Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  Eddy soon understood that for a Catholic, changing religion ‘is a terrible thing’ like a crime, he told George. At first Hélène would not even contemplate such a step. ‘I had a hard job of it as you may imagine and Motherdear also talked to her about it.’ The poor girl, he continued, was pulled in all directions and did not know what to do, until finally she ‘told me she would do anything for me. So at last with a great effort she said she would do this great thing for my sake.’ Eddy saw this as a ‘noble act’ on Hélène’s part, an act of immense sacrifice. Here was the confirmation that she loved him.39 At last he dared to propose – and to his amazement she accepted. This was the moment to exchange rings, which would mark their engagement without complications. The prince was ecstatic. For him it was a ‘blessed day’ that he would never forget. He had solved the conundrum of royal love: here was a pretty princess who declared her love for him and who he, in turn, felt he could love. There was just one outstanding obstacle: ‘Grandmama Queen’.

  ‘Motherdear hit upon a capital solution,’ Eddy related to George, although it ‘rather took me aback at first’. Alexandra, like Eddy, was ‘in such a state of excitement that I hardly know where to begin’, she confided in her youngest son, George. ‘What do you think. Dear Eddy and sweet lovely Hélène are engaged to each other! Altho’ still a dead secret so you must hold yr tongue!’40 The princess had concocted a little scheme that just might work on her mother-in-law. For all Queen Victoria’s forbidding persona, Alexandra recognised that she had a strong romantic streak. The queen had just arrived at Balmoral, where she was likely to be at her most relaxed and off guard. Alexandra concluded that Eddy and Hélène must make a direct personal appeal – something impulsive and passionate. If they explained their deep love for one another the queen could only be moved.

  Queen Victoria was greeted with the customary agreeable sense of order when she arrived at Balmoral on 26 August 1890. The grounds were pleasantly green and ‘all my Highlanders with the pipes [were] drawn up on the lawn’.41 The queen was accompanied by Beatrice and her family and the unvarying Balmoral routine was quickly restored. It was a cold, wet morning on 29 August when she took presents to people on the estate. After luncheon, Alexandra arrived with Eddy, Hélène and two of her daughters. Hélène’s presence was innocently explained away on the grounds that she and her parents were visiting Mar Lodge. After a while the queen retired for some quiet to her rooms, her suspicions still not aroused. It was not long before there was a knock on the door. There was a messenger. Prince Albert Victor wished to speak with her. The queen granted her permission.

  Eddy took Hélène’s hand in his and led her down the interminable corridors towards the queen’s apartments. He felt certain that his grandmother would find grounds to be angry both at the prospective liaison and the intriguing behind her back. ‘You can imagine what a thing to go through,’ he told his brother George. It was difficult to predict how the elderly queen might behave or whether she even understood the heated passions of youth. ‘I did not at all relish the idea,’ he continued.42 The queen had an extraordinary ability to get her own way, however unreasonable her argument. This might be his last time with Hélène. With mounting anxiety they entered her room. Each declared their undying devotion to the other and awaited the queen’s response.

  But his grandmother softened on meeting the charming possible reformer of Eddy. The formidably astute and perceptive matron of Europe momentarily suspended disbelief. What was abundantly plain to Queen Victoria was that standing before her, in the pleasing shape of this dark-haired, wide-eyed princess with the headstrong temperament, was the very thing she was looking for. The French princess exuded inner strength and conviction; her good looks and stamina were exactly what was required to improve the breeding of the dynasty. Already she appeared to have inspired Eddy into this uncharacteristically dynamic course of action.

