Around the same time that the Stadtschloss was renovated, so too was the royal family’s transportation upgraded. Millions were spent on a new royal train. Designed to show off the Hohenzollerns’ imperial dignity, the train comprised eleven gilded carriages that could seat at least twenty-four people around a formal dinner table at any one time. With the German navy’s star in the ascendant, the emperor and empress naturally declared themselves to be sovereigns of the sea. They commissioned a new royal yacht, the Hohenzollern II, colored in shades of cream and gold—it was the first time a member of the Prussian royal family ever commissioned a private royal yacht. The biggest private vessel on the seas, it was so well armed that, upon first sight, many observers thought it was a battleship. The Hohenzollern II was the royal family’s official yacht, though Dona was given her own private vessel, the Iduna, complete with a cook from Brighton who always addressed the empress as “Mum.”414 The Iduna came in especially handy for Dona when Wilhelm purchased the Achilleion, a villa on the Greek Ionian island of Corfu that became one of their favorite getaways. All of these—palaces, trains, yachts—were meant to impress. Wilhelm and Dona wanted to create an image that theirs was the greatest imperial power in the world.
At the beginning of January 1901, the Hohenzollerns were out in full force in Potsdam and Berlin for the celebrations marking the Prussian monarchy’s bicentennial. Thousands of soldiers marched past the Stadtschloss in the freezing cold as they saluted Emperor Wilhelm II and Empress Augusta Victoria. One of the special guests at the celebrations was the emperor’s uncle the Duke of Connaught, one of Queen Victoria’s sons. During the festivities, the emperor made a speech in which he declared his resolve to make the German Imperial Navy “as mighty an instrument” as the army.415 As Wilhelm stepped off the podium after his speech, he was informed that a telegram arrived for the duke from Osborne House. Queen Victoria—the larger-than-life matriarch, the woman who had lent her name to an era—was dying. As many of the relatives as possible were summoned to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, where the British royal family was holding the death vigil.
The last years of the queen’s life had been tinged by deeply painful tragedies. The Boer War in South Africa, which showed no signs of concluding any time soon, overshadowed the twilight of her reign. Her family had also been plagued by trials. Her youngest son, the Duke of Albany, died after a hemophilia attack in 1884. Her second son, the Duke of Coburg, died from tongue cancer in 1900. The death of her favorite son proved too much for the queen to bear. She poured herself out in her journal: “Oh, God! my poor darling Affie gone too! My third grown-up child, besides three very dear sons-in-law. It is hard at eighty-one!”416 Less than a year later, she was told that her daughter Vicky was succumbing to excruciating cancer of the spine. By the dawn of the twentieth century, Queen Victoria had also outlived eight of her grandchildren.
Wilhelm II immediately cancelled all the bicentennial celebrations. Accompanied by his eldest son and his uncle, he rushed from Berlin to be at his grandmother’s bedside, leaving a disconsolate Dona to care for their family. The empress tried as much as possible to discourage her husband from spending so much time in England. She later told one of his ministers that she took special care to make sure “that her sons would think differently.”417 Dona was commensurately unpopular in England. Marie Mallet, one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting, wrote in her diary that Wilhelm was a “poor man” because “he has a most insipid and boring wife who he does not care for and from whom he escapes by prancing to the four corners of the world.” Wilhelm ignored his wife’s entreaties to stay away from England. For him, there was no question about it. He had to go. “At heart,” Dona later admitted about her husband, Wilhelm was “enthusiastic about England and everything which is England, it is in his blood.”418
