Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  Too late, Wilhelm woke up to the new threat. A week after the Kaiser’s visit to Britain in July 1891, Alexander III hosted the French fleet at Kronstadt near St Petersburg, home to the Russian admiralty. The German emperor was immediately alive to the danger. Was this friendly gesture the first step towards a future military alliance between France and Russia that would leave Germany between them exposed on both sides? That summer when the returning French fleet was invited to England by the British government, it appeared to the Kaiser that his grandmother was endorsing newfound ties between France and Russia.

  The queen was, in fact, on the spot, since she happened to be hosting the Kaiser’s younger brother, Henry, and her granddaughter, Irene. Almost farcically as the French fleet drew near, Bertie hurriedly took his German cousins on a cruise on his yacht, the Aline, out of the way of the approaching French. The queen watched their fleet slowly approach Osborne Bay from the Upper Alcove, the lights of all the ships reflected across the bay as dusk fell. At a reception for French officers at Osborne the next day, the ‘Marseillaise’ was played. Like the tsar before her, the queen concealed her distaste for the republican melody, politely standing throughout, ‘which gratified them greatly’, she wrote.80 Vicky was sympathetic. The ‘Marseillaise’ was ‘horrid’, she wrote to her mother, a ‘symbol of violence’ that was ‘closely associated with the massacre of kings, aristocrats and priests’.81

  The movement of the French fleet gave weight to an idea that was beginning to loom large in the Kaiser’s mind that summer and was charged with emotions of dread and fear: encirclement. He saw any understanding between the French and the Russians as a menace to the peace of Europe. Wilhelm could not see the extent to which his own actions had fostered French and Russian fears, pushing the nations closer together, nor the skill with which Bismarck had taken care to cultivate the Russians. Now a sense of threat was in the air. Vicky wrote to her mother explaining that the Kaiser was not at all popular and that there was uneasiness ‘that the Russians and French will take this opportunity of making war . . .’82

  For the Kaiser, there was another dimension to Europe’s shifting Great Power alliances. Instead of royal alliances keeping the peace, as envisaged by his grandfather, in the Kaiser’s disturbed mind the mirror opposite appeared to be true. There was a cabal of royal relatives with significant power, heads of state spread across Europe, who appeared to be talking about him, laughing about him, perhaps threatening him. Within this wicked circle he saw his suave and sophisticated Uncle Bertie as the ringmaster, who was inspiring the conspiracy against him.

  In London, Princess May’s warm reception at St Pancras Station proved to be just the start of an extraordinary few weeks. Her rags-to-riches royal romance captured the heart of the British public. Telegrams of congratulations poured into Marlborough House from ‘nearly every crowned head in Europe’ and heads of state from far-flung colonies.83 Although in reality Eddy and May had only enjoyed a brief courtship and could scarcely be said to be in love, up and down the country the press saw things differently.

  The engagement was ‘purely a love affair throughout’, according to the Devon press, which reported Princess May was ‘very much in love with the Duke of Clarence’.84 A ‘pretty love story’ it was, too, in the Manchester press. ‘It has been an open secret years ago that Prince Eddy’s heart was set on Princess May.’ The prince had ‘remained constant’ and now Eddy and May ‘seemed all in all to each other’.85 In the Dundee Evening Times the Duke of Clarence was a different man: ‘Tall and elegant in the smart uniform of his corps [he] looks as fit to be fallen in love with as the prince in the fairy tale’, and the bride is ‘bright and unaffected’.86 While in Yorkshire the news was ‘received with gusto and general satisfaction’, according to the Evening Post, which claimed that Queen Victoria had opposed the match and sent the prince abroad to thwart his attachment to May. But the prince showed ‘great strength of will’ and his ‘constancy and perseverance have overcome all difficulties’.87 So lyrical was the press about the strength of their love ‘triumphing over all obstacles!’ that Lady Geraldine Somerset was prompted to comment in her diary on the ‘columns of rot’ from the ‘twaddling and asinine’ press.88

