When Princess Maud finally arrived in Copenhagen, the welcome from the Danish people and the royal family was a hearty one. Maud wrote to her grandmother about how she was settling into her new home: “It has been great trouble in finding and arranging all our things, but now at last we have got our rooms tidy and comfortable and we like the house very much, though it is rather damp just now as the days are so short and the weather is abominable, so raw and damp and dreadful cold winds.”47 Already, at this very early stage, Maud was finding the cold Danish winters intensely unpalatable. She would never change her mind. And as she settled into a routine in her new country, she was to find very little in charming Copenhagen to match the serene and bucolic life she had left behind so reluctantly at Sandringham.
In the autumn of 1896, Nicholas, Alexandra, and baby Olga paid an official visit to Queen Victoria at Balmoral. From the end of September to the beginning of October, the sleepy Scots hideaway was inundated with security forces and the tsar and tsarina’s entourage. So many people accompanied the couple that an entire village had to be erected for the overflow of guests.
From Ballater station, Nicholas and Alexandra were escorted by a squadron of uniformed Scots Greys, complete with bearskin hats, whose honorary colonel-in-chief was none other than the tsar. Despite the unrelenting rain, Nicky and Alix arrived at Balmoral to a warm welcome. Tenderly embracing her grandmother, Alix of Russia had come home again.
During this special visit, a historic milestone was attained. As one contemporary aptly put it, “today the dear old Queen has reigned longer than any British Sovereign. What a day of emotions for her. The young Emperor of Russia, Nicholas II, & the Empress, our Princess Alix, came to her at Balmoral & she sat waiting to receive them in a room full of trophies from Sebastopol! It was the anniversary of the fall of Sebastopol.”48 Not surprisingly, Victoria received many messages on the occasion of achieving such a lengthy reign. Alix was at hand to help her grandmother answer them. Victoria seemed impressed that despite having been tsarina of Russia for two years, Alexandra had not let her position go to her head. The queen wrote to tell her daughter, the Empress Frederick, that “Dear Nicky and Alicky are quite unspoilt and unchanged and as dear and simple as ever and as kind as ever. He is looking rather thin and pale and careworn, but sweet Alicky is in great beauty and very blooming. The baby is magnificent, bigger than she and Ella ever were, and a lovely, lively [great-] grandchild.”49
During their stay at Balmoral, Nicky and Alix had the pleasure of seeing a number of relations. Nicky wrote to tell his mother that “we met Maud and Carl—it seems rather strange for them to be husband and wife.”50 The imperial visitors also took part in a historic moment involving a novel technological wonder. For the first time, Queen Victoria and members of her family were filmed with a ciné camera. Soon afterwards, Nicholas and Alexandra planted a tree on the grounds to commemorate their visit. Then, as Queen Victoria recorded: “in the afternoon drove out with them, alas! for the last time.”51 The visit ended after a quiet day passed in the company of the aging queen. Nicholas, in the uniform of the Scots Greys, and Alexandra, swathed in a pink gown adorned with white fur, said their farewells amid kilted attendants holding blazing torches to illuminate the darkness. “It has been such a very short stay and I leave dear kind Grand-mama with a heavy heart,” wrote Alix from Balmoral to her English governess on the day of her departure. And in a poignant sentence, she added: “Who knows when we may meet again and where?”52
The void left by the death of Ena’s father was difficult for Queen Victoria and Princess Beatrice to fill. As for Ena, she was resilient and coped well. But she also had to contend with the emotional havoc that swept over her mother during the early stages of her long widowhood—an unanticipated fate that Beatrice did not accept lightly.
Nearly a year after Prince Henry died, his desolate widow still found it difficult to come to terms with her profound loss. This elicited pity from the Duchess of Coburg. Missy’s mother noted that “poor Beatrice is very sad.” But Marie was also baffled by Beatrice’s behavior which, in her eyes, bordered on the unstable. Ena’s mother, noted a stupefied Marie, would be crying one moment, raging at a picture of her dead husband the next. After this, the despondent young widow went out to ride her bicycle in heavy mourning. Then she read a book on piety or talked for hours about the small economies being made on all the candles in her homes. Such were her mood swings and peculiar behavior. “This bizarre mourning,” as the no-nonsense Marie called it, was simply “incomprehensible.”53
Queen Victoria’s attention to her Battenberg grandchildren was therefore doubly important while their mother, the widowed Princess Henry, was immersed in her grief. But within a few years, Beatrice and Ena would find themselves in mourning again—this time for none other than Victoria herself.
