Daughters of Queen Victoria

VOLUME 162

NUMBER 3

SEPTEMBER 1938

BY E. F. BENSON

WHEN the young husband and wife, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, began to consider the education and upbringing of their family, the memories of their own early years were much in their minds. These experiences were remarkably dissimilar: indeed the only point in common was that they both had known the care of one parent only.

Albert and his elder brother Ernest were brought up as motherless children by their father Duke Ernest of Coburg, and their grandmother, and Albert had only the dimmest recollection of his divorced mother. He was an extremely conscientious little boy, and recorded in his infant diary his various small naughtinesses and his tearful remorse for them. He was as studious as he was conscientious, and before he entered his teens he drew up for himself so strenuous a timetable of his lessons that no Board of Education of to-day would have permitted it to be used in schools. He was devoted to his relations, and his boyhood, consecrated to the acquisition of learning, was extremely happy.

He had among these relations a very able uncle, his father’s younger brother. Uncle Leopold, three years before Albert’s birth, had married into the English Royal Family, and his bride was Princess Charlotte of Wales, the only child of George, Prince of Wales, and heiress after her father to the throne of England. But she had died in giving birth to a stillborn child, and Uncle Leopold could therefore never become the husband of the Queen of England, or the father of the King. While Albert was in his early teens Uncle Leopold, after refusing the Crown of the Kingdom of Greece, had become King of the Belgians, and took the greatest interest in the fortunes of the family.

Albert’s Aunt Victoria, Duchess of Kent, was the mother of Princess Victoria, a girl just three months older than himself, and by the time these two children were ten years old it had become a practical certainty that Victoria, if she lived, would become Queen of England. Albert understood while he was quite a young boy that Uncle Leopold and Aunt Victoria and his grandmother were making plans which concerned him and Cousin Victoria very closely, but he took little interest in these or in the female sex generally. As a young student at the Universities of Bonn and Brussels he was a good rider and he fenced well, but he regarded all forms of sport and physical exercise as merely the needful refreshment for a mind weary of study. He looked on social functions such as balls and evening parties, with their senseless chatter, as a great waste of time, and, when obliged to go to one, far preferred a conversation with a savant in a corner to dancing. Lie had been a very pretty boy, and was growing into an extremely handsome young man. It was not only in the domestic ordering of her house that the Duchess showed a great want of wisdom in her daughter’s upbringing, but in her conduct towards Victoria’s relations as well. Her position was a very difficult one, and she made the worst of it. Her brothers-in-law disliked the Duchess personally; they were jealous of her and of her fatherless child; and instead of attempting to conciliate them, or behaving in a manner befitting the mother of a little girl between whom and the throne there still stood two of her uncles, she gave herself airs of ludicrous self-importance, as if she were the mother of the Queen already, and responded to their dislike with petty defiances. But the days of her domination were over: a month later the King died, and there was no longer any question whether Victoria should have an independent income of £10,000 a year or £4000. The Queen of England had long thought over what she intended to do when this day came. At six that morning she went alone, without her mother, to see the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Conyngham, who had come from Windsor to announce to her the King’s death. She received Lord Melbourne alone three hours later, and subsequently four officers of State. At intervals throughout the day she had interviews with Baron Stockmar, whom Uncle Leopold had sent to England in anticipation of the King’s death, and to whom he had enjoined her to give her complete confidence. She ordered that her bed should be taken out of her mother’s room, and established herself in a suite of her own. She dined alone, she said a dutiful good-night to her mother; and for the first time in her life she slept alone in her own room.

