Grandmama of Europe: The Crowned Descendants of Queen Victoria

by Theo Aronson

  Grandmama of

  Europe

  The Crowned

  Descendants of Queen

  Victoria

  Theo Aronson

  All Rights Reserved

  This edition published in 2014 by:

  Thistle Publishing

  36 Great Smith Street

  London

  SW1P 3BU

  www.thistlepublishing.co.uk

  Contents

  Author's Note

  Prologue: Golden Jubilee, Summer 1887

  PART ONE 1887–1901

  1 Vicky of Germany

  2 Bertie of Great Britain

  3 'My OWN dear Empress Victoria'

  4 Ninety-eight Days

  5 Eddy, Georgie and May

  6 Sophie of Greece

  7 Marie of Romania

  8 Alix of Russia

  9 Missy and Alicky

  10 Maud of Norway

  11 Vicky, Willie and Sophie

  12 'Sweet Grandmama'

  PART TWO 1901–1918

  13 Europe's Uncle

  14 'An Invincible Joie de Vivre'

  15 The Tsarevich

  16 Revolutionary Queen

  17 Ena of Spain

  18 The Royal Disease

  19 A Family of Kings

  20 'Our Friend'

  21 Moments of Glory

  22 The Balkan Queens

  23 'The German Woman'

  24 The Fall of Kings

  PART THREE 1918–1969

  25 'Too Exuberant to Last'

  26 Marie of Yugoslavia

  27 'La Reina! La Reina!'

  28 Louise of Sweden

  29 Ruritania

  30 'I thought I had done well'

  31 Murder in Marseilles

  32 Ingrid of Denmark

  33 Marie, Maud and Mignon

  34 The Last of the First

  Epilogue: The Matriarchy Today

  Notes on Sources

  Bibliography

  Genealogical table

  Illustrations

  Between pages 148 and 149

  Queen Victoria at the age of seventy-five

  Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, Vicky

  Queen Victoria photographed for her Golden Jubilee, with the Prince and Princess of Wales

  Fritz, later Kaiser Frederick III, Queen Victoria's son-in-law

  The Grandmama of Europe, surrounded by her family, at the time of her Golden Jubilee. A painting by Tuxen

  By gracious permission of H.M. The Queen

  The Wales family in 1889

  Radio Times Hulton Picture Library

  Queen Victoria with her grandson Willie, German Crown Prince, her daughter Vicky, the German Empress, Crown Princess Dona, and three of Vicky's daughters

  Four generations: Queen Victoria holds Prince Edward (later King Edward VIII). Behind stand Bertie, Prince of Wales, and Georgie, Duke of York

  The wedding of Constantine and Sophie in Athens

  Sophie, daughter of the Empress Frederick, and Crown Prince Constantine, in 1889

  Queen Victoria's granddaughter Alexandra ('Alicky'), Empress of Russia

  Queen Victoria with the Prince of Wales, Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsaritsa Alexandra and their baby, the Grand Duchess Olga

  Crown Prince Ferdinand of Romania holding his eldest son, Carol, later King Carol II

  Marie of Romania in 1907

  King Alfonso XIII and Queen Ena of Spain, in the early days of their marriage

  King Alfonso XIII and Queen Ena on the way back from their wedding, seconds before the bomb was thrown at their carriage

  The Empress Alexandra of Russia

  Marie of Romania at her coronation in 1922

  The funeral procession of Edward VIII, attended by nine monarchs Illustrated London News

  Princess Maud of Wales and Prince Charles of Denmark, later King and Queen of Norway, at the time of their marriage

  The first coronation ever photographed; the enthronement of King Haakon and Queen Maud, June 1906

  Illustrated London News

  King Alexander of Yugoslavia

  Queen Marie of Yugoslavia with her sons Peter, Andrej and Tomislav

  The scene after the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in Marseilles, 1934

  Princess Sophie of Greece at the time of her conversion to the Greek Orthodox faith

  'Mignon', daughter of Queen Marie of Romania and wife of King Alexander, holding her eldest son Peter

  Princess Louise of Battenberg, later Queen of Sweden, by Philip Laszlo

  Queen Ena of Spain, by Philip Laszlo

  Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark and Princess Ingrid of Sweden after their marriage, 1935

  King Frederick IX and Queen Ingrid of Denmark later in life

  By courtesy of the Danish Embassy

  King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden

  By courtesy of the Swedish Embassy

  Queen Louise of Sweden

  By courtesy of the Swedish Embassy

  Author's Note

  The direct descendants of Queen Victoria occupy, or have occupied, ten European thrones. It is with this dynastic expansion that this book is concerned. However, in order to accommodate, and make intelligible, so immense a subject as the Queen's crowned descendants, I have found it necessary to set myself certain limits. The study is confined to those of the Queen's children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren who first occupied the various European thrones, and not with their descendants. I therefore deal with Queen Victoria's son Bertie, who became King Edward VII but not with his son, who became King George V; and with the Queen's daughter Vicky who – as the wife of the German Emperor Frederick III – became German Empress, but not with Vicky's son Kaiser Wilhelm II. I do, however, deal with Vicky's daughter Sophie, who married the future King of the Hellenes; for she, as Queen Victoria's granddaughter, was the first of Victoria's direct descendants to become a queen in Greece. Thus, with the exception of King Edward VII, this book is concerned with the various British or half-British princesses who became the queens and empresses of Europe.

  Secondly, I have confined myself, very largely, to the personal lives of the characters concerned; this is a domestic history, not a political one. The focus throughout is on the royal courts; the political, economic and military events of the period are relegated to the background. Only when a subject – such as Vicky, the German Empress, or Alicky, the Tsaritsa – is closely involved in the political life of the country, are politics dealt with in any detail; otherwise they are simply mentioned en passant. This is a book about people. It is biography, rather than history.

  I must thank Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II by whose gracious permission certain extracts from the Journals of Queen Victoria are here published for the first time. For arranging this, I am indebted to Sir Michael Adeane, Her Majesty the Queen's Private Secretary and Keeper of the Archives, and Mr Robert Mackworth-Young, Librarian at Windsor Castle. I am grateful for the help I have received from Dr Anton Ritthaler of the Hausarchiv, Burg Hohenzollern, Munich, Dr Branig of the Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Berlin, and Don J. Almudevar of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. I must thank also the staffs of the British Museum, the Spanish Institute Library and the Hispanic Council Library, London; the Library of Congress, Washington; the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid; and the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Copenhagen.

  I owe a special word of thanks to Miss Myra Conradie, not only for drawing up the magnificent genealogical table from which I have worked (and of which only a simplified version appears in this book) but for helpful advice during the planning stages of this study.
For information, material, advice and help, I am indebted to Don Ernesto La Orden, Don Manuel Garcia-Miranda, Dr Klaus Schmidt, Mr Anton Reinhardt, Mr P. Skovgaard Andersen, Mr Lars Jensen, Mr Christopher Lavrano, Mr Keith Killby, Mr Andre Bothner, Mrs Alma Holtzhausen, Mrs Dorothy Caine, Mrs Ilse Rooseboom, Miss Ann Seeliger and Miss Norah Henshilwood.

  My chief thanks, however, are to Mr Brian Roberts whose assistance, encouragement and expert advice have been invaluable.

  Four recently published books which have proved especially useful and to whose authors I am deeply indebted are Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie (Gollancz), Queen Mary by James Pope-Hennessy (Allen & Unwin), King Edward the Seventh by Philip Magnus (John Murray) and Louise Mountbatten, Queen of Sweden by Margit Fjellman (Allen & Unwin). I should also like to thank the publishers of the following books for permission to quote copyright material: Letters of the Empress Frederick, edited by Sir Frederick Ponsonby and Recollections of Three Reigns, by Sir Frederick Ponsonby (Macmillan & Co Ltd, London and Basingstoke); The Empress Frederick Writes to Sophie, edited by Arthur Gould Lee (Faber & Faber); The Letters of Queen Victoria, 2nd series, edited by G. E. Buckle (John Murray).

  1973

  PROLOGUE

  Golden Jubilee

  Summer 1887

  1

  'The day has come,' wrote Queen Victoria on the morning of 20 June 1887, 'and I am alone . . . .'