The German emperor’s arrival on the Isle of Wight educed a strong reaction from his British relatives. The queen’s daughters Helena and Louise had been caring for their mother during her final weeks and tried to keep him away. Unimpressed, Wilhelm remarked that “the petticoats,” as he called his aunts, were “fencing off poor grandmamma from the world.” When he finally arrived, the emperor impressed everyone with his grace and tactfulness. The Prince of Wales wrote to the Empress Frederick, who was now too ill to come to Osborne, “William was kindness itself and touching in his devotion.”419
Gathered at Osborne House for the death vigil were four generations of Queen Victoria’s family, including George and May, who arrived from Sandringham only an hour before the end. To ease the queen’s final hours, her grandson Prince Leopold of Battenberg played his violin. Wilhelm and the queen’s physician, Sir James Reid, held her up in their arms for two hours straight as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Next to her bedside knelt the unusually pensive Prince of Wales. Winter darkness descended on the Isle of Wight around 4:00 p.m. that day. It seemed symbolic that with the setting of the sun that day, so too was the sun setting on the life of this unparalleled woman. In his diary, the Duke of York recalled the queen’s last moments: “She looked just the same, not a bit changed. She was almost asleep and had her eyes shut … I kissed her hand, Motherdear was with me. She was conscious up til 5.0 [o’clock] and called each of us by name and we took leave of her. I shall never forget that scene in her room with all of us sobbing and heartbroken round her bed. It was terribly sad.”420
At 6:30 p.m. on January 22, 1901, Victoria, queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the first empress of India, passed away at the age of eighty-one. The last word she muttered was “Bertie,” her son’s name, before a look of peace fell upon her face.421 A hushed silence fell upon the room as those gathered realized that this special little lady was gone. Exhausted from holding up his grandmother for two hours, Wilhelm turned to his youngest cousin, little Ena of Battenberg, and said cryptically, “I am the eldest grandchild and you are the youngest.”422 The queen had played a role, in some form or another, in uniting Willy and Dona, George and May, and Nicky and Alix, and her loss was a crushing blow to all of them. “The thought of England without the Queen is dreadful,” May confided to her diary. “God help us all.”423
That night, after a twilight memorial service in the queen’s bedroom, her body was lifted by her sons into a coffin that, at Wilhelm’s request, was draped with the Union Jack. Later, her iconic diamond-encrusted crown, which she wore with her black widow’s dress for decades, was placed on top of the coffin, along with six massive candles, representing the six children who had assembled for the death vigil. The dining room where her coffin was placed was turned into an otherworldly shrine to her memory. Four guardsmen kept a round-the-clock watch over the coffin, which was surrounded by funeral wreaths of white lilies and blue hyacinths. The Duchess of York recalled the almost mystic aura in a letter to her aunt Augusta: “Now she lies in her coffin in the dining room, which is beautifully arranged as a chapel, the coffin is covered with the coronation robes & her little diamond crown and the garter lie on a cushion above her head—4 huge Grenadiers watch there day and night, it is so impressive & fine & yet so simple …”424
It is not an understatement to say that countless millions of people around the world mourned this tremendous loss. Newspapers from Newfoundland to Berlin to Beijing ran touching tributes to the queen, while governmental agencies on every continent offered their condolences. For ten days, Victoria’s body was laid out in state in the dining room at Osborne House. From the Isle of Wight, her body was taken to Portsmouth on February 1 aboard the royal yacht Alberta. The Duchess of York, sitting at a window in Osborne House, watched the yacht move toward the mainland as it traveled between endless rows of battleships. It was from Portsmouth that the military escort took the queen’s coffin to London. At train stations all along the route, vast crowds gathered in silence. Men removed their caps, others fell on one knee.
