For the sake of her nerves Queen Victoria might insist that her grandchildren be brought to her room in twos but young cousins of all ages abounded in her palaces. The gentle and unassuming Christians lived on the Windsor estate; the histrionic Edinburghs arrived from time to time; and there was always the possibility of a visit to the timid Waleses at Marlborough House or Sandringham in Norfolk.
Uncle Bertie, the Prince of Wales, was a congenial host, with, according to one of his nieces, a ‘charm that… endeared him to all who had the privilege of knowing him.’[30] His Danish wife, Alexandra, radiated beauty and charisma and, as the laughter of partygoers echoed through their London mansion from evening until the early hours, the German children realised, even from the remote nurseries, that this was a world far removed from the cloistered court of their grandmother. They might well have noticed, too, the frown of disapproval on their grandmother’s face whenever Uncle Bertie was mentioned.
Of all her nine children, none had caused the Queen as much consternation as her eldest son and heir. Compared throughout his childhood to his elder and more brilliant sister, Vicky, Bertie could not have been a greater disappointment to his parents. His lack of enthusiasm for study, his inability to learn, and even his appearance distressed his mother to the extent that she feared that he had inherited the wayward characteristics of her degenerate Hanoverian uncles.
The Queen was haunted by the memory of those terrible uncles who, a generation earlier, had brought the royal family into such disrepute. Since her accession both she and Prince Albert had worked hard to restore the reputation of the monarchy, presenting the nation with an ideal of marital fidelity and domestic harmony that was beyond reproach. No one, least of all their eldest son, could be permitted to tarnish that image and from his earliest years Bertie’s parents aimed to mould him into their ideal of the perfect prince. To prevent the taint of any outside influence, he was isolated from boys of his own age and provided instead with strict tutors and even stricter regimes of study. The scheme was not a success. Bertie, criticised on all sides, struggled in the schoolroom while his natural gifts of diplomacy and congeniality were stifled and ignored. When his frustration exploded in rage, he was beaten.
Unsurprisingly, the young prince leaped at the first chance of freedom. Escaping from the ‘minders’ sent to protect him (or rather his morals) during his student days at Cambridge, he sought the kind of friends who were the antithesis of his parents and who encouraged his budding interest in drinking, gambling and fine cigars. During the university vacation in the summer of 1861, while he was attached to a regiment of guards stationed at the Curragh near Dublin, his companions managed to smuggle a pretty actress into his rooms. That night, the delighted prince embarked upon a womanising career that would continue for the rest of his life.
When word of his escapade reached Windsor, the pious Prince Consort was appalled. Although already exhausted and probably suffering from the illness[·] that finally killed him, he set out at once to Cambridge. On a wet November afternoon, father and son walked for hours in the rain, Prince Albert expressing his disappointment in Bertie’s foolishness and warning him that such scandals could pose a threat to the monarchy. Bertie was duly repentant but by the time his father returned to Windsor, his health was already failing.
The Queen refused to believe that her angelic husband was dying, and when the end came, less than a month after his visit to Cambridge, she was convinced his death was due to the shock of Bertie’s misdemeanour. For months she could hardly bear to look at her son ‘without a shudder’ and found it virtually impossible to forgive him no matter how hard she tried. Nevertheless, he was ‘My dear Angel’s own child – our Firstborn’ and would one day be king, so to deliver him from further temptation, he urgently needed a wife.
Even before Prince Albert’s death, Vicky had been entrusted with the difficult task of finding a suitable bride for her brother. Detailed with the necessary qualities – good health, good looks, an unsullied background and preferably a German – she had scoured the pages of the Almanac de Gotha, the bible of royal matchmakers, and made lists of all the available young princesses she had met in European courts. The Queen read her detailed reports with interest and, having rejected various others on the grounds of bad teeth, a frail constitution, or adherence to the wrong religion, she noted that one princess stood out above all: Alexandra, the attractive seventeen-year-old daughter of Crown Prince Christian of Denmark.
