"The Sun Has Gone Out of Our Lives" - More of Queen Victoria's Granddaughters

A decade after her Golden Jubilee, Queen Victoria prepared to celebrate her sixty years on the throne. Older now and frailer, she had no desire to entertain the numerous foreign royalties who had descended upon London ten years before, and insisted that this time it was to be more of a celebration of British Empire. Even so, no less than eighteen of her granddaughters attended the event, preceding the Queen in seven carriages as the stately procession made its way from Buckingham Palace to St. Paul’s Cathedral•. No longer able to walk unaided, the tiny monarch remained in her carriage for an open-air service of thanksgiving, before returning to the palace for a grand jubilee dinner at which Ella and her brother Ernie and sister-in-law, Ducky, were invited to share the Queen’s table. Neither Ella nor her grandmother could have failed to notice that the couple had arrived separately for the celebrations and would later depart separately, drawing further attention their unhappy marriage.
Of the granddaughters who were unable to attend, Missy was ‘terribly, terribly, disappointed’ not to be there but her husband had recently been struck with a near-fatal bout of typhoid; the Tsarina of Russia was pregnant with her third daughter, Tatiana; and it would have been incongruous for Sophie to enjoy the celebrations when her country was in the throes of the Turko-Greek War.• Noticeable too for his absence was the Kaiser, to whom the Queen Victoria had refused an invitation since he was openly supporting the Turks in the conflict. Willy was furious at the snub and so ‘frantic’ that he ‘would like to kill his poor brother [Henry] for daring to accept the Queen’s invitation.’
The celebrations were a great success and the rapturous applause that the Queen received reaffirmed her popularity. Marie Louise, sitting beside her grandmother in the carriage recalled that:
“The crowd was immense, the cheers and acclamations deafening. The Queen had asked me to accompany her back to Windsor and on the way I turned to her and said: ‘Oh, Grandmama, does this not make you very proud?’ She replied, ‘No, dear child, very humble.’”
For the Queen, though moved by the demonstrations of affection, the occasion was tinged with sorrow. She felt deeply the loss of her son-in-law, Beatrice’s husband, Liko Battenberg, whose death, the previous year, had been the first in a series of family tragedies that would cast a dark shadow over the remainder of her reign.

In spite of her initial misgivings about Beatrice’s marriage, the Queen had soon come to love Liko. His cheerful sense of humour and obvious commitment to his family, not to mention his striking good looks, greatly appealed to her and she noted, with satisfaction that, though he and Beatrice were devoted to one another they made none of the tasteless shows of affection that so grated on her nerves. So fond was the Queen of his company that he had even succeeded in persuading her to provide a more comfortable smoking room than the one which had been reluctantly allocated to Prince Christian. In fact, she had come to enjoy his company so much that she was unwilling to let him out of her sight.

But Liko was straining at the leash; the Queen’s affection, and the love of his wife and children could not compensate for the extreme dullness of life at Court. Unable to renege on the promise made before his marriage he watched enviously as his brothers went about their exciting adventures, while he frittered away his hours attending to his children’s education and carrying out minor duties for the Queen. In 1889 she appointed him Governor General of the Isle of Wight and Carisbrooke Castle, but still he remained unfulfilled and sought any opportunity to escape abroad.
Beatrice understood his need for excitement and raised no objections when he disappeared for months at a time on various yachting and continental expeditions but in his absence she missed him terribly, wept as he departed and worried that far from home his affections might stray. At the first hint of a possible scandal she dispatched a ship to bring him back.
Holidays and expeditions allowed him some release, but could not satisfy his need to find a more useful role until the autumn of 1895 when he heard of a mission to end the slave trade in Ashanti in Ghana. The Queen, reluctant to be parted from him and fearful for his health in that notoriously disease-ridden part of Africa, hesitated about granting him permission to participate in so dangerous a venture until Beatrice selflessly prevailed upon her mother to give him leave to go. Queen Victoria could hardly refuse; after all her soldier grandson ‘Christle’ of Schleswig-Holstein was taking part in the same campaign.
