Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  ‘I feel I must tell you something which you ought to know and perhaps do not,’ the queen wrote to Tsar Nicholas in March 1899:

  It is, I am sorry to say, that William takes every opportunity of impressing upon Sir F. Lascelles [British ambassador in Berlin] that Russia is doing all in her power to work against us; that she offers alliances to other powers, and has made one with the Ameer of Afghanistan against us. I need not say that I do not believe a word of this, neither do Lord Salisbury and Sir F. Lascelles. But I am afraid William may go and tell things against us to you, just as he does about you to us. If so, pray tell me openly and confidentially. It is so important that we should understand each other, and that such mischievous and unstraightforward proceedings should be put a stop to.19

  The tsar’s reply was equally frank. ‘It is a dangerous game he is playing at,’ Nicholas concluded.20 Their correspondence highlights the climate of fear and suspicion created by the Kaiser and also marked a softening in the queen’s inimical stance towards Russia.

  As the decade progressed long-held hopes for an Anglo-German understanding fell apart. The various initiatives that surfaced periodically came to nothing. Even Joseph Chamberlain, the man who could make the weather, according to Winston Churchill, could not bring about an Anglo-German alliance despite his strong desire to achieve it. Vicky heard the rumours and in her excitement urged her son on 31 May 1898 to grasp this ‘world saving idea’, which might never come again. It was the ‘most blessed’ opportunity for peace ‘that could happen not only for the 2 Countries but for the world and civilization!! . . . My father’s dream & your father’s dream, and what they worked & slaved for, would come true.’21 But all efforts foundered in the climate of mistrust between the two countries. For the British, an alliance with Germany would now have been tantamount to a hostile act against France and Russia and an endorsement of the Kaiser’s hegemonic goals. The German emperor approved the Second Naval Law on 20 June 1900 to double the size of the German fleet; in the next few years three more bills would follow to strengthen the German navy, part of a predetermined plan to build up a naval force of some sixty warships by 1920. Vicky’s warnings to her mother became ever more urgent. ‘I think with fright and horror of the future,’ Vicky wrote. ‘It makes one mad to think of all the misery that may yet come.’22

  Britain’s much-vaunted imperialism was cast in a new light in October 1899 with the outbreak of the Second Boer War. In the opening months of the conflict the Boers of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State secured victories over the British. By December, on the thirty-eighth anniversary of her husband’s death, the queen felt ‘very low and anxious about the war’. As British losses mounted in January 1900, her distress appeared to affect her physically. She fretted with each new report, ‘horrified at the terrible list of casualties’. The belief in British invulnerability was severely shaken. Long-held pride in the British Empire as an alleged moral or ‘civilising force’ was also dealt a bitter blow when the story broke of Britain’s ‘concentration’ camps to contain Boer families in which some 20,000 Boer women and children died, many in epidemics. Shocking accounts of gruesome conditions in the camps added to the list of Britain’s colonial failings, such as the failure to get to grips with famine in British India. British imperialism, for so long the glory of the nation, was taking on a different hue. There was outrage against the British treatment of the Boers in the European press, prompting the queen to write to the German emperor hoping that ‘the German Press may cease abusing and reviling us and telling lies about our army’.23

  Britain’s ‘imperialist war’ also provided further ammunition for anarchists and terrorists. Bertie was targeted in April 1900 as he travelled to Denmark. He had reached Brussel-Nord Station in Belgium when a fifteen-year-old, Jean Baptiste Sipido, appeared at the carriage window and shot at him at point-blank range. Sipido was an anarchist who blamed British royalty for the Boer War. The queen was ‘greatly shocked and upset’, although it was soon clear that the bullet had missed. She continued to worry that Bertie’s ‘precious life’ would be jeopardised and urged him to avoid events abroad.24

