Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  Queen Victoria enlisted the help of her oldest Hessian granddaughter, Victoria, to help her supervise the others at a distance. There was no danger of spoiling the children. Victoria of Hesse by her own admission ruled ‘with a rod of iron’ and could be relied upon to give the queen a full account of progress.12 After her own studies in French and German, she would help Alix with her lessons and drawing. She encouraged her younger siblings to turn to their grandmother for advice. Her tactful letters repeatedly expressed her gratitude to the queen ‘for all your love and kindness’ and her desire ‘to please you in all I do & by teaching the others the same & by looking up to you as I would to dear Mama were she still with us’.13 Victoria of Hesse did her best to ensure her grandmother’s wishes over matters of discipline were also met. ‘I am very sorry to hear that the others were lazy at Balmoral,’ she wrote after one visit. Her sisters ‘are very sorry to have vexed you about their lessons and wish me to tell you . . . that they will work hard now’.14

  Alix grew up with a love of all things British. Portraits of British forebears, of kings and queens and Grandpapa Albert hung on the walls of the Neues Palais in Darmstadt. Aunts and uncles frequently visited from Britain, and presents from the queen arrived with unfailing regularity to mark each passing birthday and Christmas: dresses, jewellery, lace, pretty items for her dressing table, a dolls’ tea service. Alix in turn drew pictures, knitted comforters and painted frames for the queen. She looked forward to her visits to see the ‘best and dearest of grandmamas’ who appeared to her both ‘a very august person and . . . a Santa Claus’.15

  Leisurely holidays with her beloved grandmother enjoying the pleasures of life at Osborne House, Windsor and Balmoral were a key part of her childhood; they were perfect little kingdoms, apparently untouched by calamity, seemingly in a time of their own. The Hesse children played with their Wales cousins who were close to them in age. ‘We formed a regular scale,’ recalled Victoria of Hesse. She was the oldest, followed by her cousin, Eddy, her sister, Ella, and cousin George. The ‘nursery party’ consisted of the two younger Hesse girls, Irene and Alix, and the younger Wales girls, Louise, Victoria and Maud.16 Adventures exploring the Highlands invariably ended with a visit to ‘the merchants’, the children’s name for a little shop near Balmoral filled with essentials such as sweets and notepaper. The two elderly women who ran the shop took a particular delight in the motherless Hesse children, and the bounty that emerged from such visits in the form of mouth-watering scones or sweets appeared to Alix years later to capture the essence of her holidays with ‘Grand-mama Queen’. It was an enchanted world ruled by benign influences presenting a picture of long-held peace.17

  In the summer of 1888 Queen Victoria invited her favourite granddaughter to join her at Osborne and then Balmoral in Scotland. Opportunities were planned for Alix to see a great deal of her British cousin, Prince Eddy. The queen was hopeful about the possibilities for her favourite granddaughter. Might she fall in love – or at least, form an attachment – to her British cousin? ‘A good long stay with us here wh wld be delightful wld do her the gst good . . .’ she insisted in June 1888 to Alix’s oldest sister Victoria.18 The magic of Balmoral in summertime was the perfect background for Eddy and Alix to spend some time together. Alix could not fail to see the desirability of the British throne and the young prince who would inherit it one day.

  But in seeking Alix for Eddy, Queen Victoria unexpectedly found herself opposed by another of Alix’s older sisters, Elisabeth or ‘Ella’. Alix’s future was intimately bound up with the choices already made by Ella, who had the temerity to act expressly against the advice of ‘Grandmama Queen’ when it came to matters of the heart. The conflict between Ella and her grandmother had run for almost a decade and was charged with their differences over that great empire rivalling Britain’s power in the east: Russia. The outcome of this clash would have a decisive impact on Europe’s history – and on Eddy’s choice of bride.

