Sons, Servants and Statesmen

by John Van der Kiste

  Like Alfred, Leopold had a passion for music, and both brothers were friends with the Queen’s favourite composer, Arthur Sullivan, a prolific writer of choral works, symphonies and songs, though known above all for his music for the Savoy Operas with librettist William S. Gilbert. Alfred persuaded them to support the cause of more free tuition for young students of music, and they made regular speeches on the subject. He was an enthusiastic amateur violinist himself and regularly performed with orchestras, though some at Court (including his own brothers) were inclined to be less than complimentary about his standard of playing as a soloist at home. He was also responsible for the foundation of what would become one of the royal family’s most priceless assets. Since boyhood he had been an enthusiastic collector of postage stamps, and in 1890 he attended the inaugural ceremony of the Philatelic Society in his capacity as first Honorary President, when he opened their first exhibition.

  When diphtheria struck the grand ducal family at Darmstadt in the winter of 1878, four-year-old May succumbed. Worn out by having to nurse each member of the family in turn apart from second daughter Ella, who had been sent to stay with relatives as soon as the disease struck them, Alice also caught the infection. Weakened by years of indifferent health, she did not have the strength to withstand it, as her anxious mother had feared. By a peculiar irony of fate she died on 14 December, the seventeenth anniversary of her father’s death.

  Leopold had always been especially devoted to Alice, her husband and children, and of all the siblings he was the one most affected by the tragedy. Although the doctors tried to dissuade him from travelling to Darmstadt to attend the funeral lest he too catch the infection, he insisted that nothing would stop him going to pay his last respects, as did the Prince of Wales. They duly joined the other mourners at the obsequies, and in January 1879 the widowed Louis followed them back to England with his children. The brothers took them to Osborne and then to Windsor, and over the next few weeks Leopold went out with the father and his children during the mornings, before playing with the children every afternoon in the Round Tower.

  The marriage between Alice and Louis had had its difficulties, as she had been all too conscious of her intellectual superiority and distressed to find how little she had in common with her husband. Nevertheless, Louis was stunned by her sudden death, and he drew great consolation from the company of his brother-in-law, whose sense of loss almost matched his. When the time came for Louis to return to Darmstadt, he felt unable to face the journey without Leopold. With some reluctance, the Queen allowed Leopold to accompany him back to Hesse.

  Alice’s death, pressure from the other children and, perhaps most importantly of all, the friendship of Disraeli had all combined to soften the Queen’s over-protective attitude towards her youngest son. His bold stand against parental authority the previous year had also demonstrated that he could have his own way without coming to any harm. From this time onwards he was allowed to undertake a greater number of public engagements and made several speeches in support of various educational and charitable institutions. At the Mansion House he was one of several speakers on behalf of the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching. Gladstone, a fellow speaker, commented afterwards on how well he had spoken: ‘keeping close to the subject, it was full of mind and it was difficult for anyone acquainted with the speeches of the Prince Consort not to recognise the father in the son’.9

  He still desperately wanted a peerage, as confirmation of his adult status and a widening of his opportunities for work. Even the papers were beginning to wonder why he continued to be excluded from the House of Lords. Yet the Queen maintained, as ever, that his first duty was to support her. Nevertheless, two years later he was granted his wish when, on the Queen’s birthday, 24 May 1881, he was created Duke of Albany, Earl of Clarence and Baron Arklow.

  Now aged twenty-eight, he was very keen to marry. That autumn he was introduced to the Prince and Princess of Waldeck-Pyrmont and their daughter Helen. In November he asked Helen for her hand, and she accepted. They were married at Windsor in April 1882, though a few weeks before the ceremony he twisted his knee and was still walking with a stick on the day. The Queen took it ill; to her, the very idea of him getting married while ‘still a complete invalid – not able to walk yet’ seemed ‘terrible’. She was afraid that everyone would be shocked, and as for the bride, ‘I pity her but she seems only to think of him with love and affection.’10

  For a little less than two years, Leopold and Helen were blissfully happy at Claremont, which had formerly been the home of his namesake, King Leopold, and Charlotte. In February 1883 Helen gave birth to their daughter, Alice. The Queen considered it remarkable that her frail son should have lived long enough to marry and have children.

