Every attempt has been made to replicate the original, printed. Some typographical errors have been corrected; Some illustrations have been moved from mid-paragraph for ease of reading. (etext transcriber's note)

[Table Of Contents]
[Illustrations]
[Index]

THE EMPRESS FREDERICK

A MEMOIR
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW YORK
Dodd, Mead and Company
1914

Copyright, 1913,
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

PREFACE

MEMOIRS of Royal personages form not the least interesting part of the whole vast field of biography, in spite of the fact that such memoirs differ from the lives of most persons in a private station because of the reticence and discretion which are necessary, especially in regard to affairs of State and political characters. It is often not until a whole generation has passed that it is possible to publish a full biography of a member of a Royal House, and in the meantime the exalted rank of the subject operates both to enhance and to diminish the interest of the memoir.

This is also true in a modified degree of statesmen, of whom full and frank biographies are seldom possible until their political associates and rivals have alike disappeared from the scene. This necessary delay is a test of the subject’s greatness, for it has sometimes happened that by the time a full memoir can be published the public interest in the individual has waned.

By heredity, by training, by all the circumstances of their lives, Royal personages form a caste apart; and though their lot may seem to some persons enviable, it is often not realised how great are the sacrifices of happiness and contentment which they are called upon to make as the inevitable consequence of their exalted position.

The Empress Frederick presents an extraordinary example of what this exalted position may bring in the way of both happiness and suffering. Her life has the added interest that, quite apart from her rank, she possessed an intensely vivid and human personality. History furnishes examples of many Royal personages who have been, so to speak, crushed and stunted in their intellectual and spiritual growth by the restraints of their position.

Not so the subject of this memoir. The Empress was a woman of remarkable moral and intellectual qualities—indeed, it is not difficult to see that, had she been born in a private station, she would have attained certainly distinction, and very possibly eminence, in some branch of art, letters, or science. Her rank, far from crushing and stunting her powers, had the effect of diffusing her intellectual interests over many fields, and perhaps laid her open to the charge of dilettanteism. But such a charge cannot really be maintained in view of the solid constructive work which she achieved, both in the field of philanthropy and in that of the application of art to industry. The exacting mental discipline which she underwent at the hands of her father, though it was in some respects ill-advised as her life turned out, at any rate supplied her with the habit of mental concentration which enabled her to carry out those practical and lasting enterprises with which her name in Germany should ever be associated. Her early training disciplined her eager, natural enthusiasm for all that was good and serviceable to humanity, and directed it especially to the welfare of soldiers and of women and children. She was “a doer of the Word and not a hearer only.” All through her life one is perhaps most profoundly impressed by her inexhaustible energy; her sense of the tremendous importance and interest of life, of the wonders of knowledge, of the delights of art and literature, and of all that there is to do and to feel and to think in the short years that are given us on earth.

One of the greatest dangers to which Royal personages are exposed by the circumstances of their position is that of falling into an attitude of gentle cynicism. Naturally they are often brought into contact with the seamy side of human nature, while at the same time they are not perhaps so well acquainted with its better side, as are persons of less exalted rank. That the cleverer among them should take up an attitude of humorous toleration of the whole human comedy is consequently very natural.

It is no small testimony to the Empress Frederick’s moral greatness that, though she had experiences in plenty of the bad side of human nature, she was never tempted to relapse into such an attitude. No one was ever less of a cynic. She was full of intense passionate enthusiasms and of a profound sympathy for the unfortunate, and the disinherited of the earth. In her warm heart there was no room for hatred or for contempt of others, and she was equally incapable of shrugging her shoulders at the foibles and follies of poor humanity.

This eagerness to be up and doing was, however, combined, as has been often seen in the history of mankind, with a touching faith in the power of logic and reason. It was not exactly that the Empress held too high an opinion of human nature, but she undoubtedly showed too little appreciation of human stupidity and, we must add, of human malice. She had been brought up with kindly, honourable, well-bred, and, on the whole, very intelligent people, and when she came into rough collision with less agreeable qualities of human nature, she suffered intensely. But she was not soured as a less noble nature might have been; on the contrary, she continued to the end of her life always to believe the best of people, always to assume that they are actuated by good motives, as well as by reason and common-sense. She seems to have missed the key to the oddities and the vagaries, as well as to the baser qualities of human nature, and therein lies, perhaps, the secret of the tragedy of her life.

That tragedy, as we know, was greatly enhanced by the singular blows of fate. Her rank had, strangely enough, given her a marriage of love and affection more real and more lasting than often falls to the lot of private persons. But the husband whom she adored, as well as two idolized children, were taken from her.

It was her fate also to be constantly misunderstood; to see the purity of her motives doubted and her most innocent actions misconstrued. Owing partly to the circumstances of her time, partly to her own generous and warm-hearted but imprudent impulsiveness, she failed to win the affection of her adopted country as a whole, though she certainly earned its respect and esteem. This was not the least bitter trial of her life, for she was one of those natures who have a craving for affection and understanding sympathy; and the criticism and even the hostility with which she was regarded in Germany were all the more painful to her in that she could not in the least understand on what they were based.

Perhaps she was too deeply convinced of the superiority of England and of English institutions, and made too little allowance for the sensitiveness of a people who were then slowly emerging into a national in place of a particularist consciousness. At the same time it is certain that, however she had comported herself, she could not have escaped criticism of which she was no more than the ostensible object, and the real purpose of which is to be found in the political cross-currents of the period.

In this memoir the attempt is made to draw a true picture of this singularly engaging and generous personality, who played her part in great affairs, and who suffered all reversals of fortune, the anguish of bereavement, and the pain of cruel disease, alike with unflinching courage and dignity.

The materials have been found, not only in many works of history, biography, memoir and reminiscence, both German and English, some of which are little known, especially to English readers, but also in the recollection of persons who were honoured with the Empress’s friendship. The aim of the writer has been, while avoiding such indiscriminate laudation as really degrades the subject of it, to draw a full-length portrait of one of the noblest and most attractive characters in the long history of the Royal Houses of Europe.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE EMPRESS FREDERICK

CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD AND GIRLHOOD

BEFORE the birth of the Princess Royal in November 1840, no direct heir had been born to a reigning British Sovereign for nearly eighty years. The Prince Regent, afterwards George IV, was born in 1762, two years after his father’s accession, and the death in childbirth of the Prince Regent’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, when she was only twenty, was still vividly remembered.

Queen Victoria was now but little older than Princess Charlotte, and the birth of her first child was regarded with a certain anxiety by the nation. It might prove to be the only child, and in that event much would hang on the preservation of its life. Those members of the “Old Royal Family” who were next in succession were not popular, and the little Princess Royal may truly be described as having been the child of many prayers.

It was natural that Queen Victoria should have recourse to Prince Albert’s confidential adviser, Baron Stockmar, the more so that he was a skilled physician. Stockmar therefore came to London early in November. Those were not the days of trained nurses, but rather of the types immortalised by Dickens, and it is interesting to find the shrewd old German, characteristically in advance of his time, urging the Prince to be most careful in the choice of a nurse, “for a man’s education begins the first day of his life, and a lucky choice I regard as the greatest and finest gift we can bestow on the expected stranger.”

On November 13 the Court arrived at Buckingham Palace, where on the 21st the Princess was born. “For a moment only,” the Queen says, “was the Prince disappointed at its being a daughter and not a son.”

The character of the monarchy in England has changed so much, both absolutely and also relatively to the people, that it is difficult for us to realise the measure of prejudice and even contempt which still subsisted before Queen Victoria had had time to win the full confidence of her subjects. It is not therefore really surprising that the little Princess Royal should have been greeted on her first appearance with a shower of caricatures, some of them not remarkable for their refinement.

Still, a good deal of the rough humour lavished on the Princess was kindly in its intention, though sometimes there was a sting in the tail. For instance, Melbourne, the Prime Minister, was shown as nurse, proudly presenting the Princess Royal to John Bull: “I hope the caudle is to your liking, Mr. Bull. It must be quite a treat, for you have not had any for a long time.” John Bull replies: “Well, to tell you the truth, Mother Melbourne, I think the caudle the best of it, for I had hoped for a boy.”

Melbourne’s fatherly devotion to the Queen was indeed a piece of luck for the caricaturists of the day. A cartoon entitled “Old Servants in New Characters” shows him dressed as a nurse with the infant Princess in his care; she is sitting in a tiny carriage, with Lord John Russell as outrider.

It was arranged that the christening should take place in London on February 10, the anniversary of the Queen’s marriage, the infant receiving the names of Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise. Even the christening of the Princess Royal inspired a long satirical poem. One verse ran:

“This is the Bishop, so bold and intrepid,
A-making the water so nice and so tepid,
To christen the Baby, who’s stated, no doubt,
Her objection to taking it ‘cold without.’”

The sponsors were Prince Albert’s brother, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (represented in his absence by the Duke of Wellington), the King of the Belgians, the Queen Dowager (Adelaide), the Duchess of Gloucester, the Duchess of Kent, and the Duke of Sussex. Lord Melbourne remarked of the Princess to the Queen next day: “How she looked about her, quite conscious that the stir was all about herself! This is the time the character is formed!” The Prime Minister would have agreed with Stockmar’s view that a man’s education (and presumably also a woman’s) begins with the first day of life.

Prince Albert sent a vivid account of the ceremony to the venerable Dowager Duchess of Gotha:

“The christening went off very well. Your little great-grandchild behaved with great propriety, and like a Christian. She was awake, but did not cry at all, and seemed to crow with immense satisfaction at the lights and brilliant uniforms, for she is very intelligent and observing. The ceremony took place at half-past six P. M., and after it there was a dinner, and then we had some instrumental music. The health of the little one was drunk with great enthusiasm. The little girl bears the Saxon Arms in the middle of the English, which looks very pretty.”

The Princess Royal, like her brothers and sisters, led an ideal childhood. All through her later life she often referred to the unclouded happiness of these early years, and it comes out equally clearly in the published correspondence of her sister, Princess Alice. In this matter both Prince Albert and Queen Victoria were in advance of their time, and the Prince, especially, perceived, what was not then at all generally believed, that children could be made happy without being spoiled.

Perhaps the most sensible decision of the parents was that the Royal children should come in contact as little as possible with the actual life of the Court. Not that the tone of the Court was bad; on the contrary, it was singularly high, but the Queen and Prince Albert knew the subtle danger of even innocent petting and flattery on young and impressionable minds.

So it was that the Royal children had very little to do with the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting—indeed they were only seen by them for a few moments after dinner at dessert, or when driving out with their parents. The Queen and the Prince entrusted the care of their sons and daughters exclusively to persons who possessed their whole confidence, and with whom they could be in constant direct communication. Both were kept regularly informed of the minutest details of what was being done for their children, and as the princesses grew older they had an English, a French, and a German governess, who were, in their turn, responsible to a lady superintendent.

It has been the custom of late to speak as if the children of Queen Victoria had been over-educated and over-stimulated. This was at least partly true of their infancy, but if they had been really over-educated, they would not have turned out as well as they did later, nor would they have all delighted in looking back with fond reminiscence to their earliest years.

The Princess Royal was soon recognised by all those about her as intellectually the flower of the happy little flock. She was clever, self-willed, and high-spirited; learning everything that was put before her with marvellous intelligence and rapidity. Her dearest friend and companion was her sister, the sweet-natured, pensive Princess Alice, who was next in age, after the Prince of Wales, to herself. The two lived for some years a life which was exactly alike. They shared the same lessons, the same amusements, the same interests; both had a strong love of art and of drawing; both were, if anything, over-sensitively alive to the claims of duty and of patriotism.

