Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  Wilhelm’s congratulatory telegram to the Boers sparked a furore and came to be seen as a watershed in Anglo-German relations. Although a British raid had provoked the crisis in the first place, Londoners took to the streets to vent their fury at the Kaiser’s response. German businesses and shops were attacked and there were anti-German demonstrations. Queen Victoria found the ‘violent feeling against Germany’ expressed in the British newspapers ‘most distressing’.75 She had hoped for a quiet time at Osborne and felt anxious and angry about the Kaiser’s ‘dreadful telegram’. Bertie was keen to punish the German emperor with ‘a good snub’, but the queen responded to her German grandson on 5 January with some tact.76

  Their correspondence shows that the British queen could still exert a personal influence over the German emperor. ‘As your Grandmother to whom you have always shown so much affection and of whose example you have always spoken with so much respect, I feel I cannot refrain from expressing my deep regret at the telegram you sent President Kruger,’ she began. She explained the trouble Wilhelm’s telegram had caused while taking care not to allocate blame or intention. ‘It is considered very unfriendly towards this country, which I am sure it is not intended to be, & has, I grieve to say, made a very painful impression here.’ The British raid ‘was of course wrong’, she conceded, but nonetheless it would have been much wiser for the emperor ‘to have said nothing’. Finally, she asked for his help in trying to contain those who harm Anglo-German relations. ‘Let me hope that you will try to check this . . .’77

  Her letter produced the desired effect and Wilhelm sent a confused but contrite answer to the ‘Sovereign whom I revere and adore’. He implied that he had been endeavouring to uphold the queen’s wishes but had been misunderstood by the press.78 The queen, who considered his reply ‘lame & illogical’, passed it to Lord Salisbury, who had become prime minister in 1895 for a third time. Salisbury agreed it was best to accept the emperor’s explanations without examining too closely ‘the truth of them’.79 As for Bertie, the queen tried to teach him to take the same moderate approach when dealing with his nephew. She sent Bertie a copy of Wilhelm’s reply, pointing out ‘it would not do to have given him “a good snub”. Those sharp, cutting answers and remarks only irritate and do harm and in Sovereigns and Princes should be most carefully guarded against.’80

  Vicky had reached a point of such anguish about her son that, it has been argued, she possibly came close to treason in her revelations to Queen Victoria on 24 October 1896. She revealed that Kaiser Wilhelm was pursuing a systematically hostile policy towards Britain and that the true purpose of his plan for a large battlefleet was to ‘wrest fr[om] her the supremacy she has in the world’. Vicky perceived ‘a systematic enmity in Germany to the ‘Welt Stellung’ [world status] of the British empire’, which had ‘an aim & a purpose’, she told her mother. For years Germany would deny that its new naval programme was aimed against Britain, insisting it was to protect German trade and colonies. Yet here Vicky explained its real purpose to the British queen, well before Germany began building its fleet. Vicky even revealed specific details. Wilhelm had befriended men like Friedrich Krupp whose weapons manufactory in Essen had become the largest company in Europe. She pointed out to her mother that Krupp, ‘the greatest manufacturer we have, who has a colossal fortune – has been ordered to buy some Docks near Wilhelmshafen, “Germania Docks”, in order . . . to be able to have English ship builders & employ engineers etc to design and build ships for the German Navy that shall beat the English’. In her frustration she railed at her helplessness at her son’s ‘deluded & mistaken’ actions: ‘I can do nothing, nothing . . .’ The cherished dream of Vicky’s generation and her father’s generation of the ‘closest friendship’ between the two countries was vanishing before her eyes.81

  With Anglo-German relations at such a worrying point, Queen Victoria hoped it might be possible to create a closer understanding between Russia and Britain in the congenial setting of a family reunion at Balmoral. She was not the first in the family to try to sound out the tsar given the new closeness of family ties. Prince Louis of Battenberg, now brother-in-law to the tsarina, had met with Nicholas and his foreign minister, Prince Lobanoff, earlier in the summer of 1896. In the serene setting of Sergei’s country estate, with its tall trees and wide river, they had talked through Russian interests as though they were brokering the world. Louis recorded Nicholas as saying ‘we are best of friends with England’ and he saw the ‘outlook in Europe as generally hopeful’. The importance of ensuring that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet could pass through the Straits into the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, the tsar’s anxious interest in the Far East, why Russia wanted to curb Japan’s influence and see an independent Korea, Russia’s need for an ice-free port, its lack of interest in Africa – all these topics were aired with some candour.82

