royal wedding celebration

Throughout the mid-1870s it was clear to Princess Alice that the effort she had put into her children’s upbringing had proved worthwhile. High-spirited and boisterous as they were, she confidently informed her mother, that they were also considerate, well-behaved and ‘very unspoilt in their tastes, and simple and quiet children, which I think is of the greatest importance.’ While the younger girls, Irène, Alix and May remained in the nursery in the charge of a kindly English nanny, Mary Anne Orchard (‘Orchie’), their elder sisters, Victoria and Ella were making rapid progress in the schoolroom. Victoria’s enthusiasm for learning was undiminished and her mother was soon observing that she was ‘immensely grown and her figure is forming. She is changing so much - beginning to leave the child and grow into the girl.’
For Victoria, on the brink of adolescence, life in Darmstadt was also on the brink of change. In March 1877 the death of Louis’ father cast a cloud over the New Palace and brought him one step nearer to inheriting responsibility for the Grand Duchy. A month later, the gloom was broken by a visit from ‘Aunt’ Vicky and the Hohenzollern cousins - an event which the Hessian princesses had anticipated with excitement. It was some time since they had met and they ‘wished they knew [their cousins] better’ but it not did not take long to realize that Charlotte and Willy were no more companionable now that they had been in seven and a half years earlier in Cannes.
With a sudden air of sophistication, Charlotte strolled flirtatiously through the New Palace, puffing away at her cigarettes; her show of worldly-wisdom and boasts of her imminent marriage making her appear far older than her sixteen years. Willy, a student at the University of Bonn, was as arrogant and insufferable as ever and, as they played tennis or boated on the lake, twelve-year-old Ella was more unnerved than flattered by his sudden, excessive attention and promises that he would visit more often.
Barely had the Prussians left, when Alice and Louis were urgently summoned to Seeheim where Louis’ uncle, Grand Duke Louis III was dangerously ill. With great trepidation they set out from Darmstadt, fearing the worst:
“I am so dreading everything,” Alice wrote to the Queen, “and above all the responsibility of being the first in everything and people are not being ‘bienveillant.’”
By the time they reached Seeheim the eccentric old man was dead leaving Louis and Alice as the new Grand Duke and Duchess of Hesse-and-by-Rhine. Along with the title and responsibilities came several castles and hunting lodges and for the first time since their marriage they had money to spare. Typically Alice threw herself with greater devotion than ever into her new responsibilities, establishing the ‘Alice Nurses’ and a home for unmarried mothers, and struggling to ease her boyish husband into his new role. The work load was immense and years of childbearing, depression and commitment to her numerous causes frequently left the thirty-four-year-old princess exhausted.
“I have been doing too much lately,” she confessed to her mother that autumn, “and my nerves are beginning to feel the strain, for sleep and appetite are no longer good. Too much is demanded of one; and I have to do with so many things. It is more than my strength can stand in the long run.”
By New Year, 1878, Alice was too exhausted even to travel to Berlin for Charlotte’s wedding•. It was clear that she desperately needed a holiday and so that summer, Louis decided to use his new-found wealth to take the whole family on a Grand Tour of Europe. They paid another visit to Vicky before enjoying a restful cruise through the Baltic with the Duke and Duchess of Baden. When they arrived in England in July, Queen Victoria was delighted by Alice’s ‘truly beautiful children’ but was deeply disturbed by how pale and drawn their mother appeared. She hoped that the fresh sea air at Eastbourne and the Isle of Wight might help restore her vigour but even a month later had to concede that ‘she still looks very weak and delicate & is up to nothing.’
In autumn, when the Hessians had returned home, Alice enjoyed a series of visits from her brothers and sisters, and life appeared to be sinking into its usual routine when suddenly the unthinkable happened. One evening in early November, as Victoria was reading to her sisters she felt a swelling in her throat. What was initially believed to be a cold or mumps was soon diagnosed as diphtheria. One of the great killers of the age, the disease spread rapidly through the family affecting each of the children in turn. Only Ella was spared and, for her own protection, she was sent to stay with her paternal grandmother in nearby Bessungen. Throughout Hesse prayers were said for the children’s recovery and a series of telegrams flew to England, keeping Queen Victoria informed of their progress and Alice’s increasing anxiety. Night and day she nursed her children, adhering to the doctors’ instructions that to prevent further contagion she must neither touch nor kiss them. In spite of all the precautions the youngest of her daughters, four-year-old May, died in mid-November.
“The pain is beyond words,” Alice telegrammed her mother, “but God’s will be done!”
By now Louis too had contracted diphtheria and a heart-broken Alice had to attend her daughter’s funeral alone. Such was her grief that, having prayed by the tiny coffin, she could not bear to see it carried from the house and watched only through a mirror. The strain was enormous and the reports reaching Queen Victoria caused further alarm:
“Darling Alice’s courage and resignation…are quite wonderful,” she wrote to Vicky at the end of November, “but she looks too dreadfully ill and they all tremble for what will follow! She is so weak.”
Victoria and her father recovered but her younger siblings remained dangerously ill and when Ernie asked daily for reports of May’s progress, his mother could not bring herself to tell him that his little sister had died. Only when he began to improve did she break the sad news. Ernie was so distraught that Princess Alice could restrain herself no longer and, disregarding all precautions, took him in her arms to kiss him. Within days she too, had succumbed to the disease.
As soon as the news of Alice’s illness reached England, Queen Victoria dispatched her own doctor, William Jenner, to Darmstadt but, worn out by weeks of worry and sorrow, the princess had no strength left to fight.
“At times,” wrote her sister, Lenchen, “she spoke in a most touching manner about her household, also enquiring kindly after poor and sick people in the town. Then followed hours of great prostration.”
Whispering her final instructions for her children’s upbringing, she lapsed into semi-consciousness and died at the age of thirty-five on Saturday 14th December 1878 - the seventeenth anniversary of Prince Albert’s death. Her final words were a whispered, ‘Dear Papa!’
As the rest of the family gradually recovered, Ella returned to Darmstadt to find the household in mourning:
“It was a terribly sad meeting, no one daring to speak of what was uppermost in their thoughts. Poor Papa looked dreadfully miserable - Ernie very pale but otherwise calm, he does not realize it yet, as none of us can do yet. It seems like a horrible dream. Would that it were.”
From an upstairs window, the girls, clothed in black mourning, watched their mother’s coffin draped in the British flag, carried through the streets of Darmstadt, followed by their father, Uncle Leo, Uncle Christian, Uncle Bertie and crowds of weeping Hessians. Messages of condolence poured in from all over the world - from Prussia to Russia, and from Canada to England, where a devastated Queen wrote of her terrible grief at the loss of her ‘dear, talented, distinguished, tender-hearted, noble-minded, sweet child.’ All past disagreements forgotten, in a letter to Vicky she gave Alice the greatest accolade of all - a comparison with her angelic father:
“She had darling Papa’s nature, and much of his self-sacrificing character and fearless and entire devotion to duty!” ’
The only sour note came from Berlin where the heartless Queen Augusta callously gloated that Alice’s death had been a blessing since, had she lived, she would have turned her children into atheists .

Noticeable for her absence among the mourners in Darmstadt was Alice’s closest sister and confidant. To Vicky’s great sorrow, her father-in-law, the Kaiser, fearing she might bring the contagion back to Berlin, forbade her to go to Hesse for the funeral. In the event, his precautions proved futile. Within months, the epidemic spread through Prussia, claiming Vicky’s son, eleven-year-old Waldemar, among its victims.
Waldemar’s illness, coming so soon after the death of Alice and May, was a great blow to his sisters. The brightest and most loveable of the Hohenzollern brothers, his cheerful good nature had been an endless source of amusement for all the family. Now, only too aware of the fate of their aunt and cousin in Darmstadt, the girls could only wait and pray.
The Crown Princess, nursing her son herself, adopted all the precautions that Alice had taken. She wore protective clothing, bathed him in carbolic and sprayed herself before leaving the room. For a while he seemed to be improving: ‘The doctors feel quite cheerful about him,’ she told her mother on the 26th March, ‘but of course all cause for anxiety is not over yet!’
The note of caution was well founded. At three-thirty the following morning, Waldemar died. ‘The grief of my parents for the loss of this splendid son was unspeakable;’ wrote Willy, ‘our pain deep and cruel beyond words.’
Even so, the Prussian journalists used the tragedy to further denigrate the Crown Princess. Accusing her of neglecting her children, one newspaper went so far as to state that God had sent her this punishment for her cold-heartedness. At least, as her second son, Henry, now a sailor in the Prussian Navy, hurried home from Hawaii, she could find some consolation in the knowledge that her often-divided family was for once united in grief.

