Grandmama of Europe: The Crowned Descendants of Queen Victoria

by Theo Aronson

  Thus it was that when Prince George of Wales made his tentative proposal of marriage, the Duchess of Edinburgh did nothing towards encouraging her daughter Marie to accept it. Although the Duke of Edinburgh was all in favour of the match (it was the dream of his life, maintained Queen Victoria) the sixteen-year-old Missy – influenced by her anglophobe Russian mother and encouraged by her anglophobe German governess – turned down her cousin's offer. Prince George married Princess May instead and gained himself a wife who was just about as different from Princess Marie as it was possible to be.

  Even at sixteen Missy was a romantic. She was an emotional, impressionable, impulsive girl, given to what she, in her always selfconscious way, referred to as 'ecstasies'. There seem to have been few things that did not bring forth some rapturous reaction; she appears to have been in an almost permanent state of enchantment. She delighted no less in the scent of violets beneath her window than in some spectacular scene in her mother's Russia – 'the fantastic, gorgeous Russia, almost Asiatic in splendour, a pageant of might and power' as she so characteristically described it.

  She was, she claims blandly, a great 'lover of beauty'; not only of her own, which was considerable, but of everything around her. She had 'an irresistible instinct, or shall I call it urge, towards beauty. I must have something about me that satisfies my eye . . .' Yet the more beautiful the object, the more likely was that very eye to spill over with tears. 'If I look hard enough at anything in this world,' runs one of her singular observations, 'it brings tears into my eyes.'

  That the Duchess of Edinburgh was anxious to marry off this impetuous and passionate creature is understandable. The Duchess had, moreover, very definite views on the advisability of princesses marrying young. 'When they are over twenty,' she used to say, 'they begin to think too much and to have too many ideas of their own which complicate matters.' It did not take much insight to appreciate that a girl such as Marie would very soon be developing a great many strong ideas of her own; it would be as well to arrange a marriage before her character was too well formed.

  With this in mind, the Duchess of Edinburgh took the sixteen-year-old Missy and her younger sister Victoria Melita (who was known by another of those arch family nicknames – Ducky) to a royal house-party at Wilhelmshöhe, near Cassel, in the autumn of 1891.

  Presiding over the royal gathering at Wilhelmshöhe was yet another of Queen Victoria's grandchildren: Marie's first cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II. (His mother, the Empress Frederick, and Marie's father, the Duke of Edinburgh, were sister and brother.) Missy, for all her theatricality and self-satisfaction, was no fool, and her powers of observation were always acute. On her cousin the Kaiser, she had some very telling remarks to make. 'William was, of course, much older than we were,' she wrote, 'and though an interesting personality, he was not a favourite cousin. He was no doubt full of good feelings but his attitude towards his family in general was brusque and at times boisterous.' He did not, she went on to say, 'exactly intimidate you, but he "put your back up" the moment he addressed you in his overloud and deliberately [aggressive] manner; you felt all prickly with opposition, there was something about him that roused antagonism'.

  It was not, however, in order to be patronized by Kaiser Wilhelm II that Princess Marie had been brought to Wilhelmshöhe. Among the guests was Crown Prince Ferdinand of Romania. He was a good-looking young man but with a shy, diffident manner and a nervous laugh. He was known, inevitably, as Nando. Whether or not the twenty-five-year old Prince knew that he had been brought to Wilhelmshöhe to meet Princess Marie is uncertain; what is certain is that Missy herself knew nothing of her mother's plans. 'In those days,' she says, 'girls were kept in ignorance of the marriage plots of their parents.' Prince Ferdinand went out of his way to be amiable although, surprisingly, the one topic the two of them never discussed was Romania. The young Princess was not even too sure where it was.

  They met again, the vivacious Missy and the unpretentious Nando, in Berlin later that year and, once more, the following spring, in Munich. 'The young prince was excruciatingly shy and laughed more than ever to mask his timidity,' says Marie. 'Curiously enough, it was his extraordinary timidity which attracted me most; there was something so young, so suppressedly eager and just a little helpless about him. It gave you a longing to put him at his ease, to make him comfortable; it aroused your motherly feelings, in fact you wanted to help him.'