  Queen Victoria found Tsar Nicholas less forthcoming. She felt confounded that her conviction that Russia and Britain ‘should go well together’ as the world’s most powerful empires to guarantee peace elicited little response. Both she and the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, found that the new tsar proved rather hard to pin down. For all his easygoing charm, there was a measured vagueness to Nicholas’s replies that was a little frustrating from the British point of view. He was out of his depth and under instructions from his ministers not to fall for British blandishments. The Russian emperor would not be drawn into any comments on British affairs in Africa. He revealed little of his attitude to shifting Great Power alliances. He appeared to ‘regret’ German hostility to Britain and was sparse with information about his attitude to the French. When the queen queried the Franco-Russian alliance she did manage to ascertain that this was primarily defensive. Both France and Russia felt threatened by Germany.83

  The queen felt dissatisfied after the Russian visit that she had made no progress with the tsar. She had asked whether he could try to ease Franco-British relations while he and Alix were on a state visit to France. But Nicholas failed to do so. He wrote briefly from Darmstadt excusing himself. His schedule for his short stay in France was packed and he ‘never had the occasion’ to raise her concerns. At a distance, however, he was a little more forthcoming about areas of difficulty between the Russians and the British. The British occupation of Egypt threatened Russian interests and could ‘endanger peace’ because it gave the British control of the Suez Canal. ‘Politics alas! Are not the same as private or domestic affairs,’ he told the queen, ‘and they are not guided by personal relationships or feelings.’84

  Ella also found family relationships were unravelling in a way that defied expectations. For years she had looked forward to her youngest sister joining her in Russia and fought for what she believed was the perfect match between Alix and Nicholas. As sisters in Darmstadt they had been close, but in their new roles in Russia, one as the empress, the other the wife of a grand duke, their relationship was sullied by malicious gossip and differences between their husbands. The aftermath of the tragedy at Khodynka lingered in the Romanov family as a ‘burning question’, observed Nicholas’s cousin, Konstantin, which nobody liked to raise but which stood ‘between us for so long like some terrible phantom of dissension’.85 The sisters’ pleasure at having each other in Russia was tainted. Ella was at pains to make sure her grandmother understood there was no rift between her and Alix or their husbands. ‘May God grant we husbands and wives may always love each other as we do,’ she wrote. The crisis that had sprung up overnight between Sergei and Nicholas at the time of the coronation had led to ‘abominable lies’ that Ella found ‘simply disgusting’.86

  Ella tried to set out the truth for her grandmother. She denied rumours that she resented her younger sister’s higher rank or had refused to kiss the tsarina’s hand. She had had no part in cancelling her sister’s arrangements, as claimed. Her husband was wrongly blamed and she felt that this was taking a toll. ‘Poor Sergei looks very thin,’ she wrote. They both felt ‘calumniated’ by the rumours
that ‘we were not liked’ in Moscow. They had very few enemies but were much more wary, ‘our eyes are open’. Poignantly, Ella now saw it as a blessing that she and her sister would be living apart. ‘In every way I find it lucky we live in another town than Alix, for her sake chiefly, it makes her quite independent.’ Ella’s long-cherished desire for her sister to join her in Russia had somehow been blighted from the very beginning.87

  11

  Ena and Alfonso

  ‘Here at last will I rest with thee . . .’