Naturally the most detailed and accurate impression of the Princess Royal’s childhood is to be derived from the correspondence of Sarah Lady Lyttelton, who was appointed Governess to the Royal children in April 1842.

This lady, who was then approaching her fifty-fifth birthday, was the daughter of the second Earl Spencer, and sister of that Lord Althorp who was a member of Lord Grey’s Reform Ministry, and who played a notable part in politics rather by his strength of character than by any commanding ability. Lady Sarah married the third Lord Lyttelton in 1813. It is interesting to recall that her son, afterwards the fourth Lord Lyttelton, married Mrs. Gladstone’s sister, Miss Glynne. Sarah Lady Lyttelton was widowed in 1837 after a singularly happy married life, and soon afterwards Queen Victoria appointed her a lady-in-waiting.

When, some four years later, she was given the responsible post of Governess to the Royal children, she was already very well known to the Queen and the Prince Consort, as well as to their closest adviser. Lord Melbourne, for instance, heartily approved the appointment, declaring that no other person so well qualified could have been selected.

The picture of the Princess Royal which her guardian draws in these letters is one of an extraordinarily winning though precocious child, and if it seems to modern judgment that the precocity was rather too much stimulated, it must be remembered that we are back in the ‘forties, when a scientific study of the psychology of infants was not dreamed of. Moreover, it is abundantly evident that the little Princess had such a way with her, “so innocent arch, so cunning simple,” that it must have required no ordinary resolution to avoid spoiling her, while even the most scientific modern expert would probably have found it very hard to draw the line between over-stimulation and proper encouragement of her remarkable intelligence.

Lady Lyttelton had her first glimpse of the Princess Royal in July 1841. She describes her as a fine, fat, firm, fair, Royal-looking baby, “too absurdly like the Queen.” Her look was grave, calm, and penetrating, and she surveyed the whole company most composedly. She was shown at her carriage window to the populace; and Lady Lyttelton, noting the universal grin in all faces, declares that the baby will soon have seen every set of teeth in the kingdom!

Some months later she records that “the dear Babekin is really going to be quite beautiful. Such large smiling soft blue eyes, and quite a handsome nose, and the prettiest mouth.” The child early acquired the appropriate pet name of “Pussy,” while she herself, finding Lady Lyttelton’s name too large a mouthful, simplified it to “Laddle.”

It may be here recorded that an absurd rumour had been circulated that the Princess Royal had been born blind, and it was this and other foolish gossip which first induced the Queen, at the suggestion of Prince Albert, to issue an official Court Circular, which has been continued ever since.

The Queen had the baby constantly with her, and thought incessantly about her, with the result that the child was perhaps rather over-watched and over-doctored. She was fed on asses’ milk, arrow-root, and chicken broth, which were measured out so carefully that Lady Lyttelton fancied she left off hungry. Lady Lyttelton, indeed, had some experience of this dieting craze, for her brother, Lord Althorp, at one time, when he had a terror of getting fat, used to weigh out his own breakfast every morning, and when he had consumed the tiny allowance used to hasten out of the room lest he should be led into temptation!

The little Princess was over-sensitive and affectionate, and rather irritable in temper, and with a prophetic eye Lady Lyttelton says that “it looks like a pretty mind, only very unfit for roughing it through a hard life, which hers may be.”

After the birth of the Prince of Wales, Lady Lyttelton gives us a passing, but sufficiently terrible glimpse of the anxieties which Royal parents must all suffer, more or less. She mentions that threatening letters aimed directly at the children were received, and though they were probably written by mad people, nevertheless no protection in the way of locks, guard-rooms, and intricate passages was omitted for the defence of the Royal nurseries; while the master key was never out of Prince Albert’s own keeping.

The Princess Royal spent her second birthday at Walmar Castle, and she is described as being “most funny all day,” joining in the cheers and asking to be lifted up to look at “the people,” to whom she bowed very actively whether they could see her or not.

Perhaps one reason why she became, and remained, so fond of France was that from infancy she was placed in the charge of a French lady, Madame Charlier. She was very advanced through all her childhood, especially in music and painting, yet she remained quite natural and simple in all her ways.

She was only three years old when Prince Albert wrote to Stockmar: “The children in whose welfare you take so kindly an interest are making most favourable progress. The eldest, ‘Pussy,’ is now quite a little personage. She speaks English and French with great fluency and choice of phrase.” But to her parents she generally talked German.

“Our Pussette,” the Queen writes a few weeks afterwards, “learns a verse of Lamartine by heart, which ends with ‘Le tableau se déroule à mes pieds.’ To show how well she understood this difficult line, I must tell you the following bon-mot. When she was riding on her pony, and looking at the cows and sheep, she turned to Madame Charlier, and said: ‘Voilà le tableau qui se déroule à mes pieds!’ Is not this extraordinary for a child of three years?”

It is evident that the oral teaching of languages had very sensibly preceded that of books, for when the Princess is four years and three months old we hear that she is getting on very well with her lessons, “but much is still to be done before she can read.”

In spite of her accomplishments, she was a very natural human child, and could be naughty on occasion. Lady Lyttelton records about this time that the Princess, after an hour’s naughtiness, said she wished to speak to her; but instead of the expected penitence, she delivered herself as follows: “I am very sorry, Laddle, but I mean to be just as naughty next time”—a threat which was followed by a long imprisonment.

Perhaps the Princess Royal’s happiest days were spent at Osborne, where she began going at the age of five. There the Royal children had a cottage, built on the Swiss model, to themselves. It comprised a dining-room, a kitchen, a store-room, and a museum; and in it the Princesses were encouraged to learn how to do household work, and to direct the management of a small establishment. When in their Swiss cottage, each princess was allowed to choose her own occupation and to enjoy a certain liberty; their parents used to be invited there as guests at meals which the Princess Royal and Princess Alice had themselves prepared.

Years later, when they had both married to Germany, there were certain tunes which neither the Princess Royal nor Princess Alice could hear without tears rising to their eyes, so powerfully did the recollection of the happy birthdays and holidays they spent at Osborne remain with them. Not long before her death Princess Alice wrote to her mother: “What a joyous childhood we had, and how greatly it was enhanced by dear sweet Papa, and by all your kindness to us!”

Many happy days were also spent by the Princesses at Balmoral. In the Highlands the restraints of Court life were entirely thrown off, and the Queen encouraged her daughters to come into close contact with the poorer classes of their neighbours, indeed everything in reason was done to arouse their sympathies for the needy and the suffering.

The Princess Royal showed even in her early childhood an astonishing power of vivid expression. For example, when she was about five and a half, she found mentioned in a history book the name of an ancient poet called Wace. Lady Lyttelton thereupon observed that she had never heard of that poet till then, but the Princess insisted: “Oh, yes, I daresay you did, only you have forgotten it. Réfléchissez! Go back to your youngness and you will soon remember.”

That the child had a natural and instinctive religious feeling is shown by another incident. She had narrowly escaped serious injury from treading on a large nail, and Lady Lyttelton explained to her that it had pleased God to save her from great pain. Instantly the child said: “Shall we kneel down?”

In October 1847 the Princess Royal had an accident which might have been very serious.

The children were riding with their ponies when the Princess was quietly thrown after a few yards of cantering. She was not hurt, but the Prince of Wales’s pony ran away with him. Fortunately he was strapped into the saddle, and, after one loud cry for help, he showed no signs of fear, but cleverly kept as tight hold of the reins as he could pull. The Princess Royal was not at all frightened herself until she saw her brother’s danger, and then she screamed out: “Oh, can’t they stop him? Dear Bertie!” and burst into tears. Fortunately all ended well, and the children went on riding as fearlessly as ever.

In October 1848 the Royal children, crossing in the yacht Fairy from Osborne on their way to Windsor, witnessed a terrible accident—the sinking of a boatload of people in a sudden squall. It made a deep impression on all the children, and the Princess Royal kept thinking of it all that night.

It is about this time that Lady Lyttelton observes: “The Princess Royal might pass, if not seen but only overheard, for a young lady of seventeen in whichever of her three languages she chose to entertain the company.”

Nearly a year afterwards, Lady Lyttelton notes that “dear Princessey” had been now perfectly good ever since they came to Osborne, and she says that she continues to reflect and observe and reason like a very superior person, and is as affectionate as ever.

Again, in April 1849, she notes every moment more and more “the blessed improvement of the Princess Royal.” “She is becoming capable of self-control and principle and patience, and her wonderful powers of head and heart continue. She may turn out a most distinguished character.” And a few months later she notes that “the Princess Royal is so enormously improved in manner, in temper, and conduct—altogether as really to give a bright promise of all good. Her talent and brilliancy have naturally lost no ground: she may turn out something remarkable.” All the children showed real kindness to the poor, visiting them and beginning to understand what poverty is.

The Princess accompanied her parents and the Prince of Wales on a visit to Ireland in August 1849, and afterwards went to Cherbourg, that being her first visit to France. It was during that stay at Cherbourg that the curé of a neighbouring village gave the young English Princess a charming sketch done by one of his parishioners, a then unknown artist named Jean François Millet.

The Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales made their first official appearance in London on October 30, 1849, when they represented their mother, who was suffering from chicken-pox, at the opening of the new Coal Exchange. The scene has been often described, notably by Miss Alcott, the author of Little Women, who was however, naturally more interested in the Prince than in his sister.

Much to their delight, the children went from Westminster to the City in the State barge rowed by twenty-six watermen, and all London turned out to greet them. They were very wisely not allowed to attend the big public luncheon, but were given their lunch in a private room. Lady Lyttelton mentions that the gentleman who made the arrangements was so overcome by his loyal feelings at the sight of the children that he melted into tears and had to retire!

In the summer before the Princess’s tenth birthday, Lady Lyttelton records: “Princess Royal standing by me to-day, as I was trying a few chords on the pianoforte, was pleased and pensive like her old self. ‘I like chords, one can read them. They make one sometimes gay, sometimes sad. It used to be too much for me to like formerly.’”

The year 1851 was memorable in the Princess Royal’s life, for it was then that she first met her future husband.

It has been said that Prince Frederick William of Prussia, who was twenty at the time, became attracted to his future wife during this first visit of his to the English Court, when he accompanied his parents and his only sister to see the Great Exhibition. But that is surely absurd, for the Princess, charming and clever as she was, was then only a child.

Still the English Court was probably never seen to greater advantage than during that year of miracles, and it is clear that the young Prussian Prince saw for the first time a Royal family leading a happy, natural life, full of affection and kindness. Queen Victoria’s children were healthy, well-mannered, and devoted to their parents, and the leader and head of the little band was the Princess Royal, full of eager interest in everything she was allowed to see and know, blessed with high spirits and a keen sense of humour even then already well developed. She was adored by her father, and encouraged in every way to “produce herself,” to use an expressive French phrase.

Prince Frederick William could not but note the contrast between the young people whose friendship he was making at Windsor, and the shy, etiquette-ridden Royal children of the minor German courts. Nor could he help contrasting this delightful domestic scene with what he knew at home. At Berlin he was in constant contact with a Royal family profoundly disunited and unhappy. Only three years before his first visit to England he had stood at the palace window and seen the first shot fired in the Revolution of 1848.

Although the Prince had a tenderly-loved sister, he had spent a lonely, austere youth, for his parents, though outwardly on good terms, were in no sense united as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were united—indeed, it was an open secret that the Prince of Prussia had only one love in his life, Elise Radziwill.

Prince Frederick William’s sister was only a very little older than the Princess Royal. The two princesses formed on this visit a friendship destined never to be broken, and henceforth the Royal children called the Prince and Princess of Prussia “Uncle Prussia” and “Aunt Prussia.”

The Great Exhibition itself undoubtedly helped to strengthen Prince Frederick William’s attraction to England. The palace of glass in Hyde Park absorbed the minds and thoughts of the whole Royal family, if only because all those who were old enough to understand anything of public affairs were aware that the success or failure of the enterprise would seriously affect the position of Prince Albert in England.

The feeling among the Royal family is shown by a passage in a letter of Queen Victoria to Lady Lyttelton. Writing on May 1, the opening day of the Exhibition, Her Majesty said:

“The proudest and happiest day of—as you truly call it—my happy life. To see this great conception of my beloved husband’s mind—to see this great thought and work, crowned with triumphant success in spite of difficulties and opposition of every imaginable kind, and of every effort to which jealousy and calumny could resort to cause its failure, has been an immense happiness to us both.”

Prince Frederick William, thoughtful beyond his years, and already under the spell of Prince Albert’s kindly and affectionate interest, began to regard England as the model State, and took most significant pains to make himself better acquainted with her national life and polity. Even on this comparatively short visit he found time to make an excursion to the industrial North.

On his return to Bonn University his admiration for England by no means waned, and his English tutor, Mr. Perry, gives us an interesting glimpse of the thoroughness with which he set to work to increase his knowledge:

“At the request of the Prince, I visited him three times a week, and had the honour of superintending his studies in English history and literature, in both of which he took special interest. His love for England and his great veneration of the Queen were most remarkable, and our intercourse became very agreeable and confidential. He manifested the keenest interest for all that I was able to tell him of England’s political and social life, and when our more serious studies were over, we amused ourselves by writing imaginary letters to Ministers and leading members of English society.”

It was in truth with England that Prince Frederick William fell in love on this memorable visit, not with the little Princess Royal, though he was undoubtedly attracted, as all the people round her were, by her winning charm and quick intelligence.

The idea of a marriage between the two had, however, occurred to other people, as is shown by the fact that in the following year the Princess of Prussia desired to visit England with a view to suggesting it. But the Prince’s uncle, King Frederick William IV, influenced by his pro-Russian consort, did not look on the proposal with favour, and it remained in abeyance, partly on account of the Princess Royal’s youth, partly owing to the outbreak of the Crimean War.

The Crimean War made an immense impression on the Princess Royal. For months the Queen, the Prince, and the elder Royal children thought and talked of nothing else. The children contributed drawings to be sold for the benefit of the war funds, and we know that the Princess’s emotions were deeply stirred by the thought of the sufferings of the wounded and by the work of Florence Nightingale, which was followed with intense interest in the Royal circle. The Princess in fact was able at a most impressionable age to realise something of the horrors of war, and this was destined, as we shall see, to bear rich fruit.

The war also led directly to the Princess’s first real sight of France. In August, 1855, the Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales accompanied their parents on a State visit to the Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie.

Of this visit a story was told at the time which greatly delighted all the Royal families of the Continent. Much as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were respected for their solid virtues, their artistic taste in matters of dress was considered to be not always infallible. It was feared at the French Court that the Princess Royal would be dressed, not exactly unbecomingly, but in a style which would by no means harmonise with Parisian taste and Parisian surroundings. The question was how to beguile her parents into dressing the child in a suitable manner.

In this difficulty someone suggested a really brilliant stratagem. The height and other measurements of the Princess Royal were obtained, and a doll of exactly corresponding size was procured, provided with a large and exquisitely finished wardrobe, and despatched to Buckingham Palace as an Imperial gift to the Princess. The expected then happened. Queen Victoria transferred most of the doll’s wardrobe to her daughter, with the result that the Princess appeared at her best and everyone was pleased.

The children stayed at the delightful country palace of Saint Cloud, whence they drove in every day to see the sights of Paris. They were not, of course, present at evening entertainments, but an exception was made on the occasion of the great ball held in the Galeries des Glaces at Versailles, when they supped with the Emperor and Empress. They both became sincerely attached to the Emperor, who was himself very fond of children. Indeed, his young guests enjoyed themselves so much that, according to an oft-quoted story, the Prince of Wales asked that his sister and himself might stay on after their parents had gone home, “for there are six more of us at home and they don’t want us!”

As to their conduct, Prince Albert wrote to the Duchess of Kent: “I am bound to praise the children greatly. They behaved extremely well, and pleased everybody. The task was no easy one for them, but they discharged it without embarrassment and with natural simplicity.”

This visit laid the foundation of that strong affection and admiration for France and the French which thenceforth characterised the Princess Royal. It was on this visit, too, that she conceived her enthusiastic adoration of the Empress Eugénie. Her character was now beginning to be formed, and it is the key to the tragedy of her life, for a cruel fate so ordered her future that, while she was made to pay the full penalty for her failings, her many lovable and generous qualities seemed often to find none but the most grudging recognition.

During the whole of her life, the Princess Royal had a peculiarity which only belongs to the generous-hearted and impulsive. She was apt to be violently attracted, sometimes for very little reason, to those she met, and then she would be proportionately cast down if these new friends and acquaintances did not turn out on fuller knowledge all that she had expected them to be. Those who knew her well are agreed in saying that she was not a good judge of character. She was apt to see in human beings what she expected to see, not what was there. She not only liked some people at first sight, but she had an equally instinctive dislike of others, and this was an even greater misfortune, for sometimes the prejudices she thus formed were hard to eradicate. In this she was quite unlike Queen Victoria, who, having once formed a wrong impression, was capable of altering it entirely if she was given good reason to change her mind.

As she grew up to womanhood, the Princess Royal was very wisely allowed to make the acquaintance of some of the brilliant men and women of the day who were admitted to her parents’ friendship. One of these was the second Lord Granville, the “Pussy” Granville who was afterwards Foreign Minister in Mr. Gladstone’s Cabinets, and we may conclude this chapter with a quotation which shows how he could count on the young Princess’s appreciation of a funny story.

Lord Granville, who went to St. Petersburg as the head of the special British Mission at the coronation of the Tsar Alexander, wrote a long letter to Queen Victoria, in which he requested the Queen to convey his respectful remembrances to the Princess Royal; and he went on to advise the Princess, when residing abroad, not to engage a Russian maid: ‘Lady Wodehouse found hers eating the contents of a pot on her dressing-table, which happened to be castor-oil pomatum for the hair!’

CHAPTER II
BETROTHAL

EVEN in the days of her extreme youth, Queen Victoria, owing to the fact that she was the reigning Sovereign, had to know much that is generally concealed from the young concerning the private lives and careers of their relatives. This is made abundantly clear in the extracts from her Majesty’s private diary which have already been published.

In these intimate records, written by the girl Queen herself, we see that Lord Melbourne early decided never to treat his Royal mistress as a child. When she asked him a question he evidently answered her truthfully; and she must have asked him many questions concerning that group of princes and princesses who, even then, were already known as the “Old Royal Family.” They were Queen Victoria’s own aunts and uncles; and over those who were still living when she came to the throne she possessed, as Sovereign, very peculiar and extended powers. It was inevitable that they should play a considerable part, if not in her life, certainly in her imagination; and yet we hardly ever find them mentioned in the work she directly supervised and inspired—the life of the Prince Consort. Her fear, her contempt, her horror, of the way they had conducted their lives, her dread lest even their innocent follies, and their sad tragedies of the heart, should be repeated in the lives of her own sons and daughters, were perhaps only revealed to trusted friends in her old age.

It may even be doubted if Queen Victoria ever communicated to Prince Albert certain of the facts which had necessarily to be made known to her. Whether she did so or not, the course she very early set herself to pursue—a course, be it remembered, in which she persisted at a time when she seemed to lack courage and energy to go on even with life itself, that is during the years that immediately succeeded the Prince Consort’s death—proved how determined she was to secure that the lives of her children should be entirely different from those of their great-uncles and great-aunts.

That her daughters, and later her grand-daughters, should marry early, and make marriages of inclination; that her sons’ wives should be chosen among princesses young, charming, sympathetic, and personally attractive to each prince concerned—this was one of Queen Victoria’s chief and most anxious preoccupations. She may have tried to guide inclination, she undoubtedly tried to arrange suitable alliances, but in no single case did she ever seriously oppose a marriage based on strong attraction.

In that matter Queen Victoria was a typical Englishwoman. To her mind, a union between a young man and a young woman based on any other foundation save strong mutual love and confidence, was vile; and all through her life she wished ardently to ensure that those marital blessings which fall comparatively often on ordinary people, but comparatively seldom on members of the Royal caste, should be the lot of her immediate descendants.

It was natural that the Queen, with that eager enthusiasm which was so much a part of her character, especially in this still radiantly happy period of her life, should have welcomed the thought of a marriage between her eldest daughter and the future King of Prussia. She had formed the most favourable opinion of Prince Frederick William during his brief sojourn in England in 1851. He was a man of high and honourable character at a time when such virtues were rare among the marriageable princes of reigning families, and his parents were regarded by the Queen and Prince Albert as among their dearest and most intimate friends.

The Prince of Prussia had spent some time in England after the Berlin revolution of 1848, and on parting from Madame Bunsen, the wife of the Prussian Minister, he had exclaimed: “In no other State or country could I have passed so well the period of distress and anxiety through which I have gone.” During his stay he had become intimate with the Queen and Prince Albert—indeed, the Queen, as was her way when she trusted and admired, had grown to be warmly attached to him. She regarded him as noble-minded, honest, and cruelly wronged; and, what naturally endeared him to her still more, he showed great confidence in Prince Albert, apparently always accepting the advice constantly tendered him by the Prince.

All through his life Prince Albert had seen a vision of a Germany united under the leadership of Prussia, and it was delightful to him to learn that it was now open to him to enter into a close relationship with one whom he naturally believed destined to play a supreme part in the regeneration of his beloved fatherland. It is not generally known that Prince Albert had written a pamphlet entitled “The German Question Explained,” in which he propounded a scheme for a federated German Empire with an Emperor at the head. This pamphlet must have been either privately printed or withdrawn from circulation, for not even Sir Theodore Martin, when writing the Prince’s life, could procure a copy.

This suggested marriage of the Princess Royal opened out to her father the fair prospect of being able to bring about by his counsel and assistance the realisation of his disinterested ambitions for the future welfare of Germany. The then King of Prussia was already sick unto death; the Prince of Prussia had now passed middle age; everything pointed to the probability that within a reasonable time Prince Frederick William would become ruler of Prussia and, incidentally, overlord of the German peoples.

There is good authority for the truth of the now famous story of “La Belle Alliance.”

In 1852 the Princess of Prussia came to England on a short visit to her aunt, Queen Adelaide. The then Prussian Envoy, Baron von Bunsen, while waiting to be received by the Princess, turned over in her sitting-room some engravings which had been sent by a print-seller; among them was that of a painting of the farm-house at Waterloo named by the Belgians, “La Belle Alliance.” In the same room was a portrait of the Princess Royal and one of Prince Frederick William. The Baron placed the two portraits side by side over the engraving, and when the Princess entered the room, he silently pointed out to her what he had done, and she saw the two young faces above the words “La Belle Alliance.” “A rapid glance was exchanged, but not a word was spoken,” wrote Baron von Bunsen’s son many years after.

As for the young Prince himself, when the question of his marriage had to be discussed, it was natural that his first thought, as also, it is clear, that of his mother, turned to England—to that affectionately united Royal family who were the envied model of all European Courts. The feeling of that day is indicated by a curious caricature, which was largely reproduced on the Continent. It shows a huge pair of scales. In one scale, high in the air, stand huddled together the then reigning sovereigns of Europe; in the other, touching the ground, proudly alone, stands the slight figure of Queen Victoria. Under the cartoon runs the significant words, “Light Sovereigns.”

England alone among the nations had had no trouble worth speaking of in ‘48, and among the Princesses and Queens of her day it was believed that Queen Victoria alone possessed the faithful love of her husband.

The greatest obstacle to the marriage, though neither Queen Victoria nor Prince Albert suspected it, was the King of Prussia himself. It is plain that at no time did he favour the suggestion, and that at last he yielded was in response to a strong appeal made to him in person by the young Prince. But, even so, the King desired the matter to be kept secret as long as possible. He did not even tell his Queen, and his own immediate circle and Household only heard of the betrothal when it was being widely rumoured in the German newspapers.

General von Gerlach came to the King one day with a sheet of the Cologne Gazette and indignantly complained of the “absurd reports that were being spread about.” It is said that the young Prince was going on to England from Ostend for the purpose of proposing for the hand of an English Princess. The King laughed aloud, and observed: “Well, yes, and it is really the case,” to the amazement and consternation of von Gerlach.

While the matter was being thus discussed at Berlin, the Princess Royal was kept in absolute ignorance. But the Crimean War and the subsequent visit to France had quickened her sensibilities, turned her from a child into a woman, and made her in a measure ready for the event which was about to occur. It should, however, be plainly said—the more so because later historians have blamed Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the matter—that neither of her parents was willing even to consider the idea of any immediate betrothal. On the contrary, they wished that the two young people should meet in an easy friendly fashion, and thus have a real opportunity of becoming well acquainted the one with the other.

Prince Frederick William of Prussia arrived at Balmoral on September 14, 1855. He allowed some days to elapse, and then, on the morning of the 20th, he sought out Queen Victoria and laid before her and Prince Albert his proposal of marriage. That proposal the parents of the Princess Royal accepted in principle, but they requested him to say nothing to their daughter till after she had been confirmed. It was their wish that, for some months at any rate, the young Princess should continue the simple yet full life of unconstrained girlhood. It was therefore suggested that the Prince should return in the following spring. The Queen also stipulated that the marriage should not take place till after the Princess Royal’s seventeenth birthday.

After this interview with Prince Frederick William, Prince Albert wrote to Stockmar:

“I have been much pleased with him. His prominent qualities are great thought, straight-forwardness, frankness, and honesty. He appears to be free from prejudices, and pre-eminently well-intentioned; he speaks of himself as personally greatly attracted by Vicky. That she will have no objection to make I regard as probable.”

Prince Albert wrote the following day to Lord Clarendon, who was then Foreign Minister, informing him that he might communicate the news to the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, and to no one else. “Pam” was pleased to approve, declaring that the marriage would be in the interest, not only of the two countries, but of Europe in general.

Queen Victoria did not fail to communicate the interesting secret to her beloved uncle, King Leopold, observing that her wishes on the subject of the future marriage of her daughter had been realised in the most gratifying and satisfactory manner. Indeed, she spoke of the joy with which she and Prince Albert for their part had accepted the suitor, while she reiterated that “the child herself is to know nothing till after her confirmation, which is to take place next winter.”

The days went on, and a sincere effort was made to keep what had taken place from the knowledge of the young Princess. Letters of warm congratulation arrived from Coblentz, as well as a very cordial message from the King of Prussia. Prince Frederick William’s relations were quite at one with the Queen and Prince Albert as to the propriety of postponing the betrothal till after the Princess Royal’s confirmation.

But the plan so carefully made was not destined to be carried out. The Prince was very much in love, and, as the Emperor of the French truly observed in a letter to Prince Albert: “On devine ceux qui aiment.” It was impossible to keep such a secret, and one which so closely concerned herself, from a girl as clever and mentally alive as the Princess Royal. What happened is best told in Queen Victoria’s entry in her diary on September 29:

“Our dear Victoria was this day engaged to Prince Frederick William of Prussia, who had been on a visit to us since the 14th. He had already spoken to us, on the 20th, of his wishes; but we were uncertain, on account of her extreme youth, whether he should speak to her himself, or wait till he came back again. However, we felt it was better he should do so, and during our ride up Craig-na-Ban this afternoon, he picked a piece of white heather (the emblem of ‘good luck,’) which he gave to her; and this enabled him to make an allusion to his hopes and wishes as they rode down Glen Girnoch, which led to this happy conclusion.”

A few days later her father wrote to Stockmar: “She manifested towards Fritz and ourselves the most childlike simplicity and candour. The young people are ardently in love with one another, and the purity, innocence, and unselfishness of the young man have been on his part touching.” To Mr. Perry, his English tutor at Bonn, the Prince declared that his engagement was not politics, nor ambition, “It was my heart.”

At the time of her engagement the Princess Royal was not yet fifteen, and it was arranged that the marriage should take place in two years and three months.

In one respect the Princess was singularly fortunate. In the majority of Royal marriages, the bride has not only to make her home in a country where everything will be foreign to her, but she is sometimes even ignorant of the language, manners, and customs which she will have henceforth to adopt as her own.

The Princess Royal, however, had to undergo no such sudden initiation. To her Germany was in truth a second fatherland, if only as the birthplace of her beloved father. She had been as familiar with the German as with the English language from her birth, constantly writing long letters to German relations and friends, and keeping up—to give but one instance—a close correspondence with her parents’ trusted friend, Baron Stockmar, who had for her the greatest affection and admiration.

In a letter quoted in his memoirs Stockmar says: “From her youth upwards I have been fond of her, have always expected great things of her, and taken all pains to be of service to her. I think her to be exceptionally gifted in some things, even to the point of genius.”

This familiarity with the German language was very well as a foundation, but Prince Albert considered that there was much to build on it. The whole of the Princess’s education was now arranged solely with a view to the life she was to lead as wife of the Prussian heir-presumptive. In addition to giving her, for an hour every day, special instruction in German political and legal institutions and sociology, Prince Albert made her henceforth his intellectual companion, preparing her as if she was destined to be a reigning sovereign rather than a queen consort. Not only did he discuss with her all current international questions, but he read her the long political letters he received daily from abroad, and discussed with her what he should write in reply.

It was indeed a mental training which, particularly in those ‘fifties which now seem so remote from us, would have been deemed only appropriate for the cleverest of boys in a private station. But Prince Albert had long known that his daughter was a good deal cleverer than most boys, and he was really running no risks in subjecting her to this intelligent preparation for her high destiny. As much as he could, he taught her himself, and such teaching as was entrusted to others he supervised with conscientious care.

In one of his letters to his future son-in-law, the Prince wrote: “Vicky is learning many and various things. She comes to me every evening from six to seven, when I put her through a kind of general catechising. In order to make her ideas clear, I let her work out subjects for herself, which she then brings to me for correction. She is at present writing a short compendium of Roman history.”

In order to give the Princess a clear picture of German policy—or rather of German policy as Prince Albert then hoped it would become, that is, broad and liberal in conception and aim—he set her to translate a German pamphlet published at Weimar. This essay by J. G. Droysen, entitled “Karl August und die Deutsche Politik,” would be counted rather stiff reading even by experts. But the Princess seems to have done her task admirably, and the proud father sent the manuscript to Lord Clarendon, who was genuinely impressed by the way it had been translated. He wrote back to the Prince:

“In reading Droysen I felt that the motto of Prussia should be semper eadem, and in thinking of his translator I felt that she is destined to change that motto into the vigilando ascendimus of Weimar.”

The statesman added the further tribute to the young translator: “The Princess’s manner would not be what it is if it were not the reflection of a highly cultivated intellect, which, with a well-trained imagination, leads to the saying and doing of right things in right places.”

CHAPTER III
OPINION IN BOTH COUNTRIES

THE Queen and Prince Albert, as we know, much wished to keep the fact of the Princess’s engagement a secret from the public. But rumour was naturally busy with the visit of the Prussian Prince to Balmoral, and on the day after his departure, that is on October 3, there appeared in the Times a leading article, in which the proposed alliance of the Princess Royal was alluded to with anything but approval—indeed, in Germany the article was considered grossly insulting both to the King of Prussia and to Germany. Prince Albert was very much angered at the terms in which it was written, which he described as “foolish and degrading to this country.”

But the article was really inspired by a consciousness of the violent dislike of England entertained by the Court of Prussia, and especially by the camarilla surrounding the then sovereign and his consort, and this was better realised by publicists than by Royal circles in England.

Amazing as it may seem to us now, it is nevertheless abundantly clear that neither Queen Victoria nor Prince Albert, well served as they were in some respects by the faithful Stockmar, had any idea of the real situation at the Prussian Court. The extreme youth of their daughter made them wish to postpone the marriage for a while, but there is no hint in any of the many letters and documents which have now come to light of the slightest fear that she would lack a good reception in that new country which she already loved as part of Prince Albert’s fatherland. On the contrary, the Prince had evidently persuaded himself that his daughter’s marriage would be very popular in Germany—more popular than it happened to be just then in England. Like most men of high, strong, narrow character, Prince Albert never allowed himself to perceive what at the moment he did not wish to see.

This view is entirely borne out by the letters which Prince Albert wrote then and later to the Prince of Prussia. Even when addressing one who was far older than himself, and already in the position of a ruler, he always assumed the attitude of mentor rather than of adviser; and as one glances over the immensely long epistles, dealing with a state of things of which the writer could know but very little, one wonders if the future Emperor William had the patience always to read them to the very end. Even were there no other evidence existing, these letters remain to show how curiously lacking Prince Albert was in that knowledge of elementary human nature which belongs to so many commoner types of mind.

The Prince Consort’s misapprehension is the more extraordinary when we consider that his brother, Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, judged the situation with accuracy. In a letter published in his memoirs the Duke says:

“The family events at Balmoral and Stolzenfels [King Frederick William IV was staying at Stolzenfels when he received the news of the engagement of his nephew to the Princess Royal and of his niece, Princess Louise, to the Prince Regent of Baden] gave rise to all kinds of dissatisfaction in many reactionary circles of the Prussian capital. The more the Liberal papers of Germany applauded, the more disagreeably was the other side affected by the unpopularity of the circumstances which threatened to strengthen, at the Court of Berlin, the influence of the Royal relations whose sentiments were not regarded with favour. One of the peculiarities of Frederick William IV was that, with reference to his personal sympathies, he would not submit to any coercion from those who were familiar with politics and affairs of State, so that the secret opponents had to beware of expressing their displeasure at the new family connections.”

As we have seen, the King of Prussia had kept his own counsel in the affair of his nephew’s engagement, which he had only sanctioned in consequence of Prince Frederick William’s strong personal appeal. His Queen was intensely pro-Russian, and as a result of the Crimean War had conceived a positive hatred for England and the English.

As for the Princess of Prussia, afterwards the Empress Augusta, she was a woman of the highest cultivation, the old cultivation of Weimar and of the French eighteenth century, but she had not much influence in Berlin, where even then she was said to be strongly inclined to Roman Catholicism. The Prince of Prussia was himself not really popular. It was inevitable therefore, in all the circumstances, that the prospect of an English alliance should become a fresh cause of contention and division, in which the voices of disapproval decidedly prevailed.

Even after the engagement had been actually announced, Prince Frederick William told Lady Bloomfield, the wife of the British Minister in Berlin, that, though he was very much disappointed that the Queen and Prince Albert wished the marriage to be postponed as the Princess Royal was so young, it was perhaps a good thing, for by that time party spirit in Prussia would run less high. The strength of that party spirit was ominously shown on the occasion of the marriage of the Prince’s sister, Princess Louise, when the great nobility of Prussia ostentatiously absented themselves from the festivities.

General von Gerlach, who as we have seen extracted from the King of Prussia that dry admission that the rumours of the English engagement were well-founded, drew also a more interesting comment on the news from a very different personage. Bismarck, who was already regarded as a man with a future, and at the time held an important diplomatic post at the Diet at Frankfort, wrote to the General on April 8, 1856, a commentary which was in some ways extraordinarily prophetic:

“You ask me in your letter what I think of the English marriage. I must separate the two words to give you my opinion. The ‘English’ in it does not please me, the ‘marriage’ may be quite good, for the Princess has the reputation of a lady of brain and heart. If the Princess can leave the Englishwoman at home and become a Prussian, then she may be a blessing to the country. If our future Queen on the Prussian throne remains the least bit English, then I see our Court surrounded by English influence, and yet us, and the many other future sons-in-law of her gracious Majesty, receiving no notice in England save when the Opposition in Parliament runs down our Royal family and country. On the other hand, with us, British influence will find a fruitful soil in the noted admiration of the German ‘Michael’ for lords and guineas, in the Anglomania of papers, sportsmen, country gentlemen, &c. Every Berliner feels exalted when a real English jockey from Hart or Lichtwald speaks to him and gives him an opportunity of breaking the Queen’s English on a wheel. What will it be like when the first lady in the land is an Englishwoman?”

Not less interesting in their way are the comments which Prince Albert’s brother, Duke Ernest, made on his niece’s betrothal:

“The Royal House of Prussia has long afforded in its genealogical history a singular spectacle of waverings between the West and East of Europe. While family alliances between Orthodox Russia and Catholic Austria were almost wholly excluded, the Protestant faith did not at all prevent the Hohenzollerns from having a strong leaning towards the family of the Tsars, and the connections which were thus made undoubtedly exerted their influence upon Germany. The Crimean War may be regarded as a political lesson on this concatenation of circumstances. Was it not most extraordinary that even before peace had been concluded with Russia, the Royal House of Prussia was, in its matrimonial aims, on the point of exhibiting a marked tendency towards the West of Europe? The union of a Prussian heir-apparent with a Princess of my House, with its numerous branches, was an event which at the time unquestionably seemed opposed to the Russian tradition.

“If we remember how at the end of the war everyone looked upon my brother as the active force against Russia, though at the beginning this was by no means clear, the marriage of a Prussian Prince who was destined to the succession with a daughter of the Queen of England necessarily possessed a decided political character. My brother, however, loved his eldest daughter too well to be influenced entirely by political considerations in respect of her marriage; and I often had an opportunity of observing that the chief wish of his heart for many years had been to see his favourite child occupy some exalted position. With paternal ambition, he was wont to picture to himself his promising daughter, whose abilities had been early developed, upon a lofty throne, but, more than all, I know that he was anxious to make her also truly happy. The Prince of Prussia, above all other scions of reigning Houses, afforded the greatest hopes for the future.”

There was another Court at which the news of the engagement was regarded with mixed feelings. The Emperor Napoleon at first received the Anglo-Prussian alliance almost with dismay. He feared that, by strengthening Prussian influence, it would have the effect of weakening, and possibly destroying, the French understanding with England. But he allowed himself to be reassured by Lord Clarendon, who declared that Queen Victoria’s affection for the House of Prussia was private and personal, and had nothing to do with politics. Prince Frederick William, returning by way of Paris as a successful suitor, had brought the Emperor a letter from the Queen, and to it Napoleon replied, rather coldly:

“We like the Prince very much, and I do not doubt that he will make the Princess happy, for he seems to me to possess every characteristic quality belonging to his age and rank. We endeavoured to make his stay here as pleasant as possible, but I found his thoughts were always either at Osborne or at Windsor.”

It was on this visit of the Prince’s that the Empress Eugénie made the following comments in a letter to an intimate friend, which, in view of those later events in which Moltke played so great a part, possess a pathetic significance:

“The Prince is a tall, handsome man, almost a head taller than the Emperor; he is slim and fair, with a light yellow moustache—in fact, a Teuton such as Tacitus described, chivalrously polite, and not without a resemblance to Hamlet. His companion, Herr von Moltke (or some such name), is a man of few words, but nothing less than a dreamer, always on the alert, and surprising one by the most telling remarks. The Germans are an imposing race. Louis says it is the race of the future. Bah! Nous n’en sommes pas encore là.”

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.

The confirmation of the Princess Royal took place on March 20, 1856, in the private chapel at Windsor Castle. The Princess was led in by her father, followed by her godfather, the King of the Belgians, who had come to England on purpose, and the Royal children and most of the members of the Royal family were present, as were also the Ministers, the great officers of State, and many of those whom Disraeli was wont to describe as the “high nobility.”

In fact, everything was done to make the rite a State ceremony—a striking contrast to the more recent practice by which the princes and princesses of England have all been confirmed privately, in the presence of their near relatives only.

The second Lord Granville, the statesman who shared with the Princess Royal the flattering nickname of “Pussy,” wrote to Lord Canning this lively account of the confirmation. The inaudible Archbishop was J. B. Sumner; his Lordship of Oxford was the Samuel Wilberforce, called by his enemies “Soapy Sam,” who played a conspicuous part in the Court and social life of the period:

“Had a slight spasm in bed; sent for Meryon. It was well before he came. He desired me not to go to Windsor for the confirmation of the Princess Royal. I went, and am none the worse; my complexion beautiful. It was an interesting sight. As Pam observed, ‘Ah, ah! a touching ceremony; ah, ah!’ The King of the Belgians the same as I remember him when I was a boy, and he used to live for weeks at the Embassy, using my father’s horses, and boring my mother to death. The Princess Royal went through her part well. The Princess Alice cried violently. The Archbishop read what seemed a dull address; luckily it was inaudible. The Bishop of Oxford rolled out a short prayer with conscious superiority. Pam reminded Lord Aberdeen of their being confirmed at Cambridge, as if it was yesterday. I must go to bed, so excuse haste and bad pens, as the sheep said to the farmer when it jumped out of the fold.”

There was certainly too much pomp about the Princess Royal’s confirmation for the taste of another spectator, Princess Mary of Cambridge, afterwards Duchess of Teck. She succeeds in drawing in a few words a remarkably vivid picture of what happened:

“The ceremony was very short (the service for the day being omitted) and not solemn enough for my feeling, although the anthems were fine and well-chosen. It was followed by a great deal of standing in the Green Drawing-room, where the Queen held a kind of tournée in honour of the Ministers, who had come down for the confirmation; after which dear Victoria, who looked particularly nice, and was very much impressed with the solemnity of the rite, received our presents on the occasion, and about half-past one we sat down to lunch en famille as usual.”

It was on April 29, 1856, that the betrothal was publicly announced on the conclusion of the Crimean War, and in the following month the Princess appeared as a débutante at a Court ball at Buckingham Palace.

This spring “Fritz of Prussia,” as his future father-in-law called him, came to pay a long visit to his fiancée. It is curious that Queen Victoria, in spite of her strong belief in love as the only right foundation for an engagement, had by no means the English notion of discreetly leaving the young people a good deal alone together. On the contrary, she seems to have entirely adopted the Continental practice of chaperonage; a passage in a letter written by her to King Leopold shows that she was always with them, and that she naturally found it very boring, but she endured it because she thought it was her duty.

Prince Frederick William was still in England when in June the Princess Royal met with rather a terrifying accident, which is worthy of mention because it showed how strong was her character and how high her physical courage.

The Princess was sealing a letter at her writing-table, when suddenly the sealing-wax flamed out and the flames caught her muslin sleeve. Her English governess, Miss Hildyard, was fortunately seated close to her, and her music mistress, Mrs. Anderson, was also in the room, giving Princess Alice a lesson. They sprang at once to the Princess’s assistance and beat out the flames with a hearthrug; but not before her right arm had been severely burned from below the elbow to the shoulder. She showed the greatest self-possession and presence of mind, her first words being: “Send for Papa, and do not tell Mamma till he has been told.”

The Princess Royal had a long engagement, probably the longest that any lady of her rank has had, at least in modern times, but the months as they went by were fully occupied with her father’s sedulous preparation of her intellect, as well as with the more frivolous preparations of her trousseau. In May 1857 Parliament voted for the Princess a dowry of £40,000 and an annuity of £4000—a provision which does not now seem to have erred on the side of generosity. But it must be remembered that what economists call “the purchasing power of the sovereign” was considerably greater then than now, and to find the modern equivalent of these sums one would have to add probably as much as 25 per cent.

Prince Frederick William, attended by Count Moltke, paid another visit to England in June, and made his first public appearance with the Princess at the Manchester Art Exhibition. The young couple seem to have corresponded on quite the old-fashioned voluminous scale. After the Prince had gone home again in August, Moltke writes to his wife that the Princess had written a letter of forty pages to the Prince, and he adds the sarcastic comment: “How the news must have accumulated!”

Whatever the aide-de-camp may have thought, the Prince himself was certainly a happy lover in his own characteristically serious way. We find him a few months later writing to his French tutor, the Swiss Pastor Godet, a long and moving letter, in which he alludes very frankly to the difficulties which even then surrounded his position. Then, going on to speak of his coming marriage, he says:

“Yes, if you knew my betrothed you would, I am sure, thoroughly understand my choice, and you would realise that I am truly happy. I can but bless and thank God to have given me the happiness of finding in her everything which ensures the true union of hearts, and repose and calm in home life, for I do not care, as you know, for the world, which I find empty and with very little happiness in it.”

The seventeenth birthday of the Princess Royal, the last she was to spend with her family before her marriage, was saddened by the death of Queen Victoria’s half-brother, Prince Leiningen. The Royal family were all extremely fond of him, especially the Princess Royal, to whom he had ever shown himself a most affectionate and kindly uncle. This was the first time the Princess had come in close contact with death, and it made the more impression on her owing to the passionate grief which her grandmother, the Duchess of Kent, showed at the loss of her only son.

The wedding had now been fixed for January 25, 1858, and already in October the bride had taken leave of those places in Balmoral which were dear to her. Of this Prince Albert writes to the widowed Duchess of Gotha:

“Vicky suffers from the feeling that all those places she visits she must look upon for the last time as her home. The Maid of Orleans with her ‘Joan says to you an everlasting farewell,’ often comes into my mind.” And in another letter: “The departure from here will be heavy for all of us, particularly for Vicky who is going away for good, and the good Highland people who love her so much say: ‘I suppose we shall never see you again,’ which naturally upsets her.”

These rather sentimental farewells had been going on for a long time. Queen Victoria, in a letter a fortnight before the wedding, says that her daughter had had ever since January 1857 a succession of emotions and leave-takings which would be most trying to anyone, but particularly so to so young a girl with such powerful feelings. The loving mother goes on to say that she is much improved in self-control, and is so clever and sensible that her parents can talk to her of anything.

Her other parent, in a letter to his grandmother, spoke of the frightful gap which the separation for ever of this dear daughter would make in the family circle, and then, with his characteristic optimism, he adds that in Germany people seem ready to welcome her with the greatest friendliness.

Here perhaps is the place to consider what sort of a country was the “Germany” whither Prince Albert was sending his cherished daughter as future Queen.

To begin with, it was not yet “Germany” at all; it was Prussia. We are well accustomed in the twentieth century to regard Germany as one of the Great Powers of Europe, with her enormous army and her expanding navy and mercantile marine, with all else for which the Fatherland stands in science, letters, and industry. It is necessary, however, to realise that the Princess Royal’s marriage was to bring her to what was then a very different country. Prussia was in fact not to be compared in power, wealth, or security with the Princess’s native land. Including Silesia, Brandenburg, and Westphalia, the country only had a population of some seventeen millions in 1858, or about that of England alone. The revenue was comparatively insignificant, but the army numbered 160,000 officers and men; the navy had 55 ships, 3500 officers and men, and 265 guns; while the mercantile marine is given as 826 ships of 268,000 tons.