  After some discussion to ascertain the strength of their feelings for one another, Queen Victoria asked whether Hélène would be prepared to give up her Catholic religion. The queen had met her match. The French princess, eyes full of emotion, tears on her cheeks, spoke with great passion: ‘For him, only for him. Oh! Do help pray do,’ she cried. If the queen would only consent, Eddy pleaded, ‘I shall be grateful to you to the end of my life’.43

  To his immense relief Queen Victoria succumbed to the romance of it all. She was prepared to accept the marriage. The queen ‘promised to help us as much as possible’, Eddy confided to George, ‘and I have been to see her several times since’. He admitted that enlisting his grandmother’s support had rested on a little deception. She had been much swayed by the romantic idea of a young couple so much in love that they had settled on this impulsive appeal for themselves. Her lethargic grandson, at last, appeared to be acting decisively on his own account. ‘This as you know was not quite true,’ Eddy told George, ‘but she believed it all and was quite pleased.’44 In the heat of the moment Eddy had lied outright to his grandmother: ‘I have not told Mama even,’ he had said.45 Princess Alexandra now colluded with Eddy, writing to the queen after the crucial interview as though she had only just heard. ‘What astounding but delightful news,’ she exclaimed, all innocence, on 30 August. The ‘two loving hearts’ were attached ‘far more deeply than we had any idea of . . .’46

  The queen was so taken with Hélène that she spoke that very day with Arthur Balfour, the minister in attendance at Balmoral who, most conveniently, was also a nephew to the prime minister, Lord Salisbury. At stake was a constitutional issue: could Eddy marry a former Roman Catholic or would he have to abandon his future throne? The queen was at her persuasive best. She was extremely keen to see ‘the young man married’, she said, and there was ‘a dearth of suitable Protestant princesses’. As Balfour explained to his uncle, ‘all the little German princesses of a marriageable age are, according to her, totally ignorant of the world and utterly unfit for the position’. By contrast the queen regarded Hélène as ‘clever’ and ‘healthy withal’ – the very woman she was looking for who had the potential to ‘be the making of her husband’. Balfour warned the prime minister that the ‘sovereign has been touched through the grandmother’, she was in ‘melting mood’, and was ‘absolutely won over to the marriage’.47

  This weighty matter, brought to the prime minister’s attention at the weekend in a rush of female emotion – ‘they are moved even to tears’, Balfour warned him – prompted Lord Salisbury once again to seek various stalling tactics. The girl should meet with the Archbishop of Canterbury, of course, and what did her father say about the question of her religion? Evidently there was some amusement for both uncle and nephew over the shortage of royal brides, for Balfour wrote again on Saturday 30 August with further clarification on this issue. ‘The Hesse girl won’t have him,’ Balfour explained, and that apparently left only ‘a Mecklenburgh and two Anhalt princesses . . . According to Her Majesty they are all three ugly, unhealthy, and idiotic’; and to boot, ‘penniless and narrow-minded . . . they might do perhaps . . . for a younger son but &c &c . . .’ Balfour was unimpressed with the notion that the ‘heroine’ had been in love since the age of sixteen, still less with the ‘ingenious theory which makes apostacy the conclusive mark of disinterested love’.48

  Queen Victoria thought little of taking on the flattening combination of Salisbury and his nephew, not to mention the Lord Chancellor. She intended to do ‘all in my power’ to promote ‘dear Eddy’s and sweet Hélène’s ardent wishes!’ she told Bertie on 7 September. Two days later the queen wrote again with detailed points of strategy and by 20 September she felt she was making headway.49 Meanwhile Bertie was secretly embroiled in diplomacy of an even more delicate kind. When the queen gave her blessing to the match, he had written at once to his comptroller, Sir Dighton Probyn, who was at Mar with Alexandra. Bertie advised that Dr Fripp must ‘have an interview’ with his wife, ‘and tell her candidly what he has said to you, so that she may know how matters are, which are far more serious t
han she has any idea of . . .’ Probyn duly passed Bertie’s orders on to Dr Fripp. ‘Hide nothing from the princess,’ he advised. Alexandra, at last, was to learn the truth about her son’s ailments and their implications. Probyn also urged the doctor to do all he could to ensure a ‘permanent restoration to health, no mere tinkering up for a few years but a lasting cure. The gout and every other ailment must be completely eradicated from the system.’50

