Queen Victoria's Matchmaking

by Deborah Cadbury

  By a supreme irony it fell to the man once singled out as the ideal consort for Alix by Queen Victoria to agree peace terms: Prince Maximilian von Baden. Appointed chancellor on 3 October, Max von Baden tried to negotiate an armistice. The Kaiser’s rule was disintegrating. It was only now, after the crucible of war that had cost the lives of millions, that the German emperor finally conceded what his English mother had advocated all those years ago. He wished ‘to see the German people more closely involved . . . in the running of the affairs of the fatherland’.65 Hurried efforts to democratise Germany’s despised autocracy did not go far enough for the American president, Woodrow Wilson. The Kaiser’s final days were haunted by the humiliating prospect of losing everything. ‘I will not abdicate,’ he told his interior minister on 1 November. ‘It would be incompatible with my duties, as successor to Frederick the Great.’

  But the German navy, the Kaiser’s proudest achievement, erupted in revolt on 3 November to the sailors’ rallying cry of ‘Bread and Peace’. The spark of rebellion in Kiel spread like wildfire to other cities. The many royal dynasties of Germany began to crumble. Suddenly the possibility of a Bolshevik revolution in Germany seemed real. The terrible sacrifice of war demanded a scapegoat, which increasingly took the shape of the Hohenzollern figurehead: the emperor. Even in the face of a German revolution, Wilhelm hesitated. Surely he could keep his Prussian throne?

  On 9 November the Kaiser was told he could delay no longer. Revolutionaries on the streets of the capital were winning the support of workers and troops. The army was not prepared to fight German ‘Bolsheviks’. Yet still he vacillated until the decision was taken out of his hands. Max von Baden released a statement for him: ‘The Kaiser and King has decided to give up the throne.’66 Germany was to become a republic. ‘Treachery, treachery, shameless, outrageous treachery,’ was Wilhelm’s response.67

  At 2 a.m. on 10 November, Wilhelm was woken and told his car was waiting. It looked just like any other car now, the insignia of emperor removed. He had been advised his life was at risk if he did not flee the country, but he appeared vacant, almost childlike as he did what he was told. At the Dutch frontier, the guards had not expected to see the former German emperor. They took his sword and his application for asylum. The former Kaiser waited for officials to process his request like any other traveller – the third of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren to lose their throne. The ceasefire had been announced by the time he reached the sanctuary of Amerongen Castle, safe behind a guard of Dutch soldiers. Almost as though the whole thing had been a game and he had never really been an enemy of the British, he declared ‘now for a cup of real good English tea’.68

  At the stroke of the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month of 1918, the chimes of Big Ben rang out across London announcing the end of the First World War. Ten million people had died and twenty million more were injured. Four empires had been swept away, the Russian, German, Austrian and Ottoman empires – claiming their monarchies. Of Queen Victoria’s seven crowned grandchildren, only George V, Marie of Romania, Maud of Norway and Ena of Spain still retained their thrones – and in Spain the monarchy was not to last. In 1931 Ena and Alfonso hurried into exile and, a few years later, the Spanish Civil War would pave the way for General Francisco Franco’s military dictatorship and ‘totalitarian state’.

  From his Dutch exile, the former Kaiser Wilhelm, the prince who had always craved adoration, found himself loathed and reviled. Even his own cousin, George V, blamed him as ‘the greatest criminal known for having plunged the world into this ghastly war’.69 Many clamoured for his trial for war crimes and for his death. Prime Minister Lloyd George considered the prospect of putting the former emperor on trial in Westminster Hall. But Wilhelm escaped such scrutiny because the Dutch government declined extradition requests.

  The former emperor took refuge in a world of his own. ‘The historian stands bewildered and ashamed before the mountain of evidence documenting the crazed and racist opinions espoused by the exiled monarch,’ observed the Kaiser’s leading biographer, John Röhl, after a thirty-year study of the Kaiser’s life.70 Presaging Hitler’s regime, the former emperor became consumed with the idea that ‘the Jewish rabble’ were responsible for his downfall. ‘Let no German . . . rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated,’ he wrote in 1919 to one former German general, August von Mackensen.71 The following year he told his former adjutant, Max von Mutius, the world would have no peace ‘until all Jews had been clubbed to death’.72 A few years later he wrote ‘the best would be gas?’73 No contradiction would be tolerated; no alternative view could be aired in his presence. His paranoid world shrank to one driven by hatred and loathing.