  Towards the close of the century anarchists set a new benchmark by singling out soft royal targets. Queen Victoria was ‘dumb with horror’ when she wrote to Vicky on 11 September 1898 after the murder of the beautiful Empress Elizabeth, wife of the Austrian emperor.25 The empress had been about to board a steamship on Lake Geneva in Switzerland when a young man appeared to knock into her accidentally. Her corset was so tight and the long industrial needle file he had used so fine that at first it was not clear there was anything wrong. But the empress fainted after walking on board and never regained consciousness. It was soon found that the four-inch industrial needle – sharpened to a fine point – had punctured her heart and a lung. The assassin, an Italian anarchist, Luigi Lucheni, was caught later that day. ‘It was not a woman I struck, but an empress,’ he said to police. ‘It was a crown I had in view.’26 Vicky, who had only recently met with the empress, wrote in some distress to her mother. She felt ‘ill with horror’ at the thought of Elizabeth’s terrible death and had learned that anarchists were ‘turning their attention to Princesses, who were more easy to get at’!27 But the next royal victim, in July 1900, was King Umberto I of Italy, followed just over a year later by the American president, William McKinley: both were murdered by anarchists. The great social divides that fuelled the rise of anarchism appeared increasingly impossible to resolve.

  However powerful a weapon assassination proved to be, for an increasing number of radicals and revolutionaries it was not enough. Anarchists had been grabbing the headlines for years with sporadic incidents since the death of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, but the injustices of the social order appeared unchanged. One young Russian, Vladimir Ulyanov, whose brother had been hanged in 1887 by Alexander III for his part in an anarchist plot, had read Marx’s Das Capital and translated the Communist Manifesto into Russian, and dedicated himself to spreading communist ideas. This led to his imprisonment and in 1897 he was banished to Siberia for three years. To the despair of his mother, who had already lost one son to the anarchist cause and did not want to lose another to Marxism, when he was freed in 1900, Ulyanov travelled back to Europe. He was absolutely sure of his mission. Only all-out revolution would make a difference: an ‘international proletariat revolution’. This time he was writing under a new name: ‘Vladimir Lenin’.

  With the arrival of the twentieth century the queen was feeling old and tired, no longer certain of the future. Vicky saw more clearly than her mother that the troubles between Europe’s Great Powers were shifting beyond the calamitous interventions of the Kaiser. Unlike her pragmatic prime minister and foreign secretary, Lord Salisbury, Queen Victoria still placed great faith in the power of personal relationships between royal heads of state; her matchmaking to extend European royal ties rested on this view. ‘I only think, if it is possible, that in families all should be made up again, for life is so very uncertain,’ she told Vicky.28 The glorious past, in all its brilliance, must live on. Her grandson George understood the significance of continuity in her mind and was quick to reassure the queen after the birth of his third son, Henry, in April 1900, ‘of course we will add Albert as his fourth name’.29 The baby’s godparents included Queen Victoria, the German Kaiser and Prince George of Greece.

  The queen’s health began to fail, with cataracts, rheumatism, lameness and exhaustion all depleting her strength. Her ‘great anxiety’ over the Boer War preyed on her mind, observed Victoria of Battenberg, along with the shock of her oldest daughter’s illness.30 Vicky was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1899, which spread to the spine. Mother and daughter continued their correspondence, now spanning over forty years. The queen tried to make light of her health troubles to Vicky but was obliged to enlist Beatrice’s help to write over Christmas 1900. ‘I have not been very well myself, but nothing to cause you alarm,’ she dictated. Beatrice tried to shield Queen Victoria from the full ho
rror of Vicky’s illness, but the queen was not fooled. She was well enough to write herself a week later and sharp enough to see her daughter’s deterioration. ‘I am so grieved to see by your dear letters that your hands trouble you so . . .’31

  At Osborne, Queen Victoria looked upon the New Year ‘sadly’, feeling ‘so weak and unwell’.32 Despite her tiredness and confusion, she rallied occasionally to sign papers or take a short drive, perhaps unable to relinquish her role of decades until a stroke robbed her of this last comfort. She lay in her room, which was crammed with precious mementos she could no longer see, her remarkable willpower no longer able to summon the strength for her to sit unaided. For two days she fought on, struggling to deal with the business of state through Beatrice until the last vestiges of strength ebbed from her.

