Queen Victoria's Matchmaking by Deborah Cadbury

Author:Deborah Cadbury
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408852842
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-07-27T11:43:12+00:00

8

Missy and Ferdinand

‘Cruel is the only word which really describes it.’

Queen Marie of Romania, Memoirs

After turning down Prince George, sixteen-year-old ‘Missy’, Princess Marie of Edinburgh, was unknowingly facing a battle of her own. The path she was being steered towards would come to cause her so much distress that even years later she found ‘my pen seems to tremble in my hand when I set about recounting it’.1

Her ordeal began imperceptibly when she and her younger sister, Victoria-Melita, accompanied her mother as guests of Kaiser Wilhelm and his wife, Dona, at Wilhelmshohe, a handsome château near Cassel, some 200 miles from Berlin. Ostensibly, the event was a celebration at the all-important annual Kaisermanover of military displays and cavalry assaults. Missy had not yet come out into society officially. All innocence, she was trying to appear grown up – a lamb to the slaughter. Dressed in her best mauve-coloured gown, complete with a matching coloured orchid she had chosen, she made her entrance through the tall pillared doorway of the eighteenth-century château with her fifteen-year-old sister, armed with her mother’s advice ‘not to be tongue-tied’. It was like entering a different realm; before her were the grandees of the German court, all appearing at ease in this lavishly gilded world.

Despite Wilhelm’s colourful personality, he was ‘not a favourite cousin’, Missy observed. She felt he could be brusque and boisterous in his dealings with the family, almost intimidating. ‘There was something about him that aroused antagonism’ and made her feel ‘all prickly with opposition’. Although his obedient wife, Dona, now the mother of six strapping sons, tried to be charming, Missy sensed there was a pretence about her cordiality, ‘her smile seemed glued on’. Doubtless it was a relief that evening for Missy to find herself seated for dinner nowhere near the German emperor and empress, but next to an attractive man, ten years her senior, who had a youthful, unconfident air. This was so marked that Missy remembered vividly his awkward habit of laughing readily – even giggling – to mask an intrinsic shyness and lack of ease. He was introduced as the heir to the Romanian throne, Crown Prince Ferdinand.

Missy thought little of the apparently chance meeting until afterwards, when it was too late. ‘Was it all a plot,’ she wondered. Were her relatives ‘all in it’? There were other ‘coincidental’ meetings through her German cousins with Crown Prince Ferdinand of Romania, who was from the senior branch of Germany’s imperial line, the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. It was only long afterwards that she reflected on her youthful joy and trust that made her suspect nothing. ‘But for all that it was cruel,’ she wrote, ‘yes, cruel is the only word which really describes it; it was a sort of trapping of innocence, a deliberate blinding against life as it truly is . . .’ At no stage did Missy blame her Russian mother, but the Duchess of Edinburgh was the key player in arranging her fate – all the while the duchess’s face appearing ‘happy and expectant’, inspiring her daughter’s confidence.

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