Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  With Fritz out of the picture, there was nothing standing in Bismarck’s way from proceeding with the next step in his plan. In June 1866, his coveted Austro-Prussian War began and progressed exactly as he had predicted. States like Hanover and Hesse were told Prussian troops would be marching through their territories to attack Austria. Should they offer any resistance, Prussia would take it as a de facto declaration of war. Hanover and Hesse did just that. Their plight at the hands of Prussia elicited the support of Saxony, Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden, all of whom categorically sided with Austria.

  The decisive hammer stroke was the Battle of Königgrätz, which took place in July. Half a million soldiers fought on both sides that day. It seemed at first that the Austrians were winning, until the Prussian crown prince showed up later in the day with eighty thousand reinforcements, tipping the scales decisively in Prussia’s favor. Austrian losses were more than forty-four thousand, while the Prussian casualties were just under nine thousand. The defeat at Königgrätz brought the war to an end with the total defeat of Austria. In the aftermath, Bismarck’s short-term ambitions came to be realized when Prussia was able to take full control of both Schleswig and Holstein, and Austria was forced out of the German Confederation permanently. Austria’s German allies paid a high price for their choice and were forced to yield large portions of their realms to Prussia. To emphasize one last time the penumbra that was cast over Austria and their allies, the victorious powers reorganized themselves into the Northern German Confederation.

  For the Holsteins, the Prussian victory was ruinous. Now in full control of the twin duchies—including Als Island—Prussia confiscated Augustenburg for compensation owed by the family. They evicted Dona’s grandfather from his palace and turned the Holsteins into nothing more than mediatised (or fourth-rank) royals at best. Christian August’s lifestyle at Augustenburg had continued to be a modest yet comfortable one, and he was able to purchase a new home, Primkenau Castle, in Silesia. Fritz and his family, bereft of their inheritance, settled permanently into their rural palace at Dolzig, uncertain what the future would hold. As with so many important events in European history, no one at the time could have foreseen the far-reaching consequences of conflicts like the Second Schleswig War and the Austro-Prussian War. The Schleswig wars and even Bismarck’s campaign to ruin Fritz Holstein would directly alter the course of Dona’s life. For the moment, though, as the daughter of a disgraced, dispossessed duke, there was little indication her life would be tapped for greatness. The same was also true for the lives of two other future empresses who had not even been born yet.

  As Dona’s family struggled to carve out a permanent life for themselves at Dolzig, in England, Princess Mary Adelaide of Teck was enceinte with her first child. Her husband, Prince Francis of Teck, had been making arrangements for the delivery for months. “I am looking over Kensington Palace,” he wrote to his sister from his mother-in-law’s house in Kew Gardens, “as I want to be established there by at least the 6th.… Let us hope that a nice baby will be born there in the lovely month of May.”14 As if on cue, Mary Adelaide gave birth to a daughter just before midnight on May 26, 1867. Her physician, Dr. Arthur Farre, released an official statement the next day: “Her Royal Highness the Princess Mary Adelaide was safely delivered of a Princess at one minute before midnight on the 26th inst. Her Royal Highness and the infant Princess are doing perfectly well.”15 The girl was named Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes. Each of the names chosen had significance for the new parents. Victoria was for the queen of England; Mary was for the infant’s mother; Augusta was for Mary Adelaide’s mother and also her sister; Claudine was for Francis’s mother; and Agnes was for his grandmother. The other names—Louise Olga Pauline—were for various women in the princess’s family tree. A less widely known account suggests the infant was initially named Agnes Augusta, which was later switched with Victoria Mary. At her christening on July 27, the infant became officially known as Princess Victoria Mary of Teck, though her family called her simply “May,” for the month of her birth. In family correspondences and casual conversations, she was often referred to as May Teck, following the English custom of using peerages as surnames. An impressive royal panoply was in attendance for the July christening at Kensington Palace. Charles Thomas Longley, the archbishop of Canterbury, performed the ceremony, which was presided over by May’s godparents: Queen Victoria—whose own birthday was two days before the baby’s; Albert Edward (“Bertie”), Prince of Wales; and her maternal grandmother, Augusta, Duchess of Cambridge.

