Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (101 page)

DUKE OF SAXE-COBURG DEAD

Expired Suddenly at Rosenau Castle on Monday

QUEEN VICTORIA’S SECOND SON

was afflicted with cancer, but did not know of his malady
³⁹

A few weeks earlier, the next step in the saga of succession had been settled in the most unsatisfactory manner imaginable: by hunting for the least unwilling candidate. Victoria and Albert’s third son, Arthur, duke of Connaught, already a general in the British army, was not going to endanger his chance of receiving a field marshal’s baton, and Connaught’s own son, Prince Arthur (b. 1883), a schoolboy at Eton College, was apparently terrified of the inheritance. Victoria and Albert’s fourth son, Leopold, duke of Albany (1853–84), another haemophiliac, was already dead, struck down by a botched injection following a fall at Cannes. So the royal courtiers’ search moved with awful inevitability to another Eton schoolboy: Leopold’s helpless and posthumous son, Queen Victoria’s youngest grandson, Prince Charles Edward (b. 1884). Rumours surfaced that the elder prince, Arthur, had given his younger cousin, Charles Edward, a good public-school thrashing in order to deflect the hand of fate. The ultimate decision would have been taken by Queen Victoria herself.

The Diet of the duchy made a rare show of dissatisfaction. As reported in the
New York Times
, which could take liberties unthinkable in London, the atmosphere had turned sour:

The Diet of the Duchy as well as the people at large is protesting most energetically against this intention of the British Royal Family, and declare that they will not allow these British princes to shake the dice for the ducal crown of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The Diet has proclaimed its right to say the directing word about the succession to the throne.
⁴⁰

The protesters were presumably told to mind their own business.

Thus began the sad public career of Prince Charles Edward (Carl-Eduard), the last duke of Albany and the last duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In theory, like his uncles and cousins, he could have tried to renounce the claim. In practice, he was trapped. Despite having a German mother, the former Princess Helena of Waldeck-Pyrmont, he was exceptional in the family for speaking no German; it had been assumed that he would have to earn his living in England. He knew of no one to whom he might have passed the burden of his succession, and had no means of gauging how poisoned the chalice would prove to be. His mother told him, or so his descendants would say, that to acquiesce in his fate was the most dutiful way of honouring his dead father’s memory.
⁴¹

At first, the prospects did not seem too bad. Carl-Eduard was allowed to finish his English education, and to begin with he reigned in name only under joint regents. He would have known that his predecessor, Duke Alfred, an accomplished musician, had won his subjects’ confidence and that in seven years’ occupancy of the throne had managed to flit happily between Rosenau and his London residence at Clarence House.

Joint regent for the boy-Duke, with his mother, was… Prince Hohenlohe. But it was the Kaiser himself who superintended his education, and ‘Charlie’ and his sister Alice spent many holidays with the imperial family… There was, occasionally, some embarrassment about the young people’s divided loyalties, but they solved it in their own way: during the Boer War the Crown Prince [of Prussia] bet Alice a diamond brooch against a diamond pin that the Boers would win – he duly paid up when the British were victorious. A few years later… the new Coburgs’ link with the imperial family was tightened, when Duke Charlie married [the Empress’s niece] and the couple divided their time between Coburg and Berlin… Princess Alice, on the other hand, had reforged the link with Britain by marrying Prince Alexander of Teck… whose sister Mary had married Prince George, the future George V. Alexander largely had been educated in Britain and was an officer in the British army.
⁴²

Duke Carl-Eduard’s accession to Saxe-Coburg-Gotha at the age of twenty-one took place in July 1905. His entry into his duchy was attended by much ceremony, and much unguarded comment. He was received at the railway station at Gotha with full military honours, before proceeding to the Friedenstein Palace, where his mother was waiting. He swore the constitutional oath in the throne room of the palace, watched by representatives of the Kaiser and King Edward VII, by ministers of the duchy’s government, and by an array of officials and their ladies. Some of the press reports, while sympathizing with the new duke, did not mince words about the manner of his succession:

