royal wedding celebration

The summer 1902 saw London bustling with preparations for the coronation of King Edward VII. So many years had passed since Queen Victoria’s accession that even the most aged courtiers had no recollection of the protocol of such ceremonies but for Bertie that posed few problems. Unlike his mother, the new king revelled in the limelight and what better way could there be to mark the beginning of a new reign than by the most impressive show of all - a coronation reflecting all the grandeur and pomp of the mighty British Empire. The organisation of the whole event was entrusted to Lord Esher with instructions that this was to be a spectacle to outshine all spectacles.

By mid-June the preparations were complete - the Abbey prepared and the many visiting royalties who had arrived in London were settling into their palaces. Then suddenly, twelve days before the ceremony, disaster loomed - the King fell seriously ill and, though he determinedly protested that he could not disappoint his guests, his doctors diagnosed appendicitis which required immediate surgery. There was no alternative but to postpone the coronation. Even then, no one could be sure that the King would survive surgery, as one doctor later confessed to Toria, he was sure ‘that His Majesty would die during the operation.’ Overweight, addicted to fine wines, gargantuan meals, fat cigars and pretty women, it seemed that the heir who had waited for so long to come to the throne would in the end be denied his inheritance.
For an anxious forty minutes in an adjoining room, Queen Alexandra waited with her daughters, Toria and Maud, while Mr. Treves performed the surgery. Yet somehow, against the odds, Bertie pulled through. Word of his recovery was greeted with rejoicing throughout the country and made the celebration of his coronation, two months later than planned, even more spectacular.
Behind the scenes came the usual family wrangling about the order of precedence. This time it was not the Kaiser• but his younger brother, Henry, who was most disgruntled at being placed towards the back during the ceremonies. His temper was soothed when his sister-in-law, Victoria Battenberg, now settled with her family in London, agreed to bring her children to spend Christmas with him and Irène at Kiel, providing him with the ideal opportunity to show off his new steam car and boat.
Paradoxically, his sister, Charlotte, who was so used to making mischief, had no complaints about the coronation. Recently recovered from one of her recurring bouts of illness, she thoroughly enjoyed the celebrations and wrote cheerfully from Sandringham:
“There is no place in the world like England, & if possible I’m more English than ever…Have made several trips with my Sailor Brother & other friends, running down to various lovely country houses…”
The accession of the new king, coinciding with the dawn of a new century, seemed to bring a new vitality to the country. The Boer War finally reached its conclusion and a precarious peace reigned in Europe. Queen Victoria’s old world had vanished overnight and the new court seemed suddenly young, modern and alive.
No two monarchs could have differed more starkly than the perpetually mourning widow of Windsor and the portly bon viveur, King Edward VII. From the moment he ascended the throne a great wind of change blew through the English palaces. On the King’s instructions, out went the late Queen’s numerous mementos of her stalwart John Brown; modern styles replaced the old Victorian décor; and the hushed and smoke-free rooms of Buckingham Palace echoed to the sound of cigar-puffing Sybarites. In Windsor, too, the king implemented changes:
“The moving of inanimate objects such as furniture and pictures does not jar,” wrote Alick York, Groom in Waiting to the late Queen, “and I must say the 3 drawing rooms are more comfortably and artistically arranged than in the old days, but still it all seems as if someone was taking a liberty and I should wake up to find things and people restored to their old places.”
More distressing for Bertie’s sisters was his decision to donate the Queen’s beloved Osborne House to the nation. To the princesses it had always been a beautiful holiday home filled with happy memories and the added attraction of having been personally designed by the Prince Consort. To Bertie it symbolised all the pain of his repressed childhood. What was more, he loved Sandringham and London and had no intention of escaping, as his mother had so often done, from the bustle and noise of the city to the peaceful seclusion of the Isle of Wight, which bored him. Notwithstanding his love of the pleasures of life, the King had more in mind than redecorating his palaces. Throughout his sixty years of waiting, he had formed clear and incisive ideas about how to govern the realm. His talents may have been overlooked in Queen Victoria’s lifetime, but now he would bring them to the fore; and nowhere was he more suited to his new role than in his ability to court not only the public, but also foreign governments by his charm, tact and diplomacy. As long as Uncle Bertie lived, peace in Europe seemed secure.

