Grandmama of Europe: The Crowned Descendants of Queen Victoria

by Theo Aronson

  This he certainly did. He not only lived and entertained in royal style but he performed many of those thankless royal duties which the Queen refused to carry out. He laid foundation stones, he opened schools, he presented prizes, he inaugurated exhibitions, he presided at dinners. He paid a highly successful state visit to India. All this was done with dignity, aplomb and apparent enjoyment. Particularly after his recovery from a serious illness in 1871, he was extremely popular with the majority of his mother's subjects. A great many people admired him for leading exactly the sort of life they would have led had they been as rich as he.

  But it was, for all that, an unsatisfactory life. Bertie was just frittering away such talents as he had. Quite simply, he did not have enough to do; nor, while his mother was alive, was there the slightest chance of his being given anything to do.

  This exclusion of her heir from the more serious business of the monarchy had not always been the Queen's intention. During his infancy, Bertie's parents had resolved to initiate him into affairs of state as early as possible; they had been determined to show every confidence in him, to encourage him to work beside them. Had Bertie shown anything like his sister Vicky's abilities, Victoria and Albert would no doubt have implemented their resolution. When he did not, they kept postponing his political initiation. Once Prince Albert died, his broken-hearted widow was determined that no one, especially not Bertie, would play the political role that her husband had once done.

  Thus the Prince of Wales was kept in almost complete ignorance of the business of government. His mother very rarely rook him into her confidence and almost never consulted him. He must not see anything, she warned her Ministers, of 'a very confidential nature'. There must be no 'independent communication' between him and the government. For almost thirty years she refused to trust him with the Prince Consort's special golden key to the Foreign Office boxes. Even the most trifling decision concerning her heir's public activities had to be vetted by her. Any move on his part to involve himself in affairs of state was severely slapped down. 'He has no right to meddle,' the Queen would say.

  And so Victoria, who would have been the first to claim that the Devil found work for idle hands, kept Bertie's hands resolutely idle.

  Sometimes, in a desperate effort to involve the heir in the workings of the monarchy, a Prime Minister would induce the Queen to send the Prince a few unimportant state papers, or at least a précis of what was happening. In 1872, Gladstone came up with a more definite proposal. In a series of long-winded letters to the Queen, he pointed out the necessity of giving the Prince some active, useful employment. Could he not become the Queen's permanent representative in Ireland? That way he would learn something of the art of constitutional monarchy.

  The Queen would have none of it. The Prince of Wales, she said, would never agree to it (in this she was correct); nor could any such artificially created position imbue him with the necessary sense of responsibility. Only when he was forced to assume full responsibility – when, in other words, he became King – would he tackle the job seriously.

  In this, too, was Queen Victoria correct. The Prince of Wales was to make an admirable King, but he was to arrive at this goal by a very different route from the one mapped out by his exacting parents.

  It was an impossible situation. Because the Queen considered her son to be so frivolous and incompetent, she refused to give him any employment; because he was given no employment, he became all the more frivolous and incompetent. A man of considerable diplomatic gifts, exceptional vitality and great panache, the Prince of Wales might have been of real service to his mother. On the other hand, the Queen was no fool; she had very good reason for her attitude. The defects of the Prince of Wales's character were not entirely due to his father's system of education or his mother's lack of confidence. He was feckless, he was self-indulgent, he was indiscreet. And every now and then yet another scandal, or another indiscretion, would serve to justify his mother's intransigent behaviour.

  Yet she was fond of him. As she gradually overcame her conviction that he had been responsible for her husband's death, she began to appreciate his many good points. 'Really dear Bertie is so full of good and amiable qualities,' she wrote to Vicky on one occasion, 'that it makes one forget and overlook much that one would wish different.' And as the years passed, and the Prince Consort's shadow grew fainter, so did she come nearer to accepting her son for what he was. There were even times when – as frequently happened, he was in trouble – she gave him her active support. For this he was always very grateful.