For Beatrice, Liko’s departure aboard the Coramandel on 8th December was traumatic:
“[She] is inconsolable,” wrote Marie Mallet, “but so patient and unselfish and declared she is glad he should do some real work and she will never stop him in any way...Of course he is bursting with excitement, it is the climate I fear, not the enemy.”
Mrs. Mallet’s fears were justified; hardly had the ship reached Africa when, on 10th January 1896, Liko contracted malaria. For a while his condition appeared to improve and he wished to continue the expedition, but his doctors and fellow officers thought him too ill to carry on and sent him homewards aboard the Blonde. Before the ship docked at Madeira, Liko suffered a relapse and realising he was dying, sent long and affectionate messages back to his wife and children, grieving at the thought that he would die so far from home. He died on 20th January 1896.
“Our grief and our misery is untold!” the Queen told Vicky, “The sun has gone out of our lives.”
When his body, preserved in rum, was eventually brought to the Isle of Wight, the Queen accompanied his family - including his nine-year-old daughter Ena - to receive the coffin:
“This was a terrible day, but one never to be forgotten…Shortly after 12 drove down to Trinity Pier with darling Beatrice, Ena and little Leopold [Ena’s brother]To attempt properly to describe the whole sad proceedings and ceremony is more than I can do.”
The funeral took place in Whippingham Church near Osborne, where eleven years earlier Liko and Beatrice were married.
For Liko’s grieving widow, a minor family squabble brought further grief. While Beatrice was in mourning, her elder and more beautiful sister Louise, cruelly announced that her own grief was equally deep, since Liko had always preferred her to his wife and had once made amorous advances towards her. As Louise’s own marriage was something of a sham and she was renowned for making mischief in the family, Beatrice dismissed her allegations as lies. Whether or not there was any truth in Louise’s tale, Beatrice loved Liko deeply and enjoyed eleven blissful years with a husband she had never hoped to find.
According to all who met her, Beatrice, though heart-broken, accepted her widowhood with remarkable courage and dignity. For her grieving mother, however, further sorrows were soon to follow. Within five years of Liko’s death, she had lost a son and two grandsons and discovered that her eldest daughter was dying.

In 1898, the royalties returned to Coburg to celebrate to celebrate the Duchess Marie’s twenty-five unhappy years of marriage to the unfaithful, alcoholic Affie. Among the intended guests was their only son, ‘Young Affie,’ who had been sent away from home at an early age to be groomed in Potsdam for his future role as Duke of Coburg. The training was intended to turn him into an efficient and reliable officer but it had had the opposite effect. Young Affie had developed into a dissolute and unstable young man with his mother’s fiery Russian temperament and his father’s addiction to drink. By the age of twenty-five, he had contracted venereal disease and was consequently dismissed from the German army.
“It is true,” Vicky wrote to Sophie, “that he was always giddy & wild, as many young men are, & that he contracted an illness of which I know next to nothing, as I have never asked or heard anything about it, one dislikes thinking about it and still more speaking or writing about it. This was neglected and the poor boy led a dissipated life, besides, Potsdam! – that was not the place for him.”
His Orthodox mother despaired of his licentiousness and, shortly before her Silver Wedding anniversary, an argument flared between them when he announced his intention of marrying an unsuitable bride. In the course of the argument, according to several erroneous reports, Young Affie shot himself and sustained a serious though not fatal wound. His true illness - which had led to ‘paralysis of the larynx, caused by the state of the brain’ - was an even greater scandal to his mother who decided that it would be better if he were absent from Coburg when her visitors arrived for the celebrations. His doctors warned that he had very little time to live but the duchess dismissed the prognosis and, against his and his father’s wishes she packed him off to recuperate in Meran in Austria. Just over a week later, on 6th February, he died. The official reports stated that the cause of death was consumption.