The Germanic Confederation had superseded the Confederation of the Rhine formed by Napoleon. It included Austria, as well as Prussia and the various German States, and by the nature of its constitution it was weak where it should have been strong. The jealousy felt by Austria for the hegemony of Prussia among the smaller German States, and the internal jealousies of those States among themselves, almost doomed the Confederation to impotence. Indeed, the primary object of the Confederation, namely, the maintenance of the external security of the States, was in constant danger, owing partly to the complicated regulations for voting in the Diet, partly to a military system which was full of compromises and certain to produce, on the outbreak of war, a maximum of confusion and a minimum of efficiency.

The constitutional liberties of the individual States had been gravely menaced by a series of feudal decrees passed between 1830 and 1840; while in 1850 the Confederation had actually suppressed the constitution of Hesse-Cassel. In Prussia itself the Manteuffel Ministry had been working, beneath the cloak of the constitutional reforms granted in 1850, to establish a centralised police State on the model of the French préfet system combined with typical Prussian mediævalism.

It was in 1847 that King Frederick William IV uttered the famous words that he would never allow a piece of written parchment to be placed, like a second Providence, between God in heaven and his country. Now the constitution of only two years later did seem to be such a piece of written parchment, but this was only in appearance, because it did not settle by organic laws the crucial questions of political liberty, but left them in practice to the Chambers which it called into existence. The task of Baron Manteuffel’s Ministry, therefore, resolved itself into obtaining a sufficiently reactionary Parliament which could be trusted to remove the foundations of political liberty laid by the great constitutional lawgiver, Stein, and his follower, Hardenburg.

It was not till 1855, three years before the Princess Royal’s marriage, that a thoroughly servile Chamber was obtained. The two principal reforms effected by Stein, namely, the localising of the administration and the independence of officials, were abolished, and the administration was carefully centralised on the French model, and the whole official class was made dependent upon the Government. This latter object was effected by an ingenious theory—that any opposition to a constitutional Ministry which enjoyed the confidence of the sovereign became constructively an offence against the Crown, and therefore punishable.

It is significant that it took five years before a really servile Chamber was obtained, even by these methods. The Prussian mediævalists did not altogether like the police supremacy established by the Manteuffel Ministry; but, on the other hand, by their alliance with the Ministry they had the satisfaction of staving off certain reforms which they especially dreaded, notably the equalisation of the land tax, the removal of the rural police from the control of the lord of the manor, and the liberal organisation of the rural communes. Moreover, they were given practical freedom to do what they liked in ecclesiastical and educational administration.

It must be remembered that, while England has had from time to time her mediævalists, they have, on the whole, failed to make any real impression on politics, and have exerted their influence only in the province of religious belief and in that of art. It was different in Prussia, where feudalism as a practical system had a much longer life.

Numerous small States within the kingdom of Prussia, with their feudal powers and rights, had to be broken up by the Great Elector as a first step towards a Prussian nationality. It was really by continuing the Great Elector’s work in this respect that Stein had aroused that national movement which eventually threw off the French yoke. But Frederick William III had set himself to reorganise the provincial States on the basis of a strict observance of their historical rights. This reorganisation did not satisfy the mediævals because it failed to provide any real check upon the bureaucratic character of the remaining part of the King’s administration.

At the time of the Princess Royal’s marriage there still survived an extraordinary number of little States, each with its ruling family, and for the most part as poor as they were proud.

CHAPTER IV
MARRIAGE

IT is the universal testimony that at the time of her wedding the Princess Royal was at the height of her youthful beauty and charm. This is not the mere flattery of courtiers, to whom all Royal ladies are beautiful as a matter of course; it is the opinion expressed by a multitude of observers in contemporary private letters, diaries, and reminiscences. And of all the descriptions of her at this time in existence the most lifelike we owe to a German lady of rank, one of the Princess’s future ladies-in-waiting, Countess Walpurga de Hohenthal, who afterwards married Sir Augustus Berkeley Paget, British Ambassador in Rome and Vienna. This lady gives in her book of reminiscences, Scenes and Memories, this vivid vignette of her Royal mistress as she looked just before her marriage:

“The Princess appeared extraordinarily young. All the childish roundness still clung to her and made her look shorter than she really was. She was dressed in a fashion long disused on the Continent, in a plum-coloured silk dress fastened at the back. Her hair was drawn off her forehead. Her eyes were what struck me most; the iris was green like the sea on a sunny day, and the white had a peculiar shimmer which gave them the fascination that, together with a smile showing her small and beautiful teeth, bewitched those who approached her. The nose was unusually small and turned up slightly, and the complexion was ruddy, perhaps too much so for one thing, but it gave the idea of perfect health and strength. The fault of the face lay in the squareness of the lower features, and there was even a look of determination about the chin, but the very gentle and almost timid manner prevented one realising this at first. The voice was very delightful, never going up to high tones, but lending a peculiar charm to the slight foreign accent with which the Princess spoke both English and German.”

As we have already seen, Queen Victoria felt strongly that it was not every day that even a future King married the daughter of a Queen of England, and she was resolved to surround the ceremony with all possible pomp and circumstance. The reader may for the most part be spared the details of these functions. What is interesting to us, looking back on that age which seems so remote from our own, is the curious note of tearful sentiment, which some would now call by a harsher name, yet mingled with high hopes and pathetic confidence in the future.

The Court spent the early part of January 1858 at Windsor Castle, and on the 15th, the day of the departure for London, the Queen wrote in her diary:

“Went to look at the rooms prepared for Vicky’s ‘Honeymoon.’ Very pretty. It quite agitated me to look at them. Poor, poor child! We took a short walk with Vicky, who was dreadfully upset at this real break in her life; the real separation from her childhood! She slept for the last time in the same room with Alice. Now all this is cut off.”

And we may quote, too, a characteristic passage from a letter written to the Queen by her sister, the Princess of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, with reference to another young Royal bride:

“Poor little wife now! I have quite the same feeling as you have on these dear young creatures entering the new life of duties, privations, and trials, on their marrying so young. Alas! the sweet blossoms coming in contact with rude life and all its realities so soon, are changed into mature and less lovely persons, so painful to a mother’s eye and feeling; and yet we must be happy to see them fulfil their Bestimmung (destiny); but it is a happiness not unmixed with many a bitter drop of anguish and pain.”

By the 19th all the Royal guests had arrived in London, among them the King of the Belgians with his sons, the Prince and Princess of Prussia, and Princes and Princesses in such numbers that the accommodation of Buckingham Palace was taxed to the uttermost. “Such a house-full,” says the Queen in her diary. “Such bustle and excitement!” Between eighty and ninety sat down to dinner at the Royal table daily. “After dinner,” says the same record, “a party, and a very gay and pretty dance. It was very animated, all the Princes dancing.”

The first of the public festivities was a performance at Her Majesty’s Theatre of Macbeth, by Helen Faucit and Phelps, while Mr. and Mrs. Keeley appeared in a farce. This was the first of four representations, organised at the Queen’s command in honour of the marriage, and each was made the occasion of an extraordinary popular demonstration. A great ball, at which over a thousand guests were present, was given at the Palace, and there was also a State performance of Balfe’s opera, The Rose of Castille.

Prince Frederick William arrived on January 23, and on the next day Queen Victoria writes:

“Poor dear Vicky’s last unmarried day. An eventful one, reminding me so much of mine. After breakfast we arranged in the large drawing-room the gifts (splendid ones) for Vicky in two tables. Fritz’s pearls are the largest I ever saw, one row. On a third table were three fine candelabra, our gift to Fritz. Vicky was in ecstasies, quite startled, and Fritz delighted.”

More magnificent presents kept on arriving, and the Queen goes on:

“Very busy—interrupted and disturbed every instant! Dear Vicky gave me a brooch (a very pretty one) before Church with her hair; and, clasping me in her arms, said: ‘I hope to be worthy to be your child!’” At the end of the day the Queen and Prince “accompanied Vicky to her room, kissed her and gave her our blessing, and she was much overcome. I pressed her in my arms, and she clung to her truly adored papa with much tenderness.”

Of the wedding itself Queen Victoria made herself the historian for all time, and we cannot do better than quote her vividly emotional account of the scene:

“Monday, January 25.—The second most eventful day in my life as regards feelings. I felt as if I were being married over again myself, only much more nervous, for I had not that blessed feeling which I had then, which raises and supports one, of giving myself up for life to him whom I loved and worshipped—then and ever! Got up, and, while dressing, dearest Vicky came to see me, looking well and composed, and in a fine quiet frame of mind. She had slept more soundly and better than before. This relieved me greatly. Gave her a pretty book called The Bridal Offering.”

Before the procession started for the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace, the Queen and the Princess were daguerreotyped together with Prince Albert, but, says the Queen, “I trembled so, my likeness has come out indistinct.” Her Majesty continues:

“Then came the time to go. The sun was shining brightly; thousands had been out since very early, shouting, bells ringing, &c. Albert and Uncle, in Field Marshal’s uniform, with bâtons, and the two eldest boys went first. Then the three girls in pink satin trimmed with Newport lace, Alice with a wreath, and the two others with only bouquets in their hair of cornflowers [the favourite flower of Queen Louise of Prussia and of all her children and descendants], and marguerites; next the four boys in Highland dress. The flourish of trumpets and cheering of thousands made my heart sink within me. Vicky was in the carriage with me, sitting opposite. At St. James’s took her into a dressing-room prettily arranged, where were Uncle, Albert, and the eight bridesmaids, who looked charming in white tulle, with wreaths and bouquets of pink roses and white heather.

“Then the procession was formed, just as at my marriage, only how small the old Royal family has become! Mama last before me—then Lord Palmerston with the Sword of State—then Bertie and Alfred. I with the two little boys on either side (which they say had a most touching effect) and the three girls behind. The effect was very solemn and impressive as we passed through the rooms, down the staircase, and across a covered-in court.

“The Chapel, though too small, looked extremely imposing and well,—full as it was of so many elegantly-dressed ladies, uniforms, &c. The Archbishop, &c. at the altar, and on either side of it the Royal personages. Behind me Mama and the Cambridges, the girls and little boys near me, and opposite me the dear Princess of Prussia, and the foreign Princes behind her. Bertie and Affie, not far from the Princess, a little before the others.

“The drums and trumpets played marches, and the organ played others as the procession approached and entered. There was a pause between each, but not a very long one, and the effect was thrilling and striking as you heard the music gradually coming nearer and nearer. Fritz looked pale and much agitated, but behaved with the greatest self-possession, bowing to us, and then kneeling down in a most devotional manner. Then came the bride’s procession and our darling Flower looked very touching and lovely, with such an innocent, confident, and serious expression, her veil hanging back over her shoulders, walking between her beloved father and dearest Uncle Leopold, who had been at her christening and confirmation.

“My last fear of being overcome vanished on seeing Vicky’s quiet, calm, and composed manner. It was beautiful to see her kneeling with Fritz, their hands joined, and the train borne by eight young ladies, who looked like a cloud of maidens hovering round her, as they knelt near her. Dearest Albert took her by the hand to give her away. The music was very fine, the Archbishop very nervous; Fritz spoke very plainly. Vicky too. The Archbishop omitted some of the passages.”

Sarah Lady Lyttelton, too, noted the calm and rather serious, though happy and loving, expression of the Princess’s look and manner—“not a bit of bridal missiness and flutter.”