  Queen Victoria’s inscription for Prince Albert, 1862

  For several days before her Diamond Jubilee of June 1897 to celebrate her sixty-year reign, Queen Victoria was ‘a good deal agitated’ for ‘fear anything might be forgotten or go wrong’.1 Feeling the increasing frailties of her seventy-eight years, the queen could no longer take for granted her ability to endure prolonged public performances. The tragedy at Alix’s coronation was also not far from her mind. At least one paper did not dismiss the possibility of ‘holocausts and wholesale massacres’.2 Ella and Sergei arrived at Windsor shortly before the jubilee and after hearing their account of the Russian disaster the queen was convinced that Sergei had been wronged. The grand duke ‘has had to suffer a great deal from wicked calumnies’, she wrote in her diary, ‘people having tried to lay on him the whole blame of the terrible disaster at Moscow’.3

  Her concerns proved to be unfounded. As her carriage emerged from Paddington Station ‘it was like a triumphal entry’, Queen Victoria wrote in her diary. ‘One mass of beaming faces’ lined the streets all the way to Buckingham Palace. Feeling buoyed up by the momentum of the occasion, she was greeted at the palace by family members and then wheeled into the Bow Room to receive foreign princes and ambassadors. That evening she abandoned her black for a dress ‘which had been specially worked in India’, she wrote. ‘The whole front was embroidered in gold.’ In this uncharacteristically vibrant attire, adorned with diamonds in her cap and her necklace, the queen joined the glamorous assembly and was led into dinner by the Austrian heir, thirty-three-year-old Archduke Franz Ferdinand.4

  All this was just the prelude. The day of the Thanksgiving Service for her sixty-year reign surpassed every conceivable expectation. It was ‘bounteous Queen’s weather’, according to the papers; ‘A never to be forgotten day’, wrote the queen. Drab London streets were transformed early as hundreds of thousands massed on the pavements or piled into tiers along the procession route to St Paul’s Cathedral. The capital looked like ‘a fairy city’, according to the St James Gazette, ‘a glorious vista of living colour’. The crowd was held back by two lines of soldiers in vivid scarlet uniforms, colourful drapes hung from balconies, and red, white and blue flags waved from walls and roofs. As the queen passed, the streets became ‘a great theatre . . . quivering with life and emotion . . . hats waved, handkerchiefs fluttered, every hand and arm at work, throats strained to shout, shriek or roar’.5 Dressed in black brocade, a white feather in her jet bonnet, the queen was overwhelmed, sometimes smiling, sometimes with eyes filled with tears. ‘No one ever I believe has met with such an ovation as was given to me passing through those six miles of streets,’ she wrote. ‘Every face seemed to be filled with real joy. I was much moved.’6 It was, concluded the St James Gazette, ‘the social function of the century . . . the like of which has not been seen on earth . . . It was a reception which has never been, and probably never will be paralleled.’7

  This was indeed the high watermark of imperial and royal supremacy, those halcyon June days apparently the very zenith of British power and glory. At the pinnacle of it all, almost worshipped like a deity, was the diminutive queen, who remained in her carriage for the Thanksgiving Service on the steps of St Paul’s, looking both ‘very grave’ and ‘under the stress of emotion’. She ‘suffered terribly’ in the heat, observed Victoria of Battenberg, being ‘lame and helpless’, her hands ‘like hot bricks’.8 Nonetheless, as a figurehead for 450 million people, the ‘Grandmother of Europe’ was the very embodiment of British stability and prosperity, the representative of the collective achievement of a generation and the recipient of the gratitude of millions. Celebrations in her honour straddled the globe, from British-ruled India, Burma, colonies in Africa and the dominions of Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Now ‘men of all races and colours marched under the flag’, continued the St James Gazette. Londoners marvelled that people from far-flung countries spoke English as well as themselves. Foreigners were astonished at the orderliness of the London crowds. To all ‘the greatness of the empire was brought home with force’.9