From the moment that Queen Victoria was told of Alice’s death, her heart went out to her Hessian granddaughters.
‘Oh! dear children,’ she wrote at once, ‘dearest beloved Mama is gone to join Grandpapa & your other dear Grandpapa & Frittie & sweet little May where there is no more sorrow or tears or separation …”
For all her complaints about Alice, she knew that she had been a devoted mother whose absence would be keenly felt in the happy Hessian household, and she promised that from now on:
“Poor old Grandmama…will try to be a mother to you.’
When the gloomy Christmas was over and the children were well enough to travel, she invited the family to Osborne for an extended holiday. The sea air, she hoped, might aid their recuperation and the meeting would give her the opportunity to prove that her promise was more than mere words.
In January 1879, when the young princesses arrived with their father and brother on the Isle of Wight, the effects of the loss of Princess Alice were immediately apparent. Victoria, thrust from childhood into the role of mother to her younger siblings, prepared to take over many of the Grand Duchess’s duties and within a short time would adopt many of her charities. Ella, too, had taken to heart her grandmother’s exhortation to be ‘truly worthy of her, to walk in her footsteps - to be unselfish, truthful, humble-minded, simple and try to do all you can for others as she did.’
But it was six-year-old Alix who seemed most deeply affected by the tragedy. The child whose exuberance had earned her the pet name ‘Sunny,’ was suddenly withdrawn and tormented by nightmares. Desperately shy, her reserved manner would often be mistaken for arrogance, and her once cheerful nature gave way to a nervousness that manifested itself in a variety of physical symptoms. Until the horrific end of her tragic life, she would be constantly tortured by thoughts of impending doom.
Queen Victoria, the doyenne of mourners, empathised completely with her bereaved son-in-law, Louis. Her own grief at the death of the Prince Consort had almost led to a nervous breakdown and rendered her incapable of continuing with her duties. Now, seeing Louis wearily wandering around the island where, sixteen years before he had spent his honeymoon, the Queen began to have doubts about his ability to raise adolescent daughters unaided. Girls, she decided, needed a mother and for their sake as much as his own, it was imperative that Louis should remarry as soon as possible.
Of course, the bride would have to be carefully chosen - not only must she be prepared to build on Alice’s foundations, but she must be equally willing to ensure that the girls spent a good deal of time under their grandmother’s supervision in England. Casting her eyes around the Court, it did not take long for the Queen to select an ideal candidate - her own youngest daughter Princess Beatrice.
Since Beatrice was only five years older than her eldest Hessian niece, and twenty-one years younger than her prospective groom, the suggestion was hardly appealing. Nor had Louis ever shown the least romantic interest in Beatrice and it must have come as a relief to them both to discover that the Church of England forbade marriage between a brother and sister-in-law. Aggrieved that her scheme had been thwarted, Queen Victoria pompously suggested that the rule could be altered, but her proposal was tactfully declined and grudgingly she had to abandon the plan. Beatrice remained at home with her mother and, in time, Louis consoled himself with a mistress - a Polish divorcée named Alexandrine de Kolomine - and a new hunting lodge at Wolfsgarten, about an hour’s drive from Darmstadt.
In time Wolfsgarten became the scene of many family reunions and holidays as cousins from all over Europe came to visit.
“The Schloss was surrounded by a collection of one-storied houses forming a square…” wrote Marie Louise, “..In the centre of this square was a small fountain where we used to go and dabble our hands and to catch the goldfish.”
Before the Hessians returned to Darmstadt at the end of February, the Queen appointed them a new governess who had strict instructions to keep her informed of every detail of their progress and development. Uncle Leopold joined them on their homeward journey and, after a break of several weeks at the new hunting lodge, Wolfsgarten, they returned the New Palace to face the reality of life without Princess Alice.
“The first months after her mother’s death were untold misery and loneliness for Princess Alix,” wrote Baroness Buxhoeveden, “[she] long afterwards remembered those deadly sad months when, small and lonely, she sat… in the nursery, trying to play with new and unfamiliar toys (all her old ones were burned or being disinfected)…The two elder Princesses tried to take their mother’s place as their father’s companions, and were constantly with him. The sixteen-year-old Princess Victoria looked after her brother and sisters, and acted as mistress of the house.”
At least they could rely on the unwavering support of the Queen who had by no means forgotten her promise to ‘be a mother’ to them. She wrote regularly to Victoria with instructions to pass on to her sisters. The pages were filled with assurances of her affection and practical guidance on all manner of subjects. In one letter she could advise them to ‘remember at dinnernot to talk too much and too loud and especially not across the table’ before reminding them of the necessity of hard work, a sensible diet and making suggestions about their choice of religious reading.
The Queen was particularly sensitive to Victoria’s position as the eldest child and frequently urged her to ensure that her younger siblings did not neglect their lessons - particularly Ernie who, according to his tutor, was becoming rather lazy. Not content to watch their progress from a distance, she encouraged other members of the family, particularly Lenchen and Leo, to make regular visits to Darmstadt and each year she invited the Hessians for extended holidays in England where her affection and admiration for each of them deepened. Victoria’s good sense and intelligence constantly impressed her; Irène was ‘a dear good child’, Alix was beautiful beyond words and Ella:
“Is sweet, sensible and also very intelligent and most lovely – indeed I rarely saw a more lovely girl and so loving and affectionate and with such charming manners.”
When it came to considering the girls’ future, the Queen was equally determined to intervene. In 1880 she wrote to Victoria, warning her not to rush into marriage ‘in the German fashion’ and yet she herself was already reviewing prospective husbands for the young princesses. It had come as pleasant news to the Queen to hear from Aunt Vicky that while Henry of Prussia was displaying a marked affection for Irène, his twenty-year-old brother Willy was paying a great deal of attention to her elder sisters. He launched Victoria on her lifelong addiction to cigarettes (no doubt concealing the fact from his mother and grandmother, both of whom detested the habit), but was still more attentive to Ella. In recent months he had been making regular excursions from Bonn to Darmstadt and before long, in his typically impulsive fashion he was declaring his love for his pretty young cousin.
Vicky was pleased to hear it. During his early adolescence, alternating between despising and adoring his English mother, Willy had developed an unhealthy fixation with her and had taken to writing her letters filled with passionate descriptions of his dreams about her. While his mother made little of his strange obsession, she was relieved to discover that had fallen in love with someone eminently more suitable. Queen Victoria, too, was elated - who better to calm the reckless boy than his gentle cousin, Ella?
Fourteen-year-old Ella was aghast. More horrified than thrilled by his overbearing attention, she confessed to Victoria that she thought him ‘absolutely horrid.’ Yet she was too polite to be openly rude to him and the more she demurred, the greater became his ardour. He followed her everywhere, hanging on her words, gazing at her photograph and writing her romantic poems. But Ella was not to be swayed and when at last Willy realised that his suit was hopeless, he could not forgive her. Even years later he could hardly bare to remain in the same room as her, but to the end of his life he kept her photograph beside that of his beautiful Aunt Alix, Princess of Wales, on his desk.
For Willy’s paternal grandmother, Queen Augusta, Ella’s refusal was seen as a personal insult for which there was no excuse. In response she voiced loud criticisms of Alice’s daughters and on one occasional even snubbed them in public. Queen Victoria, on the other hand, though equally disappointed to the extent that years later she would sigh when she thought of ‘what might have been,’ accepted Ella’s decision and consoled herself with the thought that her granddaughter’s Hessian good looks and charming manner were sure to win the attention of several other equally eligible suitors.
With so many children and grandchildren across Europe, it was impossible for the Queen to attend every family celebration but for Princess Alice’s daughters she made an exception. In 1881, she was in Darmstadt for Victoria and Ella’s confirmation - a ceremony that also marked a girl’s entry ‘into society.’ The following year Ella arrived in England for her first ‘season’ and as she accompanied her grandmother to the theatre and ballet, British newspapers were eagerly speculating on the marriage prospects of the beautiful princess. Aware of the dangers facing stunning but naïve and motherless young women, the Queen advised them not to mix too freely with young people outside the family and was gratified when Victoria replied that she and Ella were content in each other’s company, enjoying the delights of the opera at Wolfsgarten and attending to their mother’s charities, and considered themselves too young to attend balls. Victoria, as tomboyish as ever, preferred galloping apace on fast horses and watching, or even to her grandmother’s horror, participating in the shoot, to consider a future outside Darmstadt. But, in spite of their repeated reassurances, it was clear to Queen Victoria that it could not be long before such beautiful girls would be receiving proposals of marriage.

On the beautiful and interesting blog: “Cross of Laeken” there is a quotation from the Belgian Queen Louise-Marie, who was undoubtedly a saintly and ‘good’ woman, who had the best interests of her people at heart. She wrote - quoted from that blog - : “We live in hard times...we must be able to suffer and think only of those dear to us.” (Please see http://crossoflaeken.blogspot.com/2010/10/claremont-house.html for the whole story).

This is not at all about criticising any royalties or others of the past (or present) who dedicated themselves and risked their lives in service of others; it is about seeking to understand what drove these people and why their lives turned out as they did. It has been an age old question for all of us, “Why, if there is a loving God, do good people suffer?” and it becomes more apparent all the time, that so many of the most religious or devout people suffer more than any other group of people. How many who spent their lives in service of others became martyrs? (Check out any dictionary of saints and count the martyrs!). How many of the most admirable royalties came to a horrid or rather sad end? So many of the loveliest, most saintly people – and this is particularly noticeable among the most dedicated royalties of past centuries – seemed to have an almost subconscious idea that martyrdom or suffering was inevitable and holy, and in this they seemed to create their own sad fate. I do not believe they actively sought martyrdom but on some level they had absorbed the idea that suffering was a necessary part of holiness and the more one suffered, the holier and closer to heaven one was.