While the King’s cronies revelled in the glamour of Edward VII’s Court, and the new Queen Alexandra basked in the affection of her husband’s subjects, her father’s accession did nothing to ease the burden of unhappy Toria. As her elder sister, Louise - created Princess Royal in 1905 - continued to enjoy her reclusive life with her small family, and Maud and her sailor prince seemed to sink into obscurity in Denmark, Toria was obliged, more frequently than ever, to follow at her parents’ heels on their numerous royal visits. As her illnesses multiplied, her reputation for hypochondria spread; hearing that the princess had slipped and fallen during a ball at the height of the London season in 1903, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz commented acerbically, “But oh! Poor…Victoria’s fall, truly grievous, she who is already so delicate.” Most of the family shared her sentiments.
It did not ease the unhappy princess’s burden to watch her younger cousins walking to the altar to be married. In February 1905, she attended the wedding of Uncle Leopold’s daughter, Alice of Albany, to Prince Alexander (‘Alge’) of Teck, younger brother of Princess May, the Duchess of York. Although almost ten years older than his bride, there was much to commend the Eton-educated Alge. Handsome and dashing in his cavalry officer’s uniform, he had seen active service during the South African war and had even been mentioned in dispatches during the siege of Mafeking. The wedding, which took place in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor was, according to Princess May ‘a most cheerful’ occasion with ‘no crying & At. Helen [the bride’s mother, the Duchess of Albany] behaved like a brick.’
A colourful gathering of royalties attended the ceremony, including Alice’s cousin, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, and among the bridesmaids were two other cousins, Daisy and Patsy Connaught the elder of whom was soon to marry the sober and scholarly, Prince Gustav of Sweden. Following a honeymoon in Cannes, the newly-weds, at Uncle Bertie’s invitation, settled into apartments at Windsor Castle from where the lively Alice had easy access to all the parties and dances of the capital. The couple travelled frequently, visiting Alice’s brother the Duke of Coburg and representing the king in such distant places as South Africa and the Far East.
In spite of the age difference, it was a remarkably happy marriage that produced three children, May, Rupert and Maurice, the youngest of whom died tragically before his first birthday. The sorrow was made all the greater for his parents as they were away in Coburg at the time, visiting Alice’s brother. Little Maurice, it seemed, had inherited his grandfather’s haemophilia•.

Four months after Alice’s wedding, the royalties returned to Windsor for Daisy Connaught’s wedding. The beautiful Daisy had a choice of several eminently suitable candidates, among them the Crown Prince of Portugal and the arrogant King Alfonso XVIII of Spain, but in 1905, during a visit to Egypt, she met and fell in love with Gustav, heir apparent to the Swedish throne. By the end of the holiday, the couple were engaged and the wedding took place at Windsor on June 15th.

Daisy’s gentle nature and striking beauty soon won the hearts of the Swedish people.
“Daisy was unique:” wrote her cousin Marie Louise, “she possessed the most beautiful character and I can truthfully say was beloved by all who had the privilege of knowing her.”
Two years after her marriage, King Oskar died and she rose to the rank of Crown Princess. Hers too was a happy marriage, resulting in a daughter, Ingrid, and five sons: Gustav, Adolph, Sigvard, Bertil and Carl Johann.

