“Oh what sad news from Darmstadt!” gasped Queen Victoria, “…Dear dear Louis, so beloved by us all, so adored by his children, a real son to me, to think of him paralysed and helpless…Poor dear Irène how distressed she will be. I can think of nothing else.”
His daughters hurried from Prussia, Russia and Malta to be at his side but by the time they reached the New Palace ‘the best and kindest of fathers’ was barely conscious. He died in the early hours of the morning, 15th March 1892.
‘Broken-hearted, crushed and bewildered’, Queen Victoria’s heart again went out to her orphaned grandchildren and particularly, in the aftermath of the Grand Duke’s death, to his twenty-three-year-old successor, Ernst Ludwig.
Until then, Ernie had been living a carefree existence, indulging his passion for art and enjoying the company of his unmarried sister Alix. Now, suddenly saddled with the weight of responsibility for the Grand Duchy, all that would have to change, and fond as she was of her grandson, the Queen had little faith in his ability to cope at such an early age. She sent him message after message full of sound advice and, above all, recommended that he should find a wife as soon as possible not only to help him carry out his duties but to secure the Hessian dynasty.
There may have been another motive in the Queen’s persistent pestering. Perhaps she had wondered why Ernie seemed disinclined to marry and appeared so content with his artistic friends that he would have been happy to continue his bachelorhood indefinitely. Perhaps, too, she had picked up the hint in Vicky’s letter: ‘who can guess what [his] tastes may be, and whether young Ladies will be forthcoming who return whatever feelings [he] may have.’
Whether the observant Queen suspected Ernie’s bisexual tendencies and hoped to avoid a scandal, or simply believed that he would be happier with a wife, she would not let the matter drop. She had even selected him a bride from among her own granddaughters - Cousin Maud of Wales. As it quickly became apparent that Ernie had little in common with Maud, Queen Victoria simply switched his attention to another cousin: eighteen-year-old Victoria Melita (Ducky) of Edinburgh.
Whenever the couple met in one of her English palaces, the Queen delighted in seeing them laughing together and became increasingly convinced that they were ideally suited. Both were fun-loving and artistic and, since Ducky was living in neighbouring Coburg, she was familiar with all the mores of German Grand Duchies and would, in her grandmother’s opinion, make an excellent successor to Princess Alice as Grand Duchess of Hesse.
Throughout the summer of 1892, Queen Victoria cajoled and beleaguered Ernie to propose but neither he nor his sisters were quite so enthusiastic. To his sisters Ducky appeared too frivolous and flippant to take the duties of a Grand Duchess seriously, while Ernie, who had never quite recovered from the death of his little brother Frittie, feared for the health of his children and had doubts about the wisdom of marriage between first cousins. In response the Queen had her personal physician compile a medical report which assured him that since both parties were perfectly fit, such a marriage would ‘strengthen the stock.’ As Ernie continued to prevaricate the Queen became more impatient. If he did not propose soon, she warned, Ducky might slip away; the Duchess of Edinburgh and Coburg was renowned for marrying off her daughters at an early age and while Ernie dithered there were plenty of other young princes who would be only to happy to step in before him.
In fact Ducky herself had, to her grandmother’s chagrin, already fallen in love with another cousin on her mother’s side: Grand Duke Kyril of Russia. For the Queen, who still ‘grieved as much as ever’ over Ella’s Russian match, it must have come as a relief to hear that the Orthodox Church forbade marriage between first cousins, and consequently nothing could come of Ducky’s hopes.
Queen Victoria bombarded Darmstadt with letters but, frustrated by Ernie’s tardiness in replying, decided to take more direct action. She simultaneously invited both cousins to visit her at Osborne and there at last in the winter of 1893, Ernie proposed, Ducky accepted him and a date was set for a spring wedding.
The following April the splendid gathering of royalties converging on Coburg gave rise to a premature optimism that the marriage would be a success. The streets were crowded with so many guests that passers-by were delighted to see carriages stopping on the road as princes, empresses, duchesses and grand dukes descended to greet one another. The Kaiser, the Empress Frederick, the Prince of Wales, the Tsarevich Nicholas, the Crown Prince and Princess of Roumania, the Grand Duke and Duchess Serge, the Duke of Connaught and his daughters, Daisy and Patsy, and numerous other relatives from Russia, England and Germany enjoyed a family reunion and settled as comfortably as they could into the overcrowded palaces. The highlight of the gathering was the arrival of Queen Victoria, who, having put so much effort into bringing about the wedding, made a special effort to be present.
Not everyone, however, was delighted to see the Queen. Amid all the rejoicing, the bride’s father, Affie, was seething with rage. In his mother’s entourage he had spotted the ‘Munshi’ Abdul Karim, her pretentious Indian secretary and the latest in a line of favourites. Not since the days of John Brown had any of Queen Victoria’s retainers irked the royal family as much as the arrogant Munshi. His constant presence and endless complaints had been unpalatable enough in England, but Affie refused to stomach such behaviour in Coburg. Standing on his authority both as Duke and as the bride’s father, Affie adamantly refused to allow him to join the royal guests in the chapel. For once, the Queen was forced to give way and the Munshi, bristling with indignation, was banished to a stand with lesser members of the household.
