royal wedding celebration

A week after Victoria’s wedding, Queen Victoria returned to Windsor with Grand Duke Louis in tow. Though her son-in-law’s unhappiness and the prospect of Ella’s imminent departure for Russia preyed on her mind, she could rest satisfied by her part in averting the Hessian scandal and had no idea that an even greater shock was about to confront her. At the Darmstadt wedding, while she had been distracted by the Grand Duke’s folly, her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, had been busily falling in love with the bridegroom’s younger brother.
At the age of twenty-seven, ‘Baby’ Beatrice seemed destined for a life of spinsterhood. Since the plans to marry her off to Louis of Hesse had come to nothing, the Queen had decided that her youngest daughter should remain single as her constant support and companion, and by the age of twenty-two she had only ever spent ten days away from her mother. Beatrice appeared so content with her lot that no one, least of all the Queen, believed her capable of falling in love but, just in case she should have other ideas, handsome young men were discouraged from paying her any attention and guests were forbidden to even mention marriage in her presence.

The sudden disclosure that Beatrice wished to marry the dashing Prussian cavalry officer, Henry (Liko) Battenberg, struck Queen Victoria like a thunderbolt. She had no objection to the Battenbergs per se - she was still encouraging Moretta in her hopeless pursuit of Sandro – but what angered and shocked her was the fact that Beatrice had dared to fall in love at all! Offended that the daughter on whom she depended could even consider leaving her side, she dismissed the suggestion as ludicrous and adamantly refused to discuss the matter. The more Beatrice persisted, the more obstinate her mother became until she would not speak to her at all and for several months communicated only by note.
But Beatrice was not without allies. Vicky, tactfully pointed out to their mother that Beatrice was no longer a child and if the Queen were to persist in her opposition, who could tell what scandals may follow - perhaps ‘Baby’ may even follow Grand Duke Louis’ example and marry in secret! Grudgingly the Queen began to give way. Yes, she would consent to the marriage on condition that Liko resigned his Prussian commission and agreed to come and live with her in England.
Liko hesitated. Unlike Lenchen’s husband, Prince Christian, he was young, energetic and active, and the prospect of exchanging the exciting life of the Prussian Cavalry for one of servitude to a demanding mother-in-law lacked appeal. But Liko’s brothers favoured the match, and when Louis and Victoria invited him to their Chichester Home, Sennicotts, they succeeded in winning him over. He agreed to resign his Prussian commission and remain under the Queen’s roof for the duration of his marriage. Faced with such compliance the Queen raised no further objections.
While Beatrice rejoiced, republican journalists bewailed the arrival in England of another ‘German pauper’ who would have to be kept at public expense. Adopting the Queen’s own simile of ‘the rabbits in Windsor Park’ they complained of the expected surfeit of ‘Battenbunnies’ and made cruel suggestions as to how they might be disposed of. In parliament, too, there was discord as Republican Members objected to Beatrice’s marriage settlement. But the muttering in England was nothing compared to the furore in Berlin. That Victoria of Hesse had married a Battenberg was galling enough but that the Queen of England should allow her own daughter to do the same was positively unpalatable. In a typical about turn Queen Victoria flew to Liko’s defence. Elevating him from ‘Serene’ to ‘Royal’ Highness, she berated Vicky’s husband, Fritz, for voicing his opinion that Liko was not ‘of pure blood,’ and was even more furious that the upstart Willy dared to criticise what she had sanctioned. After all, she was quick to point out, Willy’s wife, the plain and fawning Dona, was a parvenu, whom the family had accepted in spite of her less than regal origins.
At least Vicky’s younger son, Henry, proved more compliant. Since he was busily courting Irène of Hesse, it would not do to belittle her brother-in-law’s family. When he heard that Irène and her younger sister Alix had been chosen as bridesmaids, he was even prepared to brave Willy’s scorn to attend the wedding.
As the ‘fatal’ day drew nearer, Queen Victoria’s misgivings returned. The prospect of handing over her ‘baby’ to a man was even more traumatic than the marriages of all her elder daughters. If a girl knew in advance what marriage entailed, she said, she would refuse to approach the altar. In Beatrice’s case she could only hope that there would be ‘no results’ - in fact there would be four: three sons and a daughter.
