Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  As for his German, ‘I am working away hard,’ George reported to the queen. ‘I find it rather difficult but still I mean to do my best to try to learn as much as I can.’44 Victoria of Battenberg was probably nearer the truth when she wrote that ‘George was a good deal bored by his life in Heidelberg and felt himself too old to start working with a tutor again.’ The zealous corrections whenever the prince attempted spoken German could be exasperating and evenings at home with the professor and his wife were so dull that George found relief in his stamp collection.45 Nonetheless, duty prevailed that autumn as he followed the schedule laid out for him. He could not, of course, go to see Missy in Coburg, but she remained in his thoughts. ‘I see from the papers that Aunt Marie and Missy are soon coming to England,’ he commented to his grandmother on 10 October. ‘But I suppose that is not true?’46

  In December 1892 Missy did have the opportunity to present her bridegroom to her British relatives including ‘Grandmamma Queen’. The introduction would take place at Windsor Castle and as the day approached Missy began to feel a sense of dread. Her fiancé ‘was a complete stranger . . . a stranger to all the beloved Malta atmosphere, to all, in fact, from which I had sprung’.47

  Missy tried to put a brave face on it all for her grandmother, writing twice beforehand to let the queen know ‘we are rejoicing on seeing you again soon’. She was beginning to appreciate the enormity of the separation ahead. ‘It will be the last visit to Windsor for some time I suppose for me, as most likely in the first year anyhow, I will hardly get away.’48 She reassured her grandmother ‘I am not at all frightened to go away so far, and to a land so different to what I have been accustomed to.’ But even Missy could not hide the fact that she was dreading the moment of parting from her family and all that she had known.49 Once surrounded by the relaxing familiarities of England, she felt distressed at what lay ahead. Her fiancé’s hesitant attentions could not fill this space, ‘so I hid my inner desolation as best I could’.50

  Queen Victoria’s approach was one she always remembered, the ‘tap-tapping’ of her stick well before she came into view, the faint sound of the rustle of silk. Missy was waiting nervously with her family and her prince on 10 December in a handsome Windsor gallery, filled with pictures and statues. The corridor curved and the ‘tap, tap’ of the queen’s approach could be heard quite distinctly before ‘Grandmamma’ suddenly appeared, seeming very small, her shyness not quite concealed. She addressed Missy’s prospective husband in his own language, speaking in fluent German to this young descendant of the senior branch of the Hohenzollern line. In those few moments the queen, ‘the censor and critic of all our lives’, missed little.51

  Queen Victoria already knew what Missy did not. The king of Romania, the forbidding King Carol, had been anxious to find a suitable bride quickly for his nephew, Crown Prince Ferdinand. Ferdinand had caused a scandal, having fallen in love with a woman at court, the beautiful Helene Vacaresco. Vicky had pieced together the whole story and informed her mother of the affair. Mademoiselle Vacaresco was ‘scheming and intriguing’ and ‘not very lady-like or refined’, according to Vicky. Nonetheless, she had the queen of Romania ‘quite in her pocket’ and had seduced Prince Ferdinand, who told King Carol that he intended to marry her.52 The king would not hear of it and Ferdinand was despatched abroad in disgrace, under instructions to find a more suitable bride.

  Missy did not yet know of the circumstances surrounding her fiancé’s proposal and was convinced that her prince was passionately in love with her. Queen Victoria was concerned, despite reassurances from Vicky that Ferdinand was, in fact, ‘nice and good’.53 She took her granddaughter out for a private drive. Missy’s youthful naivety was plain. She ‘is perfectly happy and contented and does not seem to mind going so far alone. She looks so fresh and pretty’, the queen concluded.54 Her brief visit passed quickly in an atmosphere of polite protocol surrounding the inevitable introductions, discussions of the marriage treaty, and formal receptions for ministers and officials. Nothing was said to disenchant Missy about the prospects that lay ahead.

  After introducing her Romanian prince to Queen Victoria, Missy had to face an even greater ordeal, presenting him to Prince George. The meeting occurred two days later. George had returned from the continent and arrived at Windsor in the evening with his parents and his sister, Maud. Missy chose her best gown and braced herself to meet her Uncle Bertie and others in his entourage, although she wrote later, ‘I only remember Cousin George.’

  It was her first meeting with Prince George since she had sent her hurtful letter of rejection and been beguiled into her fateful, impromptu decision. ‘My heart is beating,’ she wrote. ‘I have always that sick feeling at heart that I am in some ways betraying all the things that I had loved . . .’

  Cousin George was suddenly before her, his blue eyes resting on her face. She took in an impression of his kindness, of all that had drawn her to him before.

  ‘Well Missy?’ he began.

  There was a lump in her throat. When she found her voice she could not bring herself to talk of the times that meant something to them both, ‘of the dear Malta days, for I could not have stood it just then’. She felt ‘a traitor somehow’. She had carelessly ‘cast in my lot with a stranger . . . setting out upon an unknown sea’. The old safe harbour no longer provided anchorage and she felt ‘intolerable heart ache . . . to the point of torture’.55

  In Germany in the New Year of 1893, when the time for leaving home in Coburg was drawing close, there was a scene between Missy and her father, Alfred, when, at last, British stiff upper lip no longer prevailed. Alfred had avoided talking to his eldest daughter in private but shortly before her departure he asked to see her. Missy entered his room and was astonished to find her usually taciturn and distant father in a state of considerable emotion. He hugged her and ‘burst into tears, confiding to me that he could not bear to see me, his eldest and dearly loved daughter, go to such a far and unknown country, that he had cherished another dream for me, one which would have very differently shaped my future . . .’ He seemed distraught, and ‘could not bear parting from me . . .’

  It took him time to find his composure, and when he did, his emotions were channelled into English understatement. She must never forget that she was ‘a British-born princess and a sailor’s daughter’, he said. Missy, perhaps overwhelmed by his unexpected display of genuine feeling, took refuge in her own room and cried.

  The marriage between Missy and the Crown Prince of Romania, which had provoked such strong feeling in the royal family, took place at Sigmaringen in Germany on 10 January 1893, a few months after her seventeenth birthday. The young bride, who had been instructed to spurn the British throne and even denied a chance to enter society and find out her worth for herself, now found her future immovably fixed. Missy felt such ‘unbearable grief’ as her train steamed out of Coburg, her family finally disappearing from view, it took all her courage ‘not to cry out in my pain’.56 Bravely she wiped away her tears to make her entrance into Bucharest, but her brief honeymoon in Germany had heightened her sense of desolation.

  Missy had been unprepared for her husband’s strong passion. Years later, when her mother had occasion to defend her daughter before King Carol, the duchess wrote tellingly of ‘Ferdinand’s sensual passion for Missy [which] finished by . . . repulsing her.’57 During her honeymoon, Missy tried to respond to her husband, but felt a great void. ‘There was an empty feeling about it all; I still seemed to be waiting for something that did not come.’58 Within days she was pregnant. It was left to her mother’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Monson, who accompanied her on the journey to Bucharest, to enlighten the shocked princess as to why on arrival at the Romanian court she felt such malaise and sickness. In her memoirs, written years later, Missy made no criticism of her mother’s actions apart from one telling remark: ‘Mamma more than any other being I have ever known would cut off her nose to spite her face!’59

  Queen Victoria did not attend Mi
ssy’s wedding but it was not far from her thoughts. She knew full well what lay in store for her granddaughter and confided her true feelings to Vicky, whose own daughter, Margaret, was shortly to get married. ‘I ought not to tell you now, who have this so soon before you, what I feel about a daughter’s marrying,’ began the queen, ‘but to me there is something so dreadful, so repulsive in that one has to give one’s beloved and innocent child, whom one has watched over and guarded from the breath of anything indelicate [and that she] should be given over to a man, a stranger to a great extent, body and soul to do with what he likes. No experience in [life] will ever help me over that . . .’60

  Despite her strenuous efforts, Queen Victoria’s matchmaking for her grandchildren was not going smoothly. George had lost Missy by being too slow to act and was now failing to propose to May. Continuing worries about Alix’s future created a distinct sense of unease. And innocent little Missy had been dispatched to an obscure country to be given over to a stranger ‘body and soul’.

  9

  George and May

  ‘This must not be allowed to go on.’

