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Imperial Requiem
Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires
By Justin C. Vovk
iUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Justin C. Vovk
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-1749-9
Chapter One
Imperial Forge
(1858–73)
Far 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, 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."
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. 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." Tempted though Ada may have been by the prospect of the French throne—she said she was "dying to be Empress"—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." 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." Compared to modern, united countries like Great Britain, the northern European, mostly German states were feudal, undeveloped, and backward.
As a young toddler, the complex politics surrounding Germany, Austria, and the intricate lattice that kept them loosely allied meant little to Dona Holstein. Not until decades later would she realize how significantly these issues impacted her life. In the meantime, the death of her brother Frederick in 1858 meant she was an only child, but she soon became the eldest in a growing family. Her next sibling, a sister named Caroline Matilda, came into the world fifteen months after Dona was born. Nicknamed "Calma," she was considered the prettiest of all the Holstein girls. She was also the sister with whom Dona would always have the closest relationship. Queen Victoria, writing to her daughter Vicky in 1860 after Calma's birth, commented on Ada's frequent pregnancies after only a few years of marriage.
How can anyone, who has not been married above two years and three quarters rejoice at being a third time in that condition? I positively think those ladies who are always enceinte quite disgusting; it is more like a rabbit or a guinea-pig than anything else and really it is not very nice ... Let me repeat once more, dear, that it is very bad for any person to have them very fast—and that the poor children suffer for it even more, not to speak of the ruin it is to the looks of a young woman—which she must not neglect for her husband's sake, particularly when she is a Princess.
Two years later, Fritz and Ada were thrilled when two sons, Gerard and Ernest Günther, were born in 1862 and 1863, respectively. The hereditary prince and princess's efforts to model their family after the German royals they so idolized were encouraged by Ada's family, especially her mother, Dowager Princess Feodora of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. Feodora often passed on advice to her daughter on how to raise her family, advice that came from her half sister the queen.
As was often the case with Victoria, she freely dispensed advice, opinions, or criticisms with a noticeable lack of sensitivity for other people's feelings or circumstances. This was the case when it came to managing the Holsteins' finances. Fritz insisted on maintaining a comfortable lifestyle, but German royals were famous for exorbitant spending and, as a consequence, debt-ridden courts—the king of Bavaria was rumored to be so poor that his weekly pocket money amounted to only twenty cents. "Poor and unimportant in the eyes of the world, the German royal families of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were at their historical nadir," wrote one of Queen Victoria's biographers. Despite the fiscal tribulations faced by many of their contemporaries, the Holsteins were not entirely destitute. Christian August was exceptionally frugal with what was left of the settlement he received for his territories in Schleswig-Holstein, enabling him to provide Fritz with Dolzig and a small palace in Gotha. His finances were also augmented by the modest revenues he received from Augustenburg.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Imperial Requiem by Justin C. Vovk Copyright © 2012 by Justin C. Vovk. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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