Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  It was hard to avoid the feeling of a gathering storm. Royal marriages were proving to be irrelevant in the shaping of Europe’s Great Power allegiances. Germany, the country with the most marriage ties to the British throne, never formed an alliance with Britain. Bertie had been widely perceived as paving the way for the ‘Entente Cordiale’ in 1904 between Britain and France. This agreement over colonial conflicts marked an important shift in European relations, bringing a new understanding between Britain and France and drawing to a close centuries of recurring antagonism.71 This was followed in 1907 by the Anglo-Russian Convention, which addressed long-running disputes in central and south Asia, and which for Britain at least, provided some reassurance about the increasingly fraught state of European politics. Emperor Wilhelm never grasped that this new spirit of cooperation between Britain, France and Russia had been driven by a mutual fear of Germany. Instead, he held his uncle personally responsible for the perceived threat to Germany. Bertie, ‘the Encircler’, was the devil himself: ‘He is a Satan; it is quite unbelievable what a Satan he is,’ Wilhelm told his entourage.72

  The speed of change may have been confusing, the signals hard to read, but there was no escaping the fact that Europe’s Great Powers, still professing peace, increasingly squared up into two opposing camps. The ‘Triple Entente powers’ of Britain, Russia and France stood opposed to the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Europe was dividing into two massive armed power blocs, each side bristling with the new mass-produced weapons of the industrial age, stockpiling machine guns, high-explosive shells, dreadnoughts, submarines and aeroplanes. The Kaiser’s efforts to weaken the Triple Entente and provoke discord between Britain and France in Morocco backfired, at Tangier in 1905 and Agadir in 1911 (the First and Second Moroccan Crisis), only serving to increase their unity. Unlike Queen Victoria, who found a way to manage Wilhelm, Bertie found it hard to contain his dislike. Within a few years of his mother’s death, he had reached an impasse with his nephew. ‘Trust him – never,’ he told Louis. ‘He is utterly false & the bitterest foe that England possesses.’73

  Barely ten years after her death it was as though Queen Victoria’s grandchildren in eastern Europe, tied to their thrones, were trapped in a crucible from which there was no escape. Marie of Romania was engulfed in the turmoil of south-east Europe as the troubled ‘Eastern Question’ erupted yet again. With the weakening Ottoman Empire and inflamed passions of nationalism in the Balkans, the very air was ‘tense and electrical’, she wrote.74 The First Balkan War broke out in October 1912 when Montenegro, Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria fought for territory occupied for centuries under Ottoman rule. The following year yet another assassination would usher in the reign of Queen Victoria’s sixth grandchild, Sophie of Greece. Her father-in-law, King George of Greece, was walking through the newly won Greek town of Salonika in March 1913 when he was shot in the back by a Greek vagrant, Alexandros Schinas, who claimed to be an anarchist. No sooner were Sophie and her husband, Constantine, crowned, than Bulgaria fell upon her former allies of Greece and Serbia, demanding a greater share of land won in the first war and triggering the Second Balkan War. Romania joined the fight against the Bulgarians in July 1913 and Princess Marie dedicated herself to relieving a cholera epidemic among the troops. ‘It was my first initiation into suffering on a large scale,’ she wrote.75

  Victoria of Battenberg continued to visit her sisters in Russia and was with them during the fateful hot summer of 1914. Few anticipated that yet another assassination in an obscure part of Europe would, this time, set off the chain of events that would catapult Europe towards global war. The Austrian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was murdered with his wife Sophie in Sarajevo in Bosnia on 28 June, but Victoria continued with her travels with Ella. They steamed up the Volga, struck by the great breadth of the river, the shores seemingly so far off. They stopped periodically for Ella to attend church services or visit convents, while Victoria went sightseeing. Victoria took the time to extend her journey into the Urals, exploring many new places, including Ekaterinburg where, even then, she sensed hostility. ‘The population did not seem particularly pleased at the official visit,’ she recorded. She drove past Ipatiev House on the main square several times, little knowing the significance it would later have in the family. ‘It was pointed out to me as belonging to a rich merchant,’ she wrote.76