  In the ten years since her Golden Jubilee at the height of the belle époque, Queen Victoria had helped to fulfil Albert’s vision as her role as Europe’s grandmother had blossomed. Her first-born grandson, now the thirty-eight-year-old Emperor Wilhelm, had ruled for nine years and secured the German branch of the dynasty with no fewer than six sons. Dona ‘is getting quite grey’, Prince George observed when he saw her in Coburg in 1896.10 The queen learned of a new addition to the Russian branch of the royal family just two weeks before her Diamond Jubilee. Alix’s baby daughter, Olga, was joined by a beautiful sister, Tatiana, on 10 June 1897. Closer to home, George and May had already secured the British line with two great-grandsons, Edward (the future Edward VIII) and Albert (the future George VI) – this latter prince named, of course, after ‘his dear Great Grandpapa’, and bestowed with a bust of the late Prince Consort as a christening gift. ‘I know that when he grows up he will greatly value this beautiful bust,’ George had written tactfully.11 Queen Victoria’s granddaughters, Crown Princess Sophie of Greece and Crown Princess Marie of Romania, had also presented her with great-grandsons, assuring the continuity of the Greek and Romanian branches of the royal family. With a number of her grandchildren still growing up – her youngest granddaughter, Ena, was only nine years old – there was no end to the possibilities for royal matches. Most recently, Bertie and Alexandra’s third daughter, Maud, had married her Danish cousin, Prince Charles, although on this occasion the queen had excused herself from the wedding breakfast and slipped upstairs quietly to her room.12

  But the image of dynastic impregnability that day was not quite what it seemed. The high summer of royalty was drawing to a close. Unlike at the Golden Jubilee, reigning monarchs in the family were absent from the great pageant through London. When the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, had proposed that the queen’s jubilee should be a ‘Festival of the British Empire’ and that colonial representatives, rather than reigning monarchs, should be invited, the queen had gladly agreed.13 Quite apart from the cost of entertaining foreign royalty, she was most anxious not to parade any family differences or allow personal squabbles to ease their way into the press and cloud the big day. For a destructive element was gnawing away at the roots of this apparently flourishing royal family tree, and it resided in the very feature in which the queen had placed her trust: family relationships. Above all, the German emperor had the power to threaten the entire great edifice. Vicky saw it clearly; the queen could not bring herself to believe it was true. If she worked hard enough at family diplomacy, if Wilhelm could be induced to behave, she hoped to safeguard Europe’s stability.

  In the late nineteenth century, Kaiser Wilhelm continued to consolidate his personal power in Germany. The cabal of ministers around him found their authority fast diminishing. Rewards went to the most sycophantic rather than the most able, such as the diplomat Bernhard von Bulow, who claimed the Kaiser was nothing less than a ‘genius’ and saw him alongside his grandfather, Wilhelm I, and Frederick the Great as ‘the most impressive Hohenzollern who has ever lived’.14 Bulow duly found himself elevated to secretary of state for foreign affairs in the summer of 1897, a prelude to his becoming chancellor in 1900. Gradually the post of German chancellor was being diminished to a mere satellite or courtier in obeisance to an increasingly powerful emperor.15 Bulow supported Wilhelm’s grand dreams of building a colonial empire, and to achie
ve it Wilhelm wanted to expand the navy. He promoted Admiral Alfred Tirpitz to run the German fleet, and Tirpitz soon redefined Britain officially as Germany’s natural enemy. Fuelled by a belief in the power of the Hohenzollern dynasty, an increasingly autonomous and megalomaniacal Wilhelm aimed to steer Germany to greatness and challenge Britain’s supremacy. He spoke of German Weltpolitik or ‘World Policy’, and urged the case for German expansion, colonies and ‘a place in the sun’.16 His sabre-rattling rhetoric aimed to win support for large increases in funding for the German navy. The queen confided to Vicky her ‘great distress and anguish’ over ‘the bad feeling’ between Britain and Germany engendered by Wilhelm’s ‘speeches and colonial follies’.17 Vicky shared her despair. ‘Alas these speeches at Kiel. How unfortunate and I must say absurd!’18 The era of the Kaiser’s ‘personal rule’ was taking ominous shape far beyond the reach of his grandmother.

  But not quite. Wilhelm endeavoured to enhance German power by devious manipulation of family relationships – and here Europe’s grandmother kept an astute eye on the proceedings. Wilhelm pressured Nicholas to sign a German alliance by threatening him with claims that Britain was on the verge of striking a deal with Germany. The German emperor was equally underhand in dealings with the British, claiming that the Russians were agreeing to deals against British interests in the east. The queen suspected that her German grandson was inflaming rivalry between the Great Powers – and despite her years of hostility to Russia, turned to the tsar. Her famous exchange would expose the Kaiser’s duplicity.