While Alice and Daisy were celebrating their weddings, their cousin, Ducky, was living down the scandal of her recent divorce. For years she had known that her unhappy union with Ernie was irreparable and only respect for her grandmother had prevented her from making the final break. The whole family was well aware that the couple were living apart - Ernie remaining in Darmstadt, while Ducky occupied her mother’s villa in Nice where she frequently entertained her lover, Grand Duke Kyril. Now that Queen Victoria was gone, there was no reason to prolong the intolerable situation and at last on 21st December 1901 the divorce was officially announced on the grounds of ‘invincible mutual apathy.’
The not unexpected news might have come as a relief to the Edinburgh family but to Ernie’s sisters it struck as a double blow. Not only had they been relying on Ducky to provide an heir for the Grand Duchy of Hesse but they dreaded the scandal if, in the course of the divorce proceedings, the allegations of Ernie’s homosexuality should be made public. The Tsarina, mindful that Ducky’s lover was first cousin of the Tsar, feared that she may excuse her behaviour by revealing the reason for her dissatisfaction with Ernie. In an earnest attempt to limit the damage, Alix wrote a carefully worded letter to Nicky’s sister, Xenia, professing to pass no judgement on her cousin, while insinuating that she, not Ernie was to blame:
“It nearly broke my heart when I got the news, it was so quite unexpected, I always hoped that in time things would come right…Only with her character married life thus was impossible to continue…Only one thing I entreat you, darling Xenia, whenever you hear nasty gossip, at once put a stop to it for their sakes and ours. They parted as their characters could impossibly get on together, that is enough for the public…She will not be missed in the country, as she never made herself beloved nor showed any liking for the country, alas! Poor girl she is utterly miserable now without a home, tho’ he leaves her the sweet child.”
Though Ducky kept the ‘sweet child,’ Elizabeth, she had no objection to allowing her
to stay with Ernie for several months each year. Ernie entertained her in Darmstadt or took her with him to visit his numerous relations. In autumn 1903, the Tsar invited them to join the Imperial Family at his hunting lodge in Poland where, within days of their arrival, eight-year-old Elizabeth fell seriously ill with typhoid. Her aunt, the Tsarina, decided that there was no cause for alarm and delayed sending for her mother so that by the time Ducky heard of her illness at the beginning of November, the little girl was already dead. Ernie’s sisters, Victoria and Ella rushed to Darmstadt for the funeral where Ernie and Ducky were briefly reconciled in grief.
Two years later, Ernie found a far more compatible wife in Princess Eleonore (‘Onor’) of Lich - ‘a dignified and gracious lady and gifted with a genuine talent for dress.’ Unlike her predecessor, Onor was happy to take over many of Princess Alice’s charities and proved a very popular Grand Duchess of Hesse. In spite of Ernie’s alleged homosexuality, he found happiness with Onor, by whom he fathered two more children - George Donatus and Ludwig.
For Ducky, life was far less serene. Her ex-husband was free to take a new wife but the Orthodox Church, unable to alter its stance on marriage between first cousins, could not sanction a wedding with Kyril. Even if Kyril was prepared to defy the Church, he, as a member of the Imperial Family, need the Tsar’s permission to marry - permission that Nicky, swayed by Alix, was almost certain to refuse.
While Ducky, morose and despairing, mooched around Nice, the eccentric Queen Elizabeth of Roumania suggested that she should resign herself to a single life and concentrate on serving others, to:
“Go and learn how to nurse, form a sisterhood of her own, wander about the world in search of all the suffering, all the misery, all those that life has treated hardly. Lead a life of continual sacrifice.”
Queen Elizabeth had little idea how accurately she described the kind of life that Ducky’s cousin, Ella, was soon to adopt• but for the Edinburgh princess, such a plan was unthinkable. So deep was Ducky’s unhappiness that even her staunchly Orthodox mother pleaded with Nicky to allow her to marry Kyril in secret but, with Alix vehemently opposed to the scheme, Nicky stood firm.
From Nice, Ducky watched anxiously as Kyril saw active service with the Russian fleet during the Japanese War of 1904-5• escaping death by a whisker when his ship, the Petropavlovsk, was sunk by an enemy mine. Surely, she hoped, his heroic return would persuade the Tsar to lift the ban, but Nicky remained intransigent. Worn out with pleading and waiting, Kyril decided to take matters into his own hands. In autumn 1905, he arranged to meet Ducky at her mother’s home in Tergensee in Bavaria where on Sunday October 8th they were secretly married.
When the news reached Russia Alix was incensed, and Kyril’s arrival at Tsarskoe Selo a few days later did nothing to appease her anger. Denying the Grand Duke access to the Alexander Palace, she ensured that Nicky imposed on him the full penalty for disobeying the Tsar; Kyril was stripped of his titles and banished from the country. Only two years later, when Ducky gave birth to a daughter, Maria, and converted to Orthodoxy, did Nicky agree to endorse the marriage and restore the Grand Duke’s title. Still relations with the Imperial family were so taut that Kyril and Ducky opted to remain in Paris until after the birth of a second daughter, Kira, in 1909.
It was, perhaps, as well that they remained away from St. Petersburg, for their exile coincided with one of the most horrifying and tumultuous periods in the reign of Tsar Nicholas II.

