“Her occultism has been grossly exaggerated,” wrote Lili Dehn. “Her superstitions were of the most trivial description…I will readily admit that she possessed a strong element of mysticism which coloured much of her life; this was akin to the ‘dreaming’ propensities of her grandfather, the Prince Consort, and environment, and the Faith of her adoption fostered this mystic sense.”[123]
All the same, Alix needed a miracle and would
go to any lengths to receive one. She prayed before her icons, made pilgrimages and bathed in holy springs, but when her efforts seemed fruitless, she turned instead to mystics and dubious healers.
In attendance at Court were two Montenegrin princesses, Grand Duchesses Stana and Militsa. Though both had a reputation for dabbling in spiritualism, Alix was intrigued by their tales of mystics and agreed to invite several Holy Fools to the palace. Dressed in rags, they rambled incoherently while the Tsarina looked on and waited in vain for her miracle. Still there was no sign of an heir until, at last, the Montenegrins found a new ‘healer,’ – a Frenchman named Philippe Vachot, who, they claimed, had the power to influence the sex of an unborn child.
In the summer of 1901, Alix invited ‘Monsieur Philippe’ to the Alexander Palace to pray with her, and was so impressed by his confidence and charm that she felt sufficiently at ease to confide her worries to him. The Tsar was equally convinced of the Frenchman’s sanctity and soon he and Alix were making daily visits to Militsa’s Znamenka Palace to listen to the bizarre preaching of Monsieur Philippe. Since the meetings took place with the utmost secrecy, outsiders could only speculate about what was going on within the palace walls. The stories became increasingly outlandish: the Tsar was being drugged; they were involved in witchcraft and séances; and the most unlikely tale of all: Philippe slept at the foot of the Imperial bed to influence the conception of a son.
Nonsensical or not, the rumours were sufficiently alarming to provoke the Minister of the Interior into ordering an investigation into the healer’s background and the subsequent report confirmed his suspicions. Philippe was a swindler with three previous convictions for practising medicine without a licence.
Alix received the report with ambivalence; holy men, she claimed, were always subject to criticism and one need only read the Bible to see how many prophets had been rejected by their own people. Even when a worried Ella arrived from Moscow to warn her sister not to be taken in by Philippe, Alix refused to listen and, just as her grandmother had ignored her family’s pleas to part with John Brown, she refused to discard her healer. Her devotion to Philippe was absolute, particularly when she realised she was pregnant again and ‘Our Friend’, as he had now become, assured her that this time the child would be a boy. Now, with a heavenly guide, she had no need of worldly assistance and dispensed with the medics who had seen her through previous pregnancies, entrusting herself wholly to the prayers of Doctor Philippe.
The secret meetings continued and the months passed with Alix’s mounting excitement at the prospect of giving birth to a Tsarevich. In mid-August 1902, rather later than she had anticipated, she eventually went into labour but when the court doctors were finally permitted to attend her they discovered what several members of the family had suspected from the start. Alix was not and had not been pregnant. The symptoms she had experienced for the whole nine months were the result of anaemia and her longing to bear a son. To lessen her humiliation an official announcement stated that the Empress had suffered a miscarriage.
Notwithstanding the crushing outcome, Alix’s confidence in Philippe remained unshaken. Blaming her own lack of faith for the disappointing result, she clung to him more desperately than ever, and yet, in the face of such opposition from the rest of the family, the healer realised that his days in Russia were numbered. In his typically dramatic fashion, he announced that his mission at the court was completed and he must return to France. Before he left he promised that soon another teacher would come to take his place, and with Philippe gone, Alix kept her eyes open for the friend who would follow.