Copyright 1938, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

Very different were the conditions of life in the Royal Household at Kensington Palace in which Princess Victoria of Kent was being brought up. It consisted, as regards her earliest impressions, of five persons: her widowed mother, the Duchess of Kent, whose husband had died when the Princess was a baby eight months old; her daughter by a previous marriage, Feodore, nine years older than her half-sister Victoria, who adored her; the governess of the two girls, Fräulein Lehzen; an Irishman, Sir John Conroy, who had been an equerry of the Duke of Kent’s, and was now Controller of the Duchess’s Household; and, most potentially important of them all, the Princess Victoria herself, a plain child, but of exuberant vitality. She gobbled her food, she laughed with wideopen mouth, she was naughty and selfwilled and hated her lessons, but loved all forms of activity and diversion, her pony, her dogs, her dolls’ house, dancing, the play and the opera. When she was seven years old her beloved Feodore, now approaching marriageable age, was taken back to Germany by the Dowager Duchess of Coburg, her grandmother and Albert’s, and Victoria was left alone under the care of these three invigilants, with a troupe of tutors to give her the education suitable to a little girl who would one day be Queen of England.

Albert would have reveled in this life, which afforded such opportunities for acquiring knowledge, but to Victoria, in spite of diversions, it was a sad and lonely childhood. The Duchess was very strict with her two daughters, but there was something more than that, felt by Feodore then, and felt by Victoria also when she grew a little older. This was their mother’s dependence on Sir John Conroy. Charles Greville, the most scandalous of the world’s best diarists, duly commented on this. He reports a conversation he had with the Duke of Wellington in which he asked him whether he believed that the Duchess was Conroy’s mistress, and the Duke said he supposed that was so.

That such was the mischievous tittletattle of scandalmongers was certainly the case, and our most injudicious Duchess gave ample cause for the wagging of unfriendly tongues. It must be remembered, on the other hand, that until Victoria ascended the throne at the age of eighteen she always slept in her mother’s room, which seems an unlikely arrangement to be made by a mother who was carrying on a secret intrigue.

By day and night Victoria was under the scrutinizing eye of her invigilants; she lived as on a desert island encompassed with guards. Lehzen was a friendly guard, but Lehzen loathed Conroy, and there were thus two camps in that small and isolated household. The mother, with Conroy at her elbow, was fur too strict with the girl; indeed, after her death in 1861, when the Queen read the Duchess’s diaries of those early years, she was filled with amazement and remorse to find that they breathed the tenderest love and solicitude for her. She had never suspected that beneath that crust of hardness and severity there glowed this deep affection.

When Princess Victoria was just seventeen, her uncles on both sides of the family simultaneously made the first definite moves with regard to her marriage. Her Uncle William (who had now succeeded his brother George IV to the throne) wanted her to marry Prince Alexander, the younger son of the Prince of Orange, and invited him and his brother to Windsor; and the Duchess of Kent, instigated by Leopold, asked her brother, Duke Ernest of Coburg, to bring his two sons Ernest and Albert to stay with her at Kensington Palace for a visit of three weeks. King William in a fury said he would not allow the Coburg aspirants to set foot in England, but there was no statute in the law of the land which could enable him to act, and the Coburgs braved the royal displeasure and came. All four young men danced with the Princess at the ball her mother gave on Victoria’s birthday, but Albert in her eyes excelled them all in charm and beauty and intellect and gayety. She had never seen him before, but both the young people knew what Uncle Leopold hoped, and her heart thrilled with maidenly ecstasy.

On the tearful morning of the cousins’ departure she wrote to Uncle Leopold: ‘I must thank you, my beloved Uncle, for the prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me in the person of dear Albert. He possesses every quality that could be desired to make me perfectly happy. He is so sensible, so kind, and so good, and so amiable, too. He has, besides, the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance you can possibly see. I have only now to beg you, my dearest Uncle, to take care of the health of one now so dear to me, and to take him under your special protection.’

Again the isolating rigor of her mother’s control closed round Princess Victoria for one more winter of discontent. She continued to write in her diary those minute elaborate entries which were proper for her mother to see, and kept to herself all that she silently brooded over in the heart through which ran a vein of iron. Next May, being eighteen years old, she came of age, and the King wrote his niece an autograph letter assigning her an income of £10,000 a year independent of her mother. He sent Lord Conyngham to Kensington Palace, with instructions to deliver this personally to Princess Victoria. Sir John Conroy received him, and when he had explained his errand the Controller of the Household admitted him into the room where the mother and daughter awaited him. The Duchess asked for the letter to be given to her, but Lord Conyngham said it was for the Princess. When the Duchess learned its contents she made her final gaffe. She would still be paying all the expenses of Victoria’s board, lodging, and education, and she claimed that £6000 of this grant ought to go to her.