One spring morning in 1892, Grand Duke Louis of Hesse-and-By-Rhine sat down to lunch with his son, Ernie, and youngest daughter, Alix. During the meal he suffered a stroke and was carried, paralysed, to his bed.
“Oh what sad news from Darmstadt!” gasped Queen Victoria, “…Dear dear Louis, so beloved by us all, so adored by his children, a real son to me, to think of him paralysed and helpless…Poor dear Irène how distressed she will be. I can think of nothing else.”
His daughters hurried from Prussia, Russia and Malta to be at his side but by the time they reached the New Palace ‘the best and kindest of fathers’ was barely conscious. He died in the early hours of the morning, 15th March 1892.
‘Broken-hearted, crushed and bewildered’, Queen Victoria’s heart again went out to her orphaned grandchildren and particularly, in the aftermath of the Grand Duke’s death, to his twenty-three-year-old successor, Ernst Ludwig.
Until then, Ernie had been living a carefree existence, indulging his passion for art and enjoying the company of his unmarried sister Alix. Now, suddenly saddled with the weight of responsibility for the Grand Duchy, all that would have to change, and fond as she was of her grandson, the Queen had little faith in his ability to cope at such an early age. She sent him message after message full of sound advice and, above all, recommended that he should find a wife as soon as possible not only to help him carry out his duties but to secure the Hessian dynasty.
There may have been another motive in the Queen’s persistent pestering. Perhaps she had wondered why Ernie seemed disinclined to marry and appeared so content with his artistic friends that he would have been happy to continue his bachelorhood indefinitely. Perhaps, too, she had picked up the hint in Vicky’s letter: ‘who can guess what [his] tastes may be, and whether young Ladies will be forthcoming who return whatever feelings [he] may have.’
Whether the observant Queen suspected Ernie’s bisexual tendencies and hoped to avoid a scandal, or simply believed that he would be happier with a wife, she would not let the matter drop. She had even selected him a bride from among her own granddaughters - Cousin Maud of Wales. As it quickly became apparent that Ernie had little in common with Maud, Queen Victoria simply switched his attention to another cousin: eighteen-year-old Victoria Melita (Ducky) of Edinburgh.
Whenever the couple met in one of her English palaces, the Queen delighted in seeing them laughing together and became increasingly convinced that they were ideally suited. Both were fun-loving and artistic and, since Ducky was living in neighbouring Coburg, she was familiar with all the mores of German Grand Duchies and would, in her grandmother’s opinion, make an excellent successor to Princess Alice as Grand Duchess of Hesse.
Throughout the summer of 1892, Queen Victoria cajoled and beleaguered Ernie to propose but neither he nor his sisters were quite so enthusiastic. To his sisters Ducky appeared too frivolous and flippant to take the duties of a Grand Duchess seriously, while Ernie, who had never quite recovered from the death of his little brother Frittie, feared for the health of his children and had doubts about the wisdom of marriage between first cousins. In response the Queen had her personal physician compile a medical report which assured him that since both parties were perfectly fit, such a marriage would ‘strengthen the stock.’ As Ernie continued to prevaricate the Queen became more impatient. If he did not propose soon, she warned, Ducky might slip away; the Duchess of Edinburgh and Coburg was renowned for marrying off her daughters at an early age and while Ernie dithered there were plenty of other young princes who would be only to happy to step in before him.
In fact Ducky herself had, to her grandmother’s chagrin, already fallen in love with another cousin on her mother’s side: Grand Duke Kyril of Russia. For the Queen, who still ‘grieved as much as ever’ over Ella’s Russian match, it must have come as a relief to hear that the Orthodox Church forbade marriage between first cousins, and consequently nothing could come of Ducky’s hopes.
Queen Victoria bombarded Darmstadt with letters but, frustrated by Ernie’s tardiness in replying, decided to take more direct action. She simultaneously invited both cousins to visit her at Osborne and there at last in the winter of 1893, Ernie proposed, Ducky accepted him and a date was set for a spring wedding.
The following April the splendid gathering of royalties converging on Coburg gave rise to a premature optimism that the marriage would be a success. The streets were crowded with so many guests that passers-by were delighted to see carriages stopping on the road as princes, empresses, duchesses and grand dukes descended to greet one another. The Kaiser, the Empress Frederick, the Prince of Wales, the Tsarevich Nicholas, the Crown Prince and Princess of Roumania, the Grand Duke and Duchess Serge, the Duke of Connaught and his daughters, Daisy and Patsy, and numerous other relatives from Russia, England and Germany enjoyed a family reunion and settled as comfortably as they could into the overcrowded palaces. The highlight of the gathering was the arrival of Queen Victoria, who, having put so much effort into bringing about the wedding, made a special effort to be present.
Not everyone, however, was delighted to see the Queen. Amid all the rejoicing, the bride’s father, Affie, was seething with rage. In his mother’s entourage he had spotted the ‘Munshi’ Abdul Karim, her pretentious Indian secretary and the latest in a line of favourites. Not since the days of John Brown had any of Queen Victoria’s retainers irked the royal family as much as the arrogant Munshi. His constant presence and endless complaints had been unpalatable enough in England, but Affie refused to stomach such behaviour in Coburg. Standing on his authority both as Duke and as the bride’s father, Affie adamantly refused to allow him to join the royal guests in the chapel. For once, the Queen was forced to give way and the Munshi, bristling with indignation, was banished to a stand with lesser members of the household.
“[The Queen] was greatly distressed and cried a great deal! All the servants about her knew and were talking about this and even [the Queen’s courier] spoke …about it in terms of glee at the M[unchi]’s discomfiture.”
The wedding service took place on 19th April in the Lutheran chapel of Schloss Ehrenburg, where the young Tsarevich Nicholas observed that Ernie and Ducky made ‘a lovely couple.’ In the joyful celebrations that followed there was every reason to believe that Ernie might yet prove the ideal husband for his cousin. They both took pleasure in parties, dancing and entertaining, and Ernie’s sensitive nature complimented that of his far more passionate wife. They shared, too, a fervent interest in art for, while Ernie was a connoisseur and collector, Ducky was a talented designer and artist:
“She draws unerringly, never rubbing out or correcting a single line, and her taste is excellent. It is really genius thrown away but it makes her very happy and she works hard as if her livelihood depended upon it.”
In the company of their numerous cousins, the future seemed rosy, but once the merry band had departed and the couple were alone, Ducky quickly discovered that her marriage was doomed to failure. Their wedding night was as disastrous as Missy’s had been and left her ‘completely shattered and disillusioned.’ If she hoped that matters would improve in time, the proud granddaughter of the Tsar soon realised she had overestimated Ernie. His penchant for young men was unabated and, unlike Cousins Ella and Marie Louise, Ducky could not resign herself to life with a homosexual husband. For his part, Ernie had believed that his wife would gladly adopt the numerous charities his mother had founded but Ducky showed no interest whatsoever in the affairs of Hesse and thought her husband and his little Grand Duchy so dull that she seized any chance to escape.
A year after the wedding their first and only child, was born - causing a good deal of wrangling between Queen Victoria and Ducky’s mother about the choice of an English or German obstetrician - but by then the marriage was already rapidly deteriorating. As Ducky complained that her husband was fonder of footmen than he was of her, they were soon living separate lives, held together by two frail bonds: their daughter Elizabeth - whose obvious preference for her father grated on Ducky’s nerves - and the knowledge that Queen Victoria would never consent to a divorce.