“But oh, the poor, poor parents!” wrote Queen Victoria, “To lose their only son in whom their hopes and life were bound up is fearful…Affie [was] in a dreadful state on first going to see the dear remains.”
Her lady-in-waiting, Marie Mallet was less sympathetic:
“How strange Royalties are, their children seem to lack the ordinary care bestowed on our humblest middle class. Such a thing could never have happened to any of the boys I know and if it had the parents would be blamed by the whole of society.”
Affie never recovered from the loss of his son and within eighteen months, he too was dead of throat cancer, exacerbated by his excessive drinking. ‘Poor Marie,’ wrote a heartbroken Queen Victoria, and ‘those poor girls who adored their father!’

Young Affie’s death was to have unexpected consequences for his seventeen-year-old cousin, Alice of Albany. The Salic law precluded females from inheriting the Dukedom of Coburg and since Affie had no other son, there was much debate about who would succeed him. The next in line was Affie’s younger brother, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, but neither he nor his son had any desire to leave England or to show obeisance to the proud German Emperor. The Kaiser, too, always in awe of his English uncles, expressed his preference for a younger man and accordingly, offered Coburg with its £300,000 a year income to the late Prince Leopold’s son, thirteen-year-old Charles, Duke of Albany.
After a great deal of soul-searching, Charles’ mother, Helen, accepted the Duchy on his behalf and agreed that Cousin Sandra’s husband, Ernst of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, would act as regent until Charles came of age. Notwithstanding the fact that his young cousin spoke very little German, the Kaiser insisted that he should leave Eton at once to enrol in the Lichterfelde Military Cadet School at Potsdam. Aunt Vicky, fearing that Charles might go the same way as Young Affie, was firmly opposed to the scheme and vehemently made her feelings known to her mother. Queen Victoria agreed:
“It is most stupid and ill-judged, to take the poor boy away in the middle of his education and before he knows enough German to be able to learn in German. William unfortunately set this idea going.”
But the Kaiser had made his decision and, in spite of their reluctance to leave their beloved Claremont House, the Albanys had to comply.
In August 1899, Alice and her mother moved into the Villa Ingenheim, a relatively small cottage near the cadet academy in Potsdam, where Charles was to spend three miserable years, taunted and bullied by the other boys in the school. For Alice, the contrast between Windsor and the Kaiser’s militaristic court, governed by etiquette and tradition, appeared both amusing and bizarre.
“It’s hard to convey to English readers,” wrote Marie Louise, “the Medieval conditions in which people in our state of life lived in Germany.”
Serving officers were not permitted to appear at any social gatherings, except in uniform and, the numerous ceremonies that littered the German calendar were even more trying for the princesses who were obliged to appear at State banquets in ‘full regalia of tiaras and trains.’
“These ceremonies began…at 10a.m. and it was 5p.m. before we got back to our respective homes. At 7p.m., in full evening dress we proceeded to the opera, and then staggered home to bed at 10p.m.”

Yet, unlike Marie Louise, Alice, with a cheerful disposition and an eye for the comic, was delighted by her new surroundings. If Cousin Willy was pompous, he could also be generous, hospitable and amusing. She and Charles were regular visitors to his home where they became close friends of his sons. Formal balls were an almost nightly occurrence and for a young and beautiful princess there was no limit to the number of handsome young officers to partner her in the dances.
She and her mother remained in Germany until Charles had completed his education and was deemed old enough to fend for himself. By the time that Alice returned to Claremont in 1903, her grandmother’s staid and seemingly changeless Court had gone forever; the Victorian era was over, its sobriety replaced briefly by all the glamour and gaudiness of the new Edwardian age.

A Jubilee Baby - More of Queen Victoria's Granddaughters

A week after Victoria’s wedding, Queen Victoria returned to Windsor with Grand Duke Louis in tow. Though her son-in-law’s unhappiness and the prospect of Ella’s imminent departure for Russia preyed on her mind, she could rest satisfied by her part in averting the Hessian scandal and had no idea that an even greater shock was about to confront her. At the Darmstadt wedding, while she had been distracted by the Grand Duke’s folly, her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, had been busily falling in love with the bridegroom’s younger brother.
