by Gillian Gill
A few years after the wedding of Alix and Nicholas, medical authorities in Spain did point out to their king that Ena of Battenburg, the beautiful, healthy, young English princess he wished to marry had two hemophiliac brothers. Alfonso XIII trusted his eyes, not his doctors, and married Ena— with dynastic results that only just fell short of the Russian tragedy. One wishes that Alix and Ena, both favorite granddaughters of Queen Victoria, had been given some idea of what they were taking on when they married kings of tottering dynasties desperate for healthy male heirs. As their first cousin Marie, Queen of Romania, explained in her memoirs, Queen Victoria’s daughters and granddaughters were “kept in glorious … but dangerous, and almost cruel, ignorance of realities.” Their upbringing was based on “illusions and a completely false conception of life.”
By the early twentieth century, the Saxe-Coburg family was the most famous case study of hemophilia in the history of medicine. Hemophilia had become known as the royal disease.
French Interlude
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F LEOPOLD’S BIRTH IN 1853 WAS A SEVERE SETBACK TO QUEEN VICTORIA’S health and morale, by 1854 she had bounced back. This was as well, as the nation was at war with Russia, her workload was heavier, and she was again on the public stage. Her zest for life was on full display in 1855, when the royal family of Great Britain and the imperial family of France exchanged visits and, rather improbably, became bosom friends.
Great Britain and France were allies during the Crimean War, with their armies fighting on the plains below Sebastopol. The new ruler of France, Napoleon III, was anxious to profit personally from the English alliance. Shunned as an interloper by continental monarchs, the emperor saw Queen Victoria as his best hope for sponsorship in the royal club. Every court in Europe now knew that Prince Albert held the key to Buckingham Palace and that the only way to get close to the Queen was through him. Therefore, as an opening move, the emperor invited Prince Albert to come to Boulogne in August 1854 to spend some days reviewing the French troops and conferring with military leaders.
Napoleon III was not the kind of man Prince Albert habitually cared to cultivate. He was a nephew of the great Napoleon Bonaparte, whose ravaging armies were still recalled with horror in little German states like Albert’s Coburg. He was a supreme political opportunist and had touches of the mountebank, the roué, even the opium eater. In smooth charm he was not unlike Benjamin Disraeli, a rising political star in Great Britain whom Prince Albert could not abide. However, flattered to be treated as an expert in military matters, Prince Albert agreed to come to Boulogne. As a lengthy memorandum by the prince himself testifies, he and Napoleon III had hours of weighty conversation on political issues and personalities. When Napoleon III asked for a state visit to England, Prince Albert said he would ask his wife, which the emperor correctly interpreted to mean yes.
Prime Minister Lord Palmerston and Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon were rather surprised when the Queen agreed to receive the French emperor and empress at Windsor. Only ten years earlier, King Louis Philippe had enjoyed a magnificent state visit during which he received the Order of the Garter and was welcomed into the bosom of the English royal family as a beloved uncle. To the dismay of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the 1848 revolution, in which the then Prince Louis Bonaparte had played a principal role, toppled Louis Philippe from his throne, and the whole Orléans clan went into exile in Great Britain. By 1855 Louis Philippe was dead, but his children let out a furious cry of lèse-majesté when they learned of an impending state visit to London from their mortal enemies, the usurping Bonapartes.
Even Victoria was a little surprised to find herself preparing for the imperial couple’s visit. She had the state guest apartment at Windsor redecorated in the violet satin and gold eagles she favored, ordered her own gold toilet set to be put out for the empress, and tactfully requested that the Waterloo Room should be referred to for this occasion as the Picture Gallery. She felt virtuous to be putting aside personal feelings for the national good, and for once was deaf to the views of her extended family. Full of martial zeal and policy initiatives, Victoria was bent on using her personal influence to consolidate the entente with France, smooth over the often contentious negotiations between the allies on the battlefield, and restrain the emperor’s impetuous instincts.
