The French public saw no reason for such British restraint. Even in republican France, May’s story of royal love and tragedy had fired people’s imagination. On one occasion the Wales and the Tecks, both families in black mourning, visited a flower market in Cannes. May attracted attention: a pretty young woman in widow’s weeds and not even married, proclaiming her sad state among all the sunshine and flowers. With charming spontaneity, a Frenchman asked the princess whether she could accept a gift. When she agreed, he returned with a magnificent bouquet. His touching gesture was noticed by others and soon there was a small crowd, each person with flowers for the widowed bride. There were so many that Prince George was obliged to come to her assistance, and then the Prince of Wales too. The sombre mood was transformed for a moment. It was hard to resist the warmth of the French people’s gesture and the Prince of Wales, a committed Francophile, was enchanted.
Despite such romantic moments, George did nothing to raise May’s expectations during his visit to Cannes. With Missy he had felt there had once been a genuine affinity; he could trust in her warmth and affection, even if not her love. The queen wrote to him in early April with more news about Missy, which still provided little by way of an explanation. The Duchess of Edinburgh ‘is in no way to blame. She never wished for her Cousin, who tho he is good & steady she does not particularly care for. She is not angry with you or bears you any ill whatever. What did hurt her dreadfully was a letter that was written wh. ought not to have been.’42 If George had suspicions that Missy’s dictatorial mother had taken the decision, rather than Missy herself, the queen was unaware of it.
Both George and May left the Riviera on their separate travels that spring, their futures unresolved. Princess May continued to follow the details of the nihilist violence in Paris that formed a disturbing backdrop to her European tour. Could the anarchist movement represent a threat to any British royal marriage – however safe it appeared? There had not yet been anarchist attacks in London on the scale of the Paris attacks. In France, the authorities appeared unable to keep order, despite the arrest of the ringleader, Ravachol. On the eve of his trial in April there were more reprisals as a bomb ripped apart the very restaurant in Paris where he had been arrested. Many people were badly wounded, including the restaurant owner, Monsieur Véry, whose injuries were so severe that his traumatised wife ‘has for the time, lost her senses and is in a raving condition’, reported the Manchester Times. Monsieur Véry revealed that he had repeatedly warned the police of death threats he had received after Ravachol’s arrest, yet they had been unable to prevent the explosion at his restaurant. The jury was so terrified that the court, too, would be bombed that they ‘yielded to the sentiment of terror’ and gave lenient sentences. Their decision was ‘a triumph for the dynamite party’, concluded the Manchester Times. ‘The expression on the Boulevards is a feeling closely allied to panic.’43
Princess May and her family left the Riviera to see relatives in Germany but took the opportunity to pass through Paris and see what was going on for themselves. On 5 May the Tecks began their tour at the Conciergerie to explore France’s revolutionary past. They peered into the small, dark cells occupied a century earlier by Marie Antoinette and Maximilien Robespierre. In a dark, airless corner, under constant surveillance of the guard, Marie Antoinette had spent her last few days in her struggle to survive France’s first revolution. In the 100 years since, France had seen two further revolutions, in 1830 and 1848, as well as the Paris Commune of 1871. ‘Ravachol the anarchist is now shut up here,’ May commented in her diary.44
It was hard to make sense of the many different strands of anarchism that had emerged. France, that hotbed of revolutionary thinking, had produced Pierre Proudhon, dubbed ‘the father of anarchy’, whose writings in the first half of the nineteenth century had advocated peaceful change. Proudhon believed in ‘order in anarchy’, a phrase that later gave rise to the anarchist symbol, the ‘A’ in anarchy circled by an ‘O’. Proudhon had inspired the Russian, Michael Bakunin, who believed revolution was the only way to destroy the existing structures of power and usher in a new social order. Another strand of anarchism arose in Germany through the philosopher Max Stirner, who argued for ‘egoism’, a form of ‘self-mastery’ in which individuals were truly autonomous. His ideas would inspire a generation of existentialists and anarchists.