At the age of twenty-seven, ‘Baby’ Beatrice seemed destined for a life of spinsterhood. Since the plans to marry her off to Louis of Hesse had come to nothing, the Queen had decided that her youngest daughter should remain single as her constant support and companion, and by the age of twenty-two she had only ever spent ten days away from her mother. Beatrice appeared so content with her lot that no one, least of all the Queen, believed her capable of falling in love but, just in case she should have other ideas, handsome young men were discouraged from paying her any attention and guests were forbidden to even mention marriage in her presence.

The sudden disclosure that Beatrice wished to marry the dashing Prussian cavalry officer, Henry (Liko) Battenberg, struck Queen Victoria like a thunderbolt. She had no objection to the Battenbergs per se - she was still encouraging Moretta in her hopeless pursuit of Sandro – but what angered and shocked her was the fact that Beatrice had dared to fall in love at all! Offended that the daughter on whom she depended could even consider leaving her side, she dismissed the suggestion as ludicrous and adamantly refused to discuss the matter. The more Beatrice persisted, the more obstinate her mother became until she would not speak to her at all and for several months communicated only by note.
But Beatrice was not without allies. Vicky, tactfully pointed out to their mother that Beatrice was no longer a child and if the Queen were to persist in her opposition, who could tell what scandals may follow - perhaps ‘Baby’ may even follow Grand Duke Louis’ example and marry in secret! Grudgingly the Queen began to give way. Yes, she would consent to the marriage on condition that Liko resigned his Prussian commission and agreed to come and live with her in England.
Liko hesitated. Unlike Lenchen’s husband, Prince Christian, he was young, energetic and active, and the prospect of exchanging the exciting life of the Prussian Cavalry for one of servitude to a demanding mother-in-law lacked appeal. But Liko’s brothers favoured the match, and when Louis and Victoria invited him to their Chichester Home, Sennicotts, they succeeded in winning him over. He agreed to resign his Prussian commission and remain under the Queen’s roof for the duration of his marriage. Faced with such compliance the Queen raised no further objections.
While Beatrice rejoiced, republican journalists bewailed the arrival in England of another ‘German pauper’ who would have to be kept at public expense. Adopting the Queen’s own simile of ‘the rabbits in Windsor Park’ they complained of the expected surfeit of ‘Battenbunnies’ and made cruel suggestions as to how they might be disposed of. In parliament, too, there was discord as Republican Members objected to Beatrice’s marriage settlement. But the muttering in England was nothing compared to the furore in Berlin. That Victoria of Hesse had married a Battenberg was galling enough but that the Queen of England should allow her own daughter to do the same was positively unpalatable. In a typical about turn Queen Victoria flew to Liko’s defence. Elevating him from ‘Serene’ to ‘Royal’ Highness, she berated Vicky’s husband, Fritz, for voicing his opinion that Liko was not ‘of pure blood,’ and was even more furious that the upstart Willy dared to criticise what she had sanctioned. After all, she was quick to point out, Willy’s wife, the plain and fawning Dona, was a parvenu, whom the family had accepted in spite of her less than regal origins.
At least Vicky’s younger son, Henry, proved more compliant. Since he was busily courting Irène of Hesse, it would not do to belittle her brother-in-law’s family. When he heard that Irène and her younger sister Alix had been chosen as bridesmaids, he was even prepared to brave Willy’s scorn to attend the wedding.
As the ‘fatal’ day drew nearer, Queen Victoria’s misgivings returned. The prospect of handing over her ‘baby’ to a man was even more traumatic than the marriages of all her elder daughters. If a girl knew in advance what marriage entailed, she said, she would refuse to approach the altar. In Beatrice’s case she could only hope that there would be ‘no results’ - in fact there would be four: three sons and a daughter.
