royal wedding celebration

At the beginning of July 1897, Vicky returned from the Jubilee celebrations to her beloved Friedrichshof. There, between visits from her daughters and frequent trips to her beloved Italy, she continued to amass her artistic collections with the same enthusiasm she had shown as a child when collecting fossils to add to her collection in the Swiss Cottage. Friedrichshof was so full of antiques and treasures that, according to a regular visitor, Marie Louise, the ‘wonderful’ place became:
“..more of a museum than a house…I remember once…I went upstairs to my room and lay down on my sofa. My aunt came to see that I had everything I needed and seeing me reclining on the couch said: ‘Dear child do you not know that you are lying on a cinquecento coverlet!’ and she placed a newspaper over it although I had already taken the precaution of removing my shoes.”
Vicky’s concern for her antiques, however, did not prevent her from welcoming children into her home, and one of the chief delights of her widowhood was the pleasure she took in her grandchildren. It saddened her deeply that Willy’s wife seemed so intent on alienating her from their six sons and had acerbically pointed out that the choice of the name Victoria for their only daughter was not made out of deference to her grandmother. But while one daughter-in-law exacerbated the antagonism between Vicky and her son, her second daughter-in-law, Irène of Hesse, proved far more accommodating.
Since Irène’s marriage to Henry, in May 1888, the mutual and long-standing affection
between aunt and niece had deepened, not least because Irène had done so much to improve relations between Vicky and Henry. Life with the Kaiser’s volatile brother was not always easy for the Hessian princess:
“[He] was a tall and handsome man, but inclined to be - let us say - temperamental. At times he was overbearing and very satirical, and at others friendly and charming. His wife was a small woman, simple in manner and of a kindly, unselfish nature.”
Notwithstanding her docility, Irène succeeded in calming his fiery temper and by the time of the Diamond Jubilee, Queen Victoria’s lady-in-waiting, Marie Mallet thought him ‘simple friendly and courteous…the nicest male royalty going.’
The couple had settled in the Königliches Schloss in Kiel from where Henry continued his naval duties and indulged his passion for motor cars and engines, and to where, in March 1889, Vicky and Moretta had hurried to assist Irène through the birth of her first child.
Suffering none of Queen Victoria’s revulsion about the ‘unecstatic and animal’ state of pregnancy, Vicky set to work preparing the nursery and layette for the baby. Though the welcome she received was cordial and her efforts were greatly appreciated, she could not help but feel disappointed to find so few books in the house. It seemed incongruous that the well-educated daughter of Princess Alice showed so little interest in world events and was unable to discuss matters of political importance. Vicky may well have agreed, too, with Marie Mallet’s view that Irène’s ladies-in-waiting were ‘very dull and by no means easy to get on with.’
But if Vicky wanted reassuring that this truly was Alice’s daughter, she needed only to recall how easily her sister had shocked the Queen by breast-feeding her baby. Now it was Vicky’s turn to be appalled when Irène made no attempt to hide her pregnancy behind shawls and rugs, but appeared quite openly in public right up to the time of the birth.
“I think it quite embarrassing,” Vicky wrote prudishly to the Queen, “and would never have dreamed of doing so especially before gentlemen and children and strangers.”
Embarrassed or not, she remained at Irène’s side through the ‘quick, easy’ birth of a son, Waldemar, on 20th March 1889. The baby’s healthy appearance belied a terrible truth. It soon became clear that Waldemar was a haemophiliac, which perhaps accounts for the seven-year gap before Irène gave birth to a second child, Sigismund. Four years later the family was completed with the birth of a third son, Henry.
“I wonder that you are pleased at Irène’s having a third boy.” Queen Victoria wrote to Vicky, “There are far too many princes in Prussia.”
There was an unfortunate irony in the remark, for even as Irène was hoping for a daughter, her younger sister, Alix, Tsarina of Russia, was still desperately praying for a son.
Boys or girls, Vicky delighted in her grandchildren and looked forward with pleasure to Sophie’s frequent visits to Friedrichshof with her large family or the arrival of Mossy and Fischy with their twins. Between and during their stays she continued to enjoy the beautiful scenery of Krönberg walking and riding daily as she had done since childhood, until an accident brought her outings to a sad conclusion.

In September 1898, while out riding with Mossy, Vicky’s horse ‘took fright at a steam threshing machine…and shied violently.’ Vicky was thrown from the saddle but, though bruised and badly shaken, was able to write the next day to her mother that:
“I got up and walked part of the way home and only felt shaken and stiff towards evening…I am alright today except for a headache.”
In reality, Vicky was far more ill than anyone realised. Throughout her life, she had been troubled by a myriad of rheumatic ailments but following the accident she suffered severe back pain, which intensified with the passing of time. After consulting several doctors who presented conflicting medical opinions, she was eventually diagnosed with breast cancer, which had spread to her spine. Determined to continue living life to the full, she kept the news from her family, referring to her pain simply as lumbago and confiding the truth only to her youngest sister, Beatrice, and their mother.
For several months, she was able to make her regular excursion to Italy and France until, by the end of 1899, the pain left her confined to bed for long periods and she had no alternative but to reveal the truth to her daughters. Charlotte was the last to be told and though she, like the others, promised to keep the news to herself, she immediately announced her mother’s illness to the world.
Mossy, Moretta, and Irène were on hand to offer what comfort they could and Sophie hurried from Greece to be at her mother’s side. Vicky endured her sufferings with fortitude and a touching concern for others, apologising to her nurses for upsetting them by her screams. Yet, hard as she tried to maintain a positive outlook, the pain, relieved only by minimal amounts of morphine, was excruciating and, at its height, she refused to see anyone for fear of causing them distress:
“My legs are shrunken and falling away to nothing, a mere skeleton,” she wrote to Sophie, “The agony is as bad as ever, the nights are a torture…The tears and groans all night long drive me utterly mad. I often think I should put an end to myself if only I could. Oh I cannot bear it any longer!”
So loud were her cries of agony that even the soldiers guarding her palace requested permission to move out of earshot.

