Alice, The Enigma - A Biography of Queen Victoria's Daughter Read online

  Considering the extent of her later spiritual seeking, Alice undoubtedly approached her confirmation with great seriousness. Like her father, she was both profoundly contemplative, constantly seeking answers to spiritual questions, and, at the same time, committed to correcting her perceived faults and living her faith through service to others.[j] Her diligence in preparing for the sacrament earned her father’s respect and her mother’s admiration, as, while the Queen sighed wistfully that it was a pity that the ceremony could not be carried out in Germany where it was performed with greater reverence, she noted with satisfaction that, following Alice’s examination, both Prince Albert and the Dean of Westminster, Richard Chenevix Trench, were ‘much pleased and satisfied with her.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury, too, observed Alice’s sincerity, noting that she was ‘too intrinsically religious by nature to ever be affected by the mere outward form of worship’.

  Alice was not so pious, though, as to be immune to the lure of beautiful jewellery and dresses. To mark the occasion, she purchased for herself a diamond necklace and earrings, for which the Queen and Prince Albert made a contribution of £1,000, and she was delighted at being presented with the Royal Family Order and a cameo of her parents surrounded by diamonds.

  The ceremony took place on 21st April 1859, after which the Queen reported to Vicky that her sister showed such a deep feeling and was ‘altogether so dear, and good, and charming’.

  Now she had officially made the transition from childhood to adulthood, and, though she and her mother were reluctant to accept it, the time had come to consider her future and the possibility of marriage.

  Chapter 7 –

  Her Future is Still Undecided

  Three days after her confirmation, Alice celebrated her sixteenth birthday – an occasion which the Queen marked with a sigh of relief that there were as yet no plans for an imminent betrothal. The pain that the Queen had felt at Vicky’s departure and the problems Vicky faced on her arrival in Berlin prompted her to the decision that her younger daughters would not be allowed to marry until they were at least eighteen years old. This suited Alice perfectly. By now she had adjusted to Vicky’s absence and, thoroughly enjoying the benefits of her status as the eldest child at home, she was in no hurry to find a husband, particularly when news from Berlin created an alarming image of marriage.

  In spite of her love for Fritz and his unerring devotion, life in Prussia had not turned out to be quite as idyllic as Vicky had dreamed. By the time of her wedding, Fritz’s father, Prince Wilhelm, was acting as regent for his elder brother, who had suffered a stroke and was no longer deemed capable of ruling. Surrounded by ministers and courtiers who viewed the English princess with suspicion, Prince Wilhelm made it clear that his daughter-in-law’s sole purpose was to provide a son to continue the Hohenzollern dynasty. Although he treated Vicky with courtesy and kindness, far from appreciating her brilliant intellect or welcoming her political opinions, he was convinced that women had no place in politics, and should confine themselves to pleasing their husbands and producing children.

  For Vicky, who had been so carefully groomed to play an important role in the country’s future, such attitudes were both baffling and frustrating. While she tried to accommodate the mores of the Prussian court, she could not deny her intelligence or upbringing and found it stifling to remain silent about matters that were close to her – and her father’s – heart. To compound her frustration, Fritz, who shared her liberal views, was repeatedly prevented from participating in affairs of state, and, when Vicky pressed him to stand up to the government ministers, she was accused of attempting to dominate him to mould him to her English ways. In truth, there were times when her tactless comparisons of England and Prussia aroused a good deal of antipathy, and the situation was exacerbated by her regular correspondence with her mother, who frequently reminded her that she was first and foremost an English princess.

  If the political scene was frustrating, the tension within the royal household was positively excruciating for Vicky. The rancour between Fritz’s parents presented a stark contrast to her experience of her own parents’ happy marriage, and she found their frequent rows and public disagreements both shocking and painfully embarrassing. Like Vicky, Fritz’ mother, Princess Augusta, held strong liberal views and a desire to influence politics, but her attempts to intervene in the government of the country served only to arouse her husband’s anger and increase their mutual animosity.

  “…Her life here is as disagreeable as it can be, and it does not improve her health,” Vicky told her mother. “If only there are no more scenes; it is so painful to witness…”[64]

  The Princess’ health issues were more psychological than physical, as her moods swung from one extreme to another in a manic-depressive manner. Initially, Vicky both pitied and admired her, and in return the Princess Augusta confided in her and treated her with such kindness that Vicky happily referred to her as a ‘second mother’. Within a short time, however, her endless demands and erratic behaviour became virtually unbearable.

  “…You do not know how difficult it is to be her friend,” Vicky confided in Queen Victoria, “for she is always her own enemy!...I must acknowledge that I make many sacrifices for I am always at her beck and call all day long – whenever she wants me, whether it be morning or evening, I go but I look forward with dread to some future day when, as last year, being really faint and sick and unwell, I could not be there at all hours and as [she] is rather tyrannical, she did not like that…”[65]

  Though Vicky was reluctant to admit it, it soon seemed clear that the Princess, who had initially been in favour of the marriage, now resented her daughter-in-law’s influence over Fritz. Whether the young couple’s mutual devotion was a constant reminder of her own dysfunctional marriage, or she simply saw Vicky as a scapegoat to bear her own unhappiness, Princess Augusta began to undermine her at every opportunity, even to the extent of attempting to alienate her from her own children.

  Whether or not Alice was aware of these domestic tensions, reports of Vicky’s first experience of childbirth did not escape her horrified notice. Despite Queen Victoria’s insistence on the administration of chloroform, the labour was so tortuous and protracted that for a while it was feared that neither mother nor child would survive. Disagreements between the attending English and German doctors aggravated the difficulties, and when at last, with the help of forceps, the baby was born in the breech position he appeared not to be breathing. In a desperate effort to revive him, the doctors shook him so frantically that the nerves in his neck were damaged and, as a consequence, his arm failed to develop properly, leaving the future Kaiser Wilhelm II with a humiliating handicap for the rest of his life.

  “The detail which the courier brought us yesterday,” Prince Albert wrote to Baron Stockmar, “gave us our first information of the severe suffering which poor Vicky had undergone, and of the great danger in which the child’s life hovered for a time.”[66]

  Queen Victoria’s half-sister, Feodore, was even more horrified:

  “Oh! My dear Victoria,” she wrote, “I feel all the anxiety and pain you have suffered. It is so dreadful to know what a young creature has had to go through – one’s own child, whom we have protected from every ill, guarded against every evil; now we see them in danger and tortured by pain.”[67]

  While the Queen attempted to shield her younger children from the details of Vicky’s ordeal, Alice understood that her sister’s sufferings had been extreme, and consequently she was left with such a terror of having children that she announced she would ‘rather have none’.

  “Our dear Alice,” the Queen told Vicky, “has seen and heard more (of course not what no one can ever know before they marry and before they have had children) than you did, from your marriage – and quite enough to give her a horror rather of marrying.”[68]

  Nonetheless, neither Alice nor her parents could conceive any other future for a princess than that of a wife and mother, and, in an age where the
re were so many unhappy royal marriages, the Queen felt it was a ‘sad necessity’ to find a husband who would at least ensure her daughter’s happiness.

  It is a testament to the love that the Queen and Prince Albert bore their children that, unlike many royal parents, neither could countenance the idea of forcing any of them into a loveless marriage, no matter how beneficial such a dynastic arrangement might be. On the contrary, a great deal of time was spent studying the characters and backgrounds of similarly-aged royalties and arranging meetings in the hope that mutual attraction might form and develop into love. So it was that, even before Alice’s sixteenth birthday, the Queen had enlisted Vicky’s help in scouring the courts of Europe for available princes who might one day prove worthy contenders for Alice’s hand.

  Vicky began the search ‘close to home’ and within a short time she had furnished the Queen with a collection of photographs of suitable German princes. The Queen viewed them all with a discerning eye and decided:

  “Beauty I don’t want though I should be glad of it when it’s there; but nice manly, sensible, healthy, gentlemanlike appearance is essential.”[69]

  The first to arouse a passing interest was Fritz’s cousin, Prince Albrecht (Abbat) of Prussia. Six years older than Alice, he had once been considered as a possible partner for Queen Victoria’s cousin, Princess Mary of Cambridge, of whom the Queen was beginning to despair. As she neared her thirtieth birthday, Mary’s forwardness and impropriety convinced her family that it was ‘time to get her married’ but, though various princes had been suggested, her obesity, ungainly manner and lack of attention to her appearance seemed to be deterring potential suitors. Abbat was added to her list of possibilities but Queen Victoria, whom he had greatly impressed while visiting Osborne, dismissed the idea. Abbat was too young for Mary, she said, and wondered whether he might be more suited to Alice.

  No sooner had the thought crossed the Queen’s mind than she recalled the scandal surrounding his parents, whose marriage had ended in divorce some months after his mother had left her unfaithful husband to take up residence with a former coachman. Initially, on account of the family’s disgrace, the Queen dismissed Abbat from her list, but later, realising that his background was not so different from that of Prince Albert, she was prepared to reconsider and told Vicky not to discard him completely. In the event, nothing came of the idea. Abbat remained single until the age of thirty-six when he married the nineteen-year-old Princess Marie of Saxe-Altenburg.

  Meanwhile, Queen Victoria continued to study the photographs and read Vicky’s descriptions of the princes with whom she came into contact. Although not particularly clever, Prince William of Baden was ‘an excellent person’; Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was especially appealing but unfortunately happened to be a Roman Catholic; and, as the search extended beyond Germany, religion again prevented the Queen from pursuing a possible match with the recently widowed Catholic King Pedro of Portugal.

  In the autumn of 1859, Queen Victoria cast her eyes towards the Netherlands where the heir apparent, William, Prince of Orange, was just three years older than Alice. Vicky diligently began to ask questions of those who knew him, and quickly discovered that he had recently been staying in Baden where his dissolute behaviour had earned him a very bad reputation. While the Queen hoped that the stories of his gambling and drinking had been exaggerated, she continued to make further enquiries, all of which sadly confirmed that ‘the Orange boy’ was not at all suitable for her daughter. Though disappointed, she was not entirely surprised, since his father, who lived apart from his wife, had, she claimed, set him a very bad example. Even when her own Lady of the Bedchamber, Jane Ely, spoke highly of him, and Vicky somewhat priggishly attempted to defend his behaviour by blaming his ‘bad, loose habits’ on ‘bad company and never having associated with people of his own rank’, the Queen was not convinced. Lady Ely, she said, was swayed by her friendship with William’s mother, and, in response to Vicky’s descriptions of the eighteen-year-old prince’s ‘nice blue eyes, white teeth, and good hair’, she retorted:

  “…he is 20 and not 18 – and the ‘white teeth’ I fear cannot be his own, as he had bad ones when we saw him three years ago. Poor boy, great allowances must of course be made for him.”[70]

  These allowances did not, of course, extend to considering him as a future son-in-law and the Queen was relieved that she had not told Alice of her investigations, which might have resulted in dashed hopes or disappointment.

  No sooner had the Prince of Orange been discounted, however, than suddenly, at the end of December 1859, he announced his intention of visiting Windsor the following month. Queen Victoria was horrified. The arrival of a foreign prince in a household where there lived a princess of marriageable age, would inevitably lead to speculation about the purpose of his visit. Stories linking his name with Alice’s would circulate so quickly that it would be virtually impossible to keep the rumours from Alice herself, and, what was worse, they might deter more appropriate suitors from paying her any attention.

  Under the circumstances, the Queen and Prince Albert felt it was necessary to warn Alice of the negative reports they had heard about William to prevent her from developing any romantic notions. Alice, who had never met the prince, responded impassively, grateful, perhaps, for her parents’ honesty and relieved that she was not being pressurised into falling in love with a stranger. Still, the Queen was disconcerted by the thought that the visit could give rise to stories of an imminent engagement and was greatly relieved when Prince William announced publicly that he considered himself too young to marry, thereby quashing any speculation.