The wedding took place at Whippingham Church, not far from Osborne, after the briefest of honeymoons, they returned to take up permanent residence with the Queen. They holidayed with her in the south of France or the Italian Riviera and followed her annual rotation between Osborne, Balmoral and Windsor where their first son, Alexander (‘Drino’) - a ‘very pretty child’ in Queen Victoria’s opinion - was born in the autumn of 1886. Within months Beatrice was pregnant again and would soon give birth to Queen Victoria’s youngest granddaughter - the ‘jubilee baby’

In June 1887, as Londoners prepared to witness the greatest pageant of foreign royalties the capital had ever seen, Queen Victoria saw her well-ordered Court thrown into disarray. She understood that so many of her relatives wished to join in the celebrations for her fifty years on the throne, but, at the age of sixty-eight, her distaste for entertaining the ‘royal mob’ was as strong as ever. While hundreds of officials planned the route, the festivities and the service, the Queen was preoccupied with arranging the order of precedence (and no doubt someone would be put out by her decision). Still more troublesome was the problem of where to house her numerous foreign guests. Buckingham Palace was bursting at the seams; Affie had offered the use of rooms in Clarence House and Bertie at Marlborough House, but still the guest list grew. Willy was, as usual, causing trouble. Almost relishing the fact that his father was unwell, he suggested that the Crown Prince should stay in Prussia so that he could glory in the limelight of representing the Kaiser. His behaviour had become so obnoxious that Queen Victoria was loath to invite him at all and only Vicky’s politic persuasion had led her to change her mind. Even so, he could not be trusted not to insult the Battenberg princes and, to avoid any unpleasant scenes, it would be necessary to keep him as far from Louis and Liko as possible.
Then there was Charlotte. Not only was she actively encouraging Willy’s bombastic demands, but the Queen knew her well enough to realise what trouble her tales could cause and would have preferred her to stay in Prussia. There was no space for her at Buckingham Palace, the Queen explained to Vicky, and ‘much as I should like seeing her, I don’t think she ought to go to Marlborough House.’
Osborne was so crowded that Princesses Alix and Irène of Hesse were forced to share the same bed; and, if that were not enough, there was the unwelcome prospect of entertaining the Russians. Delighted as Queen Victoria was to see ‘dear lovely Ella’, (not least to grill her about her marriage•) the prospect of meeting her husband was far less enthralling. She could only hope that Ella’s sister, Victoria, who had recently been struck down by typhoid, would be sufficiently recovered to attend and would do her utmost to keep the Russian well away from her.
Hitches and bickering apart, Queen Victoria journeyed to London on 20th June 1887, and that evening entertained the bejewelled princesses and uniformed princes to a formal dinner. The next day, as a warm summer morning dawned, the cousins made their way to Westminster Abbey for a Service of Thanksgiving. Shortly before eleven-thirty, bugles sounded the National Anthem to announce the arrival of the sparkling procession of princesses who made their way to their seats to the left of a raised dais. Their titles were as ancient and illustrious as their surroundings: the Princesses Victoria Moretta, Sophie and Margaret Hohenzollern of Prussia, Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna, the Hereditary Princess Charlotte of Saxe-Meiningen, the Princesses Helena Victoria and Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, the Princess Louise of Wales, the Princesses Alix and Irène of Hesse and the Princesses Marie and Victoria Melita of Edinburgh.
As the chatter of sisters and cousins echoed on the Abbey walls, the Queen’s landau, preceded by a procession of princes of horseback set out from Buckingham Palace. At the entrance to the Abbey, the princes, arrayed with the emblems of their Orders, dismounted and made their way to the right of the dais on which the tiny Queen would sit during the service.
When the prayers were completed, the princesses, some ‘with tears in their eyes’ stepped forward to curtsey to their grandmother, who embraced and kissed each of them in turn. As the royalties emerged from the abbey enthralled crowds cheered the magnificent procession, hailed their monarch, and waved their flags, oblivious to Willy’s grumbling that his wife came lower in the order of precedence than the black Queen Kapiolani of Hawaii. For the first time since the death of Prince Albert, the British public turned out in their thousands to demonstrate their affection for the Queen. Later a grand formal dinner was held, during which the Queen granted the Order of the Bath to several of her grandsons and awarded each of her granddaughters the Jubilee Medal and brooch. In the evening royalties gathered in the gardens of Buckingham Palace to watch a magnificent firework display.