  But Lady Geraldine’s cynicism was out of step with the national mood. After years of Queen Victoria’s mourning and Bertie’s infidelity, the nation was ready for what the papers called ‘a royal love match’.89 Almost overnight, May and Eddy were the couple that high society wanted to meet. The bride and groom enchanted the crowds by appearing together in London. There were celebrations at Marlborough House, they visited the theatre, charity concerts, society events, and even posed romantically in a gondola at the Venice Exhibition at Olympia, which May found ‘very pretty and well arranged’. She made plans with her mother for her trousseau and drove with Eddy in a hansom cab to St James’s Palace ‘to see our rooms and choose papers etc’.90 Her future life was taking shape and for the princess who had long been overlooked it was thrilling to be swept from one glorious event to another, each one vying for the acknowledgement that it was at their party that the princess was the dazzling centre of attention. Even Bertie was won over, declaring that ‘May is the most charming girl he has ever come across.’91 He wanted a magnificent wedding for the young couple at St Paul’s Cathedral, a royal pageant that would delight the nation. But on the prime minister’s advice, St George’s Chapel in Windsor was deemed more suitable and a date was set: 27 February 1892.

  The queen was delighted but managed to strike a more sombre note when she welcomed May and her family to Windsor. The thirty-year anniversary of Albert’s death was fast approaching and at the forefront of her mind. As though to underline the solemnity of their commitment, on 12 December 1891 she invited the newly engaged couple to the royal burial ground at Frogmore. They walked across the neat lawns, still wet from the heavy rain of the previous days, to the Royal Mausoleum. ‘This day thirty years ago was the beginning of great anxiety,’ she wrote in her journal later.92 Once within the thick stone walls the air was colder, the room was dark. Standing before the granite sarcophagus, a sombre reminder of the transience of life, Eddy and May were to receive Prince Albert’s blessing from the grave.93 For Queen Victoria this was a defining moment. In the hands of this sensible, dutiful young woman, sanctified somehow by Albert’s spirit, the future of the British monarchy seemed assured.

  May’s mother, Mary Adelaide, made an exuberant contrast. Against all the odds the Tecks had won the first prize and nothing could allay the buoyant mood. There were telegrams and invitations to send and all the thrill of the wedding plans. May and her mother commissioned the wedding dress material; the finest white silk broché made at a Lancashire silk mill with a wreath of roses and rosebuds in the centre. Christmas at White Lodge was a sublime moment that could never be spoiled for the Teck family. The wedding was just two months away. On Boxing Day the Tecks joined the Fifes and other guests for a dance in Sheen. The lighthearted mood, the optimism about her future, the Christmas atmosphere all combined to bring an exciting close to ‘a most eventful year’ for May.94 The celebrations were due to continue after Christmas at Sandringham where May joined her fiancé in the New Year. Eddy had much news to tell her about the appointments for his first household staff, who had just been chosen.95

  There was thick fog at Sandringham with many guests suffering from flu and when Eddy, too, caught a chill in the New Year at first he thought little of it. People wanted to congratulate the newly engaged prince and had brought gifts for his twenty-eighth birthday. He was well enough to write to Prince Louis, who had done so much to advise him over his hopes for Alix three years before. ‘I suppose my engagement took you somewhat by surprise, as it did a good many people,’ Eddy wrote on 5 January 1892, ‘but I think I have done the right thing at last in getting married . . . I feel certain she [May] will make the best of wives, and dearest companion.’ His thoughts were of his wedding; he wanted Louis to come, which ‘would please me more than any
thing’.96

  The biting chill continued and there were skating parties on the lake in front of Sandringham, which had turned into a sheet of ice. While others in the family managed to shake off the infection, including George, who May noted was ‘looking thin’ after the typhoid, Eddy did not improve.97 By his birthday on 8 January he stayed in his room with May, who was dutifully dealing with their voluminous correspondence. ‘Eddy still in bed’, Princess Alexandra telegrammed the queen at Osborne the next day.98 Her oldest son seemed to have no resistance to this strain of influenza. Bertie warned the queen on 10 January that Eddy had ‘now developed some pneumonia in the left lung’.99 May was beginning to feel ‘fearfully anxious’. Long hours waiting for any sign of improvement were punctuated with short walks with his youngest sister, Maud.100 Word began to reach the wider family that things were not right. The influenza ‘has developed into inflammation of the left and a little of the right lung’, the queen alerted Vicky on 11 January. ‘Is it not terrible?’ The queen worried about the effects of this sudden illness on Bertie and Alix, who ‘are very sorely tried’. At the very least, the wedding would have to be postponed.101

