Grandmama of Europe: The Crowned Descendants of Queen Victoria

by Theo Aronson

  And that had been that. Prince George, supported by his strong sense of duty and his deep love for his mother, had renounced the pretty Miss Stoner and kept himself available for a more acceptable bride.

  Queen Victoria was not long in suggesting one. Indeed, on the question of Prince George's marriage, his grandmother had 'gone mad' complained the Princess of Wales. Having failed to marry Prince Eddy to either of his cousins, Alicky or Mossy, the Queen tried to interest Prince George in yet another of her grandchildren, Missy. Missy was Princess Marie, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria's son Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. In the year 1891, the fair-haired Princess Marie was only sixteen or, as the disapproving Princess of Wales put it, 'not in long petticoats yet!!!' For Princess Alexandra's taste, the Edinburgh girls were all far too German (they had been educated in Germany) and remembering that her son had once mentioned a preference for an English, as opposed to a German, consort, she made a point of stressing Missy's strong German accent.

  By this time, however, Prince George was not quite so ready to be guided by his mother. German accent or no, the lively, golden-haired Princess Marie was not unattractive to the shy Prince George; he was quite ready to marry her if she would have him. In 1892, some months after Prince Eddy's death, Princess Marie was asked if she would consider marrying Prince George. She would not. She looked upon her cousin as a 'beloved chum' and nothing more. This fact, and the promptings of her violently anglophobe German governess, caused her to reject the proposal. Prince George, who had not really been in love with Missy, was not unduly cast down. 'Poor Georgie . . .' as Queen Victoria put it, 'is not bitter.'

  Prince George might not have been bitter but by now his grandmother was almost frantic. 'She is in a terrible fuss about your marrying,' wrote the Prince of Wales to his son, while the Queen herself confided to her private secretary the fear that something quite dreadful would happen if Prince George did not hurry up and marry. But who was to be his bride? With Missy out of the running, the Queen fell back on the plan which she had formulated soon after poor Prince Eddy's death: Prince George must marry Princess May.

  4

  The idea that Prince George should marry Princess May was welcomed by everyone; by everyone, that is, other than the two principals themselves. It was not that they were indifferent to each other; it was simply that they were both acutely distressed and embarrassed by the situation in which they found themselves. Prince George had been devoted to his brother and even if Princess May had not been in love with Prince Eddy, there was something unseemly about the haste with which she was expected to transfer her affections to Prince George.

  'Aunt Mary Teck was here with May whom I thought very nice indeed,' wrote the Empress Frederick to one of her daughters. 'Her position is most difficult and embarrassing. She is still in mourning for our poor darling Eddy, and the newspapers are constantly writing about her becoming engaged to Georgie, and the whole of the public seem to wish it ardently. Of course not a word has been mentioned in the family, but there is a universal feeling among them all that it is almost sure to take place sooner or later. There is so much for it . . . in many ways she is very much suited for the position, and everyone praises her.'

  During the year that followed Prince Eddy's death, these two modest, somewhat inarticulate young people found themselves being drawn together. At first they shared a common sorrow; later they developed a respect and warmth for each other. When they were apart they exchanged affectionate letters; when they were together, they indulged in friendly, if rather halting, conversation. Not until sixteen months after Prince Eddy's death, in May 1893, did Prince George propose to Princess May.

  Queen Victoria was delighted. 'Let me now say,' she wrote to her grandson, 'how thankful I am that this great and so long and ardently wished for event is settled and I gladly give my consent to what I pray may be for your happiness and for the Country's good. Say everything affectionate to dear May, for whom this must be a trying moment full of such mixed feelings. But she cannot find a better husband than you and I am sure she will be a good, devoted and useful wife to you.'