By the 1890s anarchism was no longer the province of theorists and dreamers but encompassed a wide range of direct actions. Swelling the ranks of Europe’s disparate anarchist movements were recruits drawn from the squalor and stench of Europe’s fast-growing industrial cities. Many championed new workers’ movements and trade unions and hoped to use widespread strike action to grind the system to a halt. Amongst Europe’s peasant populations, too, there were sporadic anarchist attacks across the continent from Spain to the Ukraine. Although some anarchists believed in peaceful means to bring about change, anarchy was indelibly associated in the public mind with dynamite and the birth of international terrorism. While in Paris the Tecks took the opportunity to have lunch with Lord Dufferin, the former ambassador to Russia who had been in St Petersburg ten years earlier when the idea of a new age of anarchist terror had exploded into public consciousness with the gruesome assassination of Alexander II.45 Now dynamite conspiracies were becoming almost commonplace and captured the public imagination in the literary mainstream.
The means by which anarchy might destroy the existing social order was explored in Edward Fawcett’s science fiction novel, The Doom of the Great City, published in 1892. Fawcett’s fictional character, ‘Hartmann, the anarchist’, attempted to blow up the German Crown Prince as he drove over Westminster Bridge. The failure of this attempt fired his mission. ‘We want no more “systems” or “constitutions” – we shall have anarchy,’ declared Hartmann, who despised the hidden price paid for Victorian consumerism: ‘Men will . . . abjure the foulness of the modern wage-slavery and city-mechanisms.’ Hartmann set out to blow up London in a ‘tempest of dynamite’. His aim was ‘to pierce the ventricle of the heart of civilization, that heart which pumps the blood of capital everywhere, through the arteries of Russia, of Australia, of India . . . the fur companies in North America, planting enterprises in Ecuador and trading steamers on African rivers’. The tower of Big Ben was the first to topple, ‘bruising into jelly a legion of buried wretches’. Then the Houses of Parliament collapsed, its pinnacles and walls ‘riven asunder’. Finally, Hartmann’s dynamite was unleashed on the bankers in the city in ‘a constant roar of explosions’. Fawcett’s story showed how the anarchists and dynamiters captured dissatisfaction with all systems of power – not just constitutional but also financial – that propped up the great social injustices of late nineteenth-century Europe.46
Before leaving Paris, the Tecks went to see Véry’s restaurant for themselves.47 This was the site of the most recent anarchist outrage and on turning into Boulevard Magenta, the place was immediately marked out by a large pile of charred furnishings on the pavement. As they drew closer, they saw that the ground floor had been blown out entirely, empty space where windows should be. The ruined, blackened interior still had the power to shock. Innocent people would have stood little chance. The bomb had been placed by the door, trapping diners inside. The leading perpetrator, Ravachol, was taken to the guillotine in July defiantly chanting an anarchists’ song, according to the prison chaplain:
Danse, dynamite,
Danse, danse vite,
Dansons et chantons:
Dynamitons, dynamitons!48
The desire of the ‘dynamite party’ to spread mass terror was not easy to understand. Would such a movement grow and where would it end? Would monarchy survive into the twentieth century? As the Tecks left Paris on the Orient Express for Stuttgart, the image of the burnt-out restaurant was a chilling reminder of the threatening undercurrents of instability in Europe: a warning.
8
Missy and Ferdinand
‘Cruel is the only word whi
ch really describes it.’
Queen Marie of Romania, Memoirs
After turning down Prince George, sixteen-year-old ‘Missy’, Princess Marie of Edinburgh, was unknowingly facing a battle of her own. The path she was being steered towards would come to cause her so much distress that even years later she found ‘my pen seems to tremble in my hand when I set about recounting it’.1
Her ordeal began imperceptibly when she and her younger sister, Victoria-Melita, accompanied her mother as guests of Kaiser Wilhelm and his wife, Dona, at Wilhelmshohe, a handsome château near Cassel, some 200 miles from Berlin. Ostensibly, the event was a celebration at the all-important annual Kaisermanover of military displays and cavalry assaults. Missy had not yet come out into society officially. All innocence, she was trying to appear grown up – a lamb to the slaughter. Dressed in her best mauve-coloured gown, complete with a matching coloured orchid she had chosen, she made her entrance through the tall pillared doorway of the eighteenth-century château with her fifteen-year-old sister, armed with her mother’s advice ‘not to be tongue-tied’. It was like entering a different realm; before her were the grandees of the German court, all appearing at ease in this lavishly gilded world.
