Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  As for the prince himself, in the autumn of 1889 he was safely abroad, part of a wedding party, very aware of his position and wondering whether all the gossip about him had reached the ears of the distinguished guests. The occasion was the marriage of his Aunt Vicky’s daughter, Princess Sophie, to the Crown Prince Constantine of Greece. The royal clan descended on Athens, drawing representatives from several European dynasties. Vicky, her son, Emperor Wilhelm, and her daughters came from Germany. The British royal family was represented by Bertie and Alexandra. The tsar and tsarina sent their eldest son, Nicholas, Eddy’s first cousin. The two cousins were almost certainly aware that they both had an interest in Alix.

  For Eddy, the prolonged wedding ceremony could only serve to underline his own feelings of disappointment and humiliation, his prominent role in the proceedings supporting Sophie drawing attention to his unmarried state. Despite the setback at Balmoral he could not quite give up hope of Alix, and once again he took Louis of Battenberg into his confidence.54 He could not know that Nicholas had written endearingly to ‘darling Alix’ as soon as she returned to Darmstadt from Britain.55 Nonetheless, as the disapproving headlines in the foreign press were whispered around the court, it was hard to conceive of anything more crushing to his fast-diminishing hopes.

  From Greece, Prince Eddy travelled to India for an extensive tour. He wrote to Queen Victoria from Bangalore in late November, most anxious to please. The trip was proving most ‘instructive’ and had already taken him on ‘very hot and dusty’ journeys from Bombay to Poona, Hydrabad, Madras and Mysore. He told her of big receptions, balls and speeches, acknowledging that he ‘thoroughly understood’ he was honoured ‘merely because I am your grandson’. Everywhere the enthusiasm was ‘very touching’ and he enjoyed colourful highlights: seeing wild elephants herded into a keddah, shooting Sambar deer and snipe, and trying for a lion in the jungle.56 His travels took him on to the northern frontier and a camp not far from Lahore where there were a great many troops. ‘To give you an idea of the size of the force,’ he wrote to his grandmother, ‘when drawn up in a line [the troops] extended for over a mile and three quarters.’ The infantry were equally impressive at Rawal Pindi with many different races working side by side: ‘Highlanders, Irish, English, Sikhs, Gurkhas, Dogras and Pathans.’ He hoped he was not leaving an ‘unfavourable impression behind me’ in India, but nothing could quite redeem Eddy from the hounding in the American press.57 Sir Francis Knollys and Sir Dighton Probyn were unflagging in their efforts to limit the damage and were almost certainly behind a rebuttal printed in the New York Herald on 22 December condemning the slander against the prince: ‘a more atrocious or a more dastardly outrage was never perpetrated in the Press’. Christmas came and went with Prince Eddy still overseas and Alix still holding her ground, displaying an unwillingness to listen to the advice of her English relatives.

  In the New Year the gossip of European courts was overtaken by stunning news from Germany. After a prolonged wrestle for power, on 20 March 1890 Kaiser Wilhelm II finally ‘dropped the pilot’. Bismarck, the very man who had been instrumental in the unification of Germany and had consolidated the power of the German emperor, was now dismissed by this same power ‘like a butler’. Vicky was quick to alert her mother to the dangers. Prince Bismarck’s dismissal was ‘a dangerous experiment’, a first step towards her son’s increasing absolutism. Without Bismarck there was no check on the grandiose aspirations of her son. ‘William fancies that he can do everything himself,’ she warned Queen Victoria, adding a few days later, ‘I am afraid William is a most thorough despot.’ She could only see an ominous future for the German Empire. ‘The seeds of evil sown during the Bismarck era’ were now to be nurtured by her own son, who ‘has learned to play the despot from him’.58 The queen knew that her grandson wanted good relations with Britain and she was obliged to play her part to welcome him, however sore her feelings about his treatment of Vicky.

