Christian August’s wife, Countess Louise-Sophie Danneskjold-Samsøe, was equally unpopular with monarchists since she was an illegitimate descendent of the Danish royal family. Her aristocratic title notwithstanding, Louise-Sophie was not considered truly ebenbürtig—of equal birth to marry into Europe’s royal houses. Christian August’s critics, most of whom were royals from Prussia or other German-speaking lands who fiercely guarded their prerogatives, argued that because of his marriage to a countess, his family was parvenu and therefore had no claim to the purple blood of royalty. Dona’s grandfather was not the only member of her family to marry a commoner. Her great-uncle and a number of her father’s cousins had similarly taken nonroyal wives. The fact that her maternal grandmother was a countess, and that some of her extended relatives were commoners was a sore spot on Dona’s pride for the rest of her life. In later years, she would become overly concerned, almost obsessed, with royal rank, especially when it came to marriages.
Unlike Fritz, Dona’s mother came from a more established royal lineage. Ada was the fifth of six children born to Prince Ernest I of Hohenlohe-Langenburg.5 The Langenburgs were a relatively insignificant German house that ruled an equally insignificant German principality for barely a century until their territory was mediatised into the Kingdom of Württemberg by Napoleon in 1806. The Langenburgs lost their realm but were still considered ebenbürtig and were allowed to keep their rank and titles. Ada’s mother, Princess Feodora, was the elder half sister of Queen Victoria from their mother’s first marriage to the Prince of Leiningen.
As a young woman, Ada had a reputation for being beautiful. When she was seventeen, she captured the attention of Emperor Napoleon III of the French. The emperor was no Prince Charming. Already forty-four years old in 1852—compared to Ada’s seventeen—his appearance did not fall short of the Bonaparte family reputation. At around four feet six inches tall, he possessed a disproportionately large head, was balding, had one eyeball that was reportedly more dilated than the other, a bird-like nose, a waxy mustache, and a noticeable limp caused by rheumatism. In light of such an unseemly appearance, one must wonder what a young princess might see in him. An arranged marriage for Ada was a given, but few suitors could offer her anything comparable to what she would experience as empress of the French, living in some of the most opulent palaces in the world. After all, Marie Louise of Austria was in a similar situation when she married Napoleon I in 1810, and she was quite happy in France, albeit her marriage only lasted four years.
Queen Victoria, a woman of incredible tenacity, took a serious view of her position as head of her family and the impact that the actions of her family members would have on British interests and the monarchy. In a letter to her sister Feodora, she outlined her opinion on the emperor’s interest in Ada: “You know what he is, what his moral character is—(without thinking him devoid of good qualities and even valuable ones) what his entourage is, how thoroughly immoral France and French society are—hardly looking at what is wrong as more than fashionable and natural—you know how very insecure his position is—you know his age, that his health is indifferent, and naturally his wish to marry [Ada is] merely a political one, for he has never seen her … I ask you if you can imagine for a moment anything more awful than the fate of that sweet innocent child.”6 Tempted though Ada may have been by the prospect of the French throne—she said she was “dying to be Empress”7—her parents would have none of it, browbeating their daughter into refusing the proposal. In a letter sent to the emperor dated January 1, 1853, Ada wrote that she had to decline on religious and moral grounds—as empress, she would most likely have been required to convert from the Protestant faith to Catholicism. Princess Michael of Kent wrote that “too much stood against” the emperor in his campaign to win Ada: “his morals, his religion, his parvenu status as royalty, and the sad fate of so many Queens of France in the last sixty years.”8 Three years later, Ernest and Feodora married her off to Fritz Holstein, whose pro-German ideologies, and—most importantly to English dynastic interests in Europe—progressive attitudes, made him ideal.
