Daughters of Queen Victoria: A Family at Swords' Points

I

PRINCESS HELENA’S marriage to Prince Christian in 1866 had secured for the Queen the desired son-in-law who would live in England, but the young couple did not make their principal home with her, as she had originally planned, for the rest of her lifetime. She gave Frogmore to them as their residence (it was close to Windsor Castle), and for occupation she made her son-in-law Ranger of Windsor Park. She had still two daughters living with her, — Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice, — and her youngest son, Prince Leopold, whose extreme delicacy precluded any active profession.

Twice a year the Queen made long sojourns at Balmoral; it was there she felt most comfortable, and the remoteness, the brisk air, her drives and picnics and sketchings, and the freedom from any heartless calls that could be made on her by Prime Ministers were beginning to build up again the nervous system which she was almost anxious to prove was hopelessly shattered. She had a great friend there, Dr. Norman Macleod, the Minister of the Kirk at Crathie; she found his sermons full of consolation, and talked to him intimately about herself. Albert, she said, had worn himself out by never allowing himself any relaxation. Relaxation was necessary for her, and Dr. Macleod very tactfully entreated her always to come to Balmoral to get it. Till his death in 1872 she looked on him as a man on whose understanding and sympathy she could always rely.

The Queen derived great comfort from the constant attendance of her manservant, John Brown, with her now not at Balmoral only, but at Windsor also, and the need for a resident son-in-law was less insistent. What she had wanted was some active, reliable man without other duties than to attend to her, and she found him in this devoted attendant without whom she never left the house, and who became a pervasive element in family life, perhaps not always wholly welcome. But he suited her.

Queen Victoria was one of the kindest women in the world to those who looked after her personally. She knew all about their relations and their family history; she did not treat them, when once they had earned her confidence, as servants so much as friends, and she looked upon their performance of their duties as acts of kindness to herself.

It is the very triviality of the innumerable references to Brown in More Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the Highlands which defines the nature of his services to the Queen. He accompanied her everywhere; he walked by her pony when she rode and by her side when she was on foot. One rainy day his kilt got wet and chafed his knees behind; he had to take care of himself, and her doctor ordered him to keep his leg up. She walked with him through her Palace at Holyrood, and he was much interested in Queen Mary’s rooms; afterwards she sat under a hawthorn tree and read the poems of the Ettrick Shepherd from the volume which Brown had given her. On the anniversary of the Prince Consort’s birthday, when she made presents to all her upper servants, she gave Brown his present with the rest of them. ‘The tears,’ she wrote, ‘came into his eyes and he said “It is too much.” God knows it is not for one so devoted and faithful.’

The very fact that Brown was not in the least afraid of the Queen pleased her, for formidable people usually dislike the timidity which they inspire in others. She appreciated in him the independence of the Highland character which the Prince Consort had so much admired, and she allowed him to treat her with a brusqueness which she would not have permitted from anybody else. He told her to put on her cloak or to sit on a rug, or to make up her mind which way she wanted to drive. At Glassault Shiel she asked for a table at which to sketch; one was too low, another too high, and it looked as if she would never make her sketch at all till Brown told her she must manage with one of them, for they could n’t make a new table for her now. He knew he was indispensable and treated her Ministers and her Court with bumpkin familiarity, with doffings and pats on the back if they were respectful to him, and the rudest speeches and contradiction if they failed.

Behind his bad manners the Queen saw and rightly valued Brown’s genuine devotion to herself. Moreover he gave her day by day that sense of security and protection of which she stood so sorely in need, and we may regard him as administering to her, by the mere fact of his constant and reliable presence, some sort of rasping and comforting tonic which without doubt had by degrees the most beneficial effect on the hypochondria which caused her seclusion. He helped to build up the confidence that enabled her to face her duties again.

Presently, however, another physician with a more deliberate purpose and subtler technique was treating her on diametrically opposite lines; and while Dr. Brown of Balmoral was short and sharp with her, Dr. Disraeli of Downing Street plied her with fantastic visions of herself as the Faëry Queen whose presence in the Isle of Wight caused the primroses to burst into blossom. The treatments wore not antagonistic, but each supplemented the other. Her recovery was largely due to them.

II

Ominous clouds soon gathered up again after the war between Germany and Austria. Bismarck, like some baleful invisible witch, was brewing them in his vat of blood and iron, and this time he did not intend that any Paris Exhibition and royal cordialities should disperse them. In 1870 General Prim, who since the deposition of Queen Isabella of Spain had been at the head of the Spanish Government, sent a confidential agent to King William of Prussia with the news that Spain was looking out for a sovereign again and asked him to nominate his kinsman Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. His election, said General Prim, would be a certainty. Prince Leopold at first refused to accept this offer, but after it had been renewed several times he finally consented, and King William nominated him. France raised the most violent protest, and Prince Leopold withdrew his acceptance.

Throughout these negotiations the Prussian Royal Family had been in complete ignorance of their origin. They had not a notion that Bismarck had been at the bottom of it, with the sole object of rousing France to a pitch of fury which, carefully fanned and fostered, might end in war. War, Bismarck knew, was bound to come before long, and the German military machine was ready now, while France, in spite of the prestige of her armies, was unprepared. The withdrawal of Prince Leopold, therefore, was disappointing, for France had no longer any cause for quarrel.

But France, elated with the withdrawal of the Hohenzollern candidate, which she attributed to the firmness of her government, made the mistake which served Bismarck’s purpose to a nicety. The French Ambassador in Berlin, instead of using the customary diplomatic channels, obtained an interview with the King and demanded his personal assurance that he would never again put forward Prince Leopold as a candidate for the throne of Spain. King William told the Ambassador that this was an outrageous request, and telegraphed an account of the interview to Bismarck. That was the sort of mistake the Chancellor was hoping for. He flooded his press with exaggerations and misrepresentations of what had occurred, in order to rouse the indignation of Germany, and let loose such a tempest of abuse on the Emperor of the French and his government and his insolent diplomatic methods that France, believing her armies to be invincible, promptly declared war. But the most remarkable part of Bismarck’s achievement was that not even at this point had King William or his family the slightest suspicion that it was the Chancellor who had engineered the whole affair from the beginning.

The declaration of war on July 15, 1870 was received by all Germany, excepting Bismarck and those who knew the stupendous efficiency of his war machine, with consternation, and the Crown Princess wrote to her mother in incoherent dismay. She believed that the odds were terribly against Germany and that ruin and perhaps annihilation faced her. National feeling there, she said, was that England ought to have prevented war by a strong warning to France that she would not tolerate such wanton aggression. In England, at the outset, indignation against France ran high, holding her guilty of wantonly breaking the peace of Europe, and the Queen shared these sentiments to the full.

But Count Bernstorff, the German Ambassador in London, informed his Foreign Office that the Prince of Wales, dining at the French Embassy immediately after the declaration of war, expressed to the French Ambassador his hopes for the speedy defeat of Prussia, and that when the Austrian Ambassador, Count Apponyi, hinted at the possibility of Austria’s joining France he had shown high satisfaction. This caused the greatest indignation in official circles in Berlin, and, though the Prince denied that there was any truth in Bernstorff’s report, Berlin continued to believe it and attributed similar sentiments to the Crown Princess. Though no one was more rabidly Prussian than she, she was looked upon with such suspicion that her offers to help in the hospitals at Berlin were refused.

The Crown Princess’s fears as to the annihilation of the German armies soon died a sudden death. Disaster after disaster overtook the French. On September 1 came the battle of Sedan, after which the Emperor Napoleon surrendered, and in October Marshal Bazaine’s army of 170,000 men surrendered at Metz. The Crown Princess’s lamentation tuned up into pæans of triumph accompanied with moral reflection and comments of a very irritating sort.

The siege of Paris began. The Crown Prince was anxious to reduce it without the horror and vandalism of a bombardment; Bismarck, on the other hand, backed up by popular feeling in Germany, wanted to bombard the city at once in order to bring the war to an end as speedily as possible. It was a question which concerned the government and the military authorities, and it would have been wiser for the Crown Princess to be on her guard. Instead she ardently and openly supported her husband’s view, with the unfortunate but natural result that she was believed to be influencing her husband to delay.