If I may give a personal example, my point will be easier to explain. I, for some strange reason, grew up obsessed with saints’ lives. I read and copied and absorbed quotations such as: “We must suffer in order to go to God. We forget this far too often.” (St. Madeleine Sophie Barat) or “We can only go to heaven through suffering...” (St. Vincent de Paul) or “If God causes you to suffer much, it is a sign that he has great designs for you...” (St. Ignatius Loyola) or “Jesus gives his Crown of Thorns to his friends....” (St. Bernadette) - and there are hundreds more such quotations! Even though these ideas were no longer generally taught as I grew up, (they were far more prevalent in the 18th and 19th centuries and earlier), I worked often in Lourdes – one of the loveliest places in the world – and found there that the sick and suffering are exalted. I appreciate how contentious that sounds but it is my experience. I wrote in an earlier post of the way in which everyone is roused to a hope and a cure by the litany of wonderful quotations from the Gospels but it always ends with the rather sad and resigned, “Thy will be done.” as though the will of God is something nasty. For years and years it never occurred to me that this was absolute nonsense but when it did occur to me, it was like a Damascus-road experience! Good heavens! From a Christian perspective, if suffering is good, why did Jesus heal the sick? Why didn’t he bless them instead and say, “Oh, this is good...this is the will of God! You are blessed!” ? He spent 3 years telling people: “You are the Light of the world” and “You are the salt of the earth” and “every hair on your head has been counted” and “the works I do, even greater works will you do....” But somehow, someone wanted power and rather than concentrating on his 3 years of good news about how brilliantly beautiful we all are, twisted it to concentrating on his 3 hours of suffering...and since then, particularly in the 18th/19th centuries, holiness was synonymous with suffering. The very opposite, I contend, is true. Suffering is our own creation. We believe in it and we experience it and then either blame God for it, or see ourselves as holy because of it.

Here are some examples, which are open to debate. Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Princess Alice – one of my favourite royalties – was profoundly spiritual. Like her father, Prince Albert, she was deeply aware of the poverty around her, and wrote, “Life is not pleasure...it is duty...” She went on a spiritual search, denied herself pleasure, and died of diphtheria at 35 years old. Grand Duchess Elizabeth, her daughter – and someone I admire still more – was also deeply spiritual and dedicated her life to the service of the poor. She wrote many times of the ‘need to bear the cross’ and was eventually murdered. Tsarina Alexandra had the same mystical sense of suffering (read Princess Marie Louise’s touching account of her), as did Nicholas II – both devoutly religious people (Nicholas often mentioned being born on the Feast of Job, the long suffering – and both were murdered. Karl of Austria, sickened by war, and deeply devout, died so young and so sadly. Louis XVI of France, Henry VI of England...on some level there was a belief that they had no right to happiness as long as others were suffering and they met a lot of suffering and were murdered. They believed in martyrdom, and so it came upon them.

It doesn’t seem to demonstrate any idea of a loving God, beyond the idea that what we think about, we become. The happy truth, to my mind, is that through these ‘martyrs’ we learn the lesson that suffering is nothing to be revered. It is absolutely the opposite of Life and holiness. Life isn’t about duty or suffering or anything of the sort....You are the Light of the world...I came that they might have Life and have it to the full! As for the martyrs of the past, it is again like the wonderful quotation from Lady Constance Lytton’s book "Prisons & Prisoners" :

"Have you seen the locusts, how they cross a stream? First one comes down to the water's edge and is swept away. Then another comes and another, and gradually their bodies pile up and make a bridge for the rest to pass over." She ended by saying, "Well, perhaps I made a track to the water's edge."

By the time of Lenchen’s wedding Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh was causing his mother almost as much consternation as his elder brother, Bertie, had done. A rough-speaking, hard-drinking sailor, ‘Affie’ first shocked the Queen by enjoying an affair with a woman in Malta before developing an infatuation for his sister-in-law, the Princess of Wales.
For a brief spell in early 1868 the Queen saw a possibility of redemption. That spring, during a visit to Australia, Affie fell victim to a would-be assassin and was shot in the back. While deploring the violence Queen Victoria hoped that the realization that God had spared him from death, might bring about a change of character. She was quickly disillusioned. The good wishes he received merely increased his arrogance and his behaviour became so brash that the Queen could hardly bear his company:
“His presence in my house…” she wrote to Vicky, “was a source of no satisfaction or comfort. He came only for moments and, when he did, displeased high and low and made mischief. In short he was quite a stranger to me.”
As ever the Queen saw no alternative but to adopt her typical remedy for the treatment of errant princes and set about seeking him a wife. Various brides were suggested and rejected until, at a gathering in Denmark, Affie came across twenty-one-year-old Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna, daughter of Tsar Alexander II.
The Princess of Wales was quick to promote the match; she had received favourable reports of the Grand Duchess from her own sister, Dagmar, who was married to Marie’s brother, the Tsarevich Alexander. Princess Alice, too, spoke highly of the Grand Duchess who, as a first cousin of Alice’s husband, Louis, had been a regularly visitor to Darmstadt:
“[She is so] dear and nice, with such a kind fresh face, so simple and girlish….She is very fond of children, and of a quiet country life - that is the ideal she looks for.”
But, for all their flattering descriptions and Affie’s enthusiasm for the match, the notion of an Anglo-Russian alliance was received very badly both in St. Petersburg and Windsor.
While the Tsar doubted that a rough sailor prince, nine years her senior, was worthy of his only daughter, Queen Victoria could not have been more disgruntled had Affie said he intended to marry his Maltese mistress. Since the Crimean War she distrusted all Russians and considered the Romanovs far too decadent for her liking. The prospect of an Orthodox princess tripping through her palaces surrounded by chanting priests was more than she could bear and, as usual it was Alice who took the brunt of her rage. This time she was accused of spoiling Affie and giving him ‘grand ideas’ during his visits to Darmstadt.
In an effort to distract him from Marie, Queen Victoria frantically searched for alternative candidates but Affie, dazzled by the prospect of an exotic bride and the immense wealth that she would bring from St. Petersburg, refused to be impressed. Rejecting all other suggestions, he became so obnoxious, loitering gloomily about the palace and insulting the servants that at last Queen Victoria yielded. After a great deal of haggling with the Russian court about the correct protocol, she eventually allowed Affie to depart with the Prince and Princess of Wales for Russia where the lavish wedding took place in St. Petersburg in January 1874.
When the couple returned to England, Queen Victoria saw her new daughter-in-law in a different light. She found her charming, ‘a treasure,’ and, if not conventionally beautiful, she had a ‘pretty bust.’ What was more, unlike the Princess of Wales, the Duchess of Edinburgh had no desire to fritter away the hours in endless entertaining, but enjoyed the more studious pursuits that appealed to the Queen.
“I have formed a high opinion of her, her wonderfully even, cheerful, satisfied temper - her kind and indulgent disposition, free from bigotry and intolerance, and her serious intelligent mind - so entirely free from everything fast - and so full of occupation and interest in everything makes her a most agreeable companion.’
Though it was true that she surrounded herself with icons and chanting priests, her devotion to Orthodoxy did not impinge on the rest of the family. Nor was she as materialistic as Queen Victoria had anticipated. Members of the Court were shocked to discover how little attention she gave to her appearance within her own home. On formal occasions, however, dripping in so many priceless jewels, she made her English in-laws appear dowdy in comparison.
Marie made an equally favourable impression on the British public. Shortly after the wedding, The Ladies’ Treasury reported that:
“The Grand Duchess speaks English better than most English girls; she has a most pleasing manner, and a presence singularly ladylike and distinguished.”
Unfortunately, Marie could not reciprocate the English sentiments. Life at the English Court was exceedingly tedious after the ostentation of St. Petersburg. The late nights were tiring; the food bland; and her home, Clarence House, uninteresting. Her mother-in-law’s constant interference was more than the proud daughter of the Tsar could stomach and it irked her that she, an Imperial Highness and daughter of the Tsar, should come lower in the order of precedence than her sisters-in-law - mere Royal Highnesses.
Nor, as she learned to her cost, was the taciturn Affie an ideal Prince Charming. Disliked by the servants, to whom he was often rude, his favourite occupation was drinking to excess and entertaining his guests with discordant tunes on his violin until it almost came as a relief to Marie that he spent much of his time at sea. Nevertheless, the marriage produced five children: one son and four daughters.
Nine months after the wedding the Queen was delighted at the birth of ‘young Affie,’ but relations between her and Marie were less cordial a year later when it came to a second confinement. Queen Victoria, no doubt recalling Vicky’s traumatic experiences in Prussia, was convinced that English doctors were far more skilful and delicate in matters of childbirth than any of their foreign counterparts. It both annoyed and alarmed her that, when Marie retired to her country house, Eastwell Park in Kent, she insisted on being attended by German medics. In spite of the Queen’s strong objections, Marie stuck to her guns and a perfectly healthy daughter, was born on 29th October. The christening at Windsor Castle on 15th December brought a further disagreement between mother- and daughter-in-law. Although delighted by her new granddaughter, Queen Victoria was most put out that the child was not to be called Victoria, but rather Marie Alexandra Victoria - though, within the family, she was always to be known as ‘Missy.’ Nonetheless, when Marie went further and insisted on breast-feeding the baby, Queen Victoria grudgingly resigned herself to the inevitable:
“She nurses the child - which will enchant you,” she wrote to Vicky. “As long as she remains at home - and does not publish the fact to the world - by taking the baby everywhere and can do it well - which they say she does now - I have nothing to say (beyond my unfortunately - from my earliest childhood - totally insurmountable disgust for the process).”
Whether or not Marie knew of the Queen’s aversion to breast-feeding, she was already growing weary of her constant interference and it came as relief to know that soon she could escape from England and her overbearing mother-in-law. At birth Affie had been chosen as successor to his uncle, the Duke of Coburg, and the family would eventually settle in Germany•. In the meantime, his appointment as Commander of the Mediterranean fleet provided an opportunity to move to Valetta in Malta. There, in the secluded freedom of the San Antonio Palace the Duchess of Edinburgh came into her own. There, and later in Coburg, she was able to live, as Missy described:
“…entirely according to her desires, uncontrolled by Grandmama Queen and uncriticised by those who were inclined to find her ways foreign and out of keeping with British traditions.”
It was in Malta that a second daughter, Victoria Melita (Ducky) was born on the evening of Saturday 25th November 1876 and christened in the San Antonio Palace on New Year’s Day 1877. Three weeks later, leaving their children in the care of governesses and nannies, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh embarked on a tour of Greece. Two years were to pass before Marie’s third daughter Alexandra (Sandra), was born in Coburg, and in 1884, she gave birth to her last child, Beatrice (Baby Bee), at Eastwell Park.
Just as Vicky had became increasingly determined to protect her children from the Prussian influence, so Marie, disenchanted with England, resolutely ensured that her children would be free from the English influence. Bearing in mind that her son should one day be Duke of Coburg, she dispatched him at the earliest opportunity to the military academy in Potsdam. Her daughters, too, she decided to raise as Germans, appointing for them a German governess, who spoke no English and, as Marie herself refused to speak to them in English, German became their first language causing Danish ‘Aunt Alix’ to carp:
“It is a pity those children should be entirely brought up as Germans. Last time I saw them they spoke with a very strong foreign accent - which I think is a great pity as after all they are English.”
With her great love of all things German, the Queen might have been content, but their visits to England became so infrequent that she complained that she hardly knew the ‘darling…lovely children’ and wished she might see more of them. The Princess of Wales was even more disgusted when Missy and Ducky were confirmed in the German Lutheran Church, and wrote bitterly to her son, George:
‘Now they won’t even know they have ever been English…even Aunt Vicky was furious about it.’
Her criticism fell on deaf ears. By then George was smitten by his lively Edinburgh cousins who contrasted so dramatically with his insipid sisters it was hard to believe that they had sprung from the same stock.
Histrionic and intriguing, the granddaughters of two of the most powerful monarchs in the world grew up with a love of adventure, an awareness of their own charisma and a Russian pride inherited from their mother. From their father, whom the Queen claimed they worshipped, they learned a complete disregard for convention, bordering on eccentricity.
Though strict and exacting, the Duchess did everything possible to encourage the girls to develop their many talents. Beautiful Missy, a gifted artist, sculptress and writer, was equally proficient at riding and dancing, and the mere sight of her was enough to make Cousin George’s heart race. She was deeply attached to her younger - and taller - sister, Ducky, whom she described as a ‘rather passionate and often misunderstood child.’ Like their cousin, Victoria of Hesse, the girls had a passion for riding fast horses and, on the ponies that their father had brought over from England, they galloped apace through the Maltese fields, dispelling the tension in the household as their parents grew further apart.
Compared to her adventurous sisters, Sandra, having neither their healthy constitutions nor strength of will, appeared dull. Even her mother considered her ‘uninteresting’ but her more placid temperament provided a stabilising influence among the siblings and made her an easier companion than the youngest ‘Baby Bee’ - a ‘somewhat critical’ child who would later ‘almost lose her mind’ in the throes of unrequited love.
If the Wales children gaped in wonder at their fascinating cousins, the Edinburghs must have been equally baffled by the frailty of the English girls. No two families could have differed more starkly. While the Princess of Wales’ daughters fell ill at the slightest whim, the Duchess of Edinburgh insisted that her daughters must maintain a ‘stiff upper lip’ in the face of tragedy or illness. They were not allowed to be ill; they must eat, without complaint, everything set before them and even throughout their childhood they were encouraged to participate in adult conversations.
Far from being coddled in sheltered nurseries the Edinburghs were forced, from their earliest years, to confront the very real scandals and perils faced by many monarchies of the age. Not only were the girls aware of their parents’ unhappy marriage, but they doubtless heard stories of their Russian grandfather’s affair with a woman thirty years his junior, who bore him four children. His wife, the sickly and consumptive Tsarina, unable to tolerate the cold Russian winters, frequently repaired to the warmer climes of her native Darmstadt. In her absence the Tsar installed his young mistress in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and there, to the horror of the Imperial Family the young woman remained giving birth to his child even as his unhappy wife lay on her deathbed. With inordinate haste after the Tsarina’s death, the Tsar secretly married his mistress. The whole of Europe was shocked, sympathising wholeheartedly with the late Tsarina who had, in Vicky’s opinion,
“Suffered cruelly from her husband’s infidelity and that she never uttered a murmur, complaint or reproach – nor ever mentioned the subject to a living soul but died of a broken heart.”
Within the Imperial Family a feud ensued that would remain unresolved for many more years than the brief spell that the Tsar enjoyed with his young bride.
One afternoon in March 1881, when Missy was barely six years old, her grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, was returning from a meeting at the Mikhailovsky Palace in St. Petersburg when a bomb exploded beneath his carriage. Miraculously, the Tsar emerged from the wreckage unharmed but as he turned to tend to his wounded guard, a second terrorist rushed forward hurling another device that exploded at his feet. Disfigured and bleeding, he was rushed to Winter Palace where, as his young wife fell hysterically upon his mangled body, he died in agony.
Marie hurried to St. Petersburg for the funeral and even the Russophobe Queen Victoria was aghast at the news.
“I share your horror, condemnation and sorrow,” she wrote to Vicky, “at the death (unparalleled) of the poor, kind Emperor Alexander…Poor darling Marie on whom her poor father doted, it is almost too much to bear. But she is very courageous.”
The shock waves rippled across the continent and nowhere were they felt more keenly than in the quiet Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, where Princess Alice’s daughters were already struggling to come to terms with a tragedy of their own.