  Princess May brought much joy to her parents, Prince Francis of Teck and his wife, Mary Adelaide. Throughout his life, Francis had been a pariah in royal circles. His father, Duke Alexander of Württemberg, had broken one of the sacrosanct laws of royalty in 1835 when he married a commoner, Countess Claudine Rhédey von Kis-Rhéde, a descendant of the great Hungarian king Saint Stephen. The gravitas of this was greater than when Dona’s grandfather married his commoner wife because Alexander was in line for the throne of the German kingdom of Württemberg. Not only was Alexander exiled from the obsessively hierarchical German courts, his children were forbidden to use any royal styles or titles—a fact that made Francis overly sensitive to matters of rank. In a gesture of kindness, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, with whom Alexander had cultivated a friendship while serving as a captain in the Austrian military, gave his wife and children the titles Count and Countess von Hohenstein. It took nearly thirty years, but Alexander’s cousin King Wilhelm I of Württemberg eventually recognized the former’s marriage to Claudine and elevated Francis to royal rank by creating him Prince of Teck, a medieval title from the Holy Roman Empire that had not been used since the 1430s. Along with it came the style of Serene Highness, the lowest possible rank royalty could have. Claudine never lived to see that day. She was trampled to death by horses at a military review in 1841.

  Claudine’s morganatic blood meant that Francis was most likely destined to remain a bachelor. Most princesses wanted nothing to do with him, since he had no fortune and was not in line to inherit any thrones. The little income he did receive came from his meager soldier’s pay or the occasional handout from the Austrian emperor. Undaunted, he searched Europe for any meagerly royal bride who would take him. After unsuccessfully trawling the German courts, he crossed paths with Mary Adelaide, daughter of Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge. While the princess was famous for her effervescence, it was frowned upon that she was four years older than Francis. She was also notoriously overweight. One estimate placed her weight at 252 pounds, earning her the unkind nickname “Fat Mary.” Her father, Adolphus, once the viceroy of Hanover, was a son of King George III and an uncle of Queen Victoria. Her mother was Princess Augusta of Hesse-Cassel, an aunt of Queen Louise of Denmark. Some contemporaries have claimed that Emperor Napoleon III considered proposing to Mary Adelaide shortly after he was rebuffed by Dona’s mother, but the plan fell through when the princess revealed she was unwilling to leave England. A number of other suitors—Prince Wilhelm of Baden, the dukes of Brunswick and Saxe-Meiningen, and a number of others—came and went, but the princess was adamant that she would not leave her home.

  By 1859, Mary Adelaide had admitted to the statesman Lord Clarendon that she had made up her mind “to be a jolly old maid.”16 However, her relatives within the British royal family were working behind the scenes to play matchmaker on her behalf. So when Francis and Mary Adelaide met for the first time in 1866, it was not by chance. Mary Adelaide’s cousin Bertie, Prince of Wales, and his wife, Alexandra, had arranged it all. During a visit to Vienna in 1865, the Prince and Princess of Wales had taken a liking to Francis, whom they thought perfect for Mary Adelaide. “You see, they all wanted to find a husband for my Mother,” May said later in life. “So once when King Edward (then Prince of Wales) was out in Vienna he met this handsome young officer in the Austrian Army, liked him, invited him to come to England on a visit, introduced him to my Mother—and everyone seemed to
think it would do—and it did.”17

  To say that Francis and Mary Adelaide’s courtship was brief would be an understatement. “The wooing was but a short affair,” Mary Adelaide herself admitted. “Francis only arrived in England on March 6th and we met for the first time on the 7th at St. James’s [Palace]. One month’s acquaintance settled the question [of marriage], and on April 6th he proposed in KEW GARDENS and was accepted.”18 The fact that Mary Adelaide accepted Francis after knowing him for only a month may seem like desperation, but it proved to be a testament to the high esteem the couple had for one another. In an era marked by disastrous arranged marriages littered with infidelities, May Teck’s parents were surprisingly happy. Shortly before May’s birth, Mary Adelaide wrote to a friend, “I long to tell you how happy I am, and with what confiding hope I can look forward to a future of bright promise, as he is not only all I could wish for, but all Mama’s heart could possibly desire for her child.”19

