Chapter XXI: The Reign of Jingoism (3)

But the end of the year brought a more bitter sorrow to the Queen than the death of George V. The Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, died in extremely touching circumstances. She had spent the summer months with her children at Eastbourne, where she had endeared herself to the people by her sweetness of disposition, and by the personal interest she manifested in the poor of the town. She was usually to be seen visiting the cottages of the sick in the fishing quarter. She had taken a keen interest in studying the management of certain charitable institutions, evidently with a view to making use of her knowledge when she returned to Darmstadt, and a charming visit to Osborne completed a holiday that was for her full of happiness. Her life was uneventful at Darmstadt till the 8th of November, when her daughter, the Princess Victoria, was smitten with diphtheria. The Grand Duchess was herself a skilled and scientifically-trained nurse, and she tended her child personally. She was the first to detect the appearance of the diphtheritic membrane in the little Princess’s throat, and she promptly attacked it with inhalations of chlorate of potash. In spite of careful isolation, the whole family, including the Grand Duke, with the exception of the Princess Elizabeth, caught the disease, and it need hardly be said that the strength of the Grand Duchess soon began to give way under the strain of mental anxiety and bodily fatigue. The Princess May died, but on the 25th of November the Grand Duke recovered. On the 7th of December the Grand Duchess went to the railway station to see the Duchess of Edinburgh, and next day she too was prostrate with diphtheria. Lord Beaconsfield, in his speech of condolence in the House of Lords on the 16th of December, described her, with ornate rhetoric, as receiving “the kiss of death” from one of her children, and he recommended the tragic incident as fit to be commemorated by the painter, the sculptor, or the artist in gems. There was no foundation for this histrionic flight. Nobody knew how the Princess caught the contagion, but her biographer states “it is supposed that she must have taken the infection when one day, in her grief and despair, she had laid her head on her sick husband’s pillow.”[137] Her sufferings were severe and protracted, and on the 13th of December it was seen that she must die. Still she lingered on. In the afternoon she welcomed her husband with great joy. She saw her lady-in-waiting, and even read two letters, the last one being from the Queen, her mother. Then she fell asleep and never woke again. At half-past eight on the morning of the 14th, the anniversary of her father’s death, she passed away, quietly murmuring to herself these words: “From Friday to Saturday, four weeks--May--dear papa!” All through her life she had worshipped her father’s memory with passionate devotion, and in death his name was the last on her lips.

The grief of the Queen was only equalled by that of the Prince of Wales, who seems to have regarded the Grand Duchess as his favourite sister. As for the English people, they mourned for her with simple-minded sincerity. The character of the Princess Alice--so full of sense and enterprise, and high-spirited self-helpfulness--had been to them peculiarly attractive. She had won their gratitude by her devotion to her mother in the first hours of her widowhood, and to the Heir Apparent, when in 1871 his life hung in the balance. That her daily existence was clouded with sordid cares due to straitened means was not known to her countrymen till after her death. But they were well aware that much domestic sorrow had entered into her life. Her efforts to raise the condition of her sex in Germany procured for her many enemies in a country where it is deemed desirable to reduce the house-mothers to the position of upper servants in their families, who, however, do their work without claiming wages. Sticklers for Court etiquette were shocked by the unconventional activity manifested by the Princess in furthering the organisation of charitable and educational movements. Even the poor in most instances viewed her visits to their homes--visits which she ultimately found prudent to make _incognito_--with suspicious hostility. She had the character in fact of being bent on revolutionising the domestic and social life of Darmstadt by English ideas. She loved learning, and delighted in the society of men of letters and artists, who were always her most favoured guests. Hence it was bruited about that she was an infidel, and a foe to religion. Undoubtedly at one time, when she cultivated close relations with Friedrich Strauss, under whom she studied the works of Voltaire, her theological views ceased to be orthodox. But her musings on the mystery of life, the problem of duty, the conflict between Will and Law in the world, reveal a profoundly reverent and eagerly upstriving spirit, ever struggling towards the light. Some day the story of the spiritual conflict that went on in the still depths of this pure and gentle soul may be told. Here it is enough to say that personal influences played a great part in bringing it to a happy issue. Some time after her philosophical conclusions had crumbled away like dust, one of her most intimate relatives writes, “She told me herself, in the most simple and touching manner, how this change had come about. I could not listen to her story without tears. The Princess told me she owed it all to her child’s death, and to the influence of a Scotch gentleman, a friend of the Grand Duke’s and Grand Duchess’s,” who was residing with his family at Darmstadt.[138] “I owe all

to this kind friend,” she said, “who exercised such a beneficial influence on my religious views; yet people say so much that is cruel and unjust of him, and of my acquaintance with him.”[139] In Germany, her biographer[140] admits “her life and work were not easy,” and she had not the intrepid intellect, the ardent temperament, the caustic wit and the soaring ambition, which enabled her sister, the Crown Princess, to conquer for herself a position of dominant influence in the midst of an unsympathetic Court, and an antipathetic Society. Perhaps this explains why through life she had every year been drawn more closely to the land of her birth, where her worth was more justly appreciated than in the land of her exile. “How deep was her feeling in this respect,” writes the Princess Christian in her touching preface to her sister’s memoirs, “was testified by a request which she made to her husband, in anticipation of her death, that an English flag might be laid on her coffin; accompanying the wish with a modest expression of a hope that no one in the land of her adoption would take umbrage at her desire to be borne to her rest with the old English colours above her.”