For Queen Victoria, her eldest daughter’s illness was but one in a series of heartaches that marred her last years. In the closing years of the century, she mourned not only for Liko, for Young Affie and the Duke of Edinburgh and Coburg, but as the mother of her country, she grieved too for the young officers dying by the dozen in the South African War. Her concern for the soldiers was genuine and she repeatedly sent telegrams assuring them of her gratitude whether in victory or defeat. Though the Queen never doubted the justice of the British cause, the conflict bore an ominous portent of the division that a future war would wreak in the family.
Vicky and her three younger daughters supported the British and shared the Queen’s concern for her troops. From Sophie in Athens, from Vicky in the Friedrichshof and from Mossy in Hesse-Kassel, parcels arrived for the English soldiers, while the princesses studied British newspapers for reports of the cruelty and treachery of the Boers.
Across much of the rest of Europe, however, a different story was told. In Russia, Alix and Ella read reports of the British atrocities and the claim that their grandmother’s soldiers were using Boer women and children as shields.
“We…are right behind the Boers and wish them every success in the war,” wrote the Tsar’s sister. “I think there can be no one (except the English) who isn’t on their side!”
Even Tsar Nicholas, who claimed to discuss the matter every day at dinner, agreed with his sister, leaving Alix torn between loyalty to her grandmother and her husband.
“She is, of course appalled at the loss of English officers,” Nicky wrote, “but what can you do, it has always been like that in their wars!”
From Prussia, too, the Kaiser - while pompously offering his grandmother advice on how best to proceed - praised the Boers’ successes. In Germany ‘the antagonistic feeling…against England was very pronounced,’ making life especially difficult for those English princesses, Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein and Alice of Albany, who were living in there. Alice’s brother, as a German officer cadet had no option but to support the Kaiser’s view, while for Marie Louise, who had one brother, Albert, in the German army and another, Christle, serving with the English forces, the situation was still direr.
Christle, a Captain in the King’s Own Rifle Corps, had heroically come
through ‘many hardships’ in the campaign until, like his Uncle Liko before him, he contracted malaria and enteric fever. His sisters, anxiously awaiting news at Balmoral, heard that he was being well treated in the military hospital in Pretoria, but within days pneumonia had set in and he died on 29th October 1900. At his own request his body was buried alongside his fellow officers in Pretoria.
“Dear unselfish Princess Thora [is] just heart broken,” wrote Marie Mallet, “she cared more for her brother than for anything on earth and was justly proud of his valour…[She] is admirable, although she and her mother will miss him every hour of every day…she thinks of everyone but herself.”
It was left to the heart-broken Thora to take the news of the death of yet another grandson to the Queen.
“I cannot write but a few words, as we are in such distress about dear beloved Christle’s loss.” The Queen told Vicky, “…Poor dear Lenchen bears up wonderfully; so too does poor dear Thora…”
Even as she wrote the letter, Queen Victoria was filled with anxiety for the future of its recipient, for by then she knew that Vicky herself was dying.

The series of bereavements, Marie Louise’s divorce, anxieties about Vicky and the stress of the war brought about a rapid deterioration in Queen Victoria’s health.
“She said,” wrote Marie Mallet in the summer of 1900, “that the trials and sorrows of the last few months were almost more than she could bear and, alas, I cannot help feeling that there may be more in store.”
Her sight was failing and, scarcely able to walk any distance, she spent much of her time in the company of her granddaughter, Thora, who patiently sat at her side, listening even as her mind began to fail and she rambled occasionally incoherently of events of the past.
Shortly before Christmas 1900, Queen Victoria left Windsor for the last time, setting sail for her beloved Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. It was a cold, bleak winter and, the frail Queen was visibly fading.
“My sight is rather bad since I have been poorly,” she wrote to Vicky on 6th January, “but I hope it will soon be much better.”
It was not to be. Within a fortnight, telegrams were flying across the continent warning of her decline. Princesses hurried to the island to take their turn in approaching Grandmama’s bed to whisper a last good-bye. Racing, too, across the Solent, much to his aunts’ distress was the Queen’s eldest grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who genuinely wished to see her for one last time. Throughout the 22nd January the Queen lapsed in and out of consciousness and shortly before noon she seemed so close to death that the royalties were summoned to her bedside. As her chaplain, Dr. Davison began his prayers the Queen was able to recognise the members of her family: Victoria Battenberg, who was staying on the Royal Yacht Osborne; the Dowager Duchess of Coburg and her little grandchild, Ducky’s daughter, Elizabeth of Hesse. Daisy and Patsy Connaught arrived with their parents and joined the Prince of Wales and the Queen’s younger daughters, Lenchen, Louise and Beatrice in their vigil. For a few hours she rallied and the family withdrew but by mid-afternoon she had suffered a relapse. At half-past six in the evening of 22nd January 1901, Queen Victoria, died in the Kaiser’s arms.


