Grandmama of Europe: The Crowned Descendants of Queen Victoria

by Theo Aronson

  Yet King Constantine was spared the worst of the vilification; that was aimed at Queen Sophie.

  As the sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Sophie was in an invidious position. Once before, after the disastrous war against Turkey in 1897, she had experienced the sudden and unreasoning hatred of a certain section of the Greek people. But that had been as nothing compared with the accusations now flung at her. In the eyes of her critics she was a fanatically pro-German, hard-hearted virago, determined to force her weak-willed husband into fighting for the Kaiser.

  No story about her was too bizarre to be believed. She would only speak German, they said, not Greek; after Lord Kitchener had visited the King she forced her way into the room to counteract 'whatever impression favourable to the Entente might have been left' on her husband's irresolute mind; she had a private cable installed at Tatoi by which she could communicate with German submarines; Constantine's near-fatal illness of 1915 was due to the fact that, during the course of a disagreement between them on the question of Greece joining Germany, Sophie had grabbed a dagger and stabbed him in the chest.

  One of her most virulent critics was George Mélas, the secretary who, because of his disapproval of King Constantine's policy of neutrality, left his service to become an ardent supporter of Venizelos. In a book published after the war, Mélas vilified the royal couple in no uncertain terms. According to his somewhat implausible theory, the outbreak of hostilities changed Sophie from the a-political Queen of the Hellenes into a power-hungry German princess. 'I never forget,' he quotes her as saying before the war, 'that I am Queen of Greece first and a German princess next.' But how profound, he exclaims, was the change that followed. 'Queen Sophie completely forgot that she was Queen of the Greeks. She bethought herself only of the fact that she was a German, and the Kaiser's sister into the bargain. She remembered her duty as a princess of Germany, she forgot her duty as a Queen.'

  Yet even Mélas was forced to admit that the widely believed rumour that Sophie, in the course of a pro-German tirade, had stabbed her husband in the chest, was nonsense. Throughout the King's long illness (which was pleurisy) she nursed him devotedly. But having admitted that, Mélas goes on to accuse the Queen of several lesser offences. Only those favourable to the German cause were allowed to see the King; only German doctors ('emissaries of the Kaiser') could attend him. Because of his pro-Allied sympathies, she refused to admit the King's brother, Prince George, who had come all the way from Paris, to the sickroom. She so enjoyed wielding power that she minimized the seriousness of her husband's illness and discouraged any talk of their eldest son, the twenty-five-year-old Crown Prince, acting as Regent.

  As Sophie's mother, the Empress Frederick, had been unjustly reviled in Germany during her husband's tragic illness thirty years before, so was Sophie suffering from the slanders of those sympathetic to the Entente cause.

  But if Queen Sophie had ever shown a bias towards any country other than Greece, then that country was undoubtedly England. Her homes looked like English country houses, her home language was English, her children had attended English schools. Time and again she had voiced her admiration for English institutions and English ways. Of all Queen Victoria's continental granddaughters, none moved in a more English atmosphere than she. England, not Germany, had been her second home. 'My beloved England,' she once exclaimed, 'is the one place I love to be in most.'

  On the other hand, between Sophie and her brother the Kaiser there had never been much rapport; they had quarrelled incessantly. So unaffected herself, she had always considered him insufferably ostentatious and ludicrously conceited. Why then, should she suddenly be championing him against England?

  King Constantine's convalescence was slow. For three years after his illness he carried a tube in his back through which a poisonous discharge passed from an incision in his lung. Gradually, this suppurating wound weakened his once powerful physique. According to his brother, Prince Christopher, he 'lost much of his vigour and the capacity for crisp decision that had carried him through so many difficulties in the past. He was no longer master of the situation.' Once so dynamic and impatient, King Constantine became dispirited and lethargic.

  While the King was still in this weakened state, an attempt was made on his life – and on the lives of some of his family.

  The court was living almost continuously at Tatoi at that time. One day, as the royal party was driving out through the trees surrounding the palace to inspect a distant pall of smoke, they suddenly found themselves trapped in a raging, roaring, wind-driven forest fire. With no room to turn the car, they scrambled out and began running back home. However, the King, realizing that some other members of the party who had gone on ahead would be in danger, left the Queen and one of their daughters to make their own way home, and hurried off to help. He was too late. Seventeen members of the court had been burnt to death. With the swiftly spreading flames blazing all about him, he stumbled back to the palace. Here he found the Queen and the princess. He at once packed them off to Athens lest the palace catch fire. The building was saved from the flames, however, by a belt of green trees surrounding it.

  That the fire had been started with the intention of burning the royal family to death there was very little doubt. On the following day the police discovered, to windward of the palace, a row of empty petrol cans.

  With the King having survived the attempt of his life, Venizelos now attempted to undermine his authority. Working hand in glove with the French, the Prime Minister staged a rising in Salonika and set up a Government of National Defence, or Provisional Government, in opposition to the King's government in Athens. On 24 November 1916 Venizelos formally declared war on the Central Powers. With the King still stubbornly refusing to abandon his neutrality, the French attitude became more menacing. The French fleet had been anchored off Athens for some months; now a contingent of troops landed at Pireaus and marched on the capital. When the Greek troops, loyal to the King, resisted, the French ships began bombarding the city. When even these bullying tactics failed to coerce the Greeks into joining them, the Allies applied another method. They imposed a strict blockade. For the following eight months the Greeks all but starved.

  Small wonder that Queen Sophie's cousin, King George V of England, could ask his Prime Minister whether they were 'justified in interfering to this extent in the internal Government of a neutral and friendly country?' He declared himself astonished at the way the French were treating those Greek soldiers who, in refusing to join Venizelos's revolutionary movement, were remaining loyal to their King and government.

  But King Constantine, by now, was little better than a prisoner of the French. 'How weary I am of all these dirty politics!' he wrote to a friend at the time. 'I have periods of disgust and lassitude which almost bring tears to my eyes. . . .'

  Queen Sophie had become even more embittered. To see all her husband's work for Greece ruined and their people hounded and starving for no other reason than they they had wished to remain neutral, appalled her. 'Can Belgium have suffered more at German hands?' she would ask.

  3

  While Queen Sophie of the Hellenes was being denounced by the Western Allies, her cousin Queen Marie of Romania was being acclaimed. For two years after the outbreak of the war Romania, like Greece, remained neutral. But whereas neutral Greece was being reigned over by a king whose wife was suspected of harbouring pro-German sympathies, King Ferdinand of Romania was known to have a wife who was passionately pro-British. And while King Constantine was merely accused of being influenced by his wife, it was generally accepted that Queen Marie of Romania led her husband by the nose.

  She herself always denied this. It was simply not in her nature, she protests blandly, to dominate others. Her husband, she none the less forces herself to admit, was of a retiring disposition, slow to make up his mind and not fond of asserting himself. She, on the other hand, was quite different. He therefore turned to her for encouragement and advice. 'Owing to having been too long subjected and
oppressed [by the late King Carol]' she explains, 'King Ferdinand needed to be continually stimulated and upheld; my attitude gave him courage and hope. In the hour of doubt he found in me a steel-like assurance which he did not find in himself. Hand in hand we were strongest; life did not appal me, for I had about me something of the joyful warrior who never shuns a fight.'

  The particular fight which she was determined not to shun was, of course, a war against the Central Powers; especially now that they had been joined by Romania's old enemy, Bulgaria. As she so candidly puts it, Marie 'loathed neutrality'. King Ferdinand was not showing anything like the same eagerness. For one thing he could not help feeling sympathetic towards Germany. He was a Hohenzollern, German-born and with brothers fighting for Germany. For another, little Romania was in no position to wage war against the Central Powers. Like a bent finger, Ferdinand's country poked into the territories of the Central Powers: along the north-western borders lay Austria-Hungary; along the southern borders, Bulgaria. It was true that Romania shared its far, north-eastern border with Russia, but the Russians were already heavily engaged along their extended frontiers facing Germany and Austria-Hungary.

  On the other hand, a great many Romanians shared the Queen's anxiety to get into the fight. Not only were the majority of Romanians favourably disposed towards the French but they were violently anti-Hungarian. For years they had had their eyes on Transylvania, an area of Hungary considered to be the heartland of Romania. Territorially, an Entente victory would benefit Romania tremendously; she could win what she considered to be Romanian lands from both Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria. Queen Marie could then become, as she assures us her soldiers were longing for her to become: 'Empress of all the Romanians'.

  But for two years Romania remained neutral. While the Queen dashed off reassuring letters to her cousins Nicky and Georgie and flirted with emissaries of the warring countries (the most handsome man in Germany, claims Princess Daisy of Pless, was dispatched to the Romanian court) her husband heeded the arguments of the pro-German faction. The death, in the spring of 1915, of the inimitable old Queen, Carmen Sylva, removed one strong proponent of the German cause from the King's circle. It was not until the summer of 1916, however, that King Ferdinand was finally prevailed upon to throw in his lot with the Entente. He did so with a heavy heart. On 27 August 1916, Romania declared war against the Central Powers.

  With the outbreak of hostilities, Queen Marie of Romania came into her own. The war brought out the best in her; she could live to the very limits of her abilities. Showy and self-opinionated Queen Marie might have been, but she was neither frivolous nor foolish. All her great qualities – and she had many – were now brought into play: her courage, her compassion, her skill, her verve, her sense of duty, even her appreciation of the dramatic. 'I have health and vigour which God has given me for a purpose,' she would exclaim. 'It must not be wasted. Because I can't help but feel strong, I must work to win.' And she did. She was tireless. Invariably dressed in a nurse's white uniform, she spent her days organizing, inspecting, encouraging and visiting the wounded. Though sometimes ill and exhausted, she never spared herself. She became, in a way, the symbol of Romania's will to fight.

  It certainly needed a symbol. From the outset, the war was a disaster. The Romanians, who had crossed so bravely into Transylvania, were beaten back almost immediately. Within a month of the declaration of war, the country had been invaded by the Germans from the north and the Bulgarians from the south. Everywhere the army fell back in confusion. One town after another went to the invading armies; hospitals, weapons and provisions had to be abandoned as the troops retreated helter-skelter towards the north-east. Munitions, promised by the equally hard-pressed Entente Powers, never materialized. The Black Sea port of Constanza, so recently the scene of the Tsar's brilliant state visit, fell in October. By the end of the month Bucharest itself was threatened. Early in November it was decided to evacuate the capital.

  At this moment of extreme national despair, with Bucharest about to be abandoned, fate dealt Queen Marie a terrible personal blow. Her youngest child, a three-year-old boy named Mircea, contracted typhoid fever. For day after day the mother watched the little boy become weaker. Every moment that she was able to spare from visiting hospitals was devoted to nursing him. To sit by his bedside, to see his glazed eyes and to hear his anguished cries almost broke her indomitable spirit. By the morning of 2 November 1916 he was clearly sinking. That night he died.

  They buried him in the church at Cotroceni Palace. No sooner had this been done than Bucharest, and the Palace, had to be evacuated. In the scramble to get away, the Queen found time to scribble a note to be handed to the commander of the occupying forces. 'I do not know who will inhabit this house that I have loved,' she wrote. 'The only prayer I ask is that they should not take away the flowers from the new little grave in the church.'

  In what the Queen calls 'panic, disorder and confusion', the Romanians fell back before the enemy until only a fraction of the country remained in their hands. The royal family established itself at Jassy, a provincial town not far from the Russian frontier. With Russia finally coming to their assistance, the Romanians were able to check the enemy advance and hold the line around Jassy. Behind the front, however, all was chaos. The winter of 1916-17 was the coldest for fifty years. There was not enough food. There were too few doctors and too few beds. With typhus raging throughout the army, conditions in the hospitals were deplorable. At one stage it was thought that the army would have to retreat into Russia; at another that Queen Marie should personally plead Romania's cause with her cousin, Tsar Nicholas II. Both suggestions – the first which Marie hated and the second which she rather fancied – were abandoned. She remained at Jassy, giving advice, encouragement and consolation.

  It was a heart-breaking task. The Romanians, she complained, 'are more or less fatalists; they always imagine that God, or Fate or Chance will step in at the last hour and save them! But being of English origin my motto is: Help yourself and God will help you'.

  She certainly never gave way to despair. Like her grandmother, Queen Victoria, during an earlier war, Marie would countenance no talk of defeat. Her courage was an inspiration to them all. Always smiling, always calm, always beautiful, she travelled across nightmare roads to visit indescribably squalid hospitals and to bring comfort to appallingly wounded men. Everywhere her white uniform, with it red cross on the armband, served as a spur and a solace to her people. As an Englishman in one of the Allied missions put it, 'She was a flame of resistance that no storm could put out.'

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  'The German Woman'

  1

  Yet another of Queen Victoria's granddaughters to be accused of dominating her husband during the First World War was the Empress Alexandra of Russia. About the validity of this charge there was no doubt whatsoever.

  During the first few months of the fighting Alicky had been content to play the traditional role of a royal consort in wartime: she devoted herself to hospital work. Forgetting her own ailments, she converted several palaces into hospitals. To nursing the often cruelly mangled men, she gave herself unstintingly. Her dedication, her courage and her compassion could not be faulted. At last, in practice as well as in theory, the Empress had become the Matushka of these loyal and simple Russian soldiers.

  Not until the spring of 1915, when the Russians began to fall back before the Germans, did the Tsaritsa actively concern herself with the Tsar's affairs. The army, up to that time, had been under the supreme command of one of the Tsar's relations, Grand Duke Nicholas. The Tsar himself, although often at the front, controlled affairs of state. The Emperor was not very happy with this situation. He would much rather have been acting the warrior-Tsar at the front. Even less happy about it was the Empress. With her high-flown ideas on autocracy, she firmly believed that her husband's place was at the head of his soldiers. It was quite wrong that someone else should hold that all-powerful position; particularly the popular and
physically impressive Grand Duke Nicholas. Might he not, in time, overshadow the small and mild-mannered Tsar?

  Encouraging Alicky in her thinking was Rasputin. His motives, however, were not anything like as elevated as hers. Hating Grand Duke Nicholas (he had once threatened to hang the starets) Rasputin wanted him removed. While the Russian army was successful this was almost impossible, but once it began to retreat, the starets worked up the Empress's feelings against the Grand Duke. And she, in turn, harried the Emperor. After the fall of Warsaw in August, the Tsar made up his mind. Grand Duke Nicholas was dismissed and, against the violently expressed advice of his Ministers, the Emperor took personal command of the army.

  Alicky was overjoyed. 'You have fought this great fight for your country and throne – alone and with bravery and decision,' ran her impassioned phrases. 'Never have they seen such firmness in you before . . . I know what it costs you . . . forgive me, I beseech you, my Angel, for having left you no peace and worried you so much, but I too well know your marvellously gentle character and you had to shake it off this time, had to win your fight alone against all. It will be a glorious page in your reign and Russian history, the story of these weeks and days . . . God anointed you at your coronation, he placed you where you stand and you have done your duty, be sure, quite sure of that and He forsaketh not his anointed. Our Friend's prayers arise day and night for you to Heaven and God will hear them . . . It is the beginning of the great glory of your reign. He said so and I absolutely believe it . . . .'

  That was all very fine but it was going to need more than Our Friend's continuous prayers to ensure victory at the front and contentment at home. Not only had the control of the army passed from the strong hands of the Grand Duke Nicholas into the weak ones of Tsar Nicholas II but the disappearance of the autocratic Head of State to the battlefield had left a vacuum in the capital. It was a vacuum which was to be filled, with increasing assurance, by the Empress Alexandra. While the Tsar attended to the army, she would attend to the government. Together, they would save Holy Russia and the autocracy for their son.