Daughters of Queen Victoria
I
WHEN, in 1878, Lord Beaconsfield consulted Queen Victoria about appointing Lord Lorne Governor General of Canada, she sanctioned the offer being made. Possibly Princess Louise would not like to be away from England for five years, and that was a long parting for the Queen as well, but it would be a great distinction for the Marquis and a ‘fine independent position’ for Louise.
As the years went on, the Queen’s relations with her daughters continued to expand to their growing families. For the German Crown Princess’s eldest son, Prince William, his grandmother had always had a special tenderness, and William’s character would certainly become of greater moment to Europe in the future than his mother’s political excursions were now.
The most poignant memories of William’s childhood were the triumphant reëntry into Berlin of German armies after three swiftly successful wars, and his grandfather’s influence encouraged him to conclude that the attainment of military glory was the noblest of human ambitions. To counteract this the Crown Princess hatched a scheme with the boy’s tutor that, after his confirmation at the age of fifteen, he and his brother Henry should spend three years at the grammar school at Cassel, where they would steep themselves in culture and scholarship. It was a most unusual course of education for Princes of the House of Hohenzollern, and there was much opposition in the family; William himself greatly disliked the idea of having to compete with other boys on equal terms and perhaps ‘come out lower on the list.’ But his mother got her way, and for three years, till William came officially of age, he was a schoolboy. Then his military education began, and for two years he was with his regiment.
Prince William’s return from his military training marked the end of his loving, happy relations with his father and mother, and for her it was the opening of the domestic tragedy that ended only with her death. He came back soaked through and through with militarism and highly contemptuous of his parents’ liberal principles. Intellectually he resembled his mother in many points, but they were instinctively disposed to differ and both were disputatious. Nothing was more foreign to her than the arrogance and conceit which were among his chief moral characteristics, and which provoked from her sharp rebukes.
His father distrusted him as profoundly as he trusted his wife, and the domestic circle was an arena of incessant wrangles. Then, without consulting cither his parents or his grandparents, Prince William engaged himself in 1880 to Princess Augusta Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, daughter of Duke Frederick and granddaughter of the Queen’s half sister Feodore. The Queen, since this came within the jurisdiction of her matriarchate, at once invited the prospective bride to Windsor to be inspected. Fortunately the Queen approved of her” found her ‘gentle and amiable and sweet.’ Such qualities were more likely to be of value to her than mental brilliance, which ‘Dona’ decidedly lacked.
The Crown Princess also liked her; as for William, she was sorry that he had not seen more of the world before he settled down, but he had no taste for traveling and never looked at a guidebook or appreciated the beauties of Art and Nature, so where was the use? That was a very incorrect criticism of one who was presently to be known as the ReiseKaiser, and who composed music and painted (or at least designed) large allegorical cartoons and excavated Greek antiquities. The night before his wedding she mourned over the thought that he would never sleep under his parents’ roof again, but her regrets were more for the vanished love and confidence which had once existed between him and herself, and for the years in which bitter seed had been sown, than for the fact that her eldest son had an establishment of his own.
Bismarck made much of William and influenced the Emperor, now growing very old, to employ him on missions which would properly have fallen to the Crown Prince. His mother was horrified at the thought of the mischief he might make. She wrote to the Queen: ‘ William is as blind and green, wrong-headed and violent in politics as can be.’ Finally Bismarck asked the Emperor to let William work under him in the Foreign Office. The Emperor, with a gibe at the Crown Prince and his wife, at once consented, in order that William’s ‘young soul may be guarded against errors’ — such errors, of course, being the liberal heresies of his father and mother.
Bismarck gave notice of this intention to the Crown Prince, who formally protested in terms practically identical with his wife’s criticisms of William to the Queen. Bismarck replied that such was the Emperor’s pleasure, and showed William what his father had written about him.
II
John Brown died at Windsor in the spring of 1883. The Queen’s grief for his loss was profound, and it can only add to our respect and sympathy for her that she expressed it with the simplicity and sincerity that were so characteristic of her. Not since the Prince Consort’s death had she suffered a bereavement, which affected her daily life so intimately. She had a devoted family, but none of them ministered to her comfort and sense of security as Brown had done. Lord Beaconsfield had died two years before, and her youngest son, the Duke of Albany, had married and no longer lived with her. Like every other normal woman, she missed the daily companionship of a man whom she trusted and relied upon. Once more she bethought herself of the happy arrangement of having with her a permanently resident sonin-law.
She had long taken a great interest in the family of Battenberg, the handsome and charming sons of Prince Alexander of Hesse. The eldest, Prince Louis, had entered the British navy as a midshipman in 1868, and, as a naturalized Englishman, had married Princess Victoria of Hesse, the eldest daughter of Princess Alice. The third son, Prince Henry, was as yet unmarried, and the year after John Brown’s death he met Princess Beatrice at Darmstadt. When he came to stay with his brother Louis in England for Christmas, he asked the Queen’s permission, confident of obtaining it, to propose marriage. That was exactly what she had hoped; he was a charming young man, and he fulfilled all the required conditions. Prince Henry had no duties to perform in any foreign principality; he was content to make his permanent and only home with her, and the post of resident son-in-law would at last be perfectly filled.
III
The German Emperor was in his ninetieth year; his son was in the middle fifties. It looked as if his succession could not be far off, and he might reasonably expect a reign of fifteen or twenty years, during which Germany would be freed from the oppression of Bismarck and led into the Promised Land by the Crown Prince. Before William succeeded, it might be hoped that he would learn discretion and wisdom. At present, in imperial affairs, it was as if William, bitterly opposed to his parents, and backed up by Bismarck and his grandfather, stood next the throne.
In the winter of 1886-1887 the Crown Prince suffered from very obstinate sore throats and loss of voice. Various remedies were tried without success, and there appeared on one of his vocal cords a growth which the German doctors feared was malignant. They advised an operation for its removal, but asked that a foreign specialist should first be consulted and unanimously decided on Dr. Morell Mackenzie, who at once went out from London to Berlin. lie insisted on a pathological examination of fragments of the growth, and, on the report of the most eminent pathologist in Europe that they showed no signs of cancerous structure, it was decided that Mackenzie should treat the Prince at his clinic in England.
The Crown Prince attended the Queen’s Jubilee, riding in the procession of Princes to the Abbey, and afterwards stayed in England till early in September, for the treatment recommended byMackenzie. Though the trouble in his throat was not cured, it was no worse, and it was felt in Berlin that he ought to return there. But the Crown Princess believed that it would be madness to retard his progress by the exertions and fatigues and the use of his voice which his duties at home would entail. On the advice of Mackenzie, she took him to spend the early autumn in the pine woods of Toblach. From there they went to Venice and to the mild warmth of the Italian lakes.
But she was most anxious to make William leave Berlin too, and this was not so reasonable; for, since the Crown Prince was abroad, it was only right that his eldest son should be there. The Crown Princess thought it was bad for William to be always with the Bismarcks and the Emperor, who spoiled and flattered him, and she was jealous for her husband’s sake that William was already taking his place.
Throughout September and October the Crown Prince held his own. They moved from the Italian lakes to San Remo, and at once a new growth appeared in the Crown Prince’s throat. Mackenzie was sent for and said that it looked malignant. The news was telegraphed to Berlin, and the Emperor sent Prince William with two German doctors to San Remo to consult with the doctors there and send him their joint report. A dreadful scene took place at the meeting of mother and son. They wrangled about which of them should send this report to the Emperor.
William presided at the conference of doctors, and, as ordered by his grandfather, sent their findings to Berlin. Mackenzie concurred with the others in their verdict that the Crown Prince was suffering from cancer. When that was known, the full tempest of abuse from the German press and from the multitude of the enemies she had made descended on the Crown Princess, and for the devoted wife they had no word of sympathy. Surrounded by quarreling doctors, outraged by the fantastic reports published daily in the German press, gallantly suppressing the secret despair that gnawed at her heart, she found her only refuge in her husband’s reliance on her and in his unshaken devotion.
The Emperor William died on March 9, 1888, and the Emperor Frederick III at once returned to Berlin. Now the day had come for which, for the thirty years of their marriage, the Crown Princess and her husband had prepared themselves, when their liberal policies would be realized and the power of Bismarck shattered. But they both knew that it was too late. The aspirations once green and vigorous in their remote springtime lay withered round them, smitten by the incurable frost, and the Emperor confirmed Bismarck in his Chancellorship, since his dismissal could only uselessly dislocate the Imperial Government and suspend for a month or two the administration which would so soon be restored.
When the Queen proposed to visit Berlin, Bismarck was alarmed, and so was Lord Salisbury. But just as the anti-monarchical agitation in England died completely down when in 1871 the Prince of Wales lay desperately ill of typhoid fever, so now Berlin gave a welcome of warm sympathy to the old lady who had come to say farewell to her beloved son-in-law, and to give comfort and support to her daughter. She willingly gave Bismarck the interview he asked for. They agreed that William was most ignorant of foreign affairs, and Bismarck assured her that he should never be Regent while his father lived, and that he would stand by the Empress in the days that were coming.
The Queen had a grandmotherly talk with William; he promised that he would behave better to his mother. But, with her departure to England, all the wretched wrangles broke out more violently than ever. William behaved as if he had come to the throne in direct succession to his grandfather, and his arrogance exasperated his mother beyond endurance. She realized now that the end was very near, and all she could do for her husband was to keep him shielded, as free as possible from worries; but she was surrounded by hostile eyes and scandalous tongues, which twisted into fresh malevolence towards her every incident of those despairing days. The Emperor was moved by water to the New Palace at Berlin and died there on June 15, 1888, within a year of the day of the Queen’s Jubilee when he had been the most gallant figure in the escort of Princes who rode to the Abbey.
IV
The chief cause of the Empress Frederick’s wretchedness, apart from her overwhelming sorrow at her husband’s death, and of her resentment, was her inability to accept the change in position for which her widowhood was alone responsible. True, there were three unmarried daughters who must be brought up under her care in Germany, and it was naturally an immediate concern to know what home of her own William would offer her. The Prince of Wales had told the Queen that William was proposing to give her the Villa Liegnitz, and this gave Victoria a good opportunity to write William a letter of grandmotherly counsel on this and other matters.
This letter did not have the authoritative effect the Queen intended. William, in his reply, first set her right about the question of a home for his mother. Uncle Bertie was misinformed. William was doing everything to meet his mother’s wishes. He had already asked her to stay on at Friedrichskron for a year; and as for the Villa Liegnitz, which the Queen thought not up to her daughter’s imperial dignity, the Empress herself had told the Emperor Frederick that she only wanted a pied-à-terre in Berlin, and specifically asked him to leave her the Villa, which he had done. Moreover, when she told William that she would like a house on the Rhine, he had offered to supply the capital. As to his visiting other sovereigns, he intended to meet the Tsar in the Baltic in a few weeks. He and Bismarck were agreed that national interests demanded it. ‘We Emperors,’ he said, giving out his key ringingly, as on a tuning fork, ‘must keep firm together, and be on their [sic] guard against republican agitators who threaten the monarchical principle.’
William had got into his grandmother’s black books for other family reasons. The Prince of Wales, when attending the Emperor Frederick’s funeral, had tactlessly asked Count Herbert Bismarck whether, had the Emperor lived, he would have wished to give back to France part, at any rate, of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine; since the peace of Versailles the Prince had believed that it was his intention to do so. Various similar indiscretions as to the return of North Schleswig to Denmark and the restoration of the ex-King of Hanover had been tacked on to the story by the time it reached Emperor William’s ears. His annoyance was perfectly natural, and he pounced on several incidents as a pretext for strafing his uncle. The two were shortly going to Vienna as guests of the Emperor Francis Joseph, and when the Prince of Wales wrote to his nephew that he hoped their visits would coincide William did not answer the letter, but signified to their host that he wished no other royal personages to be entertained when he was there.
Finally Bismarck joined in and started an Anglophobe campaign in his press against English interferences in internal German affairs. He suggested that it was the Empress Frederick who had prompted her brother to make those tactless inquiries which had caused all the mischief, and by an ingenious perversion of the facts accused the Prince of deliberate incivility to William in leaving Vienna on the eve of his arrival there.
V
It seems to us now like a page of mediæval history — or, even more, like some preposterous farce — that personal quarrels between irascible members of royal families could endanger international relations. The situation had its comical side. There was the Queen at Balmoral boiling with unsuppressed fury at her grandson’s insane and vulgar and scarcely credible pompousness, and writing to her Prime Minister about him in such terms as she had never previously used to a subject about a member of the Family. There was the Prince of Wales, equally angry, cutting short his stay in Vienna and fleeing into Rumania in order not to be on Austrian soil when his nephew arrived. And there was Emperor William, as he unveiled a statue at Frankfurt, accusing his uncle of audaciously slandering his father.
But these royal wranglings had at that time a serious side, and Lord Salisbury, who was not easily alarmed, expressed to the Queen his misgivings that they might lead to perilous consequences. She agreed that if possible such an outcome must be prevented, but feared that ‘with such a hot-headed, conceited and wrong-headed young man [William] this might at any moment become impossible.’ But, whatever the consequences might be, she was determined to manage the affairs of her family (Emperors or whatever) exactly as she chose, without advice from anybody, and her way was not to propitiate William, but to put him in his place. He must be at once and unmistakably shown what she thought of his conduct to his unhappy mother and of his rudeness to his uncle, and she asked the Empress and her three unmarried daughters to come and spend three months in England with her.
The Queen sent the Prince of Wales across to Flushing to meet the Empress in the Victoria and Albert. The Queen herself came from Windsor to welcome her daughter on landing at Port Victoria; never before had she gone farther than her own front door to receive any guest. The Family assembled in force for the Empress’s forty-eighth birthday two days later, and, as in the years of childhood, her ‘present table’ was covered with gifts. The entire staff of the German Embassy came down to offer their congratulations.
The Empress’s three months’ stay in England, with its special honors, had been an adequate object lesson to William as to his grandmother’s sympathy with her, and now, in view of the serious ill-feeling between Germany and England, the Queen was persuaded to let him pay her a visit. She invited him for the Cowes week in August, and the family hatchet was effusively buried. She created him Admiral of the British Fleet, and invested his brother Henry with the Garter. In return her gratified grandson appointed her Colonel in Chief of his First Dragoon Guards, and gave Prince George of Wales the Order of the Black Eagle.
Early in January 1890 the Empress Augusta died. The Empress Frederick wrote to her mother in terms empty of all condolence but full of the details of death. The funeral was frightful; no one took any notice of her, and the young Empress’s ‘grand condescending airs’ were most aggravating.
While her husband was still a healthy man with the prospect of a long reign before him, the Empress Frederick would have hailed Bismarck’s resignation of the Chancellorship as a cause for national rejoicing, but now when the Emperor forced it on him she sincerely regretted it. William had many explanations, among them the one he told the Tsar — that Bismarck refused to obey his orders, which was near the truth, and was the explanation which the Empress accepted. Bismarck, she wrote to her mother, was remarkably well and vigorous, and William had made him resign because he himself was a thorough despot, and wanted nobody in his government who would oppose his will. She did not know whether to laugh or cry over William’s imperial flamboyance, and that very admission testified to a change in herself.
The fierceness of her resentment against insult and obliteration, against the cruel destiny which had deprived her of her husband and the fulfillment of all her hopes, gradually began to die down. She had built herself a house at Cronberg, where, surrounded by beautiful possessions, pictures and furniture and antiques, she found that consolation des arts which can palliate or even heal the hearts of those whom life has deeply wounded. Little gibes at William spurted forth now and again, but these were only the last flicker of the tragic flame that had once enveloped and agonized her; the core of heat was cooling under the ashes. She was aghast sometimes at the imprudence of his swashbuckling speeches, and she still deplored German policy. William’s craze for colonies, for instance, was great rubbish; and as for his dream of building up a navy more powerful than England’s, that was pure madness, and perhaps in time he would come to understand that.
Then came a marked softening to the violent terms in which she wrote of him; regret took the place of indignation. The anger and bitterness were transmuted into anxiety and pity for the big baby crippled from birth. A certain tenderness, long dormant, returned.
