royal wedding celebration

When the Empress Frederick and her daughters returned to Germany in the early spring of 1889, their immediate priority was finding a suitable home. The former Crown Prince’s Palace in Berlin that Willy now offered was too close to Court to appeal to the Empress, who spent several months viewing other, more appropriate, properties. One place in particular appealed to her: an old country house set in the beautiful countryside of Krönberg in the Taunus Mountains, not far from Homburg and Frankfurt.
“The position, the view are so lovely,” she told Queen Victoria, “and the air delicious and what walks and drives all around!”
Appealing as it was, the old house was dilapidated and Vicky doubted she had sufficient money for a complete renovation until a stroke of good fortune finally came her way. An old friend, the Duchess of Galliera, had recently died, leaving the Empress a large legacy which gave her the financial independence to rebuild the property.
It was a slow and time-consuming project but Vicky, utilizing her artistic talents to the full, delighted in the task which distracted her not only from her recent bereavement but also from the militaristic regime that her son was espousing in Berlin. Employing only the finest artists and craftsmen, she intended to make her new home a fitting tribute to Fritz’s memory, and the eventual outcome was Friedrichshof - a name chosen by Moretta - the home that the Empress Frederick would occupy and love to the end of her life.
“The house is very like an English country house,” wrote Fritz Ponsonby, “…Herr Ihne, the architect who built it, was half English, and fell in at once with the Empress Frederick’s idea of making it like an English country house. The bedrooms seemed quite English except for the stove. Otherwise the house was like a museum filled with a collection of works of art and curiosities.”
The absorbing venture, however, did not distract Vicky from considering her daughters’ futures and throughout the summer of 1889 she most preoccupied with the imminent wedding of her daughter, Sophie.
While Moretta moped about the Court in a desperate search for a husband, her younger sister had long seemed destined for a throne. At one time, she had been considered as a bride for the Russian Tsarevich Nicholas, but while visiting Marlborough House during Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebrations, she met and fell in love with the Princess of Wales’ nephew, the Duke of Sparta, Crown Prince Constantine (Tino) of Greece.

Queen Victoria was among the first to see the possibilities of a match between her ‘very sweet’ granddaughter and the attractive young soldier. Though she realised he was not the cleverest of men, she was sufficiently impressed by his looks and charm to ask Vicky:
“Is there any chance, of Sophie’s marrying Tino of Greece? It would be very nice for her for he is very good.”
Two months later, the engagement was announced and a date set for an autumn wedding, the following year. Vicky’s delight at the prospect of seeing her daughter as future Queen of the Hellenes was tempered by the thought of having to part with ‘dear little’ Sophie but at least she could take comfort in Queen Victoria’s assurance that, although Greece was far away, ‘she is sure to have a happy home.’
Practical matters, too, concerned the Empress Frederick as Sophie prepared to leave for Athens. As she reflected upon the inadequacies of the Greek medical services she recalled her own traumatic first childbirth, and was determined to spare her daughter the same ordeal. Knowing from bitter experience how strongly foreign Courts resented outside intervention, she conceived a plan to include an English midwife disguised as a lady-in-waiting in Sophie’s entourage.
At four o’clock in the afternoon October 25th 1889, Sophie, her mother, sisters, and the midwife arrived to a rapturous welcome in Athens. The buildings between the Royal Palace and Cathedral were draped with flags and banners and the crowds turned out in force to greet their future Queen, who ‘bore herself so nicely, and was gentle, quiet and composed.’ Royalties arrived from all over Europe: Tino’s grandparents, the King and Queen of Denmark; the Russian Tsarevich Nicholas; the Prince and Princess of Wales; and eventually the Kaiser and Kaiserin, accompanied, to everyone’s surprise, by their own chaplain.
King George (the Danish born brother of the Princess of Wales) had gone to great lengths to ensure that the wedding would pass smoothly and, as Sophie and Tino had agreed that the service would be conducted according to both the Orthodox and Lutheran rites, he had appointed his own personal chaplain to preside over the Protestant ceremony. The arrangement suited everyone but Willy. Hardly had he set foot ashore when, with typical tactlessness, he announced that he and his strictly evangelical wife were unhappy with the Greek king’s choice and insisted that their own dogmatic chaplain should lead the service instead.
“This they announce…without asking or consulting me or Sophie!!!” Vicky gasped to her mother, “…Most likely Dona knew that I & Sophie would object, therefore it was done behind my back.”