Chapter 23 - The Sun Has Gone Out Of Our Lives
Battenbergs
Beatrice: Princess Henry of Battenberg; youngest daughter of Queen Victoria
Liko (Henry) Battenberg: Beatrice’s husband
Ena (Victoria Eugenie): Daughter of Beatrice & Liko
Edinburghs/Coburgs
Affie (Alfred): Queen Victoria’s third son; Duke of Edinburgh & Coburg
Marie: Affie’s wife; Duchess of Edinburgh and Coburg
Young Affie: Only son of Affie & Marie
Albanys
Helen: Duchess of Albany; Widow of Prince Leopold
Alice of Albany: Daughter of Leopold & Helen
Charles Edward: Son of Leopold & Helen
A decade after her Golden Jubilee, Queen Victoria prepared to celebrate her sixty years on the throne. Older now and frailer, she had no desire to entertain the numerous foreign royalties who had descended upon London ten years earlier, and insisted that this time the jubilee would be less of a family event and more a celebration of the British Empire. Even so, no less than eighteen of her granddaughters attended, preceding the Queen in seven carriages as the stately procession made its way from Buckingham Palace to St. Paul’s Cathedral[·]. No longer able to walk unaided, the tiny monarch remained in her carriage for an open-air service of thanksgiving, before returning to the palace for a grand jubilee dinner at which Ella and her brother, Ernie, and sister-in-law, Ducky, were invited to share the Queen’s table.
Neither Ella nor her grandmother could have failed to notice that Ducky and Ernie had arrived separately for the celebrations and would later depart independently, drawing further attention their unhappy marriage.
Of the granddaughters who were unable to attend, the Roumanian Crown Princess, Missy, was ‘terribly, terribly, disappointed’ not to be there but her husband had recently been struck with a near-fatal bout of typhoid; the Tsarina of Russia was pregnant with her third daughter, Tatiana; and it would have been difficult for Sophie of Greece to participate in the celebrations when her country was in the throes of the Turko-Greek War.[¨] Noticeable, too, for his absence was the Kaiser, to whom the Queen Victoria had refused an invitation since he was openly supporting the Turks in the conflict. Willy was furious at the snub and incensed that his younger brother, Henry, dared to accept the Queen’s invitation.
The celebrations were a great success and the rapturous applause that greeted Queen Victoria demonstrated the extent of her popularity. Marie Louise, sitting beside her grandmother in the carriage recalled that:
“The crowd was immense, the cheers and acclamations deafening. The Queen had asked me to accompany her back to Windsor and on the way I turned to her and said: ‘Oh, Grandmama, does this not make you very proud?’ She replied, ‘No, dear child, very humble.’”[124]
For the Queen, though moved by the demonstrations of affection, the occasion was tinged with sorrow. She felt deeply the loss of her son-in-law, Beatrice’s husband, Liko Battenberg, whose death the previous year had been the first in a series of family tragedies that would cast a dark shadow over the remainder of her reign.
In spite of her initial misgivings about Beatrice’s marriage, the Queen had soon come to love Liko. His cheerful sense of humour and commitment to his family, not to mention his striking good looks, greatly appealed to her and she noted with satisfaction that although he and Beatrice were devoted to one another they made none of the tasteless shows of affection that so grated on her nerves. So fond was the Queen of his company that he had even succeeded in persuading her to provide a more comfortable smoking room than the one which she had reluctantly allocated to Prince Christian. In fact, she had come to enjoy his presence so much that she was unwilling to let him out of her sight.
But Liko was straining at the leash; the Queen’s affection and the love of his wife and children could not compensate for the extreme dullness of life at court. Unable to renege on the promise made before his marriag
e, he watched enviously as his brothers went about their exciting adventures while he frittered away his hours attending to his children’s education and carrying out minor duties for the Queen. In 1889, Queen Victoria appointed him Governor General of the Isle of Wight and Carisbrooke Castle but still he remained unfulfilled and sought every opportunity to escape abroad.
Beatrice understood his need for excitement and raised no objections when he disappeared for months at a time on various yachting and continental expeditions but in his absence she missed him terribly, wept as he departed and worried that far from home his affections might stray. At the first hint of a possible scandal she dispatched a ship to bring him back.