Pro-German ideas were something Fritz Holstein espoused since his youth. Educated at the University of Bonn, he became close friends with the future crown prince of Prussia, Frederick Wilhelm, who was, naturally, also nicknamed Fritz. The two princes had a deep affection for one another, and Frederick Wilhelm’s enlightened views on constitutional ruling made a profound impression on Fritz Holstein; the two men would remain close for the rest of their lives. When Fritz Holstein’s first son was born in 1857, he was named Frederick in honor of the Prussian prince, who stood as godfather. And when the latter married Ada’s cousin Vicky, the Princess Royal of Great Britain, in 1858, it only strengthened their bond. After completing his studies at Bonn, Fritz took up a commission in the Bavarian military. By the time Dona was born, Fritz and Ada had determined to raise their daughter to think of herself first and foremost as a German princess. They felt a special attachment to Prussia, the largest, most influential, and most powerful of the German states. This brought with it a sense of connection with the Prussian royal family, the Hohenzollerns, through Frederick Wilhelm and Vicky.
The Hohenzollerns were by the mid-nineteenth century the rising dynastic power on continental Europe. Their provenance as a strong royal house was a long process marked by continual dynastic evolution. Like the Habsburgs of Austria, they originated as counts sometime around the eleventh century. The family took its name from what is believed to be their ancestral home, Hohenzollern Castle. A typical German burg with high turrets, ramparts, and classic medieval architecture, it is located 768 feet on a mountaintop above Hechingen, in the Swabian Alps. The family tree branched off several times throughout the centuries, but the most prominent line eventually became rulers of Brandenburg, a frontier region in northeastern Prussia, in 1417. Through marriage, conquest, and inheritance, the Hohenzollerns transitioned from being margraves and electors of Brandenburg to also being dukes—and eventually kings—of Prussia.
By the 1850s, the Hohenzollerns were at the center of Prussia’s authoritarianism, which, though decried by liberals as philistine and conservative, gave the country a functionality and stability that many of its neighbors lacked. Like many of Europe’s Great Powers, Prussia was a nation of intense contrasts. In the 1750s, King Frederick II (more famously remembered as Frederick the Great) pushed Prussian ascendancy to terminal velocity. He spread Prussian influence across the continent through his support of art, philosophy, and modernization during the Age of Enlightenment. At the same time, he began establishing Prussia’s military as a force to be reckoned with when he successfully tore from Austria its beloved, ore-rich province of Silesia in 1740, marking the beginning of the War of the Austrian Succession and leading to decades of Habsburg-Hohenzollern acrimony. In 1815, it was the Prussian military that helped shatter the armies of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. This was not something the Prussians took lightly, since Waterloo marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It would also lead to decades of rivalry with the Russians, who believed it was their burning of Moscow in 1812 and the subsequent decimation of the French army that had truly sounded Napoleon’s death knell. This history of triumph through its armed forces led to Prussia effectively becoming a military state. Following the uprisings in Berlin during the Year of Revolutions in 1848, all traces of liberal or reforming ideologies were swept away, cementing a threefold Prussian cultural identity of conservatism, militarism, and absolutism, all tied inextricably with the monarchy. In time, the overwhelming influence of the military would border on paradomania—an unhealthy psychological obsession with the military—becoming an inseparable part of Prussia’s existence.
The efforts made by Fritz and Ada to impart into Dona a love for all things German was no easy task. Throughout her childhood, Germany was little more than an idea, a geopolitical concept desperately struggling to find a cultural and existential identity for itself. The root of the problem was that the German states
had once been the Holy Roman Empire. Established in AD 800, this imperial brainchild of Charlemagne’s was an attempt to resurrect the Roman Empire in Western Europe, mostly among the German-speaking realms. At its apex, the Holy Roman Empire encompassed more than four hundred states stretching from the English Channel to the Italian Alps. By the sixteenth century, the empire’s elected throne had passed into the hands of the Habsburgs. For the next two hundred years, the two greatest German dynasties, the Habsburgs of Austria and the Hohenzollerns of Prussia, used the empire as a shuttlecock in their game of imperial politics.
