Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  The Wales family arrived at Osborne in early February 1892, the queen anxious to help her grandson in his new role. Although Prince George did not suffer from any ‘constitutional lethargy’ like his older brother, at twenty-six he had not yet demonstrated his grandfather’s breadth of intellectual interests or his father’s winning charm. Some described him as dull, a stickler for royal protocol, deeply attached to his mother who leaned on her only surviving son more than before. Alexandra was ‘the very picture of grief and misery’, Queen Victoria observed, and ‘so nervous about her other children’.2 George worked hard to put the queen’s mind at rest that he could meet his new obligations. ‘I think dear Georgie (of Wales) so nice, sensible, and truly right-minded,’ the queen reported to Vicky, ‘and so anxious to improve himself.’3 Marriage was high on her list of priorities as the most potentially improving accomplishment of all.

  Prince George wrote to his grandmother after their short visit. ‘I shall never fail to come to you for advice when I feel in need of it,’ he promised on 13 February, anxious to keep her enquiries at bay.4 The queen’s reply the next day was full of sympathy. She felt ‘so [underlined twice] very deeply’ for him. There was, however, a gentle hint. The Tecks had now arrived at Osborne and the queen remained impressed with her protégé. ‘Poor dear May’ looked ‘crushed but is so nice’, she reminded her grandson.5 A couple of weeks later the queen wrote more searchingly to ‘Darling Georgie, I am longing to hear how you feel and how you spend your time? All is so changed for you since that dreadful 14th January that you must have many anxious and serious thoughts . . .’6 George knew that in his new position the queen would regard his marriage with some urgency. It was not long before her shortlist of possible brides for Eddy was transferred to his younger brother. Top of her list was ‘poor dear May’.

  The queen found May looking ‘sad and thin’ but maintaining commendable composure, her emotions under control. Her mother, Mary Adelaide, commandeered the conversation, unable to stop herself repeating every detail of Eddy’s demise, while May sat silently, barely able to hide her unhappiness at her sudden change of circumstances. Memories of her triumphant return from Luton were still fresh in her mind, but the door that had been suddenly flung wide open had slammed shut again. Her prospects shrank to the familiar round of charities and parental obligations. On the dreaded 14th – the first-month anniversary ‘since poor dear Eddy was taken’ – the queen took May out after luncheon alone and found her ‘very quiet and sensible but [she] says the contrast is terrible’.7

  Princess May, like George, found the situation one that tested her to the limit, her parents’ shameless pretensions greatly adding to her embarrassment. As the tragedy had unfolded, her father had paced around the rooms of Sandringham mumbling, ‘it must be a tzarevich, it must be a tzarevich’.8 His implication was all too plain to the royal family. Alexandra’s younger sister, Dagmar, had once been engaged to Tsar Alexander II’s oldest son, Nicholas. When her fiancé had died shortly before his wedding the Danish princess had married the tsarevich’s younger brother, now Alexander III. The Duke of Teck could not have conveyed more explicitly his ambitions for his daughter: May should marry Eddy’s younger brother, George.

  To compound this excruciating humiliation for the princess whose feelings were never on show, her mother, too, devised a scheme to advance her chances with George. Bertie was planning to take his grieving family to the south of France in the spring for a complete change of scene. Mary Adelaide’s insistence that ‘poor May’ in her unhappiness would also benefit from the restorative Mediterranean air was understandable to all. What was highly indecorous as far as Bertie was concerned, indeed quite inexplicable, was that of all the resorts on the French Riviera, May’s mother found it necessary to select Menton, a mere two miles from the Wales’s own holiday destination at Cap Martin. Bertie soon found all his original objections to Mary Adelaide reawakened, her over-familiar and ample presence grating on his mind.

