Daughters of Queen Victoria: Vicky, Alice, and Helena

I

IN the summer of 1861, Queen Victoria and her family went up to Balmoral. Crown Prince Frederick and Vicky came over to England in June and remained for nearly two months. Prince Louis, the fiancé of Princess Alice, joined the party and stayed till the middle of October. With her husband and her family surrounding and ministering to her, the Queen recovered the sense of happiness her marriage had brought her, and that supreme content began to obliterate the loss of her mother. ‘Every year,’she once wrote in her Journal, ‘my heart becomes more fixed in this dear Paradise, and so much more now that all has become my dear Albert’s own creation, own work, own building, own laying out as at Osborne, and his great taste and the impress of his dear hand has been stamped everywhere.’ With him beside her, the pleasures and interests of life resumed their savor.

The Prince of Wales came for a few days of holiday before going to Cambridge for the October term, having studied German military life in Berlin, and on the way home having seen the young lady who had been put at the head of the list of eligible Princesses — Alexandra of Denmark. They were pleased with each other, they accepted the destiny their respective parents had framed for them, and the matter was regarded as settled. The Prince Consort explained to his son that his marriage would be unpopular in Germany, for Germany felt she had a monopoly of supplying wives to the Royal House. Bertie must therefore be very tactful, and very dutiful towards his innumerable German cousins. The Prince Consort was disappointed with the unintelligent way his son received these counsels, and he could only report to Stockmar that Bertie seemed to understand him ‘as well as a boy of his age and capacity could.'

King Frederick William of Prussia, who had been insane for two years, had died in January. The coronation of King William took place in October, and the Crown Princess’s daily letter to her mother gave a most minute account of it: the costumes of her ladies in waiting, one in blue velvet, the other in red velvet, and herself in gold and ermine and white; the loud singing of chorales, the drafts, and the bitter cold; the huge number of guests at the State Banquet; the moment when, at the end of the second course, the King asked for wine, which was the signal for all ladies and gentlemen in waiting to leave the room; the four hundred servants in livery belonging to the assembled royalties.

The Prince Consort now began putting in hand the arrangements for the wedding of Princess Alice. She had been engaged for nearly a year; Parliament months ago had granted her dowry and annuity; and there was no longer any reasonable cause for delay. He selected a household for her suitable to what he considered her narrow means. With that passion for perfection in detail which was so characteristic of him, he had already rejected the stock designs for the lace on her bridal veil, and Honiton was at work on patterns of more meaning.

The English autumn always tried the Prince Consort’s health; this year, however, he seemed to feel it less than usual, and was full of engagements that constantly took him away from Windsor for tiring days. He began to suffer from general fatigue aggravated by sleeplessness. Towards the end of November he caught a chill, and made it worse by traveling down to Cambridge on a bitter day to see General Bruce: the Prince of Wales had not been behaving as the heir to the throne should. The doctors thought at first the Prince Consort had only a touch of rheumatism; they then diagnosed his illness as influenza; and it was not till he had been ill nearly three weeks that they pronounced that he had typhoid fever. But there were no unfavorable symptoms; the doctors encouraged the Queen to believe that the illness was running a normal course, and that there was no need for anxiety. He suddenly took a turn for the worse; the Prince of Wales was sent for; but the end came swiftly, and the Prince Consort died on December 14, 1861.

II

Throughout this illness Princess Alice had been her mother’s chief support, and now she took upon herself the whole burden of the tragedy. She slept in the Queen’s room, she saw the Ministers of the Crown, she made herself responsible for all immediate arrangements; and, most difficult of all, she managed to reach, by the mere force of love and sympathy, that stricken heart. She put aside her own grief for the father whom she had adored, and devoted herself body and soul to her mother. So complete was her self-surrendering service that Prince Louis thought she might decide to break off her engagement to him. During those first days, had it not been for Alice, the Queen might have irretrievably collapsed.