  According to some writers it was not just ‘the gout’ that had to be eliminated. Patricia Cornwell has concluded that there was another mopping-up operation discreetly underway around this time concerning ‘two ladies of low standing’. The more daring one, a ‘Miss Maude Richardson’, was allegedly blackmailing the prince and the money that had already changed hands had prompted further demands. Under the vigilant eye of the barrister George Lewis, who specialised in representing wealthy clients caught up in such careless follies, the matter was being unobtrusively cleared up.51 However, the authenticity of the letters Eddy is supposed to have drafted to George Lewis has been questioned.52

  Meanwhile, the bride-to-be, blissfully unaware of any troubling secrets of the groom, left Balmoral to tackle one of her own. Although her father, the Comte de Paris, had initially encouraged the match, she knew that he assumed she would remain a Catholic. For him this was an inviolable precept, his strength of feeling recently affirmed by the Archbishop of Westminster. Yet somehow, carried away on impulse – first with Eddy, then the Princess of Wales, and now before the queen of Great Britain – Hélène had agreed to change her religion. Until the age of twenty-five she needed her father’s permission to take such a step. Eddy wrote sympathetically on 31 August, ‘I hope you won’t worry yourself too much, you darling, although I know you have a terribly hard task before you. But the sooner it is done the better I think, and get the worst over, for it must come. What would I not do to help you in this . . .’53

  When the Comte learned what had happened he was angry. His daughter had ‘blurted out words’ to the queen ‘whose significance she cannot measure’, he told his wife, Isabella.54 For Hélène to abandon her faith would potentially be to expose him and his family to serious criticism. Many might see her conversion as a matter of selfish ambition to become the queen of Great Britain. While the Comte saw his daughter’s motives as pure and disinterested, it was a matter of honour, he explained. If she changed her religion for marriage she would lose the support of Catholics and Protestants alike for abandoning the faith in which she had been confirmed. Catholics would hate her for her unfaithfulness; Protestants would have no reason to trust her. Politically, too, he could now see the problems. The French Republic might take offence at the match and the Germans could feel threatened by a British-French marital alliance. The Comte’s conversation with his daughter was ‘serious and painful’, Isabella told Alexandra on 31 August. Her husband ‘will never give his consent to a marriage made under such conditions’, she wrote. She believed Eddy and Hélène must wait for seven years until her father’s consent was no longer needed. ‘God will inspire us, I am sure. Console your son as I am trying to console Hélène.’55

  Meanwhile Eddy was sublimely happy, intoxicated with love. The prince, portrayed for years as ‘backward’ and ‘abnormally dormant’, proved to be perfectly articulate in expressing his love. He wrote almost every day to ‘my own sweet darling’ or ‘my own beloved one’. Her letters were treasured, he told her, as he read them ‘over and over again’:

  To think that a darling like you should really love so much this unworthy creature, which I know and feel I am, is too lovely for words. You will be all in all to me, which, however, you are now indeed, my darling, and ever in my thoughts, night and day . . . It makes me half-wild to think I have no power to help you now in your distress you darling . . . The more I think of it all the more dear you are to me, and that you should have gone through all this for my sake too, is indeed the truest devotion. You are indeed to me an angel upon the earth, and the sweetest one too that ever lived, or was ever dear to a man . . .56

  Prince Eddy’s great romance gave him new confidence, creating an uncharacteristic courage when dealing with ‘Grandmama queen’. He told his brother George that he would ‘never give up this dear girl’ and found that a little deception came easily.57 ‘Grandmama came over here to tea on Monday and was as nice as could be about it all,’ he told Hélène on 2 September. ‘But I won’t tell her yet what your Papa has said, for I think it best to keep it from her for the present . . .’ He was also worried that Hélène’s father might be angry if he found out that they were writing to each other and forbid the correspondence. ‘Tell me . . . if there is any fear of this for if so, I will send my letters through Louise,’ he wrote to Hélène a week later.58 Fired with the idea of love he felt he could take on his grandmama, the Comte and the British government. ‘I feel you are more than half mine already, and it would take a very little to make you mine altogether and for good and all . . . I feel as if I could do anything and stick at nothing, and very little persuasion would induce me to carry you off . . . and then people might say what they liked and I would gladly bear the consequences . . . I feel I could do anything for you my darling.’59 When the Comte went away, he begged ‘my own sweet darling’ to wear the ring he had given her. ‘Whenever I look at the one you gave me, it reminds me of the day we exchanged and the day you promised to be mine, and I yours, forever,’ he told her on 21 September 1890, the hot red wax of his letters sealed by two entwined hearts. ‘Nothing on Earth would turn my resolve to stick to you whatever happens,’ he assured her. ‘Even if I had to wait 50 years or more.’

