Queen Victoria's Gene

by D M Potts

  After abdicating in late 1936 to marry Mrs Simpson, Edward, now Duke of Windsor, visited Germany again for two weeks in 1937, ostensibly to study housing and working conditions there with a view to improving conditions in Britain, though how he could apply his new knowledge from his exile in France was never made clear. While in Germany he met Hitler, Goering and Goebbels, greeting Hitler with a Nazi salute, according to The Times correspondent, while his German cousin gave a gala dinner in his honour. The visit was played down by the British press, but the New York Times reported that, ‘this gesture and remarks during the last two weeks have demonstrated adequately that the Abdication did rob Germany of a firm friend, if not indeed a devoted admirer on the British throne’. These links continued until 1940.

  The popular image of Britain in 1940, a united nation heroically resisting a ferocious Hitler, who was bent on its destruction, is largely mythical. Hitler, who had fought opposite British troops in the First World War, had the greatest admiration and respect for Britain. He saw it as a fellow Germanic nation, an heroic imperial power, and consistently sought an alliance with Britain to leave Germany free to destroy Russia. In Mein Kampf he wrote, ‘In Europe there can be for Germany, in the predictable future, only two allies: England and Italy’. Whether he would have remained a friend and ally if Russia had been eliminated is another question. In Britain there were many who either reciprocated his feelings, or felt that Britain’s interests would be best served by an alliance as resistance would be futile. In 1939 Hitler had no plans prepared to invade Britain although he had detailed plans for the defeat of France. Neither did he establish a spy network in Britain, as he never planned to fight us, in marked contrast to our later Russian allies who established an extensive and efficient network in the 1930s. Even after the declaration of war in 1939 Hitler still hoped that, after crushing France, it would be possible to reach agreement with Britain. For this reason he dithered after his panzer division broke through to the coast, holding them back for two crucial days late in May 1940, while the British army retreated to Dunkirk. Goering’s Chief of Staff explained, ‘The Führer wants to spare Britain a humiliating defeat’.4 During June contacts were made through Swedish intermediaries, between Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary and R.A. Butler, with Ribbentrop, who was confident that a settlement could be reached. Simultaneously, negotiations were carried out with the Duke of Windsor.

  The Duke of Windsor was in France when the blitzkrieg began in 1940. After the fall of France he moved to Spain where he lingered for a week. The US ambassador reported ‘in conversation last night with [members?] of the embassy staff the Duke of Windsor disclosed that the most important thing now to be done was to end the war before thousands more were killed or maimed to save the face of a few politicians’. The Germans contacted the duke through intermediaries and considered both bribing him with 50 million francs to stay within reach of Germany, or even of kidnapping him.

  In order to persuade the duke to leave the continent, Churchill appointed him Governor of the Bahamas, but even after accepting the post, the duke dawdled in Portugal for a further three weeks while continuing to negotiate with the Germans. The Germans allowed the duchess’s maid to return to their Paris residence to collect sundry personal items.

  Late in July 1940 Ribbentrop effectively offered the duke the British throne. The offer was conveyed by the German Minister in Lisbon. Reasserting Germany’s desire for peace with Britain he suggested, ‘In such a case Germany would be willing to cooperate most closely with the Duke and to clear the way for any desire expressed by the Duke and Duchess’. To the duke’s credit he chose the Governorship of the Bahamas. According to the German ambassador in Madrid, ‘The Duke hesitated even up to the last moment. The ship had to delay its departure on that account.’ The influence of Sir Walter Monkton finally persuaded the duke to depart, but even in the middle of August 1940, with the Battle of Britain at its height in the skies over England, the duke was still in communication with his German friends from his new base in the Bahamas.

  The duke himself always believed that the war with Germany should have been avoided, but his attempt to reverse his grandfather’s pro-French policy was foiled by the ease with which he had allowed himself to be manoeuvred off the British throne.

