Yet, while she appreciated his intelligence and trusted him implicitly, Queen Victoria, fearful for his health and determined to keep him by her side, continued to treat him as a child. In 1877, at the age of twenty-four, he begged her to allow him to represent her at an exhibition in Australia but she refused. Later, he would ask to be appointed Governor of Victoria but again his request was denied.
Stifled and frustrated, Leopold dedicated much of his time to worthy causes, in particular institutes for deaf children, and he escaped from his duties at court at every possible opportunity. In spite of his mother’s early misgivings he had grown into a handsome young man and his health did not prevent him from enjoying the pleasures of Paris and Monte Carlo, or the company of the ‘fast set’ at Marlborough House. He became a close friend of his sister-in-law, Marie, Duchess of Edinburgh, and a firm favourite with all his nieces; but the devotion of his extended family could not alleviate Leopold’s dissatisfaction and his intense longing for independence with a wife and children of his own.
It took Queen Victoria some time to accept that her frail son was not content to devote his entire life to her service and, considering the fragility of his health, she despaired more of his ever finding a bride than she had of Lenchen ever finding a groom. Nevertheless, moved by his evident unhappiness, she agreed to help where she could. To add weight to his position, she created him Duke of Albany, granted him the moderate freedom of his own home, Claremont House at Esher near London, and encouraged him to seek out a bride among the numerous German princesses.
Shortly before Arthur’s wedding, she packed him off to Darmstadt with his Hessian nieces, from where he could visit an old friend, Frederica, daughter of the blind King of Hanover. The visit was unsuccessful. Fond as she was of the prince, Frederica had to admit that she had fallen in love with someone else, and Leo, accepting her refusal with good grace, returned home disappointed.
The following winter Queen Victoria invited Daisy, the seventeen-year-old stepdaughter of Lord Rosslyn, to Windsor with a view to inspecting her as a prospective daughter-in-law. She was sufficiently impressed to recommend the girl to her son but again the plans again came to nothing since neither Leopold nor Daisy was attracted to the other. Within months, Daisy had announced her engagement to Lord Brooke, the future Earl of Warwick. For Leopold, perhaps it was a lucky escape; the flighty ‘babbling Brooke’ became renowned for taking numerous lovers, among them Leopold’s brother, the Prince of Wales.
In the autumn of 1880, an idea occurred to Queen Victoria: twenty-year-old Princess Helen of Waldeck-Pyrmont lived in Arolsen not far from Darmstadt. She was intelligent, well-educated and well-travelled and would certainly be worth a visit. Leopold made the journey and was sufficiently impressed to inform his mother that here was a woman he would be more than happy to marry. He thought her pretty and she came with the highest recommendation from his Hessian nieces. To the Queen’s surprise, the princess was equally enamoured, and her genuine delight in their happiness was made all the greater by her admiration for the spirited Helen. Unlike most newcomers to the court, Helen was not in the least overawed in the presence of the Queen and, although her appearance was unremarkable, her charm and grace immediately endeared her to the household.
The wedding took place in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, on 27th April 1882, a fortnight after Leopold’s twenty-ninth birthday. Though the prince had hurt his leg and was forced to lean on a stick throughout the service, it was a happy occasion made all the brighter by obvious elation of the young couple.
The Albanys moved into Claremont House where Helen proved a devoted wife, nursing her husband through his numerous episodes of bleeding and paralysis.
If his mother was pleasantly surprised that Leopold had at last found the happiness he craved, she was still more astonished to hear that, only a month after the wedding, Helen was pregnant. Queen Victoria had not believed her frail son capable of fathering a child but a perfectly healthy daughter was born at Windsor on 25th February 1883, and named Alice after her late aunt. Uncle Louis of Hesse and Aunt Vicky were among her godparents, as was Queen Victoria herself who, for once, was able to enthuse about the ‘beautiful, plump child’ with beautiful brown eyes, which were something of a rarity in the family.