On the freezing cold morning of February 2, Queen Victoria received a military funeral in the capital of the British Em
pire. More than one million people lined the streets in silence to bid farewell to the doyenne of sovereigns. In the funeral procession, the coffin was followed on horseback by Bertie, Wilhelm II, King George I of Greece, and King Charles I of Portugal. In accordance with Victoria’s wishes, London was not draped in mourning black. Ironically, the woman who had worn nothing but black for forty years of her life detested the idea of mourning for herself. Instead, purple cashmere accented by a white stripe was used to commemorate the passing of one sovereign and the accession of another. The funeral procession was equally awe inspiring. Along with the four kings on horseback were carriages ferrying King Leopold II of the Belgians, and the crown princes of Germany, Greece, Romania, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Siam. These were then followed by royal heirs representing the emperors of Austria and Russia and the king of Italy. Years later, May’s son David wrote that Queen Victoria’s funeral “was mournful beyond description, and no doubt the elderly and the sage who witnessed it must have shared a sense of the passing of a great era of peace and security, and a foreboding of the inevitable changes that would profoundly affect their own lives while altering Britain’s destiny.”425
Mourning was not confined to the British Empire. In faraway Russia, Tsarina Alexandra was shattered by the news of her beloved grandmother’s death. The queen had truly been a second mother to the empress, and the thought of a world without her was frightening to Alexandra. She had wanted to set off for Windsor Castle immediately, but because she was pregnant again, such a trip was ill-advised. At a memorial service in Saint Petersburg attended by the imperial family, Alexandra and her sister Ella broke down sobbing. “I cannot really believe she has gone, that we shall never see her anymore,” she wrote to her sister Victoria. “Since one can remember, she was in our life, and a dearer, kind being never was.” She echoed May York’s feelings when she added, “England without the Queen seems impossible.”426
8
The Weight of the World
(1901–04)
With the death of Queen Victoria, the curtain descended on one of the most important reigns in British history, marked by propriety, conservatism, and traditional values. The accession of George’s father as Britain’s first king in almost sixty-four years ushered in an equally grandiose era, presided over by a more fun-loving, gregarious monarch and his wife, the soigné Queen Alexandra. This meant that May’s husband, George, was now heir to the British throne. George was carrying the weight of the empire on his shoulders. One of the new king’s first acts was to take the name Edward VII. It had been his mother’s wish that he should reign as the German-sounding King Albert Edward, to honor the late prince consort, but as he reminded his mother, no other king of England had ever used two names.
Although Queen Victoria’s death was met with sincere grief, high hopes were attached to the reign of Edward VII, who was the first and only heir apparent ever to be born to an English queen regnant. Since it was the first time in almost seventy years that England had a king, many were optimistic that the new sovereigns would breathe new life into the monarchy. They would not be disappointed.
Almost immediately, Edward VII became a sensation despite the hand fate had dealt him. Just shy of his sixtieth birthday when he came to the throne, Edward had inherited his mother’s Hanoverian looks. He was short and overweight with a receding chin that he covered with a pointed beard. His health was poor as well. At the time of his accession, he could barely walk up a flight of stairs without losing his breath. Once, at the opera during a visit to Germany, Edward became so exhausted from climbing the stairs to the royal box with his wife, Wilhelm, and Dona that he fell asleep partway through the performance. Later, when the actors lit several fires on stage as part of the show, Edward awoke with a startle and, seeing the flames, assumed the building was on fire. He began bellowing for everyone to calmly evacuate the burning opera house. Only after a lengthy reassurance by Dona that it was part of the show did he calm down. His obesity and chronic respiratory troubles were the direct result of his gourmand lifestyle of eating five or six meals a day, each of which was between eight and ten courses. He also smoked dozens of cigars. Edward’s health was so poor, in fact, that his coronation on June 26, 1902, had to be postponed. The ordeal started earlier that month when he began complaining of stomach pains. He later told his doctors he would attend his coronation even if it killed him. The doctors replied it very likely would. Thus, it was postponed, and the king underwent surgery for what was revealed to be severe appendicitis. A briefer, curtailed coronation was held two months later.
Unlike his father, the prince consort, or his precocious sister Vicky, Edward was not overly intellectual. In a society that placed handsomeness and intelligence on a pedestal, the new king was an anomaly. He broke the mold through his urbane charisma, but “because he was ‘intensely human,’ and because ‘he never attempted to his hide his weaknesses,’ Edward succeeded in winning over most of his critics.”427 The Liberal politician Lord Esher shared this sentiment when he admitted, “The King is kind and debonair, and not undignified – but too human!”428 Queen Alexandra was equally popular. Like her sister Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna of Russia, she was regal and stately, with a slim figure and a swan-like neck. She was a trendsetter in British society who looked every inch a queen. She also earned a place in the history books by becoming the last foreign princess to be queen of England.