The celebrations continued for several days, during which the Queen frequently appeared in public with her granddaughters. There were opportunities, too, for small family gatherings. The Queen bounced little Alice Albany on her knee; she took tea at Frogmore with Alix and Irène of Hesse, whose engagement to Cousin Henry of Prussia had recently been announced. She drove through Windsor with five-year-old Daisy Connaught, visited Prince Albert’s tomb with Marie Louise, entertained Charlotte at a large family dinner and, beneath the trees at Windsor, plied Ella with questions about her Russian marriage.
By the time the celebrations were over and the guests had returned home, Queen Victoria could rest content that, in spite of her years of seclusion, her popularity among her subjects was greater than ever, and the family reunions had passed off without incident. By autumn, she believed she had earned a rest at her favourite retreat, Balmoral, and there, in October, Beatrice’s jubilee baby was born.
The confinement was not easy. After a prolonged labour, the child was removed by forceps leaving Beatrice prostrate for several weeks. But the baby, was a healthy, sturdy daughter who, according to her grandmother, bore a striking resemblance to her cousin, Ella of Hesse.
As the first princess to be born in Scotland for many centuries, she was feted by the Scots and much was made of her baptism in the Presbyterian Crathie Kirk, where she was christened Victoria Eugenie after her godmother, the Roman Catholic Empress Eugenie of France. In the family, however, she was always known by her third name, Ena.
Boisterous and lively, the young Battenbergs brought a breath of youth to the English palaces and revived in the Queen a jollity that she had rarely displayed since the death of Prince Albert. ‘Drino and Ena are flourishing and very amusing,’ she told Vicky in 1879. ‘He is getting more impudent.’ Servants and guests alike were amazed to hear her laughing so freely with the children whom she claimed to love ‘as much as their parents do.’ When Ena was two years old, a second brother, Leopold was born, and two years later the family was completed with the birth of Maurice. To accommodate the growing an extra wing - the Durbah Wing - was added to Osborne House, and there, in the freedom of the Isle of Wight the children learned to cycle and swim. Raised in a family of boys, Ena was a wild unruly child and, though the Queen was extremely indulgent with her, there were occasions when she found it necessary to give the little girl a slap.
Cousin Moretta visiting Windsor in 1889, wrote to her mother that:
“Ena runs about all over the place & the Indians & nurses after her to try and get her back, she is so strong.’
Marie Louise was equally enchanted by her naughty little cousin and recognised that she possessed such ‘great qualities’ that ‘great possibilities’ lay ahead of her.
“Even when she was a small child with golden curls all over her head and at times very naughty, [she] was always nearest my heart.”
Ena’s adventurousness rivalled that of her brothers and on one occasion, at least, almost culminated in tragedy. One Saturday afternoon in February 1894 the six-year-old princess was riding at Windsor when her pony stumbled and threw her before rolling on top of her. The little girl managed to walk home but on reaching the palace was violently sick before lapsing into unconsciousness. Fearing a brain haemorrhage, the Queen’s physician, Sir James Reid, remained in attendance all night but by the following morning the ‘splendid child’ began to show the slightest signs of recovery.
“The little princess is much better than she was, but I am still anxious about her,” wrote Sir James. “She is quite conscious when awake but rambles a little when asleep…I trust the improvement may go on steadily but I tell them that she is not yet out of danger and I watch her very closely both when she is asleep and awake.”
After so serious an accident, it came as a relief to see her gradually becoming ‘obstinate and troublesome’ again and, following her recovery she remained as fearless as ever. In fact, as she later confessed, the most daunting aspect of her childhood was the terror she felt when her grandmother grilled her about her Bible studies.

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.

A cool winter wind blew in from the sea as Queen Victoria’s two eldest daughters strolled along the front in Cannes. To all outward appearances, Vicky, the elder and cleverer of the two, had made the better match. Prussia was so much wealthier and more powerful than the impoverished Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, and she could not have found a more devoted husband than Fritz, with whom she was still in love after eleven years of marriage. Yet, as she watched the children playing croquet, running on the sand, swishing through rock pools and collecting botanical specimens, the Crown Princess could not help but wonder who had the happier lot.
Short in stature and, by the age of twenty-nine, already developing her mother’s matronly figure, Vicky had always considered her sister far prettier than she was and the sight of Alice’s girls running beside her own clumsy daughter, Charlotte, gave rise to a rueful envy. Although Victoria of Hesse was quite a tomboy with a tendency to talk too much, both she and her younger sister Ella looked so much healthier than their painfully thin Prussian cousin, who suffered continuously from nose and throat complaints and appeared far younger than her nine years.
Only two years previously, Vicky had written hopefully to Queen Victoria that Charlotte ‘is very good looking and much admired’ but seeing her now beside her Hessian cousins, the optimism seemed premature. Confident yet unassuming in their hand-me-down clothes, Alice’s daughters appeared so charming next to the nervous and graceless Charlotte whose hair was so thin it had to be cropped short like a boy’s, and who was such a nail-biter that Vicky had resorted to strapping her hands to her sides and making her wear gloves all day. When Queen Victoria played down the difference remarking that Alice’s third daughter, Irène, was plain, Vicky replied frankly that her own son, Henry, was ‘ugly,’ though conceding that this was not his fault since: ‘he cannot help being so ugly, and he is really not stupid and can be very amusing.’
Still more disappointing for Vicky than her children’s appearance, was their behaviour. With true Hohenzollern pride, her eldest son, ten-year-old Willy, strutted about giving orders and reminding his cousins of the recent Prussian victory over Hesse. Even in his more placid moments he changed his mind so often, abandoning one game to start another, that he soon earned the nickname ‘William the Sudden.’ While his younger sister and brother, Charlotte and Henry, were happy to follow his lead, Alice’s boisterous but impeccably mannered daughters yielded to his whims, perhaps making allowance for his pomposity out of pity for his atrophied left arm. Though every attempt had been made to conceal the deformity - specially designed suits with raised pockets and shortened sleeves - it served as a constant reminder to his mother that she had failed in her first duty to produce a flawless heir.
The trauma of her his birth still haunted the Crown Princess. After thirty-six hours of a tortuous labour, during which the doctors gave up hope of saving either mother or child, the baby was found to be in the breach position and was forcibly removed by forceps. In the process, the nerves in his shoulder were badly damaged and consequently his arm failed to develop. For a boy in Willy’s position as heir to the Prussian throne the deformity was more than a handicap, it was a humiliation. Already Vicky had heard cruel muttering that a ‘one-armed man’ should never be king and she had watched helplessly as he endured various brutal and unsuccessful attempts to correct the abnormality.
“The arm will be a great obstacle to his education,” Vicky had written to her mother, “as what has to be done for it not only takes up so much time but tires him so that he is not fit to learn directly afterwards. He is very backward for his age in consequence; he can neither read nor write nor spell yet…”
Through sheer strength of will he had learned to ride one-handed but even by the age of ten he had difficulty using a knife and fork and the resultant shame left him with a hatred of any sign of weakness and a need to exert his own superiority.
If the trauma of his birth explained Willy’s erratic behaviour, there was no apparent excuse for his equally tempestuous sister. Charlotte’s moods swung from total apathy to sudden tantrums and rages and her sense of her own importance led her to treat her social inferiors with disdain. Queen Victoria, who insisted that all her servants should be treated with respect, had been deeply offended by Charlotte’s refusal to shake hands with her favourite ghillie, John Brown, and wrote a strongly worded letter to Vicky expressing her disapproval. The Crown Princess knew and despaired of her elder children’s arrogance but protested that she was not to blame. Their Hohenzollern grandparents spoiled them terribly and infused them with such Prussian pride that there was little she could do to correct them.
Grey clouds gathered over the sea and the princesses assembled their children to return to the Grand Hotel. Archdeacon Dealtry of Madras had arrived to speak English with the elder Prussian boys and, as Willy and Henry prepared for their lesson, Vicky set up her easel to paint a portrait of the Archdeacon’s daughter, carried in the arms of an Indian servant.
Art was virtually the only one of Vicky’s many talents that had not been stifled since her marriage. Eleven years earlier, she had arrived in Berlin filled with high hopes for the future. Germany at the time comprised a number of independent kingdoms and grand duchies of which Prussia was the most dominant. For years, ideas had been mooted about a confederation of the various states and when Vicky married the liberal-minded Fritz, she believed that together they could realise her father’s vision of a peaceful and unified Germany governed along the lines of the British constitution. It did not take long to discover that few members of the Prussian Court shared her dream.
Fritz’s father, first Regent then King, believed more in an absolute monarchy than a British-style constitution and when he appointed the formidable Otto Von Bismarck as Chancellor, all hopes of a democratic society were dispelled. From the start, it was Bismarck’s intention to create a powerful empire rivalling its European neighbours in military supremacy and prestige. Within five years of Vicky’s wedding, he had annexed the disputed Danish duchies of Schleswig and Holstein before embarking upon a war with Austria, dragging other states - including Alice’s Hesse-Darmstadt - into the conflict.
In spite of the Prussian victory, the war had been even more disastrous for Vicky than it had been for Alice. In her anxiety about Fritz’s impending departure for the front, she gave birth to a premature baby, whom, to her mother’s satisfaction, she named Victoria Moretta.
While Moretta flourished Vicky scarcely had time to recover from the birth when tragedy struck the family. No sooner had Fritz left for battle when his son, two-year-old son, Sigismund, developed a fever. The same age as his cousin, Ella, little ‘Sigi’ had a special place in his mother’s heart as the first of her children to be breast-fed. He seemed such a healthy child, so ‘pretty’ so ‘merry’ and ‘so wonderfully strong, with such a fine colour, always laughing and so lively,’ that his illness was all the more shocking. To make matters worse, most of the Court doctors had left with the army and by the time that meningitis was diagnosed, the child was beyond hope. His death in mid-June plunged the Crown Princess into the depths of despair:
“What I suffer none can know,” she wrote to Queen Victoria, “– few know how I loved! It was my own happy secret – the long cry of agony which rises from the inmost depths of my soul reaches heaven alone.”
With Fritz far away and no one on hand to comfort her, Vicky’s grief took a rather macabre turn. Sealing the room in which Sigi had died, she placed an effigy of a baby in his cot and visited it regularly to the horror and disgust of the Court.
The decisive Prussian triumph at Könnigratz did little to raise Vicky’s spirits. Though she half-heartedly rejoiced in the honours that victory accorded her husband, military success brought no solace when she considered the plight of her sister in Darmstadt. Moreover, she could only watch in despair as Bismarck, claiming much of the credit for the Prussian triumph, urged the king to continue his belligerent ambitions further afield.
In such a militaristic climate, there was little room for a liberal-minded and very English princess, whose insistence on clinging to her native customs and tactless comparisons of Britain and Germany did nothing to endear her to the Court. Like Alice, she had shown initiative and imagination in her philanthropic activities. She had established homes and training schools for the unemployed, and organised schemes to provide them with temporary work. She had sponsored evening classes, arranged educational programmes in health and hygiene, founded schools of nursing, and an institute to train young women in a variety of trades; but her efforts were largely unnoticed. The Press drew attention only to her Englishness and her outspoken opposition to Bismarck until she became so unpopular that many Berliners were happy to believe that outlandish stories that the Chancellor fabricated about her. If she hoped for support from her in-laws, she was quickly disillusioned. As far as Fritz’s father was concerned, women had no business meddling in politics, and a Crown Princess’s sole purpose was to provide the country with heirs.
Unfortunately Vicky did little help her own cause. Like Alice, she was prone to bouts of depression and illness, exacerbated by frequent pregnancies and the stifling of her many talents. Moreover, according to one of her English nieces, there was:
“…a curious trait in her character - she was never really satisfied with the moment itself. When she was in Berlin, everything in England was perfect: when she was in England, everything German was equally perfect.”
Even in Cannes, as Alice wrote to Queen Victoria of the ‘heavenly blue sea,’ and the beauty of the sunsets and countryside, Vicky only complained of the expense of the place and the poverty of its architecture:
“If it were not that dear Alice and I were so happy together…I do not think we either of us would be enthusiastic about this place…the absence of nice buildings makes monotonous.”