  The records do not reveal at what stage Dr Fripp had his ‘little talk’ with Princess Alexandra nor whether any word of this reached Hélène. But they show in mid-September that Queen Victoria herself expressed a desire to speak to Dr Fripp about her grandson. Her sudden arrival at Abergeldie put the household in a fluster. The doctor was relaxing in a hot bath when his valet rushed in with news that he was about to be presented to the queen by the Prince of Wales. Feeling hot and bothered, Fripp suddenly found himself ushered in before the queen, her sober presence summoning up the essence of respectability. Momentarily at a loss, he instinctively raised his voice, ‘bellowing’ as he did with Princess Alexandra. ‘I am not deaf!’ the queen corrected him. She, too, felt awkward. The prudish queen had such an abhorrence of medical examinations that her own highly uncomfortable prolapsed womb was only discovered after her death. Enquiries of a more intimate or sexual nature were not within her customary range. Dr Fripp formed the impression she was trying to put him at his ease. The conversation began with watercolours and moved on to painting in general followed by polite enquiries about Fripp’s good father – before the queen finally broached the subject. What was the state of the Duke of Clarence’s health? With Bertie standing there like an adjudicator, making absolutely sure the doctor imparted as little as possible of a sensitive nature to his mother, Fripp found himself responding in a reassuring manner, revealing little. The queen seemed satisfied and brought the audience to an end.60

  While the prince was convinced that love would win through, Hélène’s resolve began to falter during October. Although she may not have known of her fiancé’s secret health problems, her father’s claims that the proposed marriage was ‘a crime’ and ‘vile cowardice’ began to undermine her confidence. Hélène did not wait for others to tell her what to do. She decided to go to the Vatican to see Pope Leo XIII for herself and did not confide in her fiancé until her travel plans were finalised. ‘I owe it to my conscience to remain Catholic,’ she wrote to Eddy on 27 October from Stowe House. ‘Only one person in the world can lower the barriers, the obstacles and that is the Pope.’ She was ready to throw herself at his feet. There was no chance for Eddy to intervene. ‘When you receive this letter I will have already left.’ The next morning she added a few more words, hoping that she had not ‘lost your feelings’. Knowing ‘the nobility’ of his heart, she w
rote, ‘you would never want to unite your fate to a woman who, even for love of you, committed a dishonourable act in her own eyes’.61

  Hélène travelled incognito with friends of her parents, the Baron and Baroness de Charette. It took three days for the small and sombre party to travel south to Rome. Hélène drafted a message to explain her predicament to the pope and they were granted an interview a few days later. Dusk was gathering, shrouding the vast complex of the Vatican in a strange half-light, the Baron observed, yet Hélène recognised the magnificent St Peter’s Basilica at once. As they made their way across St Peter’s Square the Baron realised that Hélène was ‘trembling, her emotions reaching a peak’: her future was out of her hands. A cardinal came to greet them, ushering them down narrow corridors that gave onto a large and unexpectedly bright room. There was an elderly man in a white cassock, sitting on his throne. The pope indicated to the princess to sit beside him and the Baron spoke for a while to allow Hélène the chance to regain her composure before they left her to speak privately.

  After a while the Baron heard a bell summoning them to return. They found Hélène pleading her cause, ‘in tears by the Holy Father’s knee’. The Baron was much moved to see the Holy Father ‘reaching out with both his hands to the princess who pressed them over her heart’. She was crying and he ‘looked on with great compassion’ at this ‘Daughter of France’ at his feet, ‘imploring forgiveness and mercy for her first and only love!’ But the pope saw his duty clearly. ‘It is useless, you know that I cannot compromise on the principles I represent,’ he said.62