Queen of hearts
KATHRYN HUGHES enjoys a lively new book exploring Queen Victoria’s role as a royal marriage-broker
Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking by Deborah Cadbury Bloomsbury, 400 pages, £25
When Prince Albert married his cousin Queen Victoria in 1840, he was taking the first step in what would become a masterplan for keeping Europe safe for generations. A native of Coburg, a small German state that had capitulated to Napoleon a generation earlier, Albert knew all about the chaos and destruction that occurred when neighbours and allies took up arms against each other. Albert’s plan, which grew in ambition with the arrival of each of his and Victoria’s nine babies, was to marry his children into all the royal families of Europe, from Russia to Portugal, Norway to Greece. By the time grandchildren arrived, the continent would be bound together not just by peace treaties and trading agreements, but something infinitely stronger: the love and loyalty of first cousins. No one, surely, would ever declare war on a monarch with whom they had played tag as a toddler.
Albert didn’t live long enough to see his plan come to fruition. But in this fascinating slice of popular royal family history, Deborah Cadbury follows an ageing Queen Victoria as she attempts to marry off her 40-odd grandchildren to one another in the 1890s. Although the increasingly immobile monarch was hardly in a position to flit around Europe plotting love affairs like a fairy godmother, she could insist on all the young people visiting her at Osborne, Windsor or, for the hardy, Balmoral.
Having vetted them thoroughly, the royal matchmaker would decide which of their many cousins, scattered throughout Europe, they should marry. Personal preferences played a part, but what really mattered was geopolitical practicalities. If a principality, statelet or even nation needed to be reminded of its responsibilities to the common good of Europe, then the quickest way was to marry off its princess to her boy cousin from the other side of the continent. Chances were that the two young people had once played together when visiting ‘Grandmama Queen’. What could be more natural than for love to grow on a second meeting?
Except it often didn’t. Some of the book’s saddest and most riveting sections concern those prepared to stand up to the royal matchmaker and follow their own hearts. There’s Alix of Hesse, Victoria’s favourite granddaughter, who dares to refuse to marry Prince Eddy, second in line to the British throne. You can hardly blame her: Eddy was weak, stupid and infected with VD. Heartbreakingly, Alix, who matched her grandmother in the stubbornness stakes, married another cousin, Tsar Nicholas of Russia, and met a bloody end in 1918 at the hands of the Bolsheviks.
Young Eddy wasn’t much luckier. Having been rejected by Alix, he was instructed to marry his second cousin-once-removed, Princess May of Teck. ‘Grandmama Queen’ barely
The continent would be bound together by the love and loyalty of first cousins
knew the girl but she liked the look of her from her photographs and invited her to Balmoral for an interview. The shy young woman passed the test: she was above all ‘sensible’ (which, heaven knows Eddy was not), so the young man was instructed to propose immediately. Eddy cornered May at a country house party and popped the question. Relieved rather than thrilled (she was already 24 and, by royal standards, poor), May then had to deal with her reluctant fiancé’s death from pneumonia just over a month later.
In the end it all turned out rather well, with May marrying Eddy’s younger brother, Prince George, and, in time, becoming the redoubtable Queen Mary. Most royal blind dates, though,
Cadbury deftly weaves the politics of nations with the gossip of the royal drawing room
did not turn out so happily. The world was becoming more complicated and dangerous, and it was naive to think that a cousin’s love was any match for socialist revolution and nationalist sabre-rattling. Family loyalty turned out to be meaningless when dealing with someone as bellicose as Kaiser Wilhelm, who referred to his Uncle Bertie, now Edward VII, as “Satan”. Bertie returned the favour by calling his nephew “the bitterest foe that England possesses”.
Deborah Cadbury has done an excellent job of writing about young princes and princesses as human beings with the usual needs for love and security, while never forgetting just how much was at stake in their marriage choices. She deftly weaves the politics of nations with the gossip of the royal drawing room, the two worlds linked as always by ‘Grandmama Queen’, whose own love match 50 years earlier had started the dynastic dating agency rolling.