VI
Queen Victoria had passed through her dark hours while still in middle life, and the approach of old age was more like the breaking of dawn than the closing of day, for it came with sun renewed and with serenity. As her shattered nerves recovered, her whole nature became far kindlier, and, above all, her domestic life was happier than it had been since the death of the Prince Consort. What chiefly contributed to that was the marriage of her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, in the year 1885. She and Prince Henry of Battenberg, permanently resident with the Queen, brought gayety and the power of spontaneous enjoyment back into her life, and the thought of her approaching Jubilee, which not many years ago would have appeared an unspeakable, a paralyzing ordeal, but kindled her vitality. She opened the People’s Palace, she visited Buffalo Bill’s ‘Wild West’ (‘Most extraordinary!’), she went to a garden party at Hatfield, and held one herself at Buckingham Palace; she received innumerable addresses and deputations, and though a few years ago she had been totally incapable of entertaining any royal guest, save near relations, she now had a houseful of kings and princes as her guests. She took immense pride in the title Lord Beaconsfield had with difficulty procured for her from a very disrespectful Parliament, and as Empress of India she felt she ought to learn Hindustani. Her rejuvenation was amazing: she lived again with zest, instead of dwelling with widowed melancholy on the past; and in the eyes of her subjects age brought apotheosis.
Instead of closing in, the horizons were opening out all round her; and her matriarchal dominion was extending like her Empire. She had great-grandchildren in Germany, and in 1894 an heir of the fourth generation was born to the English throne. She went to Coburg that spring for another marriage between grandchildren: Ernest, the elder son of Princess Louis, was now Grand Duke of Hesse, and he was marrying Princess Victoria of Coburg, daughter of the Queen’s sailor son Alfred, Duke of Coburg. A galaxy of princes and princesses awaited her. Among them was the Tsarevitch Nicholas, son of Tsar Alexander III and the Princess of Wales’s sister, and Princess Alix, the sister of the bridegroom. Alix was now a young woman of twenty-two, shy and reserved, but of incomparable beauty. For the last four years Nicholas had been in love with her, but his father had refused his sanction. Now, knowing that he himself had not long to live, the Tsar gave his consent, and Nicholas had come to Coburg with the intention of winning the Princess. At first she was as obdurate as his father had been. She wept; she declared it was impossible, for she was very unwilling to make the necessary change in her religion. The struggle was hard; she was deeply religious and loyal to her own faith, but she yielded.
So the morning after Ernest’s wedding the two came hand in hand to the Queen and told her they were engaged to be married. The Queen expressed herself as ‘quite thunderstruck.’ The thunderbolt gave her great gratification. Now ‘sweet gentle Alicky,’ chosen for the dazzling destiny of being the ‘great Empress of all the Russias,’ became the object of the Queen’s special regard, affection, and even reverence. Both the Queen and her Prime Minister saw in this marriage of her granddaughter to the heir to the throne of Russia a most hopeful prospect of restoring friendship between the countries.
Before the winter, Tsar Alexander III died, and Nicholas was Tsar of all the Russias. Princess Alix was received at once into the Russian Church, and it was arranged that as soon as the prodigious funeral ceremonies were over the marriage should take place, for otherwise it must be postponed for months, since, according to the traditions of the Russian Church, it could not be performed between Christmas and Easter. The Prince and Princess of Wales had already gone to Russia, and accompanied the funeral train from the Crimea to St. Petersburg. The Duke of York joined his father there, and the Queen made the new Tsar Colonel in Chief of the Scots Guards, the most intimate military honor she could bestow. All these attentions had their political significance— not for nothing would the Prince of Wales have gone through these appalling obsequies, and now he waited till his niece’s wedding had taken place.
Thus this lovely girl, so pious and so brainless, so inherently sad and so obstinate for all her gentleness, became the great Empress, and the last, of all the Russias; and the next time that she and her grandmother met they would curtsy to each other in the correct mode between sovereigns and go to the door side by side, where the Queen would draw back a shade, and let her sister and granddaughter pass out first.
VII
The Emperor William came to Cowes again in 1895. The long and fervent cordialities between his uncle and the Tsar had profoundly displeased him; they contributed to make him, as Pepys would have diagnosed, in ‘a mighty chagrin humor,’ which vented itself in the most agitating antics. The Queen found him a most fatiguing guest, and it was a great relief when his visit was over.