  By 'alone' the Queen meant that the Prince Consort, dead these twenty-five years, was not by her side to celebrate her Golden Jubilee. She could hardly have meant anything else. Buckingham Palace was crammed with royal guests, the majority of whom were closely related to the Queen. At every turn she could come up against a son, a daughter, a grandson, a granddaughter, a first or a second cousin. Although the Queen's husband might have been absent, their family, which she admitted was 'legion', was very much in evidence.

  From all over Europe they had come to celebrate this fiftieth anniversary of the Queen's accession. Never before had such a galaxy of royalties been assembled in Buckingham Palace. There were kings, crown princes, archdukes, grand dukes and scores of princes – many of them with wives, children and grandchildren. The rooms were alive with Bourbons, Braganzas, Bernadottes, Battenbergs, Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, Coburgs, Glucksburgs, Savoys, Wittelsbachs and Hesses, as well as the royalties from various lesser states – limited in size but inexhaustible in the matter of providing consorts – such as Saxe-Meinigen, Saxe-Weimar, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Schleswig-Holstein and Hohenlohe-Langenburg. And there were more exotic guests still: honey-skinned princes from such far-flung countries as India, Persia, Japan and Siam. There was even the irrepressible Queen of Hawaii, who had arrived with a piece of her own handiwork to present to the Queen: 'very rare feathers,' noted Victoria, 'but very strangely arranged as a wreath round my monogram, also in feathers on a black ground, framed'.

  To Buckingham Palace, which had known so little gaiety since the Prince Consort's death, this cosmopolitan company brought a sudden burst of brilliance. They might not all have been scintillating personalities but their presence created a decidedly kaleidoscopic air. The men were luxuriantly bewhiskered, superbly uniformed and dazzlingly bemedalled. The women were elaborately coiffured, tightly corseted and generously bustled. Little princes, kilted or sailor-suited, cavorted with princesses in frilled skirts and satin sashes. For a few days this royal throng was engaged in an almost ceaseless round of activity. Life was a succession of public appearances, presentations, receptions, luncheons and dinners. Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria complained that he did not even have the opportunity to speak to his father-in-law, King Leopold II of the Belgians. 'I am frightfully rushed . . .' he scribbled to his wife, at home in Vienna, 'no one has any free time.'

  Busiest of all was the sixty-eight-year-old Queen Victoria. From the moment of her arrival at Buckingham Palace from Windsor on the morning of 20 June until her return three days later, she was on the move. With the King of Denmark on her right hand and the King of Greece on her left, she presided over a family dinner and noted how splendidly the gold plate gleamed under the blaze of lights. In the Small Ballroom she accepted a present from her assembled children and grandchildren: an immense and elaborate table decoration in gold, silver and enamel, fashioned in Berlin under the eye of her eldest daughter, the German Crown Princess. In the Large Ballroom ('half dead with fatigue') she received the corps diplomatique, foreign envoys and their suites. In the White Drawing-room, she granted audience to a deputation from the 'Women of England'. In the Green Drawing-room she held a great reception for the Indian princes and was almost overwhelmed by the splendour of their jewels and costumes. She had always had a penchant for dark, good-looking men; 'the handsome Rao of Kutch, most beautifully dressed,' she enthused, 'really he and his brother were like a dream . . .' At yet another dinner, wearing a dress embroidered with roses, thistles and shamrocks and her 'large diamonds', she listened to her eldest son, the Prince of Wales, propose the health of the sovereigns and royal guests crowded around the table.

  The climax of these royal celebrations was the Thanksgiving Service in Westminster Abbey on 21 June. It was a day of brilliant sunshine; the longest of the year. The vast crowds lining the route had the satisfaction of seeing almost every member of the Sovereign's extensive family pass by. In the first procession drove the Queen's royal guests, not quite all of whom were her relations, but the second procession was made up entirely of her direct descendants. It needed ten carriages to accommodate her daughters, daughters-in-law, granddaughters, granddaughter-in-law and their ladies. They were followed by the men of the family. Splendidly mounted, glittering with gold, their accoutrements all a-jingle and their plumes all a-flutter, the Queen's three sons, five sons-in-law, nine grandsons and grandsons-in-law trotted by. It was a marvellous sight. Her eldest son, the forty-five-year-old Prince of Wales, was in the bright red tunic and plumed helmet of a British Field-Marshal; his eldest son, Prince Albert Victor, was in the blue and gold of the 10th Hussars; his second son, Prince George, was in the blue of a Lieutenant of the Royal Navy. Others were in scarlet and still others in green. Most spectacular of all was the German Crown Prince Frederick, husband of the Queen's eldest daughter Vicky. In his white uniform, silver cuirass and great eagle-crowned helmet, he looked, it was said, like 'one of the legendary heroes embodied in the creations of Wagner'. Dear Fritz, noted the Queen less poetically, 'looked so handsome and so well'.