She also had a nervous curiosity to meet the man in person. She was now accustomed to receiving guests from abroad and could rely on the smooth precision of Albert’s domestic management, but most of her house-guests were German family members. Louis Bonaparte and his Spanish wife, in contrast, were an unknown quantity. They were exotic, even louche, the kind of people Albert made sure she never met. The prospect of spending days in their company made Victoria’s heart pound.
Charles Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (1808–1873) was one of the most fascinating men of his generation and a politician of the first rank. During the reign of his emperor uncle, he lived for part of his youth in Augsburg, retaining traces of a German accent in French. After the final defeat of the Emperor Napoleon I’s army at the battle of Waterloo in 1815, Louis led the life of an outlaw, a prisoner, and an exile, returning periodically to France to try to incite a revolt against the restored Bourbon monarchy. For a number of years, he lived on his wits in England, where he learned excellent if accented English. Force of will and an invincible sense of destiny brought him back into French politics in 1848, when he became the president of the new French republic. Three years later, he suspended the constitution, organized a plebiscite, and declared himself Napoleon III, emperor of the French.
The new emperor was a small, skinny man with a large head, an extraordinary mustache, and a libido to match. He had great charisma and was irresistible to women. In 1853, having failed in his quest for a royal bride, Napoleon sent shock waves through Parisian high society by choosing to marry a Spanish woman at his court, Eugenie de Montijo, who, remarkably, had resisted his advances. Eugenie was acknowledged to be one of the most beautiful women in Europe, but she was in her late twenties and her name had been linked to several men. She was the kind of woman a petty German ruler like Albert’s brother might take as a mistress or marry morganatically but certainly not choose as the mother of a new dynasty.
During the week that the Bonapartes spent with the Saxe-Coburgs at Windsor, the emperor flirted expertly with the Queen, and Victoria fell under his spell. At the very first dinner, Louis enchanted his hostess by recounting how he had once stood in the crowd in Green Park to watch her drive by on her way to her first prorogation of parliament. In 1840 he had paid forty pounds he could ill afford for a box at the opera from which he could gaze at her and her new husband. At the grand ball in the “Picture Gallery,” the Queen and the emperor, both excellent dancers and well matched in height, danced a quadrille to the admiration of all. “How strange to think,” Victoria confided in her diary, “that I, the granddaughter of George III, should dance with the Emperor Napoleon, nephew of England’s greatest enemy, now my nearest and most intimate ally in the Waterloo Room, and this ally only six years ago living in this country, an exile, poor and unthought of.” As Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon remarked, after observing the pair on a number of occasions, Napoleon’s “lovemaking was of a character to flatter [the Queen’s] vanity without alarming her virtue.”
One day of the imperial visit was perforce spent at Albert’s Crystal Palace. On the way to and from Buckingham Palace and especially walking down the main nave of the exhibition hall, the royal party was mobbed by enthusiastic, cheering crowds. This was a security nightmare, as Napoleon III had political enemies of many persuasions and was under constant threat of assassination. Acutely aware of the danger, Victoria took her guest’s arm and pressed close. “I felt that I was possibly a protection for him,” she confided to her journal. “All thoughts of nervousness for myself were past. I thought only of him: and so it is, Albert says, when one forgets oneself, one loses this great and foolish nervousness.” Victoria herself survived seven assassi
nation attempts, but she reserved her “nervousness” for childbirth.
Two councils of war were held during the imperial visit to England, the first composed exclusively of men. Prince Albert joined in the discussions and was delighted to be chosen to take notes and draw up the memoranda. Eugenie and Victoria waited outside, and finally, at Eugenie’s prompting, Victoria dared to go in to ask the men if they intended to eat lunch. The answer was a polite yes, but they did not, in fact, emerge until it was time for the emperor to dress for the Garter ceremony. Victoria and Eugenie lunched alone. However, at the final council of war, “the presence of the Queen was, of course, indispensable,” as Victoria notes with some pride in her biography of her husband. Her signature was needed on the documents her husband was busily drafting.