In the autumn of 1895, the government decided to send out an expedition to Ashanti to stop the raids which King Prempeh, in spite of a warning ultimatum, persisted in making into the Gold Coast, for the purpose of kidnapping its inhabitants and selling them for slaves. Volunteers were asked to join it; the eldest son of Prince Christian in the Rifle Brigade applied, and Prince Henry, to the Queen’s astonishment and dismay, asked her leave to volunteer also. The Queen finally yielded, and within a few weeks of Prince Henry’s arrival on the Gold Coast he was stricken with the deadly fever of the country. He was invalided home, and died on the voyage.
The Queen felt his death, not only for her daughter’s sake but for her own, more acutely and personally than any loss that had befallen her since the Prince Consort’s death. She had the greatest affection for Prince Henry; he had been ‘our help, the bright sunshine of our home ’ — he ought never to have been allowed to go on that expedition.
The Queen had had great hopes of better relations between England and Russia owing to the marriage of her granddaughter with Tsar Nicholas II. They sent her messages of tenderest love on all suitable family occasions, but otherwise the results were disappointing. An anti-English trend in the Russian press was accentuated by the appointment of Prince Lobanov, a rabid Anglophobe, as Foreign Minister. He had a fine opportunity for making trouble, for early in 1896 the British-Egyptian Expedition started up the Nile for the recovery of the Sudan. Prince Lobanov, with the knowledge of the Tsar, was doing all he could to encourage France to make some counter move, for, though nominally England’s only object was to reconquer the Sudan in order to restore it to Egypt, its recovery would vastly increase the English sphere of influence.
The Queen considered this situation as coming well within the territory of her enlarged matriarchate: private conversations with her imperial grandchildren ought to bear good fruit. She asked them to stay with her quietly for ten days at Balmoral. The Family was displayed, as her Navy might have been at some review, to personify England.
As the Tsar’s letters to his mother show, however, this personification made no impression on him, He did not enjoy himself at all: Uncle Bertie insisted on his going out stalking all day in torrents of rain and gales of wind, and he never got a stag. Surrounded by his wife’s aunts and uncles, he hardly saw his beloved Alix at all. It seemed to the Queen ‘like a dream to have Nicky and Alicky with her in this informal manner, driving with them and having tea at bothies, but as for the intimate conversations from which she had expected so much, they produced nothing: he made himself a bland and impenetrable mask.’
After ten days he and the Tsarina left for a State visit to Paris, and the Queen, conscious of having accomplished nothing, instantly sent a letter after him asking him to make it clear to the French Government that he disapproved of their hostility to England, especially with regard to Egypt. His answer was as noncommittal as his share in their conversations had been. Though he had told his grandmother, to her high approbation, that he disliked having to visit so dreadfully irreligious a town as Paris, he enjoyed himself there extremely. The bonds of friendship between Russia and France were immensely strengthened, whereas the visit to Balmoral, as regards international rapprochement, was an utter fiasco. Certainly he was devoted to Alicky, but the marriage from which the Queen had anticipated such magnificent results might just as well have ended in a divorce. Never in the years to come did the Tsarina influence him in the ways of wisdom, but rather in those of ruinous folly. She encouraged him to hold fast to the principles of autocracy which eventually wrecked Russia, and to seek in religion the quackeries of magic.
VIII
The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was celebrated in June 1897. A full six months before, the Queen had decreed that no reigning sovereign should be invited. She did not bother about William or any other crowned heads, but she was very anxious about the stability of small houses in poorer quarters on the route of the drive she was to take on Jubilee day.
The German Empress came with three of her daughters. Ten years ago exactly she had attended her mother’s first Jubilee, as Crown Princess of Prussia, and her husband and William had been with her. For the Queen these ten years had garnered rich harvests of imperial sovereignty, and had invested her with a personal apotheosis unparalleled in the annals of monarchy; for her daughter there were only the memories of blanched banners and of dreams long dead. To-day she was the most exalted of that huge assembly of her mother’s children and grandchildren and heirs to foreign thrones, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the Prince of Naples, and the Prince of Persia, and to all these the future beckoned with promise; for her the future was peopled with the tragic shadows of the past.
