‘Poor dear Lenchen,’ dependent on laudanum and placebos, had never found life easy, but her nerves were strained to the limit in the summer of 1900 when an alarming telegram arrived at Cumberland Lodge. The message tersely informed her that her daughter, Marie Louise, must return at once to the little German Duchy of Anhalt to face divorce proceedings. According to the message, her husband found life with her ‘intolerable’ and since she had ‘neglected her marital duties’ and the marriage had never been consummated, her father-in-law, the Duke of Anhalt, intended to declare it null and void.
Reeling with shock, a frantic Lenchen rushed to Windsor Castle to bear the dreadful tidings to the Queen. Divorce under any circumstances was a scandal that Queen Victoria could not countenance and yet in this case, knowing the full facts, the Queen had nothing but sympathy for her maligned granddaughter.
Ten years earlier, eighteen-year-old Marie Louise was living a sheltered existence in Cumberland Lodge, interspersed with frequent trips to German spas with her hypochondriac mother. Fair, slim and graceful with striking blue eyes, the princess had already attracted the unwelcome attention of Crown Prince Ferdinand of Roumania, but it was the dashing Prince Aribert of Anhalt-Dessau who caught her eye when she arrived in Berlin for Cousin Moretta’s wedding. Bored by the interminable torch dance, and flattered by Aribert’s attention Marie Louise was instantly infatuated.
“He was very tall and good-looking, and a very striking personality,” she recalled, “and I suppose to a young girl of eighteen, he was the beau ideal of a cavalry officer. I have no hesitation in saying that I fell completely under his charm - in others words, fell in love. He paid me a good deal of attention which both flattered and bewildered me.”
The Kaiser was quick to encourage the romance and, bewildered or not, then and there Marie Louise decided that this was the man she would marry. Within a week of their meeting Vicky was writing to the Queen:
“I think it would be a very nice marriage. Aribert is a nice and amiable young man and one may hope that it would be for both their happiness.”
Though Queen Victoria was disconcerted at the speed of events, Marie Louise’s parents approved of the match and on ‘a very cold snowy day’ in December 1890 the couple were engaged at Cousin Willy’s home in Potsdam. From there they made the three-hour journey to Anhalt where a nervous Marie Louise was to be formally introduced to Aribert’s family.
“I loved my mother-in-law from the first moment,” she wrote later. “My father-in-law was rather frightening, but I soon found out he was a dear, kindly but not very intelligent old gentleman.”
The following month Queen Victoria invited Aribert to visit Osborne for her usual inspection of future grandsons and found him entirely suitable. English journalists, however, were less convinced. Even before his arrival, newspapers hinted that there was something ‘not quite right’ about the ‘youthful lover’ but Marie Louise was enraptured and the family agreed with Marie Mallet’s opinion that ‘he really is extremely good looking even for a Prince.’ With the Queen’s blessing, plans were made for a July wedding at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor.
The celebrations coincided with a state visit from the Kaiser who ‘insisted on being present,’ though, for once, proud of his part in bringing the couple together, he behaved himself well. When the ceremonials were over, the newly married couple drove in an open carriage through the streets of Windsor, where crowds of Eton schoolboys who had been given a day off in honour of the occasion, gave them a warm reception. The set out for a honeymoon in Cliveden, and spent further ten days in Marie Louise’s childhood home, Cumberland Lodge, before embarking on a tour of Holland. In the autumn, Prince Aribert took his wife home to the quaint sleepy town of Dessau in eastern Germany.
For all her youth and naïveté, it did not take Marie Louise long to discern that her husband was not quite the ‘nice amiable young man’ of Aunt Vicky’s imagination. It soon became clear that, as a serving officer in the German Cavalry, Aribert much preferred the company of his fellow soldiers to that of his wife. Abandoned to her own devices in the medieval atmosphere of dull Dessau, Marie Louise came to the sad and humiliating realisation that her handsome husband had married her solely to conceal his homosexuality and protect his reputation.
“From the Anhalt side I think it was a mariage de convenance.” she wrote many years later, “To marry the granddaughter of the Queen of England was a very important alliance especially as the girl of eighteen was also first cousin to the German Emperor - in fact she was related to the entire Almanach de Gotha.”
Doubtless, Marie Louise had heard the rumours surrounding Cousin Ella’s marriage but at least Ella had the consolation of knowing that, in spite of his difficult nature, her husband loved her. Ella had enjoyed many splendid hours in the glittering ballrooms of St. Petersburg but Marie Louise, denied even that solace, found herself isolated and trapped by the thousand rules that governed the lives of princesses in Anhalt. Every aspect of her existence was organised according to an ancient code of etiquette that had been in existence for centuries. She was not even permitted to leave her rooms without the prerequisite number of attendants and, as she quickly discovered, if she dared to flout the rules there was always someone on hand to reprimand her. On one occasion, Willy’s wife, the Empress Dona, was appalled to hear that Marie Louise had dared to venture out in an ordinary cab, unaccompanied by footmen and pages.