  Prince George and Princess May were unavoidably thrown together in late February 1892, when Bertie and Alexandra invited her to join them as the original wedding date between May and Eddy approached. The Duke of Devonshire had offered Bertie the use of his country house, Compton Place in East Sussex, and as Saturday 27 February dawned, it could not have made more of a contrast to the celebration that had been planned. The royal family walked along the cheerless esplanade, the dreary expedition in an uninviting setting perhaps an unconscious choice that fitted in with the family’s desolation. It was ‘dreadfully cold’, May wrote in her diary, but despite the chill wind they braced themselves for another walk on the downs. She ‘felt overcome’ when Bertie and Alexandra gave her ‘a lovely charming bag’ that Eddy had ordered for her, and their own planned wedding gift: a brilliant rivière of diamonds. It was hard not to be caught off guard; the river of diamonds, a gift beyond price in her normal life, was now a forceful reminder of all that was lost.9

  Her parents’ thinly disguised ambitions invited comparisons between George and Eddy. May knew enough about George to be aware of his strengths compared to his older brother. There were no troubling rumours of ‘dissipations’ attached to his name that had been beginning to give May cause to wonder what she had been taking on with Eddy. George seemed dutiful, dependable, straightforward, not drawn to the excesses of his overbearing father. His devotion to his mother hinted at a softer side to his nature hidden behind the layers of reserve. Above all he held out the prospect of the British throne, restoring the tantalising opportunity that had been fleetingly on offer. But his feelings were inscrutable. May was a strong woman. Duty she understood; her life had been shaped by it. Romantic love was elusive, perhaps unreliable. She had been prepared to accept her opportunity with Eddy and turn it into something good. What was duty if not a loving act?

  Shortly after the Wales family had left for the French Riviera in early March the Tecks also set out. A family friend had intervened, discreetly steering Mary Adelaide away from Menton to a villa at Cannes, forty miles along the coast from the Wales’s destination: far enough apart never to meet, near enough for May’s mother to hope.

  Prince George did in fact have his own view on the subject of matrimony and had already singled out a special favourite of his own: Princess Marie of Edinburgh, known in the family as ‘Missy’. Prince George had long felt an attraction to ‘dearest Missy’, but since she was ten years his junior he had held back. At the time of Eddy’s death she had turned sixteen and under renewed pressure to marry, George could no longer keep his feelings to himself.

  As the oldest daughter of the queen’s second son, Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, Missy had a remarkable heritage, descended from both the British and Russian royal families. Through her father she was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and through her mother, a Russian grand duchess, she was also the granddaughter of Alexander II. The young princess had a vivid memory of the day of the tsar’s assassination in 1881; it was the first time she had ever found her seemingly invulnerable mother weeping, ‘an overwhelming, unheard of cataclysm’, she wrote in her memoirs.10 The grand duchess had hurried to St Petersburg while five-year-old Missy had stayed with her British grandmother at Windsor, who found her ‘so innocent and dear with her fine golden hair, fair face & charming smile under her little black cap’.11

  For George it was not her remarkable pedigree that was Missy’s special attraction. Nor the fact that at sixteen she had grown into ‘a remarkably pretty girl’, according to her cousin, Victoria of Battenberg, with even features, thick blonde hair and blue eyes.12 Her unique feature was harder to describe. There was something irrepressible about Missy, a joie de vivre, an impulsive spirit that had already inspired a number of followers, including a young Winston Churchill, who allegedly admired from afar. Missy could remember playing with Winston as a child. He was ‘red-haired, freckled and impudent’, she wrote, and even then displayed ‘a fine disdain for authority’. She felt they had ‘a sneaking liking for each other’ a
nd eventually the young Winston ‘threw away all pretence’ and openly declared his preference. ‘Before witnesses [he said] that when he was grown up he would marry me!’13 In early 1892, however, the seventeen-year-old Winston had not come forward to claim his supposed childhood sweetheart and Missy was still free.

  The knight in shining armour of Missy’s youthful games had always been Prince George, who she had known from her earliest years. Growing up at Eastwell in Kent, surrounded by its inviting parklands with great stretches of grass, she soon shared his love of outdoor pursuits. Along with her three younger sisters, Victoria-Melita, nicknamed ‘Ducky’, Alexandra and Beatrice, the ‘Edinburgh girls’ had been a tomboy presence in George’s life. They were regularly invited to royal residences and in her memoirs Missy recalls the delight of afternoons playing in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Their governess was obliged to bring spare smocks because she and her sisters would invariably get filthy, drawn as they were to the ‘dirtiest, blackest’ part of the gardens, the aviary. Surrounded by rare and beautiful birds, ‘peacocks, silver and gold pheasants and every sort of duck and goose’, the cousins played make-believe games of bandits, pirates and intrepid explorers.