  Less than a week after his birthday and in a matter of hours, Eddy’s influenza turned into a fight for his life. By now the alarming developments were being announced across the empire. Regular news bulletins described his illness as ‘grave’ at first, but soon changed to ‘critical’. With ‘no abatement of the unfavourable symptoms’, a large crowd gathered silently outside the Wales’s London residence, ‘many of them ladies’, reported the West Australian. The awful possibility that Prince Eddy might lose his life just as he had become engaged added to the alarm. There was immense sympathy for Princess May whose popularity ‘has doubled and trebled’ since her engagement.102

  Confined to the small anteroom by Eddy’s bedroom at Sandringham, the Prince of Wales and his family along with Princess May waited with helpless anxiety. The queen, still at Osborne, alerted to each rally and each devastating setback in a flurry of telegrams, wanted to fly to Sandringham. ‘There could not be a question of your coming here,’ Bertie ordered his mother. There was nothing that she could do. ‘Our darling Eddy is in God’s hands.’103 Princess Alexandra, her face ‘wretched, imploring’, would not leave Eddy’s side, willing him to live.104 During the night his temperature rose sharply. He slipped into feverish delirium, which was all the more painful for May since it was not her name he called, but ‘Hélène’. The doctors were at a loss. The chaplain came, his prayers a comfort. May, dazed and wretched, her emotions unable to keep up with the shock, saw her fiancé transformed before her eyes, his face taking on a strange livid hue, his pulse weakening, his chin projecting forwards as he struggled for each breath. In the morning of 14 January 1892, barely six weeks before his wedding, the second in line to the throne died. ‘Our darling Eddy has been taken from us,’ Bertie telegrammed the queen. ‘We are broken hearted.’105

  At 9.55 a.m. an official at Marlborough House told the waiting crowd that ‘it was all over’. The city seemed to come to a standstill. The signs and sounds of death appeared during the morning, creating a sombre backdrop to the capital. By 11 a.m. all the clubs in the West End had closed their blinds, shops were shuttered, offices locked. Black flags or drapes, like a malignant growth, hung from windows, omnibuses and trains. Reverberating through the London streets the tolling bells reminded the nation of its loss.106 The news spread from city to city and crowds gathered in disbelief. ‘It is impossible to give an idea of the shock with which the news came to the public,’ reported the Edinburgh Evening News.107 Although the second in line to the throne was not well known, people responded to the tragic circumstances of his death at a time that should have been full of happiness. Princess May now had to prepare not for a wedding, but a funeral.

  The extravagant arrangements underway for a fine royal wedding at Windsor Castle were transformed into preparations for the prince’s burial. ‘There is something sadly dramatic,’ observed Sir Henry Ponsonby’s biographer, in the way the flow of letters to the queen’s private secretary concerning Prince Eddy’s marriage switched ‘with hardly a break in the sequence’ to arrangements for his funeral.108 Black-edged letters and telegrams of condolence poured into Osborne, Sandringham and Marlborough House. The groom lay at Sandringham, surrounded by flowers such as May blossom that were to feature at his wedding. His mother and May were quite unable to bring themselves to leave him. Queen Victoria was stunned, ‘too much stunned to take it in as yet! A tragedy too dreadful for words,’ she told Ponsonby.109 Forty-eight hours later it still felt ‘like a horrible dream’.110

  The press devoured the story and there was a huge outpouring of grief for the ‘lost king’. ‘Such sympathy was never known, not only from my vast empire but also from other foreign nations,’ the queen wrote in her journal.111 The following day Eddy’s ‘dear remains’ were taken by train to Windsor for the burial. As though it were still his wedding day, ‘not a vestige of black drapery has been employed’, reported the Manchester Courier.112 At Windsor Station the waiting room was transformed with white and purple flowers, lilac, lilies of the valley, white azaleas, fresh-cut orchids and other choice flowers. The coffin of the young prince was transferred to a gun carriage and taken through the packed streets to St George’s Chapel. Eddy’s father and brother, George, still dazed by what had happened, led the mourners walking behind the coffin. The queen had been advised not to attend the funeral and as a result had urged Bertie ‘I wish no other princesses to go.’113 Princess Alexandra refused to obey. ‘My darling Eddie would have wished me to take him to his last resting place,’ she telegrammed the queen. ‘So I shall hide upon the staircase in a corner, unknown to the world.’114

