horrific murder of her husband and Russia was in turmoil, Cousin Maud, youngest daughter of King Edward VII, was enjoying a peaceful existence in the obscurity of Denmark. Though she had never lost her nostalgia for England, she was happy with her sailor prince and delighted to spend several months of each year in the haven of Appleton Lodge. It would have suited Maud to remain forever in untroubled anonymity with her husband and their three-year-old son, Alexander, but life was about to take a strange turn for the shy Princess Carl of Denmark.
For ninety years the Kings of Sweden had ruled neighbouring Norway but by the turn of century, following a series of political upheavals, the Norwegians were pressing for independence with a separate monarchy. Since there was no ruling House in their country they asked King Oskar of Sweden to appoint them a sovereign from his own family but, unwilling to yield to such a revolutionary proposal, he refused. The Norwegians turned instead to the Danish King Frederick VIII who had no such qualms and recognised that his second son, Carl, was the most obvious candidate.
Neither Carl nor Maud had any desire to reign in a foreign country, particularly when they were told that large groups of Norwegians favoured a republic. For several months, in spite of pressure from both his father in Denmark and father-in-law in England, the prince refused the throne until November 1905 when the Norwegians succeeded in convincing him that he truly was the people’s choice.
Carl’s doubts about accepting the crown were soon allayed by the warmth of the reception that greeted the new King and Queen on their arrival in the capital, Christiania (now Oslo). His decision to adopt the ancient Norwegian name of Haakon VII and to change the name of his son from Alexander to Olaf proved popular with his subjects. Maud, too, made a good impression. Her regal yet unassuming manner and her determination to take her responsibilities seriously - already she had begun to master the language - quickly earned the Norwegians’ respect and affection.
In wider Europe, however, Carl’s decision to accept the throne did not win universal acclaim. The Kaiser, opposed to any scheme promoted by Uncle Bertie, had preferred a Swedish contender, though in a typical about-turn he later assured Carl of his support. Other royalties were not so easily appeased. The Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz wrote to her niece, the Duchess of York:
“So Maud is sitting on her very unsafe throne - to say the least of it!...He is making speeches…thanking the Norwegians for having elected him! No, really, it is too odd!”
Nor had Maud entirely succeeded in overcoming her shyness and, as the Coronation Day drew nearer, all her old insecurities returned.
“It haunts me like an awful nightmare this Coronation…” she wrote to her sister-in-law, “Think of me alone on my throne, having a crown to be shoved on my head which is very small and heavy by the aged Bishop, and a Minister and also has to be put on by them before the whole crowd!!! And oil to be put on my head, hands and bosom!!! Gracious, it will be awful!”
Nonetheless, Maud overcame her nerves and rose to the occasion. Even though a recurrence of neuralgia prevented her from walking in the coronation procession, her manner and bearing impressed the enthusiastic crowds that lined the route to Trondheim Cathedral. Throughout the ceremony, she played her part with the finesse that would characterise all her undertakings in Norway. In spite of her delicate health, Queen Maud, like many of her cousins, involved herself in numerous charitable causes including, to the horror of the more prudish, a refuge for unmarried mothers. Whatever the critics may have thought of her ‘revolutionary throne’ she and Carl proved popular monarchs who endured few of the upheavals that were soon to beset their cousins and other European dynasties.
While Maud was accustoming herself to the idea of a foreign throne, her cousin, nineteen-year-old Patsy Connaught - ‘tall beautiful, gifted and a brilliant artist’ - had travelled to Spain with her parents. Wandering through Madrid she was horrified to hear the enthusiastic crowds acclaiming her as their future Queen. The shy young princess had no ambition to become the Queen of anywhere and still less to be the wife of the arrogant philanderer King Alfonso XIII, who only a few months previously had been equally taken with her elder sister, Daisy.
Undaunted by Patsy’s obvious lack of interest, the king was so convinced of his own magnetism that he decided to pursue the match and journeyed to England later that year with a view to making Patsy his bride. His efforts were to no avail. Patsy resisted his advances and would remain unmarried for over a decade. In 1911 she and her parents set sail for Ottawa where her father, Prince Arthur was to take over as Governor of Canada. As her mother’s health declined Patsy assumed much of the responsibility for hosting her father’s receptions and carried out her duties with such finesse that she was rewarded by having several regiments and a mountain range named in her honour.
Patsy’s refusal did not trouble the fickle Spanish King. As soon as he realised that Patsy was unmoved by his approaches he quickly switched his attention to her eighteen-year-old cousin, Victoria Eugenia (‘Ena’) of Battenberg.
Since the death of Queen Victoria, Ena and her mother had been living peacefully in Kensington Palace from where Princess Beatrice kept her eyes open for suitable candidates for Ena’s hand. Unlike her own mother, Princess Beatrice had no qualms about permitting her daughter to marry and had encouraged the suit of the Russian Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich, (brother of Ducky’s husband, Kyril) whose name had once been scandalously linked to Cousin Missy of Roumania. The arrival of the Spanish king put paid to the notion of a Russian match and was about to change the young princess’s life forever.
What attracted Ena to the pompous Spaniard, eleven years her senior, remains unclear. Having acceded to the throne before his first birthday, Alfonso was a self-centred, lecherous chauvinist, and if the Russian throne appeared insecure, Spain’s was positively rocking. During the lifetime of Alfonso’s father, the country had briefly been a republic and even after the restoration of the monarchy, separatist groups were demanding independence. Several attempts had been made on Alfonso’s life and he was so used to anarchists’ attacks that when a car backfired in London his guards assumed it was another assassination attempt and almost shot an innocent bystander. Moreover, Alfonso was a Roman Catholic and, by order of the Spanish parliament, his wife had to be of the same faith.
Perhaps Alfonso’s seductive manner and suave appearance eventually won the heart of the English princess. Throughout the summer he courted her in the fashionable haunt of royalties, Biarritz, and before the onset of autumn, Ena had agreed to convert to Catholicism (after all, her godmother had been the Roman Catholic Empress Eugenie) to become his wife.
The Bishop of Nottingham instructed Ena in the Catholic faith and, in March 1906, she was received into the Church and given the unfortunate confirmation name, ‘Brindle.’ Few members of her family raised any objections to her conversion but, to Ena’s surprise, the British public was outraged. So great was the general disapproval that the Duke of York felt obliged to warn Aunt Beatrice to keep Ena away from London until the resentment died down. [Image]
Nor was the news of her engagement greeted with great rejoicing in Spain. Alfonso’s mother revived the old complaint that the Battenbergs were not ‘of the blood’ and considered Ena unworthy of a Spanish king. In response, Uncle Bertie elevated the princess from a mere ‘Highness’ to a ‘Royal Highness’ and, a month later, in May 1906, amid many tears Ena and her mother set sail for Madrid:
“A trying moment for the poor child,” wrote Princess May. “I do hope Ena will get on well in Spain, I think she is a sensible girl & may do good there, anyhow she is full of good intentions - but I don’t know whether she realises what a difficult future lies before her.”
Within days of her arrival in Spain, Ena would witness a terrible omen of that ‘difficult future.’
On 31st May royalties from Russia, Germany and England mingled in the sweltering heat of Madrid for the wedding. The dusty roads and squalid conditions of the capital gave rise to a good deal of muttering among the foreign guests, but their complaints might have taken on more significance if they had realised how close they were to death. As the company gathered for the Nuptial Mass an uninvited guest armed with a bomb was desperately trying to enter the impressive Cathedral of St. Hieronimo. An anarchist, Mateo Morral, almost succeeded in obtaining a ticket when, at the last minute, access was denied him and the three-hour long Mass proceeded without incident. But Morral was not to be deterred.
Amid cheering crowds, the newly-married couple left the Cathedral and set off in procession for the short drive to the Royal Palace. As their coach wound its way through the streets, Morral, watching from an upstairs balcony, hurled a bomb concealed in a bouquet of flowers onto the street below. Miraculously, at that very moment, the royal coach paused and the bomb missed the carriage, leaving Ena and her husband unharmed. King Alfonso led his bride from the coach only to discover the extent of the horror. Several footmen, soldiers and bystanders had been blown to pieces. Gazing on the terrible scene, Ena, her wedding-dress splattered with blood, remained rigid in shock until she was led to another carriage and hurriedly returned to the palace. There she threw herself into her mother’s arms, weeping in horror while her unperturbed Aunt Marie, Dowager Duchess of Coburg (and sister of the recently assassinated Serge) drifted around telling anyone who would listen, “I’m so used to this sort of thing!”
That afternoon, which should have been spent in joyful celebrations, the new Queen Ena toured the hospitals housing the injured. Later that day, with true Victorian courage, she and Alfonso rode again in an open carriage through the streets of Madrid.
After such a horrific reception, it came as relief for Ena to escape from Spain in August to spend part of her honeymoon in the remote tranquillity of Scotland in the company of Uncle Arthur, Duke of Connaught. The Scots were delighted to welcome the Scottish-born Queen and the reports of her visit were effusive in their praise. She was, they said:
‘So fair and placid and majestic, such a solemn contrast to her boyish nervous looking, energetic husband.’
Sadly, the differences between Ena and Alfonso would become more apparent once they returned to Madrid.
The death of more than thirty people on her wedding day marked only the beginning of the Queen’s unhappiness in Spain. Her plans ‘to do good there’ were thwarted time after time and she soon found herself, like Cousin Sophie in Greece, an outsider in her husband’s country. In the family tradition, she worked hard to improve the medical services but, rather than appreciating her efforts on their behalf, the Spaniards, believed it demeaning for a woman, and still more a princess, to take an interest in nursing. Even the Church objected to her interference, accusing her of usurping the work of established Religious Orders. On a personal level too, her temperament proved ill suited to the Spanish culture; her English reserve earning her ‘a reputation of frigidity. She was suspected of being all things Spaniards least admired: cold aloof insensitive Anglo-Saxon.’
Most wounding of all for Ena was the treatment she received from her blatantly unfaithful husband. When their eldest son was diagnosed with haemophilia•, Alfonso cruelly blamed his wife for the boy’s condition, and carelessly returned to his mistresses.
Three years after her wedding there came a glimmer of hope. One of Ena’s cousins was about to marry into the Spanish Royal Family, and her arrival in Madrid might have eased the young Queen’s loneliness. As it turned out, the appearance of Baby Bee of Edinburgh, merely added to Ena’s woes.
Described by Queen Victoria, as ‘a pretty girl with a very pretty figure’ Baby Bee
had, like her elder sister, Ducky, made the unfortunate mistake of falling in love with a Russian Orthodox first cousin. As histrionic as her sisters when it came to romance, Baby Bee was in her late teens when she began a correspondence with the Tsar’s younger brother, the attractive and charming Grand Duke Mikhail (Misha). For several months, she and Misha poured out their feelings with adolescent fervour:
“My beautiful Sima,” wrote the Grand Duke, “your letters are always so full of love and affection, that I am afraid to think you love me so much. Undoubtedly I love you the same way and that is why we understand each other…I kiss your lips a thousand times.”
But Misha knew very well that there could be no future in their relationship. He need only look at Ducky and Kyril to realise how unbending the Orthodox Church would be when it came to marriage between first cousins. He knew, too, that in his case there was even less chance of obtaining a dispensation than there had been for Kyril, since he was, at the time, the heir to the Russian throne. Baby Bee, however, blinded by love, remained optimistic.
When the Dowager Empress Marie of Russia realised that her son was on the verge of creating a new family scandal she desperately tried to arrange a more suitable marriage and dropped several strong hints that he intended to marry Patsy Connaught. London newspapers went so far as to print announcements of the forthcoming wedding until the distraught and much courted Patsy, who hardly knew the Grand Duke, insisted on an immediate correction.
By the end of 1903, under sustained pressure from his family, Misha conceded defeat and wrote to Baby Bee from Denmark, urging her to break off their correspondence. Beatrice was devastated and, as she cried constantly and refused to eat, her mother packed her off to Egypt to recover. In her absence, Ducky attempted to save face by announcing that her sister had never entertained any thoughts of marrying the Grand Duke and her reaction was due to the shock she had received at being so misunderstood. No one believed the excuse, particularly when Beatrice returned from Egypt appearing sicklier and more lovelorn than ever. To further her recuperation, her mother took her to the villa in Nice where Ducky was staying and from where in January 1904, the Tsar’s sister, Xenia, reported that:
“[Beatrice] was pitiful to look at, she has grown so thin and looks so unwell, poor thing…I could only tell her that Misha cannot marry, for Nicky has told him that definitely, and that he has submitted and looks upon it now as an impossibility…Ducky says that Baby B. was in such a terrible state they feared she would lose her mind.”
Two years’ later, as Misha formed an equally dangerous attachment to his sister’s lady-in-waiting, Beatrice, her sanity intact, accompanied her mother to Madrid for Ena’s wedding. All thoughts of the Grand Duke now banished, she met and fell in love with the Spanish King’s cousin, Infante Alfonso of Bourbon-Lyons, Duke of Galliera.
Baby Bee was eager to marry but, yet again, religious differences threatened to scupper her plans. Those who married into the Spanish ruling family were expected to convert to Catholicism but the Coburg princess was far less obliging in the matter than Cousin Ena had been. When it was clear that Baby Bee could not be persuaded to convert, the King urged the couple to marry in secret, which they did in 1909. What the King had failed to consider, however, was that he was a constitutional monarch who had no right to make such decisions and when the news came out, parliament took a dim view of the Infante’s misdemeanour. Like Baby Bee’s brother-in-law, Kyril, Alfonso was stripped of his commission and banished from the country. The couple settled for three years in Switzerland where two sons, Alvaro and Alonzo, were born. In 1912, the Spanish parliament relented and permitted the couple to return to Spain where, the following year, a third son, Ataulfo, was born.
If Queen Ena was initially pleased to welcome her cousin back to Court she soon discovered that Baby Bee would prove neither an asset nor a friend. Rather than attempting to ease the lonely Queen’s burden, she went out of her way to humiliate her, openly flirting with the King and even procuring new mistresses for him. Her bizarre behaviour became so unpleasant that eventually the King’s mother intervened and persuaded him to order her to leave the country again.
Baby Bee’s departure, however, did nothing to heal the rift between Ena and Alfonso. It was too late. The king could never forgive his wife for introducing ‘the terrible disease of the English family’ into his dynasty.
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