“Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”[170]
Thanks to her father’s diligence, Alice’s education had been beneficial and uplifting and she recognised the importance of ensuring her daughters received the same opportunity.
“The intellect of women is confined by an unjustifiable restriction of education,” wrote the social theorist, Harriet Martineau. “As women have none of the objects in life for which an enlarged education is considered requisite, the education is not given. The choice is to be either ill-educated, passive, and subservient, or well-educated, vigorous, and free only upon sufferance…The sum and substance of female…is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life.”
It was a sentiment which Alice echoed when it came to raising her daughters:
“I want to strive to bring up the girls without seeking [marriage] as their sole object for the future – to feel they can fill up their lives so well otherwise,” she told the Queen. “A marriage for the sake of marriage is surely the greatest mistake a woman can make.”[171]
In this, she and her mother were, for once, in complete accord. Despite her own blissful years with beloved Albert, Queen Victoria had seen enough unhappy marriages to realise that for many women, marriage was more of a prison than a pleasure. ‘A lottery’, she called it, remarking that single people were often happier than those who were married, and if young girls knew in advance what awaited them, few would approach the altar.
Alice’s views on women’s independence did not, however, lead her to neglect her duties as a mother. On the contrary, she devoted much of her time to her children’s upbringing and did her utmost to recreate for them the wonderful experiences of her own childhood.
Chapter 19 –
To Love One’s Grief
On 25th November 1868, Alice gave birth to a son, Ernst Ludwig (Ernie) – another ‘fat’ baby who was too big for the clothes that had been prepared for him – and over the next six years, three more children – Frederick (Frittie), Alix and Mary (May) – were born.
Visitors to the New Palace commented on the joyful atmosphere of the house, which echoed with laughter and the noisy games of the boisterous children who were ‘full of fun and mischief’. From his exile in the Netherlands after the First World War, Vicky’s eldest son, Kaiser Wilhelm II, would look back nostalgically on his visits to Darmstadt, recalling the hospitality of ‘Aunt Alice and Uncle Louis’ and the happy times he had spent boating on the lake, riding through the grounds or playing tennis with his delightful Hessian cousins.
“On the same floor as the nurseries,” wrote Baroness Buxhoeveden, “were [Princess Alice’s] rooms, and there the little Princesses brought their toys and played while their mother wrote or read…Sometimes all the old boxes containing their mother’s early wardrobe were brought out for dressing up. The children strutted down the long corridors in crinolines, and played at being great ladies, or characters from fairy tales, dressed in bright stuffs and Indian shawls, which their grandmother, Queen Victoria, could not have imagined being put to such a use…”[172]
In the picturesque gardens, the children learned to ride, swim and garden. All developed Alice’s love of nature and continued the family tradition of caring for animals. The palace and grounds were filled with ponies, birds, cats, dogs and guinea pigs – which, according to Alice, turned the place into something of a menagerie. On one occasion, to the children’s dismay, an owl escaped from a wooden cage and killed Alice’s ‘poor little bullfinch’.
There were regular family outings, holidays at the seaside in France and Belgium, visits to their numerous relatives, and the much-anticipated annual visit to Windsor, Osborne or Balmoral, where the children ran wild in noisy games of hide-and-seek, or gathered shells on the beach as their mother toured the hospitals, and the cottages of the poor fishermen at Eastbourne.
On their birthdays, parties were held for friends and local children; and, each Christmas, Alice sought to recreate her own happy experiences of the family festivities at Windsor.
“A huge Christmas tree stood in the ballroom, its branches laden with candles, apples, gilt nuts, pink quince sausages, and all kinds of treasures. Round it were tables with gifts for all the members of the family. The servants came in and the Grand Duchess gave them their presents. Then followed a family Christmas dinner, at which the traditional German goose was followed by real English plum pudding and mince pies sent from England. The poor were not forgotten, and Princess Alice had gifts sent to all the hospitals.”[173]
Alongside all the fun and laughter, Alice provided her children with a useful and comprehensive education. With Louis’ full support, she prepared a curriculum, and a schoolroom was constructed within the New Palace, where from seven o’clock each morning both parents taught literature, history, geography and mathematics. Tutors were employed to instruct the children in religion and French; and, growing up in a bilingual household, they quickly became fluent in English and German. In order to foster their cultural awareness, opera singers and musicians were invited to perform at the palace; and Alice, herself an accomplished musician, frequently played for the children and encouraged them in their musical endeavours. Like many other members of her family, she was also a gifted artist – a talent which several of her children inherited – and she was keen to nurture their appreciation of art, architecture and design.
Amid wars and the ever-present threat of revolution, Alice followed her father’s example in preparing her children to live independently. From their earliest years, the girls were taught needlework and cookery while the boys learned woodwork and masonry, and all the children were taught how to grow vegetables and flowers. As Alice knew only too well, even royalties were sometimes compelled to live on a restricted budget, and so, drawing on her own experience, she introduced them to book-keeping and household management.
She recognised, too, the importance of a stable routine, and when the children were left in the care of their grandparents, she left detailed lists and instructions about their meal times, bed times and periods of study.
