QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History
Page 44
A few weeks later the Emperor's illness took a turn for the worse. He had taxed his strength by insisting on attending the wedding of his son, Heinrich, to Princess Irene of Hesse; and by the middle of June he was finding it a struggle to swallow and had to be fed through a tube. It was considered advisable to send for Crown Prince Wilhelm who arrived with his wife, Augusta of Schleswig-Holstein, known as 'Dona', and immediately began bossing everyone about.
The day after her son's arrival the Empress, on entering her husband's room, realized that the end was near. Her one thought, she told her mother, was 'to help him over the inevitable end'. She asked him if he was tired; and he answered her in his hoarse whisper, 'Oh very, very.' 'Gradually his dear eyes took on a different look,' she wrote. 'We held a light up, but he did not blink at all ... He no longer seemed conscious, coughed hard once more, took a deep breath three times then gave an involuntary jerk and closed his eyes tight as if something was hurting him! Then everything was quiet.'20
'I am his widow,' she told her mother that same day, 'no more his wife. How am I to bear it? You did, and I will do.'21 'Darling, darling unhappy child,' the Queen wrote as soon as she heard of the Emperor's death. 'I clasp you in my arms, for this is a double, dreadful grief, a misfortune untold and to the world at large. You are far more sorely tried than me. I had not the agony of seeing another fill the place of my Angel husband wh. I always felt I never could have borne.'22 'I am broken-hearted,' she told the Crown Prince Wilhelm who had succeeded to his father's throne. 'Help and do all you can for your poor dear mother and try to follow in your best, noblest, and kindest of father's footsteps. Grandmama, V.R.I.'23 None of her own sons, she confided to her journal, 'could be a greater loss'. Her son-in-law's death was a 'calamity' for the whole of Europe 'as well as for his own country'.24
Far from following his grandmother's advice, the young Kaiser - who even before his father's death had, in his mother's words, fancied himself 'completely the Emperor - and an absolute & autocratic one'25 - behaved as though his father had been a traitor to his country, having the drawers of his writing desk emptied in a search for secret state papers, and marching about the room accusing his mother of hiding them.26
In fact she had already taken the precaution of asking her mother if she could bring all her private papers and those of her husband to England when they came over for the Jubilee celebrations in the summer of 1887. The Queen had readily agreed to this request and three wooden chests of papers had accordingly been handed over at Windsor Castle by the Crown Prince in July.27 In May the next year a fourth chest containing further important documents had secretly been sent to Windsor, followed by yet another chest sent by way of the British Ambassador in Berlin who was led to believe that it contained jewels.28
Against his mother's wishes the new Kaiser now ordered a post-mortem of his father's remains and authorized the publication of a pamphlet which, while praising the behaviour of the late Emperor's German doctors, condemned the treatment of the British interlopers. 'An English doctor killed my father,' he stated publicly, 'and an English doctor crippled my arm - and this we owe to my mother who would not have Germans about her!'[lvi]29
Chapter 52
THE DAUGHTERS
'A married daughter I MUST have living with me, and must not be left constantly to look about for help.'
When Princess Alice, the Queen's second daughter, attempted to persuade her mother to come out of her seclusion she caused quite as much offence as the Queen's Ministers did when they suggested it. She was sharply told that her mother must live the best way she found that she could in order to get through all the work she had to do. 'I require,' she said, 'to shape my own life and ways.'