This lasted almost uninterrupted until the French Revolution and the disastrous Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, in which French forces defeated the Austrians. The day after Christmas, Napoleon effectively dismantled the Holy Roman Empire, and through a complex process, the Austrian Empire was born. Nine years later, following the final defeat of Napoleonic France in 1814 and the Congress of Vienna, those lands that had not been placed under the control of the Austrian crown became a “loose confederation of thirty-eight duchies, kingdoms, and four free cities” that were “ruled by kings, princes, archdukes, dukes, electors, margraves, landgraves, archbishops, and so forth.” So disparate were these lands that collectively called themselves “Germany” that some—like Prussia—covered thousands of square miles spread disconnectedly across northern Europe; others—like Augustenburg—“were smaller than Liechtenstein (sixty-one square miles) is today, and most were poor, rural, and sparsely populated.”9 Compared to modern, united countries like Great Britain, the northern European, mostly German states were feudal, undeveloped, and backward.
As a young toddler, the complex politics surrounding Germany, Austria, and the intricate lattice that kept them loosely allied meant little to Dona Holstein. Not until decades later would she realize how significantly these issues impacted her life. In the meantime, the death of her brother Frederick in 1858 meant she was an only child, but she soon became the eldest in a growing family. Her next sibling, a sister named Caroline Matilda, came into the world fifteen months after Dona was born. Nicknamed “Calma,” she was considered the prettiest of all the Holstein girls. She was also the sister with whom Dona would always have the closest relationship. Queen Victoria, writing to her daughter Vicky in 1860 after Calma’s birth, commented on Ada’s frequent pregnancies after only a few years of marriage.
How can anyone, who has not been married above two years and three quarters rejoice at being a third time in that condition? I positively think those ladies who are always enceinte quite disgusting; it is more like a rabbit or a guinea-pig than anything else and really it is not very nice … Let me repeat once more, dear, that it is very bad for any person to have them very fast—and that the poor children suffer for it even more, not to speak of the ruin it is to the looks of a young woman—which she must not neglect for her husband’s sake, particularly when she is a Princess.10
Two years later, Fritz and Ada were thrilled when two sons, Gerard and Ernest Günther, were born in 1862 and 1863, respectively. The hereditary prince and princess’s efforts to model their family after the German royals they so idolized were encouraged by Ada’s family, especially her mother, Dowager Princess Feodora of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. Feodora often passed on advice to her daughter on how to raise her family, advice that came from her half sister the queen.
As was often the case with Victoria, she freely dispensed advice, opinions, or criticisms with a noticeable lack of sensitivity for other people’s feelings or circumstances. This was the case when it came to managing the Holsteins’ finances. Fritz insisted on maintaining a comfortable lifestyle, but German royals were famous for exorbitant spending and, as a consequence, debt-ridden courts—the king of Bavaria was rumored to be so poor that his weekly pocket money amounted to only twenty cents. “Poor and unimportant in the eyes of the world, the German royal families of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were at their historical nadir,” wrote one of Queen Victoria’s biographers.11 Despite the fiscal tribulations faced by many of their contemporaries, the Holsteins were not entirely destitute. Christian August was exceptionally frugal with what was left of the settlement he received for his territories in Schleswig-Holstein, enabling him to provide Fritz with Dolzig and a small palace in Gotha. His finances were also augmented by the modest revenues he received from Augustenburg.
Dona’s uncomplicated life lasted a mere five years before the Holsteins were overtaken by calamity. Prince Gerard, who had been born at Dolzig in the early weeks of 1862, died four months later. Eighteen months after that, in November 1863, the German Confederation declared war on Denmark over the already battle-scarred twin duchies of Schleswig-Holstein. Later known as the Second Schleswig War of 1863–64, this conflict would have great ramifications for not only Dona’s family but also for German and European history. The confederation used the treaty from the First Schleswig War as their casus belli, claiming Denmark violated the accord by trying to absorb the duchies directly into their sovereign borders. For the most part, ethnic Germans “in Schleswig, Holstein, and throughout Germany wanted only the restored independence of the duchies under a prince of their choosing.”12 Overwhelming public opinion looked to the liberal Fritz Holstein as the prince with the most lawful claim to the ducal throne. Following in his father’s footsteps, Fritz announced his intention of assuming the throne and began styling himself Frederick VIII, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein.