  In late April 1890 the queen made a short private trip to Darmstadt on her return from holiday in France. She was greeted at the station by her son-in-law, Louis of Hesse, and then ‘dear Alicky’ and two of her older sisters, Victoria and Irene, stepped into her carriage, the queen delighted to be reunited with these granddaughters with whom she always felt a special bond.59 If she hoped for a word in private with Alix to find out whether her feelings about Eddy had changed, her opportunities were limited. A steady stream of visitors hurried across Germany to see Queen Victoria. She was overjoyed to see Vicky, who arrived with her daughters the next day. Then Wilhelm rushed to Darmstadt to speak to his grandmother. ‘He came up to see me at once,’ she wrote in her diary. He wanted the queen to understand that ‘it would have been impossible’ to go on with Bismarck, ‘his violence in language and gesture had become such that he had to put a stop to it’.60 His wife, Dona, now the proud mother of five sons, also came to pay her respects to the queen. Finally, on 28 April there was a chance for the queen to drive out privately with Alix and her father Prince Louis. It was pouring with rain but they made the best of it, driving to the beautiful Prinz Emil Garten, modelled on an English landscape garden, and then on to Secheim, a picturesque old house nearby.

  Whatever passed between them, the queen finally settled her mind on the question of Eddy and Alix. On her return to Windsor Castle she confided to Vicky on 7 May 1890, ‘I fear all hope of Alicky’s marrying Eddy is at an end. She has written to tell him how it grieves her to pain him, but that she cannot marry him, much as she likes him as a Cousin, that she knows she wld not be happy with him & that he wld not be happy with her & that he must not think of her.’ Alix’s oldest sister, Victoria, had also written to Eddy, ‘very kindly’. Evidently much pressure had been placed on Alix. ‘It is a real sorrow to us and they have tried to persuade her,’ the queen continued, ‘but she says that if she is forced she will do it, but that she would be unhappy & he too.’61

  Queen Victoria, not a woman to be opposed lightly, had a private admiration for her strong-willed granddaughter. ‘She shows gt [great] strength of character as all her family & all of us wish it, & she refuses the greatest position there is’. But her seventeen-year-old granddaughter was not playing the game and she was convinced that Ella lay behind it. In July 1990 she asked Victoria of Battenberg ‘to take care & tell Ella that no marriage for Alicky in Russia wld be allowed, then there will be an end of it. . .’62

  5

  Eddy and Hélène

  ‘Such a marriage is utterly impossible.’

  Queen Victoria to Prince Eddy, May 1890

  Prince Eddy arrived at Folkestone in early May 1890 after a seven-month tour of the British Empire, his confidence at a low ebb following Alix’s wounding refusal. He was soon back at Marlborough House in the protective embrace of his mother and his doting younger sisters. It was not long, however, before an envelope arrived from Windsor Castle bearing Queen Victoria’s seal. A formal letter from the queen, imbued somehow with her indomitable spirit, could create foreboding in a young man who tended to drift on the wind. Sure enough, his grandmother began somewhat ominously with: ‘I wish to say a few words about the subject of your future marriage . . .’1

  Queen Victoria pointed out to Prince Eddy that he must ‘resist all the wiles and attempts of intriguers and bad women to catch you’. She had lost no time in alighting on another suitable candidate in the two weeks since reaching a final conclusion on Alix. Her second choice as a bride for Eddy was none other than Vicky’s favourite youngest daughter: eighteen-year-old Princess Margaret or ‘Mossy’. The queen knew Margaret as a well-balanced and highly respectful grandchild; tactful enough to seek her permission before writing to her and grateful enough to thank her grandmother for the slightest consideration.2 Margaret had sensed that she was not top of the list of prospective brides, admitting on one occasion that she ‘quite envied Alix . . . being near you’.3

  But now there were a number of reasons why the queen expected her grandson to look favourably on this most amiabl
e German cousin. Firstly, there was a great shortage of princesses to choose from, ‘for of course any Lady in Society would never do’, the queen instructed Eddy on 19 May 1890. No one could doubt Margaret’s Hohenzollern pedigree, which stretched back to Frederick the Great on her father’s side and generations of British royalty on her mother’s. Secondly, although the queen admitted that plain Margaret was ‘not regularly pretty’, nonetheless she ‘has a very pretty figure’. In addition she frequently expressed a great love for ‘dear England’ and to cap it all, she was available and ‘you will be able to see her shortly’.4