  While these tentative Anglo-German contacts were being made Hitler delayed the air offensive against Britain, allowing us to rebuild our fighter squadrons, which had suffered heavily in the battle for France and over the beaches of Dunkirk. Although Hitler named 13 August as the invasion date the plans progressed only in a desultory fashion. Charles Edward Leopold’s reports were a major influence in encouraging Hitler to exaggerate the strength of the pro-German party in Britain. His militaristic attitudes were in remarkable contrast to the liberal attitudes of his father and grandfather. Had Hitler had a more realistic appraisal of British opinion he might have pushed his panzers into Dunkirk with all speed and have planned and carried out the defeat of Britain with the same determination as the defeat of France.

  Charles Edward paid a heavy price for his support of German nationalism as two of his four sons lost their lives in the Second World War and at the end of the war he lost most of his estates which lay in the Russian zone of Germany. He died in 1954 and was survived by two sons and two daughters.

  After the occupation of Germany in 1945 George VI, with the support of Winston Churchill, took measures to ensure that the Duke of Windsor’s correspondence with his cousins, Charles Edward and Prince Philip of Hesse, one time Lieutenant-General in the Storm Troops, was collected and suppressed. The man chosen for this delicate task was Anthony Blunt, himself a Russian agent, and his knowledge of this embarrassing information was his insurance against prosecution when his own treason was discovered. In the words of The Times5 his treachery was trivial compared with the ‘enormity of the Windsors’ wartime activities’. In 1945 and again in 1953 Prime Minister Winston Churchill took action to suppress the relevant documents when the Nazi Foreign Ministry file on pre-war Anglo-German relations was published.6

  Mention must be made of descendants of two other leading players in the story of Queen Victoria’s gene, those of Leopold, later King of the Belgians, the prime mover in the drama, and those of the Duke of Cumberland, and later King of Hanover, who would have become King of Britain had Queen Victoria not been born.

  When Leopold I of Belgium lay dying he could look back on an astonishingly successful life, in spite of the loss of Charlotte. He was firmly established as king of a small but prosperous country. His niece ruled the greatest empire that had ever existed and the younger members of his family were set to rule much of the rest of the world.

  His eldest son, Leopold II, resembled his father in many respects. He was as ambitious and avaricious but, whereas his father had been charming and diplomatic, Leopold II was cruel and ruthless. Both manipulated their relatives’ lives in pursuit of their own ambitions, but Leopold I brought success and sometimes happiness to his kin while Leopold II brought only misery to his own children. Feeling that Belgium was too small a field for his ambitions Leopold II first attempted to lease the Philippines from Spain. A year after this plan had failed he called an international conference on Africa in Brussels and joined the scramble for Africa in a unique fashion. Behind the façade of an Association Internationale Africaine, established ostensibly to bring the benefits of civilization to central Africa and to suppress the slave trade, he converted 900,000 square miles of the Congo basin into a private estate. Forced labour and an extortionate tax, levied in wild rubber, enforced by the bullet and the lash, made Leopold a vast private fortune. The misrule led to uprisings which were ruthlessly suppressed. Tribal levies from one area were used to put down tribes in another. Huge areas became depopulated and hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, died. No complaints were raised by the Belgians, mainly responsible for organizing these horrors, but inevitably the conscience of the English-speaking world became troubled, particularly as the result of publici
ty given to the problem by Roger Casement. After nearly forty years Leopold was forced to relinquish his hold and the Congo became a Belgian colony – but he was generously compensated for his sacrifice by the Belgian taxpayer.