  Ten years earlier when Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Alice, died, the older Hessian granddaughters were unmarried and on the point of coming out into society. In 1878 Victoria of Hesse was fifteen, Ella was fourteen and Irene was twelve: all ‘fast growing out of a Child’ in the queen’s words. This was a critical time in the life of a Victorian princess, and the queen had been most anxious to guide her older granddaughters in Germany. ‘Dear Papa will, I know, be teazed & pressed to make you marry,’ she warned. But they should not marry too young, and above all, not seek ‘to be married for marrying’s sake & to have a position’. The oldest, Victoria, she knew, had far too much sense to fall into such a trap but, she warned, this was a ‘very German view of things’ and she wanted her granddaughters to be ‘prepared & on your guard when such things are brought before Papa’.19

  The queen’s struggles to influence her Hessian granddaughters at a distance were compounded by the fact that the second Hessian daughter, Elisabeth, or ‘Ella’, was widely regarded as the most eligible princess in Europe. She combined perfect beauty with a composed and guileless manner and was seldom in opposition to anyone. In the 1870s Ella had inspired Germany’s highest-ranking prince, her cousin, Wilhelm. He regarded his Hessian cousin as ‘the most beautiful girl I ever saw’. In the years before Wilhelm began his sudden pursuit of Dona in 1878 he had been besotted with Ella and reached the point where he told his mother ‘I shall make her my bride’.20 He was not alone in his admiration for Ella. ‘One could never take one’s eyes off her,’ wrote her infatuated younger cousin, Marie of Edinburgh. She regarded Ella’s beauty as almost mystical, ‘a marvellous revelation’, her features all ‘exquisite beyond words, it almost brought tears to your eyes’.21 Even the queen was prompted to observe in her correspondence with her daughter Vicky that ‘Ella is lovely – beyond all expression and so sweet and gentle’.22

  While a student at Bonn University, Prince Wilhelm had found his feelings for his cousin Ella overpowering. Personal attributes that he had taken for granted, his willpower and ability to concentrate, became dissipated under the affliction of this uncontrollable new emotion. He was lost, obsessed, and ‘liebte sie wirklich’ – he ‘really loved her’ – observed Ella’s sensitive younger brother, Ernest.23 Wilhelm himself appears to have made a less favourable impression on his pretty Hesse cousins. He could disrupt the games they were playing on a whim and dominate them to the point of bullying. Whatever Ella’s feelings about him, she was invariably discreet in her letters to her grandmother. ‘We enjoyed his stay very much,’ she told the queen after one visit. She had been riding with him, ‘which was so nice’, and he ‘read to us all a very nice book’.24 By the spring of 1878, Wilhelm’s grandparents, the Kaiser and Kaiserin, his parents and Queen Victoria all understood that the future German heir ‘wished to marry Ella’.25

  It has long been thought that Ella disliked Wilhelm’s attentions, possibly she was even repelled by her cousin, and turned him down. Almost certainly to save his pride, years later Wilhelm blamed his parents, claiming that he never actually proposed to her since his parents refused permission. Surviving letters reveal that Wilhelm’s switch to pursue Dona instead was so swift that it prompted concerns from his father, Frederick, who felt uncomfortable with his son’s ‘sudden changing of the saddle’, especially given that ‘he had already declared himself’ to Ella.26 An alternative reason for the dramatic change in Wilhelm’s feelings has been put forward by his biographer, John Röhl. It is known that the prince’s mother, Vicky, was opposed to the match, and Röhl speculates that her anxieties went well beyond a general dislike of first-cousin marriages.

  Vicky knew that her youngest brother, Leopold, suffered from haemophilia, a life-threatening disease in which the slightest injury can cause severe bleeding owing to the body’s inability to form blood clots. She had also witnessed at first hand the suffering of her sister Alice’s youngest son, Friedrich, who was also a haemophiliac and had died at the age of two in 1873 in a tragic accident. It is possible that Vicky consulted me
dical experts to understand how both her brother and her nephew suffered from the same inherited disease although they had different parents. At the time the specific mechanism of inheritance through the gene was not yet understood, but enough had been observed about the transmission of haemophilia through the female line for Vicky to piece together the possibility that her enchanting Hesse nieces might be carriers of the disease, like their mother Alice. If Vicky explained this to Wilhelm, this could account for his dramatic change of heart. The prospect that his own Hohenzollern heirs might be sickly or die would be enough to stop his courtship of Ella in its tracks. However, there is no proof that Vicky consulted medical experts or if she did, whether they were in a position to give this advice. It is also intriguing that if she did have suspicions she failed to pass them on to her mother, who remained unaware of the risk. When Wilhelm married Dona in 1881, the queen was still thinking of Ella and did not consider the possibility that her beautiful Hessian granddaughters might be carriers of the disease. ‘I could not think with regret of what might have been,’ she wrote to Vicky. Unlike the submissive Dona, she believed her granddaughter Ella had more spirit and might have held some influence for the good over Wilhelm. ‘But I will say no more about that painful past. That is over.’27