Intrigued by Vicky’s effusive descriptions, the Queen decided that the princess was worth ‘looking over’ and arranged a meeting on neutral ground: the Laeken Palace in Brussels. From the first encounter, Queen Victoria was enchanted and wrote enthusiastically to Vicky assuring her that, though Alexandra suffered from a slight deafness, her recommendation was perfect – what a pity that she wasn’t German! By the time that Bertie was introduced to her, his mother and sister had effectively decided that Alexandra was to be his bride. The wedding took place in March 1863 – an occasion marred only by the behaviour of four-year-old Willy of Prussia, who squealed throughout the service and bit and kicked his young uncles Arthur and Leopold when they tried to restrain him.
Ten months later, Alexandra did her duty by providing the country with an heir, Prince Albert Victor (Eddy) – ‘a perfect bijou,’ in the Queen’s opinion. The following year a second son, George, was born but the lure of a beautiful wife and the responsibilities of fatherhood did little to quell Bertie’s love of the high life. Unable to win the Queen’s confidence and consequently denied any serious role in constitutional affairs, he passed his time in an endless round of parties, race going and shooting with the ‘Marlborough House Set’ of fast living, wealthy and fashionable cronies who shared his taste for eating, drinking, gambling and womanising.
Reports of the goings on at Marlborough House irritated and worried the Queen. While she could not deny that the beautiful Alexandra had undoubtedly won the hearts of her people, she had turned out to be – in the Queen’s opinion – a naïve and rather empty-headed young woman whose persistent unpunctuality drove Bertie to such despair that he eventually ordered all the clocks in Sandringham House to be set half-an-hour fast.
Still worse, Alexandra shared her husband’s love of entertaining to the extent that the Queen felt obliged to warn her that such late nights and frivolous behaviour would not only damage the reputation of the royal family but also ruin her health and that of her ‘frail puny’ babies who lacked the robust constitutions of their German cousins.
Bertie and Alexandra paid little heed to the warnings and, in the winter of 1866-7, the Queen’s predictions proved accurate. During the course of her third pregnancy, the princess contracted rheumatic fever and lay for several days in a critical condition. While the country anxiously awaited news, Bertie ignored the telegrams urging him to return to London, choosing to remain instead at the Windsor races. Even when he did eventually arrive at Marlborough House and made the token gesture of moving his desk to his wife’s bedside, he continued to entertain his rowdy friends while she lay on her sickbed upstairs.
On 20th February 1867, after a tortuous labour unrelieved by chloroform, Alexandra gave birth to a daughter, Louise (whom the Queen believed should have been named Victoria). Three months later the baby was christened by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Marlborough House where her godparents included three of her aunts: Alice, Lenchen and Beatrice.
Though the Princess of Wales gradually regained her strength, the illness had accentuated her deafness and left her with a permanent limp[·]. Throughout her protracted convalescence, Bertie embarked on numerous affairs so openly that even the Queen was to comment that her daughter-in-law’s lot was not an easy one. As rumours of his neglect became known, his reputation plummeted, reaching its nadir when he was cited in the infamous Mordaunt case.
While suffering from post-natal depression, Lady Harriet Mordaunt, a close friend of the prince, confessed to her husband that her child’s father could have been on
e of several highly placed men including the Prince of Wales. Her outraged husband immediately began divorce proceedings and Bertie was summoned to court. Though, thanks to his mother’s intervention, he acquitted himself well, Lady Mordaunt was declared insane and the prince’s standing in the eyes of the public seemed irreparably damaged. Hissed in the theatre and jeered in the street, he was very much in danger of doing precisely what his mother had feared: destroying the image of the monarchy. Yet, neither public outcry nor family criticism could curtail his pleasure seeking.
