We Two: Victoria and Albert (89 page)

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Leopold was a plucky, willful child
Leopold’s hemophiliac nephew Frederick (“Frittie”), the second son of his sister Alice, was not so fortunate. The wife of a mere duke of Hesse, Alice could not afford a large staff. One day she was in her rooms sewing as her favorite child Frittie, three years old, played. Hearing his older siblings outside, Frittie ran to the window, tumbled out onto the stone courtyard below, and was soon dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. Head injuries were almost invariably fatal for hemophiliacs. Queen Victoria mourned darling Frittie but also reproached her daughter for not looking after the child properly. Alice of Hesse never recovered from the sorrow and guilt she felt at the death of her son. She died at the age of thirty-five, leaving one son and four daughters, the latter largely educated by their grandmother Queen Victoria. Alice of Hesse was a woman of high intelligence and conscience, a skilled nurse and an expert on women’s health issues. She was the person in the family who might have unearthed the medical facts about hemophilia, seen its long-term significance for women like herself and her daughters, and explained them to her mother, Queen Victoria.

288
She liked pretty, obedient, healthy children
Victoria makes regular mentions of Leopold in her letters to her daughter in Prussia and is severe about his physical handicaps and odd character.

288
Perhaps a kingdom would be found
In the last half of the nineteenth century, countries in need of a new king turned reflexively to Saxe-Coburgs. This is how one of the many Ferdinands (“Foxy’) became, for a while, king of Bulgaria.

288
He not only survived childhood
Prince Leopold, created Duke of Connaught by his mother to improve his chances of finding a wife, married in his late twenties and quickly sired a daughter and a son. But Leopold never knew his son, as in 1884, aged thirty-one, he fell on some steps, took massive doses of alcohol and opium to kill the pain, and hemorrhaged to death. Since the X or female chromosome is responsible for clotting, Leopold’s son Charles, who inherited a healthy X from his mother, Princess Helene of Pyrmont Waldeck, and a healthy Y from his father, was not a hemophiliac. Leopold’s daughter Alice inherited her father’s defective X chromosome and was thus necessarily a carrier. She married
Prince Alexander of Teck (later Earl of Athlone) and had a daughter and two sons who were both hemophiliac. One died in early childhood, but the other lived to adulthood and even served in the First World War.

289
However, Ella’s sister Irene
Stephanie Coontz, in her
Marriage—A History: How Love Conquered Marriage
(Penguin Books, 2005), shows that once biological science established the deleterious effects of inbreeding, the marriage of first cousins became increasingly frowned upon in advanced European cultures. In this regard, the Saxe-Coburgs were a throwback to an earlier age, since they were intermarrying at an even higher rate at the end of the nineteenth century than at the beginning.

289
The men of the far-flung
The family also spawned a psychopath (Kaiser Wilhelm II), a cretin (Edward VII’s eldest son Albert Victor, who could barely read or tell the time), an idiot-epileptic (George V’s son John, who died at nineteen after a secluded life on the Sandringham estate), several social deviants (including Alfred, only son of the Duke of Edinburgh and Saxe Coburg, who died paralyzed and raving mad from syphilis at age twenty-five), and a fascist (Charles Edward, second Duke of Albany, Duke of Saxe-Coburg) who fought in the kaiser’s army in World War I and was a Nazi sympathizer in World War II. On the other hand, the family produced at least three women of outstanding brilliance: Queen Victoria’s two eldest daughters, Victoria (the Princess Royal, Empress Frederick of Prussia) and Alice (Duchess of Hesse-Darmstadt), and her granddaughter Marie (queen of Romania). Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter, Louise (Duchess of Argyll), was also a very bright woman and, as her statue of her mother in Kensington Gardens proves, an artist of some standing.

