[32] It was nearly five years after her husband’s death before the Queen could bear to listen to music. In 1866, Princess Alice wrote to her mother: “I am really glad to hear that you can listen to a little music. Music is such a heavenly thing, and dear Papa loved it so much, that I can’t but think that now it must be soothing, and bring you near to him.”
CHAPTER XVII.
THE WARP AND WOOF OF HOME AND POLITICS.
Between 1858 and 1885 all the Queen’s nine children married; and every one knows that she took just as much delight and interest in their prospect of forming happy homes of their own as any other mother in her wide dominions could have done. In other words, politics and political responsibilities of the weightiest kind have not unsexed her. In arranging the marriages of her three elder children, Her Majesty had had the advantage of the knowledge and judgment of the Prince Consort. It can hardly be by accident that the brides and bridegrooms of our Royal House have not been brought up in the full blast of the hothouse atmosphere of Court life. We know that the Queen and Prince Consort looked upon this atmosphere as dangerous and pernicious, and kept their own children as much apart from it as was possible; their sons and daughters-in-law, with one exception, were selected from those who had not passed their earliest and most impressionable years as the children of reigning Sovereigns.
It has been already noted that the Queen did not allow her private inclinations, which would doubtless have been gratified by keeping the Princess Alice with her, to postpone the marriage which had been sanctioned by the Prince Consort. Prince Louis, indeed, thought that his betrothed wife would not have held to her engagement after her father’s death, seeing how her mother depended on her for comfort in her great sorrow; but he was mistaken, and the marriage took place not long after the date originally fixed, July 1st, 1862. In the autumn of the same year the Queen, who visited her uncle, King Leopold, at Laeken, arranged to meet, for the first time, her future daughter-in-law, the Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Later, in 1862, the beautiful young Princess visited the widowed Queen at Windsor, and received a mother’s welcome from that warm, tender heart. All references to the Princess of Wales throughout the Queen’s journals and the Princess Alice’s letters are most loving and tender. “Dear, sweet, gentle Alix,” are among the many endearing epithets bestowed on her by her mother and sister-in-law. The marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales on March 10th, 1863, took place in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. It was a most magnificent ceremonial, and was the first Royal marriage celebrated in that Chapel since that of Henry I. in 1122. At the wedding Prince William of Prussia, aged four, was placed between his two little uncles, Arthur and Leopold, who were instructed to keep him quiet. Bishop Wilberforce says that he resented any interference, and bit his uncles on their “bare Highland legs” if they tried to control him.
The good feeling among the various members of the English Royal Family was soon after this put to a severe test. The Schleswig-Holstein quarrel between Denmark and Germany came to a head in 1864, and war was declared, with the inevitable result that the little kingdom of Denmark was completely beaten by her powerful opponents, the combined Powers of Austria and Prussia. The King of Prussia was father-in-law of our Princess Royal. She and Princess Alice, as wife of another German Prince, naturally espoused the German side in the quarrel; the Prince and Princess of Wales, as naturally, espoused that of Denmark, and felt that the little kingdom had been unfairly browbeaten and bullied by its powerful neighbors. There was a very strong feeling in England in support of Denmark. Lord John Russell had undoubtedly led her on to suppose that in the event of war, she would receive the armed assistance of England. A powerful section of the Tory party was also in favor of war. Votes of censure were moved against the Government in both Houses; the vote was carried in the Lords, and only averted in the Commons by a narrow majority. In this crisis, it was the nearest thing in the world that England was not precipitated into war with Germany. The Emperor of the French was urging it, and offering his alliance. He had already begun to talk about the Rhine frontier being “an absolute necessity” for France, and would have liked nothing better than an alliance with England against Germany. The Queen averted the catastrophe, and we learn from Lord Malmesbury’s Memoirs that she “would not hear of going to war with Germany.” “No doubt,” he adds, “this country would like to fight for the Danes, and from what is said, I infer that the Government is inclined to support them also, but finds great difficulties in the opposition of the Queen.” Her immense knowledge of foreign politics and grasp of a continuous and definite line of action saved England from the enormous blunder of involving this country in war about the succession to the German Duchies. Probably very few people in England really understood the question at issue at the time; and it was the Queen’s knowledge and strong common-sense which saved us from a serious national disaster.
The family aspects of the quarrel called forth the good qualities of the woman, just as its national aspects had called forth those of the Queen. The war and the crushing of poor Denmark left a feeling of soreness and resentment which did not subside for many a year. The war took place in 1864; it was not till 1867 that there was a friendly meeting between the King of Prussia and the Prince and Princess of Wales. Princess Alice wrote from Darmstadt in October of that year:—
“Bertie and Alex [the Prince and Princess of Wales] have been here since Saturday afternoon.... The visit of the King [of Prussia] went off very well, and Alex was pleased with the kindness and civility of the King. I hear that the meeting was satisfactory to both parties, which I am heartily glad of. Bearing ill-will is always a mistake, besides its not being right.”
Another marriage in the Royal Family still further complicated the Schleswig-Holstein question from the domestic point of view, for in 1866 Princess Helena, the Queen’s third daughter, married Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, the second son of the German claimant of the Duchies. The Queen gave her daughter away. The Princess and her husband have made their home in England.
It was in this year that the war between North and South Germany, headed respectively by Prussia and Austria, about the disposal of the Schleswig-Holstein Duchies, had the effect of bringing the Queen’s two sons-in-law, Prince Frederick William of Prussia and Prince Louis of Hesse, into the field of battle on opposite sides. This was a severe trial. The Princess Alice’s letters showed that it caused her intense anguish. She, like her father, longed for the unity of Germany under the headship of Prussia, and was quite ready to submit to the sacrifices this would entail on the smaller German Princes; but this war of brother against brother, and friend against friend, was a thing which she felt to be too fearful to contemplate. In this hour of great trial, the love and confidence between the sisters and their respective husbands never wavered. Prince Louis went to Berlin, before the actual outbreak of hostilities, to see his brother-in-law, and he then made sure that though their respective allegiance brought them into conflict as soldiers, yet as men they would remain brothers and friends. North Germany under Prussia was, as every one knows, successful in the conflict, and the victorious Prussian army marched into Darmstadt just at the time of the birth of Princess Alice’s third daughter (July 11th, 1866). The newly made mother lay in bed hearing the shouts of her husband’s victors, at the very time knowing that he was still under fire, and that she was unable to get any news of his safety. The christening of the little Princess was put off till it could take place on the day on which the treaty of peace was ratified at Berlin; the baby then received the name of Irène, in commemoration of the event. The poor little Princess of peace had very warlike godfathers,—the whole of the cavalry brigade which had been commanded by her father in the late war. It is significant that just before this war Princess Alice had written to the Queen using the expression: “I long to ... know that your warm heart is acting for Germany.” That is the woman all over: to feel, is to translate feeling into action wherever power to do so is not lacking. The warp and woof of home and politics are ever conspicuous in the Princess Alice’s letters. When the Schleswig-Holstein question first began to threaten war, she wrote to the Queen, filling the first part of the letter with her speculations on the political situation, and then passing to her baby’s first tooth, “She makes such faces if one ventures to touch her little mouth;” and the Princess then goes on to mention some of her activities in trying to set the hospital at Darmstadt in good order, and to interest the burgomaster and town councillors in the work, and the provision she was making for the safety and well-being of poor women in childbirth. She was indeed a very political woman, and a very womanly politician.