Willy’s interference apart, the wedding took place on the 27th October 1889 and passed without incident. The bride and groom moved into an Athenian villa that was to be their official residence for the next twenty-four years. In the summer heat, they were able to escape to their favourite home - a small cottage in the mountainous Tatoi Woods, where Sophie, almost as much an Anglophile as her mother, had the rooms decorated in ‘the English style.’ There, she and Tino followed the English routine of a good breakfast in the early morning, a light luncheon at midday and, after a siesta, afternoon tea. Far from the stiff formality of the Prussian Court, the Crown Prince and Princess lived a relatively simple life, swimming in the sea, tending their gardens, planting trees, and growing flowers.
Vicky’s foresight in appointing the English midwife proved necessary sooner than anticipated. Eight months after the wedding, in the sweltering heat of July 1890, Sophie gave birth to a premature son, George, causing Queen Victoria to comment:
“What shall I say about this most unfortunate and fortunate event happening so soon?…It must be at least a week too soon for she won’t have been married nine months till the 27th.”
Vicky and her younger daughters, who had hoped to be present for the birth, arrived too late, and by the time they reached Athens in August, they were horrified to find Sophie in a very poor state and ‘nothing but a little skeleton.’ In spite of the presence of the English midwife, she had suffered terribly at the hands of three inexperienced doctors leading a squeamish Queen Victoria to warn Vicky to shield Sophie’s sisters from the ‘unedifying and for the future alarming details.’
Three years later, a tragic event in her household threatened Sophie’s second pregnancy. Among her staff was a young nursery maid named Marie Weber, whom Vicky had recommended and sent to Greece from Germany. One afternoon, the unhappy Marie climbed to the top of the Parthenon and threw herself to the ground. She died later that evening.
“Is this not too dreadful!” Vicky wrote to her mother, “Poor unfortunate - miserable girl! How could she commit such a piece of sin and folly! She must have been mad…You can imagine my anxiety - for such a shock & such scenes - should harm my Sophie.”
It was left to Mossy to break the news to Marie’s parents.
Sophie, though distressed, was unharmed and five months later gave birth to a second son, Alexander. For him and for her subsequent children - Helen, Paul, Irene and Katherine, born at irregular intervals, between 1896 and 1913 - she employed only English nannies.

With Vicky’s encouragement Sophie dedicated herself wholeheartedly to her duties as Crown Princess. In true family fashion, she established schemes to improve the medical services and implemented forestation programmes to aid agriculture. But, for all her good intentions, her efforts were not always well-received. While she despaired of the Greeks’ lack of enthusiasm for her projects, they found her stiff Prussian temperament overbearing and she lacked the personal magnetism to win great popularity.
More wounding for Sophie was the realisation that Tino was not quite the faithful and ‘very good husband’ that Queen Victoria had envisaged. Having been raised by parents who were totally devoted to one another, it came as a shock to discover that Tino thought nothing of entertaining mistresses and embarking upon several affairs. In desperation Sophie turned to her father-in-law, the king, for advice but his response was far from encouraging:
“Consult your dear mother-in-law; she will be able to give you the best advice on this point.”
The disappointment of Tino’s infidelity and the lack of warmth shown her by the Greeks soon smothered much of Sophie’s early enthusiasm. Her pessimism and gloom increased with age, so much so that Victoria Battenberg commented:
“Sophie indulges in the true German ‘Empfindlichkeit’, [sensitivity] a defect which really is at times worse than a vice.”
The high-spirited Missy of Edinburgh put it even more succinctly: ‘she bored me.’ Perhaps Missy had little patience with her cousin’s complaints, for by then, in her own idiosyncratic fashion she had found a far more effective way of dealing with a husband’s infidelities.

Returning to Germany after Sophie’s wedding, Vicky knew very well that after the Sandro debacle Moretta would not settle contentedly into what her grandmother piously called a state of ‘blessed singleness.’ Unlike her Hessian cousins, Moretta had been raised with only one purpose in mind and could envisage no other future than that of a wife. The trauma of Sandro’s departure, spurred her on to a desperate search to find a husband, and cousins and courtiers alike were persuaded to assist in her quest. For political reasons Bismarck advocated the son of the Portuguese king but since that would entail converting to Catholicism, Moretta declined. Queen Victoria examined the possibility of a match with a Swedish prince but, receiving reports of his unsuitability, concluded that he was too young and Moretta:
“Would be more likely to be happy with someone a good deal older than herself and who had, like herself, loved someone before.”
