royal wedding celebration

Not far from the New Palace in Darmstadt lived four handsome and rakish young cousins of Grand Duke Louis of Hesse-and-by-Rhine. Ambitious and charming, the young men’s striking good looks were enough to capture the hearts of several European princesses and their marital prospects would have been excellent but for the unfortunate circumstances of their parents’ marriage.
Their father, Prince Alexander of Hesse, had once been a rising star in the Russian Court where his sister, Marie, was married to the future Tsar Alexander II. The dashing young Hessian made such an impression in St. Petersburg that he seemed destined for a brilliant future until a scandal in 1851 brought his glittering career to a sudden and dramatic end. Alexander had committed the terrible faux pas of marrying a commoner - his sister’s lady-in-waiting, Julia Haucke.
Stripped of his commission and expelled from Russia, Alexander and his morganatic• wife eventually returned to Hesse, where the Grand Duke conferred on Julia the title Countess of Battenberg. Though treated with disdain throughout most European Courts, the couple settled happily into the Alexander Palace in Darmstadt and produced a daughter, Marie, and four sons - Louis, Alaxander (Sandro), Henry (‘Liko’) and Franz Josef (‘Franzjos,’) all of whom took their mother’s Battenberg title.
In spite of their inauspicious origins, the ambitious young princes soon made their mark on the world. For some years Sandro had served in the Russian army until, following the Congress of Vienna, he was chosen, with the backing of his uncle, Tsar Alexander II, as the Sovereign Prince of Bulgaria. With the help of Princess Alice and the Duke of Edinburgh, Sandro’s elder brother, Louis, obtained a position in the British Navy where he quickly proved his worth as a sailor.
“[He] has passed a first-rate examination.” Princess Alice wrote to her mother in 1874, “The parents are so happy, and the influence of the good conduct and steady work of the elder brother has on the younger [ones] is of great use as they wish to follow him and be as well spoken of and please their parents as he does…”
His naval career took him far afield. He served with the Duke of Edinburgh and became a close associate of the Prince of Wales by whose mistress, Lillie Langtry, he was rumoured to have fathered a child.
Whether or not the rumours penetrated the walls of the New Palace in Darmstadt, Victoria of Hesse was delighted when Louis returned to the Grand Duchy in June 1883. Throughout her childhood, she and her sisters had been regular visitors to the Battenbergs’ romantic summer residence, Schloss Heiligenberg, where among the leafy avenues and hazel groves, she had been entranced by the debonair young prince. Now, fresh from a voyage to the Holy Land, the tales of his romantic adventures added to his charm and when he appeared equally enamoured of her, Victoria could hardly contain her excitement. That summer when the Queen issued her annual invitation to Balmoral the princess was unusually reluctant to leave Germany.
“If Victoria does not go to Scotland,” her sister, Ella, observed, “she will become engaged to Louis Battenberg.”
Victoria did not go to Scotland, Louis proposed and, as Ella had predicted, Victoria accepted him.
When Ella and her father broke the news to Queen Victoria, a fond grandmother was alarmed. In spite of her personal fondness for Louis, Victoria’s first duty, she believed, was to her widowed father who needed help in running the Grand Duchy and caring for his younger children. Moreover, much as detested the snobbery that made other monarchs disdainful of the Battenbergs, Louis was not a wealthy man - would he be able to support a wife and family?
Level-headed Victoria reassured her on both counts: as a serving sailor her husband would often be at sea leaving her plenty of time to attend to her duties in Darmstadt. As for money, she had inexpensive tastes and was convinced that Louis’ steady income would prove sufficient. Grandmama was satisfied, and though expressing her regret that she would be unable to attend the wedding in Darmstadt, she gave the couple her blessing and secured Louis a position on her own royal yacht so that in the early months of his marriage he would not be separated from his wife by long sea voyages.
Content as she was, the Queen was not so naïve as to believe that everyone would be so accommodating.
“Of course,” she wrote prophetically to Vicky, “those who like great matches will not like it, but great matches do not make great happiness.”
Vicky had no need of the warning - she was only too aware that the Prussians certainly ‘did not like it’ for at the very moment that Louis was pursuing a princess in Darmstadt, his younger brother, Sandro, was similarly occupied in Berlin.

The assassination of his uncle and patron, Tsar Alexander II, had severely jeopardised Sandro’s hold on the precarious Bulgarian throne. The new Tsar, Alexander III, looked down on his Battenberg cousin and, irritated by Sandro’s refusal to act as his puppet in Bulgaria, was secretly stirring up the Bulgarians against their Sovereign Prince. Sandro realised that he would have to look elsewhere for European allies and, in the summer of 1883, his quest took him to Berlin.
