As her fretful mother held her hand, Alice’s labour continued throughout the evening and into the night, partially relieved by chloroform, which left her ‘half-stupefied’, until at quarter-to-five on Easter Sunday morning, a daughter was born.
As the Queen wept with relief, a twenty-one gun salute echoed across Darmstadt, and over the next few days the British newspapers kept the public informed of the progress of the baby and her nineteen-year-old mother. Nonetheless, having suffered almost as much as in the process as if she were going through it herself, Queen Victoria made it very clear to Louis that she hoped it would be a long time before he put her precious daughter through such agony again. In that, as in so many matters concerning Alice, she would be disappointed.
On 27th April, the baby was christened Victoria Alberta in a Lutheran ceremony conducted by the Hessian court chaplain, Prediger Bender. A few days later, Louis and Alice took her to Osborne, where Alice completed her recuperation before spending a couple of days with Bertie and Alexandra at Marlborough House and finally returning to Darmstadt.
Their departure grieved the Queen so deeply that she immediately began making plans for their next visit but now, with a child of her own, Alice realised the importance of spending more time in Hesse. As Louis would one day inherit the Grand Duchy, it was vital that he should devote himself more fully to his civil and military duties and, if Alice were to gain the Hessians’ confidence, she must establish her family there.
“Out of the ten months of our married life five have been spent under your roof,” she wrote rather sternly to the Queen, “so you can see how ready we are to be with you. Before next year Louis does not think we shall be able to come; at any rate when we can we shall, and I hope I shall be able to see you for a day or two in Germany to divide the time.”[119]
For all her resolve, within five months, Alice and Louis were back in Scotland to support the Queen through the ordeal of appearing in public for the unveiling of a statue of Prince Albert in Aberdeen. The event passed without incident but it would not be the only time during her stay in Scotland that Alice would be called upon to support her mother.
One cold, rainy evening as the Queen, Alice and Lenchen were returning through the remote countryside to Balmoral, the carriage in which they were travelling repeatedly veered from the road and it soon became obvious that their driver, Smith, was drunk and incapable of controlling the horses. Eventually, after one severe jolt, Alice commented that the carriage was listing, and moments later it toppled over completely, hurling its occupants to the ground. The Queen had fallen on her face and hands; and Alice and Lenchen’s clothes had become tangled in the wreckage. The shock was so great that even the seemingly imperturbable John Brown, who was travelling with them, panicked, believing that everyone had been killed. Alice, calmly took charge of the situation, ripping her dress to free herself, before holding out a lantern so that Brown could release the horses, which were fortunately unharmed. In the middle of nowhere, there was nothing to do but to huddle under blankets in the overturned carriage in the hope that sooner or later someone would come to their aid. To their great relief, within half an hour, an aide, who had feared that something like that might happen, arrived with ponies and the bedraggled party was able to return relatively unscathed to the castle.
Once again, Alice’s calmness and ability to take charge in a crisis impressed her mother, but it would not be long before the Queen would come to resent the very characteristics on which she had come to depend. While relying on Alice’s advice, she had also grown used to her ‘obedient’ daughter’s malleability, and it would come as a shock to realise that Alice was not quite as docile as she had believed. Within a couple of years, Alice’s independent thinking would lead to a severe breakdown in their relationship and turn her, in the Queen’s opinion, from a ‘dear good’ and dutiful daughter into a most ‘disagreeable’ and ‘sharp’ companion.
Chapter 14 –
How Wonderfully We Are Made
Prince Albert would have been delighted by his lively and intelligent granddaughter and would have thoroughly approved of the manner in which she was raised. Although by royal standards Alice and Louis were not wealthy, they were keen to ensure that Victoria would receive a broad education, and, despite her numerous duties and causes, Alice spent as much time as possible with the child, whose progress was recorded in regular epistles to the Queen. ‘Baby’s’ first tooth, Baby’s first words, Baby’s first steps, Baby’s first Christmas and Baby’s first birthday – all were reported in loving detail.
By the time of that first birthday, Alice was again, to the Queen’s dismay, in ‘an unfortunate condition’, but, after spending three summer months in Britain, she spared her mother’s nerves by returning to Hesse for the birth. This time, she was attended by Louis’ mother, who was ‘kindness itself’ and ‘so discreet’; and on 1st November 1864, after a labour of only four hours, a second daughter was born. Although the Hessians had been hoping for a future Grand Duke, Alice remarked that her being a girl was but a momentary disappointment as she and Louis thought how pretty two little sisters would look together. The baby, who screamed throughout her christening, was named Elizabeth after Louis’ ancestor, St. Elizabeth of Hungary[q], but within the family she would always be known as Ella.
Less than two months later, in late January 1865, Alice and Louis took their little girls to Berlin to visit their Aunt Vicky and Hohenzollern cousins. Victoria’s cradle was brought onto the train, while Ella slept in a baby bath in the middle of the carriage, which, Alice assured her mother, was heated by a stove. If the Queen was disconcerted by the thought of travelling with such young children in mid-winter, she was about to receive a far greater shock concerning her two eldest daughters. Prior to the visit, Vicky, who, contravening the mores of the Prussian court, was breastfeeding her own fourth child, had encouraged Alice to do the same for Ella; and, while the sisters were together they actually nursed each other’s babies.