Her aunt, Marie of Edinburgh, who ‘would do anything to help,’ recommended two of her own Russian cousins, Grand Dukes Sandro Mikhailovich and Pyotr Nikolaevich and, in spite of her aversion to all things Russian, Queen Victoria raised no objections:
“I think…she would not be unhappy in Russia with Ella & Minnie [the Empress Marie Feodorovna] etc…”
Moretta was intrigued by the prospect of meeting the dashing Sandro Mikhailovich but, as with the earlier Sandro, her dreams led only to disappointment. Her hopes of an encounter were repeatedly dashed and it soon became clear that the Grand Duke already set his sights on the Tsar’s daughter, Xenia, while Pyotr Nikolaevich was courting a Montenegrin princess. Various other royalties were mentioned and forgotten and, as one after another they slipped from her grasp, an increasingly despondent Moretta became convinced that she was too fat and too ugly to attract anyone. In despair, she launched herself on a drastic diet.
“Her one craze is to be thin,” Vicky wrote to the Queen. “She starves completely, touches no milk, no sugar, no bread, no sweets, no soup, no butter, nothing but a scrap of meat and apples which is not enough. She will ruin her health. She has a fine strong constitution. She goes to bed too late and takes almost too much exercise. I have begged and prayed, ordered, threatened, all to no effect. She is quite fantastical on the subject.”
With typical good sense, Queen Victoria decided to take her anorexic granddaughter in hand. In June 1889, she invited her to England where she kept a close eye on her, even allowing her to share her own sleeping carriage on the train to Balmoral from Windsor. She regulated her diet and encouraged more moderate exercise but by then even a fond grandmother was coming to believe that it was unseemly and degrading to go on frantically pursuing false hopes. To Moretta’s chagrin, she advised that, after so many disappointments, it would be better to abandon the pursuit for a husband and resign herself to spinsterhood. To make matters worse for Moretta, the presence of Sandro’s brother and sister at Balmoral revived old wounds and the announcement of the engagement of her younger cousin, Louise• added to her despair:
“Nothing but engagements all around,” she wrote to her mother, “- each house or place I go to - I see nothing but bright, radiant faces - one after another they marry - young than myself & I!!”
At twenty-three, Moretta was quickly growing beyond marriageable age. Her elder sister, Charlotte, and three of her Hessian cousins had married before their twenty-second birthdays and, as though to rub salt into the wound, her younger sister, had already married.
“Each time I hope for a thing,” Moretta wrote gloomily to her mother, “its sure not to take place & I shall never never marry – all my relations, sisters, friends do, except my stupid self. I am too ugly and nobody will have me – nothing but disappointments & bothers is my lot in this life - & for the future I shall try and put all hope out of my head.”
Moretta tried briefly to put all hope out of her head but finding the state of singleness anything but blessed, she was not to be dissuaded. Everywhere she looked she saw men with whom she dreamed she might be happy and redoubled her relentless pursuit of love so frenetically that Willy was cruel enough to observe that she would marry ‘anyone who was manly.’ His comment was not entirely inaccurate. Even Vicky was afraid that she might throw herself at any available young man who showed an interest in her, while Queen Victoria warned against allowing her to mix too freely with ‘unsuitable’ people. It almost came as a relief to them both when a minor German Prince, Adolph of Schaumburg-Lippe, arrived in Homburg and seemed quite taken with the lonely princess.
“He is not clever,” wrote Vicky, “and I believe he has learned but very little, as his parents gave him no opportunity…I think one can call him good-looking with an amiable expression…he is a little shy and awkward…Much polish and outward refinement he has not, but he is so civil and polite and makes a good impression.”
The rather scruffy soldier prince was neither well educated nor well travelled, but he had good health and a respectable reputation and when, within days of their first meeting, he proposed Moretta accepted him.
‘In her depression & discouragement,’ her mother told the Queen, ‘feeling that the happiness she had hoped for is not to be hers, she accepts this.’
The following June, Adolph was whisked off to Windsor for inspection by his future grandmother-in-law. In spite of the satisfactory - if somewhat uncouth -impression he made upon the English Court, Moretta herself was hardly enthusiastic about her prospective groom. Only months before the wedding Vicky wrote to Sophie that:
“[Moretta] is still in a state of mind about his beard and his clothes and his servant, who has very untidy German ways, but I tell her that will come alright.”
It was not a love-match; it was widely rumoured that Moretta did not even like her husband and was marrying solely ‘for the sake of marriage’ but at least she would be free of the stigma of spinsterhood and could look forward to raising a family of her own.