Holidays and expeditions allowed him some release but could not satisfy his need to find a more useful role. In the autumn of 1895, however, he heard of a mission to end the slave trade in Ashanti in Ghana. The Queen, reluctant to be parted from him and fearful for his health in that notoriously disease-ridden part of Africa, hesitated about granting him permission to participate in so dangerous a venture until Beatrice selflessly prevailed upon her mother to give him leave to go. Queen Victoria could hardly refuse; after all her soldier-grandson, Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein, was taking part in the same campaign.
For Beatrice, Liko’s departure aboard the Coramandel on 8th December was traumatic but, according to one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, Liko was ‘bursting with excitement.’
Hardly had the ship reached Africa when, on 10th January 1896, Liko contracted malaria. For a while his condition appeared to improve and he wished to continue the expedition but his doctors and fellow officers thought him too ill to carry on and sent him homewards aboard the Blonde. Before the ship docked at Madeira, Liko suffered a relapse and, realising that he was dying, sent long and affectionate messages back to his wife and children, grieving at the thought that he would die so far from home. He died on 20th January 1896.
“Our grief and our misery is untold!” the Queen told Vicky, “The sun has gone out of our lives.”[125]
When his body, preserved in rum, was eventually brought to the Isle of Wight, the Queen accompanied his family, including his nine-year-old daughter Ena, to receive the coffin. The funeral took place in Whippingham Church near Osborne, where eleven years earlier Liko and Beatrice were married.
For Liko’s grieving widow, a minor family squabble brought further grief. While Beatrice mourned the loss of her husband, her elder and more beautiful sister, Louise, announced that her own grief was equally deep since Liko had always preferred her to his wife and had once made amorous advances towards her. As Louise’s own marriage was something of a sham and she was renowned for making mischief in the family, Beatrice, though deeply distressed, dismissed her allegations as lies. Whether or not there was any truth in Louise’s tale, Beatrice loved Liko deeply and had enjoyed eleven blissful years with a husband she had never hoped to find.
According to all who met her, the heart-broken princess accepted her widowhood with remarkable courage and dignity. For her grieving mother, however, further sorrows were to follow. Within five years of Liko’s death, she had lost a son and two grandsons and discovered that her eldest daughter was dying.
In 1898, the royalties returned to Coburg to celebrate Duchess Marie’s twenty-five unhappy years of marriage to the increasingly alcoholic Affie. Among the intended guests was their only son, Young Affie, who had been sent away from home at an early age to be groomed in Potsdam for his future role as Duke of Coburg. The training was intended to turn him into an efficient and reliable officer but it had had the opposite effect. Young Affie had developed into a dissolute and unstable young man with his mother’s stubborn temperament and his father’s addiction to drink. By the age of twenty-five, he had contracted venereal disease and was consequently dismissed from the German army.
His Orthodox mother despaired of his licentiousness, and shortly before her Silver Wedding anniversary an argument flared between them when he allegedly announced his intention of marrying an unsuitable bride. In the course of the argument, according to several erroneous reports, Young Affie shot himself and sustained a serious though not fatal wound. His true illness, which had led to ‘paralysis of the larynx, caused by the state of the brain,’ was an even greater scandal to his mother who decided that it would be better if he were absent from Coburg when her visitors arrived for the celebrations. His doctors warned that he had very little time to live but the Duchess dismissed the prognosis and, against his and his father’s wishes, packed him off to recuperate in Meran in Austria. Just over a week later, on 6th February, he died. The official reports stated that the cause of death was consumption.
Affie, who, according to Queen Victoria, was ‘in dreadful state’ on seeing his son’s remains, never recovered from the loss and within eighteen months he, too, was dead of throat cancer, exacerbated by his excessive drinking.
Young Affie’s death was to have unexpected consequences for his seventeen-year-old cousin, Alice of Albany. The Salic law precluded females from inheriting the Dukedom of Coburg and, since Affie had no other son, there was much debate about who would succeed him. The next in line was Affie’s younger brother, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, but neither he nor his son had any desire to leave England or to show obeisance to the German Emperor. The Kaiser, too, always in awe of his English uncles, expressed his preference for a younger man and accordingly offered Coburg with its £300,000 a year income to the late Prince Leopold’s son, thirteen-year-old Charles Edward, Duke of Albany.