  The couple were married in the Chapel Royal, St James's Palace, on 6 July 1893, amidst scenes of great splendour. The bride wore a dress of white and silver brocade with a sweeping train and a short lace veil. The bridegroom was in naval uniform. An awkward moment occurred when, by some miscalculation, the Queen was the first, instead of the last, of the royalties to reach the chapel. The bride's mother, the elephantine Duchess of Teck, who had driven in the Queen's carriage, suggested that she wait in a small room to the left of the chapel until such time as everyone else had arrived. The suggestion made, the Duchess of Teck and her lady-in-waiting started up the aisle. But the Queen was having none of it. Coming up behind the Duchess's lady-in-waiting and giving her dress a sharp tug, the Queen announced firmly, 'I am going first.' With that she rapidly overtook the two figures ahead and advanced imperiously to her place by the altar.

  She afterwards admitted that it had been most amusing to be able to watch, for once, all the other royal guests making their entrances.

  The honeymoon was spent in the couple's future home, York Cottage, a cramped and hideous little villa on the Sandringham estate. The Queen regretted the choice of Sandringham ('rather unlucky and sad') and, indeed, the place was heavy with memories of the recent death of Prince Eddy. The Prince's room was kept exactly as he had left it. On his dressing-table were his watch, his brushes and his combs; in a glass-fronted cupboard were his clothes and his photographs. Only the bed looked different. It was now covered with a vast silk Union Jack. 'No one,' said the approving Empress Frederick of this death chamber,' 'is to live in it again.'

  But neither this, nor the ugliness and inconvenience of York Cottage itself, could diminish the Duke of York's enthusiasm for Sandringham. He loved it, and for the following thirty-three years, York Cottage was his country home.

  It was not in one of its poky rooms, however, but in a more spacious one at White Lodge in Richmond Park – the home of Princess May's parents – that her first child was born on 23 June 1894. It was a boy. On the subject of the baby's name, the Queen had very strong ideas. She lost no time in letting Prince George know that she would like the boy to be called Albert. The country, she said, 'would expect that dear Grandpapa's name should follow mine in future to mark the Victorian era'.

  But the Duke of York was not having it. 'Long before our dear child was born, both May and I settled that if it was a boy we should call him Edward, after darling Eddy. This is the dearest wish of our hearts, dearest Grandmama, for Edward is indeed a sacred name to us and one which I know would have pleased him beyond anything; it is in loving remembrance of him and therefore not painful to us.' Of course, he added, one of the boy's names would certainly be Albert, but the first name must be Edward.

  For this particular line of reasoning, the Queen had a ready answer. Dear Eddy's name, she pointed out, had not been Edward: it had been Albert Victor. She was especially anxious, she went on to say, that the name Albert should mark the dynasty; that the kings of the Coburg line – beginning with her own son, Prince Albert Edward and continuing with George himself, one of whose names was Albert – should all bear the name.

  But the young couple held firm and the Queen, who was never quite as intransigent as many imagined, had to give way on the understanding that the name Albert would feature somewhere amongst the others. In fact, it featured second, after the parents' own choice of Edward. By neither of these names, however, was the boy ever known. To his family and friends he was always David. When he finally succeeded to the throne, it was as King Edward VIII.

  But no disagreement over the choice of name could lessen Queen Victoria's delight in this birth of her great-grandson. To her daughter, the Empress Frederick, she pointed out that 'it has never happened in this country that there should be three direct Heirs as well as the Sovereign alive!'

  Some eighteen months later she had further cause for gratification. On
14 December 1895, the Duchess of York gave birth to a second son. The actual date – 14 December – was unfortunate, as this was the anniversary of the death of the Prince Consort in 1861.'The terrible anniversary returned for the thirty-fourth time,' noted the Queen in her Journal that evening, although she was not as put out by the timing as Prince George had feared. 'I have a feeling it may be a blessing for the dear little boy and may be looked upon as a gift from God,' she wrote. After all, had the child not entered this life on the very day that his great-grandfather had entered an 'even greater life' ?

  This time there was no haggling about a name. The baby was christened Albert Frederick Arthur George. In time he, like his grandfather the Prince of Wales, became known as Bertie. Yet, when he succeeded to the throne, on the abdication of his brother Edward VIII, in 1936, it was not as King Albert I, but as King George VI.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sophie of Greece

  1

  With the accession of her eldest son as Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1888, the Empress Frederick withdrew from public life almost completely. This was not, by any means, from choice. As energetic, as idealistic, as politically aware as ever, Vicky would have enjoyed nothing more than to have been involved in affairs of state. But the new Kaiser was having none of it. He simply brushed her aside as being of no consequence. No one consulted her, no one deferred to her, no one confided in her. Her husband's death was not mourned; her own eclipse not regretted.