  This was all very well, but it was not love. Not, that is, on Missy's side, although she assures us that Nando was passionately in love with her. None the less, encouraged by her mother's 'happy, expectant face', Princess Marie accepted Prince Ferdinand's halting proposal; or, as she so flamboyantly puts it, 'I just said "Yes" . . . and with that "Yes" I sealed my fate, opened the door upon life . . .'

  The engagement was announced early in June 1892 at the Neues Palais at Potsdam, and celebrated with a huge banquet given by the Kaiser. 'I was excited, believed that I was very happy,' noted the slightly bemused Missy, 'but beneath all the noise, glamour and glory there was a feeling of angoisse . . .'

  She was not alone in her distress. Her father, for one, was not at all happy about the engagement. It had been contrived while he was stationed at Devonport in England and his permission not sought until it was too late. 'Papa', admitted Marie, 'said very little, though his face was rather glum.'

  Grandmama had rather more to say. 'I have been expecting to get a telegram from you about Missy's engagement, which has us all by surprise,' wrote Queen Victoria to the Empress Frederick, 'it seems to have come very rapidly to a climax. The Country [Romania] is very insecure and the Society – dreadful – and she is a mere Child, and quite inexperienced . . .'

  Victoria admitted, however, to hearing that Crown Prince Ferdinand was 'very nice'.

  Soon, the Queen would be able to judge for herself for, as the apprehensive Marie says, 'she would have to approve of my future husband; none of her granddaughters married without her approval.'

  2

  The Romanian royal family was German. Indeed, like Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, the Romanian royalties were Hohenzollerns. They sprang from the Catholic branch of the German imperial family – the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringens, who lived in a picturesque old castle in southern Germany, near the source of the Danube. In the year 1866, one of the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen princes had been elected King of the recently created country of Romania. At the time of Princess Marie's engagement this Hohenzollern still reigned there as King Carol I.

  King Carol of Romania was a short, dignified, self-assured man, luxuriantly bearded, hook-nosed and eagle-eyed. His manner was polite but cold, cordial but masterful. He had an unshakable sense of duty. Very different was his wife, Queen Elisabeth of Romania, for she was that most bizarre of nineteenth-century royalties, the romantic poet-queen, who wrote under the name of Carmen Sylva. As this ill-assorted pair had no children, they had adopted, as the heir to the Romanian throne, the son of one of the King's brothers: this was the present Crown Prince of Romania, the modest and unassuming Ferdinand, who was to marry Princess Marie of Edinburgh.

  Unbeknown to the starry-eyed Missy at the time of her engagement was the fact that her fiancé was in disgrace. Not long before, Nando had scandalized royal circles – not because of any licentious behaviour – but by falling in love with a commoner; and not only by falling in love with her but by proposing to marry her.

  That this should have happened is understandable. Life, in the Romanian capital of Bucharest, had been no bed of roses for the young Prince Ferdinand. He had arrived there direct from the military academy at Potsdam when hardly more than a boy and had at once been plunged into a rigorous course of training by his uncle, the King. Faced, on the one hand, by the unsmiling, exacting, hard-working King Carol (Der Onkel as he called him) and the dreamy, warm-hearted and theatrical Carmen Sylva on the other, the young man had been drawn to the latter. In her spell-binding company, his hesitancies, deficiencies and inferiorities were much less apparent.

>   Nor was this the only reason for Nando's addiction to her company. The Queen delighted in surrounding herself with pretty girls; to their adoring and uncritical eyes, this silver-haired queen in her trailing draperies was, as Missy once wrote, 'the soul of poetry, the Muse, the inspirer'.

  Her favourite amongst these girls was a dark and hot-blooded beauty by the name of Hélène Vacarescu. The Queen never moved without Hélène. In 1890, the two of them had even paid a visit to Queen Victoria at Balmoral. Victoria had been enchanted by Carmen Sylva ('a wonderful and charming personality, unlike other people') and hardly less impressed by Hélène ('a bright little person of twenty-four, a poetess, very oriental-looking'). The Romanian Queen had treated the English Queen's court to one of her famous readings of her own work – a Greek play in German: 'Many of course could not understand . . .' noted Queen Victoria, 'but all were interested.' Mlle Vacarescu, said Victoria, 'helps the Queen in her writings' and her own work had been 'crowned by l'Académie fraçaise – a very rare distinction for so young a person'.

  It was with this talented favourite that Prince Ferdinand fell in love. The Romanian Queen, far from resenting the romance, actively encouraged it. The idea of it fired her fevered imagination. The lovely Hélène, her protégée, would lead this awkward young man to greatness: she would mould him, transform him. She would one day be for him a glorious Queen. Caught up in what was described as 'an atmosphere of palpitating romance', Carmen Sylva 'idealized the lovers, she threw them together, encouraged, stimulated, helped, gloried them; caring little for the morrow, she lived entirely for the excitement of the moment . . . .'

  The moment did not last very long. When the Crown Prince, plucking up courage, announced to his uncle, the King, his intention of marrying Mlle Vacarescu, he was given short shrift. Once King Carol regained control of his temper, he gave Ferdinand a choice: the throne with its attendant advantages or Mlle Vacarescu without them. Ferdinand chose the throne. The Queen, her dream – and nerves – shattered, fled to her mother's home at Neu Wied, while the unhappy Nando was packed off in search of a more suitable bride.

  He found her, of course, at Wilhelmshöhe, as King Carol and the girl's mother, the Duchess of Edinburgh, had planned he would. 'But I did not know,' protested Missy afterwards, 'that he was supposed to be travelling about with a broken heart.'

  Once the Crown Prince had become engaged to Princess Marie, he was obliged to introduce her to the architect of his earlier romance, the poet-queen, Carmen Sylva. As the Queen was still in quasi-banishment, it was to Neu Wied that Marie, with her mother and sister Ducky, had to go and meet her.

  Carmen Sylva was ready for them. Indeed she had set the scene for this momentous meeting with customary care. 'To her poetical temperament acting came quite naturally . . .' wrote Marie, 'to her the world was a vast stage, she saw all things as a series of scenes out of a drama in which she had the leading role; and today, this receiving of me who was usurping the place of the girl she had chosen, was drama indeed. Innocent though I was, I was the rival; the winning rival, and that wide gesture of welcome was on her part a gesture of heroic abnegation: she felt it as such and she meant to act it magnificently, which she did.'

  While making allowance for Marie's own tendency towards the dramatizing of every situation, there is no doubt that Carmen Sylva was fully alive to the potential of this particular scene.

  The Queen was lying in a large, low bed which took up the greater part of a small room (she had a passion for tiny, oddly-shaped rooms) which was lit by a skylight. The whole impression was of whiteness. White light, reflecting the snow outside, poured through the skylight onto the white bed with its mounds of soft, white pillows. Carmen Sylva was dressed all in white, her hair was white, her skin was white, her teeth – as she smiled with ineffable sweetness at the timid Marie – were magnificently white. The only colour came from her deep blue eyes, and they, says Marie, were full of pain. Calling the girl 'lieb Kindchen', she clasped her in her arms and gazed at her in a way that Marie could only describe as 'hungry'. In no time the impressionable girl had fallen completely under the older woman's spell. 'She was a romantic personage,' admitted Missy, 'and I loved romance.

  'She was so fascinating, so charming, the things she said were so sweet, so touching; her voice was music, everything was in keeping with the poetical atmosphere emanating from her . . . .'

  They spoke of the Queen's painting (she was busy on a vivid flower study at the time), of faraway Romania, of Marie's future life there, of Nando and of how the Queen had tried to bring some happiness into his life. On this last topic, the Queen was careful not to be too specific; Missy knew nothing of the Hélène Vacarescu affair.

  Only once was there a pause in Carmen Sylva's effusive flow. This was when Marie's strong-minded mother, embarrassed by the other woman's performance, tried to bring the conversation down to a more matter-of-fact level. But the Queen was having none of it. She had no intention, says Missy, 'of being decoyed from the part she meant to play'. Just for a second the perceptive Princess became aware of an outspoken antagonism between the two older women; 'like flint on steel [this antagonism] seemed to draw sparks'. This slipping of the Queen's mask, or what Marie calls the 'silent passage of arms' lasted hardly any time at all and Carmen Sylva, resuming her charming, if sad-eyed pose, carried on as if nothing had happened.

  'Her voice,' wrote the enraptured Marie, 'was music, but her language often too high-flown for my immature mind; I did not always understand what she was talking about, there was nothing positive I could grasp, it was just music, poetry; her words sank into my brain. A curtain was being lifted, giving me a glimpse into a world unknown to me, where all things had other names, other meanings, an unreal world which only existed while she was talking, and which dissolved like mist when I left her bedside.

  'But she was wonderful, herself a poem, a white apparition, born to be adored.'

  The visit to Queen Victoria was very different.

  Missy, accompanied by her fiancé, went to Windsor with considerably more trepidation that she had to Neu Wied. She knew that her English relations did not really approve of the engagement. Why, when she could have had her cousin Georgie and so have remained in the family, did she choose a foreigner? A foreigner, moreover, who would one day sit on so rickety a throne.

  She need not have been so apprehensive. Grandmama Queen proved extremely sympathetic. Marie tells of the occasion when she, Nando and other members of the family stood waiting for the Queen in the Great Corridor at Windsor. A distant tap, tap of a stick and the rustle of stiff silk preceded the Queen's arrival. She rounded the corner, looking astonishingly small. The Queen's shyness, to those who did not know her well, always came as a surprise. On meeting anyone new, she gave a quick nervous laugh and a little shrug of her shoulders; her smile, 'with teeth small like those of a mouse', was sweet and diffident. She now paused in front of Crown Prince Ferdinand (who was, of course, even more shy than she) and, in her beautifully modulated voice, asked, in German, after his parents. Ferdinand's mother was a Portuguese Infanta – a daughter of Queen Maria da Gloria of Portugal, whose husband had been a Coburg prince. Nando was thus blessed, as Queen Victoria would have regarded it, with some Coburg blood. The Queen told the blushing young man that she always kept a picture of his mother in her private rooms.

  'Sie war so wunderschön,' said the Queen.

  Victoria's comments on Marie were equally generous. 'Missy looked very pretty, and seemed very happy about her engagement,' she wrote.

  That the unsophisticated, German-bred Nando should make a faux pas at Queen Victoria's strange English court was inevitable. As he broke his rolls into his coffee at breakfast on his first morning there, he noticed that he was the only one doing so. The Queen had noticed it as well. Later that day, in the most tactful way possible, she drew his attention to the unacceptability of the custom. 'You must come and breakfast with me in my private apartment,' she said sweetly, 'and then we will break our rolls into our coff
ee together in the good old German fashion.'

  At a later stage during this visit to Windsor, the Queen invited Missy and Ferdinand to her rooms. The Munshi, explained Victoria, was anxious to make the Prince's acquaintance.

  The Munshi was the Queen's current favourite. An Indian, whose real name was Abdul Karim, the Munshi had taken the place of the late John Brown in the Queen's affections. Part personal servant, part secretary, part confidant, the twenty-nine-year-old Munshi held a special and much resented position in the royal household. Having heard that one of the Empress of India's granddaughters had given her hand to a foreign prince, the Munshi had expressed a desire to meet the man; no sooner expressed than fulfilled. That same day Missy and Nando were ushered into the Queen's private drawing-room. Victoria was sitting at her writing desk; all about her the air was sweet with the scent of orange flowers. On an easel beside her was Winterhalter's portrait of Ferdinand's mother. With her shy, captivating smile, the Queen drew the young man's attention to the painting.

  'Wunderschön,' she said.

  'Wunderschön,' repeated the tongue-tied Nando.

  The silence that followed this far from animated exchange was broken by the click of the door handle. A second later the Munshi stood framed in the doorway. He was dressed in gold, with a white turban. Without moving from the doorway, he greeted the young couple by putting one honey-coloured hand to his heart, his lips and his forehead. He neither moved into the room nor spoke.

  Nor did anyone else. No one knew what to do. The Queen sat smiling and hunching her shoulders. Nando simply stared at the golden figure in the doorway. Missy stood in an agony of indecision. The Munshi, as an Oriental, 'manifested no sort of emotion at all, simply waiting in Eastern dignity for those things that were to come to pass'. The impasse was finally broken by the sixteen-year-old Marie. Fractionally less shy than her grandmother and Prince Ferdinand, she moved towards the Munshi and shook him by the hand. Nando followed her example and Victoria, relieved that all was over, dismissed the equally relieved young couple.