  Then there was the thrill of Cowes week, heightened by the excitement of the ferry. Once again the Edinburgh girls led by impulsive Missy were often shown up by the Wales sisters, Louise, Victoria and Maud, whose white starched dresses and sailor hats appeared to Missy impeccably neat. When it came to summer, Missy ‘simply adored Scotland . . . which touched some special chord in me’. The dramatic landscape, coloured in ‘half tones; browns, buffs, purples, grey, every possible tint of these, and the hills in the distance blue, that special blue that distance alone can attain’: all this stirred her as it did her British grandmother. There was something ‘legendary’ about the scenery, she wrote, ‘which powerfully moved the soul’.

  Princess Marie of Edinburgh was not as carefully educated as Princess May but she had a natural intelligence and eye for detail and has left vivid cameos of the close-knit circle of royal relations she shared with George. Her earliest impression of his mother, Alexandra, was at a shooting party at Eastwell. Aunt Alexandra had chosen to wear a striking red velvet gown with a flowing train. Five-year-old Missy found herself ‘speechless with adoration’. Her own mother may have been a Russian grand duchess but she was not exactly a beauty and had settled into plump middle age with a somewhat disgruntled air. By contrast her Aunt Alexandra’s loveliness appeared ‘invincible . . . exquisite and flowerlike’. When this ‘velvet clad apparition’ volunteered to see the children take their bath, ‘I gazed at her over my sponge, spellbound,’ recalled Missy. Curious details held her attention, such as Alexandra’s beautiful hands and the gold snake bracelets that entwined around her arm with gems for eyes. ‘So much did this bracelet seem a part of Aunt Alix that one had the feeling that it had grown on her arm.’

  Missy was less sure of her Uncle Bertie. ‘He was too patronizing, he lorded it too much over everyone . . .’ Even his famed geniality could be unnerving; his laugh was a sudden outburst, ‘a sort of crackle’. As for her Aunt Vicky, Empress Frederick from Germany, ‘who spoke English with a strong foreign accent’, she appeared a learned woman ‘with a tendency towards the “blue stocking”’, rather eager to demonstrate her ‘superiority over commoner mortals’. Missy was struck by Aunt Vicky’s eyes that were ‘extraordinarily blue’ and her manner that ‘was exceedingly sweet with us children’. Nonetheless she sensed that her Aunt Vicky could be ‘forcible, incisive, penetrating’. Vicky’s good-looking husband, Uncle Frederick, had also made a lasting impression. Years later Missy could still see him on his last summer visit at the time of the Golden Jubilee in 1887, frail but trying to make light of it. On one occasion he had walked down to Osborne beach. Already voiceless, he had tried to join in with the children and ‘pretended to bombard us with sand and dry seaweed’.14

  From her earliest years, Missy was aware that the most important person in this royal constellation, ‘dwarfing all others’, was ‘Grandmama Queen, the all-powerful’. Her presence ‘was felt in all things, even when she was not actually seen’. Without a word being said, her silent wish somehow appeared to be ‘the arbiter of our different fates’. Missy could not help noticing that her aunts and uncles, the queen’s children, ‘were in great awe of “dearest mama”; they avoided discussing her will, and her veto made them tremble. They spoke to her with bated breath, and even when not present she was never mentioned except with a lowered voice.’ The queen’s inner sanctum at every residence was approached with such extraordinary hushed deference that this created the expectation in a child’s eyes of a formidable presence inside. It was something of a surprise to find the doors led to ‘a small, unimposing little woman . . . not idol-like at all, not a bit frightening’.