  In Germany, Vicky was utterly distraught at the news. Too weak to make the journey, she knew she would never see her mother again. Alix, who was four months pregnant and unable to travel, was also bereft. ‘She did so love her grandmother!’ observed her sister-in-law, Xenia.33 Ironically, it was the queen’s least favourite grandchild who held her on 22 January 1901 as she lay dying. The German emperor had set out ‘on personal impulse’, according to Victoria of Battenberg, and would not be kept away. In those final hours the grandson who had caused her and her daughter such immense distress appeared to have ‘a real affection and respect for Grandmama’, continued Victoria.34 Her family did not disclose that he was in the room and it was left to her doctor, James Reid, to arrange for the Kaiser to have a few moments alone with the queen. When Reid returned something stirred from the depths of her mind, from the great distance of all those years of tangled frustrations and hopes. ‘The emperor is very kind,’ she said.35 She died with his good arm wrapped around her at 6.30 p.m. on 22 January 1901, surrounded by her family. ‘Oh my beloved Mama. Is she really gone?’ cried Vicky when she was told the next day. ‘I wish I were dead too.’ The former German empress had only seven more months to live.36

  On 2 February, Queen Victoria’s coffin was conveyed from Osborne to London, people kneeling in the fields as the funeral train passed in reverence for the woman whose loss was hard to imagine. There was an atmosphere of shock in the capital as her coffin, conveyed by eight cream-coloured horses, crossed London to Paddington, large crowds silently witnessing the passing of the mother of the country. She was the longest-reigning monarch in British history to that point and her death marked the end of an era.

  Queen Victoria had envisaged a definite purpose to her final journey and this was fulfilled on 4 February, when her coffin was conveyed to the Royal Mausoleum near Windsor to be laid to rest beside Prince Albert. She had left instructions that on her death she was to abandon her widow’s weeds. There must be no more black. This was the day her soul would be united with her beloved Albert, the man she had waited for grieving half a lifetime. All must be perfect; she had left explicit directions to make sure this was so. Her aged body, carrying the marks of time and decay, was in bridal white, her wedding veil beside her, and hidden forever amongst her clothes many mementos of her life, including a photograph of John Brown as well as Prince Albert’s treasured dressing gown and a cast of his guiding hand.37

  A gentle rain was falling outside in the grounds of Frogmore where she had sat so often, taking tea under the shade of a parasol, seeking comfort from his proximity. Marked indelibly above the door of the mausoleum were the words that had sustained her as a young widow almost forty years before: ‘Farewell most Beloved! Here at last, will I rest with thee; with thee in Christ I will rise again.’38 Now one by one the family came to kneel at her coffin. When Albert had died, Queen Victoria had commissioned a stone effigy of herself as a young woman that was to be placed beside him, fulfilling in death the moments she had envisaged so often when they were both young together. Their love immortalised in the two white youthful figures on their tombstone, they left behind a dynasty at the height of its power, their legacy apparently invulnerable. The fruits of their sacred union held positions on the world’s mightiest thrones, the closeness of family relationships in her eyes promising Europe’s peace.

  The nineteenth-century vision at the heart of Victoria and Albert’s matchmaking did not end with her death, but collided increasingly with an overwhelming and urgent impetus for change. Their wonderful dream of constitutional monarchies spreading across the continent, bringing order, peace and a stable form of political governance, was irresistible, an idyll somehow tinged with all the innocence of village England, the sound of leather on willow, the puritan work ethic and British stiff upper lip. But as the curtain rose on the twentieth century this vision clashed with something altogether more brutal and immediate in which moderation was swept away by an overpowering impulse for change. Nowhere was this manifest more forcefully than in Russia where the injustices and oppression of the masses that had fired anarchist and revolutionary thinking in the nineteenth century could no longer be contained by its crumbling autocracy. Queen Victoria’s worst fears for her Russian granddaughters turned into a terrifying reality soon after her death.