The wedding took place at Whippingham Church, not far from Osborne, after the briefest of honeymoons, they returned to take up permanent residence with the Queen. They holidayed with her in the south of France or the Italian Riviera and followed her annual rotation between Osborne, Balmoral and Windsor where their first son, Alexander (‘Drino’) - a ‘very pretty child’ in Queen Victoria’s opinion - was born in the autumn of 1886. Within months Beatrice was pregnant again and would soon give birth to Queen Victoria’s youngest granddaughter - the ‘jubilee baby’

In June 1887, as Londoners prepared to witness the greatest pageant of foreign royalties the capital had ever seen, Queen Victoria saw her well-ordered Court thrown into disarray. She understood that so many of her relatives wished to join in the celebrations for her fifty years on the throne, but, at the age of sixty-eight, her distaste for entertaining the ‘royal mob’ was as strong as ever. While hundreds of officials planned the route, the festivities and the service, the Queen was preoccupied with arranging the order of precedence (and no doubt someone would be put out by her decision). Still more troublesome was the problem of where to house her numerous foreign guests. Buckingham Palace was bursting at the seams; Affie had offered the use of rooms in Clarence House and Bertie at Marlborough House, but still the guest list grew. Willy was, as usual, causing trouble. Almost relishing the fact that his father was unwell, he suggested that the Crown Prince should stay in Prussia so that he could glory in the limelight of representing the Kaiser. His behaviour had become so obnoxious that Queen Victoria was loath to invite him at all and only Vicky’s politic persuasion had led her to change her mind. Even so, he could not be trusted not to insult the Battenberg princes and, to avoid any unpleasant scenes, it would be necessary to keep him as far from Louis and Liko as possible.
Then there was Charlotte. Not only was she actively encouraging Willy’s bombastic demands, but the Queen knew her well enough to realise what trouble her tales could cause and would have preferred her to stay in Prussia. There was no space for her at Buckingham Palace, the Queen explained to Vicky, and ‘much as I should like seeing her, I don’t think she ought to go to Marlborough House.’
Osborne was so crowded that Princesses Alix and Irène of Hesse were forced to share the same bed; and, if that were not enough, there was the unwelcome prospect of entertaining the Russians. Delighted as Queen Victoria was to see ‘dear lovely Ella’, (not least to grill her about her marriage•) the prospect of meeting her husband was far less enthralling. She could only hope that Ella’s sister, Victoria, who had recently been struck down by typhoid, would be sufficiently recovered to attend and would do her utmost to keep the Russian well away from her.
Hitches and bickering apart, Queen Victoria journeyed to London on 20th June 1887, and that evening entertained the bejewelled princesses and uniformed princes to a formal dinner. The next day, as a warm summer morning dawned, the cousins made their way to Westminster Abbey for a Service of Thanksgiving. Shortly before eleven-thirty, bugles sounded the National Anthem to announce the arrival of the sparkling procession of princesses who made their way to their seats to the left of a raised dais. Their titles were as ancient and illustrious as their surroundings: the Princesses Victoria Moretta, Sophie and Margaret Hohenzollern of Prussia, Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna, the Hereditary Princess Charlotte of Saxe-Meiningen, the Princesses Helena Victoria and Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, the Princess Louise of Wales, the Princesses Alix and Irène of Hesse and the Princesses Marie and Victoria Melita of Edinburgh.
As the chatter of sisters and cousins echoed on the Abbey walls, the Queen’s landau, preceded by a procession of princes of horseback set out from Buckingham Palace. At the entrance to the Abbey, the princes, arrayed with the emblems of their Orders, dismounted and made their way to the right of the dais on which the tiny Queen would sit during the service.
When the prayers were completed, the princesses, some ‘with tears in their eyes’ stepped forward to curtsey to their grandmother, who embraced and kissed each of them in turn. As the royalties emerged from the abbey enthralled crowds cheered the magnificent procession, hailed their monarch, and waved their flags, oblivious to Willy’s grumbling that his wife came lower in the order of precedence than the black Queen Kapiolani of Hawaii. For the first time since the death of Prince Albert, the British public turned out in their thousands to demonstrate their affection for the Queen. Later a grand formal dinner was held, during which the Queen granted the Order of the Bath to several of her grandsons and awarded each of her granddaughters the Jubilee Medal and brooch. In the evening royalties gathered in the gardens of Buckingham Palace to watch a magnificent firework display.
