royal wedding celebration

By 1893, the Empress Frederick had completed her work on the Friedrichshof and settled comfortably into her new home with her youngest daughter, Mossy. Between riding, reading and writing interminable letters, she devoted much of her time to philanthropic activities. In Krönberg, she founded and regularly visited a hospital, built almshouses and established a school but her chief concern, as ever, was her family. Loath as she was to part with her youngest child - ‘my Benjamin,’ - it was time to seek out an appropriate husband for Mossy.
Already several suitors had been suggested, among them the young Tsarevich Nicholas, but he, in love with Alix of Hesse, declared he would rather become a monk than marry the Prussian princess, while, for her part, Mossy had no intention of converting to Orthodoxy, as was required of a future Tsarina. In 1891, Queen Victoria proposed a more suitable candidate - Mossy’s cousin, Eddy, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale. As the eldest son of the Prince of Wales, Eddy was second-in-line to the throne and Queen Victoria had little doubt that princesses would be queuing up to ascend to ‘the highest position there is.’ It came as a shock to discover that she had vastly overestimated her beloved Eddy’s attraction.
In truth, though his mother and sisters adored him, there was little about the feckless young man to appeal to an intelligent princess. A very poor scholar, listless and lethargic, he had inherited his mother’s deafness and was so dependent upon his younger brother that even when he spent a brief stint in the navy, George was sent with him. His gentleness had some appeal, and cousins and courtiers alike often praised his childlike kindness.
“He is very much to be liked,” wrote Lord Wolseley, “has most excellent manners, thoughtful for others & always anxious to do the right thing. He is however young for his age and requires to be brought out.”
Efforts to ‘bring him out,’ soon proved futile. Indolent and apathetic about affairs of state, his only enthusiasm was for pleasure and by the late 1880s it was rumoured that he was bisexual and had contracted syphilis. If there were any truth in the rumour, it must have escaped the Queen’s notice or she would not have been so keen to promote a match between Eddy and one of her favourite granddaughters.
In spite of the Prince Consort’s warnings of the need to bring new ‘dark’ blood into the family, Queen Victoria favoured marriage between first cousins - after all, she and Albert had been cousins and since their progeny cluttered the Courts of Europe, there were few available royalties who were not somehow related. Of all Eddy’s cousins none seemed, in Queen Victoria’s eyes, better suited to the role of future Queen Consort than the intelligent and devoutly religious Princess Alix of Hesse.
Since her mother’s death, Alix had spent a good deal of time at the English Court and held a particularly high place in her grandmother’s affection. Her Hessian good looks were sure to appeal to the sensuous Eddy and, more to the point, in the Queen’s view, betrothal to her cousin would distract her from the handsome Tsarevich, to whom she had lost her heart while visiting her sister, Ella, in Russia.
For Ella, who was busily promoting that match, the idea that Alix should marry the hapless Eddy was ‘absolutely ridiculous.’ Apart from his physical frailty, he was ‘quite stupid’ and though his genuine kindness had its appeal, he held no real attraction for Alix. For several months, under sustained pressure from both families, she wavered until at last she gently refused his proposal, informing him that:
“…She knows she would not be happy with him and that he would not be happy with her and that he must try not to think of her.”
It was not the first time that one of her Hessian granddaughters had thwarted the Queen’s plans for a family wedding, but she resigned herself to the outcome and wasted little time with regrets. There were other granddaughters of the right age and temperament - Mossy of Prussia, for instance.
Unlike Cousin Alix, Mossy was not, in her grandmother’s opinion, ‘regularly pretty’ but she had ‘a pretty figure, is very amiable and half English with great love for England which you will find in few if any others.’
The prospect of her daughter happily settled in England, delighted Vicky and when she received a letter from Mossy’s sister, Sophie, describing Eddy as ‘such a dear & so good & kind,’ she needed no further assurance. In February 1891, Mossy accompanied her mother to Paris, where French journalists wrote several complimentary descriptions of the svelte, blonde, Prussian princess. From there they journeyed to England for a holiday at Sandringham in the hope that Mossy and Eddy might fall in love. The plan was doomed from the start. By then Eddy had become infatuated with the daughter of the deposed French Emperor, Hélène of Orleans, and Mossy was in the throes of an unrequited ‘malheureuse passion’ for a German cousin, Max of Baden. It soon became apparent there was even less chance of pairing Eddy with her than there had been with Alix of Hesse.
It was probably just as well. The Princess of Wales would never have approved of matching her ‘little boy’ with a Prussian and much preferred the Catholic Hélène, whom Eddy was meeting regularly at the home of his sister, Louise. Eventually, at his mother’s prompting, he even went so far as to propose to the French princess before rushing her off to the Queen to announce their engagement. Touched as she was by the romance, as a constitutional monarch Queen Victoria was powerless to intervene. The law prevented the heir to the throne from marrying a Catholic, and even when Hélène offered to seek a papal dispensation to convert to Anglicanism, ministers pointed out that it would be impossible to receive the deposed Emperor’s daughter without damaging England’s relationship with Republican France. Eddy resigned himself to the inevitable and within a year had proposed to and been accepted by his childhood friend, Princess May of Teck.
Queen Victoria was satisfied with the outcome, considering May ‘a vy. pretty girl – very sensible & well informed, a solid girl wh. we want’ but not everyone in the family shared her delight. To Vicky she seemed:
“…a little stiff & cold! I hear her praised on all sides & by those who know her well…She is certainly very nice in manner -&c but I do not think she has much charm or is very fascinating! She may have been shy…”
The jealously protective Princess of Wales, while conceding that May would make a reliable wife, was reluctant to hand over her precious son to any other woman and Eddy’s equally possessive sisters could be as cutting as their mother when they wished. ‘Poor May! Poor May with her Wüttemberg hands!’ mocked the unprepossessing Louise, while her insipid sister, Toria, remarked to a guest, ‘Do try to talk to May at dinner, though one knows she is deadly dull.’
