There was also a neighbouring sovereign to whose opinion all those who appreciate the complex dynastic relations of that period will be inclined to attach importance. This was the King of the Belgians.
Though he was in no sense the noble, selfless human being Queen Victoria took him to be, King Leopold was nevertheless a very shrewd judge of human nature, and had evidently seen enough of the Princess Royal to note certain peculiarities in her character which had escaped the loving, partial eyes of her parents. This is clearly shown in a letter written by Queen Victoria in the December of 1856. In this letter there is a passage, prefaced by “Now one word about Vicky,” in which the Queen protests that she has never seen her daughter take any predilection to a person which was not motivé by a certain amiability, goodness, or distinction of some kind or other. She goes on to say: “You need be under no apprehension whatever on this subject; and she has moreover great tact and esprit de conduite.”
This surely makes it clear that King Leopold was aware of the sudden fancies which the Princess Royal, even at that early age, often showed to those who attracted her, and that for no sufficient reason. Probably in this case he was thinking of the Princess Royal’s passionate attachment to the Empress Eugénie—an attachment which lasted all through her youth, and which perhaps had more justification for it than some other of her enthusiasms for individuals.
In England, at any rate at first, the news of the engagement was received rather coldly, almost as if it was a mésalliance, though the knowledge that it was really a love-match did much to reconcile public opinion. The following passage from a letter written by Mr. Cobden, at this time the triumphant protagonist of the Anti-Corn Law League, reflects as well as anything the general feeling that the bridegroom was indeed “a lucky fellow”:
“It is generally thought that the young Prince Frederick William of Prussia is to be married to our Princess Royal. I was dining tête-à-tête with Mr. Buchanan, the American Minister, a few days ago, who had dined the day before at the Queen’s table, and sat next to the Princess Royal. He was in raptures about her, and said she was the most charming girl he had ever met: ‘All life and spirit, full of frolic and fun, with an excellent head, and a heart as big as a mountain’—those were his words. Another friend of mine, Colonel Fitzmayer, dined with the Queen last week, and, in writing to me a description of the company, he says that when the Princess Royal smiles, ‘it makes one feel as if additional light were thrown upon the scene.’ So I should judge that this said Prince is a lucky fellow, and I trust he will make a good husband. If not, although a man of peace, I shall consider it a casus belli!”
To the bride’s parents, if not to herself and her betrothed, the fact that the marriage negotiations were not quite pleasantly conducted must have been not only painful but astonishing. It was actually suggested that the ceremony should take place in Berlin, but Queen Victoria very properly scouted the proposal, which was really in the circumstances disagreeably like an insult. She wrote in her emphatic, italicising way to Lord Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary:
“The Queen never could consent to it, both for public and private reasons, and the assumption of its being too much for a Prince Royal of Prussia to come over to marry the Princess Royal of Great Britain IN England is too absurd, to say the least. The Queen must say that there never was even the shadow of a doubt on Prince Frederick William’s part as to where the marriage should take place, and she suspects this to be the mere gossip of the Berliners. Whatever may be the usual practice of Prussian Princes, it is not every day that one marries the eldest daughter of the Queen of England. The question therefore must be considered as settled and closed.”
In view of all this and of what was to befall the Princess Royal in the land for which she even then cherished so fond an affection, and of which she had already formed so high an ideal, there is something intensely pathetic in the blindness of her parents to the real conditions of her future life. This blindness is shown with amazing clearness in the sentence, certainly inspired and very likely written by Queen Victoria herself, which concludes the chapter, in Sir Theodore Martin’s Life of the Prince Consort, dealing with the betrothal of the Princess Royal:
“No consideration, public or private, would have induced the Queen or himself [i.e., Prince Albert] to imperil the happiness of their child by a marriage in which she could not have found scope to practise the constitutional principles in which she had been reared.”
The idea that the Prussia of that day, or indeed of any day, would have amiably afforded a foreign princess scope to practise constitutional principles of any sort seems extraordinary, and yet, as we shall see, there was some little justification for it at the time, though it was quickly swept away by the course of events.