  By late July 1914 the atmosphere in Europe ‘was so threatening’ that Alix urged her sisters to cut short their tour. On 28 July Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Russia mobilised in support of the Serbs and as Ella and Victoria made the last leg of their return to St Petersburg they were diverted several times to make way for troop trains. Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August. Russia declared war on Germany the next day and German troops invaded Luxembourg. On 3 August, Germany declared war on France and prepared to invade Belgium. The sisters reached St Petersburg on 4 August, the very day that Britain declared war on Germany.77

  The German emperor would not recognise any part he had played as each unbelievable step unfolded, even though he knew that his unconditional support or ‘blank cheque’ to Austria-Hungary on 5 July had emboldened it to declare war on Serbia. Instead he blamed his relatives. ‘Edward VII is stronger after his death than I who am still alive,’ he said, as though Bertie had something to do with it from beyond the grave. As for his cousins, ‘to think that George and Nicky have played me false!’ Wilhelm permitted himself a glimpse of righteous indignation coming from the silver-haired, black-clad empress, his grandmama. She would surely be on his side. ‘If my grandmother had been alive, she would never have allowed it,’ he declared.78 But she was dead, her influence gone. Soon the irresistible tide, the German Army, would change the map of Europe. ‘Paris for lunch, dinner in Petrograd,’ the Kaiser had once declared, apparently unable to see the contradictions in his beliefs in his own innocence and his warmongering exhortations.79

  Victoria of Battenberg’s last image of her sisters was on 7 August, the day she set sail for Britain. Alix came for one last goodbye, bringing thick coats for her sea journey, the sisters stoically refraining from voicing their fears. ‘I little dreamt it was the last time I should ever see my sisters again,’ wrote Victoria.80 She made her way from the Russian frontier to Stockholm and then Norway, visiting King Haakon and Queen Maud before catching the last steamer from Bergen back to Britain.

  Victoria kept her sisters’ letters and mementos. Among her papers was a poem Ella had sent her that expressed her feeling about her husband and her growing religious conviction. Ella’s belief that God had spared Sergei from further pain sustained her. This was the marriage that Queen Victoria had never wanted to occur, but it seems that even after Sergei’s death Ella was still defiantly proclaiming her love for him; a mere Victorian formality perhaps, or an expression of her true feelings? Carefully written out on thick, black-edged paper, the poem is untitled but bears only the telling date of her husband’s death.

  17 February 1905

  Oh gallant upright spirit

  Whose faithful work is o’er

  Whom earthly joy and anguish

  Will trouble never more

  Who like a faithful soldier

  Didst face a hostile host

  Until a greater Master

  Released thee from thy post!

  Oh husband true and tender

  Oh gracious gen’rous friend

  To conscience and to duty

  Found constant to the end!

  God, in His Wisdom, took thee

  From earthly love and life

  God, in his Pity, spared thee

  From further pain and strife!

  On earth the souls that loved thee

  Look upwards without fear

  And in their hearts remaineth

  The love they bore thee here.

  Oh may a ray descending

  From the great source of Love

  Strengthen the heart that waiteth

  To jo
in thy peace above.81

  12

  The Fall

  ‘She drove me away like a dog!’

  Grand Duchess Elisabeth (Ella), December 1916

  Queen Victoria’s seventh and last grandchild to be crowned became Queen Marie of Romania on 10 October 1914, ‘at a moment when the whole of Europe was on fire and flames were licking our every frontier’, she wrote in her memoirs.1 The new queen felt ‘the future lay before us like a fiery portal we should have to pass; all the unknown lay beyond.’ Swept along on a tide of national self-interest, the royal cousins stood on the very brink of a precipitous descent. ‘Tomorrow was as separated from yesterday as with the stroke of a sword,’ Marie wrote. ‘There would never be any going back, no shelter could be found, we were out in the glaring light.’2

  It is not possible in a few short pages to convey the scale of the tragedy that was about to engulf these royal cousins or to describe all the events that would sweep away the Europe of their youth. This brief summary aims to highlight turning points in their downfall in which Queen Victoria’s crowned descendants found themselves pitched not just cousin against cousin, but husband against wife and sister against sister. Several of these key points in their lives have assumed almost legendary status, the stories told and retold across the twentieth century, with the reputations of the protagonists ebbing and flowing with new evidence or even transfigured from demons to saints.