  Although he never mastered his feeling of inferiority in her presence, Bertie was no less fond of the Queen. As often as they found themselves at loggerheads over his way of life, they were in agreement on other matters. Both, for instance, were ardent imperialists, very conscious of the importance of upholding British prestige throughout the world. By the 1880s, with Britain the leading nation on earth, this shared imperialism was a very strong bond indeed. These were the years in which the Queen, having been coaxed out of her long seclusion by the romantic Disraeli, was becoming increasingly conscious of her role as ruler of a mighty Empire – Victoria Regina et Imperatrix. To the magnificence of her estate, the Prince of Wales was equally alive. Indeed, for much of the time and especially during Jubilee Year, a great deal of Queen Victoria's glory was reflected on him.

  The Golden Jubilee brought mother and son as close as they had ever been. On New Year's Day, 1887, he presented her with the first of the specially designed Jubilee inkstands: an imperial crown which opened to reveal her portrait inside the lid. Victoria pronounced it 'very pretty and useful'. Throughout the celebrations the Prince of Wales bore the major part of the burden of entertaining what the Queen called 'the royal mob'. Later that year, in his mother's presence, he unveiled a Jubilee statue of her on the Balmoral estate.

  The Queen's comments on her son's visit to Balmoral to perform this ceremony have a strangely touching quality.

  'An early luncheon,' she wrote in her Journal, 'after which dear Bertie left, having had a most pleasant visit, which I think he enjoyed and said so repeatedly. He had not stayed alone with me, excepting for a couple of days in May '68, at Balmoral, since he married! He is so kind and affectionate that it is a pleasure to be a little quietly together.'

  3

  If the Prince of Wales, in Queen Victoria's estimation, was an unsatisfactory heir, his eldest son, Prince Albert Victor, was an infinitely worse one. Of all the Queen's grandsons, not one was less promising than the young man whom it was assumed would one day sit upon her throne.

  The five Wales children – two boys and three girls – had been raised in the most informal and indulgent fashion. This was due, partly, to the Prince of Wales's determination that their childhood should in no way resemble his and, to an even greater extent, to the personality of the Princess of Wales. Not only would she have been temperamentally incapable of subjecting them to a rigorous course of training but she encouraged them to remain as childlike as possible as long as possible. So enduringly youthful, in both looks and personality, herself, the Princess was determined that they should not grow up too quickly. She might be socially accomplished and transcendentally smart, but to Princess Alexandra nothing was more important than her children. They were the centre of her world. Increasingly cut off from public affairs by her deafness, her domesticity and her immaturity, the Princess devoted herself to her children.

  And they, in turn, adored her. To the Wales children, their mother – so gay, so spontaneous, so impractical and unpunctual – was always 'darling Motherdear': a delightful companion, hardly more grownup than themselves. It was as though mother and children lived in a make-believe world, in a state of eternal youth. Long after their childhood was over, the Wales children still spoke and behaved like adolescents. One of the princesses celebrated her nineteenth birthday with a children's party; in manhood, the second son would sign himself 'little Georgie'.

  By no stretch of the imagination, ho
wever, could the blame for the backwardness of the eldest son, Prince Albert Victor, be laid at Princess Alexandra's door. Prince Eddy, as he was called in the family, had been subnormal from infancy. It was not that he was an imbecile; he was merely slow-witted. As a boy he had shown himself to be apathetic, listless, slow to react and quite unable to concentrate his attention on anything for long. His one positive characteristic being a devotion to his younger, and brighter, brother Prince George, it had been decided to keep the two princes together as much as possible. Some of George's liveliness was bound to rub off on Eddy. It did not. They spent years together at sea but neither that, nor a spell at Cambridge, could shake Eddy out of his lethargy. In one despairing report after another, his long-suffering tutors complained that there was simply nothing to be done with the Prince; 'he hardly knows the meaning of the words to read', wailed one of them.

