulers of Prussia, Prince Albert was not impressed. He saw that they were ill educated and deeply prejudiced men, hypnotized by their own greatness and terrified of change. They were also twice his age and seemed stuck in the past. Frederick William himself, the eldest of the four royal Hohenzollern brothers, once admitted: “If we had been born as sons of a petty official, I should have been an architect, William an NCO, Charles would have gone to prison, and Albrecht would have become a drunkard.”
Frederick William, the brightest and most cultured of the four brothers, had long been wrapped in a mist of romantic feudalism. He was lapsing into dementia by the time Prince Albert first met him. William, next in line to the throne, was stupider and less educated, deeply neurotic, and at daggers drawn with his wife, Augusta. The army was William’s passion and his only area of expertise. The king and his brother heir were at once stubborn and indecisive, an unfortunate combination in an autocrat.
Prince Albert was confident that he could achieve ascendancy over these pitiful specimens. By force of personality, logic, and fact, leveraging his wife’s status and England’s power, he would convince the kings of Prussia to adopt his theory of monarchy and govern as he thought they should. It would be no easy task. Prussian kings ate flattery with their daily bread and drank obsequiousness with their beer. They did not listen, they pronounced. Albert would need to play the courtier and the hypocrite. For the sake of Germany and the world, he was ready to do it.
In 1848 Prince Albert had his chance to proselytize. Revolution came to Prussia, the mob ruled the streets of Berlin, and the king was forced to accept a program of democratic reform, at least for the time being. Prince William, who had advised shooting down the demonstrators, had to get out of Germany in a hurry. He left his wife, Augusta, and two children at his Potsdam castle to protect his interests and begged to be received in England. Against the advice of Palmerston at the foreign office, who sympathized with the forces of democratic reform, Prince Albert insisted on welcoming Prince William at Windsor. During the months that the Prussian prince was dependent on his hospitality, Prince Albert offered an extended seminar in constitutional monarchy. William appeared responsive and was encouraged to believe that Albert held the reins of England’s foreign policy.
When William returned to Prussia, Albert geared up the private Prussian correspondence. He and Victoria wrote not only to William and his older brother, the king of Prussia, but to William’s wife, Augusta. She had been born a princess of Saxe-Weimar and was thus a distant kinswoman of Albert and Victoria. Weimar at the end of the eighteenth century had been the center of the German enlightenment. The Prussian court considered the princess to be a liberal and an intellectual and hence saw her as a threat. Prince Albert hoped that Princess Augusta might begin to wield more influence at the Prussian court, and he strongly encouraged a friendship between her and his wife. Letters flew between England and Prussia, carried mainly by private courier, since in Prussia all important mail was routinely opened by the state police.
A tiny fraction of Prince Albert’s vast Prussian correspondence has been published in English, and it makes for uncomfortable reading. His own letters prove that even as the prince was advising the Queen to insist that every foreign office document should be presented for his perusal and approval, he regularly divulged cabinet secrets to his royal Prussian friends. He believed, and convinced his wife, that in doing so he was acting out of principle and morality. All means, as he saw it, were noble to achieve the great cause—the reunification of Germany. At the same time, Albert begged his Prussian correspondents not to let anyone know the source of their privileged information. In the labyrinth of the Prussian court bureaucracy, where everything and nothing was secret, these requests were no doubt good for a laugh.