  The world in which little May Teck grew up was centered in London, the thriving capital of the British Empire which, by the 1860s, controlled almost one-quarter of the planet. As members of Britain’s extended royal family, the Tecks were familiar faces at Queen Victoria’s court, though their presence usually caused a stir. As a niece of two former kings, Mary Adelaide was a fairly high-ranking member of the royal family, but Francis was painfully conscious that he remained close to the bottom of the royal totem. This prompted him to overcompensate and throw fits of petulance when he felt he was not being treated with proper royal deference. On many occasions, he sent his wife to plead with Queen Victoria to grant him the higher rank of Highness, which the queen refused each time, for fear of setting a dangerous precedent.20 Shortly before May was born, Mary Adelaide sent one of her requests to the queen, also asking that her husband receive the Order of the Bath, an honorary chivalric medal created by King George I in 1725. Queen Victoria was growing weary of these constant requests. “The [Order of the] Bath, Prince Teck shall certainly have,” she promptly wrote to Mary Adelaide, “but the Title of ‘Highness’ I think wld be of little use.”21

  The issue of titles and rank was not the only problem facing the Tecks. Although May’s parents enjoyed a happy marriage, they were constantly neck-deep in debt. Mary Adelaide received an annual stipend of £7,000. Of this amount, £5,000 came from the Civil List thanks to the efforts of Lord Palmerston, and the other £2,000 came from Mary Adelaide’s mother. In today’s American dollars, Mary Adelaide’s stipend amounted to approximately $656,000, but it was barely enough to cover the family’s expenses.22 Mary Adelaide was famous for her generosity and charitable endeavors, but she always spent more than she had. By the late 1860s, the Tecks managed to bolster their income to £8,000, but they were still spending £15,000 each year.

  When May Teck was four, the new king of Württemberg, Charles I, elevated her parents to the rank of Duke and Duchess of Teck. Queen Victoria’s foreign secretary, Lord Clarendon, had earlier approached the queen to try and persuade her to use her influence with King Charles to grant Francis a dukedom. She flatly refused. It took five years after King Charles ascended the throne to confer the duchy of Teck on May’s father. This thrust Mary Adelaide into a much more visible position in British society, since her husband had now moved up to being a mid-rank royal. Even though she derived satisfaction from vigorously carrying out charitable works and creating improvements for the welfare of her countrymen, the duchess insisted on maintaining a lifestyle she believed was necessary for an English princess. This only worsened the family’s debts, and the Tecks were hounded more than ever by creditors. This deeply worried Queen Victoria, who clearly remembered how her uncles, the profligate sons of George III, damaged England’s economy by accumulating tens of millions of pounds in debt. The Duchess of Teck’s repeated pleas to the queen for money were denied. Eventually, they went unanswered.

  Like Dona Holstein, May Teck found herself the eldest child in her family. Her own birth in 1867 was followed by the prompt arrivals of three brothers: Adolphus in 1868, Francis in 1870, and Alexander in 1874. “Mary Teck was safely confined yesterday with another & still bigger boy!” Queen Victoria wrote to her daughter the day after Alexander was born.23 Royalty, especially in the Victorian era, was obsessed with nicknames, no matter how strange they sounded. Consequently, May’s brothers became known as Dolly, Frank, and Alge, respectively. The Teck children enjoyed a degree of stability in their lives that Dona and the Holsteins did not. When in London, they resided in the south wing of Kensington Palace. Their use of the palace had been a gift to them from the queen. They shared it with a number of other members of the royal family who occupied flats spread throughout the palace’s different wings. Tall and spacious, Kensington Palace’s most famous occupant was Queen Victoria herself, who had been born there in 1819—in the same room, in the same bed in which Princess May had been born—and spent the first eighteen years of her life there under the watchful eye of her mother, the Duchess of Kent, and her vile henchman, Sir John Conroy. It was not until her accession in 1837 that she left Kensington Palace.