The family life of the Crown Princess during the war was full of difficulties, and she poured out these troubles to her mother, with assurances that they arose from no fault of hers. With Fritz away there was not a soul with whom she was in sympathy; the King disliked her, and she often found it impossible to get on with Queen Augusta. It was a very awkward situation, for her mother and Queen Augusta were the most devoted friends.

She acknowledged and appreciated Queen Augusta’s good points; the Queen had always ‘fought her battles and smoothed her path’; and, though her mother-in-law often made her very miserable, she bore her no resentment for that and only remembered her better and kindlier moods, deeply pitying her for her unhappy temperament. It is difficult to see what could have been the object of repeating to her mother the disagreeable observations of Queen Augusta, unless it was to shake her mother’s confidence in her friend and inspire distrust.

The war was over, and the mission with which her father had entrusted her on her marriage was over also; the missioners, for all proselytizing purpose, had been massacred by the chief of the savage tribe which they had hoped to convert. Bismarck had realized the Prince Consort’s vision of a vast united Germany, ruled by Prussia, and far exceeding in power and in territory that ideal State which, in close alliance and amity with England, should bring eternal and industrious peace to Europe. Blood and iron had accomplished it; every step of the way had been won by the forces which Albert abhorred. If the Queen was right in pronouncing that, had the Prince Consort been alive when France declared war on his beloved Fatherland, it would have been impossible to prevent his joining Bismarck’s armies, what manner of letters would he have written to his wife and his daughter from the front?

Then for the Crown Princess there was the daily heartache of looking on the cruel maiming through which her eldest son, Prince William, had come to birth. He was twelve years old now; his left arm was still powerless, and the torturing treatments he had undergone were of no avail. It crippled all his boyish activities; for the withered limb gave him an imperfect balance and he had great difficulty in running or in learning to ride, and his food must be cut up for him. Only by painful effort could he do what came so easily to other boys, and this consciousness of inferiority, so his English tutor feared, was getting more acute as he grew older. But at the moment the mother was very happy about the affectionate relations between her and her son. ‘I am happy to say,’ she wrote, ‘that between him and me there is a bond of love and confidence which I feel sure nothing can destroy.’ She did not think much of his abilities, however, nor of his strength of character, and she superintended his education with constant care. Perhaps Queen Victoria remembered that the excessive vigilation the Prince Consort had imposed upon his eldest son had not produced the effect on his character which was intended, for she warned her daughter that ‘too much constant watching leads to the very dangers hereafter which one wishes to avoid.’ She recommended that William should be brought in contact with other classes and not get to think that because he was a prince he was of different clay from working people and servants and farmers.

The Princess retorted warmly. Her mother must not think William saw only Palace folk. When her children were with her in the country they had ample opportunity to go in and out of cottages, just as they did at Balmoral; but the Prussian peasant, who had lately been the simplest and gentlest of souls, was not at all an amiable person now, but obstinate and boorish. In fact, the discussion about William’s upbringing resolved itself into an irrelevant wrangle about Highlanders and Prussians. The Crown Princess’s habit of mind led her to search for points on which to differ, rather than common ground on which to construct. Herein lay a most disastrous factor in the development of her tragic history: she could not believe that those who did not share her views might have sound reasons for disagreeing with her, and she suspected them of a personal hostility.

III

At Darmstadt Prince Louis had been called up immediately on the outbreak of war. The Crown Princess urged her sister to come with her children to Berlin, where they would be safer than in the West of Germany should the French armies invade the Fatherland, and the King offered her the New Palace to live in. But that was not to be thought of.

Alice was busier than ever, looking after the wives and children of soldiers at the front, seeing that the hospitals were ready to receive the wounded, and sending out women from her Nurses Institute to the field hospitals. She had turned her own house into the headquarters of what we should now call the Red Cross depot. Wounded Germans and French were brought in and the hospitals grew full. ‘I neither smell nor see,’ she wrote, ‘anything but wounds.’ Her neuralgia grew acute, her eyes suffered, and she was expecting another baby before long. The Queen sent out a doctor for her confinement, and early in October her child was born — another boy, Frederick William.