  Yet still he thirsted for proper employment. An opportunity appeared in 1883, when the Marquess of Lorne’s five-year term as Governor-General of Canada expired, much to the Marquess’s regret. He had found Canada more congenial than England and wished he could spend the rest of his days there, but Louise was thirsting to return home. Leopold applied to be considered as his successor, but the Queen asked Gladstone to veto his candidacy, largely on the pretext that the Fenian movement was particularly active there. Undaunted by the precedent of his brother’s lucky escape from assassination in 1868, Leopold applied next for the governorship of Victoria, Australia, but this was rejected on similar grounds.

  His young and often frustrated life was in fact nearing its end. In March 1884 he went to Cannes on medical advice to avoid the harsh, bitterly cold English winter. He enjoyed himself so much that he seriously considered buying a plot of land on the coast nearby where he could build a holiday home for the family. Helen, expecting a second child in the summer, had stayed at home. Leopold was also looking forward to attending the wedding of his niece, Victoria of Hesse, to Prince Louis of Battenberg at Darmstadt the following month. While arranging his accommodation for the ceremony, he begged the bride’s father, Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, not to be put in the same building as his mother, as they had not spoken for three months.11

  During his stay at the yacht club in Cannes, on the afternoon of 27 March, Leopold slipped on a tiled floor at the foot of a staircase and hit his right knee hard against the bottom step. He was put to bed in considerable pain, and, after a severe convulsion early the following morning, he died. The exact cause of death was never entered on the official death certificates signed in Cannes and London. The staff at the club thought that his fall was the result of a lapse in consciousness, caused by an epileptic fit. Later it was believed that in falling he had burst a small blood vessel in the brain.

  Queen Victoria had rarely been close to her youngest, often difficult, son, but this second death of a child within her lifetime was ‘an awful blow’, as she wrote to Vicky, the German Crown Princess. But his short life had been little more than ‘a succession of trials and sufferings . . . and there was such a restless longing for what he could not have’.12 Only after he had gone did she realise that the disagreements between them had added a certain amount of zest to her existence. To Canon Boyd Carpenter she said sadly, ‘Nobody contradicts me now, and the salt has gone out of my life.’13

  Also in 1884 Queen Victoria’s peace of mind was to be shattered by two unexpected romances involving the next generation of her family. Unhindered by family mourning for Leopold, royal guests converged one month later on Darmstadt for the wedding on 30 April of Victoria, eldest child of the Grand Duke and Duchess of Hesse and the Rhine (the late Princess Alice), to Prince Louis of Battenberg, who had worked in the Royal Navy with Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh.

  The bride was in a state of some nervousness, not at the thought of her own marriage, but of a more controversial union. Having been a widower for five years, her father was known to be in love with Alexandrine von Kolemine, a thirty-year-old divorcee who had formerly been married to a Russian diplomat. From all accounts, it seems the Grand Duke had kept his plans to marry Kolemine a secret
and was trying to take everyone by surprise while they were preoccupied with his eldest daughter’s wedding, so they would not be too bothered by his (a miscalculation if ever there was one). The Grand Duke’s two elder daughters, Victoria and Ella, were well aware of his feelings and of the loneliness he would undoubtedly feel once Victoria, a mature and sensible young woman who had more or less taken over the role of mother to her siblings, was gone. Victoria herself had declared that her father would never marry again, though it was looking increasingly likely that he would take Kolemine as his wife before long.