The appearance of the romantic prince caused a stir in the Kaiser’s Court, not least in the heart of Vicky’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Moretta. At the sight of the suave and much talked about hero, the shy young princess, entranced by accounts of his escapades in the Balkans, fell head over heels in love. Whether or not Sandro was equally attracted to Moretta - ‘a particularly plain girl’ according to Queen Victoria’s lady-in-waiting - he recognised the benefits of a dynastic alliance and, with the Crown Princess’ encouragement, hinted at marriage.
Vicky, almost as taken as Moretta by the dashing prince, was delighted and could hardly find superlatives enough to describe him to her mother - he was:
“Such a very nice, charming, good, young man, so pleasing and amiable, natural, frank and simple, and full of the best intentions. …He is grown so handsome and seemed so nice and sensible, manly yet modest.”
Queen Victoria, with a keen eye for a handsome young man, particularly one who was prepared to stand up to the ‘nasty’ Russians, could not have agreed more and was equally happy to encourage the match. The response in Berlin, however, was far less obliging.
The Prussian Court was incensed. The aged Emperor, outraged by the Battenberg’s impertinence, made it perfectly clear he would never sanction a match between a Hohenzollern princess and the son of a commoner. Willy, choosing to forget that his own marriage to the lower-born Dona had caused such commotion, was equally quick to pour scorn on the idea; and even Moretta’s father, the liberal-minded Crown Prince Fritz, refused to consider a Battenberg as a prospective son-in-law. For once, the Crown Prince saw eye-to-eye with the Chancellor Bismarck who claimed that such an alliance would damage Germany’s relations with Russia. Privately, Bismarck was seeking to enhance his own standing in Prussia by marrying his son, Herbert, to Moretta.
In the midst of such antagonism, the news of Cousin Victoria’s engagement brought Moretta a glimmer of hope. If one German princess should marry a Battenberg, would she not set a precedent for another? It was a naïve hope. The Prussians gasped in horror at Victoria’s foolishness and declared that if she insisted on marrying Louis Battenberg, the Hohenzollerns would boycott the wedding.
The absence of bombastic Willy and his suite would doubtless have suited the bride, but Queen Victoria refused to stomach such an insult. Furious at the Prussians’ arrogance and determined to show her support for her granddaughter, she immediately rearranged her schedule to make the journey to Hesse. If the ‘grandmother of Europe’ saw fit to attend the wedding, who would dare to refuse an invitation?

In April 1884, the ‘royal mob’ descended en masse upon the little Grand Duchy. Never before had the Hessians seen such a gathering of royalties in Darmstadt. From England came Princess Beatrice and the Prince and Princess of Wales with their three ‘royal shynesses,’ Louise, Toria and Maud. From Russia came the Grand Dukes Serge and Pavel, younger brothers of Tsar Alexander III; and from Prussia the disgruntled Hohenzollerns, among them the lovelorn Moretta, and Charlotte with her three-year-old daughter, Feodora. The local people turned out in their hundreds to show their appreciation to the British Queen who, delighting in her warm reception, was still more gratified to discover that the room in which Princess Alice had died remained untouched as a shrine to her memory.
Perhaps for the first time since Princess Alice’s death, the New Palace echoed to the sounds of laughter and rejoicing.
“The young Princesses were so much excited by the event that this first break in their family circle had no sadness in it, particularly as Princess Victoria promised to return to Darmstadt whenever her sailor husband was at sea.”
In fact, so great was Victoria’s excitement that she leaped over a coal scuttle and sprained her ankle and for several days was too excited to eat and when she finally feasted on lobster, the night before her wedding, she promptly made herself sick. Only the timely assistance of Queen Victoria’s doctor, James Reid, ensured that she was sufficiently recovered in time for the ceremony.