  Within a few months of Queen Marie’s coronation in 1914, Europe was fastened into ‘frightful bondage’, wrote the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, its great glory reduced into ‘an immense battlefield’. Trench lines cut through Europe like a gaping wound, tearing up the meadows of Flanders and northern France as the armies of the British and French tried to halt the rapid German advance. The cannon and machine guns of the industrial age had already ‘hurled death across battlelines’ at Mons, Marne and Arras on the western front and at Tannenberg and along the Vistula on the eastern front. ‘Havoc on such a scale had never even been dreamed of,’ Churchill later observed, ‘and had never proceeded at such a speed in all human history.’3

  Kaiser Wilhelm was fighting against his cousins, George V and Nicholas and Alexandra. His sister, Sophie of Greece, and his crowned cousins in Norway, Spain and Romania had declared their neutrality. At her coronation Queen Marie of Romania felt ‘a new and fearful page was opening before me’. During the ceremony suddenly she became aware that the people were calling out her name: ‘Regina Maria’. There was something in the way they spoke ‘that had within it a sound of hope’. Solemnly, she turned to face the congregation and lifted the veil that covered her face. The response was overwhelming. There was a united cry of ‘Regina Maria’, the voices rising into the vaults, ‘as though I were their supremest hope’. In that moment Marie felt she had won; the stranger from overseas ‘was theirs with every drop of my blood!’4

  Despite her strong identity as Romania’s queen, Queen Victoria’s last granddaughter to be crowned also had an unquestioning faith in Britain that pitched her in opposition to her husband. She was convinced that Romania’s neutrality was unsustainable, but King Ferdinand, a descendant of the House of Hohenzollern, believed their country’s very survival lay with Germany. Romania shared borders with Germany’s allies, he pointed out, and the German Army was ‘invincible’. It was unthinkable to Ferdinand to fight for Britain against Germany and the Central Powers. Marie could not agree. ‘I should die of grief if Romania were to go to war against England,’ she replied. She turned to her cousins, George V and Tsar Nicholas, pleading Romania’s interests. It was widely believed she ‘swayed King Ferdinand’s will’.5

  When Romania did enter the war on the side of the British and their allies on 27 August 1916, Marie still believed in cousinly solidarity. ‘I am happy we are together in these great and terrible times,’ she wrote ‘cousin to cousin’ to George V on 12 September. ‘We are a small country and we are risking our existence – we know it.’ Although separated from Britain by ‘the whole of Europe, yet we feel . . . it is England that we trust’.6 It was a critical moment. There was deadlock. The thundering battlefields of the eastern and the western front were devouring the young manhood of Europe. The Germans feared the small country of Romania with its large army and oil reserves could tip the balance against the Central Powers.

  At German headquarters the Kaiser panicked. The all-powerful German Warlord who had projected German glory and military prowess for decades had rapidly turned into a shadow king. His grandiosity and self-belief were often overtaken by paralysing states of anxiety and on occasion he took to his bed.7 But when news was brought to him of Romanian advances he summoned his two great generals from the eastern front to plan a counter-attack: Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. On hearing of the German counter-offensive, Queen Marie turned at once to Tsar Nicholas. It is ‘as a woman and as a queen that I make my appeal to you, to the man and the Emperor!’ she wrote less than six weeks after joining the war. ‘We have come to the realisation that we are facing tremendous and immediate danger and that unless we are helped at once it may be too late.’ Russia was the only Entente country that could realistically come to Romania’s rescue.8