  By Christmas 1904, Ella and Sergei knew what it was to be hunted. Like Sergei’s father, Alexander II, twenty-five years earlier, they lived with a heightened sense of danger. Sergei was convinced he had been a target for some weeks; and he was right. The revolutionaries who kept a close watch on his movements knew that Sergei had worked out that he was in their sights. ‘He was running scared, changing palaces, trying to avoid a death that was already inescapable, already creeping up on him,’ recorded Boris Savinkov, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which had superseded the People’s Will.39

  Tsar Nicholas had no solution for the countless hungry peasants roaming the land unable to survive on their meagre plots or the thousands of industrial workers in the cities striking against appalling factory conditions. As losses mounted during 1904 from his disastrous war with Japan, radicals and reformers turned on the tsar demanding an end to his authoritarian rule. Nicholas wavered, torn between those, such as his Uncle Sergei, who argued for strengthening autocracy, and those who argued for reform and the creation of a ‘duma’, or assembly with limited power. The mood in turbulent Russia was ‘far too like that’ of the years before the murder of Alexander II, observed Nicholas’s cousin, Grand Duke Konstantin. ‘One senses something unknown, but inescapable and terrible. It is as if the dam has been broken.’40

  Ella knew the toll this exacted on Alix, who lived with her family imprisoned behind ever higher barriers of barbed wire at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, about fifteen miles from St Petersburg. The young grand duchesses, Olga and Tatiana, had been joined by two more sisters, Maria in 1899 and Anastasia in 1901. The arrival of a son and heir in August 1904 fulfilled everything Nicholas and Alexandra had worked for; the longed-for little boy, Alexei, contained their whole purpose. But for two days afterwards, the fresh bloodstains on his swaddling clothes soon brought the dreaded confirmation that her perfect baby boy suffered from ‘the family curse’, haemophilia. Enough was now known about it for Alix to understand that his disease had come through her line from Queen Victoria; haemophilia had already claimed the lives of Alix’s infant brother, Friedrich, her favourite uncle, Leopold, and just six months previously, her nephew, Irene’s young son, Heinrich. Alexei, too, could bleed to death from the slightest injury. Alix felt crucified daily whenever the bleeding started, unable to get away from the horror of what was happening to her beautiful, innocent son.41 Her own health suffered and she withdrew still more from society. Exhausted from the nervous strain, hours passed on her daybed, a table with her daily occupations beside her, every surface around her crammed with portraits and memorabilia. Behind the looped-back fabric adorning her bedstead was a wall covered with brightly coloured icons.

  In Alix’s devotion to the Russian Orthodox Church, it seemed to Ella and her friends that she ‘dipped into mysticism and was led astray’.42 Her son’s episodes of bleeding and the helplessness o
f the doctors appeared to throw Alix off balance and bias her judgement, making her susceptible to the claims of faith-healers. Eventually, she became totally dependent on one man, a Russian peasant and mystic, Grigori Rasputin, whose uncanny ability to relieve her son’s suffering convinced her he had supernatural, God-given powers of healing. Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia supported their mother, adapting to her strained and idiosyncratic world. In their photographs from the early twentieth century, Queen Victoria’s Russian great-granddaughters appear radiant, four young women on the brink of maturity. With their good looks and impressive pedigree they could expect happy and fulfilling lives; there is no doubt to be read on their faces that this is the story that will unfold.

  But on Sunday 22 January 1905 a watershed was reached in St Petersburg. Thousands of workers processed peacefully to the Winter Palace to present a petition to Nicholas II, many bearing icons and images of the tsar. As the masses drew nearer to the town centre, the imperial guard opened fire. Over 1,000 died and many more were wounded, the dark shapes of the dying on the white snow an incendiary symbol of the misdirected power of the tsar. Nicholas II was not at the palace, but he was blamed nevertheless. Overnight he was no longer the peasants’ ‘Little Father’ but ‘Nicholas the murderer’ and ‘Nicholas the Bloody’. The cry went out for vengeance. Strikes and riots swept the country, which now shuddered to the violent convulsions of the first Russian revolution.43

  Sergei had recently resigned his post as Governor General of Moscow, objecting profoundly to his nephew’s instinct to listen to reformers. ‘The people were not yet ripe,’ he explained to his sister-in-law, Victoria of Battenberg, for ‘a more liberal government in Russia’.44 Sergei remained a hardliner and for many in Moscow he inspired loathing. Like his older brother, Alexander III, he was convinced that any attempt to liberalise Russia was an invitation to revolutionaries and terrorists to incite further revolt. Ella knew her husband’s fears. He changed his routes and slept in different rooms; they rarely went out. Eventually, they moved inside the Kremlin, secure behind its thick fortified walls, soldiers keeping guard.