In Cumberland Lodge, Aunt Lenchen, too, was most put out that Eddy had chosen the lower-born May before her own eligible daughter, Thora. In the event, the complaint was immaterial. During the bitterly cold January of 1892, the Waleses gathered at Sandringham for Eddy’s twenty-eighth birthday. It was hardly going to be the most thrilling event; his brother, George, was recovering from typhoid, frail Toria was in bed with ’flu’ and most of the rest of the family had colds. On the day before his birthday, while out shooting with his father, the prince became ill and returned to the house to join the other invalids. The following morning he managed to make a brief appearance to open his presents, but was too weak to participate in the planned festivities. That evening influenza was diagnosed and on 10th January, the Queen recorded in her diary:
“Was startled and rather troubled by a telegram from Bertie saying dear Eddy had a ‘very sharp attack of influenza and had now developed pneumonia in left lung, the night restless but strength maintained.’”
For four more days, while his anxious mother and sisters sat mopping his brow, he drifted in and out of consciousness, repeatedly whispering ‘Hélène,’ until, in the early morning 14th January 1892, he died surrounded by his family. Even the sheltered world of the Waleses was not immune to tragedy.
“In this our overwhelming grief,” Toria wrote to her grandmother, “it is almost impossible to believe that our beloved Eddy has been taken from us. How I wish dear Grandmama you could have seen him as he lay there, as a saint or a knight, with a heavenly peaceful expression on his lovely face.”
A saint he most certainly was not, but his sister, Louise, was equally effusive in her praise:
“His was such a gentle, kind and affectionate nature, that everyone was devoted to him, and it is some consolation to me to know that his memory will be cherished by all his relations and friends. We are all heartbroken and I am sure we shall never quite get over it.”
To the country at large the death of this most unsuitable monarch-in-waiting came as a blessing, but his sisters’ grief was genuine and the Princess of Wales never did ‘quite get over’ the shock. Almost twenty years later, during the Coronation of George V, she was heard to whisper, “It should have been Eddy.”

In the Friedrichshof, meanwhile, Mossy recovering from her infatuation with Max of Baden, met and fell in love with the scholarly Frederick ‘Fischy’, a brother of the Landgrave of neighbouring Hesse-Kassel. He may not have been the most illustrious of princes, but Vicky, more concerned with Mossy’s happiness than her position, was delighted:
“He loves her devotedly,” she wrote to the Queen, “and is really a very nice boy, so steady and quiet though rather timid and delicate looking. He is intelligent and cultivated with a taste for learning and art and writes charming poetry. He is not rich and does not possess a place of his own but he is quite comfortably off.”
Queen Victoria’s response was typically guarded. Although she had recently been pressing for a match with Prince Albert Victor, she now decided that it would be better for Mossy to remain single to devote her life to the service of her widowed mother. Happily, Vicky had no intention of putting the same pressure on Mossy as the Queen had once put on Beatrice and, putting aside her own feelings, willingly gave them her blessing.
The usual gathering of royalties arrived for the wedding in Potsdam on 25th January 1893. From England Queen Victoria sent, among other gifts, a ring for the bride. Willy, despite his complaint that a mere Landgrave was unworthy of the Kaiser’s sister, behaved himself well and only the brother of the straight-laced Empress Dona marred the occasion by entertaining the visiting Tsarevich with dancing girls and plying him with so much drink that he could barely stand.
Mossy and Fischy moved into the peaceful Schloss Rumpenheim - an ancient castle, given to them in trust by Fischy’s elder brother - and began what was to be probably the happiest marriage of all Vicky’s daughters. The Queen’s fears that Vicky would be lonely once Mossy had left home proved largely unfounded. She and Fischy regularly stayed at Friedrichshof where their cordiality impressed all who came to visit. Vicky’s admiration for her studious son-in-law increased by the day; he shared her love of art and architecture, and repeatedly in her letters to Mossy, she ‘wished’ that Fischy could have been with her to share a particular experience, a scenic view or impressive building. She trusted his judgement so implicitly that she came to rely on his advice in political and family matters.
Within days of the wedding Mossy conceived her first child, causing her grandmother to sigh:
“Poor thing, I pity her so much. It is really too dreadful to have the first year of one’s married life and happiness spoilt by discomfort and misery.”
It worried the Queen too, that the draughty old Schloss was unsuitable for a woman in an ‘unhappy condition’ but in October 1893, Mossy’s gave birth to a healthy son, Friedrich. The following year a second son, Max, was born, to be followed in 1896 by twin boys, Philip and Wolfgang, an event which delighted the Queen who ‘laughed very much and is rather amused at the list of her great grandchildren being added to in such a rapid manner.’
A second set of twins Christoph and Richard was born in 1901. Like their parents, they were gentle studious boys who, unlike their Prussian cousins, had no appetite for militarism. Alice Topham, the English governess to Willy’s daughter, recalled a visit they made to Berlin in 1903. Standing beneath a painting of a great Prussian victory, eight-year-old Max said,
“My father says war isn’t like that at all. He says it’s not so clean and bright and that shells tear the men and horses to pieces and it’s horrible.”
In little over a decade, Max and his brothers would realise the tragic accuracy of his father’s words.•