Sons, Servants and Statesmen (37 page)

The press was critical of the impending marriage, calling the groom a ‘German pauper’ who expected to be kept at government expense. The wedding took place in July 1885 at St Mildred’s Church, Whippingham, and though the marriage was to prove unhappily brief, Henry rapidly became the Queen’s favourite sonin-law. Although he had had to give up his military career, the Queen insisted on his wearing his white uniform, that of the Prussian Garde du Corps, and the Princess of Wales called him ‘Beatrice’s Lohengrin’.

Henry, known in the family as ‘Liko’, a diminutive of his childhood name ‘Henrico’, brought back an atmosphere of happiness to the Queen’s domestic life such as she had not known since before the Prince Consort’s death. Once more there was a man in the family, one who was not in the least overawed by her, and one with whom she could make lighthearted conversation and laugh at meals. She gave him a yacht in which he could take pleasure cruises as far away as the Mediterranean, and a bicycle which he mastered with ease. He also took the lead in helping to revive the
tableaux vivants
which Albert had so loved when assisting his small children to prepare for their mother’s amusement. Queen Victoria looked forward to these performances with almost childish enthusiasm, though requested that she must always be allowed to censor if necessary. It would never do for her daughter Louise, even if playing the part of a villainess in a French comedy, to be reproved as ‘a degraded woman’ by an assistant under-secretary.

Henry’s position was not easy at first. He was half-German and half-Russian by birth, and neither country was particularly popular in Britain. He had to play second fiddle to his wife and submit to the authority of a powerful lady. However, he was pleasant, genial and full of fun, and soon endeared himself to everyone at Court. He was an excellent sportsman, good at sailing, riding, shooting, tennis and skating.

Above all, he managed to succeed where others had failed – by persuading the Queen to relax her attitude towards smoking. While staying with his mother-in-law, the cigar-loving Christian had only been allowed to indulge in this anti-social vice in a small cubby-hole at Osborne with bare boards and hard wooden chairs, which was reached by crossing the servants’ quarters and an open yard. Now, after Henry had put the pro-smoking case, more conveniently situated, well-furnished sitting rooms at Balmoral as well as Osborne could be used for the purpose. Even so, there was to be no relaxation of the Queen’s rules at Windsor. Only the billiard room was available for smoking, and only after 11 p.m. Here Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, tended to occupy one of the best chairs whenever he visited and hold forth endlessly about himself. In consequence, Henry preferred to give up smoking for a while rather than put up with his brother-in-law’s endless naval conversation.

Christmas 1885 at Osborne was the happiest that any of the family could remember for a quarter of a century. Beatrice and Henry were allotted the use of a suite in the new wing of the house. Helen of Albany and her two children – a son, Charles, having been born three months after his father’s sudden death – as well as the Connaughts were there to share the festivities, with presents on the tables, party games, theatrical performances and beech logs burning brightly in the polished steel grate of the Queen’s sitting-room.

In November 1886 Beatrice gave birth to a son, whom they named Alexander. Two more sons and a daughter followed during the next five years. Henry was apparently happy and contented in his life at home, even if under the watchful eye of his mother-inlaw. She gave orders that the old nursery quarters on the top floor at Osborne should be turned into a special suite for the Battenberg children, and the sovereign who normally so loved peace and quiet in her own home said that nothing made her feel so happy as the sounds of these youngest grandchildren playing around noisily in the rooms directly above her suite.

A
s the youngest son-in-law of Queen Victoria, Prince Henry of Battenberg could indeed count his blessings. Not the least of these was that he never shared the fate of his brother Alexander, who had reigned for three troubled years as sovereign Prince of Bulgaria, a tenure brought to a violent end in August 1886 when a gang of drunken officers acting under Russian orders broke into his palace at Sofia and ordered him at gunpoint to sign a deed of abdication. He arrived in England a few weeks later, prematurely aged and broken by his experiences.

Alexander’s tragedy was soon to be bound up with that of another of Queen Victoria’s daughters and sons-in-law. He had become unofficially betrothed to Princess Victoria of Prussia, eldest un-married daughter of the German Crown Prince Frederick William and Princess Victoria (Vicky). The match was warmly endorsed by the Crown Princess and by Queen Victoria, as well as the British royal family. Most of the German imperial family, and Bismarck, the German Chancellor, resolutely opposed it for political reasons, while the Crown Prince himself gave his approval only with reluctance. Prince Frederick William could not but share the view of his parents that a Battenberg, no matter how good his character, was still the child of a morganatic marriage (see note 9, chapter 7) and therefore hardly a suitable son-in-law for a Hohenzollern princess. He had already viewed the announcement of Henry’s betrothal to his sister-in-law Beatrice with reservations. ‘Dear Fritz speaks of Liko as not being of
Geblüt
[stock], a little like about animals’,
¹
the Queen wrote disapprovingly to the Crown Princess.

All the same, the Queen and her daughter hoped they would eventually persuade the Crown Prince to agree to accepting a Battenberg in his family. After he was forced to abdicate, Prince Alexander found that his importance as a political figure dwindled accordingly. When the time came for the Crown Prince to succeed his father Emperor William on the throne, it was assumed that he would readily give his approval to the marriage. The Emperor celebrated his ninetieth birthday in March 1887; by then he was increasingly frail and feeble, and it would surely be only a matter of months before he passed away.

While every member of the royal family in Britain was looking forward with excitement to the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s jubilee that summer, her eldest daughter had an additional cause for concern. Throughout the winter Crown Prince Frederick William had been unable to shake off a severe cold and cough, and remained unusually hoarse. In the spring he was examined by the German physicians, who, fearing he might have something more serious than a persistent sore throat and cough, decided to seek another opinion from a specialist outside Germany. A major operation could prove fatal, and it would be as well for the cause of German science if a foreign doctor was left to take any crucial decisions, and therefore all the blame, should anything go wrong.

For political reasons, given Prussia’s conquests in war during Bismarck’s period of power, it was inadvisable to consider a specialist from Austria or France. The name of Dr Morell Mackenzie, a Scottish laryngologist who had a thriving practice in Harley Street, seemed the most obvious. He was a renowned expert on diseases of the nose and throat, spoke fluent German and already knew Professor Gerhardt, one of the Germans on the case, on a professional basis. Above all, as he was British, it would prove to be something of a triumph for the anglophobe element at court in Berlin if one of their unpopular Crown Princess’s fellow countrymen could be held responsible for the death of her husband.

At the German doctors’ request, the Crown Princess asked Queen Victoria to send Mackenzie to Germany as soon as possible. This the Queen did, adding a caveat that he was clever but had a reputation in England for greed and self-advertisement. He arrived in Germany on 20 May and, after a consultation with his colleagues, examined the Crown Prince’s throat. A small portion of the swelling was removed and passed to Professor Rudolf Virchow at the Berlin Institute of Pathology for diagnosis. It was deemed too small, and on request Mackenzie removed a larger sample two days later. Gerhardt insisted that Mackenzie had injured the previously healthy right vocal cord and made it bleed. He and his German doctors maintained that the only possible course of action was for them to operate on the Crown Prince at once. Mackenzie declared that if they did, the Prince would surely die.

The Crown Prince and Princess had been invited to London for Queen Victoria’s jubilee celebrations, for both personal and political reasons. As the Queen’s eldest daughter, and as her son-in-law who expected to ascend the throne of the most powerful empire on mainland Europe before long, they had every right to be there. Dr Mackenzie suggested that they should be in England so they could combine participation in the festivities with the Crown Prince’s regular attendance as a private patient at his London surgery. The German doctors accepted this course of action, largely as they were relieved that the responsibility for their illustrious patient’s health would no longer be theirs.

In June the Crown Prince and Princess came to England and stayed at a hotel in Norwood, sufficiently near the centre of London for convenience, but far enough from the worst of the heat and dust. They moved to Buckingham Palace on 18 June, so the Crown Prince could rest for a couple of days before the procession to Westminster Abbey and the service of thanksgiving.

‘The day has come,’ the Queen wrote in her journal that evening, happy though exhausted, ‘and I am alone, though surrounded by many dear children.’
²
She was alone in the sense that the Prince Consort was long since departed, but all surviving seven children and their spouses were present, as were the widowed partners of the two deceased children, the Grand Duke of Hesse and Duchess of Albany. The Duke of Edinburgh was now a Rear-Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, based at Malta, while the Duke of Connaught was a serving officer in India, but both had obtained leave without much difficulty.

The climax of the jubilee celebrations was the procession to Westminster Abbey and the thanksgiving service on 21 June. Huge crowds lined the route and were rewarded by seeing almost every member of the royal family passing by, whether riding in carriages or on horseback. The Prince of Wales was resplendent in the scarlet tunic and plumed helmet of a British field-marshal, but everyone agreed that none looked more magnificent than Crown Prince Frederick William, in his white cuirassier uniform and silver helmet surmounted with the imperial eagle. Towering above his relations on every side, it was said that he looked like ‘one of the legendary heroes embodied in the creations of Wagner’. Very few of those who stood on the streets of London to cheer him with such enthusiasm were aware of his illness.

The Crown Prince and Princess stayed in Britain for the rest of the summer, spending part of their time at Osborne and the rest at Braemar, near Balmoral. As Dr Mackenzie advised them to avoid the bitter weather of Berlin over the winter, on leaving Britain they went first to Toblach in the Austrian Tyrol, then to Venice and Baveno, and finally to San Remo on the Riviera.

It was here in November that the seriousness of the Crown Prince’s illness became apparent. For some weeks it had been rumoured that he was suffering from cancer of the larynx, and at last Mackenzie had to admit that this was almost certainly the case. For some time, the Crown Prince and Princess had had another cross to bear, the growing estrangement from their eldest son and heir, William. ‘Willy’ shared none of his parents’ liberal leanings but revered the ultra-conservative politics of his grandfather and Prince Bismarck, the Chancellor whose wars had elevated Prussia from the humble status of one of several German kingdoms to the leading military and political state in the new German Empire, created in January 1871 after the victorious war against France. Endlessly fawned on and flattered by the reactionary elements at court and the military clique, William became more arrogant and dismissive of his parents’ ways than ever. Though he undoubtedly felt some sympathy for his seriously ill father, he concealed it well.

In February 1888 the Crown Prince was operated on for a tracheotomy, the operation against which he, his wife and Mackenzie had held out for so long. Without it he would have suffocated and died almost immediately, but by this stage it was realised that his life could only be prolonged by a matter of weeks. Since late the previous year he had been in constant pain, unable to speak at all except in a hoarse whisper and reduced to writing everything he wished to say on a pad of paper which he always kept within reach.

On 9 March, while walking in the garden at San Remo, he was handed a telegram from Berlin. It brought him the news that his father, Emperor William, had passed away, within two weeks of what would have been his ninety-first birthday.

‘My own dear
Empress Victoria
it does seem an impossible dream, may God bless her!’ the Queen wrote to her daughter when she learnt of her son-in-law’s accession. ‘You know
how
little I care for rank or Titles – but I cannot
deny
that
after all
that has been done & said, I am
thankful
&
proud
that dear Fritz & you shd have come to the throne.’
³
Like many others, not least the newly elevated Empress Victoria herself, she had often feared that Fritz might not survive his father. Now that he had come into his inheritance, and was unlikely to enjoy it for long, she begged her daughter to be firm, put her foot down and remind her elder children – particularly William, now Crown Prince – that in the previous reign they had always spoken of the Emperor and Empress with great respect and ‘to remember who they are now’.

The new sovereign announced that he intended to reign as Emperor Frederick III. He, the Empress and their entourage returned to Berlin that same week, but it was evident to all that the disease was too far advanced for there to be any hope of recovery. Their existence was made worse still by the tactless behaviour of William, surrounded by toadies who already had an eye on their own advancement during the next reign.