Once more Victoria turned to Uncle Leopold. ‘I am anxious,’ she wrote, ‘to repeat one thing, and that one is my firm resolve, my irrevocable decision, viz. that his wishes, his plans about everything, his views about every thing are to be my law. And no human power will make me swerve from what he decided and wished, and I look to you to support and help me in this. I apply this particularly as regards our children — Bertie &c. — for whose future he has traced everything so carefully. I am also determined that no one person, may he be ever so good, ever so devoted among my servants — is to lead or guide or dictate to me. . . . Though miserably weak and utterly shattered, my spirit rises when I think that any wish or plan of his is to be changed, or that I am to be made to do anything.’

The Queen remained at Osborne for more than two months after the Prince Consort’s death, and this seclusion began to form itself into the habit which eventually became so disastrous. A Council was held there in January, but it was so arranged that she need not meet its members face to face. However, she gave all diligence to such work as could be done in complete privacy. She read with the utmost care the dispatches that were sent her, and more than once complained that they did not contain sufficient comment and guidance to enable her to make the decisions which she must now arrive at without her husband’s counsel. She felt sure that she could not live long, and the future of her children occupied her.

But she never deviated from what she regarded as a sacred and immediate duty — namely, to follow out the plans which the Prince Consort had made for his children. The first of these was the foreign tour that he had arranged for the Prince of Wales. He had sketched out the programme for this with the Prince’s Governor, General Bruce. Certain fêtes and entertainments must now be canceled owing to Bertie’s deep mourning, and, since this was to be a long absence, General Bruce was instructed to keep the thought of Princess Alexandra constantly before him. The party, with Dr. A. P. Stanley as Chaplain, left England in February, as had been already planned, and traveled for four months.

Princess Alice’s long-delayed marriage to Prince Louis was the next duty. It was celebrated at Osborne on July 1, 1862, soon after the Prince of Wales’s return from his tour. But every note of joy was muted. Though the girl was to be united to this admirable young man whom she devotedly loved, and who had been welcomed by her mother as an ideal son-in-law, the wedding was to the Queen more like a memorial service for her own husband, and the account of it in her Journal is heartbreaking.

Early in the morning she heard the muffled knockings in preparation for the ‘sad marriage.’ Alice came to see her, and she gave her daughter a Prayer Book, like that her mother had given her for her own ‘happy marriage.’ They breakfasted alone and went to look at the dining room which the knockings had converted into a chapel. Over the altar was hung a family picture by Winterhalter: Albert’s hand was stretched out as if blessing them. The arrangement of the cushions and chairs in blue cloth, and of the curved altar rails, was as at her own wedding. Only a few relatives had been bidden — Prince Louis’s two brothers and his parents, Albert’s brother Ernest, Prince and Princess Augustus of Saxe-Coburg, Princess Feodore Hohenlohe (Victoria’s own half sister), and the Crown Prince of Prussia; and they breakfasted together in the Council Chamber, where hung a picture of the Queen’s wedding which she had sent for specially from Windsor. Alice came to see her mother in her wedding dress, with its flounce of Honiton lace and the corresponding pattern on her veil, which Albert had ordered. Whatever Victoria looked on reminded her of her own sorrow.

Her four sons conducted her to the chapel before anybody but the clergy was there, and took her to her armchair close to the altar; the two eldest stood between her and the seats for the congregation, so that nobody could see her. The Duke of Coburg gave his niece away, since the Prince of Wales, who would naturally have done so, was shielding his mother from the eyes of her relatives. Even the bridegroom found no place in this sad, stricken soul, for the Queen recorded that ‘when all was over dearest Alice, who was wonderfully calm, embraced me, who was all she had.’ When everybody had left the chapel the Queen rose and, accompanied by her sons, went to the Horn Room, the walls of which were covered with the antlers of Albert’s stags, and dreadful scenes of weeping took place.

The bridal couple went off for their honeymoon to a house lent them in the Isle of Wight, and after leaving them to themselves for one day the Queen drove over from Osborne to have tea, making a long detour to avoid being seen in Ryde. Bride and bridegroom came back to Osborne for three days before they left for Darmstadt, and at length, on her last night, Alice cried bitterly too. ‘I strove,’ wrote the Queen, ‘ to cheer her up by the prospect of an early return.’

III

After Princess Alice’s marriage the Queen, still in the strictest seclusion, went up to Balmoral, accompanied by her three younger daughters and sons, and took in hand the accomplishment of the third of the Prince Consort’s arrangements for his children, writing to the father of Princess Alexandra and obtaining his formal permission for the Prince of Wales to propose marriage to her. The Queen had not yet seen Alexandra; and now she went to stay with Uncle Leopold at Laeken, where the Princess and her parents came for her inspection. It was a terrible ordeal to receive them without Albert’s support, but the beauty, the charm, the simplicity and dignity of the girl instantly won her heart, and the Prince was sent for from England to speak for himself, while his mother went on to Coburg to revisit the scenes of Albert’s youth. Bertie was accepted, and the Queen herself worded the announcement in the English newspapers. ‘The revered Prince Consort, whose sole object was the education and welfare of his children, had long been convinced that this was a most desirable marriage.’ For her that was a sacred ordinance, but Germany in general, and Prussia in particular, were schismatic, and the fact that the Crown Princess Frederick was known to have taken a hand in the match added to her growing unpopularity.

This feeling against the Crown Princess was aggravated by the arrival in Berlin of Bismarck and the inauguration of what might be called his reign of twenty-eight years. He at once showed that the principles on which he intended to govern were precisely the opposite of the liberal policies which she and her husband stood for. In his first speech in the Reichstag he declared that parliamentary government was dead: autocracy — which meant his autocracy endorsed by the King — had superseded it, and the implements were blood and iron. For the Crown Prince and Princess he had nothing but a shrug of his vast shoulders: as long as the King lived, these Anglo-Coburgs were next to negligible. But he kept his eye on them. The Engländerin had not left the Englishwoman at home, and her influence over her husband was paramount. Nor could he forget that the Engländerin’s mother was Queen of England.

The Queen wanted to see more of her future daughter-in-law and have some quiet, serious conversation with her, and she also wanted to give the Prince of Wales something to do to occupy his spare time, of which he had twenty-four hours ever day. Moreover, she did not think it desirable that the two young people should see too much of each other before their marriage. They might, as Melbourne had once suggested to her, find traits in each other which they did not like. So she lent her yacht, asked Vicky and Fritz to cruise with Bertie in the Mediterranean, and signified her wish that Alexandra should spend ten days with her at Osborne.

The Princess’s father, Prince Christian, brought her over, and then was sent away again, for the Queen was not equal to entertaining an adult royal guest, for whom she might have to alter her way of life; moreover these conversations with his daughter concerned him, and were better held in his absence.

These ten days at Osborne must have been a frightful experience for the girl, for she and her brothers and sisters were used to a gay and rather romping family life (she herself turned ‘cartwheels’ across a room with the utmost ease and elegance), and here the unremitting gloom of the Queen’s widowhood darkened the house, and anything like laughter or lightness was out of the question in her hostess’s presence. Every day the Queen took solitary drives with her or sent for her, and explained to her, as Albert had previously explained to Bertie, the supreme dynastic importance of not offending Germany and her future husband’s innumerable German relations. Tact was required, and it may safely be said that what Princess Alexandra did not instinctively know on that subject was not worth learning. The girl had, too, a rare power of sympathy and comprehension, and there sprang up between the two a warm and abiding affection.

The Queen now had a personal interview with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Thanks to the masterly management of the Prince Consort, the estates of the Duchy of Cornwall, which at the Prince of Wales’s birth had only been worth £13,000 a year, now yielded £62,000, and the Sandringham estate had been purchased out of accumulated capital. Gladstone proposed to bring the Prince’s income up to £100,000, with a separate income for Princess Alexandra of £10,000, to be increased, in case of her widowhood, to £30,000. The Queen thought this a meagre provision; supposing the Prince died, leaving a family of young children, how could their mother bring them up on £30,000 a year? Gladstone agreed that in such a deplorable event a fresh provision would have to be made.

The wedding was celebrated at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, where no royal wedding had been held since that of Henry I. Westminster Abbey or the Chapel Royal at St. James’s would have been more suitable for the marriage of the heir to the throne; but that would have entailed a public appearance in London for the Queen, and was therefore impossible. To her it was just such another revival of heart-rending memories as the wedding of Princess Louis had been, and she would have liked the marriage to take place on February 10, the anniversary of her own wedding day, in order to link up those memories with an intenser poignancy. She did not put off her widow’s mourning for the day, nor did she go into the chapel herself, but sat withdrawn in a gallery above the chancel, so that she need not face the wedding guests.

After the wedding the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia went home, but that devoted and unselfish couple, Prince and Princess Louis, still stayed on. Princess Louis was soon to have her first child, but the Queen did not see the slightest cause for their leaving her because of that: rather it was a reason for their remaining. If a boy, the baby would be in the direct succession to the Grand Duchy of Hesse, but Windsor was Alice’s ancestral home just as much as Darmstadt was Louis’s. So the baby was born at Windsor, and, as it was a girl, it was christened Victoria, and the parents stayed there till the middle of May. Alice, after parting with her mother, wrote the warmest and most affectionate letter of thanks for the Queen’s kindness to herself and her husband and her baby.

IV

In the year 1863, Bismarck took an important Fascist step in establishing the autocracy of himself and the Crown by abolishing the freedom of the press. The Crown Prince and his wife were at Danzig, on a tour of military inspection, when this was announced. Neither of them had had any idea that such a step was contemplated, and she urged him to write to the King, plainly stating that he entirely disapproved of such a measure and to send a copy of this protest to Bismarck. The same day the Bürgermeister of Danzig, a man of strong liberal views, was to make a speech at the Rathaus, at which the Crown Prince would be present, and he suggested that he should allude to this measure in such a way as would give the Crown Prince an opportunity in his reply of saying how repugnant such a step was to his principles, and this he did. The King was justifiably furious at his son’s having expressed his personal disapproval of a measure to which he himself had already given his assent, and ordered him publicly to withdraw what he had publicly stated. This, with the enthusiastic backing of his wife, he refused to do, and a violent quarrel, which set up a permanent estrangement between father and son, was the result.

The Queen thought that Fritz had been quite right in making this public protest against Bismarck’s tyrannical measure, and approved of Vicky’s having induced him to do so. But she did not ask herself what she would have done if an analogous incident had occurred in England — if the Prince of Wales under the influence of his foreign wife had publicly protested, at some mayoral function in Manchester, against an Act of Parliament which had received her assent. She would doubtless have treated them exactly as King William of Prussia had treated his son and daughter-in-law. She would have given Bertie a tremendous wigging, and then taken no further notice of such a silly prank.

The Schleswig-Holstein question that culminated in the Danish war early in 1864 led to somewhat sharp differences of opinion between the Queen and her daughters. Briefly, there were three claimants to the Duchies: the King of Denmark, to the throne of which the Princess of Wales’s father had now succeeded as King Christian IX; Duke Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg; and Prussia in alliance with Austria. Prussia’s claim was that Schleswig was mainly German in population and Holstein entirely so, being also a member of the German Confederation. A slight invalidity in the claim of Duke Frederick was that his father had sold (and been paid for) his family rights to the late King of Denmark.

The Queen hovered at first between the claims of Prussia and of Duke Frederick, but as the Prince Consort had decided that neither Denmark nor the Augustenburg family had any rights, she plumped for Prussia. The Crown Prince and Princess, on the other hand, were supporters of Duke Frederick, as was also liberal feeling in Hanover, Coburg, and other German states. Finally, the Prince and Princess of Wales were ardent pro-Danes, and English popular sympathy was on their side on the general grounds that a tiny kingdom was being brutally bullied by two very powerful kingdoms. When, therefore, the family was assembled at Windsor in December, domestic conversation was animated. Vicky was voluble for Duke Frederick, the Queen found a memorandum of the Prince Consort’s on the subject and was pontifically Prussian, and Alix continued to say: ‘The Duchies belong to Papa.’ No arguments were of any use, and so the Queen signified that they had better talk about something else. The Crown Princess went back to Berlin unshaken in her belief in the Augustenburg claim, and the Princess of Wales, amid national rejoicings, gave birth to a son.