While the men talked, Victoria and Eugenie were thrown into each other’s company, and they hit it off tremendously. Victoria looked with pleasure on Eugenie’s beauty, sympathized with her nervousness on state occasions, and appreciated the warmth of her nature. The two women would be friends for the rest of their long lives. Albert too melted before the empress’s charm and praised the elegance of her toilettes. “Altogether I am delighted,” Victoria confided to her diary, “to see how much Albert likes and admires her, as it is so seldom I see him do so with any woman.”
Napoleon III was more than satisfied by the warm relations he and his wife had managed to develop with the English royal family, and he pressed his advantage by issuing an invitation to Queen Victoria to come to Paris in late August. Victoria was pleased, especially since her delightful new French friend assured her that Prince Albert would be given the same precedence on French soil as in England. With rather less enthusiasm, the cabinet, which had a war to manage, agreed to sanction the visit. A large diplomatic party, headed by Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon himself, was deputed to accompany the Queen and ensure that she and the prince made no unilateral policy moves.
In the eyes of all Europe, Queen Victoria’s state visit to Paris in 1855 was very big news. England and France had been rivals since the Middle Ages and enemies on several continents during the eighteenth century, with wars that culminated in the great Napoleonic campaigns. The last time an English monarch had officially set foot on French soil was in 1520, when Henry VIII met Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The visit was also a personal challenge for the Queen. The French were known to be making the most elaborate preparations, and the eyes of the world’s press would be trained on the English royal couple. Paris was the fashion capital of the world, and Victoria would need to look her best. Even Albert was of the opinion that economy was not in order on so solemn and important an occasion. By good luck, the Queen was not pregnant, and for two weeks at Os-borne she devoted unusual time and thought to her wardrobe.
At the outset, things did not bode well for Queen Victoria as England’s fashion ambassadress. General Canrobert, the emperor’s cousin who had recently resigned as commander in chief of the French army in the Crimea, watched Victoria make her triumphal entry into Paris and was appalled. “In spite of the great heat,” he wrote, the Queen “had on a massive bonnet of white silk with streamers behind and a tuft of marabou feathers on top … Her dress was white and flounced, but she had a mantle and a sunshade of crude green which did not go with the rest of her costume. When she put her foot on the steps she lifted her skirt, which was very short (in the English fashion, I was told) and I saw she had on small slippers tied with black ribbons which were crossed around her ankles. My attention was chiefly attracted by a voluminous object which she carried on her arm; it was an enormous reticule—like those of our grandmothers,—made of white satin or silk, on which was embroidered a fat poodle in gold.” If Prince Albert, in his capacity of fashion adviser, was consulted about the tossing stork feathers or the gold poodle (apparently the work of a royal daughter), we might wonder if he was trying to make his wife look ridiculous.
Fortunately, both the French and the English press were anxious to promote good relations, and the Queen of England’s dubious taste in clothes did not make the front pages. Flattered outrageously by the emperor, showered with delicate attentions and gifts by the empress, gloriously sure that she had never looked so attractive, Queen Victoria enjoyed every second of her visit to Paris.
She was indefatigable, refusing to allow even the intense heat to get the better of her. She wore out her French hosts, her English ministers, her ladies-in-waiting, her servants, and her husband. Apart from the many social events and tourist opportunities scheduled by her French hosts, Victoria dragged Albert and maid of honor Mary Bulteel along for an incognito sortie in an open carriage to the Jardin des Plantes and the Grands Magasins du Louvre. How odd it was, she chirped, that in Paris people ate outside on the street, that knives in French cutlery shop windows were arranged in a circle, and that no one saw through her incognito and shouted “Vive la Reine.” On a visit to the Hôtel des Invalides, the Queen made her son the Prince of Wales kneel in homage at Napoleon I’s tomb, which pleased Napoleon III immensely and made old French soldiers weep.
When the imperial party arrived at the emperor’s box at the opera house for a command performance, the national anthems boomed and hundreds of curious faces turned upward in anticipation. The Empress Eugenie, a picture of beauty and elegance despite her pregnancy, held back timidly for a moment. Queen Victoria, who had been doing this kind of thing since she was eighteen and two months, swept forward, greeted the crowd with a broad smile and a practiced wave, and then sat down without a backward look. The crowd was impressed. Experts on protocol emerged to note in the French press that only a real queen never looks to see if her chair is in place. Effervescing with amusement, Queen Victoria won the hearts of the French and got rave reviews in newspapers all over the world.