Another eye-witness of the scene supplies a moving touch: “The light of happiness in the eyes of the bride appealed to the most reserved among the spectators, and an audible ‘God bless you!’ passed from mouth to mouth along the line.”

The Queen’s description proceeds:

“When the ceremony was over, we both embraced Vicky tenderly, but she shed not one tear, and then she kissed her grandmama, and I Fritz. She then went up to her new parents, and we crossed over to the dear Prince and Princess [of Prussia], who were both much moved, Albert shaking hands with them, and I kissing both and pressing their hands with a most happy feeling. My heart was so full. Then the bride and bridegroom left hand in hand, followed by the supporters, the ‘Wedding March’ by Mendelssohn being played, and we all went up to the Throne Room to sign the register. Here general congratulations, shaking hands with all the relations. I felt so moved, so overjoyed and relieved, that I could have embraced everybody.”

The young couple drove off to Windsor for a honeymoon of only two days, as was then the custom with Royal personages.

“We dined,” says Queen Victoria, “en famille, but I felt so lost without Vicky.” In the evening, however, there came a messenger from Windsor with a letter from the bride, containing the news that the Eton boys had dragged the carriage of the Prince and Princess from the railway station to the Castle, and that they had been welcomed by immense crowds and with the greatest enthusiasm. All London, too, was illuminated, and there were great rejoicings in the streets. The Duke of Buccleuch made it his business to mingle with the humblest people in the crowds, and he afterwards greatly pleased the Queen with his account of their simple, hearty enthusiasm.

Of those two days at Windsor, the bride, thirty-six years later, when she was already a widow, spoke to her old friend, Bishop Boyd Carpenter. She received the Bishop in the red brocade drawing-room which overlooks the Long Walk, a room which awakened memories: “We spent,” she said, “our honeymoon at Windsor. This room was one of those we occupied. It was our private sitting-room. I remember how we sat here—two young innocent things—almost too shy to talk to one another.”

The Court moved to Windsor on the 27th, and on the following day the bridegroom was invested with the order of the Garter. On the 29th the Court returned to town, and in the evening the Queen and Prince Albert, and the bridal pair, went in state to Her Majesty’s Theatre. The audience demanded the National Anthem twice before and once after the play, two additional verses appropriate to the occasion being added. Prince Frederick William led his bride to the front of the Royal box, and they stood to receive the acclamations of the house.

On January 30 the Queen held a Drawing-room, at which there were no presentations, “only congratulations,” and the Princess wore her wedding dress and train. In the evening the eight bridesmaids, with their respective parents, came, but though there were no young men, they all danced till midnight.

The dreaded separation was fast approaching. Those were days in which people of all classes seemed to give freer play to their natural emotions than they do now, and the actual parting at Buckingham Palace may almost be described as agonising. “I think it will kill me to take leave of dear Papa!” were the words of the Princess to her mother. “A dreadful moment, and a dreadful day,” wrote the Queen. “Such sickness came over me, real heartache, when I thought of our dearest child being gone, and for so long—all, all being over! It began to snow before Vicky went, and continued to do so without intermission all day. At times I could be quite cheerful, but my tears began to flow afresh frequently, and I could not go near Vicky’s corridor.”

Even the less emotional but not less warm-hearted Princess Mary of Cambridge writes in her diary of February 2:

“A very gloomy, tearful day! At eleven-thirty we drove to the palace to see poor dear Vicky off. It was our intention to wait downstairs; but we were sent for, and found dear Victoria [the Queen] surrounded by a number of crying relations in the Queen’s Closet. It was a sad, a trying scene. We all accompanied her to the carriage, and, after bidding her adieu, Mamma and I hurried to one of the front rooms to see her drive up the Mall.”

There exists a private photograph, or rather a daguerreotype, taken of the Princess Royal that morning, her face unrecognisable, swollen with tears.

It may be imagined how delighted the populace were when they saw that, though it was snowing hard, their Princess had chosen an open carriage for her drive through the London she even then loved so well and went on loving to the very end. The route taken was through the Mall, Fleet Street, Cheapside, and over London Bridge, and in spite of the terrible weather enormous crowds gathered to see the last of the bride. The stalwart draymen of Barclay and Perkins’s brewery shouted out to the bridegroom in menacing tones, “Be kind to her or we’ll have her back!”

The Princess was accompanied by her father and her two elder brothers; and at Gravesend, where the Royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert, was waiting to take her and her bridegroom across the Channel, the scene was again most affecting. The Prince Consort was deeply moved but he was determined to appear composed, and he kept his look of serenity. Not so the Prince of Wales and Prince Alfred; they wept openly, and their example was followed by many, for there was something profoundly moving in this departure of the Daughter of England—as Cobden had called her—for a country of which the great majority of Englishmen and Englishwomen at that time knew little or nothing.

Perhaps the general feeling among the educated classes of the England of that day is best reflected in a leading article in the Times, which said:

“We only trust and pray that the policy of England and of Prussia may never present any painful alternatives to the Princess now about to leave our shores; that she will never be called on to forget the land of her birth, education, and religion; and that, should the occasion ever occur, she may have the wisdom to render what is due both to her new and her old country. There is no European State but what changes and is still susceptible of change, nor is this change wholly by any internal law of development. We influence one another. England, indeed, has ever been jealous of foreign influence, and she would be the last to repudiate the honour of influencing her neighbours. For our part, we are confident enough of our country to think an English Princess a gain to a Prussian Court, but not so confident to deny that we may be mutually benefited, and Europe through us, by a greater cordiality and better acquaintance than has hitherto been between the two countries.”

CHAPTER V
EARLY MARRIED LIFE

THE bridal journey to Berlin was in the nature of a triumphal progress, and it was well that the Prince and Princess were both young and full of healthy vitality. At Brussels they were present at a great Court ball given in their honour, but early the next morning they were again on their route, and all the way there were receptions, addresses of congratulations, &c., to be received and answered.

It was probably at Brussels that the Princess received a touching letter from her father, written on the day after her departure from England:—

“My heart was very full when yesterday you leaned your forehead on my breast to give free vent to your tears. I am not of a demonstrative nature, and therefore you can hardly know how dear you have always been to me, and what a void you have left behind in my heart: yet not in my heart, for there assuredly you will abide henceforth, as till now you have done, but in my daily life, which is evermore reminding my heart of your absence.”

Three days later Prince Albert again wrote to her:

“Thank God, everything apparently goes on to a wish, and you seem to gain ‘golden opinions’ in your favour; which naturally gives us extreme pleasure, both because we love you, and because this touches our parental pride. But what has given us most pleasure of all was the letter, so overflowing with affection, which you wrote while yet on board the yacht. Poor child! well did I feel the bitterness of your sorrow, and would so fain have soothed it. But, excepting my own sorrow, I had nothing to give; and that would only have had the effect of augmenting yours.”

To Stockmar, whose son, Baron Ernest Stockmar, was appointed Treasurer to the Princess Royal on her marriage, he wrote:

“Throughout all this agitated, serious and very trying time, the good child has behaved quite admirably, and to the mingled admiration and surprise of every one. She was so natural, so childlike, so dignified and firm in her whole bearing and demeanour, that one might well believe in a higher inspiration. I shall not forget that your son has proved himself in all ways extremely useful, and takes and holds his ground, which, among the Berliners, is no easy matter.”

The progress to Berlin was, at any rate, by no means dull; it was marked by plenty of incident, sometimes not of a pleasant nature. For instance, when the bridal pair were entertained at a great Court banquet at Hanover, whether by malice, or more probably by sheer stupidity, the feast was spread on the very gold dinner-service which had been a subject of dispute between Queen Victoria and King Ernest, a dispute which had been decided by the English law officers of the Crown in favour of Hanover. The Princess Royal, who knew all about the affair, felt deeply hurt, but she did not allow this to be noticed except by her intimate entourage.

In Magdeburg Cathedral the crowd became so obstreperous in their eager desire to see the Princess that shreds of her gown, a dress of tartan velvet, were actually torn off her back.

Just before Potsdam was reached, the famous Field-Marshal Wrangel, who had played so great a part in the Revolution of 1848, jumped into the train. After he had complimented the Royal bride, he sat down on a seat on which had been placed an enormous apple-tart which had just been presented to the Princess at Wittenberg, a town noted for its pastry. Fortunately the old soldier took the accident in good part, and joined in the hearty laughter which accompanied the efforts of the Princess and her ladies to clean his uniform.

The whole of the Prussian Royal family assembled at Potsdam to greet the bride and bridegroom, who made their State entry into Berlin on February 8. It was a fine day, but the cold was of an intensity never before experienced by the Princess. Nevertheless, she and her ladies were all in low Court dresses, and, by her express wish, the windows of the State carriages were kept down, so that the eager populace might be the better able to see inside.

The drive lasted two hours and ended at the Old Schloss, where the Prince and Princess found once more the whole of the Prussian Royal family assembled, headed by the then King and his Queen. As the Queen embraced the bride, she observed coldly: “Are you not frozen?” The Princess replied with a smile; “I have only one warm place, and that is my heart!”

It is a curious fact that on that night of the State entry into Berlin, when every house, and especially every palace and embassy, was brilliantly illuminated, the English Legation alone remained in darkness. This was simply because the gas company had undertaken to do more than it could accomplish, for gas had never been used for public illumination in Berlin before that night. Still, the circumstance was long remembered by the more superstitious of the Berliners.

The youthful bride made a very favourable impression on those who saw her on that first day in Berlin. Her manner was singularly quiet and self-possessed, and she found a kind and suitable word to say to everyone. Yet, even so, feeling ran so high in Prussian society, and especially at the Court, that Lord and Lady Bloomfield, the then English Minister and his wife, made a point of avoiding the Princess Royal, so desirous were they of giving no cause of offence to the King and Queen.

Meanwhile, the loving parents in London were kept busy in reading the accounts, which poured in on them from every quarter, of their daughter’s reception in their new home. Thus, Queen Victoria’s sister, the Princess of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, writes from Berlin on February 17:

“You know of everything that is going on, and how much she [the Princess Royal] is admired, and deserves so to be. The enthusiasm and interest shown are beyond everything. Never was a Princess in this country received as she is. That shows where the sympathies turn to, certainly not towards the North Pole.”

This was perhaps a little too couleur de rose, and when Prince Frederick William telegraphed to his parents-in-law, “The whole Royal family is enchanted with my wife,” Prince Albert’s dry comment, in writing to his daughter, was that the telegraph must have been amazed at the message. Nor did the anxious father fail to seize the opportunity for a little sermon. In this same letter, dated February 11, he writes to the Princess:

“You have now entered upon your new home, and been received and welcomed on all sides with the greatest friendship and cordiality. This kindly and trustful advance of a whole nation towards an entire stranger must have kindled and confirmed within you the determination to show yourself in every way worthy of such feelings, and to reciprocate and requite them by the steadfast resolution to dedicate the whole energies of your life to this people of your new home. And you have received from Heaven the happy task of effecting this object by making your husband truly happy, and of doing him at the same time the best service, by aiding him to maintain and to increase the love of his countrymen.

“That you have everywhere made so favourable an impression has given intense happiness to me as a father. Let me express my fullest admiration of the way in which, possessed exclusively by the duty which you had to fulfil, you have kept down and overcome your own little personal troubles, perhaps also many feelings of sorrow not yet healed. This is the way to success, and the only way. If you have succeeded in winning people’s hearts by friendliness, simplicity, and courtesy, the secret lay in this, that you were not thinking of yourself. Hold fast this mystic power; it is a spark from Heaven.”