Delighted by his little daughter, Leopold continued his duties and charitable works, but there was no relief from his medical condition. A year after Alice’s birth, he was troubled by a particularly painful swelling in his joints and his doctors recommended a trip to the warmer climes of the south of France. By then Helen was again in the early stages of pregnancy and not well enough to accompany him to Cannes. Although his life had often hung in the balance, as she watched him depart she had no idea that she would never see him again.
One afternoon, he slipped on the tiled floor of his hotel and banged his knee. A painful swelling ensued and the subsequent haemorrhage was so severe that he did not recover. After less than two happy years with Helen, he died in Cannes on 28th March 1884.
“My beloved Leopold!” Queen Victoria wrote, “That bright clever son who had so many times recovered from such fearfull [sic] illnesses, and from various small accidents has been taken from us! To lose another dear child, far from me, and one who was so gifted and such a help to me, is too dreadful.”[63]
Later, in a more tranquil moment, the Queen reflected that death had come as a blessing, for so often in his hours of agony Leopold had cried out that death would be preferable to his suffering.
The Scottish poet William McGonagall, wrote a dreadful ode in his honour, which begins:
“Alas! Noble Prince Leopold, he is dead,
Who often has his lustre shed:
Especially by singing for the benefit of Esher School,
Which proves he was a wise prince. and no conceited fool.”[64]
The ditty continues through a further seventeen equally painful stanzas.
Although Leopold’s haemophilia had prevented him from entering the armed forces, he was given a full military funeral on the 12th April. His coffin, having been returned to England aboard the Royal Yacht Osborne, was carried by eight Seaforth Highlanders and laid in the vault in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, to the strains of one of the Queen’s favourite hymns: John Newman’s Lead Kindly Light.
As ever in a crisis, Queen Victoria’s heart went out to the twenty-two-year-old widow and she insisted on being present at Claremont House when, six months later, the Duchess gave birth to a son, Charles Edward. It was heart-breaking to see little Alice deprived of her father, and, as with her Hessian granddaughters, she promised to do all she could to help in her upbringing.
To Alice her grandmother was nothing like the prudish old lady of popular myth; she found her so kind, approachable and loving.
“She was wonderful,” Alice told an interviewer, shortly before her death, “always very nice. When we lost our teeth, she always used to give us a pound…One time, I hadn’t seen her for some time and I had lost three and I was awfully keen to show her. She said, ‘Oh dear, that’s very expensive.’”
Alice’s affection was returned in full, and the Queen’s admiration for Helen’s cheerfulness and lack of self-pity was boundless. In fact so great was the Queen’s attachment to the Albanys that at times it aroused a little jealousy among other members of the family. On one occasion the Queen felt obliged to ask Vicky to persuade the Duchess of Connaught to be a little kinder to her.
Like so many other members of the family, the Duchess of Albany devoted much of her time to charitable works. She took an interest in nursing and, together with Princess Beatrice, the Duchess of Connaught and the Princess of Wales, she obtained a first aid qualification from the recently formed St. John’s Ambulance Brigade. The Duchess, too, paid special attention to the fate of ‘fallen women’ and established an institute in Deptford Market for the improvement of the slaughterhouse girls, providing them with regular meetings for Bible reading, singing, sewing and an occasional treat. She came to know each
of the girls by name and, in time, won their affection and respect.
The loss of her father at such an early age had none of the dramatic effects on little Alice that the loss of their mother had on her cousins in Hesse. Inheriting the strong spirit of both parents, she was a confident, vivacious child. While the Queen thought her ‘pretty,’ ‘merry’ and ‘good,’ visitors were not always so impressed by her precocity. Following a meeting with the six-year-old Alice, the author Lewis Carroll wrote to a friend:
“The little Princess I thought very sweet but liable, under excitement, to betray what is called ‘self-will’ (it’s really weakness of will) and that selfishness which is the besetting sin of childhood. Under weak management, that child wd, I should fear, grow up a terror to all around her.”[65]
Fortunately, Alice was brought up under the strong management of her mother and grandmother and Carroll’s fears were not realised.