By a strange freak of fortune it took a near-disaster to restore his tarnished reputation. In the winter of 1871 he contracted typhoid and for several days his condition appeared to be fatal. His sister, Alice, who been staying at Balmoral with the Queen, was soon at his bedside playing the same role as she had played during her father’s fatal illness a decade earlier. On the 14th December – the tenth anniversary of the Prince Consort’s death – Bertie was believed to be dying when quite unexpectedly in the evening he began to rally.
The country rejoiced at his recovery and the Queen forced herself out of her seclusion to attend a thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s Cathedral after which she appeared in public on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for the first time since her widowhood. When the Queen returned home, satisfied that the monarchy was secure, she felt certain that Bertie’s brush with death would lead him to adopt a less frivolous lifestyle. It was a vain hope. With so few responsibilities to occupy his time, it was not long before he returned to his old routine of gambling, shooting and womanising.
Alexandra endured Bertie’s infidelities with a dignified silence, and bore him two more daughters: Victoria (Toria) on July 6th 1868, and Maud a year later. A third son, Alexander, was born at Sandringham in 1871 but died within hours of his birth.
If her husband failed to give Alexandra the attention she craved, she was determined to receive it from her children. Jealously overprotective, she virtually smothered them with affection. No aspect of their lives escaped the notice of ‘Motherdear’, leaving Queen Victoria to complain that she spoiled them terribly. For all her glamorous lifestyle, she was in constant attendance in the nursery, bathing the babies and tucking them into bed each evening before donning her jewels and ball gowns to entrance her guests at dinner.
To the young German princesses, dazzled by the glamour of the Marlborough House Set, it must have come as a surprise to find their Wales cousins so insipid. Of the three girls, only Maud, whose love of the outdoor life and manner of speaking in schoolboy slang earned her the nickname Harry, showed any of the spirit common to her cousins. The ‘frail puny babies’ grew into frail puny children, constantly prone to colds, toothache, abscesses, sciatica and a myriad of other real or imaginary ailments. So fearful was Louise for her health that she took her physician on holiday with her, while ‘precious’ Toria collapsed at the slightest provocation.
“The children are very dear and pretty,” observed Alice, “but my boy is as tall as little Louise, and of course much bigger.”[31]
Even when they were well, they were hardly the most scintillating companions for their highly-educated cousins. Unlike her sisters-in-law, the Princess of Wales saw little need to tax her daughters with learning, and Bertie’s recollection of his own miserable years in the schoolroom made him loath to inflict the same torture on his children. Maud was an able linguist and Louise a talented musician, but their education was so haphazard that Queen Victoria despaired of their ignorance and lack of serious interest in anything.
Occasionally the girls accompanied their mother to hospitals and the homes of their Sandringham tenants but for the most part life beyond the narrow confines of their nursery remained a mystery to them. They lived and played in their own sheltered world, innocently delighting in each other’s company to the extent that Queen Victoria complained that Alexandra was ‘unfortunately most unreasonable and injudicious about her children.’[32] On one point, however, Alexandra satisfied the Queen: she insisted on raising her children with an absence of arrogance or pride.
Unfortunately, the ‘absence of all pride’ was coupled with a complete lack of confidence. With the exception of Maud, who had inherited her mother’s fine features, they were not viewed as pretty girls and, overshadowed by their charismatic parents, they found few occasions to shine. Unused to the company of strangers, their diffidence left them tongue-tied in social gatherings and warranted the cruel if apt epithets ‘the whispering Waleses’ and ‘their Royal Shynesses.’
“They always, if I can so express it,” wrote their cousin Marie of Edinburgh, “spoke in a minor key en sourdine. It gave a special quality to all talks with them, and gave me a strange sensation, as though life would have been very wonderful and everything very beautiful, if it had not been so sad.”[33]
Even as they grew into their late teens, Alexandra was determined to keep them as little children, making them emotionally and intellectually far younger than their years. Princess May of Teck, who would eventually marry their brother, George, was astonished to attend a birthday party for nineteen-year-old Louise only to discover that it was to be a children’s tea party. Their ‘sweet and prettily arranged’ rooms, cluttered with ornaments, shells and souvenirs, resembled nurseries and they continued to refer to each other by childish nicknames: Toots, Gawks and Snipey. They found their greatest enjoyment in games and giddy pranks, which doubtlessly bored the more serious Hessians and were treated with contempt by the Hohenzollerns.