  After Wilhelm’s courtship, beautiful Ella continued to turn the heads of Europe’s princes. Queen Victoria found it ‘very unfortunate’ that her Hessian granddaughter turned down ‘good Fritz of Baden’, an ‘excellent’ prince ‘so good & steady, with such a safe, happy position’.28 Two Danish dukes also failed to win Ella’s hand. Yet all was not lost; the queen began plotting in favour of Prince Charles of Sweden. But before long, Queen Victoria heard that Ella was to be paid the compliment of a visit from one of her dashing Russian cousins: twenty-five-year-old Sergei, the younger brother of the tsar, Alexander III. The fact that Sergei was a Russian grand duke, with all the associated glamour and power, was the most damning thing Queen Victoria had against him. He was very tall – a Romanov trait – and his photograph revealed his even, chiselled features, and his arresting eyes gazing at the camera giving nothing away. It was said that he had a sensitive nature like Ella and took a keen interest in Russian and Italian art.

  Queen Victoria may have been shrouded in black and many years a widow but she did know what it felt like to receive the attentions of a Russian grand duke. Sergei was the fifth son of Tsar Alexander II, the very Romanov who forty years earlier had come to England and led the queen onto the dance floor for a mazurka. After those memorable few days at Windsor in the spring of 1839 the Russian tsarevich had left Windsor for Darmstadt and chosen a Hessian princess, Marie, as his bride (who years later became Sergei’s mother and Ella’s great-aunt). Even at a distance of 1,000 miles Queen Victoria sensed trouble. Would Ella align herself with the very country that the queen most feared, Russia?

  Of all the warnings Queen Victoria had issued since the death of their mother Alice, she had taken particular care to alert her Hessian granddaughters to the dangers of Russia, and her fear about a Russian marriage for any one of them almost amounted to an obsession. Long before the assassination of Sergei’s father, Alexander II, she pointed out that their ‘dear mama . . . had such a horror of Russia & Russians’. She urged them not to ‘get at all Russian’ from the inevitable social engagements that arose through their Russian relatives.29 Victoria of Hesse had replied by return that there was no chance of that. Even if her Russian cousins ‘were a hundred times more kind they would not make us a bit Russian, they have such odd manners and say such odd things to each other and even once about the English that it made one quite angry’. Apart from ‘considering themselves perfect’, Victoria of Hesse found her Russian cousins to be ‘lazy’, with no clue ‘how to amuse themselves’ and totally ignorant of ‘what to say’.30

  Queen Victoria would not let the matter rest. Her objections to the Russians were zealously woven into her correspondence with Victoria of Hesse, to be passed around the family in the hopes of instilling into the innocent unmarried princesses the dangers of marrying into Russian royalty. For the queen had long viewed Russia as ‘our real enemy & totally antagonistic to England’.31

  Ever since the Romanovs came to power in the seventeenth century, Russia had expanded at an average rate of 20,000 square miles a year, becoming the world’s largest country two centuries later. To the east, Russian borders reached across the Bering Straits to Alaska. In Europe, the imperial bear had swallowed up Poland and Finland, and to the south-east it menaced the Ottoman Empire, while along its southern border, Russia’s expansion in Asia threatened the Persian Empire and Britain’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’: India.

  This expansionism brought imperial Russia and the British Empire repeatedly into conflict and fuelled the queen’s concerns about Russian aggression. One key battleground arose from the weakness of the Ottoman Empire, ‘the Sick Man of Europe’, which for six centuries had ruled lands around the eastern Mediterranean, at its greatest extent dominating the peoples of south-east Europe and the Balkans, north Africa and west Asia, who now questioned Turkish rule. This gave rise to ‘the eastern question’, which flared up in different forms across the nineteenth century. A cartoon in Harper’s Weekly captured British fears, showing a large Russian bear sporting an imperial crown, licking its lips in contemplation of a sickly and sleepy-looking Turkey, with an Islamic crescent moon on its head. ‘Which is the gobbler?’ read the caption.32