The death of Prince Leopold had drastically reduced the Duchess’ income and as a result Alice, like her Hessian and Christian cousins, was raised in relative simplicity and not allowed to become inflated by her royal status. Two years after their first meeting, Lewis Carroll’s opinion of little Alice changed considerably. She was, he thought:
“…improved…not being so unruly as she was two years ago: they [Alice and her brother, Charles] are charming children. I taught them to fold paper pistols, and to blot their names in creased paper…”[66]
While Alice and her brother were young, their mother spent many hours in their nursery, reading to and playing with them. As they grew older she encouraged them to study a wider range of subjects alongside the usual accomplishments of riding, music and dancing, and even arranged for Alice to travel into London to attend extra classes.
Like her cousins, Alice was fortunate in having so many relations across the Continent with whom she could spend happy holidays. Among the chief pleasures of her childhood were the visits to her mother’s native Arolsen where many happy family reunions involved cousins squabbling over toys and running boisterously through the woods. Usually among the guests was her mother’s widowed sister, Emma, Queen Regent of the Netherlands, with her little daughter, Queen Wilhelmina.
Apart from visits to Arolsen, the Albanys often holidayed in France with the Queen, who was present with them in Cannes in 1898 for Alice’s confirmation in a chapel built as a memorial to her father.
PART II
“A Very Doubtful Happiness”
Happy & Unhappy Marriages
Chapter 10 – Nature Has Made Her So
Hohenzollerns
Vicky (Victoria): Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter; Crown Princess of Prussia
Fritz (Frederick): Crown Prince of Prussia
Charlotte: Eldest daughter of Vicky & Fritz; Princess of Saxe-Meiningen
Bernhard: Charlotte’s husband.
Willy: Eldest son of Vicky & Fritz
Dona: Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein; Willy’s wife.
In spite of her own blissful, if occasionally stormy, years with beloved Albert, Queen Victoria had a particularly pessimistic view of marriage. She had dreaded her daughters’ weddings, unable to bear the thought of handing her innocent girls over to a man to become ‘bodily and morally his slave.’ By the time that her granddaughters had reached marriageable age, her opinion had altered little. People married ‘far too much’, she claimed, and for a women marriage was ‘a very doubtful happiness.’
Her gloomy reflection proved accurate in the lives of several of her granddaughters: one married a notorious womaniser and at least two others were shocked by their husbands’ infidelities; three discovered that their husbands were alleged to be homosexual; and others became embroiled in scandals, two of which ended in divorce. Even those princesses who were fortunate enough to fall in love with loyal and devoted husbands often found themselves in foreign courts, far from their families and isolated in unfamiliar surroundings.
There were, of course, love matches but inevitably within weeks or even days of their wedding, the majority of the young and naïve princesses found their new-found freedom curtailed by the ‘unecstatic state’ of pregnancy with all the risks and restrictions that entailed.
Yet, while the Queen frequently insisted that unmarried people were often happier than those who were married, few of her granddaughters could envisage any other future than that of her a wife. For nineteenth century princesses, as for most Victorian women, the only alternative to marriage was to become a piteous maiden aunt and dutiful daughter – an unpaid companion to aging parents. Faced with such a choice, even the prospect of a loveless marriage was preferable to enduring the stigma of spinsterhood and when suitors were not forthcoming, princesses sometimes panicked. At least one rushed into marriage with the first available prince, while another pleaded desperately with her parents to find her an appropriate parti.
Most of the Queen’s granddaughters married young – often too young in their grandmother’s opinion – and it was predictable that the Queen’s eldest and probably most difficult granddaughter, Charlotte of Prussia, should be the first to announce her engagement, if only to assert her independence and escape from her parents’ domination.
The years since the holiday in Cannes had done nothing to alleviate Vicky’s anxieties about her eldest daughter’s appearance or behaviour. At the age of fourteen Charlotte had, in her mother’s opinion, not ‘an atom’ of a figure and showed no evidence of growing into maturity. By the time she visited Darmstadt two years later, Vicky was still more disconcerted by her ill proportioned body with its short legs and ‘immense breasts and arms.’