Although she was no more than eighteen years old when her father died, Princess Alice, a pretty, sympathetic girl, had more or less taken over the running of the household while the Queen was in the first agonies of her grief, sleeping in her mother's room, seeing Ministers on her behalf, and doing all she could to comfort the grievously mourning widow. The Queen, indeed, came so much to rely upon her that when, less than six months after the Prince Consort's death, Princess Alice married Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, her mother parted from her with the utmost reluctance, comforting herself with the thought that she and her husband would be able to spend much of their time in England, 'Louis not having any duties to detain him much at home at present'.1
For a long time the Queen - who had found the charming and graceful Alice most 'obliging' - had insisted that she would not let the girl marry so long as she could 'reasonably delay her doing so'. As she had told King Leopold in April 1859, 'I shall not let her marry for as long as I can.'2 But then the Princess had met Prince Louis and, although Lord Clarendon described him as a 'dull boy', coming from 'a dull family in a dull country', she herself thought him delightful, while the Queen was also much taken with him: he was, if 'very shy and blushing when one talks to him about Alice', 'a dear, pleasant, bright companion, full of fun and spirits ... natural and unaffected - so quick-witted and taking an interest in everything and I think him so good-looking'.3 The Duchess of Cambridge might well consider it 'an insignificant match'; but the Queen contended that 'great matches' did not 'make for happiness', often, in fact, causing great 'annoyance'. Better a thousand times not marry at all, she thought, 'than marry for marrying's sake'. This was advice she continued to press upon her children and their children for the rest of her life. 'I know full well,' she was to write to Princess Alice's daughter, Victoria, 'that you don't wish to be married for marrying's sake & to have a position. I know darling Child that you would never do this, & dear Mama had a horror of it; but it is a very German view of things ... I have told ... dear Papa that you were far too young to think of it, & that your ist duty was to stay with him, and to be as it were the "Mistress of the House", as so many eldest daughters are to their Fathers when God has taken their beloved mother away.'4
As the day of Alice's 'wretched' wedding approached, the Queen had made it clear that she dreaded it. As at the Prince of Wales's wedding, she was almost hidden from view, this time by her four sons who surrounded her in the dining room at Osborne where the gloomy ceremony was conducted on 1 July 1862. After it was over the Queen broke down in floods of tears and was soon writing to Princess Alice to complain that she ought to spend more time in England than she evidently intended to do. There was, after all, nothing much for her to do in Darmstadt; it was selfish of Louis and his family to keep her there. She ought to be as much with her mother as possible. 'A married daughter,' she wrote, 'I MUST have living with me, and must not be left constantly to look about for help, and to have to make shift for the day which is too dreadful.'5
So, frequently complaining that Princess Alice spent far too much time in her husband's duchy, the Queen turned to her next daughter, Helena, 'Lenchen' as she was known in the family, to take her sister's place. At the time of Alice's wedding, Helena was sixteen years old, a kindly, sensible, but rather plain, dowdy and ungainly girl; and, as with Alice, her mother was possessively determined to keep her at home as long as she could, although she had no high opinion of her personality or deportment. 'Poor dear Lenchen,' the Queen wrote of her, 'though most useful and active and clever and amiable, does not improve in looks and has great difficulty with her figure and her want of calm, quiet, graceful manners.'
'I don't intend she should marry,' the Queen wrote the year after Alice's marriage,6 'till nineteen or twenty.' And, even then, her husband, as she had hoped of Alice's, must make England his 'principal home'. The husband chosen for her, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, was perfectly amenable in this respect. Unfortunately, he was not very desirable in any other: he smoked incessantly, which made him cough; his teeth were bad; he had very little hair and hardly any money; he had only one eye and at dinner parties would ask a footman to bring in a tray containing his glass eyes. 'He would explain the history of each at great length, his favourite being a blood-shot eye which
he wore when he had a cold.'7 He was fifteen years older than his intended bride and was generally acknowledged to be very boring. The Prince of Wales disapproved of the match; so did his wife who had hoped that Helena might marry her brother, the Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark; so did his sister, Alice, who was upbraided by her mother for interfering: it was 'monstrous' of her to do so when the Queen, her parent and sovereign, had settled the 'thing for Helena's good'.8
So Princess Helena was married on 5 July 1866 in St George's Chapel, Windsor, where, to general surprise, the Queen gave her daughter away, explaining, 'I was the only one to do it. I never could let one of my sons take their father's place while I live.'9
As agreed, the bride and her husband settled down at Windsor, first at Frogmore then, after Prince Christian's appointment as Ranger of Windsor Park, at Cumberland Lodge. The arrangement was not to prove a very satisfactory one: the Queen was to find Helena - who, like so many of her contemporaries, became addicted to laudanum - 'difficult to live with'; while Prince Christian proved quite as tedious in the Queen's opinion as he did in everyone else's. He was also very idle: one day the Queen, glancing out of her sitting-room window, saw him lounging about in the garden, smoking. She felt constrained to send him a note telling him to find something more constructive to do. In spite of his constant smoking he lived to be eighty-six. Princess Helena's next sister, Louise, was considered no more satisfactory as a daughter than Princess Helena. A talented sculptress whose work was shown at the Royal Academy, she was good looking, outspoken, independent, indiscreet, often caustic and, in her mother's opinion, 'the most difficult' of all her daughters. There was never a question of her staying at home as a help and companion to the Queen who was perfectly ready to see her married when she came of age.