Marie Louise might have coped with her husband’s predilection for young men had he, like Serge, shown her the least consideration but Aribert not only preferred his male friends but made it clear that he resented her being there at all:
“I was not wanted, my presence was irksome to him, and we were two complete strangers living under the same roof. We occasionally met at meals and when we had guests, otherwise days might pass without our even seeing each other - and from the enthusiastic girl of eighteen, I became a disillusioned woman.”
Drawing on her cigarettes, the unhappy princess sought escape from Anhalt whenever possible. She paid regular visits to Aunt Vicky and her circle of interesting artists and intellectuals in Berlin, and taking advantage of Aribert’s apathy, indulged her lifelong love of travel in a series of tours. She visited Italy with her brother and Cousin Charlotte, before journeying further afield to meet with the Roman Catholic White Fathers in their African mission. Her husband, meanwhile, squandered her dowry, sold her jewels and made her life so unpalatable that Marie Louise, disheartened and alone, fell ill.
As usual, the observant Queen Victoria was among the first to detect that something was amiss and in June 1898, and invited her granddaughter to England:
“[Marie-] Louise has been here for two nights,” she wrote to Vicky, “very far from well but not in bad spirits. She is only so weak and everything tires her.”
But, after eight years of marriage, Marie Louise’s spirits were sinking rapidly. She remained with her grandmother at Osborne throughout the summer, enjoying visits from Cousin Sophie and Tino of Greece. On the 12th August, she celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday on the Isle of Wight in the company of her sister, Thora, and her uncle and aunt, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, receiving telegrams from her Wales cousins, then aboard the Royal Yacht Osborne.
The peaceful rest in comfortable and familiar surroundings made Marie Louise’s return to the gloom of Dessau all the more depressing, and the outbreak of the South African War intensified her unhappiness. The strength of anti-British feeling in Germany made life unbearable for an English princess, particularly one whose own brother was serving with the Queen’s forces. Weary with the façade of her sham marriage and desperate to escape from Anhalt, Marie Louise asked her grandmother’s and husband’s permission to take an extended break in America. Aribert, scarcely aware of her absence, was more than happy to agree.
For several weeks in the spring of 1900, she toured the United States and Canada, thoroughly enjoying the break until the telegram from Anhalt brought an abrupt end to the holiday. To her horror, her father-in-law was summoning her back to Dessau. The same day, her parents had received the letter informing them of Aribert’s intentions.
Queen Victoria, utterly indignant, and appalled at Marie Louise’s ‘cruel treatment,’ immediately dispatched a telegram of her own to Lord Minto, the Governor of Canada:
“Tell my granddaughter to come home to me. V.R.”
After a gruelling and anxious sea crossing, Marie Louise returned to the solace of Cumberland Lodge:
“My parents and my sister were there to meet me in the hall. You can imagine all the babel of talk! I was completely bewildered and could not understand or in the least manner grasp why I had been summoned back across two continents in this peremptory manner by my father-in-law.”
As a horrified Marie Louise listened to the list of ‘obscene’ charges that her husband levelled against her, her humiliation was absolute and she could only take comfort in the knowledge that ‘there was one accusation which my husband did not bring against me, because he could not, and that was the charge of infidelity.’
Only later did the princess learn the true reason for the urgent summons. In her absence Aribert had been caught in flagrante delicto with a homosexual lover. To avoid bringing scandal on the family, his father demanded an immediate annulment of the marriage laying the blame for its non-consummation squarely at his wife’s feet. Rather than facing a prolonged and humiliating court battle, the Christians agreed to the annulment and Marie Louise, though deeply distressed by the outcome, was finally released from a life that had brought nothing but disappointment and unhappiness.
She returned to her family and, having acquired rooms for herself in London established a small studio where she made jewellery. Most of her time, however, was devoted to numerous charitable foundations, including the ‘Princess Club’ for the factory workers of Rotherhithe, centres for down-and-outs and former prisoners and those connected with her mother’s nursing foundations. Like Aunt Alice and her Hessian cousins, Marie Louise was often to be found in the homes of the poor, witnessing first hand the lives of workers ‘which otherwise might have remained a closed book to me.’
In spite of all she had suffered, Marie Louise shared Ella’s belief that vows made before God were binding for life. She never saw her husband again yet continued to wear her wedding ring and, to the end of her life, considered herself a married woman.
“The reason I have never married again,” she wrote towards the end of her life, “is because my marriage was according to the Church of England with its solemn and binding vows, and no arbitrary local family law could absolve me from these marriage vows.”
It was hardly likely that her passionate Edinburgh cousins, Missy and Ducky (Victoria Melita) would resign themselves so patiently to life with unfaithful husbands
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