  In the first half of the nineteenth century Tsar Nicholas I had built up the largest army in the world numbering one million men, and when he crossed the Danube in 1853 into Romania, which was under Ottoman rule, he stumbled into the Crimean War. ‘The power and encroachment of Russia must be resisted,’ the queen urged her cautious prime minister, Lord Aberdeen, in March 1854.33 Two days later Britain joined the Turks, the French and the Sardinians against the Russians. For the first time the bloodthirsty horrors of the battles of the Crimean War such as at Alma and Balaklava were reported by the mass media and they shaped perceptions at home of a heroic British lion standing up to a tyrannical Russian bear. The queen was ‘in the greatest anxiety’ as Britain and her allies advanced on Sevastopol, a Russian stronghold and naval base on the Black Sea.34 But the long siege in fact exposed Russian weaknesses. The health of Tsar Nicholas I went into decline and he died of pneumonia in March 1855.

  When Alexander II became tsar, he aimed to recover his father’s losses and in 1871 regained access for his fleet in the Crimea. A few years later the troubled ‘eastern question’ resurfaced yet again when Slavic Christian minorities in Serbia and Bulgaria, which were part of the Ottoman Empire, rose up against their Turkish masters. Alexander II backed the Slavs against the Turks whereas British allegiance lay with the Turks, who supported their interests in the Mediterranean. Queen Victoria believed Britain must ‘remove from Russia the pretext for constantly threatening the peace of Europe on the Eastern or Oriental question’ by creating an independent buffer state out of the rebellious Turkish-ruled principalities of eastern Europe.35

  War broke out in April 1877 when Russia joined the Serbs in the fight against the Ottoman Empire. In less than a year Alexander II’s troops were advancing on Constantinople, which many in Britain, including the queen (but not her prime minister, Disraeli), saw as grounds for war. Whoever controlled this ancient city, sited so strategically between east and west, controlled Britain’s short cut to India through the eastern Mediterranean. The queen’s obsessive hatred of the Russians was well known to the tsar through her second son, Alfred, who shared her letters with his wife, Marie, the tsar’s daughter. Incensed, Alexander, the man who had once led her round the dance floor, now saw her as that ‘old madwoman the Queen, that tramp!’ The tsarina joined in his condemnation, seeing Queen Victoria’s remarks as ‘worthy of a fish-wife’.36 Britain sent battleships to the region. Europe was catapulted to the brink of war. The crisis was resolved in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin where, despite Russia’s victory over the Tu
rks, its control in the Balkans was checked by other European powers. Amongst the agreements reached, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro were recognised as newly independent countries in the Balkans, liberated from years of Turkish rule. The Principality of Bulgaria was also established with the tsar’s nephew, Alexander of Battenberg, on its throne.

  A second key area of conflict between imperial Russia and the British Empire was in central Asia. The struggle for control from Constantinople eastwards, across the deserts and mountain ranges to Afghanistan and the mountain passes of the Himalayas, became known as the ‘Great Game’, and it captured the imagination of the Victorian public with tales of spectacular derring-do in unmapped and hostile lands. But Russia’s continued expansion overland brought them gradually to within twenty miles of British India. The queen who rarely left the confines of Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral was in thrall to her ‘Jewel in the Crown’. She pressured her prime minister, Disraeli, to pass the Royal Titles Act, making her ‘Empress of India’ in 1876, dismissing opposition to her claim in her usual grand manner. ‘I am all for it, as it is so important for India,’ she wrote in her journal on 17 March 1876.37 She feared Russian encroachment. ‘How can we ever trust the Russians?’ was her continual lament.38

  It was not just Russia’s expansionism that worried the queen, but its autocracy. The tsar’s absolute power was deemed ordained by God and as integral to the order of things as the stars in the heavens. The tsar chose ministerial appointments and wielded power over all aspects of policy including war. Although Alexander II had been in the process of introducing reform and he emancipated the serfs in 1861, a vast peasant underclass continued to subsist in harsh conditions on the land, their ranks swollen by another type of worker in the factories and mills of Russia’s newly industrialising cities, whose plight was equally desperate. A great gulf remained between the working masses and the elite. The glaring injustices of Russian society brought in their wake the terrifying spectre of terrorism.