For many years the Queen had gone abroad in the spring for a month’s holiday, but in 1900 she went to Ireland instead. It was a gallant expedition for an old lady of eighty years, but she wanted to mark her appreciation of the services of the Irish regiments in South Africa; also she had not been to Ireland since she was there forty years ago with the Prince Consort, to see the Prince of Wales at the Curragh. But this visit could scarcely be described as a holiday: day after day she inspected convents and churches and schools and troops, she gave dinners at the Viceregal Lodge, and she came back immensely gratified with the enthusiastic loyalty of her people, but tired out.
Anxiety about the war weighed heavily on her, and there were grievous family bereavements to be borne. The only son of Alfred, Duke of Coburg, died, and his death was followed by that of his father. Young Prince Christian, who had gone out in the Ashanti expedition with Prince Henry of Battenberg, succumbed to an attack of typhoid in South Africa. Of her eldest daughter, there was the worst of news: she had been suffering for months from agonizing pain which would not yield to any treatment, and now the German doctors had pronounced the sentence which thirteen years ago they had passed on her husband.
All these were heavy burdens for one over eighty years old, and her physical infirmities increased as her life force ebbed. She grew very blind, and could barely read the dispatches. Her appetite failed; she had wakeful nights, and when morning came and she wanted to attend to her work she would drop asleep. But still she stuck to her duties, seeing her Ministers, and inspecting troops who had returned from the war. Her Journal, which she had begun at. her mother’s desire nearly seventy years ago, she dictated to a granddaughter, Princess Helena Victoria, who was now constantly with her. She took daily drives with one daughter or another; she thought that her annual holiday abroad, when spring came, would restore her strength.
The Queen died on January 22, 1901. She had given Princess Henry and Princess Louise houses of their own on the Osborne estate, but she had left that estate and the estate and castle at Balmoral to the new King. Osborne, as a residence, was perfectly useless to him. It was an immense house with large gardens and stables and a park of two thousand acres, and the upkeep was very expensive. He had no intention of ever occupying it, and his son, to whom it would eventually pass, said that under no circumstances would he do so.
Coincidentally there arose two national needs which it might meet. The ancient ship Britannia, moored at Dartmouth, had hitherto been a school for naval cadets; both the King’s sons and his brother Alfred had been trained there. But the Britannia was inconvenient and obsolete, and the Admiralty was looking out for some site on the mainland for this school. It was suggested to the King by Lord Esher that the stables at Osborne, with a substantial slice of land added for playground, might be replaced by school buildings, erected at the Admiralty’s expense; the proximity to the sea rendered it an ideal site. The second national need was for a convalescent home for officers invalided from foreign service. No such existed; there were only the naval and military hospitals for hospital cases. The big wing of Osborne House could be easily converted into such a home. The King approved both these suggestions. As for the pavilion or central portion of the house, he kept the rooms on the first floor, where his father and mother had their private apartments, as a memorial shrine to them. They were left exactly as they had been during the Queen’s lifetime, but the State rooms on the ground floor, with the immense Indian or Durbar room, were to be treated like the State rooms at Windsor, and to be open to the public on certain days.
Though these arrangements did not contravene the provisions of the Queen’s will, they certainly disregarded her intention, which was that Osborne House should be an appanage of the Crown, to be used ns a residence by her eldest son and those who succeeded him, while two of her daughters should live in the houses on the estate which she had given them. The King nevertheless informed his Prime Minister of the magnificent gifts he had made to his people on the day of his coronation.
So concludes the story of sixty years. Since the happy days of childhood there had been for the five daughters dark waters of trouble to be passed through, and bereavements bitter in themselves and in their consequences, but all alike had found in their mother firm and unfailing comfort, and in turn they had rendered her the eager obedience of devotion to one who was not only their loving mother but their Queen. Again and again in the letters of the two elder daughters this double aspect is apparent. They thank her, with recognition of the honor done them, for some deed of kindness to them or theirs, and ‘kiss her dear hands.’ This was no empty phrase, nor a mere formula to express the dutiful respect with which the daughters of that day were taught to regard their parents. The reverence was real, and, so far from imposing formality on filial affection, it enhanced it. The two emotions were fused together, and the conscious sense of loyalty was one with love.