  For Eddy the prospect of Kaiser Wilhelm’s youngest sister descending on Sandringham with marriage in mind was not an attractive one. He had known his cousin Margaret for many years and did not feel drawn to her, still less to the prospect of closer ties to the Kaiser as a brother-in-law. Knowing that this match would please the forceful mother-daughter alliance between his grandmother and his Aunt Vicky, Eddy no doubt felt the pressure. But as the queen was perfectly well aware, the prospect of an alliance to a princess from the German ruling house had already sparked controversy between Eddy’s parents. Although Bertie was not opposed to Margaret, the queen knew from her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, that Princess Alexandra ‘would object most strongly and indeed has already done so’.5 Ever since Prussia had invaded Denmark, the home country of Eddy’s mother, Alexandra had nursed a grievance against Germany and this had found new focus in her loathing of Kaiser Wilhelm. In her view the ‘emperor of All and Mighty Germany’ was ‘mad’ and ‘a conceited ass’ who was behaving ‘worse and worse to his poor Mother’, quite apart from being ‘most frightfully rude and impertinent’ to his Uncle Bertie as well as a perfect ‘beast’ who was unreasonably ‘infuriated against England’.6 She viewed the prospect of a closer unity with the mighty Hohenzollerns with alarm.

  In anticipation of Queen Victoria’s next move, Princess Alexandra and her daughters had also given thought to Eddy’s future marriage while he was away and had arrived at a different conclusion to the queen. Most conveniently, they had discovered a French princess who convinced them that she had strong feelings for Eddy: eighteen-year-old Hélène of Orléans. Dark haired, blue-eyed Hélène did not have the classic beauty of Alix of Hesse, but she was pretty and had the tremendous advantage that she was not German. Her air was aristocratic, her figure tall and slim, her personality full of vitality. With her headstrong and impulsive nature, she formed a striking contrast to the detached and self-possessed Alix.

  Eddy had known Hélène for some years since the French princess had spent large periods of her childhood in England. Her father, Philippe d’Orléans, Comte de Paris, although not currently in possession of a throne, had little doubt of his high social standing. But as Princess Alexandra was perfectly aware, there were immense problems with a Protestant future heir to the British throne becoming allied to a Catholic princess, one whose family history raised delicate diplomatic issues between monarchist Britain and republican France. For the fortunes of the Orléans dynasty had been intimately entwined with tempestuous French politics over the last hundred years.

  A century earlier, Hélène’s great-great-grandfather, Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, was a man of great wealth, with the added cachet of being a cousin to the Bourbon French king, Louis XVI. His circumstances changed dramatically in 1789 during the violence of the French Revolution. France became a republic in 1792 to the rallying cry of a new revolutionary song, ‘La Marseillaise’, exhorting citizens to take up arms against foreign tyranny and treacherous kings. Louis-Philippe considered himself a liberal and a moderniser. He adapted to the times, changing his name to ‘Citoyen Philippe Egalité’ and voting for the death penalty for his cousin, the king. None of this helped him during ‘the Terror’ in which many thousands were deemed ‘enemies of the revolution’ and executed in mass killings. In November 1793, a month after Marie Antoinette was executed, Philippe Egalité in turn was carted off to the guillotine.

  The Revolution was followed in nineteenth-century France by periods of stability interspersed with further insurrections in which Hélène’s Orléanist forebears almost regained their former royal glory. After the Napoleonic Wars the original Bourbon royal line was restored to power in France until a second revolution in 1830 swept the Orléanist line of the family into power. Hélène’s great-grandfather, Louis-Philippe, reigned for eighteen years as ‘King of the French’ until an economic crisis in 1848 sparked yet another revolution.

  At Buckingham Palace in London, Albert came to Victoria on 25 February 1848 bearing the shocking news from France. ‘The king has abdicated & left Paris,’ he said. At first, it was not possible to know the fate of the French royal family. Victoria felt ‘bewildered and petrified’. The centre of Paris was ‘in possession of the mob who were destroying everything’, she wrote in her diary. It was hard to think of anything but ‘these dreadful French affairs’.7 On 1 March came definitive news: ‘Monarchy and Royalty [in France] have been abolished,’ she recorded. ‘The people are going on in a disgusting way.’ Victoria offered sanctuary to the exiled French king, who was a distant relation by marriage: his daughter, Louise, had married the queen’s Uncle Leopold of the Belgians in 1832. Now the ‘King of the French’ was reduced to fleeing his country as plain ‘Mr Smith’, ‘wearing spectacles . . . a cap & his whiskers shaved off’ and travelling as an ordinary passenger, Queen Victoria wrote on 4 March 1848. ‘How indescribable does that sound?’8