  In Russia the Bolshevik revolution was soon consumed with the mass killings of the Cheka, or secret police. During Lenin’s ‘Red Terror’, repression in a myriad of violent forms became widespread: ordinary civilians could face the firing squad, the notorious gulag system became established, and torture became almost commonplace. People could face execution simply for belonging to ‘the possessing classes’. There were reports of barbaric torture reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition for captured White officers or members of the clergy, and mass drownings of civilians. Tsarist autocracy was replaced with a ‘revolutionary autocracy’ that even Lenin’s former friends saw as evidence of Russia’s ‘growing bestiality’ as the Bolshevik ‘murder machine’ set to work ‘as butchers’.74

  Unable to leave the Crimea without her son, the former dowager empress, Maria Feodorovna, would not accept accounts of Nicholas’s death. She waited and waited until the advancing Red Army in spring 1919 forced her to flee.75 She learned of the continuing turmoil as Russia became the ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’, or ‘Soviet Union’, in 1922. Lenin’s death in 1924 did not bring an end to the misery as Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, seized power. Russia’s new dictator cultivated the authority of a tsar and would become responsible for the deaths of many millions on a scale that dwarfed that of the Romanov tsars. Recent estimates suggest in excess of twenty million died under Stalin.

  Europe’s Great War exorcised the leading autocracies of Victorian times; the thrones proving to be tottering tokens of power, their figureheads mere miniatures caught up in the swift-flowing current of change. The royal family’s fall mirrors the collapse in Europe’s supremacy. The measureless sacrifice in the killing fields of the First World War cost the lives of a generation but would pave the way for Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany and the Second World War, during which some sixty million more were killed. The glory of Europe’s belle époque years was forever eclipsed as Russia and America would emerge as the world’s great superpowers.

  Could all this have been avoided? Could Europe have marched without bloodshed through the process of democratisation and the transformation of its many monarchies to a continent of peaceful democracies, whether republics or constitutional monarchies? Prince Albert and Queen Victoria’s vision of extending royal ties and developing a flourishing continental cousinhood was intended to enhance diplomacy and bring about peace and had its roots in the traumas inflicted on the continent in Napoleonic times. But the European cousinhood proved to be powerless – even harmful – in the face of the tectonic shifts in political power during the early twentieth century. The titanic clash, not just between nations, but of poverty against wealth, the disenfranchised against ruling elites, was on an undreamed-of scale, its resolution well beyond the scope of any one individual or any one family.

  Queen Victoria has been condemned for her matchmaking by some historians as a control freak, whose manipulation of her relations went well beyond motherly feeling or her duty as queen. It is undeniable that the marriages of her descendants were an all-consuming interest and she rarely shrank from expressing her views. It proved impossible for her to implement Prince Albert’s grand vision for the dynasty, her frustrations over the decades finding expression in he
r intimate correspondence with her daughter, Vicky. Nevertheless, she adapted to the changing times, exercising her strong need for control while still keeping the cherished dream in view. She had a powerful instinct for the survival not just of her family, but of the monarchy, an instinct whose immediacy and shrewdness shaped her character – and was rarely wide of the mark.

  The dutiful Princess May might not have had the glamour and lively spirit that drew Prince George to Princess Marie, but even after Queen Victoria’s death, May lived as though trying to meet her expectations, playing her part to the full in adapting the British monarchy to the times. The marriage against which Queen Victoria fought longest – that of Alexandra and Nicholas – may indeed have been a love match, but it proved to be highly destructive. The queen’s instincts had warned her with the power of a premonition that Alix would be unsafe in Russia as tsarina but they failed to foretell the role her strong-willed granddaughter would play in her own downfall as well as the collapse of the Russian Empire. Alix’s unswerving advocacy of autocracy and her belief in the divine power of the tsar sealed the fate of her in-laws and paved the way for the total rejection of the governing elite in Russia. How different might things have been had the weak tsar married plain Margaret, who shared her mother’s enlightened beliefs and might have encouraged Nicholas to follow the reforming influences of his grandfather? Or if Ella had obeyed her grandmother’s instructions to break her engagement with Sergei, thereby making a union between Nicholas and Alexandra less likely. Intriguingly, the man Queen Victoria judged most suitable for Alix, Maximilian von Baden, was the very prince who came to be seen by the Kaiser as an ‘arch traitor’ for his role in speeding up his abdication. Kaiser Wilhelm fulfilled the queen’s early assessment as ‘the enemy’, becoming the worst possible caricature of royal power.

  There remains one haunting ‘what if?’ in the tale of Queen Victoria’s matchmaking. If Vicky’s husband, Emperor Frederick, had not died of cancer, but lived to a ripe old age like his father, historians have speculated for years what might have been Europe’s fate. The rapprochement between Germany and Britain to which Vicky’s marriage had been dedicated? An Anglo-German understanding? Detractors from this view point out that Frederick may not have proved to be the liberalising force that was anticipated. Apart from his personality weaknesses that were not conducive to driving change, when Frederick ascended the throne after twenty-six years of Bismarck’s domination, the liberals had long since lost their majority in the Reichstag and the tide had turned against the Albertine programme. But even Frederick’s detractors agree that he would have been unlikely to steer the country on a warlike path. It is hard to imagine an early twentieth century with no naval arms race between Britain and Germany, no goading and inflammatory hostility in the German and British press, no clashes over colonies, and no grounds for the fears that provoked Anglo-French and Anglo-Russian treaties.76 Victoria and Albert’s idealistic vision did not encompass the possibility that their own grandson at the helm of the vigorous new country of Germany, his thoughts constantly directed towards his dreams of German power, would help to sow the seeds of destruction.