  'I am completely cast off from the official world;' she complained to her mother Queen Victoria, 'not a single official person ever comes near me and what used to be mein tägliches Brot [my daily bread] has quite ceased. How I used to work for Fritz and how he used to tell me everything! Now I might be buried alive . . . Influence on the course of events I have not the smallest or faintest . . . Now that my experience is perhaps worth something there is a dead silence and one's existence is forgotten.'

  Denied any political outlet, the Empress busied herself with the affairs of her home and family. With almost indecent haste, the Kaiser had turned her out of the Neues Palais, in which she had lived for most of her married life, and had offered her, instead, the use of two inconvenient castles. Not wanting to spend the rest of her days in some state-owned building and so be at the mercy of her son's whims, Vicky decided to build a home of her own. About a year after her husband's death, she bought an estate at Kronberg, near Homburg. Here, in the chestnut-covered Taunus hills, she built a vast country mansion. Ever die Engländerin, she packed her German architect off to England to look at Elizabethan architecture and Victorian plumbing. As a result, there was erected, 'not a Schloss according to German ideas', as she assured her mother, but an outsize country house in the mock-Elizabethan style so dear to English Victorian hearts. In this steep-roofed, many-windowed, multiple-chimneyed home were collected her paintings, her furniture, her objets d'art and her books. She even kept the little scraps of paper on which her voiceless husband had scribbled his last messages. In his memory, she named her home Friedrichshof.

  'His spirit shall rule there,' she declared, 'and in that way alone can his poor, forsaken, broken wife have any peace in her loneliness and sorrow.'

  It was a touching prospect but, with the best will in the world, the Empress could not give herself up entirely to revering the memory of her dead husband. For one thing, she was far too active; for another, she still had three unmarried daughters on her hands. The eldest was Victoria (Moretta) whose projected marriage to Prince Sandro of Battenberg had been opposed with such vehemence by Wilhelm and Bismarck; the second was Sophie, known to the family as Sossie or, in moments of even greater intimacy, as Fozzie; the youngest was Margaret (Mossy) whom Queen Victoria had once suggested as a possible bride for Prince Eddy.

  These three girls, in contrast to the Empress's three eldest children (Kaiser Wilhelm II, Prince Henry and Princess Charlotte) were devoted to their mother. Throughout the months of their father's tragic illness and brief reign, these three princesses had remained by their parents' side, dispelling some of the gloom by their youth, their loyalty and their liveliness. Since Kaiser Frederick Ill's death, they had been a source of great comfort of the Empress. 'My trio', 'my Kleeblatt', 'my three sweet girls', she called them.

  The girls' grandmother, Queen Victoria, was hardly less fond of them. She loved having them to stay with her and took the closest interest in their welfare. To help Moretta recover from her disappointment at not being allowed to marry the dashing Sandro of Battenberg, Queen Victoria invited her to spend a few weeks at Windsor and Balmoral. The calm and well-ordered atmosphere of the English court, together with the sage and sympathetic presence of Grandmama Queen, soon restored Moretta's spirits. To the girl's mother, Queen Victoria had some sound advice to give on the matter of not forcing Moretta into another marriage against her will.

  Of these three granddaughters of Queen Victoria, Sophie was possibly the most engaging. Small-waisted, plump-cheeked, fair-haired and with a fashionably frizzed fringe that was the despair of her mother, she was also the first of the three girls to get married. In the autumn of 1888, when Sophie was eighteen, Crown Prince Constantine, the son of King George I of the Hellenes, asked for her hand. The young couple had known each other for some time. Constantine, the Greek Diadoch or Crown Prince, had studied in Germany – at Leipzig and at Heidelberg – and was now a sub-lieutenant in the 2nd Prussian Guards. He and Sophie seem to have been very much in love.