The wedding took place 30th April 1884 and if the Prussian Crown Prince gritted his teeth through the service, the celebrations were passing without incident, when suddenly the bride’s father made an announcement which stunned the entire gathering. Excitedly he announced that his second daughter, Ella, had accepted the proposal of the Russian Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich - a severe blow to Cousin Willy, and a disaster for the Russophobic Queen. As if that were not enough to rile the Prussians, a far more shocking revelation soon began to emerge:
“There is a scandal being whispered about here,” wrote the Queen’s doctor, Sir James Reid, “…that the Grand Duke is going to marry a Polish lady of rather doubtful reputation, who is divorced from her husband a Russian baron. The Queen does not yet know all the trouble, but she will be furious…”
The rumours were true. That very evening, Louis secretly married his long-time mistress, Alexandrine de Kolomine. It was three days before the news was confirmed and if the Grand Duke had hoped for congratulations, he was quickly disillusioned. The Hohenzollerns were thrown into paroxysm of indignation and no sooner did the German Emperor hear what had happened than, gloating with self-righteousness, he ordered the entire Prussian party to return at once to Berlin. The scandal threatened to ruin not only Victoria’s wedding celebrations but the reputation of the whole Hessian family and again it was left to Queen Victoria to save the day. Though as shocked as everyone else by her son-in-law’s ‘aberration,’ she refused to abandon her granddaughters in their hour of need. Outwardly, she continued as though nothing had happened, while behind the scenes ordered the Prince of Wales to arrange an immediate annulment of the mésalliance. The Grand Duke yielded meekly and, as Victoria and Louis Battenberg set off for their honeymoon at romantic Heiligenberg, the hapless Mme. Kolomine left for Poland, paid off with a hefty sum from the Queen’s own coffers.

After a brief honeymoon in Heiligenberg, Victoria and Louis set sail for England. They leased a house, Sennicotts, in Chichester, close enough to Portsmouth for Louis to continue his service aboard the Victoria and Albert, and close enough to Windsor for the Queen to keep a fond maternal eye on Victoria. The ‘mother of 9 children’ was only too aware of the almost unavoidable ‘unecstatic’ state in which young wives soon found themselves and was anxious to be on hand to help her motherless granddaughter when the occasion arose. Before the wedding she had delicately hinted:
“Let me further ask you that…you will always turn to me for advice about your health or anything in which you are both in doubt.”
Within a month of the marriage, the Queen expressed herself more plainly, exhorting Victoria to avoid riding too often and not at all ‘if you were not regular in other respects.’ Her advice was timely; within weeks of the wedding Victoria was pregnant and the news prompted another barrage of letters from the Queen enquiring into every detail of her condition. Victoria had returned to Darmstadt to help her father, but the Queen, recalling Vicky’s terrible experiences of childbirth at the hands of German doctors, recommended only English doctors and midwives - better still, Victoria, should return to England for the birth so that her grandmother could be on hand to comfort and support her.
Victoria obeyed the summons and arrived at Windsor Castle in the winter of 1884-5. The Queen, discarding the pressing affairs of state, remained at her side, stroking her hand throughout the ‘long, hard labour,’ nostalgically recalling that, twenty two years previously she had sat in the same room with Princess Alice when Victoria herself was born. Out of deference to her mother, Victoria named her daughter Alice.
In earl spring, the Battenbergs returned to Darmstadt where the baby was christened, and where soon Victoria was receiving yet more admonitions from her grandmother. Before the wedding, the Queen had given her a good deal of advice about marriage. A woman’s first duty, she said, was to her husband whom she must obey and ‘look up to’ and in whom she must confide everything. Now, the Queen noted, Victoria seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time attending to her father’s affairs, and the Queen felt obliged to warn her not to neglect her husband. Victoria accepted the reprimand with good grace and assured her grandmother that she and Louis were devoted to one another. Even so, as the Queen observed with concern, it was four years before a second child, Louise - ‘a rather miserable little object’ - was born at the Heiligenberg, and a further three years until the girls had a brother, George. In 1900, at the age of thirty-seven Victoria gave birth to her youngest child, ‘Dickie,’ the future Lord Louis Mountbatten, at Broadlands in Hampshire.
While raising her young family, Victoria lived a rather peripatetic existence, following her husband’s naval postings and migrating from Darmstadt, to Portsmouth, to Valetta in Malta. Yet the endless travelling did not prevent her from taking personal responsibility for her children’s education and upbringing just as her own mother had done. Accepting the Queen’s advice, she appointed well-tried nannies and when she discovered that Alice was deaf, she even succeeded in teaching her to lip read in several languages. Victoria’s own love of learning continued throughout her life. Without neglecting the many charities which her mother had founded, she continued to travel extensively, earning the respect and love of her family and, according to her cousin Marie Louise, ‘the many who had the privilege of knowing her…[as] a great and courageous lady.’
Victoria’s may not have been ‘a great match’ but it proved a long and happy marriage and Victoria would live to see the wedding of her grandson, Philip, to the present Queen Elizabeth II.