Admirable advice in a sense, but unfortunately too general to be of much service to the warm-hearted, impulsive Princess, before whom lay so many unsuspected pitfalls. Prince Albert believed, as he had said to his son-in-law, that his daughter possessed “a man’s head and a child’s heart,” an allusion to the poet’s words, “In wit a man, simplicity a child.” But Prussia was not Coburg, and even from Coburg Prince Albert had now been away for nearly twenty years. He does not appear at all to have appreciated either the situation which now confronted the Princess Royal, or how little adapted she was by her temperament and her training to meet it.

In the Princess of Prussia (afterwards the Empress Augusta) her English daughter-in-law ever had a true friend and ally, and during the forty years which followed, the two ladies were on far better terms than anyone could have expected, considering how entirely different had been their upbringing and outlook on life.

For example, Princess Augusta had been taught as a child to tenir cercle in the gardens of the Palace at Weimar—that is to say, she had to make the round of the bushes and trees, each of which represented for the moment a lady or gentlemen of the Court, and say something pleasant and suitable to each! In this curious but extremely practical fashion was inculcated one of the most fundamentally important duties of Royal personages, and it may be suggested with all respect that the future Empress Frederick would have benefited if she had had some similar training.

The Princess who was to become Queen of Prussia and the first German Empress had been brought up at Goethe’s knee. She belonged, in an intellectual sense, to the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century. She knew French as well as she knew German—indeed, it is said that she often thought in French, and perhaps her chief friend, at the time of her son’s marriage to the Princess Royal, was Monsieur de Bacourt, the French diplomatist to whom the Duchesse de Dino’s diary-letters were for the most part addressed. Among her intimates were many Catholics, and for many years it was believed in Berlin that she had been secretly received into the Roman Church. As a young woman she was full of heart and warmth of feeling, but she soon learnt, what her daughter-in-law never succeeded in mastering, the wisdom of circumspection and the painful necessity for prudence. She early made up her mind to remain on the whole in shadow. While never concealing her point of view from those about her, she yet never took any public part in the affairs of State.

During the Crimean War, when the whole of the Prussian Court was pro-Russian, the Princess of Prussia had been pro-English—a fact which naturally endeared her to Queen Victoria, but which had made her Prussian relatives very sore and angry. When the Princess Royal arrived in Berlin as the bride of the King of Prussia’s heir-presumptive, the Crimean War was already being forgotten. Among the Liberals there was what may be called a pro-English party, and the joyous simplicity and youthful charm of the Princess silenced criticism, at any rate for a time.

It must be remembered that the Princess Royal had left a young Court. At the time of her marriage her parents were still young people—she made them grandparents when they were only thirty-eight. But the Court in which she now became an important personage was composed of middle-aged men and women, with some very old people. There was still living in the Court circle a lady who was said to remember Frederick the Great. This was the Countess Pauline Neale, who had been one of Queen Louise’s ladies-in-waiting. She could recollect with vivid intensity every detail and episode associated with Napoleon’s treatment of the King and Queen.

Of great age, too, was the gigantic Field-Marshal Wrangel, who had actually carried the colours of his regiment at the battle of Leipzig.

Another interesting personality in the Princess Royal’s new family circle was her husband’s aunt, Princess Charles, sister of the Princess of Prussia, who afterwards became the grandmother of the Duchess of Connaught. She still bore traces of the wonderful beauty for which she had been famed in the ‘twenties, but was, of course, no longer a young woman.

Not long after the Princess Royal’s arrival in Berlin, a German observer wrote to the Prince Consort: “She sees more clearly and more correctly than many a man of commanding intellect, because, while possessing an acute mind and the purest heart, she does not know the word ‘prejudice.’”

Less than a month after her marriage, on February 17, the Prince Consort sent his daughter a letter full of wise warning:

“Your festival time, if not your honeymoon, comes to an end to-day; and on this I take leave to congratulate you, unfeeling though it may sound, for I wish you the necessary time and tranquillity to digest the many impressions you have received, and which otherwise, like a wild revel, first inflame, and then stupefy, leaving a dull nerveless lassitude behind. Your exertions, and the demands which have been made upon you, have been quite immense; you have done your best, and have won the hearts, or what is called the hearts, of all. In the nature of things we may now expect a little reaction. The public, just because it was rapturous and enthusiastic, will now become minutely critical and take you to pieces anatomically. This is to be kept in view, although it need cause you no uneasiness, for you have only followed your natural bent, and have made no external demonstration which did not answer to the truth of your inner nature. It is only the man who presents an artificial demeanour to the world, who has to dread being unmasked.

“Your place is that of your husband’s wife, and of your mother’s daughter. You will desire nothing else, but you will also forego nothing of that which you owe to your husband and to your mother. Ultimately your mind will, from the over-excitement, fall back to a little lassitude and sadness. But this will make you feel a craving for activity, and you have much to do, in studying your new country, its tendencies and its people, and in over-looking your household as a good housewife, with punctuality, method, and vigilant care. To success in the affairs of life, apportionment of time is essential, and I hope you will make this your first care, so that you may always have some time over for the fulfilment of every duty.”

Baron Stockmar had also been watching the details of the Princess’s reception in her new country with anxious interest. He, too, saw the danger of a reaction, and he wrote a letter to the Prince Consort, in reply to which the father, after commending the Princess’s tact, said:

“The enthusiasm with which she seems to have been everywhere received exceeds our utmost calculations and hopes, and proves that the people approved the idea of this alliance, and have found Vicky in herself answer to their expectations. It is only now, indeed, the difficulties of her life will begin, and after the excitement of the festivities a certain melancholy will come over the poor child, however happy she may feel with her husband. With marriage, a new life has opened for her, and you would have marvelled at the sudden change and development which even here became at once apparent.

“We, that is, she and I, have, I think, remained, and I believe will remain, the same to one another. She continues to set great store by my advice and my confidence; I do not thrust them upon her, but I am always ready to give them. During this time of troubles she has written less to me, and communicated the details of her life, and what she is doing, more to her mother. I had arranged this with her, but I hold her promise to impart to me faithfully the progress of her inner life, and on the other hand have given her mine, to take a constantly active part in fostering it. You may be sure I will not fail in this, as I see in it merely the fulfilment of a sacred duty.

“What you say about an early visit had already been running in my head, and I will frankly explain what we think on this subject. Victoria and I are both desirous to have a meeting with the young couple, somewhere or other in the course of the year, having moreover given them a promise that we would. This could only be in the autumn. A rendezvous on the Rhine—for example at Coblentz—would probably be the right thing. This does not exclude a flying visit by myself alone, which, if it is to be of any use, must be paid earlier in the year. How and where we could see each other I have naturally weighed, and am myself doubtful whether Berlin is the appropriate place for me. I have therefore come to the conclusion that I might go to Coburg, and give the young people a rendezvous there.”

The Princess Royal spent her first winter in Berlin in the Old Schloss. The castle had not been lived in for a considerable time, and to one accustomed to the even then high standard of English living and hygiene, it must have seemed almost mediæval in its lack of comfort, and of what the Princess had been brought up to regard as the bare necessities of life—light, warmth, and plenty of hot water.

The young couple were allotted a suite of splendidly decorated but very dark and gloomy rooms; and none of the passages or staircases were heated. The Princess, who had always been encouraged to turn her quick mind to practical matters, and who delighted in creating and in making, found her way blocked at every turn owing to the fact that nothing could be done in the Old Schloss without the direct permission of the King. Not only was Frederick William IV in a very bad and mentally peculiar state of health, but to him and to his Queen any attempt to change or modify anything in the ancient pile of buildings where his predecessor had lived savoured of sacrilege. To give one instance, King Frederick William III had died in the very suite of rooms allotted to the Prince and Princess, and his children had piously preserved the “death-chamber,” as it was still called, in exactly the same state as it was on the day of his death. This room was situated next to the Princess’s boudoir, and every time she went to her bedroom or dressing-room she was obliged to pass through it.

The Old Schloss was widely believed to be haunted, not only by the “White Lady” but by other ghosts, and the door between the Princess Royal’s boudoir and the “death-chamber” would sometimes open by itself. One winter evening, the Princess and one of her ladies were sitting together in the boudoir. The lady, who was reading aloud, raised her eyes and suddenly saw the door of the death-chamber, which was covered, like the walls, with blue silk, open noiselessly, as if pushed by an invisible hand. She stopped reading abruptly. The Princess asked nervously, “What’s happened? Do you see anything?” The lady answered, “Nothing, ma’am,” and, getting up, shut the door.

But it would be absurd to suppose that the Princess allowed the ungraciousness of the King and the material discomforts which surrounded her at this time to cloud the beginning of a singularly happy married life. She threw herself with eager zest into her husband’s interests, and for the time she seemed completely merged in him. Having regard to the mental equipment and demands of the Princess, it is obvious that she found in her husband great intellectual gifts. The theory that the Prince was wholly influenced by his wife, who took the lead in all, cannot be maintained. He was nine years older than the Princess, who was little more than a child when they married, and his character and outlook were formed long before. His uncle, Duke Ernest, testifies on the contrary, to the influence which the Prince exerted over his wife.

It must, however, be acknowledged that Prince Frederick William, especially in these early days, agreed with the Princess in regarding England as a perfect country with a perfect constitution. He was deeply grateful to her for having left an ideally happy home to become his wife, and his entire devotion was shown in many ways. Indeed, the only thing in which the Prince Frederick William of these days seems to have ever withstood the Princess Royal was in his refusal to give up his solitary evening walk in the streets of Berlin. The Princess used to go to bed quite early, and then the Prince would go out and walk about quite unattended.

Years later, in reference to her domestic happiness, the Empress wrote feelingly to a friend: “The peace and blessed calm that I ever found in my home, by the side of my beloved husband, when powerful influences from outside were first distressing me, are blessings which I cannot describe.”

Some of the conditions of the Princess Royal’s new life were undoubtedly very irksome to her. The tone of the Prussian Court in matters, not only of religion and politics, but also of etiquette, was very much narrower than that of the English Court. She seems to have found it impossible to guard her tongue, to conceal her convictions, or to hold aloof from political discussion. At “home,” as she soon very unwisely began to call England, she had been used to say everything she thought from childhood upwards, sure of not being misunderstood, and reticence would have seemed to her mean, if not absolutely dishonest.

But it is difficult to say when the Prussian reactionary party first became aware that in the bride of Prince Frederick William they had a determined and a brilliant opponent. It must, however, have been fairly early, for it is on record that during that first winter in Berlin “the very approach of a Tory or a reactionary seemed to freeze her up.”

Nor is it easy to see how much the Princess’s father, watching anxiously from England, knew of this. She continued with unabated enthusiasm those historical and literary studies to which the Prince Consort had accustomed her, and she wrote him a weekly letter, asking his advice on political questions. She wrote to her mother daily, sometimes twice a day, but it was her father’s influence which really counted with her, and that remained quite unimpaired. It is reasonable to suppose that he attributed whatever seemed to annoy and distress her in Prussian public life to the still paramount influence of the dying King. But he evidently did not at any time realise that, though factious persons might be ready enough to use her in their own interests, no one in Prussia really wanted to see a Princess dabbling in politics at all. Thus, we find the Prince writing to Stockmar in March 1858:

“From Berlin the tenor of the news continues excellent. Vicky appears to go on pleasing, and being pleased. She is an extremely fortunate, animating, and tranquillising element in that region of conflict and indecision.”

And again:

“Brunnow had reckoned upon Moustier from Berlin, whom he would have had in his pocket, and through him Walewski. Now he gets the Duke of Malakoff! He has not yet been able to realise the position, and is by way of being extremely confidential; it is he alone who has made Vicky’s marriage popular in Berlin, where it was at first very unpopular, and he weeps tears of emotion when he speaks of her!”

To the Princess herself he wrote also in March: