Christopher Hibbert - Edward VII - The Last Victorian King

‘I said that I hoped she would remain always there, and then offered her my hand and my heart,’ the Prince wrote.

She immediately said yes. But I told her not to answer too quickly but to consider over it. She said she had long ago. I then asked her if she liked me. She said yes. I then kissed her hand and she kissed me. We then talked for some time and I said I was sure you would love her as your own daughter and make her happy in the new home, though she would find it very sad after the terrible loss we had sustained. I told her how very sorry I was that she could never know dear Papa. She said she regretted it deeply and hoped he would have approved of my choice. I told her that it had always been his greatest wish; I only feared I was not worthy of her … I cannot tell you with what feelings my head is filled, and how happy I feel … You must excuse this hurried account as … I really don’t know whether I am on my head or my heels …

The more he saw of her the more pleased the Prince was with his choice. General Knollys assured Queen Victoria that it ‘was a happy sight to witness the happiness of the young couple in the society of each other’. Knollys sincerely believed that the Prince of Wales was ‘as much attached to the Princess Alexandra as Her Royal Highness [was] to him.’

‘I indeed now know what it is to be really happy,’ the Prince himself assured Dr Acland, ‘though I daresay I have never done anything to deserve it.’ He told Mrs Bruce that he really felt ‘a new interest in everything’ now that he had found ‘somebody to live for’. And to his mother he wrote, ‘I frankly avow that I did not think it possible to love a person as I do her. She is so kind and good, and I feel sure will make my life a happy one. I only trust that God will give me strength to do the same for her.’

The Queen hoped so too, but rather doubted it. ‘May he be only worthy of such a jewel!’ she commented. ‘There is the rub!’ Even though they were now engaged there must be no question of their being left alone together, except ‘in a room next to the Princess’s mother’s with the door open, for a short while’. The Queen’s main worry for the moment, however, was that the Prince would be persuaded to adopt an anti-German position on the Schleswig-Holstein question; and she insisted that, before the marriage took place, Princess Alexandra must come over to England by herself so that the Queen might be given an opportunity to give her due warning not to ‘use her influence to make the Prince a partisan … in the political questions now unhappily in dispute [which] would be to irritate all the Queen’s German connections and to create family feuds — destructive of all family comfort and happiness’.

The Princess was naturally reluctant to come. She did not want it to appear that she had been summoned to England ‘on approval’; and, apart from that, she was ‘terribly frightened’ at the prospect of being left alone with the Queen for so long. Both the Prince of Wales and the King of the Belgians tried rather diffidently and wholly unsuccessfully to persuade the Queen not to subject Alexandra to such embarrassment. The Queen, however, was adamant: trouble enough had already been caused in Germany, where old Baron Stockmar’s ‘rage and fury knew no bounds’. The Princess must come. While she was here, the Prince could go on a cruise aboard the royal yacht in the Mediterranean. General Knollys could go with him. So, too, could the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, who would find this an excellent excuse for leaving Berlin where their known promotion of the Danish marriage, as well as their disapproval of Bismarck’s recently declared preference of ‘blood and iron’ to ‘parliamentary resolutions’, had rendered advisable a temporary withdrawal from court. At the beginning of October, therefore, the Prince was dispatched abroad once again. He went to Dresden where the King of Saxony placed him in the care of Count Vitzthum, the Saxon Minister at St James’s, who happened to be on leave of absence. Vitzthum found him ‘gay, extremely amiable, well informed … simple and unaffected’. Vitzthum later told Disraeli that after he and the Prince

had examined the museums, galleries, etc., the Prince said to him: ‘Don’t you think now we might have a little shopping?’ Agreed: and they went to a great jeweller’s, and the Prince bought some bracelets for his future bride; and to some porcelain shops, where he purchased many objects for his brothers and sisters; but he never asked the price of anything, which quite delighted the Saxons, who look upon that as quite grand seigneur.

Leaving Dresden, and having toured South Germany and Switzerland, he embarked at Marseilles for his first visit to the Riviera. Then, after spending a few days at Hyères, he sailed down to Palermo, across to Tunis, where he inspected the ruins of Carthage and visited the Bey at his castle of Al-Bar, and on to Malta before landing at Naples, from which Garibaldi had recently driven the Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies. General Alfonso La Marmora, representative of Victor Emmanuel, now King of the new united Italy, provided the English travellers with an escort of bersaglieri for the inevitable ascent of Mount Vesuvius and afterwards came aboard the Osborne for dinner. Three evenings later, on 9 November 1862, while the British ships in the Bay fired rockets and showed blue lights, the Prince quietly celebrated his twenty-first birthday, regretting ‘very much not being at home’.

Meanwhile, Princess Alexandra was listening to the Queen’s lectures with tactful acquiescence. She concealed the resentment which she subsequently admitted to have felt that her father, who had brought her over to England, had — for want of any invitation to stay at Osborne — been obliged to put up at a hotel; and that her mother, from whom she had never been parted before, had not been asked to come to England at all. She was polite, charming, understanding, affectionate; and the Queen was more delighted with her than ever, particularly when, after listening to many stories about the Prince Consort, the Princess burst into tears at an account of his death.

‘How beloved Albert would have loved her!’ the Queen wrote. She certainly adored her now herself. ‘I can’t say how I and we all love her!’ she told the Crown Princess. ‘She is so good, so simple, unaffected, frank, bright and cheerful, yet so quiet and gentle that her [companionship] soothes me. Then how lovely! … She is one of those sweet creatures who seem to come from the skies to help and bless poor mortals and lighten for a time their path … She is so pretty to live with.’

There was no doubt, the Queen thought, that — provided she did not ‘knock under’ — she would make a perfect wife for the Prince of Wales who was given permission to meet her at Calais and to accompany her and her father as far as Harburg-on-Elbe on their way home to Copenhagen. The Prince was, however, on no account to cross the Danish frontier. As the Queen’s acting secretary, General Grey, explained to Augustus Paget, the British Minister in Copenhagen, it was not only the political question ‘and the storm that would be raised among her German connections were any extra civility to be shown towards Denmark’ which weighed on the Queen’s mind, but the fear — Grey felt he ‘might almost say horror’ — the Queen had of the Princess’s mother’s family.

‘The Queen’s own expression is, “The Prince of Wales is so weak that he would be sure to get entangled with Princess [Christian’s] relations,” ’ Grey continued, ‘ “and it would be too horrid if he should become one of that family.” These are reasons which cannot be stated; but I cannot tell you how firmly rooted they are in the Queen’s mind.’