Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (4 page)

None of these are excuses for poor nonfiction. Authors have a responsibility to present the facts, ideally without bias. Professor Abbas Milani of Stanford University aptly describes the writing process and the challenges faced by nonfiction authors in his latest book,
The Shah
.

Though books often have the name of one person as their author, they are invariably a collective effort—every conversation, every question, every book or essay we read, every criticism, fair or unfair, that we encounter, combine to shape our vision and words and leave indelible marks on any narrative we form. I have made every effort to reduce the affects of these influences to a minimum and allow the facts, reflected first and foremost in primary documents, to speak for themselves.…

There is an element of hubris in biography as a genre. It claims to illuminate the dark corners and the infinite complexities in the life of an individual [or individuals], a life invariably shaped by concentric influences, dreads, dreams, and pressures … Any narrative of a life entails a constant process of cutting, encapsulating, eliminating, glossing, and sometimes surmising. A good biography is not one that forgoes these choices, but one that makes them without any a priori assumptions and in the humble recognition that the search for the truth of a life is ever-exclusive, yet never bereft of interest.
²

With this in the forefront of my mind, and coupled with my goal to improve upon those areas of
In Destiny’s Hands
that came under scrutiny, I have written
Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires
. I certainly make no claim that this book is a paradigm-altering work that could ever compete with or replace the many incomparable biographies of these women or their husbands and families. In fact, the opposite is true. I have drawn heavily on many splendid authors and historians to compose this work. Saying I am in the debt of authors like James Pope-Hennessy, Julia Gelardi, or Gordon Brook-Shepherd is an insulting understatement. In weaving my narrative I have had to accept the fact that dealing with four lives precludes the possibility of providing readers with the exhaustively-researched biographies that are so often craved, though I have tried to provide as much in-depth detail as possible. Throughout the writing process I was encouraged to discover that the story of these four women—which invariably encompasses many individuals, locations, and events—was greater than simply the sum of its parts. The stories of these four empresses can easily stand alone, but I cannot help but feel that their tales become more fully rounded out when they are set in the context of one another, what preceded their time as reigning consorts, what followed, and how cause and effect came into play.

I have done my best to wean out hyperbole without compromising the narrative epic, to present the facts on their own merit, and to discern proven facts, evidentially supported hypotheses, and reported but unsubstantiated claims in the hopes of showing every side of these women—their strengths, their weaknesses, their quirks, and even their contradictions. It is my desire that readers will see them as more than just two-dimensional women without depth or gradation. If that happens, I think I will have succeeded in my goal and done these incomparable individuals justice. Whether readers judge them as successful or failures as women, wives, mothers, and empresses, no one can deny the incredible impact they each have had. Their tales of duty, self-sacrifice, and inspiration are part of the special legacies they have left behind.

Justin C. Vovk

Ljubljana, Slovenia

July 11, 2011

Part 1
Unlikely Empresses 

(1858–94)

1
Imperial Forge
 

(1858–73)

F
ar removed from the imperial grandeur of the Berlin Stadtschloss, the first of Europe’s last four empresses came into the world amid humble surroundings. She was born in the yellow Dolzig Palace, nestled in central Brandenburg in eastern Prussia, near the small riverside town of Sommerfeld (now Lubsko in Poland). The palace—which could better be described as a luxurious country villa at best—was the home of the infant’s father, Hereditary Prince Frederick (“Fritz”) of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg
³
, who received Dolzig as wedding present in 1856 from his father. Fritz’s wife, Princess Adelaide (“Ada”) of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, was twenty-three when she gave birth to their second child on October 22, 1858. It was an excruciating delivery performed without the benefit of chloroform to dull the pain—a practice that Ada’s aunt, Queen Victoria, began to champion since the birth of her son Prince Leopold in 1853; she described the effects as “soothing, quieting and delightful beyond measure.”
⁴

Happy though Fritz and Ada were for their daughter’s arrival, their joy was quickly mingled with grief. Seven days later, on October 29, their first child, a son named Frederick, died at the age of fifteen months. The new baby girl was now an only child. Protocol dictated she be baptized as quickly as possible, which took place a few days later in a simple, Evangelical Lutheran ceremony in Dolzig’s chapel. At that time, the infant received the names Augusta Victoria Friederike Louise Feodora Jenny, though she would always be known officially as Augusta Victoria. In time, her family gave her the diminutive “Dona,” a nickname that would stick for the rest of her life and helped to distinguish her from the ubiquitous princesses named Victoria, Augusta, and Friederike that populated Europe. There are a number of theories regarding whom Dona was named after. The most widely accepted belief is that Augusta was for Princess Augusta of Saxe-Weimar, the wife of the future king of Prussia, and later, the first German emperor; and that Victoria was either for Dona’s great-aunt, Queen Victoria, or Queen Victoria’s daughter Vicky (who also happened to be Augusta’s daughter-in-law and a close friend to Fritz and Ada). In reality, Victoria was probably for both women.

Fritz Holstein—as Dona’s father was generally known among Europe’s extended, interwoven royal family—was relatively tall according to the standards of the time, possessing a slight frame with dark hair and a matching beard. Labile, forward thinking, and a progressive constitutionalist, he was the son and heir of Christian August II, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, the insignificant ruler of the microscopic city-state Augustenburg, located on Als Island near the Jutland Peninsula in southern Denmark. In 1852, at the end of the First Schleswig War, Christian August lost his family seat after unsuccessfully trying to claim the throne of the twin duchies of Schleswig-Holstein. Financially ruined after the war, he sold his ancestral lands in Schleswig-Holstein to the king of Denmark for 2.75 million thalers—less than half of their total worth. Now hugely unpopular and without any real prospects for the future, the middle-aged Christian August retreated into near seclusion at Augustenburg Palace, his pseudo-Baroque family home on Als Island.

Christian August’s wife, Countess Louise-Sophie Danneskjold-Samsøe, was equally unpopular with monarchists since she was an illegitimate descendent of the Danish royal family. Her aristocratic title notwithstanding, Louise-Sophie was not considered truly
ebenbürtig
—of equal birth to marry into Europe’s royal houses. Christian August’s critics, most of whom were royals from Prussia or other German-speaking lands who fiercely guarded their prerogatives, argued that because of his marriage to a countess, his family was parvenu and therefore had no claim to the purple blood of royalty. Dona’s grandfather was not the only member of her family to marry a commoner. Her great-uncle and a number of her father’s cousins had similarly taken nonroyal wives. The fact that her maternal grandmother was a countess, and that some of her extended relatives were commoners was a sore spot on Dona’s pride for the rest of her life. In later years, she would become overly concerned, almost obsessed, with royal rank, especially when it came to marriages.

Unlike Fritz, Dona’s mother came from a more established royal lineage. Ada was the fifth of six children born to Prince Ernest I of Hohenlohe-Langenburg.
⁵
The Langenburgs were a relatively insignificant German house that ruled an equally insignificant German principality for barely a century until their territory was mediatised into the Kingdom of Württemberg by Napoleon in 1806. The Langenburgs lost their realm but were still considered
ebenbürtig
and were allowed to keep their rank and titles. Ada’s mother, Princess Feodora, was the elder half sister of Queen Victoria from their mother’s first marriage to the Prince of Leiningen.

As a young woman, Ada had a reputation for being beautiful. When she was seventeen, she captured the attention of Emperor Napoleon III of the French. The emperor was no Prince Charming. Already forty-four years old in 1852—compared to Ada’s seventeen—his appearance did not fall short of the Bonaparte family reputation. At around four feet six inches tall, he possessed a disproportionately large head, was balding, had one eyeball that was reportedly more dilated than the other, a bird-like nose, a waxy mustache, and a noticeable limp caused by rheumatism. In light of such an unseemly appearance, one must wonder what a young princess might see in him. An arranged marriage for Ada was a given, but few suitors could offer her anything comparable to what she would experience as empress of the French, living in some of the most opulent palaces in the world. After all, Marie Louise of Austria was in a similar situation when she married Napoleon I in 1810, and she was quite happy in France, albeit her marriage only lasted four years.

Queen Victoria, a woman of incredible tenacity, took a serious view of her position as head of her family and the impact that the actions of her family members would have on British interests and the monarchy. In a letter to her sister Feodora, she outlined her opinion on the emperor’s interest in Ada: “You know what
he
is, what his moral character is—(without thinking him devoid of good qualities and even valuable ones) what his entourage is, how thoroughly immoral France and French society are—hardly looking at what is wrong as more than fashionable and natural—you know how very insecure
his
position is—you know his age, that his health is indifferent, and naturally his wish to marry [Ada is] merely a political one, for he has never seen her … I ask you if you can imagine for a moment anything more awful than the fate of that sweet innocent child.”
⁶
Tempted though Ada may have been by the prospect of the French throne—she said she was “dying to be Empress”
⁷
—her parents would have none of it, browbeating their daughter into refusing the proposal. In a letter sent to the emperor dated January 1, 1853, Ada wrote that she had to decline on religious and moral grounds—as empress, she would most likely have been required to convert from the Protestant faith to Catholicism. Princess Michael of Kent wrote that “too much stood against” the emperor in his campaign to win Ada: “his morals, his religion, his
parvenu
status as royalty, and the sad fate of so many Queens of France in the last sixty years.”
⁸
Three years later, Ernest and Feodora married her off to Fritz Holstein, whose pro-German ideologies, and—most importantly to English dynastic interests in Europe—progressive attitudes, made him ideal.