Ten days later, a long procession of royal mourners followed the coffin towards the yacht Alberta that was to take the Queen’s body back to England. On 4th February, through flurries of snow, the cortege set out from the Albert Memorial Chapel in Windsor to Queen Victoria’s final resting place beside beloved Albert in the Mausoleum at Frogmore. For Marie Louise, standing beside the coffin brought a deep sense of ‘peace and awe’, but, in typical Wales’ fashion, her cousin, Maud, confessed that she found the funeral procession to ‘rather trying & exhausting.’
“I cannot believe that she is really gone, that we shall never see her anymore. It seems impossible,” wept the young Tsarina Alix, whose fourth pregnancy had prevented her from making the journey to England. “How I envy you [she wrote to her sister, Victoria] being able to see beloved Grandmama being taken to her last rest.” A memorial service was held for the Queen in St. Petersburg where, for the first time since her arrival in Russia, the Tsarina wept in public.
While Ducky avoided the funeral, remaining in France with her Russian lover, her elder sister, Missy, was deeply distressed at being prevented from accompanying her husband to the ceremonies. She sensed the implications of the loss of ‘dearest grandmama’ and in a letter to her mother described her longing to return to England:
“To see it all again if only for a day or two…to have a last peep at the old house…with out dear old Granny the last link is cut off!...I tell you it is inconceivable sorrow for me.”
For Alice Albany, who had returned from Germany for the funeral it was an equally devastating experience:
“I had come to regard her as permanent and indestructible - like England and Windsor Castle.”
But it was the future Queen Mary who, perhaps, most accurately expressed the country’s sense of bewilderment:
“The thought of England without the Queen is dreadful even to think of. God help us all.”

Grief-stricken at the death of her grandmother, Mossy of Prussia faced the most difficult task of all. It fell to her to break the news to her mother. Vicky heartbroken and racked with pain, wept “I wish I were dead too!”
For six more months, she struggled on, her agony increasing by the day. In February 1901, she received a final visit from her brother, the new King Edward VII. In spite of the friction between Willy and ‘Uncle Bertie’, the encounter passed off amiably enough, thanks largely to the tact of Sophie and Mossy who ‘were always ready to dash in if the conversation seemed to get into dangerous channels.’ Bertie was horrified by his sister’s rapid deterioration; as she sat ‘propped up with cushions; she looked as if she had just been taken off the rack after undergoing torture.’ Before they left, the king’s physician Sir Francis Laking persuaded her doctors to administer larger doses of morphine to combat her pain.
Through the last few months of her life, Vicky’s daughters and daughter-in-law, Irène, visited regularly, Mossy and Moretta barely leaving her side. To the end she continued to take an interest in current events and in her daughters’ futures; when Sophie arrived from Greece, Vicky urged her to continue to care for the poor of her country. To the last, too, Vicky remained first and foremost an English princess. To her friend Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, she confided that she hoped he would preside at her funeral and read the English Burial Service over her.
In the early evening of August 5th 1901, Vicky, surrounded by her children, died reciting the Lord’s Prayer. The funeral service she had requested was carried out at the English Church Homburg, to be followed some days later by a Lutheran funeral at Krönberg, after which she was interred with Fritz at Potsdam. In her will she left her favourite home at Friedrichshof to her youngest daughter, Mossy.

The death of Queen Victoria severed the tie uniting the royal cousins. Without her as their mainstay, there would be no common bond to keep the family together. With the dawning of the new century, the old world had passed away and the ominous clouds across the Solent portended a future far bleaker for the family that anyone could have predicted.

A decade after her Golden Jubilee, Queen Victoria prepared to celebrate her sixty years on the throne. Older now and frailer, she had no desire to entertain the numerous foreign royalties who had descended upon London ten years before, and insisted that this time it was to be more of a celebration of British Empire. Even so, no less than eighteen of her granddaughters attended the event, preceding the Queen in seven carriages as the stately procession made its way from Buckingham Palace to St. Paul’s Cathedral•. No longer able to walk unaided, the tiny monarch remained in her carriage for an open-air service of thanksgiving, before returning to the palace for a grand jubilee dinner at which Ella and her brother Ernie and sister-in-law, Ducky, were invited to share the Queen’s table. Neither Ella nor her grandmother could have failed to notice that the couple had arrived separately for the celebrations and would later depart separately, drawing further attention their unhappy marriage.
Of the granddaughters who were unable to attend, Missy was ‘terribly, terribly, disappointed’ not to be there but her husband had recently been struck with a near-fatal bout of typhoid; the Tsarina of Russia was pregnant with her third daughter, Tatiana; and it would have been incongruous for Sophie to enjoy the celebrations when her country was in the throes of the Turko-Greek War.• Noticeable too for his absence was the Kaiser, to whom the Queen Victoria had refused an invitation since he was openly supporting the Turks in the conflict. Willy was furious at the snub and so ‘frantic’ that he ‘would like to kill his poor brother [Henry] for daring to accept the Queen’s invitation.’
The celebrations were a great success and the rapturous applause that the Queen received reaffirmed her popularity. Marie Louise, sitting beside her grandmother in the carriage recalled that:
“The crowd was immense, the cheers and acclamations deafening. The Queen had asked me to accompany her back to Windsor and on the way I turned to her and said: ‘Oh, Grandmama, does this not make you very proud?’ She replied, ‘No, dear child, very humble.’”
For the Queen, though moved by the demonstrations of affection, the occasion was tinged with sorrow. She felt deeply the loss of her son-in-law, Beatrice’s husband, Liko Battenberg, whose death, the previous year, had been the first in a series of family tragedies that would cast a dark shadow over the remainder of her reign.