No one, least of all perhaps her mother, had suspected that this homely little girl with the projecting blue eyes and the mouth that she opened so very wide when she laughed had such an indomitable will. Her complete selfreliance, her immense personal dignity, amazed all who came in contact with her, and she took up the power and responsibility of sovereignty as if she had been Queen all her life. To her mother she was ruthless in intention and in act. The Duchess had looked forward to the day when Victoria would be Queen of England and she herself the honored counselor and friend, directing and guiding the Queen and perhaps paying back with bitter interest the snubs which she had undergone from Victoria’s relations and which her own lack of wisdom had so largely brought upon her. Instead, she ceased to exist.; her life was blighted at the precise moment when she imagined it would burst into flower. As for Conroy, the Queen conferred on him a baronetcy and a pension of £3000 a year for his services to her parents and never spoke to him again. She was Queen: her mother knew that now, and in the years to come her children would know it also.

But, with all her native dominance, Victoria demanded throughout her life to have by her some man whose judgment she could trust, or on whom she depended for her sense of comfort. Since her early girlhood she had exalted Uncle Leopold to the oracular seat; now she deposed him and established Lord Melbourne in his place as counselor. ‘Dear Uncle,’ as she subsequently wrote, ‘is given to believe that he must rule the roast everywhere. However, that is not a necessity.’ And there was a project on which Uncle’s heart was set which she did not want to discuss.

It was the only subject which affected her intimately on which she could not make up her mind. She was twenty now, and three years had elapsed since the birthday party and ball her mother had given at Kensington Palace when Albert had made so engaging an impression. She had not seen him since, and neither of them had yet shown any desire to meet again. Her life had undergone an enormous change since then: she hugely enjoyed being Queen of England, and she was not sure she would like to be under a husband’s control as a dutiful wife must be. But in the meantime Albert was being kept dangling, and he had intimated that he did not intend to dangle forever. Eventually she consented to see him again, on the understanding that she was absolutely free to refuse him. In October 1839, he came to Windsor with his brother Ernest, equally determined that she must say the word now or forever hold her peace. At the first sight of him all hesitation was over. He was perfection; she loved him more than she could say.

The marriage took place in February 1840. The Queen had ordained that they should have only two days of uninterrupted solitude at Windsor for their honeymoon, and when Albert, fearful of being plunged so soon into the pomp of Court life, asked for a small extension, she was very much the Queen. ‘You have not at all understood the matter,’ she wrote to him. ‘You forget, my dearest love, that I am the Sovereign and that business can stop and wait for nothing. Parliament is sitting, and something occurs almost every day for which I may be required.’ So after two days the Court and the Queen’s Ministers and her mother and Lehzen streamed down on them, and the honeymoon was over. It is strange to think how completely in later years the Queen ceased to regard the sessions of Parliament as a reason for her presence in London.

II

On November 21, the Queen gave birth to her first child, a daughter. According to the barbaric usage of the day, Ministers of the Crown, with Archbishop Howley of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, were assembled in the room adjoining that in which the Queen was in unanæsthetized labor, the door of which was open. There was a little disappointment when Dr. Locock, who was within with the midwife and Prince Albert, was heard saying to the mother, ‘Oh, Madam, it is a Princess!’ but a confident voice from the bed answered him, ‘Well, next time it will be a Prince.’

Then the newborn girl was brought out on a tray as Nature had just made her, so that the Lords temporal and spiritual might see with their eyes and hear with their ears (for the young lady seemed vexed) that there was now an heiress in the direct line to the throne of England, and the distinguished company dispersed congratulating themselves that another life intervened before the detestable Hanoverian Ogre, Ernest Duke of Cumberland, uncle of the Queen and now King of Hanover, could ascend the throne of England. Uncle Leopold was equally delighted. But he did not say quite the right thing when he hoped that she would presently be the Mama ‘d’une nombreuse famille.’ She told him that such was not her wish. Childbearing involved ‘hardship and inconvenience’ to herself (men seldom thought of that) and her country would not welcome a nombreuse famille any more than she.