Despite Wilhelm’s colourful personality, he was ‘not a favourite cousin’, Missy observed. She felt he could be brusque and boisterous in his dealings with the family, almost intimidating. ‘There was something about him that aroused antagonism’ and made her feel ‘all prickly with opposition’. Although his obedient wife, Dona, now the mother of six strapping sons, tried to be charming, Missy sensed there was a pretence about her cordiality, ‘her smile seemed glued on’. Doubtless it was a relief that evening for Missy to find herself seated for dinner nowhere near the German emperor and empress, but next to an attractive man, ten years her senior, who had a youthful, unconfident air. This was so marked that Missy remembered vividly his awkward habit of laughing readily – even giggling – to mask an intrinsic shyness and lack of ease. He was introduced as the heir to the Romanian throne, Crown Prince Ferdinand.
Missy thought little of the apparently chance meeting until afterwards, when it was too late. ‘Was it all a plot,’ she wondered. Were her relatives ‘all in it’? There were other ‘coincidental’ meetings through her German cousins with Crown Prince Ferdinand of Romania, who was from the senior branch of Germany’s imperial line, the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. It was only long afterwards that she reflected on her youthful joy and trust that made her suspect nothing. ‘But for all that it was cruel,’ she wrote, ‘yes, cruel is the only word which really describes it; it was a sort of trapping of innocence, a deliberate blinding against life as it truly is . . .’ At no stage did Missy blame her Russian mother, but the Duchess of Edinburgh was the key player in arranging her fate – all the while the duchess’s face appearing ‘happy and expectant’, inspiring her daughter’s confidence.2
For some months the Duchess of Edinburgh had been working on a marital alliance for her oldest daughter that would suit her relatives in Russia and win favour in her new home of Germany. The duchess’s choices were intimately bound up with the outcome of the Russo-Turkish War. Her father, Alexander II, had been humiliated at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 when Russian control in the Balkans was curtailed. At the time Romania was recognised as an independent country, freed from Ottoman control. It was in the interests of the duchess’s older brother, Alexander III, to gain influence there with his niece on the Romanian throne.
There was a second beneficiary of the Duchess of Edinburgh’s planned alliance who was not unaware of the scheme: Kaiser Wilhelm. While Missy innocently pictured Romania in vague terms as ‘a land of Romance, a land of Promise’ somewhere far off in the east, ‘near the Rising Sun’, the Kaiser knew exactly how the land lay.3 This was a Balkan country of strategic importance to the east of Austria-Hungary where he wanted to strengthen German influence. In 1881 his distant cousin, Prince Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, had been crowned King Carol of Romania. Two years later Carol joined the treaty between Germany and Austria-Hungary (and later Italy) – his agreement so secret that the only copy was kept under lock and key by the king himself.4 Since Carol was childless his nephew, Prince Ferdinand, became the heir to the throne. The duchess’s proposed alliance for her daughter could only serve to bind the ties between the two countries still more tightly together.
After turning down Prince George, events came to a head for Missy in Germany with astonishing speed. Her mother took the view that as girls grow older they ‘begin to think too much and have too many ideas of their own which complicate matters’.5 She was keen to preempt this with her spirited oldest daughter. Missy and her younger sister, Victoria-Melita, were invited to Berlin to stay at the house of the Kaiser’s older sister, Charlotte. Missy implicitly trusted her worldly ‘Cousin Charly’ and it was only later that she felt taken in. Charlotte contrived that the timid Crown Prince Ferdinand of Romania was a frequent visitor, a tactic that misfired when it became clear that Missy and her sister did not shine in their cousin’s sophisticated Berlin set. The Duchess of Edinburgh hurriedly adapted her plans, making arrangements for her daughter to meet the Romanian prince in Munich. All innocence, Missy wrote to her grandmother on 21 May 1892 about her forthcoming trip to see her brother, Alfred. ‘We like going to Munich as there are many interesting things to see and lovely pictures,’ she told Queen Victoria.6 Under her mother’s expert direction, Missy found that she and the Romanian prince were frequently thrown together.