Frustrated in her aspirations and increasingly isolated from Berlin society, Vicky had no option but to confine her many talents to the decoration of her home and the upbringing of her family. ‘Every moment she could spare…she spent with us,’ Moretta recalled yet even in the schoolroom her hopes were thwarted. It was frustrating for a woman of Vicky’s intellect to discover that her children were not great scholars. Impulsive Willy was hindered by his arm, Henry was ‘lazy’ and Charlotte was, in her mother’s eyes, ‘backward’ and ‘dull.’
‘Stupidity is not a sin,’ she wrote in exasperation to Queen Victoria, ‘but it renders education a hard and difficult task.’
Brilliant herself, the standards she set for her children were way beyond their ability until Queen Victoria herself felt it necessary to intervene:
“Don’t press poor dear Henry too much; it will not do any good and he will learn none the better for it…more harm than good is done by forcing delicate and backward children.”
If at times the perfectionist Vicky despaired of her elder children, she could be equally effusive in their praise. Henry - in spite of his ‘ugliness’ - was ‘a great darling’; Willy, ‘very intelligent and good-looking’ and yet within the same paragraph she was ever ready to point out their faults with the result that the children were never quite sure where they stood and, beneath much of their bluster, all were intrinsically shy and lacking in self-esteem. Unable to impress their mother, Willy, Charlotte and Henry ran to their grandparents for praise. The Prussian Queen Augusta made no secret of her contempt for the Crown Princess and actively encouraged Willy’s rising hostility towards her. The king, meanwhile, regaled his grandson with tales of past Prussian victories, filling his head with dreams of ruling a mighty Empire surpassing that of his British grandmother. The giant Bismarck, ever willing to flatter the impressionable boy to his face while privately viewing him with scorn, appeared to personify that dream and beside the ‘Iron Chancellor’ the Crown Prince and Princess seemed weak, unpatriotic and unworthy of respect or imitation. Proud of his Hohenzollern ancestry, Willy grew to despise his English blood and Vicky could only take refuge in Fritz’s abiding love and the determination to keep her younger children free from the ‘Prussian influence.’
By the time of Moretta’s birth, Vicky was determined to play a more direct role in her children’s upbringing and the effects were almost immediately apparent. Lacking the precociousness of her elder siblings, Moretta, even in early childhood, appeared more English than Prussian:
“She is the only one of our children who does not speak German;” Vicky explained to Queen Victoria, “she will not say any German words.”
Her cheerfulness endeared her to Vicky, but even so her extreme shyness, particularly among strangers, caused her mother a great deal of concern. Within eighteen months of Moretta’s birth, a fourth son, Waldemar was born and he too, under Vicky’s care was so ‘dear’ and ‘honest’ that he soon became her favourite child.

The holiday in Cannes brought a brief respite to both Vicky and Alice. ‘Living quietly together,’ they had the rare opportunity of sharing memories of their idyllic childhood and confiding in one another their present troubles.
“It does me good…to have Vicky’s stimulating company,” Alice wrote to Louis from Cannes, “and to get right away from the narrow, stifling atmosphere of Darmstadt…Vicky learns and hears so much, and she makes really good progress every year, which I cannot say for myself.”
Vicky, too, began to appreciate that, though Alice’s life seemed so much less complicated than her own, she too had her share of difficulties:
“[Alice’s] life in Germany, though she enjoys more liberty than I, and has her husband more to herself, has its disadvantages and I have always admired the way she has taken them.”
The winter moved on and the arrival of Louis and Fritz on the 19th December brought a happy reunion of both families in time for Christmas. Yet, while the children listened intrigued to their fathers’ accounts of adventures in distant lands, both Alice and Vicky had reason to anticipate their return to Germany with some trepidation. With a heavy heart, Alice set out with her children to the ‘stifling’ atmosphere of Darmstadt, while for Vicky there came a brief respite as she and Fritz broke their journey in Paris. Entertained by the charismatic Emperor Napoleon III, and delighting in the Parisian culture, neither Vicky nor Fritz could have realized that within seven months the Prussian Crown Prince would be leading his troops towards the French capital in the midst of a bitter war.