  When the Tecks were not at Kensington Palace, they could be found at their well-loved Richmond Park estate, White Lodge. This grace-and-favor country home came into the Tecks’ possession only after Mary Adelaide harangued the queen over the fact that her young children needed a rural estate. The queen acquiesced, partly because Princess May almost died as an infant after contracting a feverish illness from the squalid, unsanitary living conditions in London at that time. Though not a lavish home, White Lodge had a rich heritage. Originally built as a hunting lodge by King George II in 1727, the palatial residence was two stories tall with four Roman pillars on the front facade. Like many of Britain’s royal estates, White Lodge changed hands numerous times in its one-hundred-and fifty-year history. Since its construction for George II, the building had been owned by a king, two queens, a princess, and a prime minister. It was here that Horatio Nelson mapped out his attack plans for the Battle of Trafalgar. Later, after Queen Victoria gave it to the Tecks, it would grow to become one of the most familiar homes Princess May would ever have.

  Two months after May Teck’s third birthday, another German war took place. Unlike the Second Schleswig War and the Austro-Prussian War, which were relatively limited in their impact beyond continental Europe, this third conflict would completely reshape the course of history and would directly impact all four of Europe’s last empresses in one way or another. In July 1870, France declared war on Prussia. Not only did the North German Confederation ally with Prussia against France, but so too did the other, nonaligned German states. Even Fritz Holstein obtained semi-redemption by taking up his military commission once again and serving on the general staff of his old friend Crown Prince Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia. The entire war, which began with manipulating France into making a first strike so that Prussia would not look like the aggressor, was strategically planned by Bismarck in the pièce de résistance of his Realpolitik. At the Battle of Sedan in September 1870, French forces were quickly defeated by the Prussians, and Emperor Napoleon III personally surrendered. Though he was later released, his government promptly dethroned him, abolished the French monarchy for the last time, and declared the Third Republic on September 5. The broken, battered Napoleon III fled into exile in England, followed later by his wife and son. The last Bonaparte rulers of imperial France spent the remainder of their lives living as guests of their old friend Queen Victoria.

  Decisive though the Battle of Sedan was, it did not immediately end the war. The end did not take place until 1871, after a five-month siege of Paris by the Germans led to France’s surrender. Out of the innumerable armed conflicts fought in Europe since the beginning of the Late Modern Period, the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War had one of the most significant impacts on both the state of Europe at the time and the course of its future. Along with handing over the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to German control, which would be a sore spot in French national
pride for decades to follow, France was also forced to yield up its status as a great imperial power. The structure, order, and politics that had existed in Europe since the Congress of Vienna were now gone. This opened the door for Otto von Bismarck to see his ambitions for Realpolitik bear their long-awaited fruits. During the siege of Paris, German military command had been established in the Palace of Versailles. It was here, in the Hall of Mirrors, that Prussia, the North German Confederation, and the smaller, unaligned states united to form the German Empire. Throughout the ceremony, the windows in the Hall of Mirrors rattled from explosions as gunfire rained down on Paris twelve miles away. While watching the unification ceremony at Versailles, Fritz Holstein remarked to the poet Gustav Freytag, “Such a time changes the opinions of men and imposes new challenges.”24

  At the center of Europe’s newest imperial power was the Prussian royal family, the Hohenzollerns. Selected by popular vote, King Wilhelm I of Prussia became the first German emperor—this specific wording was chosen rather than emperor of Germany, which was deemed unacceptable by the empire’s other rulers, as it offended their own statuses as heads of state.25 The Hohenzollerns, now both kings of Prussia and German emperors, became the foremost dynasty on the continent, ruling the preeminent imperial power. With its provenance in Bismarck’s Realpolitik and its foundation established through militarism, German-speaking Europe’s imperial forge was now complete. Germany was no longer an existential anomaly but was now a physical, geopolitical empire whose borders were vast, covering more than three hundred thousand square miles. In the west, it bordered France, Belgium, and Luxembourg and ran along the entire Baltic Sea up to Lithuania and Russia. It shared its southern border with Switzerland and Austria-Hungary.