The celebrations continued for several days, during which the Queen frequently appeared in public with her granddaughters. There were opportunities, too, for small family gatherings. The Queen bounced little Alice Albany on her knee; she took tea at Frogmore with Alix and Irène of Hesse, whose engagement to Cousin Henry of Prussia had recently been announced. She drove through Windsor with five-year-old Daisy Connaught, visited Prince Albert’s tomb with Marie Louise, entertained Charlotte at a large family dinner and, beneath the trees at Windsor, plied Ella with questions about her Russian marriage.
By the time the celebrations were over and the guests had returned home, Queen Victoria could rest content that, in spite of her years of seclusion, her popularity among her subjects was greater than ever, and the family reunions had passed off without incident. By autumn, she believed she had earned a rest at her favourite retreat, Balmoral, and there, in October, Beatrice’s jubilee baby was born.
The confinement was not easy. After a prolonged labour, the child was removed by forceps leaving Beatrice prostrate for several weeks. But the baby, was a healthy, sturdy daughter who, according to her grandmother, bore a striking resemblance to her cousin, Ella of Hesse.
As the first princess to be born in Scotland for many centuries, she was feted by the Scots and much was made of her baptism in the Presbyterian Crathie Kirk, where she was christened Victoria Eugenie after her godmother, the Roman Catholic Empress Eugenie of France. In the family, however, she was always known by her third name, Ena.
Boisterous and lively, the young Battenbergs brought a breath of youth to the English palaces and revived in the Queen a jollity that she had rarely displayed since the death of Prince Albert. ‘Drino and Ena are flourishing and very amusing,’ she told Vicky in 1879. ‘He is getting more impudent.’ Servants and guests alike were amazed to hear her laughing so freely with the children whom she claimed to love ‘as much as their parents do.’ When Ena was two years old, a second brother, Leopold was born, and two years later the family was completed with the birth of Maurice. To accommodate the growing an extra wing - the Durbah Wing - was added to Osborne House, and there, in the freedom of the Isle of Wight the children learned to cycle and swim. Raised in a family of boys, Ena was a wild unruly child and, though the Queen was extremely indulgent with her, there were occasions when she found it necessary to give the little girl a slap.
Cousin Moretta visiting Windsor in 1889, wrote to her mother that:
“Ena runs about all over the place & the Indians & nurses after her to try and get her back, she is so strong.’
Marie Louise was equally enchanted by her naughty little cousin and recognised that she possessed such ‘great qualities’ that ‘great possibilities’ lay ahead of her.
“Even when she was a small child with golden curls all over her head and at times very naughty, [she] was always nearest my heart.”
Ena’s adventurousness rivalled that of her brothers and on one occasion, at least, almost culminated in tragedy. One Saturday afternoon in February 1894 the six-year-old princess was riding at Windsor when her pony stumbled and threw her before rolling on top of her. The little girl managed to walk home but on reaching the palace was violently sick before lapsing into unconsciousness. Fearing a brain haemorrhage, the Queen’s physician, Sir James Reid, remained in attendance all night but by the following morning the ‘splendid child’ began to show the slightest signs of recovery.
“The little princess is much better than she was, but I am still anxious about her,” wrote Sir James. “She is quite conscious when awake but rambles a little when asleep…I trust the improvement may go on steadily but I tell them that she is not yet out of danger and I watch her very closely both when she is asleep and awake.”
After so serious an accident, it came as a relief to see her gradually becoming ‘obstinate and troublesome’ again and, following her recovery she remained as fearless as ever. In fact, as she later confessed, the most daunting aspect of her childhood was the terror she felt when her grandmother grilled her about her Bible studies.