Within a year there was another addition to the family. No Prince of Wales had been born to the Sovereign for eighty years, and the only discontent was that of Albert Edward’s sister, who was not at all pleased with her brother. The Queen was sure that everybody, like herself, must fervently pray that he should ‘resemble his angelic dearest father in every, every respect, both in body and mind.’ Bertie, however, showed no signs of precocity, and when in the autumn his parents came back to Windsor from their first visit to Scotland it was a disappointment to find him so little grown either in mind or in body.

Before the Princess Royal was three years old the general lines of education for the children were established. Sarah, Lady Lyttelton, was the President of the Board, and under her (for the present) were three governesses, English, German, and French, who, as the children were weaned from the nursery, would teach them their lessons and look after them at their play. These governesses were very trustworthy women, and all of them were allowed to seek audience with the parents and lay before them any small problem that might arise about their charges. The Queen, remembering her sad childhood at Kensington Palace with its camps and its factions, was delighted with the freedom and openness of these arrangements.

But she longed for some angulus terrae to which she could retire without ceasing to be Queen and which should be her own personal property. In 1843 she purchased Osborne House, in the Isle of Wight, with eight hundred acres of ground, subsequently increased to two thousand. The house was far too small, and it was at once demolished; and then came an added, a consecrated joy, for Albert, with the professional assistance of that rising architect Mr. Cubitt, planned a residence suited to the dignity of the Queen.

This same year a second daughter was born to the Queen, Princess Alice, a very plump and sunny child, on whom her father, who now made the most apposite English puns, bestowed the nickname of Fatima. While Osborne was still in the throes of decoration and fresco, a second son was born, Prince Alfred. A son of Albert’s would succeed to the Dukedom of Coburg, and, since the Prince of Wales was earmarked for the throne of England, Alfred would inherit. He was a robust, skylarking boy, and, more fortunate than his elder brother in being allowed to have a profession, he was to enter the English Navy as soon as he was old enough to become a naval cadet. Two more daughters, the Princesses Helena and Louise; two more sons, the Princes Arthur and Leopold, brought the offspring up to eight; and finally the birth of Princess Beatrice in 1857 completed the tale of a family which might now be considered nombreuse. The Queen had gladly suffered all the hardship and inconvenience of a loving wife, and it would soon be the nation’s business, according to precedent, to provide for the dignified maintenance of her offspring. On Prince Albert’s birthday the children always produced for their father evidence of their progress in various forms of art. He listened to their recitations, their performances on the piano and violin, and they made him presents of their needlework, their sketches, and their essays in composition, and jointly they gave their parents delightful surprises of a more elaborate sort. Where Bertie was concerned, Prince Albert was quicker to censure than to approve, and he took a very gloomy view of the boy’s character and abilities. Albert was not a clubbable man: to sit talking for the mere sake of human intercourse was to him a waste of time, when he might have been reading a book. He concluded, therefore, that anybody who liked to sit talking with his fellows, unless some useful discussion occupied their tongues, was idling. The only book that Albert never cared to study was the book of human nature; nor did he consider that anything worth learning could be drawn from it. A huge destiny awaited Bertie, and it was his father’s duty to fit him for it by cramming him, like a Strasbourg goose, with the nutriment which Albert himself would have so eagerly assimilated. Except under strict supervision, Bertie was never allowed to consort with boys of his own age. Tutors prowled round him, like the hosts of Midian, and sent regular and unsatisfactory reports of his progress to a genuinely distressed Papa. So, in the domestic life which the Queen found quite idyllic, there was always this discordant note, and it is strange that she, remembering her own sad childhood, did not remonstrate with her husband about this régime of snubs and strictness. And yet how could she? Albert to her was the incarnation of wisdom, and all his judgments were true. It was not till many years after her husband’s death that she began to see in her son the value of these genial qualities which Albert had despised.

During this long period of fertility she had positively gloated over the happiness in the family circle. Albert remained perfection; never once did he cast an admiring glance on any other woman, and throughout the years of her marriage the greatest domestic trial she ever experienced was when on his father’s death he went to Coburg for a fortnight without her. ‘I have never been separated from him,’ she wrote to Uncle Leopold, ‘even for one night, and the thought of such a separation is quite dreadful. If I were to remain quite alone, I do not think I could bear it quietly. . . . I may be indiscreet, but you must think of what the separation from my all in all, even only for a fortnight, will be to me.’

The Hanoverian dynasty, she once exclaimed, was finished. Henceforth the Royal Family of England were the House of Victoria and Albert. But this doting did not extend to her children; few women indeed, if any, can fill the rôle of adoring wife and adoring mother with equal intensity. She was very fond of her children, so said the admirable Lady Lyttelton, but she was very strict with them. And mixed with their dutiful love towards her there was a very considerable awe. Mama’s wish must also be looked upon as the Queen’s will.

The early years of the young family, particularly of the elder girls, must have been extremely happy. They adored their father and were at ease with him, and in Pussie, now promoted to the more dignified name of Vicky, he found a mind which in many respects exactly mirrored his own. She loved her lessons, she was quick to learn and retentive of memory; she had strong artistic tastes, even as he had; and while she was yet scarcely in her teens she was in these ways far more a companion to him than his wife. Victoria panted after him, glowing with admiration, but she did not care as Vicky cared for prolonged browsing on the subjects to which his mind instinctively turned in moments of leisure.

The Queen thought Vicky a plain child, whereas, without being beautiful, she had a most charming and attractive face. Alice, once Fatima, both parents were agreed was the beauty of the family, and unfortunately they both agreed that Bertie was backward and stupid. He had become very shy and timid with his father, and whereas Lady Lyttelton’s report of him, when he was still under the sway of governesses, was that he was singularly truthful, a rather later verdict was that he was much given to telling fibs. That is one of the unfortunate effects of a child’s fear of a parent who, even from the highest motives, is too apt to mark what is done amiss.

The desire for remote domesticity grew. Osborne was too easily accessible, the Isle of Wight was almost suburban, and the Queen wanted some wilder and more untrammeled home. She rented a small Highland castle at Balmoral on Deeside; the distance from London was an advantage rather than otherwise. Here she could live the simple life with Albert and the children among glens and lochs and mountains. There was deer stalking for Albert, who made an exception in favor of that form of sport, which he found fatiguing but most interesting. For herself there were visits to the crofters with presents of tea and petticoats, and there were picnics on the hill, and they made great excursions to the wildest unpopulated districts, staying incognito in country inns with only a lady and gentleman in attendance, and dining off skinny chickens. She purchased the house, with an estate of 25,000 acres, and Albert planned yet another paradise for her. Down came the little Scotch castle, and in its place there rose from his architectural designs a more royal abode built of granite and bristling with turrets, like a German Schloss.

In the spring of 1855 Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie paid a State visit to England. The Queen and Prince Albert returned the visit in August, taking with them their two eldest children, the Princess Royal, now fourteen years old, and the Prince of Wales, a year younger. The Queen was completely bowled over by their enthusiastic reception in Paris and the brilliance of the fêtes in their honor, and found the Emperor amazingly attractive. She would have been sadly disconcerted had she known that the impression of Paris formed by her small and (she was afraid) stupid son would have a far greater effect on the future relations of the two countries than her own presence.

III

Straight from the dazzle and pomp of Paris, the four returned to the simple life at Balmoral, occupying the new castle for the first time. The earliest guest they received there was Prince Frederick William of Prussia, eldest son of Prince William of Prussia, and nephew of the childless king. Prince Frederick had visited England once before, on the occasion of the Great Exhibition in 1851, and, though their eldest daughter was then only a girl of ten, she had roused in him remote matrimonial dreams.