Nor had the onset of adolescence improved Charlotte’s demeanour or manners. She had always been moody and difficult but now became so flirtatious and untruthful that her mother genuinely feared for her future. Her childish nervousness had given way to bizarre attention-seeking behaviour and, while outsiders delighted in listening to her revelations about the goings-on at the Prussian court, the slanders and secrets she divulged were causing untold damage, not least to her mother’s reputation.
Coquettish, materialistic and addicted to smoking, Charlotte seemed very much in danger of causing a scandal. Then suddenly, at the age of sixteen, with the impulsiveness so characteristic of her elder brother, she announced to her startled parents that she intended to marry. Her chosen fiancé, Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Meiningen, an officer in the prestigious Potsdam regiment, was a cousin on her father’s side into whose arms she had literally been thrown when the switchback train on which they were travelling suddenly jerked to a halt.
Few, if any, of the family believed that she was in love and it was widely rumoured that she was marrying simply to escape from her mother. Nevertheless, the Crown Prince and Crown Princess, believing that a studious husband nine years her senior might calm their wayward daughter, gave their consent, hoping, as Vicky told Queen Victoria, that Bernhard would prevent her from causing any more harm.
The optimism was premature. No sooner was the engagement announced than the flabbergasted Crown Princess was complaining to Queen Victoria that the younger generation had lost all sense of propriety since Charlotte did not even bother to tell her when she was writing to Bernhard! Queen Victoria wholeheartedly agreed and bemoaned the fact that young people had lost all modesty and decorum. Even in those far off days, she suspected the American influence.
The wedding took place in Potsdam in February 1878, beginning with the civil ceremony in the drawing room of her parents’ home before continuing through a long service and series of celebrations in the old Schloss. Dressed in a silver silk-moire train, with myrtle and orange decorating the veil, Charlotte looked ‘very pretty’ in her mother’s opinion, and, in spite of her reckless behaviour and all the anxiety she had brought her parents, Vicky secretly wept at her departure.
“When I came back last night and looked into her little empty room and empty bed where every night I have kissed her before lying down myself I felt very miserable. Howev
er it must be so and she looks very happy and shed not a tear yesterday, and Bernhard dotes upon her…I am sure she is thankful the wedding ceremony is over! It all went off very well we may say, and that is a thing to be thankful for…”[67]
After a brief honeymoon, the couple moved into a house near Berlin, provided by the bride’s grandfather, the aged Kaiser Wilhelm I. Charlotte, now mistress of her own home, delighted in her new-found freedom and immediately dispelled all her parent’s hopes that that Bernhard might be a calming influence on her. She had no intention of allowing marriage to restrict her behaviour; on the contrary, freed from her mother’s influence, she threw herself with greater fervour than ever into the life of what Queen Victoria called the fast set. She and Bernhard purchased a car and a villa in Cannes, which soon attracted all the most fashionable people in society.
“…the great love of amusement is much to be regretted,” wrote Queen Victoria, “and then I blame her husband very much if he allows what you say?”[68]
Parading around in her Parisian gowns, drinking copiously, chain-smoking and alternating between bouts of illness and self-indulgence, Charlotte revelled in cultivating friendships with foreign kings and dignitaries by encouraging them to believe that she could supply them with private information about the intrigues of the Hohenzollerns and the Prussian court. Even at home, she delighted in shocking the court with her revelations and tales of her imaginary affairs.
When she wished, she could be charming; Ella of Hesse, who throughout her life earned a reputation for seeing the best in everyone, preferred Charlotte to her elder brother, Willy, and liked her enough to send her gifts. Unfortunately, more often than not Charlotte used her charm to manipulate others into believing the most preposterous lies and it did not take long for the rest of the family to see through her pleasant façade. Even her mother commented that her pretty appearance concealed the most ‘dangerous’ traits.
Queen Victoria's Granddaughters 1860-1918 Page 9