  Naturally, the Grand Duke’s affair and impending marriage – which Victoria suspected would take place sooner or later – were impossible to keep secret, and by the time the Queen arrived at Darmstadt for her granddaughter’s wedding, it seemed that everybody was aware of his plans except the Queen herself. On 25 April she was told by Vicky, who added that it was only a temporary passion and that the Grand Duke could be persuaded not to marry the lady. The Prince of Wales had also been informed of it by his sister, and he was chosen to speak firmly to his brother-in-law, instructing him to break off the relationship, or at least postpone any thoughts of marriage.

  ‘The Grand Duke has behaved very badly in not telling the Queen before she came to Darmstadt because it places her in a most awkward position,’ Sir Henry Ponsonby wrote to Gladstone. ‘If she goes away it will create a scandal, if she remains it will look as if she approved the marriage.’14 The Prime Minister replied that it would ‘cause continual and painful embarrassment’ to Her Majesty, and he could not see how the conduct of the Grand Duke in not giving her notice beforehand could be justified.

  The wedding of Victoria and Louis took place as arranged on 30 April. During the banquet that evening, it was whispered by some that the bride would continue to be the first lady in the duchy as she had been since her mother’s death, because ‘la Kolomine’ would never live in the palace. The guests were probably too wrapped up in the happy festivities or complimenting the bride and groom to notice that the Grand Duke had quietly slipped away. At another room in the palace, his Prime Minister and a few witnesses were waiting for him and ‘la Kolomine’, and they went through a short, secret civil marriage ceremony. The bride stayed that night with friends. According to some, it was never consummated, though another, less reliable version is that a son was born and later adopted as a brother by the Grand Duke’s youngest daughter, Alix, when she was Empress of Russia.15

  Inevitably, the news leaked out, and Lady Ely was chosen to inform her. Inwardly furious but outwardly calm, she sent for the Prince of Wales, ordered him to interview Alexandrine von Kolemine and arrange that the marriage be declared null and void. Next, the Grand Duke announced that his second daughter, Ella, was betrothed to Grand Duke Serge of Russia. The German Empress Augusta was already thoroughly indignant at the various Battenberg and Hesse alliances, not least the romance between Louis of Battenberg’s brother Alexander and her granddaughter Crown Princess Victoria of Prussia. This was the last straw, and she ordered the Crown Prince and Princess to leave ‘this contaminated court’16 and come back to Berlin.

  The Crown Princess had been one of the first to tell the family about ‘la Kolemine’ and might have helped her brother the Prince of Wales in his delicate negotiations regarding the breaking off of the Grand Duke’s doomed marriage. However, Bertie was left with the unwelcome task himself, namely negotiating with his brother-in-law and the lawyers who were required to deal with the annulment of the marriage. Miss Jackson, the English nurse at Court, had always strongly disapproved of the liaison and said at the family discussions that Alexandrine von Kolemine should be sent back to Russia where she belonged. ‘But if she won’t go?’ asked Sir Henry Ponsonby. ‘Ah, but she must!’ the nurse retorted.17

  The British ambassador at Berlin, Lord Ampthill, was ordered by the Queen to persuade the German government to expedite this, and the marriage was dissolved on 9 July. Far from resenting interference from his mother-in-law, the distressed Grand Duke was grateful to her for saving him from himself. Something – possibly the family, possibly something else – told him that Alexandrine was a gold-digger, and perhaps he had had a lucky escape, embarrassing though it looked at the time. Yet against his late wife’s family, he was powerless to do anything. As the Prince of Wales said, ‘We are a very strong family when we all agree.’18

  There was no question of the Grand Duke being ostracised for his behaviour. Anxious to show him that he had not incurred anything more than momentary disapproval, the Queen invited him back to stay at Windsor a few weeks later, though he was still in a state of deep depression. Later in May she wrote to her newly married granddaughter that her father was ‘in such a state of distress & grief that it is terrible to see’.19

  Queen Victoria fervently hoped, if not assumed, that her youngest daughter, Beatrice, was always going to remain by her mother’s side. Yet soon after their return home from Darmstadt, Beatrice astonished the Queen by announcing that she had fallen in love with Henry, another of Louis’s younger brothers, and they intended to marry. For several weeks, mother and daughter were not on speaking terms and only communicated by means of written notes passed between them at the breakfast table. Very much her mother’s daughter, Beatrice also had a will of her own.