  Queen Victoria to Victoria of Battenberg, December 1890

  Prince George’s return from Germany in late autumn of 1892 sparked renewed speculation that he would shortly be proposing to Princess May. When she was invited to Sandringham in early December for the anniversary of her engagement to Eddy, her mother, Mary Adelaide, thought this could be the long-awaited moment. But the solemn occasion passed with nothing said. Sandringham was a house still suffused in grief and feeling the pain of each anniversary, Eddy’s last Christmas, his birthday, his death. ‘We missed our darling Eddy too terribly,’ George told the queen. ‘Mama was so brave all the time.’1 The Wales family found consolation by going ‘into His dear room’, still laid out as though he was alive, the fire warming the room. George found remembrances flooded back as though ‘they were grown into my memory then & nothing can obliterate them’.2

  On Christmas Day George did write to May at White Lodge with ‘a thousand thanks’ for her gift of a little pin that ‘I will often wear’, he assured her.3 May replied with careful formality. She felt ‘so grateful’ to him for his letter and was ‘deeply touched’ by his Christmas gift of a brooch. Grief over Eddy’s loss was something she recognised they shared. ‘Everything came back so vividly to my mind, that awful night, the sad, sad ending, and all the misery,’ she told him.4 ‘I could almost hear his dear voice,’ George responded.5

  The pressures intensified on George in the New Year of 1893. May was now out of mourning and George carried on with his duties – opening the new Royal Eye Hospital in Southwark, making the keynote speech for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children – harried by reporters. There was much ‘beastly newspaper bosh’, as his mother put it, with many of the newspapers expecting the announcement before the opening of parliament.6 The marriage would be popular on account of ‘the great sorrow’ that befell Princess May a year ago, declared the Pall Mall Gazette, earning for her ‘the affections of the nation in an especial degree’.7 At court, too, there was an air of expectation as though the outcome was inevitable.

  Queen Victoria’s patience was wearing thin. Forbearance was not her strong suit when it came to matchmaking. It was inappropriate to delay. She urged George to come to Osborne later in January for a few days. ‘I long to see you. You must not think I wish to press you in anyway but as you have made your mind up about May – pray do not delay after [double underlined] the 20th, for her sake, as well as the Country’s. Her position is most trying & I think that she, Aunt Mary & Uncle Teck behave most discreetly and kindly. But you must not let the trial be too long.’ Given that his parents also wished it, ‘you shd after the 20th go quietly down to White Lodge and speak to A[un]t Mary and then to May. This wld be the most correct & not tell anyone wh day you are going. One cannot settle a day for such a thing.’ With her thoughts still on ‘poor Missy’s wedding’ she added somewhat insensitively, ‘Poor Alfred never ceases regretting she is not to be yours!’8

  But the twenty-seven-year-old prince held back, harassed by the decision. His mother was sympathetic, convinced he was being hurried. ‘I too am worried to death about it,’ she confided to him. ‘I can so well enter into all your poor feelings.’9 Princess Alexandra wrote to the ever-expectant Queen Victoria with stalling tactics, explaining that George ‘required a complete change and a rest’. She proposed to take him and his younger sisters, Maud and Victoria, who was unwell, on one last holiday together in the royal yacht to see their Greek relatives. Removed from the pressure, touring the Mediterranean in the spring, she hoped Prince George would recover his spirits. It would bring him back ‘fresh and less worried’, she promised Queen Victoria, ready to settle his affairs.10 The queen agreed and Alexandra wrote reassuringly to George, ‘yr poor much worried mind can rest at peace for a bit’.11

  On the day of his departure George wrote an apology to Princess May. ‘I am so sorry that I have seen so little of you lately, only a passing glimpse now and again.’12 He knew she would be back in her home routine, her life revolving around her mother’s needs and the endless guild and charity commitments. Ahead for him open seas and wide horizons beckoned while he wallowed in the reprieve afforded by the royal yacht. ‘It is a very pleasant feeling to know that one can go where one likes when one likes,’ George admitted to his grandmother from Genoa. He took the opportunity to remind the queen that his mother was still grieving and his sister, Victoria, remained poorly. The holiday was doing them ‘a world of good’.13

