Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

For the Prince, however, his time on the Curragh had its compensations. He had been allowed to have with him there Frederick Stanley, the Earl of Derby’s second son, one of those Etonians whom the headmaster had selected as a suitable companion for his walking tour in the Lake District. There were also other convivial young Guards officers at the camp; and one evening, after a noisy and rather drunken party in the mess, some of these persuaded a young actress to creep into his quarters and wait for him in his bed. This was Nellie Clifden, a vivacious, cheerfully promiscuous and amusing girl who was also unfortunately most indiscreet. The Prince was much taken with her. On his return to England, he continued seeing her when he could, evidently sharing her favours with Charles Wynn-Carrington; and, on one occasion at least, she seems to have gone down to Windsor. Delighting in her company, and in the pleasures of her body, the Prince felt more than ever disinclined to concentrate upon a subject to which his parents had urged him to lend his mind — his marriage.

The subject had first been broached soon after the Prince’s return from America, when the difficulty that had faced King George III in similar circumstances now faced the Queen and the Prince Consort: a Protestant being required by law, and a princess by custom, there were extremely few young ladies available and, of those, even fewer who were in the least good looking and whose character would not, as the Queen put it, ‘knock under’ when subjected to the strain of having Bertie for a husband. Moreover, like George III’s heir, the Prince of Wales did not want to marry a princess anyway, not — as his parents had reason to be thankful — because he was secretly married already, which had been the case with his unfortunate predecessor, but because he was vociferously determined to marry only for love. When the Queen wrote to him about his duty to get married to a suitable bride, he replied to her, so she complained to Bruce, ‘in a confused way’. His sister, now Crown Princess of Prussia, when asked to help in the search for a suitable bride, thought that his problem might be solved when she produced photographs of Princess Elizabeth of Wied; but the Prince professed himself unmoved by the pictures of this nineteen-year-old girl and declined to give them a second glance. Persuaded that their son’s mind was quite made up on the subject of Princess Elizabeth, the parents began to reconsider other possible girls who could fulfil the Queen’s requirements of ‘good looks, health, education, character, intellect and good disposition’. There was Princess Anna of Hesse, of whom the Crown Princess gave ‘a very favourable report’; there was Princess Marie of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who was certainly ‘quite lovely’ — but she was a Roman Catholic. There was Princess Marie of Altenburg, but she was ‘shockingly dressed and always with her most disagreeable mother’. There was Princess Alexandrine of Prussia, but she was ‘not clever or pretty’. There was the nice little Princess of Sweden, but she was ‘much too young’. And there were the Weimar girls, who were also nice, ‘but delicate and not pretty’. Indeed, the more the Queen and the Prince Consort thought about the problem, the more their minds kept returning to another young girl, Princess Alexandra of Schleswig-Holstein-SonderburgGlucksburg, whom they had at first firmly rejected.

She was the daughter of Prince Christian of Denmark, a distant relative of the drunken, divorced King Frederick VII and recognized as his heir. Her mother was Princess Louise, daughter of the Landgrave William of Hesse-Cassel. There were thus two strong objections to this match which the Queen and Prince Consort had initially dismissed out of hand. In the first place, they much disapproved of the Hesse-Cassel family, whose castle at Rumpenheim near Frankfurt was said to be the scene of the wildest and most indecorous parties; and in the second place they were most reluctant to become entangled in the complicated question of the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, which had been ruled for years by the Kings of Denmark but which the Germans considered they had a good right to annex.

As opposed to these objections, however, Princess Alexandra herself was wholly unexceptionable. Indeed, the reports of her from Copenhagen were enthusiastic. She was only just seventeen and still at school; but, though so young, she displayed a remarkable grace of movement and manner. And when the Queen saw the photographs sent to her by Walburga Paget, the German wife of the British Minister in Copenhagen, who had once been Crown Princess Frederick’s lady-in-waiting, she had to admit that Alexandra was, indeed, ‘unverschämt hübsch’, ‘outrageously beautiful’. The Princess was not in the least intellectual and had rather a quick temper, but few other faults could be found in her. If she occasionally displayed a lamentable ignorance, she was never tactless; and if she was sometimes a little stubborn, she was never unkind. When sending her parents another photograph of ‘Prince Christian’s lovely daughter’, the Crown Princess wrote, ‘I have seen several people who have seen her of late — and who give such accounts of her beauty, her charm, her amiability, her frank natural manner and many excellent qualities. I thought it right to tell you all this in Bertie’s interest, though I as a Prussian cannot wish Bertie should ever marry her … She is a good deal taller than I am,’ the Crown Princess added later, ‘has a lovely figure but very thin, a complexion as beautiful as possible. Very fine white regular teeth and very fine large [deep blue] eyes… She is as simple and natural and unaffected as possible — and seems exceedingly well brought up.’ The only physical blemish was a slight scar on her neck which might, the Crown Princess thought, have been the result of an attack of scrofula; but this, the Queen was subsequently assured, was not the cause of the mark which, in any case, could be concealed — as Princess Alexandra later did conceal it, thus setting a long-lasting fashion — by wearing a jewelled ‘dog-collar’.

The Queen was rather sceptical of her daughter’s lavish praise of the girl, since the Crown Princess was ‘perhaps a little inclined to be carried away’ when she liked someone. But the Crown Prince agreed with everything his wife said. So the Queen allowed herself to be convinced that Princess Alexandra must ‘be charming in every sense of the word’. She seemed all the more desirable because not only was the Russian court also interested in her as a bride for the Tsar Alexander’s heir, but so was the Queen of Holland on behalf of the Prince of Orange. Evidently she was a ‘pearl not to be lost’.

‘We dare not let her slip away,’ the Prince Consort wrote to his daughter. ‘If the match were more or less your work … it would open the way to friendly relations between you and the Danes which might later be a blessing and of use to Germany.’ At the same time the Prince Consort informed his son that, if Princess Alexandra appealed to him, the marriage would be considered more important than either the Schleswig-Holstein question or his parents’ disapproval of the Hesse-Cassel family. So eager for the match did the Prince Consort become, in fact, that when he heard that his brother, Ernest, Duke of Coburg, was raising objections to it on the grounds that it would not be in the best interests of Germany, he wrote him a furious letter: ‘What has that got to do with you? … Vicky has racked her brains to help us to find someone, but in vain … We have no choice.’ To his son, the Prince Consort wrote, ‘It would be a thousand pities if you were to lose her.’

So, in September, without marked enthusiasm, the Prince of Wales embarked for the Continent with General Bruce to see the girl whom his sister, having contrived a meeting with her at Strelitz, now described as ‘the most fascinating creature in the world’. It was given out that the purpose of his visit was to continue his military studies by accompanying his brother-in-law, the Crown Prince, to the autumn manoeuvres of the Prussian army. But the German newspapers hinted that there might be other reasons for the Prince’s journey, particularly as, in the same week, Princess Alexandra left Copenhagen for her grandfather’s castle at Rumpenheim which was not far from the area selected for the forthcoming army manoeuvres. The Prince carried with him detailed instructions from his father as to how he must behave if his Uncle Ernest endeavoured to interfere with the proposed arrangements. He was warned: