Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  ‘I wish to say that I heard it rumoured that you had been thinking and talking to Princesse Hélène d’Orléans!’ Queen Victoria wrote appalled on 19 May 1890. ‘I can’t believe this for you know that I told you . . . that such a marriage is utterly impossible.’12 For almost two centuries, since Parliament’s Act of Settlement of 1701, no Catholic or person married to a Catholic could accede to the throne. If Eddy proceeded with the marriage it would provoke a constitutional crisis. The queen instructed him to steer well clear of the French princess. ‘None of our family can marry a catholic without losing all their rights . . . You should avoid meeting her as much as possible,’ she ordered.13

  Eddy did the exact opposite, encouraged by his mother. The queen had just conferred on the prince a new title, ‘Duke of Clarence and Avondale’, bringing him new responsibilities as a peer, but that very week he disobeyed her order, writing encouragingly to Hélène on 27 May. ‘Dearest Hélène . . . how pleased I am to hear you have returned again,’ he began. Her ‘nice little letter’ had given him ‘so much pleasure while I was in India’. He had been delighted ‘to know that you had not quite forgotten me, although I was so far away’. He expressed a desire to see her ‘before very long and be able to tell you something of my travels which may interest you’.14 On cue, Eddy’s sister Louise, the Duchess of Fife, invited Hélène to her home at Sheen Lodge. This soon proved to be a most convenient rendezvous where romance blossomed rapidly, nurtured by the women of the Wales family in secret opposition to ‘grandmama queen’.

  Eddy soon found that whereas Alix of Hesse had been hard to read, her inner feelings unassailable and with, he detected, a certain coldness towards him, the French princess was agreeably frank and direct, with a warmth that was hard to resist. He saw that she was ‘everything that is nice in a girl . . . and gradually perceived that she really liked me’, he told George. ‘Well this went on till one day she came to lunch and came up to the girls’ room afterwards.’15 Falteringly, charmingly, Hélène came to reveal that she had been deeply in love with him for several years but had felt unable to show her feelings. Knowing full well that Eddy was destined for Alix, she had admired from a distance, her devotion undimmed. For Eddy this was a revelation. Could it be possible, after the fruitless years of courting Alix, that this French princess had all along been nurturing a secret passion for him? Certainly Hélène had been very private about her feelings. Could she really be in love with him? Or was this what his grandmother referred to as the ‘wiles and attempts of intriguers’ out to snare him?16 That very day the subject ran quickly to marriage, ‘but then the unfortunate point of religion came in’, Eddy confided to George, and Hélène ‘feared it was quite impossible to think of marrying or anything of that sort’.17

  Unknown to Eddy, within two weeks of his daughter’s return, the aspiring Catholic Comte was looking for a loophole to find out whether there was a way around the religious problem. After generations of his family seeking to restore their fortunes in France, suddenly a glorious rise to the British throne had opened up before him. The Comte’s first daughter had already become Queen of Portugal. If his second daughter succeeded in marrying a future heir to the British throne, the ascendancy of the House of Orléans, for so long adrift, would be secure. He saw the prospect in most honourable terms. This could be a watershed year between Catholic and Protestant faiths. Could the laws of the Catholic Church bend a little to accommodate the circumstances? For example, the Catholic Church required that the offspring of a mixed marriage must be brought up as Catholics, but any heirs to the British throne had to be brought up as Protestants. Could the Catholic Church contemplate granting permission for children of a mixed marriage to be brought up as Protestants? What were the prospects of a royal marriage between his Catholic daughter and Protestant second heir to the throne? He went to seek the advice of the most senior Catholic prelate in the country, Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster.

  The archbishop ‘weighed carefully and anxiously’ the points raised by the French Comte. Regarding the Catholic law that children of Catholics should be raised as Catholics, this was a ‘natural and divine law’, he concluded on 22 June 1890, from which the pope had never permitted any deviation. The archbishop had applied this law all his life and having searched his conscience, would find it ‘impossible to act otherwise’. The only alternative was to alter the laws of England by changing ‘Laws of Succession’ so that a Protestant king could raise Catholic children. The archbishop was convinced that this would be politically and morally unacceptable and that ‘the slightest contact of the Catholic church with the public and political life of the country’ would be met with the greatest hostility. He was conscious that this was an issue that affected not just the ‘happiness of the two Families’ but also ‘the salvation of souls’, and so for the archbishop there was no hope for the marriage.18

  The Comte was nothing if not ambitious. He felt the need for a second opinion and began to contemplate approaching the highest Catholic authority in the world: the pope. Drafts survive in the Comte’s hand showing that he considered this a most commendable cause. ‘The heir to the throne of Henry VIII and William of Orange wants to be able to seek the hand of a Catholic princess of the highest lineage,’ he wrote. The prince would have to forfeit his throne to marry the Catholic princess, but was it not possible for the Catholic Church to change the rules? ‘There must be no stipulations on the religion of the children who will be born of this marriage,’ he continued. The Comte saw a great destiny for Prince Eddy if he married a Catholic queen: ‘will not all Europe see this as a great event?’19 Although not generally thought of as Europe’s most illustrious prince, Eddy was about to have his hour of greatness thrust upon him.

  Almost 2,000 miles away in St Petersburg, the very princess who had just declared her love for Prince Eddy was also being shortlisted by the Russian tsar and tsarina as a suitable consort for the tsarevich. Envoys from Alexander III considered the French princess, Hélène, a most promising candidate, who was said to possess great charm and self-confidence. But the tsar faced opposition from Nicholas, supported by Ella, who would not give up on Alix of Hesse.

  Nicholas first raised the question of marrying Alix with his father in 1889 after her visit to St Petersburg, but Alexander III would not give his consent, convinced that Alix of Hesse was not suitable. The very qualities in Alix that appealed to Queen Victoria, such as her antipathy to the social whirl, were seen as failings in the Russian court. The princess from Darmstadt was too shy and gauche to be an empress, unable to measure up to what was required in the imposing Russian court. Queen Victoria soon discovered that she had an ally in the Russian emperor and warned Victoria of Battenberg, ‘moreover Minnie [Empress Maria] does not wish it. In short that cld not be.’20 The queen was not pleased to learn that within weeks of issuing instructions to Victoria of Battenberg that no marriage between Alix and Nicky ‘wld be allowed’, Alix was back in Russia again at Ella’s invitation, with her father and oldest sister.

  Ella was overjoyed. She had ‘longed for them to come’, she told the queen. They stayed at Sergei’s country house, Ilinskoye, a private estate of over 2,000 acres some forty miles from Moscow. The late summer of 1890 passed and they relished the timeless tranquillity of the place, boating, fishing and bathing on the River Mosca, playing lawn tennis or chatting on the balcony that ran the length of the first floor. There were carriage tours to meet Ella’s friends in the neighbourhood, among them Prince Felix Yusopov, one of the richest men in Russia. Yusopov had a ‘palace-like country house’, observed Victoria of Battenberg, reminiscent of Versailles with its fountains, statuary and an eighteenth-century theatre. Even the pigs in the piggery enjoyed the latest modern novelty, electric light.21

  Nothing occurred in her visit to alert Alix to the dangers of the great injustices of Russian society as depicted by her grandmother. Ella presided with great charm over village fetes and fairs, which gave Alix a brief glimpse of the lives of the poor. The pea
sants appeared to Alix to be ‘good natured’ and deeply respectful to the royal party, welcoming ‘their Grand Duchess’.22 Russia once again worked its magic on Alix, who was beguiled by the beauty of the scenery and the apparently simple, trusting relationship between the peasants and the nobility. She had been expecting to see Nicholas but a last-minute change in his schedule made this impossible.23 It is likely that the emperor intervened to keep them apart.