  Queen Marie was working as a nurse in Bucharest in late September when she saw the blue sky blotted out by the exploding shells. ‘Death streamed down upon us from the heavens,’ she wrote. The Romanians were beaten back into their own territory, caught between Bulgarian and other troops invading from the south and German and Austro-Hungarian troops closing in from the north. On 6 December she learned of the fall of Bucharest as she fled on a crowded train. She felt she was ‘struggling against invading floods of disaster’. The rapid German victory in Romania was bound to cause trouble in Russia, ‘now we are so weak with our half-destroyed army and three-quarters of the country torn from us, all our riches gone! . . . Everything is sad, sad, sad . . .’ Russia might do a deal with Germany. ‘What then? What would be our fate? Wherever I turn nothing but terror, danger and pain . . .’9

  Family relations that had seemed strong and inviolable were proving irrelevant. George V had not been able to help. Her last hopes rested with the tsar. With immediate Russian support, there might yet be a chance for Romania. Marie wanted to go in person to Nicholas and plead Romania’s interests. She wrote to her sister, Victoria-Melita, who was now living in Russia, having divorced Ernie in 1901 and married Grand Duke Kirill of Russia, a grandson of Alexander II, in 1905. But Victoria-Melita’s reply was chilling. She advised Marie not to come under any circumstances. There was a crisis at the Russian court. Their cousin Alix was ‘extraordinarily hated’. Marie was uneasy as she waited for news. ‘Something uncanny and dreadful is going on there,’ she wrote.10

  Towards the end of 1916 the perilous fall for Queen Victoria’s crowned grandchildren was gathering pace most quickly of all for Nicholas and Alexandra. Trapped in an unalterable mindset, the tsarina was greatly accelerating the unfolding tragedy.

  During 1915 the Russians had been beaten back beyond Russian Poland on a wide front. Spectacular Russian advances against the Austrians proved hard to sustain. It was as though even the vast lands of Russia itself were against them, conspiring with the poor state of the railways to turn the transport of fresh soldiers and supplies into a home battleground. When unskilled Russians finally reached the front they were often without weapons, and were forced to wait to get a gun until the men ahead of them fell.11 Line upon line of infantry was slaughtered by the German heavy artillery, which arrived at the eastern front with Teutonic efficiency.

  Alix desperately wanted to share her husband’s burden. Nicholas looked so ill; she felt sure she could help. Inspired by a mystical belief in his God-given autocratic powers, she impressed upon Nicholas that as Russia’s ‘chosen one’ he should take personal control of the army. In his absence at the front, she would act as head of government for him. The tsarina turned to the one man who she knew understood God’s will: the corrupt faith-healer, Ras
putin. Soon she was running the government, leaning heavily on ‘our Friend’.

  Rasputin’s every suggestion was pursued by the tsarina as though she had been personally directed by God. Key ministerial appointments were made on his whim. ‘He likes our Friend’ or he is ‘Our Friend’s enemy’ was sufficient grounds for her to choose or reject a minister and her letters to Nicholas implored him to agree. ‘God sent Him to us,’ she reasoned.12 This appalling state of affairs was sustained by Alix’s blind faith. Such was her absolute conviction that she was saving Russia that her instinctive reserve vanished. ‘I am no longer the slightest bit shy,’ she wrote to Nicholas in September 1916. Indeed, she found the words came freely and forcefully, ‘like a waterfall in Russian’.13 Inevitably, the tsarina had access to military secrets, many of which she shared with Rasputin against her husband’s wishes.

  St Petersburg, now renamed ‘Petrograd’, was soon alive to the rumours. Rasputin was no man of God. His drunkenness, debauchery and thieving were common knowledge.14 The tsarina was either a fool or a spy. His recommendations for top jobs were not guided by God, but by bribes and favours, perhaps even the enemy. Rasputin was indiscreet with his cabal of supporters. There was talk of treason.