In spite of her initial misgivings about Beatrice’s marriage, the Queen had soon come to love Liko. His cheerful sense of humour and obvious commitment to his family, not to mention his striking good looks, greatly appealed to her and she noted, with satisfaction that, though he and Beatrice were devoted to one another they made none of the tasteless shows of affection that so grated on her nerves. So fond was the Queen of his company that he had even succeeded in persuading her to provide a more comfortable smoking room than the one which had been reluctantly allocated to Prince Christian. In fact, she had come to enjoy his company so much that she was unwilling to let him out of her sight.

But Liko was straining at the leash; the Queen’s affection, and the love of his wife and children could not compensate for the extreme dullness of life at Court. Unable to renege on the promise made before his marriage he watched enviously as his brothers went about their exciting adventures, while he frittered away his hours attending to his children’s education and carrying out minor duties for the Queen. In 1889 she appointed him Governor General of the Isle of Wight and Carisbrooke Castle, but still he remained unfulfilled and sought any opportunity to escape abroad.
Beatrice understood his need for excitement and raised no objections when he disappeared for months at a time on various yachting and continental expeditions but in his absence she missed him terribly, wept as he departed and worried that far from home his affections might stray. At the first hint of a possible scandal she dispatched a ship to bring him back.
Holidays and expeditions allowed him some release, but could not satisfy his need to find a more useful role until the autumn of 1895 when he heard of a mission to end the slave trade in Ashanti in Ghana. The Queen, reluctant to be parted from him and fearful for his health in that notoriously disease-ridden part of Africa, hesitated about granting him permission to participate in so dangerous a venture until Beatrice selflessly prevailed upon her mother to give him leave to go. Queen Victoria could hardly refuse; after all her soldier grandson ‘Christle’ of Schleswig-Holstein was taking part in the same campaign.
For Beatrice, Liko’s departure aboard the Coramandel on 8th December was traumatic:
“[She] is inconsolable,” wrote Marie Mallet, “but so patient and unselfish and declared she is glad he should do some real work and she will never stop him in any way...Of course he is bursting with excitement, it is the climate I fear, not the enemy.”
Mrs. Mallet’s fears were justified; hardly had the ship reached Africa when, on 10th January 1896, Liko contracted malaria. For a while his condition appeared to improve and he wished to continue the expedition, but his doctors and fellow officers thought him too ill to carry on and sent him homewards aboard the Blonde. Before the ship docked at Madeira, Liko suffered a relapse and realising he was dying, sent long and affectionate messages back to his wife and children, grieving at the thought that he would die so far from home. He died on 20th January 1896.
“Our grief and our misery is untold!” the Queen told Vicky, “The sun has gone out of our lives.”
When his body, preserved in rum, was eventually brought to the Isle of Wight, the Queen accompanied his family - including his nine-year-old daughter Ena - to receive the coffin:
“This was a terrible day, but one never to be forgotten…Shortly after 12 drove down to Trinity Pier with darling Beatrice, Ena and little Leopold [Ena’s brother]To attempt properly to describe the whole sad proceedings and ceremony is more than I can do.”
The funeral took place in Whippingham Church near Osborne, where eleven years earlier Liko and Beatrice were married.
For Liko’s grieving widow, a minor family squabble brought further grief. While Beatrice was in mourning, her elder and more beautiful sister Louise, cruelly announced that her own grief was equally deep, since Liko had always preferred her to his wife and had once made amorous advances towards her. As Louise’s own marriage was something of a sham and she was renowned for making mischief in the family, Beatrice dismissed her allegations as lies. Whether or not there was any truth in Louise’s tale, Beatrice loved Liko deeply and enjoyed eleven blissful years with a husband she had never hoped to find.
According to all who met her, Beatrice, though heart-broken, accepted her widowhood with remarkable courage and dignity. For her grieving mother, however, further sorrows were soon to follow. Within five years of Liko’s death, she had lost a son and two grandsons and discovered that her eldest daughter was dying.

In 1898, the royalties returned to Coburg to celebrate to celebrate the Duchess Marie’s twenty-five unhappy years of marriage to the unfaithful, alcoholic Affie. Among the intended guests was their only son, ‘Young Affie,’ who had been sent away from home at an early age to be groomed in Potsdam for his future role as Duke of Coburg. The training was intended to turn him into an efficient and reliable officer but it had had the opposite effect. Young Affie had developed into a dissolute and unstable young man with his mother’s fiery Russian temperament and his father’s addiction to drink. By the age of twenty-five, he had contracted venereal disease and was consequently dismissed from the German army.
“It is true,” Vicky wrote to Sophie, “that he was always giddy & wild, as many young men are, & that he contracted an illness of which I know next to nothing, as I have never asked or heard anything about it, one dislikes thinking about it and still more speaking or writing about it. This was neglected and the poor boy led a dissipated life, besides, Potsdam! – that was not the place for him.”
His Orthodox mother despaired of his licentiousness and, shortly before her Silver Wedding anniversary, an argument flared between them when he announced his intention of marrying an unsuitable bride. In the course of the argument, according to several erroneous reports, Young Affie shot himself and sustained a serious though not fatal wound. His true illness - which had led to ‘paralysis of the larynx, caused by the state of the brain’ - was an even greater scandal to his mother who decided that it would be better if he were absent from Coburg when her visitors arrived for the celebrations. His doctors warned that he had very little time to live but the duchess dismissed the prognosis and, against his and his father’s wishes she packed him off to recuperate in Meran in Austria. Just over a week later, on 6th February, he died. The official reports stated that the cause of death was consumption.
“But oh, the poor, poor parents!” wrote Queen Victoria, “To lose their only son in whom their hopes and life were bound up is fearful…Affie [was] in a dreadful state on first going to see the dear remains.”
Her lady-in-waiting, Marie Mallet was less sympathetic:
“How strange Royalties are, their children seem to lack the ordinary care bestowed on our humblest middle class. Such a thing could never have happened to any of the boys I know and if it had the parents would be blamed by the whole of society.”
Affie never recovered from the loss of his son and within eighteen months, he too was dead of throat cancer, exacerbated by his excessive drinking. ‘Poor Marie,’ wrote a heartbroken Queen Victoria, and ‘those poor girls who adored their father!’

Young Affie’s death was to have unexpected consequences for his seventeen-year-old cousin, Alice of Albany. The Salic law precluded females from inheriting the Dukedom of Coburg and since Affie had no other son, there was much debate about who would succeed him. The next in line was Affie’s younger brother, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, but neither he nor his son had any desire to leave England or to show obeisance to the proud German Emperor. The Kaiser, too, always in awe of his English uncles, expressed his preference for a younger man and accordingly, offered Coburg with its £300,000 a year income to the late Prince Leopold’s son, thirteen-year-old Charles, Duke of Albany.
After a great deal of soul-searching, Charles’ mother, Helen, accepted the Duchy on his behalf and agreed that Cousin Sandra’s husband, Ernst of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, would act as regent until Charles came of age. Notwithstanding the fact that his young cousin spoke very little German, the Kaiser insisted that he should leave Eton at once to enrol in the Lichterfelde Military Cadet School at Potsdam. Aunt Vicky, fearing that Charles might go the same way as Young Affie, was firmly opposed to the scheme and vehemently made her feelings known to her mother. Queen Victoria agreed:
“It is most stupid and ill-judged, to take the poor boy away in the middle of his education and before he knows enough German to be able to learn in German. William unfortunately set this idea going.”
But the Kaiser had made his decision and, in spite of their reluctance to leave their beloved Claremont House, the Albanys had to comply.
In August 1899, Alice and her mother moved into the Villa Ingenheim, a relatively small cottage near the cadet academy in Potsdam, where Charles was to spend three miserable years, taunted and bullied by the other boys in the school. For Alice, the contrast between Windsor and the Kaiser’s militaristic court, governed by etiquette and tradition, appeared both amusing and bizarre.
“It’s hard to convey to English readers,” wrote Marie Louise, “the Medieval conditions in which people in our state of life lived in Germany.”
Serving officers were not permitted to appear at any social gatherings, except in uniform and, the numerous ceremonies that littered the German calendar were even more trying for the princesses who were obliged to appear at State banquets in ‘full regalia of tiaras and trains.’
“These ceremonies began…at 10a.m. and it was 5p.m. before we got back to our respective homes. At 7p.m., in full evening dress we proceeded to the opera, and then staggered home to bed at 10p.m.”

Yet, unlike Marie Louise, Alice, with a cheerful disposition and an eye for the comic, was delighted by her new surroundings. If Cousin Willy was pompous, he could also be generous, hospitable and amusing. She and Charles were regular visitors to his home where they became close friends of his sons. Formal balls were an almost nightly occurrence and for a young and beautiful princess there was no limit to the number of handsome young officers to partner her in the dances.
She and her mother remained in Germany until Charles had completed his education and was deemed old enough to fend for himself. By the time that Alice returned to Claremont in 1903, her grandmother’s staid and seemingly changeless Court had gone forever; the Victorian era was over, its sobriety replaced briefly by all the glamour and gaudiness of the new Edwardian age.

Of all her nine children, none had caused the Queen as much consternation as her eldest son and heir. Compared throughout his childhood to his elder and more brilliant sister, Vicky, Bertie could not have been a greater disappointment to his parents. His lack of enthusiasm for study, his inability to learn, even his appearance distressed his mother to the extent that she feared that he had inherited the wayward characteristics of her degenerate Hanoverian uncles.
The Queen was haunted by the memory of those ‘terrible’ uncles who, a generation earlier, had brought the royal family into such disrepute. Since her accession both she and Prince Albert had worked hard to restore the reputation of the monarchy, presenting the nation with an ideal example of marital fidelity and domestic harmony that was beyond reproach. No one, least of all their eldest son, could be permitted to tarnish that image and, from his earliest years, Bertie’s parents aimed to mould him into their ideal of the perfect prince. To prevent the taint of any outside influence, he was isolated from boys of his own age and provided instead with strict tutors and even stricter regimes of study. The scheme was not a success. Bertie, criticised on all sides, struggled in the schoolroom while his natural gifts of diplomacy and congeniality were stifled and ignored. When his frustration exploded in rage, he was beaten.
Unsurprisingly, the young prince leaped at the first chance of freedom. Escaping from the ‘minders’ sent to protect him (or rather his morals) during his student days at Cambridge, he sought the kind of friends who were the antithesis of his parents and who encouraged his budding interest in drinking, gambling and fine cigars. During the university vacation in the summer of 1861, while he was attached to a regiment of guards stationed at the Curragh near Dublin, his companions managed to smuggle a pretty actress into his rooms. That night, the delighted prince embarked upon a womanising career that would continue for the rest of his life.
When word of his escapade reached Windsor, the pious Prince Consort was appalled. Although already exhausted and probably suffering from the typhoid• that finally killed him, he set out at once to Cambridge. On a wet November afternoon, father and son walked for hours in the rain, Prince Albert expressing his disappointment and disgust at Bertie’s foolishness and warning him that such scandals could pose a threat to the monarchy. Bertie was duly repentant but by the time his father returned to Windsor, his health was already failing.
The Queen refused to believed that her angelic husband was dying, and when the end came, less than a month after his visit to Cambridge, she was convinced his death was due to the shock of Bertie’s ‘fall.’ For months she could hardly bear to look at her son ‘without a shudder’ and found it virtually impossible to forgive him no matter how hard she tried. Nevertheless, he was ‘My dear Angel’s own child - our Firstborn’ and would one day be king so to deliver him from further temptation, he urgently needed a wife.
Even before Prince Albert’s death, Vicky had been entrusted with the difficult task of finding a suitable bride for her brother. Detailed with the necessary qualities - good health and looks, unsullied background and preferably a German - she had scoured the pages of the Almanac of Gotha, the bible of royal matchmakers, and made lists of all the available young princesses she had met in European courts. The Queen read her detailed reports with interest and, having rejected various others on the grounds of bad teeth, a frail constitution, or adherence to the wrong religion, she noted that one princess stood out above all - Alexandra, the attractive seventeen-year-old daughter of Crown Prince Christian of Denmark.
“She is the sweetest girl who ever lived,” Vicky informed her mother, “and full of life and spirits…She has always been strong and healthy as possible and has never ailed anything in her life except having the measles…I own Princess A. of Holstein is the only one of these princesses for whom I feel portée – it would be dreadful if this pearl went to the horrid Russians.”
Intrigued by Vicky’s effusive descriptions, the Queen decided that the princess was worth ‘looking over’ and arranged a meeting on neutral ground, the Laeken Palace in Brussels. From the first encounter, Queen Victoria was enchanted and wrote enthusiastically to Vicky assuring her that, though Alexandra suffered from a slight deafness, her recommendation was perfect - what a pity she wasn’t German! By the time that Bertie was introduced to her, his mother and sister had effectively decided that Alexandra was to be his bride. The wedding took place in March 1863 - an occasion marred only by the behaviour of four-year-old Willy of Prussia. who squealed throughout the service and bit and kicked his young uncles Arthur and Leopold when they tried to restrain him.
Ten months later, Alexandra did her duty by providing the country with an heir, Prince Albert Victor, (‘Eddy’) - “a perfect bijou,” in the Queen’s opinion, “ –very fairy-like but quite healthy, very wise-looking and good…He is very placid almost melancholy-looking.”
The following year a second son, George, was born but the lure of a beautiful wife and the responsibilities of fatherhood did little to quell Bertie’s love of the high life. Unable to win the Queen’s confidence and consequently denied any serious role in constitutional affairs, he passed his time in an endless round of parties, race going and shooting with the ‘Marlborough House Set’ of fast living, wealthy and fashionable cronies who shared his taste for eating, drinking, gambling and womanising.
Reports of the goings on at Marlborough House irritated and worried the Queen. While she could not deny that the beautiful Alexandra had undoubtedly won the hearts of her people, she had turned out to be a naïve and rather empty-headed young woman whose persistent unpunctuality drove Bertie to such despair that he eventually ordered all the clocks in Sandringham to be set half-an-hour fast.
“I am sorry too for Bertie;” Queen Victoria complained to Vicky, “I don’t think she makes his home comfortable; she is never ready for breakfast - not being out of her room till 11 often, and Bertie breakfasts alone and then she alone.”
Still worse, in her mother-in-law’s opinion, Alexandra shared her husband’s love of entertaining to the extent that the Queen felt obliged to warn her that such frivolous behaviour would not only ruin the reputation of the royal family but the late nights would ruin her health and that of her ‘frail puny’ babies who lacked the robust constitutions of their German cousins.
Bertie and Alexandra paid little heed to the warnings, and in the winter of 1866-7 the Queen’s predictions proved accurate. During the course of her third pregnancy, the princess contracted rheumatic fever and lay for several days in a critical condition. While the country anxiously awaited news, Bertie ignored the telegrams urging him to return to London and remained instead at the Windsor races. Even when he did eventually arrive at Marlborough House and made the token gesture of moving his desk to his wife’s bedside, he continued to entertain his rowdy friends while she lay on her sickbed upstairs.