  It was not so much the thought of her youngest daughter marrying that so alarmed the Queen, it was the fear that Henry would insist on continuing his military career, and that Beatrice would go to Potsdam with him. His brother Louis and sister-in-law Victoria realised that action had to be taken, and they invited him to stay with them at their home, Sennicotts, near Chichester. Between them, they persuaded Henry to give up his military career and be prepared to make his home with Beatrice and the Queen. When she was advised of this she relented and gave her consent to the marriage. As Henry was retiring from the Prussian Army, Beatrice could stay at home and continue to be her mother’s unofficial private secretary and confidante; and both of them were to live with her in England.

  The press was critical of the impending marriage, calling the groom a ‘German pauper’ who expected to be kept at government expense. The wedding took place in July 1885 at St Mildred’s Church, Whippingham, and though the marriage was to prove unhappily brief, Henry rapidly became the Queen’s favourite sonin-law. Although he had had to give up his military career, the Queen insisted on his wearing his white uniform, that of the Prussian Garde du Corps, and the Princess of Wales called him ‘Beatrice’s Lohengrin’.

  Henry, known in the family as ‘Liko’, a diminutive of his childhood name ‘Henrico’, brought back an atmosphere of happiness to the Queen’s domestic life such as she had not known since before the Prince Consort’s death. Once more there was a man in the family, one who was not in the least overawed by her, and one with whom she could make lighthearted conversation and laugh at meals. She gave him a yacht in which he could take pleasure cruises as far away as the Mediterranean, and a bicycle which he mastered with ease. He also took the lead in helping to revive the tableaux vivants which Albert had so loved when assisting his small children to prepare for their mother’s amusement. Queen Victoria looked forward to these performances with almost childish enthusiasm, though requested that she must always be allowed to censor if necessary. It would never do for her daughter Louise, even if playing the part of a villainess in a French comedy, to be reproved as ‘a degraded woman’ by an assistant under-secretary.

  Henry’s position was not easy at first. He was half-German and half-Russian by birth, and neither country was particularly popular in Britain. He had to play second fiddle to his wife and submit to the authority of a powerful lady. However, he was pleasant, genial and full of fun, and soon endeared himself to everyone at Court. He was an excellent sportsman, good at sailing, riding, shooting, tennis and skating.

  Above all, he managed to succeed where others had failed – by persuading the Queen to relax her attitude towards smoking. While staying with his mother-in-law, the cigar-
loving Christian had only been allowed to indulge in this anti-social vice in a small cubby-hole at Osborne with bare boards and hard wooden chairs, which was reached by crossing the servants’ quarters and an open yard. Now, after Henry had put the pro-smoking case, more conveniently situated, well-furnished sitting rooms at Balmoral as well as Osborne could be used for the purpose. Even so, there was to be no relaxation of the Queen’s rules at Windsor. Only the billiard room was available for smoking, and only after 11 p.m. Here Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, tended to occupy one of the best chairs whenever he visited and hold forth endlessly about himself. In consequence, Henry preferred to give up smoking for a while rather than put up with his brother-in-law’s endless naval conversation.

  Christmas 1885 at Osborne was the happiest that any of the family could remember for a quarter of a century. Beatrice and Henry were allotted the use of a suite in the new wing of the house. Helen of Albany and her two children – a son, Charles, having been born three months after his father’s sudden death – as well as the Connaughts were there to share the festivities, with presents on the tables, party games, theatrical performances and beech logs burning brightly in the polished steel grate of the Queen’s sitting-room.