  His treatment of his family was almost as cruel. After only four weeks of marriage his unfortunate Habsburg wife, Marie Henriette of Hungary, lamented ‘If God hears my prayers I shall not go on living much longer’, but she survived to bear him three daughters and a son. The son died as a child but the three daughters all endured lives of misery. The eldest, Louise, was married at the age of sixteen to an elderly relative, Philip of Coburg. She literally fled from her husband on the first night, hiding in the palace greenhouse. She wrote later, ‘I am not, I am sure, the first woman who having lived in the clouds during her engagement, has been suddenly hurled to the ground on her marriage night and who, bruised and mangled in her soul, has fled humanity in tears’. With Coburg resolution, she returned to her husband, learned to enjoy sex and its many variations and soon accumulated her own lovers. She eventually left her husband for a handsome cavalry officer, Count Mallachich. After a financial scandal the count was imprisoned in wretched conditions and Louise, who was quite sane, was confined in a lunatic asylum. Ignoring his daughter’s pleas for help, Leopold instructed the jailer ‘to keep strict watch upon the madwoman’. Eventually she escaped, but spent a long life in poverty only to inherit a fortune on her deathbed from her aunt Charlotte, the widow of Maximilian of Mexico. Leopold’s second daughter Stephanie married Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, but lost him to Baroness Vetsera, with whom he committed suicide in the hunting lodge at Meyerling. Leopold kept his youngest daughter, Clementine, by his side for many years, forbidding her to marry. When he eventually died, she promptly married Prince Victor Napoleon, head of the Napoleon family. Perhaps she had a little happiness in later life. It is ironic that the son of the great schemer, organizer and expositor of kingship should have brought such misery on his own family, though perhaps by his own standards Leopold II regarded himself as a success.

  As we noted at the beginning of this book the lives of royalty often prove to be of compelling interest. Monarchs wield great influence, as did Victoria, her grandson the kaiser and her granddaughter Tsarina Alexandra. The circumstances of their childhood often leave them less disciplined or inhibited in their behaviour so that they may show extremes of human behaviour, ranging from the altruistic Pedro of Brazil to the monstrous Leopold II of Belgium.

  If Queen Victoria was not the daughter of the Duke of Kent then the British throne should have passed to Ernest Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland. When Victoria ascended the British throne the throne of Hanover passed to Ernest Augustus (or Ernst August as he was known in Hanover), as the Hanoverian throne could only be passed to males. His son, blind George V of Hanover, unwisely sided with the Austrians in the war of 1866 and was deposed by the victorious Prussians, who annexed his kingdom. George’s grandson, another Ernst August, Prince of Hanover, married Louise, a daughter of the last kaiser, in 1913. This was the last of the great royal family gatherings before the First World War destroyed their world, and the wedding ceremonies ended with the legendary Fackeltanz, or torch dance, in which only those of the rank of ‘Royal Highness’ or above, could take part. Their son, also Ernst August, fought on the Russian front and was wounded at Kharkov, but was imprisoned by Hitler after the July plot of 1944. After the war he fought a successful legal battle to establish his claim to be a British subject, as a descendant of the Hanoverians.7 His eldest son, yet another Ernst August, born in 1954, is the present head of the Welf (Guelf) family and is a prince of both Britain and Hanover. His younger brother, Prince Ludwig Rudolf, married Countess Isabelle Thurn Valsassina but committed suicide after his young wife died of a drug overdose. Inherited wealth, and the boredom that it may cause, can be as dangerous as haemophilia.

  Our early human and pre-human ancestors no doubt lived in hierarchical structured societies and for many people a king or queen still forms the natural centre and representation of a state. At the end of the twentieth century the wheel of history is turning full circle. In Britain the sexual behaviour of some of the younger members of the royal family, widely advertised by foreign-owned newspapers of republican sympathies, are discrediting the royal family as much as the family of George III did two hundred years ago, but the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and Russia have produced some most unexpected results. Descendants of the monarchs who were disposed of in 1918 have suddenly become popular. Ex-King Michael of Romania, exiled by the Communists in 1947, made a surprise visit to Bucharest in 1990 where he was welcomed by a group of monarchists in the Central University Square. One nineteen-year-old product of the Communist system said: ‘We are very happy. The King represents stability and peace.’ The Romanian government, formed of ex-Communists, fearing Michael Hohenzollern’s popularity, prevented the royal family from visiting their ancestors’ tombs, the ostensible purpose of the visit, and hastily deported them.

  Further south the Bulgarian monarchy was abolished as the result of a plebiscite held under Communist auspices in 1946, but when Princess Maria-Luisa, sister of the last King Simeon, visited Bulgaria, over 50,000 people thronged the streets of Sofia chanting, ‘We want Simeon, we want our king’. A poll showed that 41.2 per cent of Bulgarians wanted the return of the monarchy. Simeon is a Coburg by descent in the male line. The ruling ex-Communists hastily passed a law requiring presidential candidates to have been resident in Bulgaria for at least five years, in order to exclude his candidature.

  In 1991 Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich Romanov, son of a first cousin of the last tsar, visited St Petersburg, the first Romanov to see the city for over seventy years. The reception was friendly and small groups of monarchists, some wearing tsarist uniforms and others clutching portraits of the last tsar, followed him around. A service was held at St Isaac’s Cathedral in his honour, by Patriarch Aleksy II. When Vladimir died he was interred with his ancestors in the fortress of Sts Peter and Paul. Monarchist feeling is not strong but viewed across the seventy years of Communist terror, mismanagement and corruption, the tsarist era appears more attractive than in 1917 and if conditions in Russia do not improve the current regime may become discredited as well.

  When Alexander Karadjordjevic, the Crown Prince of Yugoslavia, descended through his grandmother Marie, the daughter of Ferdinand I of Romania, from Prince Alfred, a son of Queen Victoria, visited Belgrade, over 70,000 people gave him a triumphant welcome. The break up of Yugoslavia and the subsequent war between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia make it impossible to imagine the resurrection of the Yugoslavian throne, but many Serbs still have some loyalty to their old monarchy. His father King Peter was driven into exile in 1941 when Yugoslavia bravely resisted Hitler’s demands and was betrayed when the West backed Tito instead of the legitimate government.

  In July 1994 the Estonian Royalist Party, representing one-tenth of the Estonian electorate, invited Prince Edward to become King of Estonia. This is the more remarkable because Estonia has never had a king before, previously being ruled by the Teutonic Knights, the Swedes or the Russians. The proposers felt that a constitutional monarchy would best combine ‘ancient culture with modern political reality’.

  The closely related dynasties of Europe were rightly damned by their failure to prevent the First World War but the horrors of the Communist governments in Russia and Eastern Europe and of the Second World War have, at least in the eyes of many, rehabilitated them.

  ELEVEN

  A BREED APART

  History may be studied in order to understand how we arrived at our present state or because it is often more intriguing than fiction. Is it a random, totally chaotic series of events? How many foresaw in 1988 that the Soviet empire was about to collapse, or even that there was a small but significant probability that one or more monarchs, all inevitably descended from Queen Victoria, might be invited back to thrones in Eastern Europe. How decisive
is the influence of the individual? Were only the trumpets of Gorbachov capable of bringing down the Berlin Wall or might others have done the same? Prince Albert, on his deathbed, probably averted war with the Northern States; could the tsar, perhaps with Rasputin at his shoulder, have averted the First World War? Efforts to construct predictive theories based on history have been peculiarly unsuccessful but historical experience can be used in order to avoid repeating the more obvious mistakes of the past. While the history of mankind may have been ‘little more than the register of the crimes, failings and misfortune of mankind’ (Gibbon), lessons may still be learned.

  The story of Queen Victoria’s gene contains both sober warnings and tentative grounds for hope. It is a story of power: of what kings offer their subjects and what commoners expect of their monarchs. Do the trivial sexual peccadillos of minor royalty matter or does the peculiar interest they excite reflect the link between power and sex? Biologically sex and power are related. The Coburgs were the ultimate dynasts, losing every battle on the ground and making all their conquests in the marriage bed (Duke Francis’s son Ernst backed the Prussians against Napoleon in the 1790s while his brother Leopold fought for Napoleon against the Russians in 1812). Leopold and his relatives and descendants were ruthlessly ambitious and sexually aggressive, twice marrying the Crown Princess of Britain (Charlotte and Victoria), together with those of Portugal and Brazil. The creativity of the family of the Dukes of Coburg must be admired. For five generations Duke Francis’s opportunistic and promiscuous descendants expanded their control over nations great and small. By any criterion of territorial acquisition they had become the most successful family in human history: quite probably, their record will never be challenged. But then nature (or a misjudged liaison) injected a single defective gene into the family which within fifty years contributed to two of the bloodiest wars in history.