Pro-German ideas were something Fritz Holstein espoused since his youth. Educated at the University of Bonn, he became close friends with the future crown prince of Prussia, Frederick Wilhelm, who was, naturally, also nicknamed Fritz. The two princes had a deep affection for one another, and Frederick Wilhelm’s enlightened views on constitutional ruling made a profound impression on Fritz Holstein; the two men would remain close for the rest of their lives. When Fritz Holstein’s first son was born in 1857, he was named Frederick in honor of the Prussian prince, who stood as godfather. And when the latter married Ada’s cousin Vicky, the Princess Royal of Great Britain, in 1858, it only strengthened their bond. After completing his studies at Bonn, Fritz took up a commission in the Bavarian military. By the time Dona was born, Fritz and Ada had determined to raise their daughter to think of herself first and foremost as a German princess. They felt a special attachment to Prussia, the largest, most influential, and most powerful of the German states. This brought with it a sense of connection with the Prussian royal family, the Hohenzollerns, through Frederick Wilhelm and Vicky.

The Hohenzollerns were by the mid-nineteenth century the rising dynastic power on continental Europe. Their provenance as a strong royal house was a long process marked by continual dynastic evolution. Like the Habsburgs of Austria, they originated as counts sometime around the eleventh century. The family took its name from what is believed to be their ancestral home, Hohenzollern Castle. A typical German
burg
with high turrets, ramparts, and classic medieval architecture, it is located 768 feet on a mountaintop above Hechingen, in the Swabian Alps. The family tree branched off several times throughout the centuries, but the most prominent line eventually became rulers of Brandenburg, a frontier region in northeastern Prussia, in 1417. Through marriage, conquest, and inheritance, the Hohenzollerns transitioned from being margraves and electors of Brandenburg to also being dukes—and eventually kings—of Prussia.

By the 1850s, the Hohenzollerns were at the center of Prussia’s authoritarianism, which, though decried by liberals as philistine and conservative, gave the country a functionality and stability that many of its neighbors lacked. Like many of Europe’s Great Powers, Prussia was a nation of intense contrasts. In the 1750s, King Frederick II (more famously remembered as Frederick the Great) pushed Prussian ascendancy to terminal velocity. He spread Prussian influence across the continent through his support of art, philosophy, and modernization during the Age of Enlightenment. At the same time, he began establishing Prussia’s military as a force to be reckoned with when he successfully tore from Austria its beloved, ore-rich province of Silesia in 1740, marking the beginning of the War of the Austrian Succession and leading to decades of Habsburg-Hohenzollern acrimony. In 1815, it was the Prussian military that helped shatter the armies of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. This was not something the Prussians took lightly, since Waterloo marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It would also lead to decades of rivalry with the Russians, who believed it was their burning of Moscow in 1812 and the subsequent decimation of the French army that had truly sounded Napoleon’s death knell. This history of triumph through its armed forces led to Prussia effectively becoming a military state. Following the uprisings in Berlin during the Year of Revolutions in 1848, all traces of liberal or reforming ideologies were swept away, cementing a threefold Prussian cultural identity of conservatism, militarism, and absolutism, all tied inextricably with the monarchy. In time, the overwhelming influence of the military would border on paradomania—an unhealthy psychological obsession with the military—becoming an inseparable part of Prussia’s existence.

The efforts made by Fritz and Ada to impart into Dona a love for all things German was no easy task. Throughout her childhood, Germany was little more than an idea, a geopolitical concept desperately struggling to find a cultural and existential identity for itself. The root of the problem was that the German states had once been the Holy Roman Empire. Established in AD 800, this imperial brainchild of Charlemagne’s was an attempt to resurrect the Roman Empire in Western Europe, mostly among the German-speaking realms. At its apex, the Holy Roman Empire encompassed more than four hundred states stretching from the English Channel to the Italian Alps. By the sixteenth century, the empire’s elected throne had passed into the hands of the Habsburgs. For the next two hundred years, the two greatest German dynasties, the Habsburgs of Austria and the Hohenzollerns of Prussia, used the empire as a shuttlecock in their game of imperial politics.

This lasted almost uninterrupted until the French Revolution and the disastrous Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, in which French forces defeated the Austrians. The day after Christmas, Napoleon effectively dismantled the Holy Roman Empire, and through a complex process, the Austrian Empire was born. Nine years later, following the final defeat of Napoleonic France in 1814 and the Congress of Vienna, those lands that had not been placed under the control of the Austrian crown became a “loose confederation of thirty-eight duchies, kingdoms, and four free cities” that were “ruled by kings, princes, archdukes, dukes, electors, margraves, landgraves, archbishops, and so forth.” So disparate were these lands that collectively called themselves “Germany” that some—like Prussia—covered thousands of square miles spread disconnectedly across northern Europe; others—like Augustenburg—“were smaller than Liechtenstein (sixty-one square miles) is today, and most were poor, rural, and sparsely populated.”
⁹
Compared to modern, united countries like Great Britain, the northern European, mostly German states were feudal, undeveloped, and backward.