“I have not spent a day without loving you; I have not spent a night without embracing you; I have not so much as drunk a single cup of tea without cursing the pride and ambition which force me to remain separated from the moving spirit of my life.”
What an interesting line from one of Napoleon’s letters to his wife. In other letters he writes of the distance between them and again blames his pride – it almost seems like he was driven beyond reason to be constantly conquering somewhere or other for fear of being conquered. When he discovered that during one of his terribly long absences Josephine had taken a lover, he was beside himself with grief but rather than treating her with physical cruelty, he returned home and when she swore it would not happen again, he accepted it....on condition that he could take what mistresses he chose – and he did. What a need to be in power...and such a tender heart. He must have lived in constant conflict between his head and his heart – his driving ambition that made him quite ruthless, and his natural tendency to love and the need to feel loved in return. Even as he invaded other countries, he tried to convince himself that he was doing so to liberate them but it was surely was merely a symptom of his need to liberate himself from the many unresolved issues from his childhood and beyond.

In spite of myself, I really do find something attractive and intriguing about him – something of the lost little boy who disguised his need to feel loved behind a display of machismo. In this he reminds me a lot of Kaiser Wilhelm II, but Napoleon had the added intellectual brilliance and personal drive to be able to achieve so many of his aims. Unlike the vile Robespierre, he didn’t insist on the slaughter of innocent bystanders- he fought only opposing armies - and he did seize a crown, but only when that crown was already there for the taking. His support for the French Revolution is something I dislike but he didn’t support all that unnecessary slaughter or the paranoia that was so characteristic of ‘The Terror.’

He divorced Josephine when he considered her too old to bear him a son to continue the dynasty but he was heart-broken by that decision and he saw that Josephine was well cared for. When he heard later of her death, he retired to his room, refusing to be seen for two days. There was a man who had the wherewithal and opportunity to achieve all that Nicholas II would have liked to have achieved – a quiet life with his wife and family – but who was so driven by ambition that he could not live that ideal. Nothing except Napoleon stopped him from living a happy life with his wife but he remained driven and unhappy. Doesn’t it show how everything is in the mind of the individual? None of us is a victim of circumstance. We are victims only of our own thoughts and beliefs and, since we have power over those, the world is our oyster!

I set out to learn more of Napoleon, believing I would dislike him but in fact, I find him fascinating. (Incidentally, as a light aside, my mother told me today that when she was a small child her grandmother, for some odd reason, had a very large portrait of Napoleon hanging on the wall. My mother – being a small child – assumed it was a picture of her late grandfather! Funny...my mother’s name is Josephine!)

Here is a fascinating site with some of Napoleon’s letters to Josephine....and then to his mistresses and to his second wife.

http://www.napoleonguide.com/lovelett.htm

(Another interlude from the Queen’s granddaughters...)

Napoleon is ‘before my time’ as it were but I’ve been learning more about his life and found it rather sad at the end to see him fall and die as he did in exile. Although he was, in my opinion, a desperate little boy still having to overcome the bullies and humiliations of his childhood - and so became so obsessed with power over others to make up for the lack in himself, consequently leading to the death of 13 million soldiers across Europe – there is something attractive and inspiring about him. He was absolutely driven by ambition to the extent that when everything went wrong for him, he never stopped and complained, he simply did what he did and came back again! Exiled to Elba, for instance, after having been so successful a general and Emperor of France, he simply turned himself into Emperor of Elba (small island that it was) and did what he had done in France – made the place beautiful with trees and roads etc. etc. and when he had done all he could do there, he returned to France and by the sheer power of his personality and charisma, won the hearts of those who were sent to prevent his return. Unlike many revolutionaries, I think he had a heart – he genuinely loved Josephine – but, as with everything else in his life, he would not allow that heart, which could sometimes be so tender and he was not a cruel man, to stand in the way of his ambition.

Ultimately he fell...and that is the way of those who seize power, isn’t it? They all seem to spend their lives looking over their shoulders because they know that what they have done to others, others will do to them (Trotsky’s end...William the Conqueror, even, died alone and naked...Stalin left to die alone...). It surely comes from deriving power from others. It becomes like an insatiable hunger. Napoleon achieved greatness, but was never satisfied. He had to go on and on and on, even when he knew it was hopeless, trying to fill the need to feel secure, although such a need was insatiable since he sought that security from others and was never able to find it in himself.