Missy’s next meeting with the Crown Prince in Berlin brought matters to a swift conclusion. The venue was the German emperor’s magnificent Neues Palais at Potsdam. Kaiser Wilhelm had transformed the galleries and reception rooms of Frederick the Great’s baroque masterpiece into a palatial statement of the power and glory of the German Empire. Berlin’s elite assembled in their finery under the newly electrified chandeliers, themselves the craftsmanship of the finest glassmakers. In this opulent setting, spurred on by Charly and other German relatives, somehow the reticent prince managed to find the crucial words.
‘How he ever had the courage to propose is today still a mystery to me,’ Missy recalled. ‘But he did and I accepted – I just said “Yes” as though it had been quite a natural and simple word to say. “Yes” and with that “Yes” I sealed my fate.’ Missy remembers no particular feeling; she hardly knew her fiancé. She was merely aware of ‘the approving eye of Kaiser William’; ‘the benignly conventional smile’ of his wife, Dona, and her own mother: ‘radiant’. Later in life she looked back on her incredible trust and ‘simple mindedness’. Still no more than a child, she was unaware of reality and lived ‘in a glorious, happy, healthy Fool’s Paradise’.7
Later that night, as though the outcome had been expected, Kaiser Wilhelm held a magnificent banquet for the young couple. The feast took place in the seemingly enchanted white castle at Pfaueninsel, ‘Peacock Island’, on a river within the Potsdam estate. In the luxurious setting of the island retreat, Missy was the centre of attention, heady with excitement and champagne, convinced she had found happiness. Emperor Wilhelm rose to make a speech and announce his cousin’s engagement, sealing the deal with his authority. Toasts were proposed. Hands were shaken. The deed was done. It was only afterwards, prompted by her more cautious sister, Victoria-Melita, that impetuous Missy paused to reflect that she had accepted a man virtually unknown to her. Her British father had not been consulted. There was also the question of ‘Grandmamma Queen’. ‘My conscience was not quite easy,’ she recalled.8 With good reason; the British royal family were not well pleased.
Queen Victoria was ‘quite dumbfounded’. She was at Balmoral on the evening of 2 June 1892 when a telegram arrived from Alfred out of the blue. Her son was devastated, she noted in her journal, but ‘did not feel he could withhold his consent’ after being presented with a fait accompli.9 The queen felt powerless and turned to Vicky to confide her feelings. A match between Missy and George had been ‘the dream
of Affie’s life’ and he worried about what lay ahead for his pretty oldest daughter in Romania. Bertie too, she wrote, was ‘very angry’ about the match, which seemed like a further insult to George.10
Vicky’s replies to her mother reveal her suspicions that her own children may have helped engineer the match. ‘I . . . only hope that William did nothing to hasten matters – he has done that very often – not always with happy results.’ It also struck Vicky as curious that her daughter, Charlotte, was ‘very enthusiastic for Romania’.11 Two days later she wrote again to the queen commenting on how strange it seemed that both Missy and Ferdinand ‘should feel so sure’. Had they been manipulated in some way? She expressed her concern for George, recognising his disappointment, ‘wh. I feel sure is great’. At least the engagement ‘so completely clears the situation’, she pointed out. There was no longer room for George to entertain secret hopes.12
Queen Victoria was blind to the possibility that the Duchess of Edinburgh had deliberately engineered the match in her determination to steer her oldest daughter well away from the British court and her own forceful control. Instead, the queen chose to believe that the duchess had herself been taken by surprise. The duchess put it about that she had gone to Potsdam to please Dona, who ‘wished Missy for odious Gunther!’ her unappealing brother, Ernst, who had already been rejected by Princess May. Vicky recognised that this could not be the whole story. She noted the troubling fact that Alfred was away ‘when his child was engaged!’ with all arranged behind his back. As for Ernst Gunther, she understood that he was ‘very anxious’ to marry Missy’s younger sister, Victoria-Melita, but did ‘not find any favour wh is quite natural’.13 Part of the queen’s strength appeared to lie in her inability to see or brood on her weaknesses. She continued to air her opinions liberally on the match, unable to see her own influence on the outcome owing to her poor relationship with her Russian daughter-in-law. The whole thing had been done with most indecent haste, she thought. Added to which ‘the Country is vy insecure & the immorality of the Society at Bucharest quite awful,’ she told Victoria of Battenberg.14 As for ‘poor Missy’, she is ‘a mere Child’.
Queen Victoria's Matchmaking Page 22