  There were magnificent floral tributes, including a wreath measuring fifteen feet of white flowers, from the Emperor and Empress of Russia to ‘Our Beloved Nephew’.115 But it was a simple symbolic gesture that brought the tragedy home to the nation. May’s father gave away her wreath of bridal orange blossoms to Bertie, who then placed it gently on Eddy’s coffin. May found it ‘too sad for words’ to see his coffin ‘close to the altar at which we were to have been married’.116 To the press she became ‘the sole object of the nation’s sympathy as a widowed maid’. Under an ancient statute for a princess betrothed to a future heir to the throne, there were reports that she could not marry for another five years, adding ‘further gloom’ to her ‘dismal’ circumstances.117 Her rags-to-riches story had, apparently, ended in rags again, her future as an old maid apparently assured. May bore her grief with dignified restraint but she felt ‘utterly crushed’.118 All that remained of her ‘bright dream of happiness’ were two rings, her mother reminded the queen.119

  After years of effort, Queen Victoria’s matchmaking to secure the British throne had ended in a catastrophe. ‘Poor darling Eddy was so good and gentle I shall miss him greatly,’ she confided to Victoria of Battenberg.120 As for ‘poor May’, her whole bright future had become ‘merely a dream’.121 The very idea that the ‘poor young Bride’, personally selected by her, had gone to Sandringham to celebrate her fiancé’s birthday only ‘to see him die’, was unbearable. ‘It is one of the most fearful tragedies one can imagine,’ she continued. ‘It wld sound unnatural & overdrawn if it was put into a Novel.’122

  Accustomed as she was to dealing with grief and weaving the rituals of mourning into her daily life, Queen Victoria’s powerful sense of loss that spring was compounded by another family tragedy when her son-in-law, Louis of Hesse, also died. Her Hessian grandchildren, at a young age, had now lost both parents. ‘It adds to my quite overwhelming grief to think of your distress,’ she wrote to Victoria of Battenberg, ‘& dear Ernie and Alicky alone – Orphans!! It is awful. But I am still there & while I live Alicky, till she is married, will be more than ever my own Child – as you all are . . .’123 She felt bound even more tightly as a mother to her two remaining unmarried Hessian grandchildren, especially Alix.

&nbs
p; This second death, so hard after the first, proved too much. ‘Everything goes wrong,’ she confided in despair to Vicky. The queen’s matchmaking was in disarray. It seemed impossible to bring Albert’s dream to fruition and the harder she tried the more it was pushed out of reach. The sudden loss of Britain’s future heir, the endless crisis created by her own German grandson and the trials that beset her favourite granddaughter, Alix, now parentless and irresistibly drawn to the temptations of dangerous Russia – the queen felt ‘broken hearted, crushed, bewildered’.124

  PART TWO

  The High Summer of Royalty

  1892–1901

  7

  George and Missy

  ‘Grandmama has gone mad on the subject . . .’

  Princess Alexandra to Prince George, April 1891

  It was a colder winter than usual and the icy chill outside seemed to pervade the atmosphere at Sandringham as the royal family struggled with their loss. Alexandra could not be comforted. Her oldest son, who had always been so loving, was now beyond a mother’s reach. Prince George, still frail from his recent typhoid, found the loss of his brother, and all the implications that followed, difficult to bear. His grief mixed with fears about the responsibilities ahead as a future king, for which he felt so unprepared. Telegrams poured in from concerned relatives. ‘Feel for you awfully,’ wrote his cousin, Nicholas, from Russia.1 Prince Eddy had shouldered the great expectations of being the heir, a burden that had shaped his life and protected George. Suddenly the British throne looked vulnerable. As the prince on whom the future of the British line would depend, it was George’s turn to experience the full force of Queen Victoria’s consideration.