The candidate selected for her as a husband, although rumoured to be homosexual, was the Marquess of Lome, heir to the eighth Duke of Argyll and grandson of the Queen's old friend, the Duchess of Sutherland, in happier years gone by her Mistress of the Robes. He was said to be a clever young man who wrote poetry. He had been found a seat in the House of Commons as Member for Argyllshire. Princess Louise was fond of him. So was the Queen who found him 'very pleasing, amiable and clever', though she did 'not fancy' him at first, complaining of his 'forward manner' and his unpleasant voice, the result of an injury sustained at Eton. Also there were grumbles from the Tories in the Household because Lome sat in the Commons as a Liberal; and the Crown Princess did not approve, advocating a Prussian Prince, much to the annoyance of her mother who wrote to the Prince of Wales to protest against these 'foreign alliances' which, so often, meant that family feelings were 'rent asunder'. 'Beloved Papa' had advocated them, to be sure; but that was before Bismarck's Prussia had 'swallowed everything up'.10
There would be problems about precedence, of course, with Princess Louise married to a subject, the first time such a marriage had taken place in England since King Henry VIII's sister, Mary, had married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. And already the Queen considered that the Duke of Argyll was being rather too familiar as a future member of her family. 'I believe "Eliza" is a little nervous about the whole thing,' commented Henry Ponsonby. She 'is not accustomed to such intimacy with a subject'. He himself, however, was thankful that there was no 'talking now of this or that Seidlitz-Stinkinger', while the Queen eventually persuaded herself, or at least told Vicky, that the match had been greeted everywhere as the 'most popular act' of her reign. As for the future bride, she was not so concerned as others were about matters of precedence, about whether, for instance, she would be Princess Louise in her mother's houses and merely Lady Lome in her husband's. At least, as she told Ponsonby, with a side swipe at John Brown, she was quite sure she did not want 'an absurd man in a kilt' following her everywhere.11
Louise was married on 24 March 1871 at Windsor with far more ceremony than Alice and Helena had been. Her mother led the procession up the nave, to the strains of the bridegroom's family's marching song, 'The Campbells are Coming', the severity of her black dress offset by diamonds and rubies.12 Soon afterwards the bride moved into apartments in Kensington Palace, outside which still stands the marble statue she created of her mother in her coronation robes.
She was often at odds with other members of her family and the Household. Marie Mallet found her 'fascinating, but oh, so ill-natured. I positively dread talking to her, not a soul escapes ... Never have I come across a more dangerous woman, to gain her end she would stick at nothing.'[lvii] Mrs Mallet later decided, however, that she was 'at her best' when people were in trouble and this was 'a redeeming feature in her most complex character'. She trusted she would 'make up her quarrels and be a help to the Queen'.13
Louise was never of much help to the Queen though, and in long conversations with Dr Reid, with whom she was on the best of terms, she made no secret of her belief that her mother should abdicate in favour of the Prince of Wales. Her mother was, she said, no longer fit to reign and was 'reducing the future role of the Prince of Wales to a nonentity'.14
Chapter 53
THE SONS
'I agree with the Mohammedans that duty towards one's Parents goes before every other but that is not taught as part of religion in Europe.'