The Germans’ opinion, however, was of no consequence to the Danish Princess of Wales. Since Bismarck’s seizure of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, she made no secret of her dislike of all things German and more especially Prussian. For Vicky, whom she liked, Alexandra made an exception but her prejudice was never more in evidence than when it came to the wedding of Bertie’s younger sister, Lenchen.
Chapter 5 – Poor Dear Lenchen
Christians
Lenchen: Helena Victoria; Queen Victoria’s third daughter
Christian of Schleswig-Holstein: Lenchen’s husband.
Children of Lenchen & Christian:
Christle (Christian Victor)
Albert
Thora (Victoria Helena)
Marie Louise
Princess Helena Victoria, known in the family as Lenchen, trudged through the corridors of Windsor Castle, doing her utmost to fulfil the Queen’s requests in the manner appropriate to her station. It was not a role that she relished. As a child, having neither the vivacity nor intellectual brilliance of her elder sisters, she had preferred to play with her brothers in the model fort at Osborne than to master the usual accomplishments of a young princess. Her father, with an understanding ahead of his time, appreciated her skills as a horsewoman and her love of the outdoor life and, rather than stifling her natural talents, encouraged her to develop her gifts however unconventional they appeared. It did not matter to him that she lacked the grace of Vicky and Alice. He recognised her musical, linguistic and artistic abilities and praised her equestrian skill; and few things in life gave Lenchen greater joy than winning her father’s approbation.
Now, as she moved awkwardly along the corridors of Windsor, Lenchen was only too aware that Prince Albert’s untimely demise had brought those halcyon days to a premature and permanent end.
Only seven months after the Prince Consort’s death, Lenchen faced a further wrench when her sister Alice departed for Darmstadt, leaving her to take over her duties as their mother’s chief support and confidante. Forced into a role to which she was ill-suited, Lenchen had seen her talents smothered in the morbid atmosphere of the court and there were times when she had to confess that she wished she had been born a boy.
In 1865 the future appeared bleak for Queen Victoria’s third daughter. Her only hope of escape from the gloom of perpetual mourning was marriage but finding a suitable husband was proving no easy quest. The Queen, considering her easier to please than her elder sisters, had become so reliant on Lenchen that
she was unwilling to part with her. There were younger sisters, who might eventually replace her, but Louise was so volatile and Beatrice so young that for now there seemed little hope of escape. The Queen was not totally opposed to the idea of Lenchen marrying but, having already lost two daughters to foreign courts, she insisted that any prospective suitor must be willing to settle in England. Since a commoner was out of the question for a daughter of the monarch[·] and few foreign princes would accept the Queen’s stipulations, the prospects were unpromising.
To make matters worse, Lenchen herself believed that she had few personal charms to attract an appropriate parti. A plain girl, in her mother’s opinion, with a tendency to put on weight too easily, Queen Victoria left her with few illusions about her desirability:
“Poor dear Lenchen,” she had written to Vicky, “though most useful and active and clever and amiable, does not improve in looks and has great difficulties with her figure and her want of calm quiet graceful manners.”[34]
Vicky remained optimistic. In spite of the Queen’s disparaging remarks, her sister, she believed, had a good deal to offer a husband. Though she may not have been the most beautiful of princesses, her amber eyes were accentuated by her masses of wavy brown hair and, apart from the fact that she was the daughter of the Queen of England, her docile nature and kindly manner gave her all the attributes of an ideal Victorian wife.
Clutching her Almanac de Gotha, Vicky scoured the German principalities and eventually a suitor was unearthed in the person of an old friend of Vicky and Fritz: Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein.
Queen Victoria's Granddaughters 1860-1918 Page 5