THE EXCHANGE OF STATE visits between the French and British rulers in the summer of 1855 was royal diplomacy at its best. A political and military alliance between Great Britain and France represented a shift in the balance of power and was watched with rapt attention in all European capitals. Given all that was at stake for France and Great Britain in the ongoing struggle with Russia in both the Crimea and the Baltic, it was important for both governments to have the chance to coordinate strategy at the highest levels of command, find common ground, and begin to trust each other. But the new relationship with the imperial couple was also the catalyst for important changes in the private lives of Queen Victoria and her family.
For several days after her return to England, the Queen could talk and write of little else but France. How exciting it had been to dance in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles and go out to see a fireworks display that ended with the outline of Windsor Castle sparkling in the sky. Victoria was determined to return to France when she could, if possible incognito so she could meet more interesting people and have more fun.
The hours spent with the emperor had reminded the Queen pleasurably of the time before her marriage when she had ridden out with her attractive German cousin Alexander Mensdorff and danced the mazurka with the tsarevitch. Victoria was very much a man’s woman, delighting in male society, and in Napoleon III she found the first man since Lord Melbourne who both liked her as a woman and valued her as a monarch. On her last night in Paris, she remarked to Lord Clarendon: “It is very odd; but the Emperor knows everything I have done and where I have been since I was twelve years old; he even recollects how I was dressed, and a thousand little details it is extraordinary he should be acquainted with.” Clearly, Queen Victoria was not accustomed to getting this degree of personal appreciation. To her diary she confided, “I should not fear saying anything to him [Napoleon III]. I felt—I do not know how to express it—safe with him.” The word safe is very significant here: It is the word Victoria often uses to describe her relationship with her husband.
Unlike his wife, Albert was not unhappy to be back in England. The prince’s appetite for late nights and other men’s magnificence had never been large, and the rich
French cuisine played havoc with his digestive system. He felt well and happy only when he was on his own estate, and even there less and less. State visits reopened the chasm in status between a British queen regnant and a Coburg second son, and even on private occasions Albert found himself eclipsed by his wife. The prince cut a distinguished figure in his uniforms and dress clothes, but he had none of the Queen’s infectious charm and ready enthusiasm. His heavily accented French was stilted, while his wife could chat as idiomatically in French as she could in English and German.
As for royal diplomacy, in the public events and even in counsel, the Queen had held the limelight even though her voice was rarely heard. Just to have a woman’s presence in a counsel of war was a statement. The emperor gallantly allowed it to be known that it was the Queen herself who had persuaded him not to go to the Crimea to lead his troops in battle personally. Albert was far less sure that he had achieved any real influence over the French ruler. In Albert’s early private conversations with Napoleon III in Boulogne, the emperor had listened attentively to all that the prince had to say, but it was far from clear that he had changed his policies. The state visits had offered no opportunities for manly tête-à-têtes. Victoria was the focus of the emperor’s attention. She was the one who counted.
If Napoleon III effected a tiny breach in the united front of the royal English marriage, he also gave a significant nudge to the relationship evolving between Victoria and Albert and their eldest children. At Windsor, Emperor Napoleon and Empress Eugenie went out of their way to make friends with Vicky and Bertie, and they urged the Queen and the prince to allow both children to come to Paris for the state visit.
For the Prince of Wales, almost fourteen, Paris was a revelation. Bertie had little in common with his father. He cared for sensations, not ideas and facts; for pleasures, not principles and morals; for suits and boots and uniforms, not books and memoranda and protocols. In France he found what he wanted, what had hitherto been systematically denied him. Leaving his loathsome tutor Gibbs in England and supervised by the urbane Lord Clarendon, the Prince of Wales saw enough of Paris to conceive a lifelong love. Here the women were chic and flirtatious, the men elegant and debonair, the cuisine incomparable, the wine superb, the atmosphere deliciously decadent. What a contrast to the dyspeptic, straitlaced court his father had created in England!