  Constantine's father, King George I of the Hellenes, was the son of King Christian IX of Denmark. Like so many descendants of the Danish King, Constantine (or Tino, as he was called in the family) was attractive, good-natured and high-spirited. The Empress Frederick assured her mother that he was 'very nice and charming and well brought up'; her only reservations about the match were Tino's youth (he was twenty-one) and the precariousness of the Greek throne.

  Some months after the young couple had become engaged, the Empress took Sophie to Copenhagen on holiday. Staying at Fredensborg Castle with their grandfather, the Danish King, were Tino and some of his brothers. The Empress was thus able to get to know him better. The young Greek princes, she informed the interested Queen Victoria, were 'the finest of young men, and also the most intelligent'. They were also the liveliest. Their simplicity, their cheerfulness, their complete lack of inhibition must have served as a refreshing change from the formality of the German imperial court or the correctness of the English. 'The noise they all made, and the wild romps they had were simply indescribable . . .' reported the Empress. They carried each other, they flung each other about, they 'seemed happier and to enjoy themselves more thoroughly than children of five or six'.

  It was no wonder that pretty Princess Sophie, who had spent the last few years in an atmosphere of such Sturm und Drang, was taken with the blond and square-jawed Tino, whom the Empress described as 'a young Hercules'.

  The match between Tino and Sophie even satisfied Kaiser Wilhelm. After all, it meant that his sister would one day be Queen of the Hellenes. With his capacity for self-deception, Wilhelm managed to convince himself that it was he who had arranged it – for reasons of state. With one masterly stroke he had united five ruling houses: those of Germany, Britain, Greece, Denmark and Russia. Was the bride not the sister of the German Kaiser and granddaughter of the Queen of England? Was the bridegroom not the grandson of the King of Denmark, the son of the King of the Hellenes and the nephew of the Tsaritsa of Russia? Wilhelm had every reason to be satisfied.

  The wedding, in Athens on 27 October 1889, was one of those splendid late nineteenth-century royal jamborees; a coming together of that interrelated crowd that Queen Victoria always referred to as the 'Royal Mob' ('than which,' she would add, 'I dislike nothing more.') The sunlit waters of Piraeus were crammed with royal yachts; the summit of the Acropolis was a swarm with sightseeing royalties. Besides the Greek and German royal familes, there were the King and Queen of Denmark, the Tsarevich of Russia and, representing the bride's grandmother,
the Prince and Princess of Wales. The weather was perfect, sunny but not too hot, and there was no wind to coat the city with dust from the Plain of Attica.

  The Prince of Wales's yacht, Osborne, was escorted by the entire British Mediterranean fleet. This afforded the Kaiser, whom Queen Victoria had recently made an honorary admiral, the ideal opportunity to air his views on his grandmother's Navy. At an official luncheon aboard the Dreadnought, he warned his hosts that their Mediterranean fleet was far too weak. This uncalled-for advice he followed up with a lengthy memorandum on the state of Britain's Navy; the fleet, he instructed his grandmother, 'must be reinforced'. Bertie, not allowing himself to be annoyed at his nephew's officious behaviour, merely assured Queen Victoria that 'Willy' had been in 'high good humour' and that, for once, there had been no contretemps.

  The wedding itself was a spectacular affair. The royalties, ablaze with jewels and orders, drove in open carriages (hastily borrowed from the wealthier bourgeoisie of the town) through the sunbright streets to the new Greek cathedral. The theatricality of the Orthodox ceremony – the candles, the crowns, the bearded and mitred bishops – was offset by the simplicity of the service, in a specially arranged Protestant chapel, which followed it. Princess Sophie wore an elaborate dress of white and silver with a long, lavishly embroidered train. Because her bridal veil was nowhere to be found, she was obliged to wear a simpler one, of tulle. 'My darling Sophie looked so sweet and grave and calm . . .' reported the Empress to Queen Victoria. 'How much I thought of you and dear Papa and my wedding when I saw the dear young people standing at the altar. . . .'