Immediately afterward Bismarck sent an ultimatum to Denmark to evacuate Schleswig within twenty-four hours; war followed. The Crown Prince went to the front and his wife abandoned Duke Frederick and automatically became as Prussian as Bismarck himself. The whole rights of the question were miraculously revealed to her. ‘It is impossible,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘to blame an English person for not understanding the Schleswig-Holstein question — it remains nevertheless to us Germans plain and simple as daylight.’ As for the pro-Danish sympathies expressed in the British Parliament and the press, they were ‘absurd, unjust, rude and violent.’ ‘The continual meddling and interfering of England in other people’s affairs has become so ridiculous abroad that it almost ceases to annoy. But to an English heart it is no pleasant sight to see the dignity of one’s country so compromised and let down — its influence so completely lost.’

The Queen was far better pleased with her daughter-in-law. It was only natural that she should hold that her Papa had been robbed of his Duchies; but, whatever she might say in the privacy of the family circle, she could be perfectly trusted to be discreet in public, and the Queen willingly let her go to Denmark when the war was over to visit her parents, whom she had not seen since her marriage. But the Prince of Wales had been very indiscreet with official personages; he had openly asked the French Ambassador in London whether France had pro-Prussian leanings, and he had written to various English Ministers rejoicing in small Danish successes. The Queen had already punished him by directing that no dispatches from the seat of war should be sent him, so that he knew no more about it than he could read in the public press, and now she refused to let him go to Denmark with his wife until he solemnly promised to be more careful. Lest Germany should feel slighted, the Queen insisted that they both should visit other relatives there. They thus had a glimpse of Vicky and Fritz at Cologne, but that was less a reunion than an encounter. ‘It was not pleasant,’ he wrote to one of his Household, ’to see him [the Crown Prince] and his A. D. C. always in Prussian uniform, flaunting before our eyes a most objectionable ribbon which he received for his deeds of valour (???) against the unhappy Danes.’

V

Prince and Princess Louis had spent two months at Balmoral in the autumn before the Danish war broke out, and on her return to Darmstadt she resumed that diligent correspondence with the Queen which contrasts strangely with the bombardments from Berlin which her mother did not wholly relish. It is easy to see why the Queen set such store on the companionship of this gentle daughter, for her letters show how enchanting her presence must have been. She had the spontaneous pen which portrays and invests the merest trivialities with the thrilled interest she herself took in them.

She was busy over Christmas festivities and made a Christmas tree for her servants, buying their presents and hanging them there herself, and Baby had a small tree of her own, all her very own, at her grandparents’ house. A turkey pie had arrived from Windsor: she and Louis were giving a dinner party in its honor. There was a long frost and she skated; the only other lady in Darmstadt who could skate at all was a very poor performer. She and Louis went to the theatre three or four times a week — like her mother, she loved a play — and had to dine at five in the afternoon. The building of their new house got on apace. . . . Then, without transition, — for everything to her was part of life itself, — she wrote of intimate things; of her conviction, growing ever stronger, that to live for others is the only key to happiness, and yet ‘self constantly turns up like a bad sixpence.’

Her second daughter, Elizabeth, to be known as Ella, was born in November; there was a momentary disappointment over the sex, but two little girls would make a very pretty pair.

And for the New Year of 1865 she wrote a gem of a letter, recalling memories of her girlhood: —

That bright happy past, particularly those last years when I was the eldest at home, and had the privilege of being so much with you both, my own dearly loved parents, is a remembrance deeply graven and with letters of gold upon my heart. All the morning I was telling Louis how it used to be at home, and how we all assembled outside your dressingroom door to scream in chorus ‘Prosit Neujahr!’ and to give to you and Papa our drawings, writings, &c., the busy occupation of previous weeks. Then playing and reciting our pieces where we often stuck fast, and dear Papa bit his lip so as not to laugh; our walk to the Riding-school [when the alms to the poor of Windsor were distributed] and then to Frogmore. Those were happy days, and the very remembrance of them must bring a gleam of sunshine even to you, dear Mama. . . .

But, in spite of the intense happiness of her married life, Princess Louis had gone through disagreeable experiences at Darmstadt during the last two years, analogous to those which her sister had encountered in Berlin, and she felt them bitterly. There was prejudice against her because she was English, and, in especial, because she had been spending so much of the year in her native land. This feeling was not altogether to be wondered at. During the first year of her married life she and her husband had been five months with the Queen, and their first child had been born at Windsor. During the next year they had both been in England for over four months; her baby’s name was English and her private secretary, Dr. Becker, had been librarian to the Prince Consort . The dilemma was similar to her sister’s, for Darmstadt suspected Anglicization, and the Queen thought that her daughter and son-in-law ought to be with her more.

VI

The Queen’s third daughter, Princess Helena, would be nineteen in the spring of 1865, and her mother began to look out for a husband. Two years before she had specified to Uncle Leopold the qualification she would require for a sonin-law when the time came: she wanted a sensible and moral young prince, not necessarily of a reigning house, who would make his home with her, for she could not part with her daughter. Uncle Leopold, who had great experience in matchmaking, for he had been chief matrimonial agent for Coburgs since the time when he had been so largely instrumental in marrying his own sister to the Duke of Kent, had suggested a very suitable candidate. This was Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, the younger brother of Duke Frederick, who had been one of the claimants for the Duchies. The Danish war and the appropriation of these territories by Austria and Prussia had left the brothers without a country of their own, and Bismarck, who delighted to humiliate fallen foes, however powerless, had deprived them of their commissions in the German armies.

Victoria was not at all pleased with Prussia just now. Bismarck was determined to grab both Duchies, depriving her ally of Holstein, as had been arranged between them by the Convention of Gastein; and the situation, if he persisted, threatened to become extremely dangerous. The Queen’s pro-Prussian sympathies had evaporated, for this bellicose, blood-and-iron Prussia was not the peaceful, powerful, but liberallyminded Prussia of which Albert had dreamed; and she wrote to her uncle: ‘Prussia seems inclined to behave as atrociously as possible, and as she always has done. Odious people the Prussians are, that I must say.' The King had also offended her personally; he had refused to let the Crown Prince and Princess come to stay with her at Balmoral this year in the autumn, though Vicky had made a moving appeal to him. That seemed to the Queen a most tyrannical act, and she intended to write him a very firm letter on the subject. She suspected, too, that her project of marrying her daughter to the brother of the dispossessed Duke Frederick would be interpreted as an open manifestation of her anti-Prussian feelings, but that was quite irrelevant. The marriage concerned nobody but the Family, and indeed it concerned nobody but her daughter and herself. If Princess Helena accepted the proposed bridegroom and if she herself approved of him as a son-inlaw, there was nothing more to be said.

The Queen went out to Coburg in August to stay with her brother-in-law for the purpose of unveiling a statue of the Prince Consort. For this unveiling of the statue the Queen had assembled twenty-four of her German relatives, including the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, and she brought Princess Helena with her. She had asked Prince Christian to come to Coburg, and found him ‘pleasing, gentlemanlike, quiet and distinguished.’ Princess Helena as yet knew nothing about the matrimonial project, but she was greatly pleased with him, and the Queen asked him to Windsor so that the two should get to know each other better. But she regarded the matter as settled, and felt sure the Prince Consort would have approved. One only had to be firm, and the thing was done.

She was delighted also to find that her firm letter to the King of Prussia about Vicky and Fritz coming to Balmoral had been equally successful. He allowed it profusely, and was most anxious to stand well with her, and begged for an interview. She did not want to see him at all, but Queen Augusta was most anxious that she should; and after an exchange of numerous telegrams, which crossed each other in a most provoking manner, she consented to meet him again at the Grand Duke of Hesse’s palace at Darmstadt, on her way back to England. The interview was not productive of much, for, after he kept her waiting for half an hour, they talked about the weather for another half-hour. But perhaps that was as well, for there were few important topics on which they took the same views.

She went back to the dear Highland home; once more all her daughters were with her, and Princess Helena’s engagement was publicly announced. Since the Prince Consort’s death the Queen had never opened Parliament, but at the session in the spring of 1866 there was a very special reason for her doing so, since she intended to ask her Commons to make provision for her daughter on her marriage, and for her second son Prince Alfred on his coming of age. So strong now was the feeling in the country against her continued seclusion that her Government feared that unless she went in person these grants might be refused, and, though she compared the ordeal to being led to execution, she went. The usual dowry of £30,000 and an annuity of £6000 were granted to Princess Helena, and to Prince Alfred — setting a decent precedent for younger sons — an annuity of £15,000.

The war between Prussia, with Italy as an ally, and Austria had now been successfully engineered by Bismarck, and it broke out in June. Austria suffered an overwhelming defeat at Königgrätz on July 3, and there remained the German States to be settled with. The Prussians crossed the Hessian frontier; there was fighting at Aschaffenburg, and the sound of the guns was heard in Darmstadt. In two days the Hessians lost eight hundred men, but no serious resistance was possible or even contemplated, and they retreated.

On the outbreak of war Princess Louis had sent her two daughters, Victoria and Elizabeth, to England to stay with their grandmother; they attended their Aunt Helena’s wedding, for which the Queen provided them with new frocks. The Princess herself remained at Darmstadt, for in a few weeks she was expecting another baby. She wanted to remain as far as possible in touch with her husband, who was in command of a brigade of Hessian cavalry; and her mother-in-law, whose three sons were all serving, was in sore need of her companionship and support . Equipment was urgently needed for field hospitals, as Hesse had been utterly unprepared for the war, and Princess Louis was busy collecting sheets, old linen, and rags, and was making shirts. She begged her mother to send her any discarded stuff from Osborne or Windsor, for the need was fearful. The next month she gave birth to a third daughter, but within a few weeks she was visiting the hospitals again, looking after the sick and wounded.

Before the end of July the Prussian troops entered Darmstadt as conquerors, with bands playing and banners flying, and remained there till an armistice was declared and the terms of peace settled. They commandeered whatever they wanted; they forbade any communication with Hessian troops still in the field; and the villages round were in a lamentable plight, for they pillaged right and left. The hospitals were full to overflowing. Princess Louis’s letters to her mother during these weeks were wretchedly unhappy, but Louis, still with his brigade, was well and unwounded, and he was idolized by his men for his personal bravery and his cheerful sharing of their privations. An armistice at last was granted: Louis returned to Darmstadt, and the two daughters from England.

The terms of peace were harsh. The Grand Duke of Hesse was deprived of the Hinterland and the Domains and the whole of Hesse-Hamburg; and Hesse was terribly impoverished. But not a hint of bitterness appeared in the Princess’s letters. ‘If only,’ she wrote, ‘the other sovereigns [Saxony and Hanover and Hesse-Cassel] will forget their antipathies and the wrongs they have suffered from Prussia, and think of the welfare of their people and the universal fatherland, and make those sacrifices which will be necessary to prevent the recurrence of these misfortunes!’

So the new baby was christened Irene, and they settled down to the quiet and much straitened life in Darmstadt. Princess Louis was not well: her confinement and the months of anxiety had tried her strength, and every evening found her desperately tired. She had wanted to get away for a change, but they could not afford the expense.

VII

Crown Princess Frederick looked on the war from a very different angle to that of her sister; it could not have been otherwise. While Bismarck in the previous spring had been engaged in making trouble with Austria, in order to secure for Prussia the sole possession of the Duchies, she regarded him as a monster. ‘Not a day passes,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘that the wicked man does not with the greatest ability counteract and thwart what is good, and drive on towards war, turning and twisting everything to serve his own purpose.’ That was a perfectly just view, and she never wavered from it.

But war having once begun, and her husband at the front, her sympathies were wholly with Prussia. Swiftly there followed the great victories of her husband’s army, and her pride in him was coupled with her admiration of his troops.

She could share neither her mother’s sympathy with those German States which had sided with Austria nor her indignation at their treatment. She pitied their miserable plight, but it was their own fault. She wrote: ‘At this sad time one must separate one’s feelings for one’s relations quite from one’s judgment of political necessities. . . . Those who are now in such precarious positions might have quite well foreseen what danger they were running into: they were told beforehand what they would have to expect: they chose to go with Austria and now they share the sad fate she confers on her Allies. . . . I cannot and will not forget that I am a Prussian, but as such I know it is very difficult to make you, or any other non-German, see how our case lies.’ But once again this perfect understanding of the true position, similar to that which had enlightened her in the Danish war and equally outside the comprehension of all except Prussians, did not do anything for the Crown Princess in Berlin.

(To be continued)