  Two weeks elapsed before George wrote to May from the island of Elba, describing his tour with a care for detail that could give her grounds for encouragement. They had been in Pisa and then on to Florence where ‘in the two days we saw everything we possibly could in the time, both the picture galleries, Pitti and Uffizi, nearly all the churches . . . Weren’t you there for nearly two years once, I forget,’ he asked casually. He included one or two anecdotes such as the nicknames they had adopted in their efforts to remain incognito, which was all ‘rather fun’ except that there were so many English, ‘they of course soon found us out, which was rather a bore’.14 May thanked him ‘very warmly’ for his letter. She had been following his travels in the papers ‘with great interest’. The nicknames amused her and she had evidently shared the details with her inquisitive mother, who was ‘much flattered’ at Maud adopting her pet name, Maria. ‘What on earth made you choose “Jane” for “Motherdear”,’ May enquired. ‘She does not at all give me the idea of Jane!’15

  George’s next letter was from Palermo in Sicily just before Easter. He was ‘very much touched’ by the speed of her response, he wrote, reassuring May that she and her mother ‘have often been in my thoughts’. He continued to describe the many wonderful sights in Rome and Naples where he had seen Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii and the Blue Grotto at Capri. Perhaps aware that his letter did not contain expressions of feeling for which she might hope, he added bashfully ‘you must be sick of reading this very stupid long epistle & I have a great mind to tear it up only that I think it might be useful to light your fire with’.16 May responded in a similar vein with her news of London. Both registered their attentiveness to each other. Neither let down their guard, deflecting expressions of their feelings into neutral descriptions of daily events, and so the polite courtesy continued in an intermittent exchange of letters around the Mediterranean.

  By early April the Wales family was in Greece and giving no sign of coming home. In Corfu they met Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who was still grieving the loss of her only son, Rudolf. Prince George had a chance to catch up with his aunt and uncle, the king and queen of Greece, and his twenty-two-year-old cousin Sophie, already the mother of a ‘delightful’ little boy, George told the queen, ‘who talks away in the most funny English’. Sophie and Tino’s house in Athens was decorated in an English style, ‘with a lot of pretty things in it’, he continued.17 In this relaxed setting with
hazy views of the Aegean, George unwound, mulling over his anxieties with his aunt, Queen Olga, who was sympathetic. She had first met May shortly after the Tecks had travelled abroad in disgrace and had formed a favourable view.

  Olga was not the only concerned aunt keeping an eye on the proceedings. Vicky travelled from Germany in late January to see her mother at Osborne. It was a rough crossing but mother and daughter, so happy to be reunited, went straight to the drawing room together ‘talking of many things’.18 There was much to discuss concerning the queen’s grandchildren. Vicky’s youngest daughter, Margaret, had given up on the unforthcoming Maximilian of Baden and married his friend, Prince Friedrich Karl, a future head of the Hesse-Kassel dynasty.19 Missy, the new Crown Princess of Romania, had been ‘enthusiastically received’ in her adopted country. As for the future of the British throne, Vicky was still trying to discern what special qualities marked May out as a bride for George above her own girls. ‘She seemed to me a little stiff & cold!’ Vicky confided to Margaret, her frank views perhaps summing up reservations that George also privately felt. Although May was being ‘praised on all sides’, Vicky found her lacking in charm, perhaps even ‘rather dull – & superficial!’ Nonetheless, she felt certain that May was enviably destined to ‘be Georgie’s Bride – and – have the first position in Europe, one may say in the world!’20

  There was much to concern the queen and her daughter about the German emperor. Vicky had reached the point where she felt her own relationship with her oldest son was beyond repair. There was nothing she could do or say to guide him. Wilhelm had been keen to build an alliance with Britain, a plan that had been part of Grandpapa Albert’s original vision. But the Kaiser’s efforts to first charm and then intimidate Britain into an agreement had had little impact on British ministers. William Gladstone replaced Lord Salisbury at 10 Downing Street in 1892 and Lord Rosebery in foreign affairs, but ministerial comings and goings made little difference. British interests appeared best served by its ‘Splendid Isolation’, keeping the country out of European alliances and focusing on her empire. Any alliance Britain entered into would oblige her to go to war on behalf of her ally even if she did not want to – although the precise terms might vary from treaty to treaty. It was unthinkable to the leaders of the British Empire to lose control over such a vital matter. By avoiding the tangled web of European alliances Britain was less likely to be drawn into any war.