  Events in Europe conspired to create the impetus for war, but Kaiser Wilhelm II and his generals were the first to draw their shining swords. Albert’s hopes for a thriving and stable Europe ended in a way far from his original dreams – his fellow countrymen as well as Englishmen lying in death together in peace at last:

  In Flanders fields the poppies blow

  Between the crosses, row on row,

  That mark our place; and in the sky

  The larks, still bravely singing, fly

  Scarce heard amid the guns below.77

  Grandmama’s Little Poem

  Then come what will and come what may!

  As long as thou dost live, ’tis day

  And if the world through which we must roam

  Wherever thou art, there is my home

  I see thy face so dear to me

  Shades of the future I do not see.78

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to express my thanks to Her Majesty the Queen for her gracious permission to read the papers and correspondence of her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, and to publish extracts. Unrestricted access to the many letters in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle between Queen Victoria and her children and grandchildren provided a window into their innermost lives and made it possible to examine their hopes and dreams as well as the tumultuous conflicts behind the royal marriages that shaped Europe. My aim was to present an intimate portrayal and I am most indebted to the team at the Royal Archives for their support with my research over many months as well as their skill in deciphering Queen Victoria’s handwriting in her later years when her eyesight was failing.

  This book could not have been completed without the expertise of several scholars and historians who helped me along the way. I would particularly like to express my thanks to Jane Ridley, Professor of Modern History, University of Buckingham, for reading and commenting on the manuscript and for her compelling insights into the characters and the times. It was an honour to meet John Röhl, Emeritus Professor at the University of Sussex, who provided invaluable guidance on sections of my draft, helped me through the complexities of the German court in the late nineteenth century and opened up the world of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Discussions with Andrew Wilson at the Royal Archives and the British Library were always an inspiration and I am indebted to Andrew for many steers including Prince Albert’s idealistic vision for Europe. Thank you, too, to Christopher Warwick for giving up valuable time to discuss Elisabeth of Hesse and her sisters and advising on extracts in my text. I would also like to thank Dr Richard Williams for his patience and generosity in commenting on the draft, and many others who assisted with the project.

  In researching this story I owe a debt of gratitude to staff in several public archives including the Lambeth Palace Library, the National Archives, the British Library and the Parliamentary Archives. Karen Robson, John Rooney and the team at the Mountbatten Archives in the Hartley Library at the University of Southampton drew my attention to unpublished papers, poems and memorabilia collected over a lifetime by Victoria of Hesse about her sisters, and I am grateful for permission to publish extracts. Thank you to Prince Michael of Greece and Ted Rosvall for generously granting permission to publish extracts from the recently found correspondence between Eddy and Hélène in Eddy & Hélène . . . An Impossible Match, published in 2013 by Rosvall Royal Books in Falköping, Sweden. Thank you also to John Röhl for permission to cite key correspondence from his outstanding three-volume biography of Kaiser Wilhelm published by Cambridge University Press between 1993 and 2014: Young Wilhelm: The Kaiser’s Early Life, 1859–1888; Wilhelm II: The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy, 1888–1900; and finally Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile, 1900–1941. In addition, many thanks to Christopher Warwick for permission to quote from Ella: Princess, Saint and Martyr, Chichester, John Wiley, 2006.

  In London it has been a great pleasure to work with my editor at Bloomsbury, Michael Fishwick, who nurtured this project from the outset and saw its potential. I would like to thank Bloomsbury’s managing editor, Sarah Ruddick, for her excellent oversight, assistant editors Marigold Atkey and Jasmine Horsey, and also Richard Mason for his thoughtful copy-editing. In New York I have greatly enjoyed working once more with Clive Priddle, the publisher at Public Affairs, Hachette Book Group. Thank you to Jane Robbins Mize at Public Affairs for guiding the book through each phase of its American production. This project would never have happened without Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown, who spotted the potential in the story from the beginning. I am indebted to Gordon for his skilful editorial insights and encouraging advice during each phase of the book’s development.

  Lastly, heartfelt thanks to friends and family who made it possible for me to complete this book. Thank you to Pete and Jo and most of all to Julia Lilley, whose imaginative ideas and wisdom sustained me through the years
of writing.

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