  For years there seemed no hope of an Orléanist restoration and Hélène’s forebears adapted to life in exile at Claremont, near Esher in Surrey. As a grandson of the exiled Louis-Philippe, her father was styled ‘Prince Royal’, and became a pretender to the French throne when his own father had a fatal carriage accident. Meanwhile the Second French Republic, forged in the heady idealism of 1848, was undermined within three years by Napoleon’s nephew, who consolidated power and declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. His downfall came twenty years later during the German wars of unification, which culminated in war between France and Prussia. With Napoleon III’s surrender in 1870, a Third French Republic was born. But after the ignominious French defeat, it was opposed by the radical ‘Paris Commune’, which briefly seized power in the French capital.

  Once again, Queen Victoria followed the violent insurrection in troubled Paris, transfixed. Telegrams poured into Osborne House in the spring of 1871. The news from France was ‘dreadful’, she wrote on 8 April. ‘The Commune has everything their own way & they go on quite as in the days of the old Revolution in the last century, though they have not yet proceeded to commit all the same horrors . . . They have burnt the guillotine and shot people instead.’9 For communists such as Karl Marx, the Paris Commune, led by socialists, anarchists and radicals, was blazing a trail for a radical new model of ‘revolutionary government’. For the British queen, the Commune was appalling, ‘nothing can exceed its state of Moral and Physical degradation’. The possibility that the radical ideas of the excitable French might spread to Britain was much discussed at Osborne.10 The French government struggled to regain order during May. The magnificent imperial Tuileries Palace went up in flames and there were ‘fires raging in every direction and great fears for the Louvre’, the queen wrote on 25 May. Two days later she was stunned when the ‘horrid Communists’ shot the ‘wretched Archbishop’ and dozens of prisoners. The Third French Republic regained control by the end of May but faced a changed Europe. Newly unified Germany was now the greatest power on the continent.

  The troubled Third French Republic wrestled not only with the rise of Germany and then the extreme left of the Paris Commune, but also with the political right who argued for a return of the monarchy. The government permitted the Orléans family to return from exile in June 1871, the very month that Hélène was born in Twickenham on the outskirts of London. The Comte took his family back to Paris and a significant part of the Orléans fortune was restored, but his own grandiose ambitions created problems
. At the marriage of his eldest daughter, Princess Amélie, in 1886 to the heir to the Portuguese throne, Prince Carlos, the Comte proved just a little too kingly and flamboyant, a rallying point for French royalists. The republican government expelled the pretender to the throne and fourteen-year-old Hélène returned with her family to exile in England, taking up residence at Sheen House in Richmond.

  The Comte de Paris and his wife, the formidable, cigar-smoking Marie Isabelle d’Orléans, a crack shot who could hold her own with any honourables on the hunting grounds, became an accepted part of Bertie and Alexandra’s circle. Queen Victoria, too, regularly invited ‘The Paris’ as she called him, to royal events. Nonetheless, she was astute enough to realise that the British must not offend their closest neighbour, republican France. Any match between the English throne and a daughter of the exiled pretender to the French throne could pose delicate complications.

  But Princess Alexandra saw only that the Comte de Paris’s second daughter, Princess Hélène, combined Parisian chic with a lively personality that made her a much more sympathetic companion for her son than Alix of Hesse. She and her daughters were enthralled over the winter of 1890 when the French princess hinted that she had feelings for Eddy. When Eddy returned from India his sisters could not contain the secret for long. ‘The girls told me that dear Hélène had been fond of me for some time,’ he confided to his brother George. He admitted this was a surprise for Hélène ‘never showed it in any way’, but his sisters were adamant: ‘the girls constantly told me how she liked me’.11 There was little Eddy could do that month to find out Hélène’s feelings for himself since she was abroad on a European tour. But even before the prince had a chance to advance his interests, somehow his all-seeing grandmama appeared to know what was in his mind.