294
She had passed to her son
The Empress Alexandra of Russia was only thirty-two when she gave birth to her fifth child and first son, Alexei, and discovered to her horror that he was hemophiliac. Unlike her cousin Ena, queen of Spain, who kept having children until she produced a healthy boy, Alexandra lapsed into chronic invalidism and religious mania. She concentrated all her energies on her son’s survival, kept his hemophilia a secret even from other members of the family, and resisted all democratic reforms that might lead to a republic and thus deprive “Baby,” as she called Alexei, of his divine right to rule. Convinced that God was punishing her, Alexandra went mad from guilt and remorse, and her four daughters were the innocent victims of her obsession with Alexei’s illness.

294
As the medical historians
Queen Victoria’s Gene: Haemophilia and the Royal Family
, D. M. Potts and W.T.W. Potts, Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1995, p. 82.

294
Alfonso XIII trusted his eyes
Unlike her cousin Alix, Victoria Eugenie (Ena), Queen of Spain, was a survivor. She can be seen in the pictures of the coronation of her great-great-niece Elizabeth II. Ena was at first in love with her husband King Alfonso XIII, but he turned against her when their first child was a hemophiliac boy. Despite the bitter relations with his wife, Alfonso was determined on having more sons, since under Spanish law only a healthy heir could inherit the throne. Jaime, Ena’s second child, became blind and deaf after an attack of meningitis, so he also was barred from the succession. She then produced two girls, a healthy boy, and another hemophiliac boy. In Spain, news of the hemophiliac princes leaked out, and the public was fed fantastic rumors that they survived by drinking the blood of young soldiers. Alfonso was an ineffective and highly promiscuous ruler, but it was at least in part because of his sons’ ill health that he was deposed in 1930. The interregnum in the Spanish monarchy ended when Ena’s grandson Juan Carlos was recalled to the throne in 1975.

294
As their first cousin Marie
Julia P. Gelardi,
Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria
, New York: St Martin’s Press, 2005, p. 14.

294
By the early twentieth century
For my information on hemophilia in the Saxe-Coburg family, I have relied on the book by Potts and Potts and also on the following two articles in the medical literature: An Historical Review by Richard F. Stevens, “The History of
Haemophilia in The Royal Families of Europe,”
British Journal of Haematology
, 1999, 105, 25–32; and “Historical and political implications of Haemophilia in the Spanish royal family,” by C. Ojeda-Thies and E. C. Rodriguez-Merchan,
Haemophilia(2003)
, 9, 153–156.

Chapter 23:
FRENCH INTERLUDE

295
He was a supreme political opportunist
“[Napoleon III] was described as having the ‘appearance of an opium eater’” (Woodham-Smith, p. 346).

295
In smooth charm he was not unlike
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) was born into the brilliant and cosmopolitan D’Israeli family. He became an Anglican at the age of thirteen, a conversion that allowed him to go into English politics while pursuing a highly successful career as a novelist. He was prime minister from 1874 to 1880 and became close friends with the Queen. Victoria had many prejudices, but she was not a racist.

295
As a lengthy memorandum
Martin, vol. 3, pp. 98–109.

297
Three years later, he suspended
This was the coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire in 1851, which sent a number of important republicans into exile in Britain, including Victor Hugo, France’s greatest poet. From his place of exile on the Island of Jersey, Hugo launched an excoriating set of political satires called “Les Châtiments” [Chastisements], which presents Napoleon III as the vile merchandiser of his uncle’s great legend.

297
In 1853, having failed
Napoleon III made determined efforts to win the hand of Queen Victoria’s niece Adelaide of Hohenlohe Langenburg (third daughter of the Queen’s half sister Princess Feodora), among others. Adelaide was a young sixteen, and both her mother and aunt felt the hot-house atmosphere of the French court would be too much for her happiness and her morals.

297
In 1840 he had paid forty pounds
Martin, vol. 3, p. 211.

297
“How strange to think,” Victoria confided
Martin, vol. 3, p. 205.

297
“I felt that I was possibly
Ibid. p. 211.

298
The two women would be friends
After her husband was deposed in 1870, the Empress Eugenie (1826–1920) spent the rest of her life in England. A Spaniard by birth, she is said to have promoted the marriage of Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenburg (Ena) to King Alfonso XIII of Spain. Ena was the empress’s goddaughter and namesake.

298
“Altogether I am delighted
Martin, vol. 3, p. 209.

299
“In spite of the great heat
Tisdall, p. 34.

299
If Prince Albert, in his capacity
As Queen Victoria once remarked in a letter to her daughter Vicky, she never chose so much as a bonnet without consulting her husband. Victoria had little interest in fashion and was quite aware that, as a small, plump woman with a plain face, she was hard to dress. As an unmarried woman, the Queen got good fashion advice from other women, notably her mother, her aunt Louise in Belgium, and court ladies such as the Duchess of Sutherland, her first mistress of the robes. For her wedding, the simple dresses Victoria chose for herself and her bridesmaids got excellent press. But once she was married, Victoria cared only for Albert’s approval, and apparently he made time to supervise her choice of dresses and hats. The results were spectacularly bad. Even the English wondered why their Queen looked so much less chic in her day outfits than the average middle-class woman dressed for town.

300
Victoria was determined to return
Queen Victoria devoted pages of her journal to the visit of Napoleon III and his wife to Windsor in April 1855, and to her visit to Paris with the prince and their two eldest children five months later. The Queen allowed sections of her journals to be published—I believe her first move into print—and critics have found it interesting to compare this, as it were, self-edited version to the bowdlerized one produced by Princess Beatrice two generations later. We also have immediate, first-person accounts of the state visit to France in the letters written from France to her family in England by Mary
Bulteel Ponsonby, who attended the Queen as a maid of honor, and to her family in Germany from Frieda Arnold, who attended the Queen as a dresser. All three ladies were overwhelmed by the superb preparations the French had made for the visit.

300
On her last night in Paris
Woodham-Smith, p. 361.

300
To her diary she confided
Longford, p. 316, quoting Queen Victoria’s journal.

302
When she politely said
Woodham-Smith, p. 361.

302
Like his mother, the Prince of Wales
In her letters to her daughter Vicky, Queen Victoria comments over and again on how miserable and bored she is by court life at Windsor and Buckingham Palace.

302
Here was diplomatic tact and womanly sympathy
On the relations between the French imperial couple and the Princess Royal (Vicky), see Pakula, chapter 4, pp. 54–59.

Chapter 24:
THE PRUSSIAN ALLIANCE

304
The idea that Victoria, Princess Royal
At three, already fluent in German and English, “Pussette,” as Vicky was then known to her family, impressed her French governess one day when out on her pony ride. Looking at the landscape, Vicky quoted a line from a poem she had just memorized by the poet Alphonse de Lamartine: “le tableau se déroule à mes pieds” (the scene unfolds at my feet) (Pakula, p. 37, quoting Queen Victoria’s letter to King Leopold).

304
His personal mission as a diplomat
The business and professional classes in Prussia were essentially excluded from political power, which was wielded by a small, entrenched landed aristocracy represented by the court party, often called the camarilla. The camarilla, in turn, was supported by the large, well-financed, and superbly trained army, which, unlike the British army that was scattered all over the globe, saw its mission to lie in Europe. The social classes were kept rigorously separate, and it was rare for a Prussian merchant or intellectual to have connections at court or a relationship with a member of the royal family When Victoria’s daughters Vicky and especially Alice tried to move across class lines in Prussia and Hesse, they met with savage criticism. The Prussian merchants and intellectuals were eager to follow the example of Britain and take control of the nation’s politics and administration, but they failed. In the first half of the nineteenth century, occasional uprisings would force some movement toward democratic reforms and the formation of elected assemblies. But as soon as the rioters returned to their homes and things quieted down, the army would assert its grip, the king and his government would renege on all their promises of reform, the assemblies were dismissed, and the camarilla came down hard on political dissidents, the press, and the courts. In the second half of the century, the army’s success in military campaigns against Austria, France, and Denmark—and Prussia’s reunification of the nation—kept protest in check.