  Queen Victoria was exasperated to learn that Ella continued to conspire to bring Alix and Nicky together, and she expressed her disapproval in the strongest terms to Victoria of Battenberg on 29 December 1890: ‘I had your assurance that nothing was to be feared in that quarter, but I know it for certain, that in spite of all your (Papa, Ernie’s & your) objections & still more contrary to the positive wish of his Parents who do not wish him to marry A . . . in spite of all this, behind all your backs, Ella & S [Serge] do all they can to bring it about, encouraging and even urging the Boy to do it!’24 The queen’s source was Princess Alexandra, who had been informed by her sister, the tsarina herself, ‘who is very much annoyed abt it’, she continued, adding that Victoria of Battenberg must ‘never’ reveal her source. But now Queen Victoria had had enough. Beautiful Ella was beyond any kind advice. It was time to insist on firm rules. ‘This must not be allowed to go on. Papa must put his foot down & there must be no more visits of Alicky to Russia,’ she ordered with her usual imperiousness. ‘He must & you and Ernie must insist on a stop being put to the whole affair. The state of Russia is so bad, so rotten, that at any moment something dreadful might happen & tho’ it may not signify to Ella, the wife of the Thronfolger [heir to the throne] is in a most difficult and precarious position.’25

  The queen was well informed about the continuing worries over the security of the Russian royal family through the tsarina, ‘Aunt Minnie’. For greater safety, Alexander III had settled his family in the Gatchina Palace, some thirty miles south of St Petersburg, which had the air of a fortress, with its defence wall, a moat, cannon and hexagonal towers. The imperial family settled in the Arsenal wing and the palace soon became known as ‘the Citadel of Autocracy’. The revolutionaries responded to Alexander III’s repressive regime by developing underground terrorist cells, but these were frequently infiltrated by his secret police, the dreaded Okhrana.

  In February 1887 the Okhrana learned of a new plot to assassinate the tsar and fifteen suspects were arrested. Five of the terrorists were hanged, including a twenty-one-year-old science student at St Petersburg called Alexander Ulyanov, who admitted responsibility for making the bombs.26 Like the members of the People’s Will before him, Ulyanov made a heroic but doomed stand in the courtroom, pointing out the injustices of tsarist Russia and the rightness of his cause and insisting he would die for his country. News of frightening incidents continued to reach the British press. The tsar had another narrow escape from assassination seven months later at Kutais in Georgia. A Kouban Cossack was arrested for ‘having upon him explosives in a handy form’, claimed the London Evening Standard. He was a member of the South Russia Revolutionary Society ‘and aimed to make an attempt on the Emperor’s life’.27 Queen Victoria did not want this kind of alarming future for Alix and was reassured by the fact that the emperor and empress also did not support the match.

  Ironically, in their search for a suitable princess for Nicholas the tsar’s advisors alighted on one of the very candidates Queen Victoria had favoured for Eddy: Princess Margaret. A Hohenzollern princess who was accustomed to the pressures of the court at Berlin would be a far more suitable consort than Alix. Margaret had a reputation for being outgoing and socially at ease and was well liked in the royal family.28 Nicholas’s protest that he would rather spend his life in a monastery than marry Margaret was ignored by his father. But as Nicholas’s family weighed up the best bride for him, Princess Hélène had an advantage over her German rival. For Alexander III, a French princess brought the added advantage of helping to symbolise a new bond being forged between autocratic Russia and republican France.

  Since Bismarck’s Triple Alliance of 1882, in which the central European countries of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy had formed a military agreement, both Russia and France appeared exposed. A great swathe of central Europe was pro-German. To the east, Germany and her allies threatened Russia’s border with Europe. To the west, France feared the growing strength of Germany on her northern border. For years Bismarck had built an intricate web of secret alliances to balance the Triple Alliance. He strengthened German ties with Russia firstly through the ‘League of Three Emperors’, a treaty of neutrality between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia that aimed to preserve European monarchies against republican France. When this failed owing to differences between Austria and Russia in eastern Europe, Bismarck negotiated a separate treaty between Germany and Russia known as the ‘Reinsurance Treaty’, which continued to isolate France and provide safeguards if Germany was attacked by France, or Russia by Austria.