In the evening of 19th November 1890, wearing the veil that her mother had worn to her own wedding thirty-three years before, Moretta made her vows in a civil ceremony in the old Schloss Berlin before moving on to the chapel for the religious service. Though attended by numerous foreign royalties including the Crown Princes of Greece and Roumania, it was a relatively simple affair by royal standards as many of the traditional festivities were curtailed because of the Empress Dona’s pregnancy. Even so, according to one guest, Cousin Marie Louise, the celebrations lasted long enough to become monotonous:
“There was of course, a wedding feast and afterwards the traditional torchlight procession, when the bridegroom, preceded by pages, holding in their hands candelabra…had to lead each princess right round the room bowing to the Emperor and Empress. The best man then led the bride around the room in the same manner, and all the princes and princesses did likewise. You can imagine how long this took and how very bored we became.”
As Marie Louise found distraction elsewhere•, a weeping Moretta prepared to say goodbye to her family. The prospect of leaving her mother cast a shadow over the celebrations, and her leave-taking was not made any easier when Willy entered into a dispute with his sister, Sophie, which would take five years to resolve.•
Late in the evening, amid many tears:
“The bridal pair left for their honeymoon [in Egypt]. Instead of distributing wedding favours as we know them, the bride distributed her ‘garter’. This consisted of pieces of white satin ribbon, rather like a bookmarker, with initials, crown and date inscribed upon them.”
If Moretta was not exactly in love with her husband, she at least had the joy of discovering that by the end of her honeymoon she was pregnant. After long years of failed romances it seemed that at last the future was bright and, in early February, three months after her wedding, she cheerfully set out from Cairo to take the good tidings to her sister, Sophie, in Athens.
A holiday of several weeks had been planned and Sophie, by then Crown Princess of Greece, eagerly awaited her sister’s arrival with a view to showing her all the splendours of Athens. But Moretta had been in the city for only an hour and a half when she suddenly announced that she and Adolph must leave at once for Homburg. The next day Vicky received a ‘frantic’ telegram from Sophie to say that Moretta was urgently rushing home.
“I…do not know…what she is going to do and what is the matter,” Vicky told the Queen, “…I sadly fear she wants to catch me before my journey to England for some reason or other and will find me gone.”
The cause of the sudden departure soon became apparent. Moretta had suffered a miscarriage and, while the sympathetic Queen advised her to ‘have some rest’ before ‘beginning again,’ it emerged that Moretta would never be able to have children. It must have seemed at that moment that her desperate longing for a husband and family had been jinxed from the start, and further disappointments were soon to follow.

Adolph’s native principality, Lippe, on the borders of Hanover and Westphalia had been ruled for twenty years by the childless Prince Waldemar. The prince’s brother and rightful successor was so hopelessly insane that he was incapable of ruling and so, in a secret decree, Waldemar had appointed Adolph to act as regent after his death. Following the death of Prince Waldemar in 1895 Adolph prepared to take up his new role and he and Moretta arrived in the picturesque capital Detmold where they received a warm greeting from the crowds who gathered to welcome them to the city. The quaint little town with its medieval buildings was surrounded by beautiful forests and both Adolph and Moretta envisaged a happy future there. Yet again their hopes were soon dashed. Other branches of the extended Lippe family were dissatisfied with Waldemar’s secret arrangements and contested his decree. A prolonged court hearing ensued which took almost two years to resolve until the summer 1897 when the court found in favour of the contesters, forcing Adolph and Moretta to leave the town.
It was yet another blow for Moretta but it drew her and Adolph closer together, so much so that by the following year Queen Victoria’s lady-in-waiting, Marie Mallet, thought them ‘a devoted couple and she has changed much and for the better in her personal appearance, being now a graceful good-looking woman.’
The same year, they settled into a villa in Bonn, which they had rebuilt into a ‘nice small English country house’:
“She has taken a great deal of trouble with it,” Vicky explained to Queen Victoria, “and certainly with great success. It is not large and the garden is not so either but they have some nice trees and grass and the lovely Rhine before them…A beautiful new drive and quay is being arranged along the banks of the Rhine and steps from [the] garden lead down to it.”
Settled into her new home, Moretta’s life sank into a stagnant routine. Daily she wrote to her mother, bemoaning her childlessness, but at least, though se had not discovered the ‘grand passion’ of her dreams, she had at least found a faithful husband, leaving Vicky to turn her attention to her one remaining daughter.