In the immediate aftermath of Queen Victoria’s death, London was overcome by a wave of controlled chaos. Most of the population had lived and died under Victoria, Regina et Imperatrix. There was a finely tuned social order that many people had known all their lives, with Victoria at the top, followed by her son, the Prince of Wales. But Edward VII had held that title—which is traditionally given by the monarch to the heir to the throne but is not an automatic title—since he was a month old, and most of the British population was uncomfortable having a new Prince of Wales so quickly after Edward’s accession. Even letters and memos intended for Princess May, as wife of the heir to the throne, were accidentally sent to Queen Alexandra.
Almost from the moment he became king, Edward made it a point to depart from the traditions that his mother had held to so vehemently. One of the ways he did this was by not immediately making George Prince of Wales. The king correctly argued that the public had been so used to himself in that role that it would cause confusion for there to suddenly be a new Prince of Wales after sixty years. Having an heir apparent styled as Duke of York was inappropriate, but since the king was unwilling to grant George the Wales title, he granted him the duchy of Cornwall. Typically given to the heir apparent along with being created Prince of Wales, Cornwall was the first ducal peerage ever created in England. It also brought with it tremendous revenues. The fact that she was now a very wealthy woman seemed to interest May very little. Long accustomed to keenly observing others, she was sensitive enough to understand the significance of the king’s decision. “We are to be called D. & Dss of Cornwall & York and I don’t think the King intends to create G. Pce of Wales,” she wrote to her old governess Hélène Bricka in January 1901.429 Later, in a letter to her aunt Augusta, she was more candid about her feelings: “I believe this is the first time that the Heir Apparent has not been created Prince of Wales! I dislike departing from traditions.”430 However the duchess may have behaved outwardly, the king’s choice offended her sense of tradition. It was one of the few times she explicitly displayed her father’s fanatical obsession about royal rank.
To help alleviate some of the administrative confusion in London, George and May were sent on a lengthy tour of the British Empire, with stops in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The visit had been planned since before Queen Victoria’s death. King Edward had always been close to his son, especially after Eddy died. He insisted on canceling the tour because he could not bear being parted from his son and daughter-in-law at such a difficult time. The colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain, along with the prime minister Lord Salisbury, convi
nced the king to go ahead with the expedition as planned. It was the largest international tour ever undertaken by a member of the British royal family. King Edward may also have been waxing sentimental about sending George and May abroad. In 1860, when the king was still Prince of Wales, he had made his own official visit to Canada, marking the first time a British heir apparent had ever crossed the Atlantic. Remembering how much of a hit he had been, the king may have hoped that sending his shy son and daughter-in-law might do them some good.
Not keen on leaving her children, May was encouraged to take the trip by Queen Alexandra, who felt it was important for the world to see a fresh, youthful face representing the monarchy. The British politician and statesman Arthur Balfour argued it was imperative for George and May to take the tour. “The King is no longer merely King of Great Britain and Ireland and of a few dependencies whose whole value consisted in ministering to the wealth and security of Great Britain and Ireland,” he told Edward VII. “He is now the great constitutional bond uniting together in a single Empire communities of free men separated by half the circumference of the Globe.”431
On March 16, 1901, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall left England. That day, they brought their children down to the harbor at Portsmouth to say good-bye. “Pretty!” little Princess Mary exclaimed when she saw their newly redecorated, black-and-white-striped steamship, the Ophir.432 The children, left in the care of the king and queen, watched from shore as the Ophir gave three long booms on the horn before slowly pulling away. As the duke and duchess stood on the bridge waving, their eyes filled with tears. George later wrote to his mother that, after the departure, he and May “came down to our cabins and had a good cry and tried to comfort each other.”433 A few days after leaving England, May wrote to an old friend, “Those dreadfull [sic] farewells nearly killed me. I am always thinking of the children, and must thank you so much for the sweet picture of baby Mary; it is too nice, and looks so pretty on my table.”434
Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires Page 22