The flavor of Prince Albert’s style when writing in his native German to his royal correspondents in Prussia can be felt even in translation. Here are the opening paragraphs of a six-page effusion that he penned in April 1847:
Your Majesty, I must begin my letter by expressing my deep gratitude for the great, unrestricted and gracious confidence you have shown me in your two letters. Indeed I scarcely had a right to expect any reply to my latest lengthy epistle … I have decided to reply to Your Majesty without delay, and it imitates the brilliant qualities displayed in your letter—or at least one of them—namely, by replying … with absolute frankness and truthfulness. There is no need to assure Your Majesty that, in all our views and opinions on English policy, as well as on European and world policy connected with England, Victoria and I are one, as beseems two faithful married people … If however in my communications to Your Majesty there appears, side by side with considerations concerning general world questions, a certain excess, as in my last letter, of purely British feeling, you will, (knowing as I do your truly German sentiments) see in it, I am sure, in future nothing unseemly, but will freely admit, that, though I am incidentally the Queen of England’s husband, I am also one German prince speaking to another. It goes without saying that all such out-pourings, whether they come from Your Majesty or are addressed to you, are to be treated by us both with the strictest secrecy, and to be withheld from everyone, including our Governments.
Only days after Prince Albert wrote this letter, King Frederick William gave an impromptu speech to the Prussian assembly. This was 1847, democratic fervor was coming to the boil, and Europe once again faced bloody revolution. The king stated plainly to the elected members that his government consisted of ministers appointed by and answerable to him alone, the divinely anointed king. No elected body, he affirmed, could ever possess a legitimacy comparable to his own. These were the principles that the king sincerely held throughout his life. In 1848 he would give lip service to democratic reform only because his dynasty seemed likely to face the fate of the deposed Bourbons in France.
Learning of the speech, Prince Albert wrote in dismay and amazement to Stockmar: “I have today read with alarm the King of Prussia’s speech … Those who know and love the King recognize him and his views and feelings in every word and will be grateful to him for the frankness … but if one puts oneself in the position of a cool, critical public, one’s heart sinks. What confusion of ideas, and what boldness in a king to speak ex tempore; and at such a moment and at such length not only to touch on topics so terrible and difficult, to dispose of them in that slap-dash way.” So much for Prince Albert’s “absolutely frank and truthful” paean to the “brilliant qualities” of the king of Prussia.
The gap between what Prince Albert expected Prussia to do and what it actually did widened to a chasm in 1854. England and France went to war with Russia. Austria repulsed Russian advances into the Balkans and stood ready to defend the integrity of its empire. Piedmont, a small nation seeking to shake off the Austrian yoke and to become the nucleus for a new, united Italy, demonstrated its commitment to democracy and constitutional government by sending a contingent to fight in the Crimea. But Prussia, the sixth Great Power, whose well-financed army was being honed to a peak of readiness, adamantly remained neutral. The English government and the English nation were outraged by Prussia’s refusal to honor its treaty obligations to Turkey, send troops to the Crimea, and reinforce the English blockade of the Russian ports in the Baltic.
Prince William was now regent in Prussia, following the definitive lapse into dementia of his brother King Frederick William IV. The regent refused all Prince Albert’s impassioned pleas for his nation to join the Franco-British alliance. When the chips were down, William, like his brother the king, preferred to side, tacitly, with Russia, not with their
new friend Prince Albert. In this decision, both dynastic and national interests played a part. The tsar of Russia was married to the favorite sister of the king and the regent of Prussia. The Russian state observed the autocratic principles that the kings of Prussia cherished. As Palmerston’s man in Berlin accurately reported to the foreign office, the Prussian government was convinced that it was in Prussia’s best interests to keep its army intact and waste no money on the defense of the Turks. Prussia planned to exploit the weakness of the Crimean combatants once they had tired of battle to begin its campaign of territorial expansion.
Prince Albert was angry and distraught at what he regarded as a personal betrayal as well as a cynical flouting of international law. “That every good German desires the consolidation, perhaps the aggrandisement, of Prussia, is intelligible,” he wrote to Stockmar, “but physical expansion is, or ought to be, the result of moral strength and struggle, and people ought to see that the war with Russia [that is, Prussia’s joining with Britain and France in the war against Russia] would offer many chances to attain the desired object in a way which Europe would regard as consonant with her own interests and those of civilisation. On the other hand, the policy of seeking to embarrass Europe now, in order to fish in troubled waters later on, cannot fail to produce the opposite effects.”