  The princes were followed by an escort of Indian cavalry, exotically turbaned, and then came the open landau drawn by six cream-coloured horses, in which sat the Queen, her eldest daughter Vicky, German Crown Princess, and her daughter-in-law Alexandra, Princess of Wales.

  Whereas the Crown Princess looked attractive and the Princess of Wales superb (in cream and gold brocade with a toque of creamy-pink roses), the Queen looked hardly different from her everyday self. She had flatly refused to wear her robes of state for the great occasion. When the Princess of Wales, on behalf of the Queen's children, had tried to get the Queen to change her mind, she had been given short shrift. 'I was never so snubbed in all my life,' complained Alexandra. So the Queen drove to the Abbey in a dress of black satin, relieved by the blue Garter ribbon, several glittering orders and a few lace panels. One concession she did make, and this was in the matter of her bonnet. For the first time in twenty-five years she forsook a black bonnet for a white one. From a Marie Stuart-shaped brim, set with diamonds, a tuft of white feathers sprouted heavenwards, while a length of white Alencon lace was secured firmly under her chin. It was not notably regal but it was something.

  Through the vociferously acclaiming, lavishly decorated streets the Queen drove to the Abbey. At the door she was met by a cluster of clergymen, all gorgeously robed. She started slowly up the nave to the strains of an overture by Handel. Preceded by the princes of her family and followed by the princesses, she made her way to the red-carpeted dais on which stood the Coronation chair. She was no
t too overwrought to spot various familiar faces in the congregation, but she was spared the sight of her bête noire, Mr Gladstone, 'though he was there'.

  'I sat alone (oh! without my beloved husband, for whom this would have been such a proud day!)' wrote the Queen. But if Prince Albert was not there in person, reminders of him were in no way lacking. They played his Te Deum and they sang his chorale. At the end of the service ('to which all, even the natives of Asia, seemed reverently attentive,' ran one report) the Queen's – and the Prince Consort's – descendants passed before her to pay homage. Her sons, sons-in-law, grandsons and grandsons-in-law bowed and kissed her hand; her daughters, daughters-in-law, granddaughters and granddaughter-in-law curtsied and were embraced by her.

  'It was a moving moment,' noted the Queen, 'and tears were in some of their eyes.'

  For many, the sight of the old Queen embracing the members of her family was the most touching of the day's events. 'What Queen in the world has been so rich in offspring and has such good cause to rejoice in her many children?' asked one effusive observer. 'She was perfectly justified in kissing them all round. . . .'

  The service over, the royal family drove once more in triumph through the streets. At the Palace the Queen thankfully exchanged her bonnet for her cap and distributed Jubilee brooches to the members of her family. Not until four in the afternoon did they sit down to luncheon. The rest of the day passed in a haze of presentations, greetings, speeches and gift-giving, and ended in the flash and shimmer of fireworks. Exhausted, the Queen slipped away to bed.

  'Felt truly grateful that all had passed off so admirably, and this never-to-be-forgotten day will always leave the most gratifying and heart-stirring memories behind,' she wrote.

  She had every reason to be gratified. Not only had her Golden Jubilee been a triumphant national event but it had emphasized her role as the head of a great royal clan. More than anything, Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee was a family affair. Her Diamond Jubilee, ten years hence, was to have an altogether different atmosphere: it would be grander, more imperial, more stridently nationalistic. Then she would be hailed as the Queen-Empress of a mighty Empire; now she was being greeted as a European sovereign, head of a cosmopolitan family, the Grandmama of Europe.