After a great deal of soul-searching, Charles’ mother, Helen, accepted the Duchy on his behalf and agreed that Cousin Sandra’s husband, Ernst of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, would act as regent until Charles came of age. Notwithstanding the fact that his young cousin spoke very little German, the Kaiser insisted that he should leave Eton at once to enrol in the Lichterfelde Military Cadet School at Potsdam. Aunt Vicky, fearing that Charles might go the same way as Young Affie, was firmly opposed to the scheme and vehemently made her feelings known to her mother. Queen Victoria agreed but the Kaiser had made his decision and, in spite of their reluctance to leave their beloved Claremont House, the Albanys decided to comply.
In August 1899, Alice and her mother moved into the Villa Ingenheim, a relatively small cottage near the cadet academy in Potsdam, where Charles was to spend three miserable years, taunted and bullied by the other boys in the school. For Alice, the contrast between Windsor and the Kaiser’s militaristic court, governed by etiquette and tradition, appeared both amusing and bizarre.
The court was, in Alice’s opinion, ‘very stiff and formal,’ compared to that of her grandmother. Serving officers were obliged to appear in uniform at social gatherings, and the numerous ceremonies that littered the German calendar were even more trying for the princesses. The ceremonials, which began in the morning, could last for up to seven hours after which the princesses barely had time to change into the ‘full regalia of tiaras and trains’ for State Banquets which continued late into the night.
Yet Alice, with a cheerful disposition and an eye for the comic, was delighted by her new surroundings. If Cousin Willy was pompous, he could also be generous, hospitable and amusing. Alice observed that, though he was a stickler for the formalities and public displays, he was very different and ‘quite ordinary’ within his own home. She and Charles were regular visitors to his palace in Potsdam where they became close friends of his sons. Formal balls were an almost nightly occurrence and for a young princess there was no limit to the number of handsome young officers eager to become her dance partner.
Alice and her mother remained in Germany until Charles had completed his education and was deemed old enough to fend for himself. By the time that she returned to Claremont House in 1903, her grandmother’s staid and seemingly changeless court had gone forever; the Victorian era was over, its sobriety replaced briefly by all the gaudy glamour of the new Edwardian age.
Chapter 24 – We Shall Never See Her Anymor
e
Hohenzollerns (Prussians)
Vicky/Empress Frederick: Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter; Dowager German Empress
Vicky’s children and their spouses:
Willy: Kaiser Wilhelm II
Dona (Augusta Victoria): Willy’s wife, German Kaiserin.
Charlotte: Princess of Saxe-Meiningen
Henry
Irène: Henry wife; daughter of Princess Alice
Moretta (Victoria Moretta): Princess of Schaumburg-Lippe
Sophie: Crown Princess of Greece
Mossy: Princess of Hesse-Kassel
Christians
Lenchen (Helena): Queen Victoria’s third daughter; Princess Christian
Christian: Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein; Lenchen’s husband
Lenchen’s children:
Christle: Prince Christian Victor
Thora (Helena Victoria)
Marie Louise
At the beginning of July 1897, Vicky returned from her mother’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations to her beloved Friedrichshof. There, between visits from her daughters and frequent trips to Italy, she continued to amass her artistic collections with the same enthusiasm she had shown as a child when collecting fossils to add to her collection in the Swiss Cottage. Friedrichshof was so full of antiques and treasures that, according to a regular visitor, Marie Louise, the ‘wonderful’ place became more of a museum than a house.
Vicky’s concern for her antiques did not prevent her from welcoming children into her home and one of the chief delights of her widowhood was the pleasure she took in her grandchildren. It saddened her deeply that Willy’s wife, Dona, seemed intent on alienating her from their six sons and had acerbically pointed out that the choice of the name Victoria for their only daughter was not made out of deference to her grandmother.
Queen Victoria's Granddaughters 1860-1918 Page 20