At the opposite end of the spectrum, is Nicholas II. A man who never wanted power but had it thrust upon him and, while working just as hard as Napoleon did to maintain an Empire, dreamed always of a simple life with his wife and family. Napoleon was prepared to sacrifice Josephine, the love of his life, in order to continue his dynasty. Nicholas, a man who was secure in himself and did not need power from others, was prepared to sacrifice everything for the love of his wife and family.

Who was the greater leader and who was better off in the end? A man who achieved so much and is seen always as a hero...and who died alone and sad seeing his life’s work taken from him, or a man who is always seen as weak but who ended his life secure in his own faith, surrounded by his family and with a clear conscience? Napoleon ended his life writing his memoirs and reliving his former glories. Nicholas’ life was cut short by murderers before he had the chance to do that but I doubt he would have felt any need to justify himself anyway. I really believe that these lines from ‘King Lear’ (ah! the joy of two passions intertwined – Shakespeare and the Romanovs in one post!) could have been written for what Nicholas said to his wife when they were in captivity...

Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage...
...so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon us the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon

It’s all so endlessly fascinating!!

Only six Weeks after the Wedding of Duchess Tatiana of Oldenburg another Wedding took place id the Grand Ducal Family. Her cousin duchess Beatrix, older daughter of Duke Huno and his wife Fenita, married Sven von Storch. The civil marriage took place on the Castle of Eutin on 22. October. On the next day 23. October the oecumenuic religious Ceremony took palce at the Castle church of Eutin. Among the guest wher duke Friedrich August and Duchess Donata of Oldenburg
http://www.shz.de/nachrichten/lokales/ostholsteiner-anzeiger/artikeldetails/article/111/die-herzogin-heisst-jetzt-von-storch.html
http://www.ln-online.de/artikel/2871916

Princess Helena Victoria, known in the family as Lenchen, trudged through the corridors of Windsor, doing her utmost to fulfil the Queen’s requests in the manner appropriate to her station. It was not a role that she relished. As a child, having neither the vivacity nor intellectual brilliance of her elder sisters, she had preferred to play with her brothers in the model fort at Osborne than to master the usual accomplishments of a young princess. Her father, with an understanding ahead of his time, appreciated her skills as a horsewoman and her love of the outdoor life and, rather than stifling her natural talents, encouraged her to develop her gifts however unconventional they appeared. It did not matter to him that she lacked the grace of Vicky and Alice. He recognized her musical, linguistic and artistic abilities and praised her equestrian skill; and few things in life gave Lenchen greater joy than winning her father’s approbation.
Now, as she moved awkwardly along the corridors of Windsor, Lenchen was only too aware that Prince Albert’s untimely death had brought those halcyon days to a premature and permanent end.
“Oh, if you knew how miserable I am…” she wrote to a friend, “I adored Papa, I loved him more than anything on Earth. His word was a most sacred law and he was my help and adviser.”
Only seven months after the Prince Consort had died, Lenchen faced a further wrench: her sister Alice departed for Darmstadt, leaving her to take over her duties as their mother’s chief support and confidante. Forced into a role to which she was ill suited, Lenchen had seen her talents smothered in the morbid atmosphere of the court and there were times when she had to confess that she wished she had been born a boy.
In 1865 the future appeared bleak for Queen Victoria’s third daughter. Her only hope of escape from the gloom of perpetual mourning was marriage, but finding a suitable husband was proving no easy quest. The Queen, considering her easier to please than her elder sisters, had become so dependent on her company, that she was unwilling to with her. There were younger sisters who might eventually replace her, but Louise was so volatile and Beatrice so young that for now there seemed little hope of escape. The Queen had no serious objection to the idea of Lenchen marrying but having already ‘lost’ two daughters to foreign courts, she insisted that any prospective suitor must be willing to settle in England. Since a commoner was out of the question for a daughter of the monarch• and few foreign princes would accept the Queen’s stipulations, the prospects were unpromising.
To make matters worse, as Lenchen well knew, she had few personal charms to attract an appropriate parti. A plain girl, in her mother’s opinion, with a tendency to put on weight too easily, Queen Victoria left her with few illusions about her desirability:
“Poor dear Lenchen,” she had written to Vicky, “though most useful and active and clever and amiable, does not improve in looks and has great difficulties with her figure and her want of calm quiet graceful manners.”
Vicky remained optimistic. In spite of the Queen’s disparaging remarks, her sister, she believed, had a good deal to offer a husband. Though she may not have been the most beautiful of princesses, her amber eyes were accentuated by her masses of wavy brown hair and, apart from the fact that she was the daughter of the Queen of England, her docile nature and kindly manner gave her all the attributes of an ideal Victorian wife.
Clutching her Almanac de Gotha, Vicky scoured the German principalities and before the end of the year, a rather sorry suitor was unearthed in the person of an old friend of Fritz’s, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein.
At first sight, Christian had little to offer the twenty-year-old princess. Fifteen years her senior, balding, with poor teeth and a propensity to stoutness, his family, the Dukes of Augustenburg, had lost their lands during Prussia’s annexation of Schleswig-Holstein. To the Queen, however, his impoverishment proved advantageous: landless himself, he would be more than willing to settle in a house that she would provide in England. Lenchen was whisked off to Germany for a meeting and was delighted by what she found. What Christian lacked in youth and good-looks he made up for in kindness and good manners.
He shared her love of horses and was, as his daughter later recalled:
“…A very remarkable person…a splendid shot, a very keen horseman, and had a profound knowledge of forestry. In addition to all these outdoor interests he loved poetry and literature…He had inherited from his mother a love of flowers and gardening.”
What was more, since he readily accepted the Queen’s offer of a home in England, Lenchen would face none of the traumas of leaving the familiar world to become a stranger in a foreign court as her elder sisters had done.
From their first meeting Queen Victor liked Christian enough to make allowance for his habit of chain-smoking cigars and, though she sighed, ‘if only he looked a little younger!’ she shared Vicky’s view that, with a few adjustments to his teeth and manners, he would make an ideal son-in-law.
The future suddenly appeared brighter, and when Christian proposed Lenchen gladly accepted him. The Queen was content; Lenchen was happy; Vicky was satisfied with her part in bringing them together; and none of them was prepared for the furore that the engagement was about to raise.
The outraged Princess of Wales objected that, since Christian had fought against the Danes in the seizure of Schleswig-Holstein, she could not accept him into the family. Bertie supported his wife and stated categorically that if the wedding went ahead they would not attend. From Darmstadt too, Alice opposed the match. Her sister, she believed, was being rushed into marriage with an unattractive and older man simply so that her mother could keep her ‘in service’ forever. The Queen responded by writing to her relatives across Europe that Alice was being ‘sharp and grand and wanting to have everything her own way’ and when the press caught a whiff of the dispute, all kinds of improbable stories appeared in the papers. Christian, it was reported, was a madman and a bigamist who had already fathered several children whom the princess was about to adopt.
In the end, it was left to much-maligned Alice to restore the peace. When a flustered Lenchen assured her that she truly wished to marry her not-so-handsome prince, Alice relented,
“I am so glad she is happy,” she wrote to the Queen, “and I hope every blessing will rest on them both that one can possibly desire.”
Though her third pregnancy and Austro-Prussian War prevented her from travelling to England for the wedding, she was delighted to hear that the Queen had provided her two elder daughters with new frocks for the occasion and even succeeded in persuading Bertie to attend the ceremony, which took place at Windsor Castle in July 1866.
The newly-weds settled into Frogmore House on the Windsor estate where life was peaceful but dull. As Alice had predicted, Lenchen remained on call to the Queen’s slightest whim, following her progress to the tedium of Balmoral each spring and autumn, Osborne for Christmas and summer, and back to Windsor in early spring. For her efforts she received the same £30,000 dowry as had been granted to her sisters, but, to impecunious Alice’s great annoyance, she also received a larger annuity of £6,000 and, of course, a free home.
Christian settled easily into his new life in England. With no official duties to occupy his time, he was perfectly content to loll about the gardens, puffing at his cigars until the Queen, watching him through the window, found his idleness disconcerting and, after sending a curt message telling him to find something useful to do, created him Ranger of the Windsor Estate. Even then, the responsibilities were so undemanding that for the most part he occupied himself by shooting birds. One day while out on a shoot, his brother-in-law, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught (ironically, a great marksman), accidentally shot him in the eye. Doctors were rushed to the scene and after a careful examination informed Queen Victoria that the wounded eye would have to be removed. Whatever Christian’s view of the matter, the prospect of a one-eyed son-in-law so disgusted the Queen that she refused to permit surgery, which was, in her opinion:
“…Quite unnecessary as formerly she knew several people with shot eyes who did not have it done and who did not become blind: that nowadays doctors were always taking out eyes; and in short spoke as if [the doctors] wished to do it for [their] own brutal pleasure.”
Eventually, she relented and the damaged eye was removed after which Christian acquired a large selection of glass eyes which he would take out and display to guests.
A year after the wedding, Lenchen gave birth to her first son, Christian Victor (Christle) -‘a nice little thing’ according to Vicky. Two years later a second boy, Albert, was born to be followed in May 1870 by Victoria Helena (Thora) and, in the summer of 1872, Marie Louise, whom the Queen had wanted to be named ‘Georgina.’ By the time of Marie Louise’s birth the ‘Christians’ had moved into Cumberland Lodge - ‘a warm red brick covered with Virginia creeper and honeysuckle’ - where in 1876 a third son, Frederick Harold, was born but lived for only eight days.
The stresses of pregnancy weighed heavily on Lenchen’s nerves and, following the birth of a stillborn child in 1877, she became increasingly convinced that all kinds of ills had befallen her, the symptoms of which were largely in her own imagination. Even her mother, while conceding that Lenchen was ‘good’ and ‘amiable,’ lost patience with her bouts of hypochondria, and warned Vicky to show her less sympathy as:
“…complaining is partly her (unfortunate) habit…But she is so inclined to coddle herself (and Christian too) and to give way in everything that the great object of her doctors and nurse is to rouse her to make her think less of herself…”
To calm her nerves Lenchen took up smoking in secret (since her mother detested the habit and would not permit it in her palaces) and frequently badgered her doctors for prescriptions of laudanum. Eventually her addiction became so alarming and made her behaviour so bizarre that the Queen and Prince Christian persuaded the doctors to prescribe her with placebos instead.
In spite of her personal problems, Lenchen diligently carried out her duties both as a princess and as a mother. Patronising various medical organisations, she helped establish the Red Cross in England and played a major role in establishing the Princess Christian Nurse Training Schools and the Princess Christian District Nurses, which proved so successful that, years later, her niece the Tsarina would establish similar institutions in Russia. Like her elder sisters, Lenchen took a passionate interest in music, religion and politics - a subject about which her elder daughter, Thora, would prove equally enthusiastic.
Devoted to her children, Lenchen raised them according to the broad educational principles established by her father. Her eldest son, Christle, was the first royal prince to attend school, Wellington College, as opposed to being educated at home. The girls too, like their cousins in Darmstadt, were provided with an extensive curriculum and learned several languages from an early age. They spoke French to their maid in French, and German to their father who also taught them mathematics and inspired them with his own love of poetry and music.
Living in such close proximity to their grandmother, the children were particularly close to Queen Victoria who was happy to take care of them while their parents travelled abroad.
“Nothing can beat Lenchen’s boy – who one really sees grow daily,” the Queen wrote of Christle – “He is a splendid fellow,”
She was not, however, quite so taken by his sister. On one occasion while Lenchen was in the South of France the Queen sent her a telegram reporting:
“Children very well but poor little [Marie] Louise very ugly.”
Marie Louise purported ‘ugliness’ (which certainly was not in evidence as she grew older) did not prevent the Queen from taking a great interest in her granddaughters’ upbringing. From their earliest years she instilled them with the her own belief in the value of simplicity and necessity of treating members of the household with respect. Like their Hessian cousins, the girls were not permitted to expect servants to do for them what they could for themselves. On one occasion, while staying at Balmoral, Thora asked if she might be allowed to play tennis with two maids of honour.
“Grandmama’s reply was ‘Yes, so long as you pick up the balls yourself. Since it’s Sunday I do not think it right to make others work for your amusement.’”
Respect for servants was one thing, over-familiarity another. The Queen would never allow her granddaughters to forget that they were princesses with all the advantages and duties that their position entailed. Marie Louise recalled a dinner at Balmoral when she was fifteen-years-old:
“I was sitting next to the Lord Chancellor, feeling very shy and rather inarticulate. I was completely dumbfounded when a voice from over my head whispered in my ear, ‘The Queen wishes the young princesses to remember that their duty is to entertain the neighbours at table.’ After this, before coming down to dinner, I used to rehearse little bits of conversation so as to carry out my grandmother’s injunction.”
Poor Thora received a further reprimand on her way into dinner, when the Queen, noticing her low décolletage, whispered:
“A little rose in front dear because of the footmen.”
Though firmly established in England, the girls spent much of their youth traipsing after their mother through the spas of Germany and France in search of a cure for her numerous psychosomatic ailments. The continental tours not only inspired Marie Louise with a great love of travel that would remain with her all her life, but also brought her and Thora into frequent contact with their German cousins in Potsdam and Hesse. Intelligent, gentle and unassuming, they were welcome guests in Berlin and were equally well-received in Darmstadt, where they soon discovered they had a great deal in common with Princess Alice’s daughters. Similar in age to the younger Hessian children, they too had been raised simply, cleaning their own rooms, wearing inexpensive clothes, and assisting their mother in her many nursing projects. All the cousins loved animals (a trait no doubt inherited from Queen Victoria, who spoiled and pampered her numerous dogs), and like Uncle Louis in Hesse, Prince Christian, the avid gardener, taught his daughters to grow flowers. Like Aunt Alice, too, Lenchen often invited the great performers of the day to sing for them. Princesses or not, the children did not always appreciate their mother’s theatrical guests and were not above making occasional social gaffes. Once, following a private performance by a renowned German actress, Irène of Hesse had candidly declared, “That was ghastly!”
Marie Louise made a similar faux pas when the singer Jenny Lind appeared at Windsor:
“She came up to the schoolroom and said she would like to sing to the ‘dear children’ - which she did…I went up to her when she had finished and said, ‘Dear Madame Goldschmidt, must you always make such a noise when you sing?’ All she said was ‘Sweet child’ - and kissed me.”
With so much in common, it was unsurprising that Marie Louise and Alix of Hesse, born within two months of one another, soon became the closest of friends, and ‘more like sisters than cousins.’
Back in England, life in Cumberland Lodge passed serenely for Lenchen’s daughters. They continued their lessons, looked after their pets, and played happily together by the lake or in the woods of Windsor.
“Few sisters were really so different in temperament and perhaps character as [Thora] and I,” wrote Marie Louise, “yet I do not think that any two sisters have been quite such close and intimate companions and friends as we were. I always referred to her in everything. She had such wonderful judgement, was so clear-headed and wise, and was so loyal and strong in her affection. With it all, she was very humble and very diffident about her own gifts.”
Their gentleness and good sense endeared them to their Wales cousins, though time had done nothing to ease Princess Alexandra’s prejudice against Prince Christian. While Queen Victoria delighted in having the little princesses so close at hand, ‘Aunt Alix’ could never forgive their father’s part in the Schleswig-Holstein affair and she was not above making childish and cruel remarks about the girls. Overlooking the plainness of her own frail daughters, she mocked their appearance, referring to Thora as ‘the Snipe’ - a nickname chosen by her brothers because of her long nose and thin features.
If the Christians were aware of her jibes, they might have known better than to take her words to heart. After all, their aunt could be equally cutting in her descriptions of the most flamboyant of all the royal cousins - the daughters of ‘Uncle Affie,’ Duke of Edinburgh.