UNWILLING PRINCE IS NOW A GERMAN DUKE

Charles Edward of Saxe-Coburg Attains his Majority

HIS HEAD WAS NOT PUNCHED

Cousin to whom the Dukedom was also offered

Threatened to Whip Him if he refused it
⁴³

One small source of satisfaction arose from Carl-Eduard’s right to a magnificent, newly designed personal standard, the
Herzogstandarte
, neatly combining his British and Saxon connections. The design showed the royal banner-of-arms of Saxony – a field of ten black and gold horizontal stripes – surmounted by a diagonal
Rautenkranz
or ‘crancelin’, and a heraldic canton. The crancelin, running from upper left to bottom right, took the form of a crenellated garland in deep green. The heraldic canton placed in the top-left corner was made up from the quartered arms of a royal British prince ‘defaced’ by a white ‘label’ bearing red hearts and red crosses.

Very soon the first international storm clouds appeared on the horizon. The ‘Dreadnought race’ was driving a wedge between Britain and Germany, and the young duke’s chief patron and cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm, was proving particularly bullish. The Kaiser had already nominated the duke’s bride, Princess Victoria Adelaide of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg – a relative both of Britain’s Queen Alexandra and of Prince Andrew of Greece (father of the yet-unborn Prince Philip) – and he now ordered his protégé to attend an officer school of the Prussian army. This assignment must have been especially uncomfortable. Carl-Eduard had been taking German lessons, but, as a lifelong sufferer from rheumatoid arthritis, he had no military ability or inclination. Fortunately, his marriage was a happy one. He married his bride at Glücksburg in Holstein – in the ‘Lucky Castle’. His wife and five children provided a source of solace in a life that was to grow increasingly bleak.

The First World War saw the duke raised to the rank of general, yet abruptly removed from his nominal command. Though he volunteered to fight on the Eastern Front, he saw no active service. No doubt to mask this embarrassment, a medal was struck in 1916 to celebrate his non-existent military record. The Diet of his duchy revived the issue of the succession, voting that ‘all foreigners’ and ‘persons who have waged war on the German Empire’ should be excluded; at the same time, in Britain, he was struck off the list of Knights of the Garter. In July 1917, nearly three years into the war, his British relatives abandoned the German family name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha by an Order in Council, and were magically transformed into ‘Windsors’. His sister Alice and her husband, the duke of Teck, were reinvented as the countess and earl of Athlone, but he was not offered the same option. Still worse, since he was judged to have ‘adhered to His Majesty’s enemies’, Britain’s Titles Deprivation Act (1917) empowered the Privy Council to investigate his alleged treason and to decide on the punishment.

The Titles Deprivation Act was peculiarly vindictive with regard to those members of the British royal family for whom, like Duke Carl-Eduard, much more was at stake than a mere name change. It was one thing to legislate for British royals at home, quite another to lay down the law for ‘all descendants of Queen Victoria’:

We, of our Royal Will and Authority [proclaimed George V], do hereby declare and announce that as from the date of this Our Royal Proclamation Our House and Family shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor… And We do hereby further declare that We for Ourselves and… for all other descendants of Our… Grandmother Queen Victoria who are subjects of these Realms, relinquish and enjoin the discontinuance of the use of the degrees, styles, dignities, titles and honours of Dukes and Duchesses of Saxony and Princes and Princesses of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and all other German degrees, styles, dignities, titles, honours and appellations.
⁴⁴

The Privy Council’s verdict was delivered in January 1919. Together with three other ‘enemy peers’, Carl-Eduard was to lose the dukedom of Albany, the earldom of Clarence, the barony of Arklow and the style of Royal Highness. His standards were removed from St George’s Chapel, Windsor. In short, he was turned into a pariah.
*

Meanwhile, as the German Empire folded, all the hereditary rulers in Germany were forced to abdicate. Carl-Eduard renounced his dukedom on 14 November 1918, five days after the announcement of the Kaiser’s own abdication. Then, as the Weimar Republic stuttered into life, the German populace took revenge on its aristocracy. The Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council of Gotha invaded the ex-duke’s castle at Rosenau, abolished his duchy and confiscated his lands. He was now a private citizen, a condemned man in his homeland, an outcast in his adopted country and a lodger in his own home. He had done nothing except to behave well and do what he was told. The humiliation was acute.