The girl was not yet fifteen, but he had already obtained the consent of his parents and of King Frederick William to his proposing marriage. He at once made up his mind, and duly asked her parents’ leave. She was a little young yet to make so momentous a decision, and the Queen suggested that he should wait until Vicky was a little older and had been confirmed. But he wanted it settled now, and, perhaps remorsefully remembering how long she had kept Albert dangling, she allowed him to indicate his intentions by the delicate device of picking a sprig of white heather and presenting it to the girl with ‘an allusion to his hopes.’ Vicky responded in the most direct manner to this allusion, but then, appalled at her own unmaidenly conduct, went in floods of tears to her parents and confessed. As she had done exactly as they desired, they found no difficulty in forgiving her. The Queen decided that the wedding should take place at the Chapel Royal in St. James’s Palace. A week before the date set a galaxy of royal personages and their suites arrived; they were so numerous that the Prince Consort wrote to the Dowager Duchess of Coburg that it would be a most dexterous feat to find room for them all ‘in a very limited palace,’ and that if he succeeded he was thinking of going on a professional tour as a conjurer. A unique festival of entertainment ensued. One night there was a gala performance at Her Majesty’s Theatre of Macbeth, followed by a farce, Twice Killed. ‘We made,’ wrote the Queen in her diary, ‘a wonderful row of royalties.’ Next evening there was a State Ball, and the evening after a gala performance of Balfe’s Rose of Castile, with another farce. There was a State Dinner, with Mr. Henry Leslie’s Choir to sing afterwards. Then on Saturday the bridegroom arrived. After lunch the whole royal company attended a demonstration by Mr. Rarey of his method of taming vicious horses, and after dinner there was a performance of Sonnambula. The only chance of the Princess’s drawing England and Germany together was that she must first win the confidence of her adopted country. To do that she must understand it, and the way of understanding lies in appreciation rather than criticism. To be sure, she was very young and needed guidance, but she should have sought that from her husband’s parents rather than her own, not only because they knew better what Prussia expected (and did not expect) from her princesses, but because the fact of her seeking it from them would have roused in them the kindly protectiveness of which she stood in need. To do otherwise could only result in her influence over her husband alienating him from them. This was exactly what happened, and herein lay the primary cause of her troubles and her tragedy.

Both Albert and the Queen, in spite of her recent infatuation with Paris and the Emperor Napoleon, were strongly proGerman, as from their almost unmixed German blood was only natural, and they had long believed that a very great expansion was coming to the State of Prussia and its paltry dynasty. Prince Albert some years before had written one of his most thoughtful memoranda for the benefit of the King, recommending certain liberal reforms in the constitution of the State, Now he envisaged a Confederation of German States, under the controlling hegemony of Prussia allied with England. Prussia would develop into a Continental Power of huge military strength, and, with England’s invincible command of the sea, the two would keep the peace of Europe inviolate. Both would be inspired by enlightened and liberal aims, and an era of progress and prosperity, of free trade and commerce, as foreshadowed by the Great Exhibition, would dawn on a distracted world. His aspirations were that his daughter, through her influence over her husband, should advance liberal and democratic policies, the comprehension of which in Prussia would automatically draw the two countries together.

The betrothal was formally made public in May 1857, and in the Queen’s message to Parliament announcing it she asked that such provision be made for her daughter ‘as was suitable to the dignity of the Crown and the honor of the country.’ This was the first occasion on which the country had been asked to contribute to the support of the nombreuse famille, now consisting of nine members, and there was a little uneasiness as to what the response might be. The Government did not feel sure that the dowry of £40,000, with an annuity of £8000, which they intended to ask for the Princess Royal would be granted very graciously; it would be much wiser not to present to the country the total estimate of its future indebtedness. But all went well: only fourteen members of the House of Commons voted against the grant, and the Prince regarded this as practical unanimity, inspired by the respect of the nation for the Crown. It also established a useful precedent for the numerous applications which would be made in the future.

The marriage was fixed for January 25, 1858. The alliance with the paltry dynasty was still not popular in England, and Prussia did not feel unduly honored. Prussia had her suspicions: she wondered if there was a plot being hatched for her Anglicization. As if to test that in an inconspicuous manner, the Prussian Foreign Minister called on the British Ambassador in Berlin some months before the wedding and told him that it was the custom for Princes of the House of Hohenzollern to be married in Berlin. This impertinent suggestion was duly conveyed to the Queen, who dealt with it in the most summary manner: ‘Whatever may be the custom of Prussian Princes, it is not every day that one marries the eldest daughter of the Queen of England. The question therefore must be considered settled and closed.’