(A brief interlude from “Queen Victoria’s Granddaughters”, which will continue shortly...)

I love history! I just love it with a passion! And I think its appeal isn’t so much the awful cloistered professors-in-towers passing judgement on individual people of the past or the way that old text books make statements such as ‘Germany invaded Poland’ (as if this bit of land could suddenly uproot itself and become that bit of land?? What is Germany? What is Poland? Pieces of land marked out by mankind) but rather it is a never-ending unfolding fascination with what it is to be human. Everyone seems to love a good story – be it in sermons, radio plays, snatches of films – as soon as the beginning of a story is heard, it captures your attention. History is filled with amazing stories and maybe we love stories of other people because basically we are all one and learning to understand ourselves.

Here’s a thing that dawned on me today: isn’t it interesting that virtually all revolutions are born of a self-righteousness which is a mask for hatred and jealousy? And which people are, for the most part, the leaders of revolutions? Little boys with unresolved issues from their childhood acting out their theme on the world stage.

When young, Napoleon Bonaparte, the ‘little Corsican upstart’ who was treated with disdain, ostensibly despised the French. (I think Napoleon was a brilliant general but a very unhappy man who came to an unhappy end - the painting of him was propaganda to continue his myth). He was so jealous of the power of France that his overwhelming desire was to rule that country no matter who stood in his way. He adpated himself to the revolution, spoke up for revolutionary values....and made himself a tyrannical Emperor of France. So much for his 'equality and freedom'.

I wonder if Austrian-born Hitler, knowing that during WW1 the Germans believed their alliance with Austria had them ‘shackled to a corpse’ felt the same inferiority complex about Germany. Interesting how both those men were driven by hatred to rise above their circumstances and ultimately to self-destruct. Lenin and Stalin hated the Tsarist regime but were so quick to move into the Tsar’s palaces (once they had murdered him and his family) and play at being Tsars – and acting out a far more violent and cruel tyranny than the Tsars ever exacted.

Napoleon and Hitler both were devoted to their mothers but disliked their fathers and saw them as weak (Oedipus?). They railed throughout their childhood against perceived slights, and rather than learning to regain the power over their own feelings and self esteem, found a need to dominate others in order to feel secure. No one cane really control anyone else...so obviously when they realised that, they both moved into self-destruction.

What is most fascinating of all is the idea that ‘ordinary’ people believed and continue to believe that their wellbeing lies in the hands of others. Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and every other leader who has ever seized power, was able to do so – and to go on to commit terrible atrocities - because a great number of people felt a need for someone else to take control of their lives and make decisions for them, and these ‘leaders’ (lost little boys) were glad of the adulation and enjoyed the power trip.

I think humanity has grown up a bit recently, but there are still people who view their leaders as the controllers of their lives. People create leaders whom they worship (did you see the election of President Obama?) or love to hate (did you see the applause at Tony Blair's election victory, or Mrs. Thatcher's...and did you watch them depart?). Bizarre how people believe that anyone else has any real control over their lives!