  The visit, though uneventful, altered the Queen’s perception of the young man. Comparing him favourably with her eldest son, she was impressed by his impeccable behaviour and intelligent conversations with Prince Albert. William, however, was far more attentive to the younger children – two-year-old Beatrice and her brothers – than he was to Alice, and he went on his way, leaving Alice to continue her carefree existence, unburdened by the prospect of an imminent departure to a foreign court.

  By now, though, Alice was far too astute to be unaware of her mother’s quest. Prince Albert’s warning about the Prince of Orange was evidence enough that her parents were busily studying the backgrounds of possible suitors, and, as she neared her seventeenth birthday, she could not forget that, at that age, her elder sister was married. Still, she hoped to cling to the vestiges of childhood and postpone the separation from her family for as long as possible.

  “…Only the day before yesterday,” Queen Victoria wrote to Vicky, “she said she could not dream or think of going away from us – or from here!”[71]

  Her reluctance to leave was understandable. Now, according to her mother, she was physically fitter and stronger than she had ever been; she relished her father’s attention, was on excellent terms with her mother, and the intimacy she enjoyed with them both was more rewarding than at any other time in her life.

  “Alice has become a handsome young woman of graceful form and graceful presence,” Prince Albert wrote to Baron Stockmar in January 1860, “and is a help and stay to us all in the house.”[72]

  A few days later after this letter was written, Alice accompanied her parents to the State Opening of Parliament for the first time – yet another stepping-stone along the path of royal duties and an acknowledgement of her maturity. By the beginning of 1860, changes were clearly afoot, and a whole new way of life was appearing on the horizon.

  “My dearest Uncle,” Queen Victoria wrote to the King of the Belgians on 25th April 1860, “I write to you on this paper today, as it is our good Alice’s birthday – her seventeenth! She is a good, dear, amiable child, and in very good looks just now. Her future is still undecided, she is quite free, and all we wish is a good, kind husband – no brilliant position (which there is not to be got), but a quiet, comfortable position.”[73]

  Alice’s future might have been undecided but by now the Queen had na
rrowed down the list of potential husbands to three: Abbat and two young princes who indeed seemed to offer a ‘quiet comfortable position’ and at whom she might well have been hinting in her letter.

  For some time, the Queen had been making discreet inquiries about the family of Prince Charles, brother and heir of the Grand Duke of Hesse-and-by-Rhine. Her initial interest centred around Prince Charles’ only daughter, Anna, whom she briefly considered as a bride for Bertie, but by autumn 1859 she had switched her attention to Anna’s brothers, Louis and Henry – in particular, the elder of the two – as serious contenders for Alice’s hand.

  The princes had first impressed the Queen fifteen years earlier in Coburg, and even then, although they were still children, she had considered them as future prospects for her daughters. Now she needed a more recent appraisal and, as usual, Vicky was enlisted to supply her with photographs, which proved sufficiently impressive to merit further investigation. Conveniently, their mother, Princess Elizabeth, was a first cousin of Vicky’s father-in-law, so, with Fritz’s help, it did not take long to obtain the most up-to-date information, including the unfortunate rumour that Louis had already formed an attachment to ‘Maroussy’, a daughter of the Duke of Leuchtenberg.

  Pressed by the Queen to discover more, Fritz approached one of his uncles and casually asked if the rumour were true. On receiving the reply that that there was no possibility of Louis marrying the girl since the Leuchtenbergs were deemed to be of an inferior rank, Fritz mentioned ‘in passing’ that none of his four English sisters-in-law was married and they would certainly be worth Louis’ consideration. In response, his uncle remarked that Louis’ mother would be delighted if her son should marry one of Queen Victoria’s daughters, since that was exactly what she had been hoping would happen.

  Though mildly relieved by this news, Queen Victoria, with her typical dislike of snobbery, commented that it was ridiculous to view the Leuchtenbergs as inferior; and, what was more, whether or not Louis were permitted to marry, if he had already given his heart to Maroussy he couldn’t possibly be considered as a suitor for Alice.