On 20th February 1867, after a tortuous labour unrelieved by chloroform, Alexandra gave birth to a daughter, Louise (whom the Queen believed should have been named Victoria - ‘but upon those subjects Bertie and Alix do not understand the right thing.’). Three months later the baby was christened by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Marlborough House where her godparents included three of her aunts - Alice, Lenchen and Beatrice.
Though the Princess of Wales gradually regained her strength, the illness had accentuated her deafness and left her with a permanent limp•. Throughout her protracted convalescence, Bertie embarked on numerous affairs so openly that even the Queen was to comment that her daughter-in-law’s lot was not an easy one. As rumours of his neglect became known, his reputation plummeted, reaching its nadir when he was cited in the infamous Mordaunt case. While suffering from post-natal depression Lady Harriet Mordaunt, a close friend of the prince, confessed to her husband that the child’s father could have been one of several highly placed men including the Prince of Wales. Her outraged husband immediately began divorce proceedings and Bertie was called to court. Though he acquitted himself well and Lady Mordaunt was declared insane, his standing in the eyes of the public seemed irreparably damaged. Hissed in the theatre and jeered in the street, he seemed very much in danger of doing precisely what his mother had feared and destroying the image of the monarchy. Yet, neither public outcry nor family criticism could curtail his pleasure seeking.
By a strange freak of fortune it took a near-disaster to restore his tarnished image. In the winter of 1871 he contracted typhoid and for several days his life was despaired of. His sister Alice, who been staying at Balmoral with the Queen, was soon at his bedside playing the same role as she had played during her father’s fatal illness a decade before. On the 14th December - the tenth anniversary of the Prince Consort’s death, it appeared that Bertie was dying when quite unexpectedly in the evening he began to rally. The country rejoiced at his recovery and the Queen forced herself from her seclusion to attend a thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s Cathedral after which she appeared in public on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for the first time since her widowhood. When at last the Queen returned home satisfied that the monarchy was secure and certain that Bertie’s brush with death would lead him to adopt a less frivolous lifestyle. It was a vain hope. With so few responsibilities to occupy him it was not long before he returned to his old routine of gambling, shooting and womanising.
Alexandra endured Bertie’s infidelities with a dignified silence, and bore him two more daughters - Victoria (Toria) on July 6th 1868, and Maud a year later. A third son, Alexander, was born at Sandringham in 1871 but died within hours of his birth.
If her husband failed to give Alexandra the attention she craved she was determined to receive it from her children. Jealously overprotective, she virtually smothered them with affection. No aspect of their lives escaped the notice of ‘Motherdear’ leaving Queen Victoria to complain that she spoiled them terribly. For all her glamorous lifestyle, she was in constant attendance in the nursery, bathing the babies and tucking them into bed each evening before donning her jewels and ball gowns to entrance her guests at dinner.
To the young German princesses, dazzled by the glamour of the Marlborough House Set, it must have come as a surprise to find their Wales cousins so insipid. Of the three girls, only Maud, whose love of the outdoor life and manner of speaking in schoolboy slang earned her the nickname ‘Harry’, showed any of the spirit common to her cousins. The ‘frail puny babies’ grew into frail puny children, constantly prone to colds, toothache, abscesses, sciatica and a myriad of other real or imaginary ailments. So fearful was Louise for her health that she took her physician on holiday with her, while ‘precious’ Toria collapsed at the slightest provocation.
“The children are very dear and pretty,” observed Alice, “but my boy is as tall as little Louise, and of course much bigger.”
Even when they were well, they were hardly the most scintillating companions for their highly-educated cousins. Unlike her sisters-in-law, the Princess of Wales saw little need to tax her daughters with learning and Bertie’s recollection of his own miserable years in the schoolroom made him loath to inflict the same torture on his children. Maud was an able linguist and Louise a talented musician, but their education was so haphazard that Queen Victoria despaired of their ignorance and lack of serious interest in anything.
“Alix and I never will or can be intimate;” she wrote in exasperation, “she shows me no confidence whatsoever especially about the children...”
Occasionally the girls accompanied their mother to hospitals and the homes of their Sandringham tenants but, for the most part, life beyond the narrow confines of their nursery remained a mystery to them. They lived and played in their own sheltered world, innocently delighting in each other’s company to the extent that Queen Victoria complained that Alexandra was ‘unfortunately most unreasonable and injudicious about her children.’ On one point, however, Alexandra satisfied the Queen by insisting on raising her with “…great simplicity and an absence of all pride.”
Unfortunately, the ‘absence of all pride’ was coupled with a complete lack of confidence. With the exception of Maud, who had inherited her mother’s fine features, they were not pretty girls and, overshadowed by their charismatic parents, they found few occasions to shine. Unused to the company of strangers, their diffidence left them tongue-tied in social gatherings and warranted the cruel if apt epithets ‘the whispering Waleses’ and ‘their Royal Shynesses.’
“They always, if I can so express it,” wrote their cousin Marie of Edinburgh, “spoke in a minor key en sourdine. It gave a special quality to all talks with them, and gave me a strange sensation, as though life would have been very wonderful and everything very beautiful, if it had not been so sad.”
Even as they grew into their late teens, Alexandra was determined to keep them as little children, making them emotionally and intellectually far younger than their years. Princess May of Teck, who would eventually marry their brother, George, was astonished to attend a birthday party for nineteen-year-old Louise only to discover that it was to be a children’s tea party. Their ‘sweet and prettily arranged’ rooms, cluttered with ornaments, shells and souvenirs, resembled nurseries and they continued to refer to each other by childish nicknames - Toots, Gawks and Snipey. They found their greatest enjoyment in games and giddy pranks, which doubtless bored the more serious Hessians and were treated with contempt by the proud Hohenzollerns.
Not that the Germans’ opinion was of any consequence to the Danish Princess of Wales. Since Bismarck’s seizure of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark she made no secret of her hatred of all things German - and more especially Prussian. That in itself was sufficient to alienate her from other members of the family and causing the Queen to moan that ‘her feelings are so anti-German and yet so little really English that she is no real help – good, kind, dear as she is and much as I love her.’
For Vicky, whom she liked, Alexandra made an exception, but her prejudice was never more in evidence than when it came to the wedding of Bertie’s younger sister, Lenchen.