Today and yesterday, endless news articles report ad nauseam of the effects of the government cuts to public spending but I think we give too much attention to what is decided among politicians. It really doesn’t have so large an effect on our lives as people like to believe. It’s all just stories and we have far more power over which stories we choose to listen to, and how we choose to live our lives, than most of us realise.

Before continuing with “Queen Victoria’s Granddaughters”, today I received word of the imminent availability of a new book which is going to be wonderful. No matter how many biographies appear, nothing ever quite compares to the feeling that comes with reading the actual letters exchanged between people. Queen Victoria’s letters to her daughter are far more interesting than any biography, as are the original letters of any other historical person. This book is entirely new as these letters have not been seen before. The book is: The Correspondence of the Empress Alexandra of Russia with Ernst Ludwig and Eleonore, Grand Duke and Duchess of Hesse. 1878-1916 collected, edited and compiled by Petra H. Kleinpenning. Below is a description of the book, which will soon be available on Amazon:

“As young people, Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine (1872-1918) and her brother, Hereditary Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse and by Rhine (1868-1937), were always together. They remained on close terms when Alix married Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and became the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. This book presents the complete collection of letters and postcards, written in English and German, that Alix wrote to her brother over the years 1878-1916, from moving children's notes to poignant letters written during the cataclysm of World War I. Also included are Alix's letters to Ernst Ludwig's second wife, Grand Duchess Eleonore, some letters from Tsar Nicholas II to Ernst Ludwig, and the few letters and postcards from Ernst Ludwig and Eleonore to the imperial couple that survived the days of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Alix's letters to Ernst Ludwig and Eleonore focus on the weal and woe of her family and friends, on official receptions and military manoeuvres, the concerts and performances she attended, her charities and her war work. This unique private correspondence between Alix and Ernst Ludwig and Eleonore provides additional first-hand details about the everyday lives of these important people in the history of Russia and Hesse and increases our understanding of their characters, interests, and relationships.”

http://www.bod.de/index.php?id=1132&objk_id=405799
I can’t wait to read it!

Of all her nine children, none had caused the Queen as much consternation as her eldest son and heir. Compared throughout his childhood to his elder and more brilliant sister, Vicky, Bertie could not have been a greater disappointment to his parents. His lack of enthusiasm for study, his inability to learn, even his appearance distressed his mother to the extent that she feared that he had inherited the wayward characteristics of her degenerate Hanoverian uncles.
The Queen was haunted by the memory of those ‘terrible’ uncles who, a generation earlier, had brought the royal family into such disrepute. Since her accession both she and Prince Albert had worked hard to restore the reputation of the monarchy, presenting the nation with an ideal example of marital fidelity and domestic harmony that was beyond reproach. No one, least of all their eldest son, could be permitted to tarnish that image and, from his earliest years, Bertie’s parents aimed to mould him into their ideal of the perfect prince. To prevent the taint of any outside influence, he was isolated from boys of his own age and provided instead with strict tutors and even stricter regimes of study. The scheme was not a success. Bertie, criticised on all sides, struggled in the schoolroom while his natural gifts of diplomacy and congeniality were stifled and ignored. When his frustration exploded in rage, he was beaten.
Unsurprisingly, the young prince leaped at the first chance of freedom. Escaping from the ‘minders’ sent to protect him (or rather his morals) during his student days at Cambridge, he sought the kind of friends who were the antithesis of his parents and who encouraged his budding interest in drinking, gambling and fine cigars. During the university vacation in the summer of 1861, while he was attached to a regiment of guards stationed at the Curragh near Dublin, his companions managed to smuggle a pretty actress into his rooms. That night, the delighted prince embarked upon a womanising career that would continue for the rest of his life.
When word of his escapade reached Windsor, the pious Prince Consort was appalled. Although already exhausted and probably suffering from the typhoid• that finally killed him, he set out at once to Cambridge. On a wet November afternoon, father and son walked for hours in the rain, Prince Albert expressing his disappointment and disgust at Bertie’s foolishness and warning him that such scandals could pose a threat to the monarchy. Bertie was duly repentant but by the time his father returned to Windsor, his health was already failing.
The Queen refused to believed that her angelic husband was dying, and when the end came, less than a month after his visit to Cambridge, she was convinced his death was due to the shock of Bertie’s ‘fall.’ For months she could hardly bear to look at her son ‘without a shudder’ and found it virtually impossible to forgive him no matter how hard she tried. Nevertheless, he was ‘My dear Angel’s own child - our Firstborn’ and would one day be king so to deliver him from further temptation, he urgently needed a wife.
Even before Prince Albert’s death, Vicky had been entrusted with the difficult task of finding a suitable bride for her brother. Detailed with the necessary qualities - good health and looks, unsullied background and preferably a German - she had scoured the pages of the Almanac of Gotha, the bible of royal matchmakers, and made lists of all the available young princesses she had met in European courts. The Queen read her detailed reports with interest and, having rejected various others on the grounds of bad teeth, a frail constitution, or adherence to the wrong religion, she noted that one princess stood out above all - Alexandra, the attractive seventeen-year-old daughter of Crown Prince Christian of Denmark.
“She is the sweetest girl who ever lived,” Vicky informed her mother, “and full of life and spirits…She has always been strong and healthy as possible and has never ailed anything in her life except having the measles…I own Princess A. of Holstein is the only one of these princesses for whom I feel portée – it would be dreadful if this pearl went to the horrid Russians.”
Intrigued by Vicky’s effusive descriptions, the Queen decided that the princess was worth ‘looking over’ and arranged a meeting on neutral ground, the Laeken Palace in Brussels. From the first encounter, Queen Victoria was enchanted and wrote enthusiastically to Vicky assuring her that, though Alexandra suffered from a slight deafness, her recommendation was perfect - what a pity she wasn’t German! By the time that Bertie was introduced to her, his mother and sister had effectively decided that Alexandra was to be his bride. The wedding took place in March 1863 - an occasion marred only by the behaviour of four-year-old Willy of Prussia. who squealed throughout the service and bit and kicked his young uncles Arthur and Leopold when they tried to restrain him.
Ten months later, Alexandra did her duty by providing the country with an heir, Prince Albert Victor, (‘Eddy’) - “a perfect bijou,” in the Queen’s opinion, “ –very fairy-like but quite healthy, very wise-looking and good…He is very placid almost melancholy-looking.”
The following year a second son, George, was born but the lure of a beautiful wife and the responsibilities of fatherhood did little to quell Bertie’s love of the high life. Unable to win the Queen’s confidence and consequently denied any serious role in constitutional affairs, he passed his time in an endless round of parties, race going and shooting with the ‘Marlborough House Set’ of fast living, wealthy and fashionable cronies who shared his taste for eating, drinking, gambling and womanising.
Reports of the goings on at Marlborough House irritated and worried the Queen. While she could not deny that the beautiful Alexandra had undoubtedly won the hearts of her people, she had turned out to be a naïve and rather empty-headed young woman whose persistent unpunctuality drove Bertie to such despair that he eventually ordered all the clocks in Sandringham to be set half-an-hour fast.
“I am sorry too for Bertie;” Queen Victoria complained to Vicky, “I don’t think she makes his home comfortable; she is never ready for breakfast - not being out of her room till 11 often, and Bertie breakfasts alone and then she alone.”
Still worse, in her mother-in-law’s opinion, Alexandra shared her husband’s love of entertaining to the extent that the Queen felt obliged to warn her that such frivolous behaviour would not only ruin the reputation of the royal family but the late nights would ruin her health and that of her ‘frail puny’ babies who lacked the robust constitutions of their German cousins.
Bertie and Alexandra paid little heed to the warnings, and in the winter of 1866-7 the Queen’s predictions proved accurate. During the course of her third pregnancy, the princess contracted rheumatic fever and lay for several days in a critical condition. While the country anxiously awaited news, Bertie ignored the telegrams urging him to return to London and remained instead at the Windsor races. Even when he did eventually arrive at Marlborough House and made the token gesture of moving his desk to his wife’s bedside, he continued to entertain his rowdy friends while she lay on her sickbed upstairs.
On 20th February 1867, after a tortuous labour unrelieved by chloroform, Alexandra gave birth to a daughter, Louise (whom the Queen believed should have been named Victoria - ‘but upon those subjects Bertie and Alix do not understand the right thing.’). Three months later the baby was christened by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Marlborough House where her godparents included three of her aunts - Alice, Lenchen and Beatrice.
Though the Princess of Wales gradually regained her strength, the illness had accentuated her deafness and left her with a permanent limp•. Throughout her protracted convalescence, Bertie embarked on numerous affairs so openly that even the Queen was to comment that her daughter-in-law’s lot was not an easy one. As rumours of his neglect became known, his reputation plummeted, reaching its nadir when he was cited in the infamous Mordaunt case. While suffering from post-natal depression Lady Harriet Mordaunt, a close friend of the prince, confessed to her husband that the child’s father could have been one of several highly placed men including the Prince of Wales. Her outraged husband immediately began divorce proceedings and Bertie was called to court. Though he acquitted himself well and Lady Mordaunt was declared insane, his standing in the eyes of the public seemed irreparably damaged. Hissed in the theatre and jeered in the street, he seemed very much in danger of doing precisely what his mother had feared and destroying the image of the monarchy. Yet, neither public outcry nor family criticism could curtail his pleasure seeking.
By a strange freak of fortune it took a near-disaster to restore his tarnished image. In the winter of 1871 he contracted typhoid and for several days his life was despaired of. His sister Alice, who been staying at Balmoral with the Queen, was soon at his bedside playing the same role as she had played during her father’s fatal illness a decade before. On the 14th December - the tenth anniversary of the Prince Consort’s death, it appeared that Bertie was dying when quite unexpectedly in the evening he began to rally. The country rejoiced at his recovery and the Queen forced herself from her seclusion to attend a thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s Cathedral after which she appeared in public on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for the first time since her widowhood. When at last the Queen returned home satisfied that the monarchy was secure and certain that Bertie’s brush with death would lead him to adopt a less frivolous lifestyle. It was a vain hope. With so few responsibilities to occupy him it was not long before he returned to his old routine of gambling, shooting and womanising.
Alexandra endured Bertie’s infidelities with a dignified silence, and bore him two more daughters - Victoria (Toria) on July 6th 1868, and Maud a year later. A third son, Alexander, was born at Sandringham in 1871 but died within hours of his birth.
If her husband failed to give Alexandra the attention she craved she was determined to receive it from her children. Jealously overprotective, she virtually smothered them with affection. No aspect of their lives escaped the notice of ‘Motherdear’ leaving Queen Victoria to complain that she spoiled them terribly. For all her glamorous lifestyle, she was in constant attendance in the nursery, bathing the babies and tucking them into bed each evening before donning her jewels and ball gowns to entrance her guests at dinner.
To the young German princesses, dazzled by the glamour of the Marlborough House Set, it must have come as a surprise to find their Wales cousins so insipid. Of the three girls, only Maud, whose love of the outdoor life and manner of speaking in schoolboy slang earned her the nickname ‘Harry’, showed any of the spirit common to her cousins. The ‘frail puny babies’ grew into frail puny children, constantly prone to colds, toothache, abscesses, sciatica and a myriad of other real or imaginary ailments. So fearful was Louise for her health that she took her physician on holiday with her, while ‘precious’ Toria collapsed at the slightest provocation.
“The children are very dear and pretty,” observed Alice, “but my boy is as tall as little Louise, and of course much bigger.”
Even when they were well, they were hardly the most scintillating companions for their highly-educated cousins. Unlike her sisters-in-law, the Princess of Wales saw little need to tax her daughters with learning and Bertie’s recollection of his own miserable years in the schoolroom made him loath to inflict the same torture on his children. Maud was an able linguist and Louise a talented musician, but their education was so haphazard that Queen Victoria despaired of their ignorance and lack of serious interest in anything.
“Alix and I never will or can be intimate;” she wrote in exasperation, “she shows me no confidence whatsoever especially about the children...”
Occasionally the girls accompanied their mother to hospitals and the homes of their Sandringham tenants but, for the most part, life beyond the narrow confines of their nursery remained a mystery to them. They lived and played in their own sheltered world, innocently delighting in each other’s company to the extent that Queen Victoria complained that Alexandra was ‘unfortunately most unreasonable and injudicious about her children.’ On one point, however, Alexandra satisfied the Queen by insisting on raising her with “…great simplicity and an absence of all pride.”
Unfortunately, the ‘absence of all pride’ was coupled with a complete lack of confidence. With the exception of Maud, who had inherited her mother’s fine features, they were not pretty girls and, overshadowed by their charismatic parents, they found few occasions to shine. Unused to the company of strangers, their diffidence left them tongue-tied in social gatherings and warranted the cruel if apt epithets ‘the whispering Waleses’ and ‘their Royal Shynesses.’
“They always, if I can so express it,” wrote their cousin Marie of Edinburgh, “spoke in a minor key en sourdine. It gave a special quality to all talks with them, and gave me a strange sensation, as though life would have been very wonderful and everything very beautiful, if it had not been so sad.”
Even as they grew into their late teens, Alexandra was determined to keep them as little children, making them emotionally and intellectually far younger than their years. Princess May of Teck, who would eventually marry their brother, George, was astonished to attend a birthday party for nineteen-year-old Louise only to discover that it was to be a children’s tea party. Their ‘sweet and prettily arranged’ rooms, cluttered with ornaments, shells and souvenirs, resembled nurseries and they continued to refer to each other by childish nicknames - Toots, Gawks and Snipey. They found their greatest enjoyment in games and giddy pranks, which doubtless bored the more serious Hessians and were treated with contempt by the proud Hohenzollerns.
Not that the Germans’ opinion was of any consequence to the Danish Princess of Wales. Since Bismarck’s seizure of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark she made no secret of her hatred of all things German - and more especially Prussian. That in itself was sufficient to alienate her from other members of the family and causing the Queen to moan that ‘her feelings are so anti-German and yet so little really English that she is no real help – good, kind, dear as she is and much as I love her.’
For Vicky, whom she liked, Alexandra made an exception, but her prejudice was never more in evidence than when it came to the wedding of Bertie’s younger sister, Lenchen.