The Queen exercised as much control over her sons as over her daughters. Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, like her eldest son, Bertie, was alternately a source of great worry to her and an object of affection. He was, she once regretted, 'reserved, touchy, vague and wilful', a 'great, great grief. Yet when he came home on leave, after having been sent to sea at a tender age, so much against her wishes, he was greatly improved. He was so like his 'dearest Papa', though not, of course, so handsome, that she was delighted to see the 'good, dear, clever' boy again. 'Bless him,' she wrote. 'He is such a dear, dear boy ... We have not had a single fault to find with him since he has been here.' He was 'very clever and intelligent' and talked 'so sensibly and pleasantly' about all he had seen: everybody was pleased with her 'dear darling'.1 He had always had so many interests, unlike that 'nameless youth', his elder brother. He collected stamps; he took photographs; he played the violin though not very well, and wrote music for it, though not very good music. He was a competent draughtsman; he painted watercolours. Unfortunately, he did not always observe her rule that servants should be treated in a kindly manner, forgetting that 'civility and consideration for servants' was a thing which the Queen was 'very particular about'.2 On one occasion she had cause to reprimand him severely: he must 'not treat servants etc. as many do, as soldiers, which does great harm and which especially in the Queen's home is totally out of place and she will not tolerate it.'[lviii]3
When Prince Alfred went back to sea again, however, there was another cause for complaint: he forgot the eighteenth anniversary of his parents' wedding and had to be sent a curt telegram demanding to know if he remembered what day it was.[lix] Not only was he forgetful; when he came home again, he was grumpy and offhand, impatient with the servants and junior members of the Household whom he treated - though his mother repeatedly told him not to - like recalcitrant seamen. He also had a very quick temper and was notoriously avaricious. In 1862, the year after his father's death, while serving with the Mediterranean Fleet, he dealt his mother what she described as 'a heavy blow to her weak and shattered frame', proving himself 'both heartless and dishonourable', by becoming involved with a young woman on Malta just as his elder brother had disgraced himself in Ireland the year before. He was forgiven the following year, however, when he was described as being 'liker and liker to blessed Papa'. But the improvement was transitory. 'I am not as proud of Affie as you might think,' she wrote to the Crown Princess after he had been shot and wounded by a Fenian in Australia, 'for he is so conceited himself and at the present moment receives ovations as if he had done something - instead of God's mercy having spared his life ... Yes, Affie is a great, great grief - and I may say a source of bitter anger for he is not led astray. His conduct is gratuitous.'4 Then he gave furthe
r offence by his determination to marry the plain but extremely rich Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna, only daughter of Tsar Alexander II, who was head of a family which his mother particularly disliked as being 'false' and 'half-Oriental'. She wished to see the girl before the marriage took place; and was very cross when her father declined to bring her over for inspection. She was even more angry when Princess Alice supported the Tsarina's suggestion that the Queen herself should go over to the Continent to meet the girl at Cologne. 'You have entirely taken the Russian side,' she wrote to her daughter, 'and I do not think, dear child, that you should tell me who have been nearly 20 years longer on the throne than the Emperor of Russia and am Doyenne of Sovereigns, and who am a Reigning Sovereign which the Empress is not, what I ought to do. I think I know that.'5
So the Queen did not meet the Grand Duchess Marie before the wedding, which took place in St Petersburg on 23 January 1874, the bridegroom appearing for the occasion in the uniform of a Russian naval captain, much to the Queen's displeasure. However, when she eventually did meet her new daughter-in-law she liked her very well. She seemed good-natured, natural and intelligent; not in the least shy or nervous in the presence of the Queen, who liked her all the more for that. The satisfaction was not mutual. Her family in Russia heard that the Duchess found her visits to Windsor and Osborne 'boring beyond belief, that English food was 'abominable', the late hours at Court 'very tiring', and London, where she and her husband lived at Clarence House, 'hideous'. As for her husband, it was obvious that she found his heavy drinking tiresome and his evil temper exasperating. She was relieved when he went back to sea as captain of the ironclad Sultan in the Mediterranean.