  Indeed, the source of her grandmother’s remarkable authority was not easy to understand as a child. The queen seemed ‘almost as shy as us children’. Missy found ‘conversation was not very fluent on either side’ and she imagined that the queen was as relieved as her visitor when an audience was over. Her rooms, too, were homely, smelling of orange flowers, even when none could be seen. There were pictures of Grandpapa Albert, in such quantities that they ‘appeared the first and foremost spirit’ of her rooms. All this domesticity was balanced by a heavy workload. Missy felt her grandmother’s dispatch boxes commanded her attention for so long that they ‘seemed almost a part of Grandmama herself’. In later years, looking back at this period, Missy found she ‘cannot help marvelling at the prestige’ the queen possessed. It was almost ‘fetish-like’; her presence, her personality, the places she inhabited ‘had something of shrines about them, which were approached with awe’.15

  Of all her childhood experiences it was her years in Malta that stood out for Princess Marie. A special affection sprang up between her and her cousin George, and for years afterwards their carefree Malta days appeared as an oasis of delight as though permanently bathed in a summer glow. It all began in 1886 when her father, Alfred, who had a career in the navy, was posted to Malta to assume command of the Mediterranean fleet. Prince George was stationed nearby as a lieutenant on HMS Alexandra. Missy’s parents kept a room for George at their official residence in the San Antonio Palace and he was a frequent visitor. Missy appreciated her cousin and soon felt George was her ‘beloved’ friend. ‘What fun we had with George, what delightful harmless fun!’ Missy wrote.

  For Missy and her younger sister, Victoria-Melita, arriving in Malta from Britain in the mid-1880s was like waking up in an exotic land. Standing on the flat roof of their residence on her first morning, Missy felt a wild sense of joy at the scene before her: ‘a walled-in oasis, Eastern and secret-looking, a maze of trees, mostly of kinds quite unknown to me . . . a lovely mass of colour saturating the whole place with exquisite fragrance . . . An enchanted world!’ Beckoning enticingly beyond the walled gardens lay an unknown land of improbable beauty, which the girls could explore on their treasured white ponies. In the evening the setting sun created a ‘stupendous illumination’; the sky, ‘burning red, as if on fire’, and the sea all around them ‘caught up in its reflection as did the rocks on the harbour’, created the impression of a world where ‘Earth, heavens and sea were ablaze’.

  Into this magical setting, Cousin George had entered their days like a breeze from England; practical, safe, sensible, brotherly. Although older than Missy he joined in their high-spirited games. ‘He used to drive us in a high, two-wheeled dog cart,’ she recalled. They shared exhilarating days out riding. George ‘had a horse called Real Jam, a beautiful glossy bay’. He was companionable at family picnics at the weekends, adept at keeping order between the rowdy sisters and above all, without fail, always loyal to Missy, taking her side when she got into scrapes. On one occasion when she was banished from riding for a week, ‘I can still feel what a delicious relief it was to lay my humiliated head upon his shoulder, and to weep my heart out . . .’ His han
dkerchief wiped away her tears and he consoled her with ‘Poor dear little Missy . . . poor dear little Miss . . .’16

  Louis of Battenberg was also stationed in Malta in the 1880s and his wife, Victoria, has left vivid impressions of family gatherings with her Wales and Edinburgh cousins. ‘Life was more leisurely there,’ wrote Victoria of Battenberg. There were few private carriages; people used ‘carozzas’ or pony carts, and goats ‘were met with every street’. When she escorted the exuberant Missy and her sisters, they would ‘gallop along the hard roads’, while she would follow at a ‘sober trot’. Victoria often sat with her Aunt Marie taking tea in the gardens of the San Antonio palace while her younger cousins played. The Edinburghs hosted many dinner parties and balls; a particular highlight was the fancy-dress ball during carnival week where, it seemed, the entire population turned out to dance traditional Maltese square dances in the sun-drenched streets.17 In this vibrant carefree world, far away from the restrictive formalities of the British court and his grandmother’s watchful concern, George was captivated by his pretty cousin, Missy.

  Prince George referred to his Edinburgh cousins as the ‘dear three’, although Missy had the impression that she was his dearest. Uncertain of himself in this confusing world of transition from childish games to real romance, George held back from expressing his feelings. Missy, too, with a childish crush on the captain of her father’s ship, gave no sign of encouragement. But Missy was convinced she was George’s ‘decided favourite, there was no doubt about that whatever’.18 Secretly, George felt that they had ‘an understanding’. He wrote to ‘my darling Missy’ whenever he was away on his travels. ‘You are always in my thoughts,’ he told her on her fourteenth birthday in 1889, sending her ‘a great big kiss [for her] sweet little face’.19