“[The Queen] was greatly distressed and cried a great deal! All the servants about her knew and were talking about this and even [the Queen’s courier] spoke …about it in terms of glee at the M[unchi]’s discomfiture.”
The wedding service took place on 19th April in the Lutheran chapel of Schloss Ehrenburg, where the young Tsarevich Nicholas observed that Ernie and Ducky made ‘a lovely couple.’ In the joyful celebrations that followed there was every reason to believe that Ernie might yet prove the ideal husband for his cousin. They both took pleasure in parties, dancing and entertaining, and Ernie’s sensitive nature complimented that of his far more passionate wife. They shared, too, a fervent interest in art for, while Ernie was a connoisseur and collector, Ducky was a talented designer and artist:
“She draws unerringly, never rubbing out or correcting a single line, and her taste is excellent. It is really genius thrown away but it makes her very happy and she works hard as if her livelihood depended upon it.”
In the company of their numerous cousins, the future seemed rosy, but once the merry band had departed and the couple were alone, Ducky quickly discovered that her marriage was doomed to failure. Their wedding night was as disastrous as Missy’s had been and left her ‘completely shattered and disillusioned.’ If she hoped that matters would improve in time, the proud granddaughter of the Tsar soon realised she had overestimated Ernie. His penchant for young men was unabated and, unlike Cousins Ella and Marie Louise, Ducky could not resign herself to life with a homosexual husband. For his part, Ernie had believed that his wife would gladly adopt the numerous charities his mother had founded but Ducky showed no interest whatsoever in the affairs of Hesse and thought her husband and his little Grand Duchy so dull that she seized any chance to escape.
A year after the wedding their first and only child, was born - causing a good deal of wrangling between Queen Victoria and Ducky’s mother about the choice of an English or German obstetrician - but by then the marriage was already rapidly deteriorating. As Ducky complained that her husband was fonder of footmen than he was of her, they were soon living separate lives, held together by two frail bonds: their daughter Elizabeth - whose obvious preference for her father grated on Ducky’s nerves - and the knowledge that Queen Victoria would never consent to a divorce.
In April 1896 Ernie and Ducky returned to Coburg for the wedding of Ducky’s younger sister Sandra to Ernst of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. The Queen complained that nineteen-year-old Sandra was too young to be married, particularly to a man fifteen years her senior, and with typical family histrionics the bride and her younger sister, Baby Bee, wept throughout the service, but the marriage would prove the happiest and most stable of all the Edinburgh princesses. The couple settled into a Schloss near Hesse where, between 1897 and 1911, Sandra gave birth to five children: Gottfried, Marie Melita, Alexandra, Irma and Alfred, the youngest of whom died within his first year.
Two months after Sandra’s wedding, Ducky found another excuse to escape from ‘dull’ Darmstadt to the glamour of Moscow for the coronation of her Russian cousin, the new Tsar Nicholas II. The delights of Russia were all the more alluring for Ducky when she came face to face once more with her first love, the dashing, if taciturn, Grand Duke Kyril Vladimirovich. From then on, there was no hope of saving her marriage; her thoughts were only of Kyril.
Trapped and frustrated, Ducky sought escape from Hesse at every opportunity, visiting her relatives across Europe, in the full knowledge that in her absence Ernie was entertaining his boys. In 1899 she stayed at Balmoral with Queen Victoria and Cousin Thora of Schleswig-Holstein, where her dissatisfaction was obvious to everyone.
“The Grand Duchess is most amusing when describing her life at Darmstadt and her loathing of Germans is most extraordinary,” wrote the Lady-in-Waiting, Marie Mallet. “Though anything but British by birth she adores England with passion and declares a cottage here is preferable to all the Schlosses in the Fatherland.”
Beneath the ‘amusing’ façade, Ducky was in despair and wept to her grandmother that the only solution was divorce. The Queen had no need of her explanations; she had already made own discreet and thorough enquiries into the goings-on in Hesse and genuinely pitied Ducky’s plight but still she remained adamant on the subject of divorce.
Faced with no alternative, Ducky made one final attempt to accommodate her grandmother’s wishes and salvage her marriage. Perhaps, she hoped, another child might draw her and Ernie closer together but, after suffering a miscarriage in the spring of 1900, she gave up all hope of a future with Ernie. Leaving Darmstadt, for her mother’s villa in the South of France, she sought comfort in the arms of her lover, the Grand Duke Kyril.
Intensely disappointed by the outcome of her schemes, Queen Victoria firmly declared she would never again indulge in matchmaking. Not only had the marriage that the Queen so desired, wrought nothing but unhappiness for both parties, it had also led indirectly to the marriage she had been most anxious to avoid - that of her favourite granddaughter, Princess Alix of Hesse.
No comments:
Post a Comment