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.