Sunday was spent in worship and rest, and on Monday the wedding was celebrated: ‘the second most eventful day in my life,’ wrote the Queen, ‘as regards feelings.’ She noticed how small the ‘old’ Royal Family had become, but the young Royal Family, the dynasty of Victoria and Albert, more than made up for that dwindling. She walked with her two eldest sons, one on each side of her (‘which they say had a most touching effect’), and the three eldest girls followed. All was happiness and joy at this wedding of the first of her children, and she felt that she could have embraced everybody. The newly married couple went for two days of solitude to Windsor, and there was a State Concert at Buckingham Palace.

Princess Frederick was received very cordially in Berlin; she had youth and charm and intelligence, and her new relations and the high circles were most willing to give her a fair chance. At the same time she was the centre of a circle of critical eyes, who watched her very closely. Bismarck was still at the German Embassy in Paris, and did not come to Berlin for four years yet, but he saw her there soon after her marriage, and was at once aware from his own observation and from what he heard that she was prejudiced against him because of his ‘alleged anti-English feelings.’ His verdict, however, was conditionally favorable and agreed with the general impressions. He did justice to her charm and intelligence; he noted, with equal justice, that she was not clever at concealing her real sentiments; and he wrote to General Gerlach: ‘If the Princess can leave the Englishwoman at home and become a Prussian, she may be a blessing to the country.’ But to leave the Englishwoman at home was just what the Princess could not bring herself to do, and what her parents would not permit.

Her father continued his tutorial offices, writing to her every week long letters of advice, which could not have tended to Prussianize her: he told her that if her path of life was not always smooth, she must take such trials as designed to strengthen her mind and ‘not be seduced by familiarity into approval of that which, while it was unfamiliar, the reason could not recognize as good or fitting.’ In fact she must not adapt herself to new ways. To her mother she wrote, as desired, every day of her life. This policy of not leaving her alone was the worst possible: the Queen wished to exercise over her the old maternal authority, and the Prince backed that up by telling her, ‘Your place is that of your husband’s wife and your mother’s daughter. You will desire nothing else, but you will also forego nothing which you owe to your husband and your mother.’

A fortnight before the expected birth of the Princess’s first baby in the following January, the Queen sent out her favorite physician, Sir James Clark, so that an English eye should watch over her; an English nurse followed, and the Prince Consort would have liked his old tutor, Baron Stockmar, to go to Berlin also for the event. The delivery was very difficult; it was doubtful whether either mother or son would survive, and not till two days afterwards was it discovered that the baby’s left shoulder was so seriously injured that, in spite of all subsequent treatment, Prince William’s arm remained permanently powerless.

IV

At home, meantime, the rest of the family were growing up. The Prince of Wales, in the pangs of unmitigated education, had been sent for a winter to Rome under the care of General Bruce, and on his return to England he was placed at Edinburgh University to fill up in study the months of the deplorably long vacation before he went to Oxford.

Since Princess Frederick’s marriage, Alice had been the eldest daughter at home, and the mother in her diary always speaks of Alice with the warmest affection, as the greatest comfort to her and a treasure of a child. But mixed with her affection was that maternal possessiveness with which the Queen always regarded her daughters. ‘I shall not let her marry,’ she wrote to Uncle Leopold, ‘as long as I can reasonably delay her doing so.’

Next to Alice came Alfred. If his elder brother was a disappointment, he did much to compensate for it. As destined for the Navy, he had to start early on his career, and was already lost to the permanent home circle. He came home when he was sixteen to be confirmed, and the Prince Consort was rejoiced to find that he had a brain ‘in which no prejudice can maintain a footing against straightforward logic.’ That was a boy after his own heart, and perhaps he turned with a sigh to the latest report from General Bruce about Bertie, now an undergraduate at Oxford. Bertie lived with his Governor and an equerry in a private house, Frewen Hall, under the strictest supervision. He did not attend lectures, but professors of the University came to instruct him privately in English literature, German literature, chemistry and modern languages, modern history, and ecclesiastical history. He was not allowed to mix with other young men or to dine in hall, except on special occasions, but, in spite of this invigilation and these bountiful opportunities for acquiring useful knowledge, he remained, as his father lamented, ‘neither fish nor flesh.’

The Queen permitted her resolve to keep Princess Alice at home as long as she reasonably could to be remotely threatened the next year, but she had no intention of letting the threat develop into an act of aggression. She asked to her party at Windsor for Ascot week, in June 1860, Uncle Leopold and his two sons, and the two sons of Prince Charles of Hesse, brother to the childless Grand Duke. The Prince Consort noticed that the elder Hesse son, Louis, and Alice were mutually attracted, and he expected ‘further advances from the young man’s family.’ He thought the Hesses a good respectable family, and they were well connected, for the Empress of Russia was Prince Charles’s sister, and Louis was the heir presumptive to the ancient Duchy and occupied in Hesse exactly the same position as did Prince Frederick in Prussia.

At the end of November, according to plan, Prince Louis was bidden to Windsor again, with just such an intention as that for which Prince Frederick of Prussia had been bidden to Balmoral, and one evening he asked Princess Alice to marry him. They went together to the parents, and with many embraces and ‘squeezings of hands’ the engagement was permitted. But the young couple were told that the marriage could not take place for over a year yet.

The Queen was immensely pleased at the thought of having Louis, eventually, as a son-in-law. She found him good, amiable, honest, modest, warm-hearted, high-principled, and ‘unassuming.’ But Alice and Louis, though deeply in love with each other, must put off their marriage, and after that, since he was so desirable an inmate and had no particular duties at home, they would make their principal home in England, where Louis would have no duties at all. This was Mama’s wish and the Queen’s will, and Alice took it quietly and sensibly, like a dutiful daughter and a loyal subject.

Until the year 1861 the Queen had never lost anyone, friend or relation, to whom she was emotionally attached. But in March her mother, the Duchess of Kent, died after a short illness. Years ago the early estrangement between mother and daughter had passed and was forgotten, and since her marriage the Queen had long been on the most affectionate terms with the Duchess. Her grief was sincere and profound, but since her childhood the thought of death and all details connected with it had held a strange fascination for the Queen, and she wrote in her diary a minute account of the hours during which she watched by her mother’s deathbed, of the associations they suggested, of the striking of the clocks in the silent house, and especially of the chiming of the repeater watch in a tortoise-shell case which had belonged to her father, the sound of which had been so familiar to her when as a girl she had slept in her mother’s room, but which she had not heard since the day of her accession.

Now, sleepless through the night, she heard once more the tinkled quarters, and it was just striking half-past nine in the morning when the breathing from the bed ceased. She held her mother’s hand and kissed it, and Albert took her into the room next door. He brought to her the daughter with whom she was so loath to part, and left them together, saying to Alice, ‘Comfort Mama.’ To the girl that was a moment of self-dedication which she never forgot. Year after year, during her married life abroad, she wrote to her mother on that day renewing that vow, and telling her that neither time nor distance could ever loosen the dear obligation then laid on her by her father.

The Duchess’s death produced an effect on the Queen that was strange to one possessed of so vigorous a vitality. She clung to her grief as if to something intrinsically precious in itself which must be cherished for its own sake, and she surrendered herself to the luxury of selfpity. Her doctors agreed that she must not attempt to make any effort. ‘Long conversation, loud talking, the talking of many people together I can’t bear yet, it must come very gradually.’ Even the birthday of her youngest daughter three weeks later was most upsetting, because Beatrice’s grandmother idolized her, and the presence of Louis was equally agitating: it made her ‘long and pine’ for her mother because she would have been so happy and proud. This fond embrace of sorrow foreshadowed the effect which the approaching tragedy of the Queen’s life would have on her.

(To be continued)