Then back she went to Darmstadt, working in the hospitals and meeting trains full of wounded soldiers at the station. In the town there were many widows and mothers who had lost perhaps an only son. She went to see them all, for sympathy was the only medicine for such grief. Christmas came round; Louis was at Orleans and she decked a minute Christmas tree for him and his staff, and sent a pair of stockings she had knitted for him. She had two wounded officers in her house now, which was a great expense, and this continual assistance to soldiers’ widows brought her near the end of her slender resources.

Paris capitulated, and the trains were no longer full of wounded, but of German soldiers returning from the war, singing and cheering. And at last her Louis came back on leave and for the first time saw his little son. The parents went to Berlin for the entry of the victorious armies with the new German Emperor riding at their head. As she watched the triumphant cavalcade, Alice’s heart ached for the Emperor and Empress to whom France had behaved so shamefully. But they had found a refuge in England and were treated with respect and friendliness.

IV

In England meantime the Queen had been much exercised over the marriage of her fourth daughter, Princess Louise, who had passed her twenty-first birthday in the spring of 1869, and was already older than any of her elder sisters had been when they were wed. It would have been in accordance with precedent to be looking out for some suitable German Prince, but Princess Louise found such a future extremely distasteful. She much preferred to make a British marriage and to settle in her husband’s house in England. The Queen entirely agreed with her. That the daughter of a reigning Sovereign should marry a subject was at that time a very startling proposition; such a thing had not happened in the Royal Family of England since the days of the Plantagenets, and since the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty all had married Germans. The proposed candidate was the Marquis of Lorne, son and heir of the Duke of Argyll.

The Prince of Wales had talked it over with his sister, and disapproved of such a marriage. The Queen was particularly anxious that he should see eye to eye with her, and she wrote him a remarkable letter which shows how entirely (for the present) her sentiments about foreign marriages for her daughters had altered, and the reasons: —

Times have much changed; great foreign alliances are looked on as causes of trouble and anxiety, and are of no good. What could be more painful than the position in which our family were placed during the wars with Denmark, and between Prussia and Austria? Every family feeling was rent asunder, and we were powerless. . . . Nothing is more unpopular here or more uncomfortable for me and everyone than the long residence of our married daughters from abroad in my house, with the quantities of foreigners they bring with them, the foreign view they entertain on all subjects, and in beloved Papa’s lifetime this was totally different, and besides Prussia had not swallowed everything up. You may not be aware, as I am, with what dislike the marriages of Princesses of the Royal Family with small German Princes (German beggars as they most insultingly were called) were looked on. . . .

Now that the Royal Family is so large (you have already five, and what will these be when your brothers marry?) in these days, when you ask Parliament to give money to all the Princesses to be spent abroad, when they could perfectly marry here and the children succeed just as much as if they were the children of a Prince or Princess, we could not maintain this exclusive principle. As to position I see no difficulty whatever; Louise remains what she is, and her husband keeps his rank, like the Mensdorffs and Victor (Hohenlohe), only being treated in the family as a relation when we are together.... It will strengthen the hold of the Royal Family, besides infusing new and healthy blood into it, whereas all the Princes abroad are related to one another.... I feel sure that new blood will strengthen the Throne morally as well as physically.

This letter shows how intolerable to the Queen had become the endless worries to which the marriages of her two elder daughters, though sanctioned and arranged by the Prince Consort, had given rise. In the main she blamed Prussia; the Crown Princess’s marriage, one way and another, had embittered instead of improving international relations. Prussia had become a bullying, domineering power, and the reaction therefrom had seriously disturbed her domestic happiness. That resentment is intelligible, but it is strange to find that the long visits of the Queen’s two daughters from Germany had become so distasteful to her.

But times were changed, and such were her sentiments now. She had made up her mind that Princess Louise should marry the handsome, able, and artistic young son of the Duke of Argyll. All parties directly concerned were agreed, and next autumn Lord Lorne was asked to stay at Balmoral, even as Prince Frederick of Prussia had been bidden there for a similar purpose in 1855. The procedure of the betrothal was on much the same lines. The Queen drove out in one direction with Princess Beatrice to taste a chalybeate spring, while Princess Louise and Lord Lorne, with the Lord Chancellor and Lady Ely, drove to Glassault Shiel. The chaperons then effaced themselves; the young people took a walk and returned to Balmoral with the news for which, as the Queen justly admitted, she was not unprepared.

The Queen never for a moment contemplated that Princess Louise and her husband should make their principal home with her, as had been her intention in the marriage of two of her elder daughters. One of the main general reasons for the marriage was that her new son-inlaw should be an independent British subject, heir to a great estate with solid responsibilities of his own, and not a foreign princeling living in an alien country, where he had no duties except that of being a constant companion of his mother-in-law.

Similar considerations were equally applicable to the bride. Princess Louise herself was far more suited to be the mistress of a great nobleman’s house than the wife of the Queen’s resident son-in-law, where her position would render her completely subordinate to her mother. Her individuality was no less strong than that of the Crown Princess, and she had the same brilliantly faceted vitality, incongruous to the shrouded and subdued atmosphere of the joyless palaces. She was a radiant creature, extremely handsome, genial, and ebullient, with little trace of the Teuton in her nature; and her gay and eager presence, her sense of fun, her manifest power of enjoyment, her freedom from any conventionally royal consciousness, had a social potency which rivaled her mother’s, but with this antipodal difference — that the Queen evoked awe and almost paralytic reverence, whereas her daughter exhaled a psychical ozone. Like her eldest sister, she too inherited from her father an intensely artistic nature, and her work in sculpture was far removed from that of the amateur. It was only fit that she should have a wider scope for her gifts and her self-expression than her cloistered home.

The Queen little guessed how increasingly this precedent for royal marriages with subjects would be followed during the next sixty years. The Princess Royal of the next generation married a compatriot of Lord Lorne’s, and in the generation after that the King’s only daughter married an Englishman and two of his sons ladies of Scottish blood, of whom one is now the Queen of England.

V

The Queen opened Parliament again in the spring of 1871. She had performed that ceremony only once since five years before, when Princess Helena was engaged to Prince Christian and Prince Alfred attained his majority. A similar exigency drove her to do so now, for she intended to ask her Commons to make provision for Princess Louise on her marriage. She knew that these grants for her daughters were unpopular in the country, and Mr. Gladstone was not easy in his mind as to how the House would receive the request. It was ‘ to his agreeable but extreme surprise’ that the vote of the usual dowry of £30,000 and an annuity of £6000 was passed unanimously. When, later in the session, a grant to Prince Arthur on his coming of age was brought before the House, it was passed with the expression of the hope that she would show herself more frequently to her loving subjects.

Gladstone, who feared that this continued retirement would really affect the stability of the throne, deplored the paltry cause of the danger. He believed that the shattered state of her nerves which she so often bewailed was imaginary, and that her doctor, ‘the feebleminded Dr. Jenner,’ was encouraging her to refuse to do anything for which she did not feel inclined; and now he begged her graciously to postpone her departure for Balmoral till the end of a difficult session and hold her Council for the prorogation. She was so indignant at such a suggestion that she disregarded her Prime Minister altogether and wrote to her Lord Chancellor instead. She told him that she was doing as much as she could, and that, as she grew older, she would not, for the sake of her health, be able to make these continued exertions. She was ‘driven and abused’; her private life was being interfered with, and her nerves would break down. She warned him that if this persecution went on she would have to give up the awful weight of sovereignty to another, and then perhaps these discontented people would be sorry that they had wrecked her health.

Victoria had really done a good deal more this year than since the Prince Consort’s death, and this nerve storm subsided. But Gladstone’s fears for the throne were by no means fantastic. He knew how strong was the feeling against the Queen’s seclusion. In addition, her German sympathies in the FrancoGerman War were very unpopular, and the fall of the monarchy in France, with the establishment of the Republic, had been reflected in England by a strong agitation against the throne and the prodigious expense of a sovereign who so rarely appeared, who must be annually transferring to her own pocket immense sums of money which were granted her by the nation for the purpose of upholding the splendors of the Crown, and who was so constantly asking her Parliament for substantial grants for her children.

The heir to the throne caused equal dissatisfaction for exactly opposite reasons. He was seen too much, always surrounded by frivolous folk; he led a fast and far from edifying life, and instead of spending too little he was credited, in spite of his cosy income of £100,000, with being heavily in debt. He had lately appeared, too, in a horrid public scandal.

The agitation against an invisible and expensive sovereign and a son who did nothing but amuse himself was kept simmering in the press, and it fairly boiled over when, early in November, Sir Charles Dilke made a most violent anti-monarchical speech at Newcastle which both infuriated and alarmed the Queen. Then suddenly the whole agitation subsided, for the Prince of Wales was stricken by typhoid fever, and he and the Queen ceased to be a profligate heir and an unfunctioning Sovereign; they were just a son seriously ill and a miserably anxious mother. Human sympathy with them as such wiped from the slate all the indictments against them. The case became critical, and the Queen came to Sandringham, where she had never been before, though the Prince had lived there for eight years.

The present anxiety ominously linked itself up with the past: the nursing, the symptoms, the attacks of difficult breathing, the rambling voice, all reminded her of the Prince Consort’s illness. And now the dreadful anniversary of her husband’s death, December 14, was approaching, and that uneasy belief in fatally ordained coincidences which always lurked in her mind made her feel certain that she would lose her son on the day she had lost her husband ten years ago. These forebodings were so firmly rooted in her mind that when, on that very day, the Prince took a decided turn for the better, she could hardly realize it.

VI

Princess Louis’s sixth child, a daughter, was born in the summer of 1872. She called her Alix (a variant of her own name, since Germans always pronounced ‘Alice’ so infamously). Alix was a ‘nice little thing,’ like her sister Ella, but with darker eyes; her features promised to be good, but it looked as if her nose would be too long. That defect remedied itself, and Alix and Ella grew up to be two of the most superbly beautiful women in Europe. Alix was always laughing; her mother nicknamed her ‘Sunny,’ and it is good to know that as a child she was happy. Destiny wove for her imperial splendors, and for them both a doom of Æschylean tragedy.

Princess Louis was soon busy again with fresh activities, and again she had to be a little careful as to how she wrote of them to the Queen. A conference on women’s work and their possible careers beyond marriage and childbearing and housekeeping was assembling at Darmstadt. Germany, Holland, and Switzerland were sending delegates from sympathetic associations, and from England came such distinguished propagandists as Miss Carpenter and Miss Octavia Hill. But the Queen viewed with the deepest distrust movements that threatened any sort of emancipation for her sex, and the idea of women ever being put on the electoral roll was to her an outrage on decency. Princess Louis therefore assured her mother that she had taken the utmost pains to rule out all discussion on such repulsive topics and that the most advanced subjects on the agenda papers of her conference were girls’ schools, the employment of women in postal and telegraph offices, the education of nurserymaids, and of young mothers with regard to the care of their babies.

Her work was extending in other directions; she had long been president of the Darmstadt Nurses Institute, and now she was forming an Association for the care of children boarded out by the State. Children must be made happy: there was nothing that counted for so much in the formation of character.

There was constant anxiety about the health of her second son, Frederick William, known as ‘Frittie,’ who had been born when his father was serving in the Franco-German War. From birth he had been extremely delicate, and now it became evident that he suffered from that obscure and most dangerous condition called hæmophilia. Frittie, now aged two, got a small cut on his ear, and for two days this incessant bleeding continued, till his hair was matted with blood. At last the bleeding was stopped with caustic and tight bandages, but she feared it might break out again. And he was so boisterous when he was well, full of tearing spirits! How was it possible to guard against some trivial injury which would cause further attacks?

Frittie recovered, and the Prince and Princess treated themselves to a tour in Italy. One morning a month after their return, Ernie and Frittie came trotting in to see their mother while she still lay in bed. The windows of her bedroom, reaching nearly down to the floor, were open, and next door was her sitting room, which had a projecting bow window that looked sideways into the bedroom. As the boys played about, Ernie appeared at this bow window, and Frittie, seeing his brother there, scampered across to the open window of the bedroom. He fell out on to the stone terrace twenty feet below and was picked up unconscious. No bones were broken, and at first it was hoped that he was not seriously hurt. All day his mother watched by him, but bleeding on the brain had set in, and that evening, before her husband returned, the child died.

Princess Louis never got over the shock. There were times when she realized that Frittie had been spared the physical perils and suffering that, had he lived, must always have been his; and now she would cherish till her life’s end the image of his flowerlike brightness and his love. But the family circle, which was the world of her heart, had been broken into, and the dread of what the future might hold was ever with her. She clung more closely to those who were left; children grew up so quickly, and she longed that they should take into the world no memory of home that was not charged with happiness. She was resolved from the first not to allow her life to become barren and withdrawn or her grief to render her remiss in answering its calls.

Throughout the year following Frittie’s death her letters to the Queen were no less frequent, but the effervescent quality in them died out. She wrote as if the concerns of the outer world were dream stuff, and her yearning for Frittie, her grief that she loved because it seemed to be part of him, were more real to her than they. Ernie missed his brother terribly; he constantly spoke of him. ‘When I die,’ he said, ‘you must die too, and all the others: why can’t we all die together? I don’t like to die alone, like Frittie.’ How that went home to her! It was as if her heart were crying out through the boy’s lips.

VII

Princess Louis’s seventh and youngest child, a daughter, was born on May 24, 1874, the anniversary of the Queen’s birthday, and just a year after Frittie’s death. She wrote her mother that she was not one of those tiresome women who made themselves a nuisance with their perpetual baby-worship. Certainly her brothers and sisters saw less of their children than she, but they could afford a staff of trustworthy tutors and governesses. Her motherhood had to be, as in private families, of a more real and personal kind, and it entailed a good deal of self-denial in other ways.

Then a fresh phase of life, with new responsibilities and burdens, opened for Princess Louis and her husband. In the spring of 1877 Louis’s father, Prince Charles, died after a short illness, and three months later the Grand Duke of Hesse, and Louis succeeded his uncle.

There was an overwhelming press of public functions and of business. At Darmstadt she and Louis had a tremendous public welcome, and once more she took up her work, with all the duties that her new position entailed. But she was always tired, for she always overtaxed her strength; and she knew her mother would understand the brevity and infrequence of her letters, for after the day’s work was over the fatigue of writing was too much for her.

She came to England once more in the summer of 1878 with her husband and her children, and spent a month at Eastbourne. Then final rest came to that gallant and loving spirit, though preceded by weeks of intolerable grief and anxiety. One morning in November 1878, Victoria, the eldest of her six children, fell ill of diphtheria, and four days afterwards Alix and May were down with it. Next Irene and Ernie caught it, and now there were five children out of six with diphtheria, and May and Irene were desperately ill. The day after, her husband was down with it also, and that night May died. Louis kept asking about the children, and his wife went to tell him.

Ernie’s life still hung by a thread, but he began to mend, and he too asked after his sisters. One morning he sent May a present of a book, and his mother had to smile back at him, for the news could not be broken to him yet. Sometimes the whole of life seemed to be an agonized dream; sometimes she woke to reality, and then the agony was over, for she accepted the will of God and in His will was peace. By that entire and complete resignation she could feel gratitude that the others had been spared.

A month had passed since the first of her children had been taken ill, and now her husband and those who were left were able to go out again, and the Princess was making arrangements for them to get away for a change of air. All one day she had a very bad headache, and next morning diphtheria had developed. Not being allowed to speak, she wrote down little messages and directions for her husband. The case was almost hopeless, for the attack was very virulent, and she had no strength with which to fight it.

Then came a morning when the doctors realized that there could be but one end, and her husband was told. She was quite conscious; she enjoyed a visit from her beloved mother-in-law, and in the afternoon the Queen’s doctor, Sir William Jenner, arrived from England with a letter from her mother, which she read. Her husband came in to wish her goodnight as usual, and when he had left her she said she would go to sleep again. She whispered, ‘May — dear Papa,’ and died in her sleep early next morning, on the anniversary of her father’s death.

(To be concluded)