Queen Victoria was so horrified that, in her own words, the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end: such an ‘animal’ practice was demeaning for any woman, but for a princess it was totally unnecessary and disgusting! No matter how vehemently Vicky protested that it benefited the baby, Queen Victoria could only gasp in horror that her daughters had ignored ‘the advice of a mother of nine children’ and had turned themselves into cows!
Vicky’s behaviour was alarming enough, but that Alice had followed her example was positively appalling for the Queen, who had assumed that Alice shared her disgust at the ‘details of the nursery’. In the weeks that followed, she would discover how mistaken she had been.
Since reading the accounts of Florence Nightingale’s work in the Crimean War, Alice had been fascinated by nursing; and, after tending her father through his final illness, her natural inclination had been to learn as much as possible about caring for the sick and the nature of disease. As early as 1863, she had made a point of visiting the hospital in Darmstadt with a view to raising public awareness and gaining donations to improve the less-than-ideal conditions. The Queen approved of such philanthropy and concern for the welfare of the people, but, with the birth of her children, Alice’s interest had extended into branches of nursing and medicine which her mother considered inappropriate for a woman, and particularly for a woman of her station.
The Queen was not alone in her views. Only a decade earlier, prior to the establishment of the Nightingale Fund, nursing was viewed as a very unsavoury occupation which attracted only the lowest class of society. Dickens’ drunken Mrs Gamp was a typical caricature, portraying the prevalent view of untrained nurses as slovenly and incompetent:
“She was a fat old woman, this Mrs Gamp, with a husky voice and a moist eye, which she had a remarkable power of turning up, and only showing the white of it…She wore a very rusty black gown, rather the worse for snuff, and a shawl and bonnet to correspond…The face of Mrs Gamp – the nose in particular – was somewhat red and swollen, and it was
difficult to enjoy her society without becoming conscious of a smell of spirits. Like most persons who have attained to great eminence in their profession, she took to hers very kindly; insomuch that, setting aside her natural predilections as a woman, she went to a lying-in or a laying-out with equal zest and relish.”[120]
Unsurprisingly the Nightingale family had initially opposed Florence’s chosen career.
Apart from the insalubrious reputation of nurses, the idea that middle or upper class women should have any knowledge whatsoever of human anatomy was anathema to the ideal of the innocent ‘angel in the house’ – the naïve little woman who was totally dependent on her father or husband. At the same time as Alice was beginning her studies, Britain’s first female doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, was being refused admission to dissecting theatres and prohibited from practising as an apothecary, despite having obtained all the necessary qualifications. In certain medical quarters it was even claimed that women’s brains were too small to house too much knowledge, and excessive learning would lead to infertility and hysteria.
Alice, however, was not to be deterred. In early March 1864, she confessed to the Queen:
“I have read and studied a great deal about the human body; about children – their treatment &c. It interests me immensely. Besides, it is always useful to know such things, so that one is not perfectly ignorant of the reasons why doctors wish one to do certain things, and why not. In any moment of illness, before there is time for a doctor to come, one can be able to help oneself a little. I know you don’t like these things…Instead of finding it disgusting, it only fills me with admiration to see how wonderfully we are made.”[121]
Such was her fascination that Alice quickly became so uninhibited in her conversation that Queen Victoria worried about allowing her younger daughters to visit Darmstadt for fear of what they might hear!
Unruffled, Alice continued her studies, seeking the advice of several forward-thinking doctors, who agreed that breastfeeding was the best means of building of a strong immune system in the baby to prevent dysentery and other childhood ills. When this argument did not satisfy her mother, Alice reminded her that, while the Queen could afford to employ as many staff as she chose, in her own reduced circumstances, hiring a wet nurse would be nothing but an unnecessary expense, which could so easily be avoided.
Ever her father’s daughter, Alice was not content to gain a theoretical knowledge without putting it into practice for the good of the people, and she was particularly keen to see improvements for women in childbirth.
Throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in response to the high infant mortality rates and the number of deaths in childbirth, numerous lying-in hospitals had been established, wherein poor but respectable women were attended by doctors and trained midwives. In fact, the primary purpose of many of these hospitals was not to benefit expectant mothers but to provide an opportunity for doctors to train in obstetrics, and, due to their unhygienic methods, the death rates from puerperal fever rose significantly.
“The extent to which these institutions increase the danger of childbirth is now well known,” wrote the eminent epidemiologist and statistician, William Farr, in 1842; and Florence Nightingale was in complete agreement, recommending that better provision should be made for women to have their babies at home. By the 1860s, institutes had been established to provide clean linen and other necessities for those who chose to avoid the hospitals, and when, in 1864, Alice was invited to become the patroness of one such institute – the Heidenreich Institute for Lying-In Women, to which her mother had already made a financial contribution – she willingly accepted the position.
Typically, patronesses donated money and assisted in administration, but Alice was eager to play a far more proactive role. Either through humility or fear of creating a stir in aristocratic circles, she quietly went incognita to the homes of the poor, where she undertook the most menial tasks to assist the new mothers and their babies. Twice, accompanied by her lady-in-waiting, Christa Schenk, she visited a particular family who lived in one room accessible only by a dark ladder. While the mother, who had recently given birth to a fifth child, lay in bed, Alice assisted her husband in cooking a meal and:
“…arranged the bed a little, took the baby for her, bathed its eyes – for they were so bad, poor little thing! – and did odds and ends for her.” [122]
Far from seeing herself as a benevolent philanthropist, Alice recognised the benefits she gained from contact with people outside her own class.
“...If one never sees any poverty, and always lives in that cold circle of Court people, one’s good feelings dry up, and I felt the want of going about and doing the little good that is in my power. ”[123]
This willingness to see for herself the conditions in which people lived, and to venture into areas which many women of her station considered unseemly, enabled her to become involved in another taboo branch of medicine: the care of the mentally ill.
These were the days when psychiatric illness was seen as something shameful, which had to be hidden away. For fear of offending public sensibilities, the immense 19th century asylums were usually situated in the countryside, out of sight from main thoroughfares and approached by winding avenues, giving rise to the expression ‘going round the bend’. Within their walls, all manner of patients were housed, from the dangerously insane to the mildly eccentric, and from troublesome adolescents who refused to conform, to unmarried girls who had become pregnant and were ‘put away’ to avoid bringing shame on their families. Little distinction was made between people with different mental illnesses, while those with learning difficulties were referred to as ‘feeble-minded idiots’ or ‘imbeciles’, and deemed incapable of living in normal society.
Nonetheless, the foundation of asylums – literally refuges – was an attempt to improve life for those who, in past decades, would have found themselves in workhouses, prisons or private madhouses, where conditions were often filthy and barbaric, and where inmates were frequently kept chained in solitary confinement. The new asylums of the 19th century were regularly inspected; the patients were attended by doctors and nurses rather than gaolers; and the buildings were equipped with the most modern facilities, including libraries, bakeries, laundries and farms, where the patients could participate in meaningful and therapeutic labour. Rather than using restraints, many forward-thinking doctors believed in ‘moral treatment’, which involved providing their patients with a daily routine in order to create a sense of discipline and order to rebalance their minds.
When, in 1866, Alice attended a series of lectures about the need for such an institution in Hesse, she took up the cause with gusto, and, in much the same way as the patronage of Diana, Princess of Wales dispelled many myths about AIDS, Alice’s support led to something of a reappraisal of mental illness. No sooner had she adopted the cause, however, than she came into conflict with the clergyman who had delivered the lectures and who was hoping to create a distinctly religious establishment.
Typically, many 19th century philanthropists believed they had a duty to impose their own religious ideas and practices on those whom they sought to help. Many of the model factories of the era were founded by pious people who, while providing excellent conditions and housing for their workers, prohibited gambling and alcohol and insisted on regular church attendance for their tenants. Although their motives were well-meaning, Alice, like her parents, opposed this paternalistic approach which, she believed, impinged on individual freedom of conscience. Moreover, contrary to the prevalent view of the time, she viewed mental illness as a medical rather than a spiritual problem and believed, therefore, that it would be better dealt with by doctors than by clerics.
Despite the disagreements, Alice, with her determination and flair for organisation, formed a committee of like-minded supporters and personally undertook responsibility for raising the necessary resources to build and equip an asylum. Having donated 1000 florins of her own money, her first fund-rais
ing activity – a charity bazaar – was so successful that in just four days she had raised sixteen thousand florins[r], and wrote excitedly to her mother:
“There have been crowds…something quite unusual for the quiet inhabitants of this place. They have shown so much zeal and devotion that I am quite touched by it, as I am more or less a stranger to them.”[124]
Already, through her contact with so many people, Alice was gaining more experience in the care of the sick, and, within three months of the charity bazaar, circumstances would contrive to give her an even greater opportunity to develop her medical expertise in the midst of a bitter civil war.
For over fifty years, since the defeat of Napoleon, the German states had been led by Habsburg Austria. By the mid-19th century, however, a sense of German nationalism had emerged, leading to a call for the unification of the different states to create an entirely independent nation. While most Germans supported this idea, two distinct camps had developed with opposing opinions about how the unification should be organised. The German Federation, including Alice’s Hesse-Darmstadt, believed in a ‘Greater Germany’ – the amalgamation of all German-speaking peoples under Austrian leadership. The Prussians, on the other hand, favoured a ‘Lesser Germany’, independent of Austria and led by the King of Prussia.
Prussia’s Iron Chancellor, the Machiavellian Otto von Bismarck, was determined to see his kingdom rise to greater prominence, and had long been seeking an opportunity to provoke a conflict which would lead to the realisation of his plan. The opportunity arose in 1866, following the Prussian seizure of the disputed Danish territories of Schleswig and Holstein, the latter of which was governed by Austria. After several thwarted attempts at negotiation, Austria declared war on Prussia and her ally, Italy; and, by May that year, it was it was clear that other German states would soon be dragged into the conflict.
Alice, The Enigma - A Biography of Queen Victoria's Daughter Page 15