Six
“TOO PAINFUL TO BEAR”
AFTER NEARLY HALF A DOZEN YEARS IN ROMANIA, MISSY FOUND to her surprise that King Carol I began loosening his tight rein on her and Nando. Carol granted them a new home, Cotroceni Palace, on the outskirts of Bucharest, and allowed the couple to attend parties with certain members of the Bucharest aristocracy. The elite society of late nineteenth-century Bucharest in which Missy began mixing was high-flying, almost hedonistic in nature. This explains in part King Carol’s hesitancy in allowing such an attractive, vivacious, and impressionable young woman into their midst. A cultured group, often educated abroad, especially in Paris, the men and women were so full of life that one visitor to the city during the era described it as a “riotous place.” Morals were loose and divorce was easy. An elderly French diplomat who spent twelve years there was heard to exclaim that “in all Bucharest…I don’t believe there is a single honest woman.”1 So untamed was life among the elite that one British minister sent his wife and daughter to live in England, then closed his legation and lived in a hotel in the city to spare his family the vices of Bucharest. Carmen Sylva was equally forthright about the Romanians’ lax attitude when it came to morals. After spending several decades in the country, the queen candidly admitted in a sheepish tone to an American that Romania was “a country where one was not even ashamed, but rather proud, of one’s immorality!”2
In contrast to Tsarina Alexandra at St. Petersburg, Marie at Bucharest enjoyed rubbing shoulders with her country’s aristocracy. Rivaling the Russian nobility’s lackadaisical attitude toward morality and excesses, the Romanian upper classes’ hedonistic behavior did not shock Missy to the point that she felt repulsed, unlike her cousin, whose disdain for the Russian elite’s decadence knew no bounds. To the high-minded and idealistic Alix, her bond with the Russian people seemed to extend only to the simple peasants and the clergy, whereas Missy’s emerging attachment to her new country, gradual as it was, extended to Romanians of all walks of life. To her, the true spirit of Romania was not to be found exclusively in the country’s peasants. Rich and poor alike were appreciated by their crown princess. And in this time of her life, Missy’s discovery of the country’s fun-loving elite held much appeal for one so naturally inclined to loving life.
Missy was still looked upon by King Carol and Queen Elisabeth as being “too English, too free and easy, too frivolous…too fond of dress, of riding, of outdoor life…too outspoken…not enough respect for conventions or etiquette.”3 This, plus her frightfully wild riding habits (which entailed galloping at full speed in all types of weather and riding astride in Sinaia), were used by the king, and especially the queen, to reinforce the point that Missy was simply too young and too irresponsible to watch over her own children. This was the excuse employed by Queen Elisabeth to physically remove Missy’s children. Deprived of any children of her own, Carmen Sylva bullied the young mother into handing over little Carol and Elisabetta—with devastating consequences.
For Princess Maud, her task as a newly married woman was to try to fit in comfortably with her husband’s family, as well as identifying with her new country. But this was proving to be a case of easi
er said than done. Once Charles took up his duties as a Danish naval officer, Maud felt out of place in her new homeland. As she wrote in 1898 to her family in England: “I think of all of you almost constantly and sometimes I feel so depressed and full of homesickness, and when he is away, it is terrible.”4
For Maud, meeting up with Charles’s family once or twice a year was bearable, but living in their vicinity for longer periods grated on her nerves. This, combined with the very cold winters in Copenhagen, plus cramped living quarters for one accustomed to such expansive houses as Marlborough House and Sandringham, got the better of Maud. In a letter to one friend, Lady Charles Scott, whose husband had been transferred from the British Legation in Copenhagen to St. Petersburg, Maud expressed astonishment that Lady Scott could miss Denmark, saying: “I can’t get over that you are homesick for Copenhagen!” Part of Maud’s amazement centered on the bleak Danish winter. As she endured her second winter in Denmark, she complained: “The weather is so terrible always rain & wind & so gloomy & dark, that we are obliged to have light all day!”5
Letters to her mother began to take on a note of loneliness interspersed with complaints. But if Maud thought she could get sympathy from there, she was wrong. The Princess of Wales herself had long suffered the humiliation of her husband’s infidelities, choosing to face them with admirable calm and dignity. Alexandra was in a position to understand her daughter’s feelings, for though Alexandra loved her native Denmark, her first loyalty was to England. And so it had to be with her Maud: Denmark must supersede England if not in her affections, then certainly in her loyalty and sense of duty. So Princess Alexandra expressed very little patience. “She must on no account,” wrote the princess firmly, “forget that she married a Danish Prince and a naval man and he owes his first duty both to his country and his profession.”6
As befitting an unassuming young couple, life in Copenhagen was relatively modest. Despite their distinguished pedigree, neither Maud nor Charles had a taste for the extravagant life. It was just as well. Charles’s income would not have supported such a life, since the couple was denied an allowance by the Danish government. His earnings as a naval officer had to suffice.
In Copenhagen, Maud’s new home consisted of a ten-room apartment in a large house located at 48 Bredgade, not far from the Amalienborg Palace, home to Denmark’s kings. Much as she tried to personalize the place, Maud never came to see Bredgade as a true home. For one thing, with over a dozen live-in servants, the home was crowded and lacked privacy. Even more disconcerting was the fact that during the winter months some of Copenhagen’s homeless could be found huddling in the building to ward off the cold.
Life at Bredgade was certainly a far cry from Alix’s grand surroundings in Russia, Missy’s new palace in Bucharest, or Sophie’s home in Athens. Maud’s much more modest abode was not only small but uncomfortable in comparison. Moreover, Maud continued to suffer from shyness. Within just weeks of arriving in Copenhagen in 1897, she confessed to Lady Charles Scott: “I feel very shy, as I hardly know any one. I am dreading the dinner on Friday…but I hope you will come & help me as you are always so kind to me.”7
Increasingly, Maud’s thoughts focused on the life she had left behind in England, as Charles returned to his full-time duties as a naval officer. She yearned for Appleton. During a visit to England in 1898, Maud wrote from Sandringham to Lady Scott: “I am having a delightful time here in my own beloved Country…I have become quite fat & sun-burnt & you will never know me again…all the trees & flowers out, so delightful & makes it very hard leaving again so soon.”8
Without children to occupy her attentions, Maud’s homesickness reinforced her closeness to her mother and sister, Toria. Maud wasted no time in showing her eagerness to visit England at every opportunity. But her visits were also made for the sake of the unmarried Toria, who badly needed a break from being at her mother’s constant beck and call. Maud sympathized and admitted minding leaving Toria “alone again as her life is not an easy one.”9 George, the sole surviving male offspring of the Princess of Wales, concurred. Years later, he came to admit that Alexandra was one of the most selfish women he had ever known. Though the Wales children loved their mother dearly, they were not blind to her faults.
Owing to their differing temperaments, Missy and Nando’s marriage continued to remain rocky. In 1897, Nando was struck by typhoid fever. For a while, the prince’s life hung in the balance. Double pneumonia set in, leaving Missy very anxious. To make matters worse, the drama held a strange appeal for Carmen Sylva’s disordered personality. She almost gloated at every detail of Nando’s declining condition. Understandably, the crown princess was horrified to find the queen standing by the palace windows, “with tragic face and finger on lip pan-tomming the news to those waiting below.”10 So close to death was Nando that Missy was summoned to his bedside, where she held his perspiring hands as she knelt to say her last good-bye. Fortunately, however, Nando rallied. But his convalescence was long and slow. Missy stayed close to her husband so that a degree of intimacy, lacking for some time, now entered their marriage.
This brief interlude was soon broken, for Missy began to chafe. With boredom at her heels, she embarked on a liaison with a Romanian officer, Lieutenant Zizi Catacuzene, a member of her own Hussar regiment. This scandal played nicely into the hands of Queen Elisabeth. It did not take much for Elisabeth to convince King Carol to impose her latest plan for Missy’s household—one that would ensure that the crown princess had even less control over her son and daughter.
The ongoing campaign she fought with Queen Elisabeth over the issue of raising the children was truly shaping into a battle royal, and one that continually exasperated Missy, for there was no letup in the queen’s hold over Carol and Elisabetta. Much to Missy’s consternation, the childless queen tightened her hold over both children’s minds with the connivance of her own set of servants, who sympathized completely with the queen’s agenda.
The celebrations surrounding the birth of the modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 were followed by a more personal one when, on 2 May 1896, Sophie and Tino were blessed with the arrival of their third child, Princess Helen. Sophie’s happiness was, however, soon marred by talk of war.
The island of Crete proved to be the flashpoint that sent Greece’s fortunes (and the royal family’s) plummeting in 1897. The island was then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, a sore point that rankled with many of King George’s subjects, who viewed Crete as unredeemed land. Since most of the island population consisted of Greeks, it took very little provocation to inflame the hearts and minds of Greeks to want Crete dislodged from its Turkish masters and united with the mainland.
Caught in the middle was the Greek royal family. Events moved beyond the control of the family’s patriarch, the cautious and realistic King George. His daughter-in-law knew this, and so did not mince words in a letter to her mother:
I am dying to go to Grandmama’s Jubilee but there will be many things to prevent it. I fear fighting in Macedonia and Crete; there is no possibility or hope of preventing people here; they were poussés à bout [exasperated]; they make their preparations secretly. Do not speak about it in general. It will be known soon enough. This is, alas, the result of the Powers doing nothing decided enough and letting matters drift.11
Full of exasperation at deteriorating events, Sophie wrote frantically: “You can imagine how this torments me! The Sultan is an impossible creature, and does not keep a single promise! He is so false, sly, and mad, and such awfully untrustworthy people about him.”12 Queen Victoria and the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, read the dire warnings. Salisbury reported that in his view, to allow the Cretans to unite with Greece would send Macedonia rising against the Ottomans, leading to “a bloody struggle between the Moslems and the Christians throughout the Empire.”13
Since King George I of the Hellenes, as Queen Victoria noted, “can no longer keep his people back,”14 Crown Prince Constantine had the unenviable task of takin
g over command of unprepared Greek forces.
Faced with impending war, an anxious Sophie confessed to her mother: “I think with fright and horror of the future. It makes one mad to think of all the misery that may yet come!…Even if the Powers do not give us Crete, they must know that never, never will the Cretans rest or the island have peace until they are Greek.”15 After reading Sophie’s letter, the Empress Frederick told her mother, “how one longs for this nightmare to be removed, and to be able to sleep and breathe again.” If Sophie thought she could find some comfort during this political crisis in her ties with Kaiser Wilhelm II, she was sadly mistaken. The fact that Crown Princess Sophie was in Greece mattered not at all to her brother when he sided unequivocally with the Turks during the entire crisis.
To exacerbate matters, Wilhelm’s support of the Turks was utterly transparent. So anti-Greek was Willy that Queen Victoria reprimanded him on the tone he took toward Sophie. The queen asked Lord Salisbury to pass on her disgust at her grandson’s behavior. “I wish you would desire Sir F. Lascelles, to tell the German Emperor from me, that I was astonished and shocked at his violent language against the country where his sister lives. He could surely have abstained from such language.”17
In reply to Vicky’s pleas to help Sophie, Queen Victoria wrote: “I do feel so deeply for you…and for darling Sophie and all. We are doing what we can but it is very difficult.”18
Reluctantly, King George finally went to war against the Ottoman Empire. According to the Duke of York, if the king had “not declared war—and he did so much against his will,—he would have been assassinated.”19 The Greek military forces, defective and insufficient in many areas, were no match against a numerically superior and well-trained Turkish army, which had benefitted from improvements introduced by German officers. Sophie and Tino were aware of the stakes riding on his military campaign. At Larissa, Constantine implored his troops to be firm and disciplined. The men, spoiling for war, greeted their commander with shouts of “Hurray for war” and “Long live the Crown Prince.”20
Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria Page 12