  After Cambridge, Prince Eddy joined the 10th Hussars and although the recreations – and dissipations – of army life held more appeal for him than study, he remained abnormally immature.

  During Jubilee Year, Prince Eddy turned twenty-three. The Queen's complaint that the Wales children seemed to her 'a puny breed' was certainly justified in Prince Eddy's case. Not even his spectacularly flattering Hussar uniform nor his jauntily waxed moustache could make him look anything other than an indolent weakling. He was thin and pale, with an extraordinarily long neck and a vacant expression. His whole being was notable for an extreme lassitude; his air was that of a sleepwalker. With the best will in the world, his superior officers could find very little to say in his favour. They could only hope that he would prove to be a late maturer. With each passing year the hope became more remote.

  Yet the Prince had his good points. He was a gentle, well-mannered young man, with an ability to charm and a complete lack of arrogance. He meant well. 'Kind' and 'dear' were the adjectives his family most frequently used when referring to him. Indeed, to some women his languid air was very attractive, almost seductive. His grandmother, Queen Victoria, treated him with great sympathy. He might be retarded but she appreciated him for his goodness, his simplicity and his sense of duty towards his parents and herself. Only later was she to learn something of his sexual escapades.

  Prince Eddy's limitations would not have mattered nearly so much had he not been heir to the British throne. What sort of king was he likely to make? Anyone further removed from Prince Albert's ideal of an intelligent, enlightened, influential and unsullied monarch would have been difficult to imagine.

  Very different from the lackadasical Prince Eddy was his brother, the twenty-two-year-old Prince George. At the age of twelve, as a lively, intelligent and good-natured boy, he had joined the Navy. Since then he had spent almost all his life at sea. His character had formed early and by now he was already the steady, straightforward and conscientious person that he was to remain throughout his life. Unimaginative and unintellectual Prince George might have been, but the discipline of life in the Navy had incalculated him with one very valuable characteristic – a strong sense of duty. In this he was very much a Coburg.

  Alone amongst Princess Alexandra's children, Prince George had inherited something of her good looks. Blue-eyed, suntanned, with a neatly trimmed nautical beard and moustache, he had none of the pallid, inbred appearance of his brother and sisters. Yet he, no less than the rest of them (and despite his more resolved personality) was still very much enmeshed in his mother's web. He adored her and she him. To read the letters between mother and son is scarcely to believe that she was the middle-aged future Queen of England and he a fully adult naval officer. How he wished, he wrote to her at this time, that he were going with her to Sandringham for the holidays. It almost made him cry to think of it. 'I wonder who will have that sweet little room of mine, you must go and see it sometimes and imagine that your little Georgie dear is living in it.'

  It was no wonder that Queen Victoria could pronounce the young Prince to be 'so dear and amiable'.

  The three Wales princesses – Louise, Victoria and Maud – had something of their brother Eddy's negative quality. Indeed, it was difficult to tell them apart. All three were pale and narrow-skulled with protruding eyes and tightly curled poodle fringes. Invariably, they were identically dressed. Diffident in public and boisterous in private, they had all suffered from the same happy-go-lucky system of education. Even their conversation had a similarity. They always talked, claimed one of their cousins, about people as 'the dear little thing' or 'the poor little man'. They always 'spoke in a minor key, en sourdine. It gave a special quality to all talks with them, and gave me a strange sensation, as though life would have been very wonderful and everything very beautiful if it had not been so sad.' Their rooms were like those of little children: jam-packed with an accumulation of tiny, pretty, dainty but far from aesthetic objets – miniatures, shells, little vases, diminutive paintings, tiny china ornaments. The three of them were sometimes referred to as 'the whispering Wales girls'.

  All in all, the Wales family could not have afforded Queen Victoria much satisfaction. Amongst the lot of them, Prince George was the only one to show some promise. And he, unfortunately, was not in the direct line of succession. It was thus not surprising that the Queen, in thinking of her heirs – the dissolute Prince of Wales and the slow-witted Prince Eddy – sometimes despaired of the British monarchy outlasting her lifetime.

  CHAPTER THREE

  'My OWN dear Empress Victoria'

  1

  No one, seeing the fifty-five-year-old German Crown Prince Frederick riding in Queen Victoria's Jubilee cavalcade, would have imagined that he was seriously ill. So tall, so manfully bearded and spectacularly uniformed, Fritz looked the very picture of royal dignity and radiant health. Even the Queen, who knew that something was wrong, remarked on how well and handsome he looked. Indeed, Fritz himself had no real appreciation of the gravity of his condition.

  His illness had first manifested itself during the previous winter. He had suffered from a persistent soreness in his throat. By March 1887 his personal physician, unable to alleviate the Prince's sufferings, had decided to call in a specialist, Professor Karl Gerhardt. Dr Gerhardt discovered a small growth on the left vocal cord. Having tried, without success, to remove the growth, Gerhardt advised the Crown Prince to take a holiday. He went to Bad Ems and from here the Crown Princess was able to assure Queen Victoria that Fritz was improving and that when, on his return to Berlin, the growth was removed, he would be quite well again.

  She was soon disillusioned. On re-examining the Prince's throat, a panel of six leading German doctors decided that the growth was cancerous. They advised an immediate operation. This would involve the splitting of the larynx. Even if the patient survived the operation, he would probably be rendered permanently voiceless. Before going ahead, however, the doctors suggested that yet another specialist be consulted. They decided on one of Europe's leading authorities on diseases of the throat – an Englishman, Dr Morell Mackenzie. He was requested to come as soon as possible to Berlin.

  Sick with worry, Vicky backed up the doctors' telegram to Mackenzie with one of her own to the Queen. Would her mother see that the doctor set off at once. 'Greatly distressed,' wrote the Queen in her Journal, 'and cannot bear to think of poor darling Vicky's anguish and sorrow.'

  Dr Mackenzie arrived in Berlin on 20 May 1887. He examined the Crown Prince's throat and sent several fragments of the growth to a German pathologist for examination. The report was negative. He therefore advised against the operation and suggested that the Crown Prince come to England for treatment. He should be able to cure him, reckoned Mackenzie, in a matter of months.

  The Crown Princess was exultant. 'We are much more hopeful and reassured about Fritz's throat now,' she told her mother. The suspense, she admitted, had been agonizing, 'but I own the hope held out is a very great relief, and as I am sanguine by nature, I easily cling to it. . . ."

  The German doctors were distinctly less sanguine. Still suspecting th
at the growth was cancerous, they could not agree on what should be done. Some advised the operation; others suggested that Mackenzie's proposed treatment be carried out in Berlin; Dr Gerhardt thought it would be best if Mackenzie treated the patient himself. 'I now leave it to them to settle their minds amongst themselves and shall not interfere with them,' wrote Vicky. 'Fritz ought to be under [Mackenzie's] care and we must see how we can carefully effect this.'

  She needed to be careful. A great many people at court, kept in ignorance of the seriousness of the Crown Prince's illness (he had no very clear idea himself) considered it quite wrong that he should think of absenting himself from Germany at a time when the health of his ninety-year-old father was far from good. Others were only too quick to say that the Crown Princess was anxious to whisk him away to her beloved England where he, who had always been putty in her hands, could be manipulated more easily.

  But contrary to popular belief, she could not, and did not, simply insist that the Crown Prince go to England to be treated by Mackenzie. Only when Dr Gerhardt, albeit reluctantly, gave his permission, could she think of doing so. Queen Victoria's Jubilee celebrations provided them with the excuse. Fritz, who had a taste for ceremonial, was longing to represent the Kaiser at the Thanksgiving Service in Westminster Abbey. And the fact that his son, the officious Prince Wilhelm, was already suggesting that he take his father's place, acted as an added incentive.