On 6th July 1868, when told of the birth of her seventh granddaughter, Queen Victoria remarked that the news was ‘a very uninteresting thing for it seems to me to go on like the rabbits in Windsor Park.’ Her apathy was understandable - this was her fourteenth grandchild, and over the next two decades twenty-six more would be born. Though the Queen herself had given birth to nine children she had never been fond of babies, viewing them as ‘frog-like’ and ‘rather disgusting…particularly when undressed.’ The early years of her marriage had, she claimed, been ruined by frequent pregnancies; and large families were unnecessary for wealthy people since the children would grow up with nothing worthwhile to do.

Nevertheless, her initial reaction to the birth of Princess Victoria of Wales belied the genuine concern that Queen Victoria felt for each of her twenty-two granddaughters. ‘As a rule,’ she wrote, ‘I like girls best,’ and for the rest of her life she devoted a great deal of time to their well-being and happiness, showering them with an affection she had seldom shown her own children. Though at times she found them too big, too noisy, too boisterous or too ill mannered, she was ever on hand to offer support and to welcome them into her homes. No matter how pressing affairs of state, she never missed their birthdays and was always available when they were in need. When one was in labour the Queen was quickly at her side, holding her hand and mopping her brow; when one’s marriage failed or another’s love was unrequited, the Queen held her as she wept. She felt deeply for their troubles, sympathised with their sorrows and worried about their futures. Even when they exasperated her by ignoring her advice, she was quick to forgive them. She missed them when they were far away and took offence if they did not accept her invitations to Osborne, Balmoral, or Windsor. The truth was that, almost in spite of herself, she loved them deeply: “They are like my own children;” she wrote to the Earl of Fife, “their happiness is very near my own heart."

The twenty-two princesses were raised in eight separate family groups - the Hohenzollerns, the Waleses, the Hessians, the Edinburghs, the Christians, the Connaughts, the Albanys, and the Battenbergs - and their lives and personalities were as varied as their names. Some lived and died in virtual obscurity, others played a major role in world events. Some were pale and sickly, others robust and energetic; some strikingly beautiful, others tragically plain. Several met with appalling violence and tragedy, while others enjoyed the carefree lives of wealthy Victorian women. They grew up as far apart as England, Germany, Malta, and India, sometimes amid great wealth, other times struggling to maintain royal standards. Twenty-seven years passed between the birth of the first and the birth of the last, but they shared the common bond of being shaped by their English grandmother, whose influence was apparent even in their names. The Queen often expressed the hope that all her grandchildren would be called after her or their grandfather, Prince Albert, resulting in seven Victorias, while the majority of the rest had Victoria or Alberta somewhere in their litany of names.

By 1914, through a series of dynastic marriages, the Queen’s granddaughters included the Empress of Russia, the Queens of Spain, Greece and Norway, and the Crown Princesses of Roumania and Sweden. As their brothers and cousins occupied the thrones of Germany, Britain and Denmark, Prince Albert’s dream of a peaceful Europe created through bonds of kinship seemed a real possibility.

“All our cousins,” wrote Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, “were more like brothers and sisters than mere blood relations.”

Yet in little more than a decade after Queen Victoria’s death, the Prince Consort’s dream would lie shattered in the carnage of the First World War. Royal cousins and even siblings would find themselves on opposing sides; two of them would die horrifically at the hands of revolutionaries and several others would be ousted from their thrones. They had lived through the halcyon days of European monarchies but their lives, like the lives of millions of their subjects, would be changed forever by the catastrophe played out on the battlefields of France.

Through all the upheavals, tragedies and conflicts one person had bound them together and, even when wars had divided their nations, to the end of their lives, they would look back and remember ‘dearest grandmama’ with love.