In spite of her own blissful, if occasionally stormy, years with beloved Albert, Queen Victoria had particularly pessimistic view of marriage. She had dreaded her daughters’ weddings unable to bear the thought of handing her innocent girls over to a man to become ‘bodily and morally his slave,’ and by the time her granddaughters reached marriageable age, her opinion had altered little.
“I think people marry far too much;” she wrote to the Crown Princess, “…it is for a woman a very doubtful happiness.”
Her gloomy reflection proved accurate in the lives of several of her granddaughters: one married a notorious womaniser and at least two others were shocked by their husbands’ infidelities; three discovered that their husbands were alleged to be homosexual; and others became embroiled in scandals, two of which ended in divorce. Even those princesses who were fortunate enough to fall in love with loyal and devoted husbands, often found themselves in foreign courts, far from their families and isolated in unfamiliar surroundings.
There were, of course, love matches but inevitably within weeks or even days of their wedding, the majority of the young and naïve princesses found their new-found freedom curtailed by the ‘unecstatic state’ of pregnancy with all the risks and restrictions that entailed.
Yet, while the Queen frequently insisted that unmarried people were often perfectly happy, few of her granddaughters could envisage any other future than that of her a wife. For nineteenth century princesses, no less than for the majority of women at the time, the only alternative to marriage was to become a piteous ‘maiden aunt,’ or worse the dutiful daughter - an unpaid companion to aging parents. Faced with such a choice, even the prospect of a loveless marriage was preferable to enduring the stigma of spinsterhood and when suitors were not forthcoming, princesses sometimes panicked. At least one rushed into marriage with the first available prince, while another pleaded desperately with her parents to find her an appropriate, parti.
Most married young - often too young in their grandmother’s opinion - and it was predictable that the Queen’s eldest and most difficult granddaughter, Charlotte of Prussia, should be the first to announce her engagement, if only to demonstrate her independence and escape from her parents’ domination
The years since the holiday in Cannes had done nothing to alleviate Vicky’s anxieties about her eldest daughter’s appearance or behaviour. At the age of fourteen Charlotte had, in her mother’s opinion, not ‘an atom’ of a figure and showed ‘no sign of her health beginning to change.’ By the time she visited Darmstadt two years later, Vicky was still more disconcerted by her ill proportioned body with its short legs and ‘immense breasts and arms.’
Nor had the onset of adolescence improved Charlotte’s demeanour or manners. She had always been moody and difficult but now became so flirtatious and untruthful that her mother genuinely feared for her future. Her childish nervousness had given way to bizarre attention-seeking behaviour and, while outsiders delighted in listening to her revelations about the goings-on at Prussian Court, the slanders and secrets she divulged were causing untold damage, not least to her mother’s reputation.
Coquettish, materialistic and addicted to smoking to the extent that Vicky described her as smelling like ‘a walking cigar box,’ Charlotte seemed very much in danger of ‘going off the rails.’ Then suddenly, at the age of sixteen, with the impulsiveness so characteristic of her elder brother, she announced to her startled parents that she intended to marry. Her chosen fiancé, Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Meiningen, an officer in the prestigious Potsdam regiment, was a cousin on her father’s side into whose arms she had literally been thrown when the switchback train on which they were travelling suddenly jerked to a halt. Few, if any, of the family believed that she was in love and it was widely rumoured that she was marrying simply to escape from her mother. Nevertheless, the Crown Prince and Princess, believing that a studious husband nine years her senior might calm their wayward daughter, gave their consent, hoping, as Vicky told Queen Victoria, ‘that the good Bernhard will protect & guide her. Then at least her wicked qualities will not be able to cause any harm.’
The optimism was premature. No sooner was the engagement announced than the flabbergasted Crown Princess was complaining to Queen Victoria that the younger generation had lost all sense of propriety since Charlotte did not even bother to tell her when she was writing to Bernhard! Queen Victoria wholeheartedly agreed and bemoaned the fact that young people had:
‘…Lost all modesty, for not only to they go about driving, walking & visiting - everywhere alone, they have also now taken to go out everywhere together in society.’
Even in those far off days, she suspected the American influence.
The wedding took place in Potsdam in February 1878 and the couple moved into a house near Berlin, provided by the bride’s grandfather, the aged Kaiser. Charlotte, now mistress of her own home, delighted in her new-found freedom and immediately dispelled all her parent’s hopes that that Bernhard might be a calming influence on her. She had no attention of allowing marriage to restrict her behaviour; on the contrary, freed from her mother’s influence, she threw herself with greater fervour than ever into the life of what Queen Victoria called the ‘fast set.’ She and Bernhard purchased a car and a villa in Cannes, which soon attracted all the most fashionable people in society.
Parading around in her Parisian gowns, drinking copiously, chain-smoking and alternating between bouts of illness and self-indulgence, Charlotte revelled in cultivating friendships with foreign kings and dignitaries by encouraging them to believe that she could supply them with private information about the intrigues of the Hohenzollerns. Even at home she delighted in shocking the Court with her revelations and tales of her real or invented affairs.
When she wished, she could be charming; Ella of Hesse, who throughout her life earned a reputation for seeing the best in everyone, preferred Charlotte to her elder brother, Willy, and liked her enough to send her gifts. Unfortunately, more often than not Charlotte used her charm to manipulate others into believing the most preposterous lies and it did not take long for the rest of the family to see through her pleasant façade.
“That pretty exterior - & empty inside, those dangerous characteristic traits!” Vicky wrote in despair to her mother. “Everyone is initially enthralled, & yet those who know her better know how she really is - and can have neither love nor trust nor respect!”
To her younger cousins Missy and Ducky of Edinburgh, Charlotte’s air of confidence and sophistication were so fascinating that they were delighted to receive an invitation to her home in Berlin. Their ‘idol’ promised to entertain them lavishly and introduce them to all her fashionable friends and the excitement leading up to the visit made the reality all the harder to bear. Charlotte was so engrossed in her own flirtations that she had ‘hardly a look or word’ for her young guests and treated them so disdainfully that, years later Missy recalled that the visit was ‘one of the most painful memories of my young life.’ Charlotte had fallen from her pedestal and had become instead:
‘One of the most fickle and changeable women…with a single word she could shrivel up your ardent enthusiasm, make your dearest possession appear worthless or rob your closest friend of her charm.’
Queen Victoria had long defended her eldest granddaughter and throughout Charlotte’s unruly adolescence had urged Vicky to be a little less strict in the hope that praise might prove more successful than criticism.
“You are rather severe on Charlotte.” She wrote when Vicky complained of her lack of interest in art, “I don’t consider myself ‘uneducated’ and yet I could not live in churches, the frescoes and galleries as you do.”
Yet even the Queen had to concede that Charlotte ‘fast’ life was unseemly and wondered why her husband did not keep her in check. Queen Victoria knew too, that Charlotte was not to be trusted and she worried about her visits to England for fear of whom she might meet. When Charlotte claimed she had asked her grandmother to present a gift to her regiment of dragoons stationed in Berlin, the Queen understood Vicky’s need to clarify the matter:
“As one never knows whether what she says is quite correct I thought I would ask you whether it was the case, as, of course, it easily may have been though I do not quite think it her business.”
But Charlotte had a habit of interfering in matters that were not ‘quite her business’ and never was her interference more acerbic than when it came to the marriage of her elder brother, Willy.
In 1881, Willy proposed to the plain but pious Princess Augusta (‘Dona’) of Schleswig-Holstein - a first cousin of his cousins, Thora and Marie Louise. The proposal caused something of a furore in the Prussian Court. As the daughter of a ‘mere’ countess, Dona lacked the ideal provenance of a future Empress and neither her dowdy appearance nor aloof manner endeared her to the rest of the family. Vicky, ever willing to welcome newcomers and set them at ease, assured Queen Victoria that she was ‘sweet,’ ‘amiable’ and would ‘win all hearts’ but the Queen was not so convinced. While conceding that she had ‘good teeth’ she replied in her usual candid manner:
“You think dear Dona so pretty. We do not; nor do others. But sweet, gentle, graceful and ladylike.”
‘Insipid and boring’ according to one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting, Dona’s zealously evangelical opinions and obsession with etiquette often infuriated other relations. To Willy, however, still smarting from the sting of Ella’s refusal, her fawning adulation had a definite allure. Unlike his Hessian cousin and even his own sisters, Dona eagerly agreed with everything he said and so boosted his inflated ego that he repeatedly beseeched his grandfather to permit him to marry so malleable a bride. Eventually the Kaiser gave way, the wedding took place in Potsdam in early 1881.
“Sweet Dona looked quite lovely,” Vicky wrote to her mother, “– so sweet and self-possessed not shy and yet so modest and gentle…everyone was taken by her sweetness and grace.”
From their first meetings Vicky went out of her way to make her new daughter-in-law feel welcome in the somewhat forbidding Prussian Court but it did not take long her kindness to backfire. Dona’s arrival did little enhance Court life and her self-righteous deference to her husband increased rather than eased Willy’s arrogance, exacerbating the tension between him and his mother. Dona objected to Vicky’s interference in the upbringing of their children and seemed intent on alienating them from her. Repeatedly Vicky tried to understand Dona’s antipathy, making excuses for her behaviour and hoping that time might ease their relationship. But if the Crown Princess, with characteristic gentleness, was prepared to make allowance for her ‘parvenu’ daughter-in-law, Charlotte was not.
Irked that the lower-born Dona would now take precedence over her, Charlotte had no qualms about belittling her future Empress and treated her as little more than the butt of her cruellest jokes. Family gatherings became tense occasions when both women were present as no one could be sure what mischief Charlotte would make next.
In February 1883, the Crown Prince and Princess celebrated their Silver Wedding anniversary - a month later than planned due to a recent family bereavement. Vicky, whose love for her husband had deepened with each year of marriage, had gone to great lengths to ensure that the festivities in Berlin would be worthy of the occasion. Invitations were extended across Europe and a wide variety of artists and actors were called to the palace to present an Elizabethan pageant. One of the highlights of the celebrations was a performance of a play staged by the Crown Princess’ children and members of her suite. It was a tradition that Vicky had brought with her from childhood when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert delighted in such family entertainment and, with a touch of nostalgia, she anticipated the performance with excitement. Unfortunately, Charlotte had other plans. Disregarding her mother’s feelings, she used the occasion to humiliate her sister-in-law by drawing attention to her poor acting skills, deliberately upstaging and publicly ridiculing her .
Later, following Willy’s accession to the throne, Charlotte’s behaviour became even more outlandish. Initially she went out of her way to ingratiate herself with the new Kaiser, siding with him against their mother whom she blamed for not having given Willy his rightful position during Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee procession. But her façade of devotion did not last long. Her vindictive jokes about Dona continued unabated and she frequently appeared unannounced and uninvited at formal functions with the sole intention of causing trouble. On one occasion when the Kaiser was attending a prestigious hunt, he was horrified to see his sister, obviously the worse for drink, clumsily mount a horse in a cruel impersonation of the Kaiserin. There was even a suggestion that Charlotte was involved in a more serious scandal when the Kaiser, Kaiserin and various government ministers received a series of pornographic photographs and letters detailing accounts of their alleged misdemeanours. The Kaiser ordered a full investigation of the matter and eventually a Court Official was imprisoned but when the scurrilous letters continued, it was obvious that there had been a miscarriage of justice and the unfortunate official was released. The content of the letters made it clear that they had been written by someone with inside knowledge of the Court and, though there was no evidence to implicate Charlotte, her brother felt sufficiently suspicious of her involvement to advise her to leave Germany for a while.• In 1896 she settled in Roumania, ingratiating herself with the German born King Carol and his wife, the eccentric Queen Elizabeth, and deliberately spreading malicious gossip about her cousin Missy of Edinburgh.•
A little over a year after her wedding, Charlotte gave birth to a daughter, Feodora (‘Feo’) and, declaring she would have no more children, promptly returned to her fashionable friends and foreign holidays, leaving the little girl in her mother’s care. For Vicky, whose fondness for children was so great that Queen Victoria accused her of ‘baby-worship,’ such indifference was incomprehensible and she could only gaze askance at Charlotte’s complete lack of maternal feeling.
Sadly for Vicky, as Feo grew older it became increasingly apparent that she had inherited many of her mother’s less attractive characteristics. The similarity in their temperaments made the relationship between Charlotte and her daughter even stormier than that between Charlotte and Vicky. In 1898, eighteen-year-old Feo announced that she was engaged to be married to man fifteen years her senior. Charlotte, forgetting that she had treated her own parents in an identical manner, was outraged that she had not been consulted. Virtually disowning her daughter, she turned her malicious tongue upon the unfortunate girl with greater venom than ever. When Feo fell ill with a series of mystery symptoms, Charlotte even spread the rumour that she had contracted venereal disease from her husband. In response Feo refused to visit her for several years.
The true cause of Feo’s illness was never fully recognised or disclosed during her lifetime but recent research by John C.G. Rohl, Martin Warren and David Hunt shows that both she and Charlotte were suffering from the hereditary malady, porphyria•. The diagnosis would account for much of Charlotte’s bizarre behaviour and consistently poor health and perhaps excuse some of her more outrageous activities.
Surprisingly, perhaps, in spite of Charlotte’s difficult temperament and often ‘unaccountable’ behaviour, her marriage was not the disaster that some members of the family had anticipated. Her husband, Bernhard shared her enjoyment of the life among the ‘fast set’ and together they zipped across Europe as leading lights in the fashionable world of high society. Whether or not there was any truth in her boasts of her numerous lovers, Bernhard cared for her during her increasingly frequent bouts of illness and, unlike many of her more stable cousins, there is no evidence to suggest that she ever had cause to regret her decision to marry so young.
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