Above all, she wished to instil in them a sense of personal responsibility, dedication to duty and respect for other people. The young princes and princesses were fed on a simple diet (‘indeed,’ wrote Baroness Buxhoeveden, ‘they kept all their lives hated memories of rice puddings and baked apples in endless succession’) and were not permitted to ask the servants to do anything for them which they were capable of doing for themselves. Dressed in homemade and hand-me-down clothes, they made their own beds, cleaned their rooms, black-leaded the grates and lit fires.
“I strive to bring them up totally free from pride of position, which is nothing save what their personal worth can make it,” Alice told the Queen. “I feel…how important it is for princes and princesses to know that they are nothing better or above others, save through their own merit; and that they have only the double duty of living for others and of being an example – good and modest. This I hope my children will grow up to do.”[174]
To emphasise their responsibilities, Alice encouraged them to participate in her charities by creating and selling their own needlework and paintings and donating some of their toys to the poor.
‘It is good to teach them early to be generous and kind to the poor,’ she told her mother; and, so that they might learn by example, she took them with her on her hospital visits where they witnessed her willingness to carry out the most menial chores from scrubbing floors to emptying
slop buckets.
Although she loved her children deeply and missed them terribly when they were apart, Alice was careful not to pamper them or to become ‘one of those women who constantly speak of their children’. In an era where it was seen as unhelpful for children to be constantly in their parents’ company, she excused the amount of time she spent with her own by claiming that it was more through necessity than choice.
“That they take a greater place in my life than is often the case in our families, comes from my not being able to have enough persons of a responsible sort to take charge of them always; certain things remain undone for that reason if I do not do them and they would be the losers.”[175]
In reality, though, as her letters to the Queen reveal, she delighted in their company and missed them terribly when they were apart. ‘They eat me up!’ she wrote on one occasion, after being separated from them, and, ‘My heart was full of joy and gratitude at being with them once more.’ Each evening, she prayed with them and listened to their hymns; and she wrote in detail of their health, their progress and amusing things they had said or done. Unlike the Queen, who had no qualms about describing her children as plain, precocious or lazy, Alice wrote only of how pretty, how entertaining, how intelligent, how loving and how good her children were.
Victoria, the eldest and most dominant child, had inherited her mother’s inquisitive nature and her grandfather’s brilliant intellect. Throughout her life she was renowned for being a great ‘chatterbox’; and as a child she was something of a tomboy, who was, in her mother’s opinion, rather ‘wild’. She was particularly close to her father, with whom she went for a walk before breakfast each morning, with her hands in her pockets, which greatly amused him.
“Her adoration for Louis is touching,” Alice wrote fondly to the Queen. “…She is a very dear little thing and gets on very fast, but equally in all things...She makes a face when she is not pleased and laughs so heartily when she is contented.”[176]
Victoria was also inseparable from her younger sister, Ella, who preferred puppies and dolls to Victoria’s more physical pursuits and was, according to Baroness Buxhoeveden, ‘the personification of kindness’. Ella’s interior beauty was matched by her physical appearance and she would soon earn the accolade of being ‘the most beautiful princess in Europe.’ Queen Victoria, who was ever quick to comment on an attractive face, noted that she was:
“…sweet, sensible and also very intelligent and most lovely – indeed I rarely saw a more lovely girl and so loving and affectionate and with such charming manners.”[177]
Unfortunately, the Queen was equally quick to comment on an unattractive appearance, and was less impressed by Alice’s third daughter, Irène, whom she considered ‘very plain’. Alice, on the other hand, thought Irène was ‘a pretty child and so very good’, and, though she was a little overshadowed by her elder sisters, she was very close to her younger brother, Ernie, with whom she loved to sing and dance.
Of all her children, Alice felt the strongest bond with ‘inexpressibly precious’ Ernie, who shared her aesthetic passions and would soon become a connoisseur of art.
“I fancy seldom a mother and child so understood each other, and loved each other as we two do,” Alice wrote. “It requires no words; he reads in my eyes as I do what is in his little heart.”[178]
Ernie was close, too, to his younger siblings, particularly his only brother, Frittie, with whom, despite his natural ‘roughness’, he was ‘most tender and gentle and not jealous’. Since the country was at war at the time of Frittie’s birth, Alice had feared that her exhaustion and work among the wounded could have an adverse effect upon his health, but in the event, he appeared to be perfectly healthy and thriving with ‘fine, wide-awake and intelligent’ features, and in his early months he thrived.
Before Frittie was two years old, a fourth daughter was born. Named Alix – because as her mother explained, the Hessians ‘murdered; the name ‘Alice’ – she bore a physical resemblance to her elder sister, Ella, and had such a cheerful disposition and smile that she soon earned the family nickname ‘Sunny’.
The youngest child, May, shared a birthday with her grandmother, Queen Victoria, who agreed to be her godmother. A ‘sweet’, ‘pretty’ and ‘enchanting’ child, her cheerfulness earned her the name ‘Little Sunshine.’
By the time of May’s birth, however, tragedy had struck the family and, much as Alice delighted in her sunny disposition, it could never fully alleviate the sorrow which would remain with her to the end of her life.
1873 dawned brightly for Alice, with the prospect of fulfilling a long-cherished dream to indulge her aesthetic passion for art and culture with a tour of Italy. For two months, leaving the children in the care of their father, she sated her senses on the masterpieces of the Renaissance, from Capri to Naples, and from Rome to Sorrento, recording each stage of her trip in her regular epistles to the Queen. The Sistine Chapel was dark, Alice noticed, and the frescoes were damaged by dust and smoke; the paintings of San Clemente were full of expression; the antique monuments were magnificent; and the terraces of the Via Doria Pamfili reminded her of Osborne. Far from the squalor of military base hospitals and Hessian slums, her thirtieth birthday was celebrated in Florence. Palm Sunday was spent in Rome, where Louis joined her to attend the opening of Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, and later they were given an audience with Pope Pius IX in his private apartments. Alongside asking Alice to convey his regards to Queen Victoria and all her family, the aged pontiff told Louis that he strongly opposed Bismarck’s treatment of the German Catholics and he hoped that his sentiments would be conveyed to the appropriate quarters.
Returning refreshed to Darmstadt on 2nd May, Alice enjoyed a happy reunion the children, and looked forward to a peaceful summer with her family. It was not to be. Within a few weeks of her return from Italy, an accident occurred which would cast a shadow over the rest of her life.
Alice had long shared her mother’s concern for her younger brother, Leopold, whose haemophilia had so blighted his childhood, but, while she regularly asked after Leopold’s health, she had no idea that the condition was hereditary or that she might have passed it on to her children.
Haemophilia, which is carried by girls but manifests only in boys, was little understood in the 19th century, and, since Leopold was the only haemophiliac in the family, there was no reason for Alice to suspect that her own son could be similarly afflicted. In the summer of 1871, however, eight-month-old Frittie, became unwell with what Alice simply referred to as ‘an illness’. ‘I have been so anxious about him,’ she told the Queen as he began to recover, and a week later, she remarked that he had had a ‘slight return’ of the condition.
By August, the colour had returned to his cheeks but over the next eight months Alice observed that he was often covered in bumps and bruises and she recognised the similarity of his symptoms to those of her brother, Leopold. Unwilling to consider the possibility that Frittie, too, was a haemophiliac, she accepted Dr Jenner’s recommendation that he should take iron to strengthen his blood, and naively hoped that he would eventually outgrow the condition.
In February 1873, shortly before Alice left for Italy, a slight cut on Frittie’s ear bled so profusely that for four days nothing could be done to staunch the flow. This time, Alice could no longer avoid the truth:
“I own I was much upset when I saw that he had this tendency to bleed,” she wrote to the Queen, “and the anxiety for the future, even if he gets well over this, will remain for years to come.”[179]
Even then, she reassured herself that the colour in his cheeks was a sign that he had ‘good blood and to spare’ but, with the example of Leopold before her, she knew only too well that his life would be far from easy.
Four weeks after her return from Italy, while Louis was away inspecting the troops, Alice was lying in bed one morning, working through her papers while her two little boys ran playfully in and out. Eventually, at about eight forty-five, she left the room t
o call for the children’s nurse, momentarily leaving Frittie alone. In that brief absence, he somehow climbed up to the open window and tumbled out onto the terrace below. Alice, returning in time to see him falling through the air, screamed in horror and rushed outside to where he lay on his side, unconscious but without any apparent sign of injury. There were no broken bones or obvious bleeding, but towards evening, the side of his head began to swell and the doctors suspected an internal haemorrhage. An aide was quickly dispatched to tell Louis of the accident, and telegrams flew back and forth between Darmstadt and Balmoral, where a shocked Queen Victoria waited for news. Alice, she was told, was calm and composed, aware of the danger that Frittie was in but clinging to a hope of his recovery.
At first Frittie’s breathing was regular and he even managed to move his arm, but as the evening drew on his condition deteriorated and as night fell it was clear that he was dying. Alice, holding him in her arms, could only hope that Louis would return in time to say goodbye. It was a vain hope. At eleven o’clock that night, Frittie’s breathing stopped and the doctors pronounced him dead. Alice burst into tears, finding solace only in the knowledge that his passing had been quite painless.
Three days later, little Frittie was laid to rest in a ‘quiet spot amid trees and flowers’, and, as Alice and Louis tried to come to terms with the shock, there was small comfort in Leopold’s assurance that death was a blessing for the little boy who would otherwise have faced a lifetime of suffering. Queen Victoria commissioned a statue of Frittie, which remains to this day at Frogmore, and invited the family to Osborne to recuperate. The doyenne of mourners could not, though, be upstaged in grief, and shortly afterwards she somewhat coldly observed that the loss of a child was as nothing compared to the loss of a husband. Alice could only reply that the experiences were quite different, though equally painful.
Alice, The Enigma - A Biography of Queen Victoria's Daughter Page 20