It is not true, however, that the ex-duke was penniless. With some delay, he received a compensation settlement from the state, and possessed other sources of income that enabled him to sustain a comfortable family life. His mother, the dowager-duchess of Albany, came to visit him and his family for vacations, delighting in her grandchildren. They were all spending a family holiday together at Hinterreis in the Austrian Tyrol when she died there suddenly in September 1922.

Inter-war Germany was a hotbed of radical politics and a cauldron of economic distress. Industrial production faltered, unemployment soared and the currency collapsed. The nation lost its established leaders, the middle classes lost their savings and large sections of the public lost all hope. The vacuum was filled by wild radicals from both the Right and the Left. Fascist and Communist Party gangs battled each other in the streets.

On 14 October 1922 a little-known group of right-wing thugs from Munich decided to target the town of Coburg, which they knew to be, like Gotha, a nest of their left-wing opponents. Their leader, a former corporal called Adolf Hitler, announced that he was going to stage a ‘German Day’ in Coburg, and hired a train for the purpose. He arrived with a brass band and 800 flag-waving supporters (practically the whole National Socialist Party at the time), who promptly brawled with policemen attempting to maintain order. When a crowd of locals tried to bar the way, a general fracas ensued. Stones were thrown, insults hurled and bones broken. The Nazis then pressed on to the town centre, where Hitler held a rally, announcing that Coburg had been cleansed of ‘Red tyranny’. Back at the train station, the railwaymen refused to release the Nazis’ train. Hitler responded by threatening to kidnap every ‘Red’ in sight and to take them hostage to Munich. His bluster and brutality won the day. Seven years later, Coburg was the first city in Germany to give the Nazis an absolute majority of votes in a municipal election. In 1932 Hitler issued one of the most prized Nazi Party decorations, the ‘Coburg Badge’, showing a wreathed swastika. The inscription reads: ‘MIT HITLER IN COBURG, 1922–32’.  
⁴⁵

It is not possible to say whether ex-Duke Carl-Eduard watched Hitler at work on the ‘German Day’ in Coburg; if not, he would certainly have heard first-hand reports. He was an example of those who cared little for the Nazis’ radical ideology, but who shared their outrage at Germany’s shabby post-war treatment; he would have approved of their hostility to the Communists, who had destroyed his duchy. At first he was associated with one of the more conservative groupings, the Harzburg Front, which sought to unify the German right-wing opposition, and which made a tactical alliance with the Nazis in the early 1930s. In 1932, however, when right-wing politics were in some disarray, he was persuaded to join the SA, the Nazi Brownshirts, and rose quickly to the high rank of
Obergruppenführer
. He may have been influenced by his wife’s brother-in-law, ex-Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, who had joined the Nazi Party before him.

After Hitler’s election to power in 1933, the ex-duke was singled out as an instrument for cultivating the British establishment and was made president of the Anglo-German Friendship Society. In this capacity he kept in close touch with the British ambassadors in Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps and Sir Nevile Henderson, and attended the funeral in London of his cousin George V in January 1936. Limping along far behind the late king’s coffin as the official German emissary, he was completely ignored by his British relatives. A solitary figure, he shuffled along painfully, shoulders stooped and feet splayed, struggling to keep pace with the procession. Incongruously, he wore a green, German-style trenchcoat bereft of insignia and a stormtrooper’s iron helmet. His influence, such as it was, came to an end less than a year later with the abdication of his cousin’s son, Edward VIII, of whom the Nazis had entertained high hopes.