Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria

by Julia P. Gelardi

  In her mid-teens, the increasingly attractive Missy began gathering more attention from admiring young men, who hovered around her like bees around a honey pot. To Missy, attentions from the opposite sex were always to her liking— whether from the young gardener to whom Missy once gave a small decorated egg at Easter or from the dashing officers who gallantly presented her with flowers and keepsakes. Missy’s many admirers, it seems, were never far off. Not surprisingly, romance was soon in the air for this outgoing and pretty granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

  To outsiders, the “whispering Wales girls” appeared painfully shy. “Her Royal Shyness” was how people referred to Maud, Louise, or Toria, who spoke “in a minor key, en sourdine,” as Missy recalled of them. This timidity was a trait Maud shared with her cousin, Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, and with their grandmother. Even as late as 1867, Queen Victoria admitted that “I am terribly shy and nervous and always so. “7

  Missy noted that her shy Wales cousins also spoke in an almost patronizing manner, saying, “dear little” or “poor little” so-and-so. The future Queen Marie of Romania was sometimes on the receiving end of this annoying habit, often called “dear little Missy,” with a whiff of condescension. Years later, she recalled how “the three cousins were very kind, but they too treated us as the young things we were then, which made us feel cruelly the inferiority of our five to ten years less.”8

  By her teens, Maud had inherited a little of her mother’s famed beauty, but did not outshine her. Another of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters, however— Princess Alix of Hesse—had already become an acknowledged beauty, whose attributes did not go unnoticed. Never one to mince words where looks were concerned, even when they involved her own family, Queen Victoria was thoroughly pleased with Alix, exclaiming that Alicky was “the handsomest child I ever saw.”9

  At twelve years of age, Alicky’s good looks made their first memorable impression on a young man of sixteen. It was a meeting that changed the course of history: in 1884, the future Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra encountered each other for the first time when Alix attended the wedding of her sister, Ella, to Nicky’s uncle, Serge. Alix’s arrival in Russia for her sister’s wedding opened the young girl’s eyes to the splendors of the Russian imperial court. In wealth and spectacle, this court was still unsurpassed in all of Europe. But even more fascinating than the surroundings and ceremonials was the sixteen-year-old tsare-vitch himself. If Nicky was the object of a preadolescent crush on Alix’s part, she proved equally intriguing to the future tsar. Eventually, using a diamond, the pair carved their names on a windowpane, and the tsarevitch recorded that “we love each other.”10

  It was the norm for many Victorian widows to have a daughter designated to spend her life by her mother’s side. Queen Victoria was no exception—and the one on whom this onerous burden fell was none other than the baby of the family, Princess Beatrice, Victoria’s fifth daughter. As her mother’s anointed lifelong companion, it was Beatrice’s role to be at Victoria’s beck and call. Years later, Beatrice’s daughter, Ena, said of her mother’s life: “She had to be in perpetual attendance on her formidable mother. Her devotion and submission were complete.”11

  A husband for Beatrice was not conducive to this arrangement, so when Beatrice wished to marry Prince Henry (“Liko”) of Battenberg, her mother was furious. Beatrice eventually won—but at a price. In this battle of wills, the queen was the undeniable winner because Beatrice and Liko capitulated, agreeing to live with Queen Victoria all year round. By the wedding day, Queen Victoria had not only reconciled herself to Liko but, according to the Duchess of Edinburgh, “has found in him true perfection.”12 Among Beatrice’s wedding attendants were fifteen-year-old Maud of Wales, thirteen-year-old Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, and nine-year-old Missy of Edinburgh. Queen Victoria had specifically written to Missy’s parents telling them of her desire to have Missy and Ducky as part of the bridal entourage. The girls were thrilled. As their mother noted, “they are very flattered and very proud” to be able to play such an important role in their aunt Beatrice’s wedding.13 Never had the parish church of Whippingham in the Isle of Wight seen such a gathering of royalty as that of 23 July 1885. The bride, who was to become the mother of a future Queen of Spain, was married in the simplest of ceremonies, attended by three nieces who were to grace the thrones of Norway, Romania, and Russia.

  The next major celebration was Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. For one granddaughter, the Jubilee in the summer of 1887 was more than a chance to celebrate her grandmother’s fifty-year reign. Sophie of Prussia’s prolonged stay in England meant that she became better acquainted with a tall, handsome prince from Greece, Constantine (“Tino”), heir to his father, George I, King of the Hellenes. Queen Victoria watched the budding romance, even venturing to ask Sophie’s mother: “Is there a chance of Sophie’s marrying Tino? It would be very nice for her, for he is very good.”14

  Months after the queen’s celebrations, Princess Beatrice, already the mother of a son, Alexander (“Drino”), gave birth at Balmoral on 24 October 1887 to a girl whom Queen Victoria referred to as “my little Jubilee grandchild.”15 At her christening at Balmoral, the baby was given the names Victoria Eugenie Julia Ena. Victoria was for the queen; Eugenie was for the baby’s godmother, the Empress Eugénie; Julia was for her paternal grandmother, the Countess Julia von Hawke; and Ena was a Gaelic Highland name given in tribute to her birthplace. The little girl came to be known as Ena, the most unusual of all these names.

  Officially, Princess Ena was referred to as Victoria Eugenie. They were illustrious names, fit for a future queen since they were the names of two empresses, one of India and one of France. Because Princess Beatrice was so close to her mother, the choice of Victoria for her only daughter was inevitable. Eugenie was less obvious. It came as a result of the friendship between Beatrice and the Empress Eugénie of France, who along with her husband, Emperor Napoleon III, had settled into a life of exile in England in 1871 after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

  Little did anyone guess at the time of her birth that little Ena would one day become queen of her godmother Eugénie’s native country, Spain. The Empress Eugénie took an interest in Ena as she grew up, never forgetting to send her gifts. Years later, Ena remembered how the empress had shown an “unfailing kindness and interest in me, since I was a tiny child.”

  Queen Victoria’s close relationship with her Battenberg family intensified as the family was augmented with the arrival of more children—Leopold in 1889 and Maurice in 1891. Sadly, it was discovered that Leopold was a hemophiliac.

  Nowhere was the contrast between the closeness Queen Victoria felt toward the Battenbergs living with her and the distant relationship with the Waleses more evident than in March 1888, when the Prince and Princess of Wales celebrated their silver wedding anniversary. A formal family dinner at Marlborough House, with Queen Victoria as the guest of honor, was to be the highlight of the celebrations. The queen’s presence was special, for it marked the first time that Maud’s grandmother had ever dined at the London home of the Prince and Princess of Wales, located within walking distance of Buckingham Palace.

  During this time, Princess Maud became infatuated with one of her childhood playmates, Prince Frank of the Teck, a handsome young man with jet black hair and blue eyes. At eighteen years of age, the shy, tomboyish “Harry” had become a young woman. With her dark hair and tiny waist, and her illustrious pedigree, Maud was bound to become the object of attention from suitors. However, during this period Maud found herself in the position of pursuer as her infatuation with Frank grew.

  Princess Sophie of Prussia, in the meantime, was coping with a family tragedy, as she watched her father slowly dying from throat cancer. Fritz soldiered on, bravely putting up with the painful and humiliating effects of his disease. Waiting in the wings was Sophie’s brother, Willy, who made no secret of his desire to mount the throne and inaugurate a grandiose era.

  Willy stepped up his
bitter quarrel with his mother, knowing that people were inclined to side with him. Backing up Willy against Vicky were the Berlin elite, who disliked the English princess, chief among them Otto von Bismarck. Contemptuous and jealous of this brilliant daughter of Queen Victoria, enemies of Fritz and Vicky were poised to throw in their lot with Willy, who became heir when his father succeeded Wilhelm I on the death of the ninety-year-old monarch on 9 March 1888.

  Within the space of three short months, Germany witnessed the succession of two highly divergent monarchs in the form of the emperors Frederick III and his son, Wilhelm II. In Berlin, the new emperor, weak and dying, was a pitiful sight. Unable to talk, he was reduced to scribbling messages to get himself understood. The dying emperor spent his last days in his beloved Neues Palais. There, Sophie and her family began their vigil. Fritz fought long enough to live to see Sophie turn eighteen. On the morning of her birthday, it was clear that Fritz’s death was imminent. Nevertheless, the emperor found the strength to wish her a happy birthday. In a letter to Queen Victoria, Vicky described the unfolding drama: “With a pleasant smile he asked after her at once and wanted us to do something to amuse her. What a birthday for the poor child! What a recollection for the whole of her life! At nine she came over with her sisters, he embraced her and gave her the bouquet, looked at her so kindly and did not appear sad or depressed, he had no idea how seriously ill he was.”17 It was one of the most heart-wrenching ways a daughter could celebrate such a special occasion.

  Within twenty-four hours, Fritz’s agonies ended. Having just celebrated her eighteenth birthday some hours before, Sophie now witnessed the poignant last good-bye between her parents. After lapsing into unconsciousness, Frederick III died. Scarcely had the corpse grown cold, however, when Willy’s unsavory character emerged in spectacular manner. With great disrespect, he ordered his soldiers to ransack the Neues Palais for “incriminating” evidence of “liberal plots.” In his delusion, the new Kaiser was sure he could find something to accuse his mother and father of. His newly widowed mother was horrified that “William’s first act as Ruler was to have our house, our sanctuary, our quiet house of mourning where death had set up his throne, cordoned off by a regiment of Hussars who appeared unmounted with rifles in their hands from behind every tree and every statue!”18 Wilhelm’s soldiers found nothing—despite literally turning the contents of the entire palace upside down, leaving papers and other objects strewn everywhere. Anticipating this, Fritz had had his papers sent to England, where Wilhelm could not get his hands on them.

  With the death of Frederick III, Willy’s latest and cruelest plundering became too much to bear for Vicky, Sophie, Moretta, and Mossy. Vicky knew that her three youngest daughters, without a father, were now more dependant than ever on her for emotional support. They had stood together throughout the ordeal of Fritz’s illness and death; they would now stand by to face whatever else the future held for them. The four women clung to one another as if to avoid sinking further into despairing grief. Vicky recognized this, and on the night of Fritz’s death, told her mother so: “I have my three sweet girls—he loved so much—that are my consolation.”19

  As a girl, Sophie of Prussia already exuded a regal bearing. Sophie’s youngest daughter, Lady Katherine Brandram, remembered her mother as being “dignified” but also “quiet, not stern, a lovely personality”20 Sophie’s sister, Moretta, recalled how Sophie “was always dignified and queenly.” Even Sophie’s nurse confidently predicted: “Sophie will be a queen one day”21 This prediction proved prescient, for just as Queen Victoria had hoped, Sophie did marry Crown Prince Constantine of Greece.

  Fair-haired, with deep blue eyes, and towering at just over six feet, Tino had been born on 2 August 1868 at Athens, a birth heralded throughout Greece. Since his parents were Danish and Russian, Tino’s birth on Greek soil meant that the next King of the Hellenes was to be a native Greek.

  Thanks to intermarriages among the royal houses of Europe, Tino was a first cousin of Maud of Wales on his father’s side, while another cousin was the Tsarevitch Nicholas, and yet others the future kings Frederick VIII of Denmark and Haakon VII of Norway. By the time Tino was twenty, his good looks and joie de vivre proved intoxicating to the impressionable young Sophie, hardly a surprising development considering the funereal atmosphere that prevailed at the home of her widowed mother. Esme Howard, a young secretary at the British Embassy in Berlin who was visiting Sophie and her mother at the time, wrote of “the terrific atmosphere of mourning which pervaded the whole place after the death of the Emperor Frederick. The Empress herself, the three Princesses, were dressed in crape from head to foot. The long room in which we sat was scarcely lighted, with the exception of one large picture of the Emperor Frederick, the frame of which was draped in crape. This dominated the entire scene and made it almost impossible to forget his tragic death.”22 Little wonder that Tino, and Greece, proved alluring to Sophie or that she accepted Tino’s proposal.

  The Athens of the late 1880s to which Sophie went to live was a small city set in a landscape that Sophie’s mother, the Empress Frederick, called “very bare, arid and sandy”; yet the hills made for “a most striking and interesting panorama.” There was no doubt that Athens was “certainly more eastern than European.”23 The city’s Royal Palace, an unassuming building, lacked artistic inspiration but housed a huge ballroom, reputedly the largest in Europe. The rooms were decorated with marble statues and ceiling frescos depicting Greek wars. Bloodied flags from past conflicts hung in parts of the palace.

  Earlier in the year, Princess Maud of Wales had expressed her excitement at the thought of going to Greece for Sophie’s wedding, as it might provide a chance to see her favorite cousin, Grand Duke George. Maud wrote an effusive letter to George about the visit: “It would be lovely if we all went to Athens for Tino and Sophie’s wedding.” Maud imagined the British royal and Russian imperial yachts sailing side by side in Greece and added, “we could see each other the whole way. It would be extremely amusing.”24 That nineteen-year-old Maud was smitten with George was evident in one letter in which she ordered George to “let no one see this [letter]. You wrote such lovely things. I miss you sweet Musie. It is terrible without you now that everything reminds me so of you.”25

  On 27 October 1889, in a ceremony that united two reigning houses, Sophie became the first of Queen Victoria’s five special granddaughters to marry. Bearded bishops performed the solemn Greek Orthodox service as Sophie and Constantine, holding tapered candles, walked three times around a table draped in gold cloth and bearing a Bible. According to one witness, the “elaborate ritual” turned out to be “impressive but very long.” It was exhausting, but the bridal couple acquitted themselves well as they stood “for upwards of an hour without swerving.”2 This was all the more impressive as Tsarevitch Nicholas wrote to his mother that “everyone was suffocating from the heat.” Nevertheless, Nicky was glad to report that “everything went off very well” and the bride and groom “were both calm.”27

  Sophie’s marriage was a sign to the Greeks that Greece was set to see greatness again, for there was an old prophecy which said that when Constantine and Sophia reigned, Constantinople would again fall into Greek hands. It had “seemed to me,” noted Sophie’s brother-in-law, Prince Nicholas, “that the Greek people felt at last, that they were nearing the realisation of their lifelong dream— the dream that lasted throughout the dark centuries of slavery, the dream that had saved their souls from despair.”28 It came then as no surprise that when Sophie appeared outside the cathedral on the arm of her new husband, “the enthusiasm of the people was unprecedented.”29

  After the Orthodox ceremony, in deference to the bride’s religion, a Protestant service was performed in the Royal Palace, conducted by the king’s own chaplain. The day ended with a spectacular fireworks display, which bathed the Parthenon in blazing reds and greens. When Kaiser Wilhelm prepared to depart Athens, he took leave of everyone “most affectionately.” “The only one he for
got to say good-by to,” according to a witness, “was his own sister, the bride!”30 It was a far different kind of good-bye, however, where the Empress Frederick was concerned. To Queen Victoria, the empress wrote, “my trio…is broken up now and I feel it bitterly.” Though Vicky “felt dreadfully upset” because it was difficult “having to part with her,” she was nevertheless proud of “my darling Sophie [who] looked so sweet and grave and calm, my little lamb.”31

  The parting was just as wrenching for Sophie as it was for her mother. Searching for words for emotions too difficult to put on paper, Sophie wrote: “I also miss you dreadfully, it seems too odd not to have you anywhere.…It was too disgustingly awful, that saying goodbye the other day, and I never thanked you half enough for all your trouble and care for me. I am so touched by all you have done, and hope you know how grateful I am and always will be.” The letter was signed: “your loving and obedient little child, Sophie.”32

  This was the start of a voluminous correspondence, written in English, between mother and daughter, which came to two thousand letters and a million words, beginning in 1889 and ending in 1901, when the Empress Frederick died. No small detail was too trivial to chronicle. The empress often began her letters with endearments such as “Sophie love,” “My own Sophie darling,” or, “My precious child.” Sophie’s letters to her mother began and ended just as affectionately.

  Princess Maud may have harbored fond feelings for Grand Duke George of Russia, but she was increasingly drawn toward Prince Frank, though he was not in the least bit interested in her. Maud’s letters were left unanswered. In one letter to Frank’s sister, May (the future Queen Mary, consort of King George V of England), Maud tried to enlist May’s help to push her brother to answer. “Frank promised to write to me,” lamented Maud, “but he has not done so: if you ever write [to] him, you may remind him of that promise.”33