In April 1896 Ernie and Ducky returned to Coburg for the wedding of Ducky’s younger sister Sandra to Ernst of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. The Queen complained that nineteen-year-old Sandra was too young to be married, particularly to a man fifteen years her senior, and with typical family histrionics the bride and her younger sister, Baby Bee, wept throughout the service, but the marriage would prove the happiest and most stable of all the Edinburgh princesses. The couple settled into a Schloss near Hesse where, between 1897 and 1911, Sandra gave birth to five children: Gottfried, Marie Melita, Alexandra, Irma and Alfred, the youngest of whom died within his first year.
Two months after Sandra’s wedding, Ducky found another excuse to escape from ‘dull’ Darmstadt to the glamour of Moscow for the coronation of her Russian cousin, the new Tsar Nicholas II. The delights of Russia were all the more alluring for Ducky when she came face to face once more with her first love, the dashing, if taciturn, Grand Duke Kyril Vladimirovich. From then on, there was no hope of saving her marriage; her thoughts were only of Kyril.
Trapped and frustrated, Ducky sought escape from Hesse at every opportunity, visiting her relatives across Europe, in the full knowledge that in her absence Ernie was entertaining his boys. In 1899 she stayed at Balmoral with Queen Victoria and Cousin Thora of Schleswig-Holstein, where her dissatisfaction was obvious to everyone.
“The Grand Duchess is most amusing when describing her life at Darmstadt and her loathing of Germans is most extraordinary,” wrote the Lady-in-Waiting, Marie Mallet. “Though anything but British by birth she adores England with passion and declares a cottage here is preferable to all the Schlosses in the Fatherland.”
Beneath the ‘amusing’ façade, Ducky was in despair and wept to her grandmother that the only solution was divorce. The Queen had no need of her explanations; she had already made own discreet and thorough enquiries into the goings-on in Hesse and genuinely pitied Ducky’s plight but still she remained adamant on the subject of divorce.
Faced with no alternative, Ducky made one final attempt to accommodate her grandmother’s wishes and salvage her marriage. Perhaps, she hoped, another child might draw her and Ernie closer together but, after suffering a miscarriage in the spring of 1900, she gave up all hope of a future with Ernie. Leaving Darmstadt, for her mother’s villa in the South of France, she sought comfort in the arms of her lover, the Grand Duke Kyril.

Intensely disappointed by the outcome of her schemes, Queen Victoria firmly declared she would never again indulge in matchmaking. Not only had the marriage that the Queen so desired, wrought nothing but unhappiness for both parties, it had also led indirectly to the marriage she had been most anxious to avoid - that of her favourite granddaughter, Princess Alix of Hesse.