The turrets of Windsor rising through the clouds, beckoned like a fairy-tale castle to the German cousins for whom few childhood pleasures were more thrilling than their regular visits to in England. The sight of the ‘pretty little English houses,’ and their gardens, and above all, the pleasure of meeting ‘dearest grandmama’ again made the long journey and Irène’s sea-sickness suddenly seem worthwhile. Whatever her disputes with their parents, Queen Victoria was kindly and tolerant grandmother who went out of her way to make their holidays a pleasure and as Alice told her mother: ‘there are none of us who would not gladly have our children live under the same roof where we passed such a happy childhood, with such a loving grandmama to take care of them.’
Their boisterousness might irritate her nerves, and she could sigh that it was no wonder Alice appeared constantly exhausted with so many ‘big children’ to care for, but the Queen was far more lenient with her grandchildren than she had ever been with their parents. To four-year-old Sophie of Prussia, her tiny grandmother appeared like a ‘very very pretty little girl,’ while to the young Alix of Hesse she was ‘…a combination of a very august person and of a Santa Claus.’ Even when far away in Germany, their grandmother was seldom far from their thoughts. They celebrated her birthday with parties and the singing of the national anthem, and they received constant assurances of her affection, short letters and gifts for their birthdays and Christmas which never failed to delight them:
“They showed [the presents that the Queen had sent] to everyone,” Alice gratefully wrote to the Queen one Christmas, “shouting, ‘This is from my dear English Grandmama;’ and Ella, who is always sentimental added: ‘She is so very good my Grandmama.’ Irene could not be parted from the doll you gave her, nor Victoria from hers.”
To be with her in England brought even greater excitement. As she worked on her papers, the children played around her feet and on one occasion little Waldemar of Prussia released a live crocodile under her desk. Other times they charged along the corridors of Windsor Castle, darting through rooms filled with priceless treasures, in noisy games of hide and seek. Outside in the acres of woods and parklands, they rode on ponies or visited the farm and collection of exotic animals including an ostrich and kangaroo. Circus troupes and theatre companies were invited for the children’s entertainment and the Queen took particular pleasure in watching amateur theatricals performed by members of her family and household:
“So unspoilt was dear grandmamma in all things concerning amusements,” wrote her granddaughter, Missy of Edinburgh, “that her joy and interest in these performances was almost childlike.”
Sometimes the visits coincided with the Queen’s annual migration between her homes. At Balmoral, the Scottish castle, despised by courtiers for its remoteness and by the household for its gloom, provided the children with pony rides amid spectacular scenery. At the beautiful Italianate Osborne on the Isle of Wight, the children played on the private beach, cooked and picnicked in the quaint Swiss Cottage, imported by Prince Albert for the practical education of his own children, or charged around the miniature Victoria Fort and Albert barracks, raising the standards of Prussia, Hesse and England.
Although inevitably, grandmama plied them with questions and grilled them about their behaviour, education and development, she was equally quick to offer praise: Willy’s manners had improved; Charlotte’s German was faultless; Moretta’s handwriting was neat; Victoria was clever; Ella, a ‘wonderfully pretty’ child; and Irène ‘so unselfish & good tempered…and so affectionate.’
In stark contrast to the formal atmosphere of Potsdam or the homely New Palace in Darmstadt, there was something strangely exotic about the English Court. Though Queen Victoria clung to her seclusion from society, she surrounded herself with fascinating personalities, from the turbaned Indian secretaries and tartan-clad ghillies to a whole host of relatives of various ages and characters. Aunts and uncles from all over Europe wandered in and out of the palaces: Aunt Beatrice, only two years older than her eldest niece, Charlotte, was always a willing playmate, as was young Uncle Leopold, who refused to allow his haemophilia to prevent him from living life to the full. Beautiful, artistic, though occasionally acerbic, Aunt Louise often came through her private entrance to Buckingham Palace, sometimes accompanied her handsome Scottish husband the Marquis of Lorne. There was intriguing Aunt Marie, a Russian Grand Duchess, and the German Uncle Christian who entertained visitors by displaying his collection of false eyes.
For the sake of her nerves Queen Victoria might insist that her grandchildren be brought to her room in twos, but young cousins of all ages abounded in her palaces. Gentle and unassuming, the ‘Christians’ lived on the Windsor estate; the histrionic Edinburghs arrived from time to time; and there was always the possibility of a visit to the timid ‘Waleses’ at Marlborough House or Sandringham in Norfolk.
Uncle Bertie, the Prince of Wales, was a congenial host, with, according to one of his nieces, a ‘charm that… endeared him to all who had the privilege of knowing him.’ His Danish wife, Alexandra, radiated beauty and charisma and, as the laughter of partygoers echoed through their London mansion from evening until the early hours, the German children realised, even from the remote nurseries, that this was a world far removed from the cloistered Court of their grandmother. They may well have noticed, too, the frown of disapproval on their grandmother’s face whenever Uncle Bertie was mentioned. “Dear Uncle cannot keep anything to himself - but lets everything out,” she warned Victoria of Hesse.