  During the crisis of Bismarck’s dismissal in 1890, the Iron Chancellor’s ‘Reinsurance Treaty’ with Russia was due for renewal, but Wilhelm and his new chancellor, Count Leo von Caprivi, declined to do so. This was a crucial choice. The future of Russo-German relations hung on this decision. Neither the Kaiser nor Caprivi fully appreciated the diplomatic safety net fashioned by Bismarck.29 Alexander III had hoped to renew the secret treaty but was snubbed. Wilhelm’s changeability and capricious statements on foreign policy soon heightened tensions with Russia.

  Warily, the autocratic tsar began to look to republican France, which was investing heavily in Russian infrastructure. Industry was booming in Russia in the 1890s; iron and steel in the Ukraine, oil in Baku, and railways that began to criss-cross the country. French funds helped to oil the wheels and symbolise the unlikely new friendship. A pretty French bride and young Russian groom might serve as an iconic bond between their two countries. Nicholas hated finding himself in conflict with his mother, who began to drop hints about the suitability of the French princess as the perfect wife and empress. The tsarevich knew he could not disregard the wishes of his parents.

  In July 1890 Prince Eddy returned to his regiment in York, but his mother and sisters hatched a plan that would help to advance his cause. Eddy’s sister, the Duchess of Fife, invited him, Hélène and her parents to her husband’s sporting estate at Mar Lodge in the Scottish Highlands five miles from Braemar. Queen Victoria was still at Osborne, unaware of these forbidden developments. The fact that a message reached the Comte de Paris from the queen, in which she charged him ‘to avoid all meetings’ between his daughter, Hélène, and Eddy, proved no impediment. By a rather convenient ‘ill fortune’ – as he later put it – the communication from the queen came the day after his arrival at Mar Lodge. ‘Had I received it the day before, we would not have gone there,’ he exonerated himself to the queen later.30

  While Hélène’s father had been doing his best to resolve the religious issue by tackling the saintly guardians of sin, Eddy’s father was preoccupied with a rather more earthly matter, possibly arising from his son’s ‘dissipations’. With unfortunate timing, just as love and marriage appeared almost within his grasp, Prince Eddy was suffering from ill-health once more. Historians have speculated that this was a recurrence of his sexual infection.31 He was taken ill in late July with a ‘sharpish attack of fever’ and the young locum who was visiting him daily, Dr Alfred Fripp, was invited to accompany him to the Highlands. Fripp was most discreet about his diagnosis in his letters home, although he did reveal that he had to give detailed directions about Eddy’s diet and also limit his smoking since the prince ‘smokes himself until he is stupid’. Fripp urged his own parents not to breathe a word of this, since the Prince of Wales ‘is afraid the public will get the impression that his son is a chronic invalid’.31

  Journalists, however, were not completely fooled. At Aberdeen Station the prince was spotted by one reporter who noticed that he ‘looked jaded and ill, heav
y-eyed and sallow complexioned’, and with Dr Fripp in ‘constant attendance’.32 The press soon worked out that the prince was in the care of a doctor staying close at hand in the Fife Arms Hotel. Fripp worried that ‘the cat is out of the bag’, and indeed not all of the press was obliging enough to write – as claimed – that the prince had been involved in a riding accident.33 The Leeds Times on 30 August considered the prince was ‘really weak’ and ‘suffering from a marked general debility’.34 For the Yorkshire Post there was ‘not the slightest foundation’ for claims made in a number of ‘foolish journals’ that the prince ‘was suffering from Indian fever’.35 As the mystery deepened, one reporter commented angrily in the Sheffield Evening Telegraph on 28 August that ‘no one is told the nature of the illness which has now continued in a more or less degree for several weeks’. The Huddersfield Chronicle had a solution: the prince was ‘sick with a malady common to youth: namely love’.36

  The prince may have been pale and sallow but he was indeed blissfully happy as he spent enchanted days at Mar Lodge with Princess Hélène. ‘I naturally got to like, or rather, to love her, by the manner she showed her affection for me which I soon found out,’ Eddy explained to his brother George.37 The relationship between Eddy and Hélène blossomed, quickly running into open declarations of love. ‘I had a long talk to Motherdear about the dear girl and she said if I really wished to win her, it was to show her how fond I was of her and then try and persuade her to change [her religion] for my sake.’38