When it looked as if a German victory over the Danish was imminent, Fritz—believing he would promptly be invested with the mantle of government—departed Dolzig for his Thuringian estate with the goal of being ready to move into the ducal capital, Kiel, at a moment’s notice. The decision to leave his family was a difficult one for a man who cared so deeply for his wife and children. If things went according to plan, Fritz reasoned, he would send for his family as soon as he was installed as duke. It is difficult to ascertain exactly when Ada and the children joined Fritz, but it is reasonable to conclude that, given the volatility of the situation and how much the duke cared for his family, he did not want to risk their safety by bringing them so close to an active war zone.
In Fritz’s absence, the person who bore the greatest burden of responsibility was Dona’s mother, who was now being called the Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein. With her husband shuttling back and forth across Germany trying to shore up support for when he would actually assume the government in Kiel, Ada was left with few resources with which to care for herself and her three young children. Their meager finances evaporated as the duke struggled to pay for his expenses abroad. Coming to Ada’s rescue during this period was her cousin Prince Chlodwig of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst. A prominent politician who would one day be appointed German chancellor, Chlodwig took an active role in managing what was left of the duchess’s money and ensuring her children were provided for. Some thirty years later, Dona’s brother Ernest Günther wrote an embittered letter in which he said Prince Chlodwig was the only person who saved their family while their father was away in Kiel squandering their money.
When the Danish surrendered to the victorious German Confederation in 1864, Prussia was given administration of Schleswig, while Austria received Holstein. As the weeks and months rolled by, Fritz Holstein was disconcerted to find that Prussia had still not consented to his entering Kiel and assuming the throne. The person standing in the duke’s way was the balding, mustachioed Prussian minister-president, Otto von Bismarck. At first glance, he appeared to be a saturnine, middle-aged statesman entering his political twilight. In reality, he was fiercely ambitious, obsessively conservative, unprogressive, and reactionary. He agreed to Prussia’s participation in the Second Schleswig War to further his goal of Realpolitik—his unfaltering commitment to establishing Prussian hegemony in German Europe through conquest and annexation; and because Fritz was pro-German, Bismarck saw him as a convenient puppet. Once Prussia had control of Schleswig, Bismarck used the duke to set into motion the next phase of his plan: war w
ith Austria. An integral part of Realpolitik was forcing Austria out of the German Confederation—the Austrian emperor had been president of the confederation since 1850—and, by extension, German affairs altogether, since Bismarck believed the Habsburgs were no longer worthy of being leaders of German Europe. Hoping to chum the waters in an effort to get Austria to make a military strike against Prussia, Bismarck launched a vicious campaign to destroy Fritz Holstein and his family. Bismarck openly derided the duke, whom he called “that idiot of Holstein.”13
By May 1865, the duke had grown tired of Prussian false promises. Using his personal authority as Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, he made his way to Kiel, took up residence in the castle there, and established a provisional government with ministers loaned to him by the Duke of Coburg. It appears that it was at this point that Ada and the children joined Fritz. But even with the presence of his attractive wife and young family, German public opinion began to turn against the duke. Bismarck managed to convince the general public that Fritz’s government was illegal under the terms of the treaty that ended the war. He then began a public relations campaign to destroy the duke. By the time the Holsteins were settled in at Kiel Castle, Bismarck had succeeded in spreading so much anti-Augustenburg propaganda that no foreign ambassadors would receive Fritz, and King Wilhelm I of Prussia even accused him of treason.
Fritz managed to keep his government operating in Kiel for almost another year. He was also hesitant to uproot his family again because his wife was into the third trimester of another pregnancy. In April 1866, she gave birth at Kiel Castle to a daughter named Louise Sophie. Contemporary accounts indicate that within a matter of weeks of Louise Sophie’s birth, Fritz’s government fell apart. Prussia declared it would never recognize his reign, German public opinion was against him, and his support from the international community evaporated. Dejected and utterly defeated, Fritz and his family had returned to Dolzig by June 1866. Children, even young ones, can sometimes sense drastic changes in their parents’ moods. It is probable that for a number of months, Dona could see the morose depression that weighed on her father. But if Dona’s parents—who, as a courtesy from the King of Prussia, were allowed to continue using the titles Duke and Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein—hoped their return presaged the end of a long, difficult period, they were wrong.
Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires Page 3