She was the daughter of Prince Christian of Denmark, a distant relative of the drunken, divorced King Frederick VII and recognized as his heir. Her mother was Princess Louise, daughter of the Landgrave William of Hesse-Cassel. There were thus two strong objections to this match which the Queen and Prince Consort had initially dismissed out of hand. In the first place, they much disapproved of the Hesse-Cassel family, whose castle at Rumpenheim near Frankfurt was said to be the scene of the wildest and most indecorous parties; and in the second place they were most reluctant to become entangled in the complicated question of the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, which had been ruled for years by the Kings of Denmark but which the Germans considered they had a good right to annex.
As opposed to these objections, however, Princess Alexandra herself was wholly unexceptionable. Indeed, the reports of her from Copenhagen were enthusiastic. She was only just seventeen and still at school; but, though so young, she displayed a remarkable grace of movement and manner. And when the Queen saw the photographs sent to her by Walburga Paget, the German wife of the British Minister in Copenhagen, who had once been Crown Princess Frederick’s lady-in-waiting, she had to admit that Alexandra was, indeed, ‘unverschämt hübsch’, ‘outrageously beautiful’. The Princess was not in the least intellectual and had rather a quick temper, but few other faults could be found in her. If she occasionally displayed a lamentable ignorance, she was never tactless; and if she was sometimes a little stubborn, she was never unkind. When sending her parents another photograph of ‘Prince Christian’s lovely daughter’, the Crown Princess wrote, ‘I have seen several people who have seen her of late — and who give such accounts of her beauty, her charm, her amiability, her frank natural manner and many excellent qualities. I thought it right to tell you all this in Bertie’s interest, though I as a Prussian cannot wish Bertie should ever marry her … She is a good deal taller than I am,’ the Crown Princess added later, ‘has a lovely figure but very thin, a complexion as beautiful as possible. Very fine white regular teeth and very fine large [deep blue] eyes… She is as simple and natural and unaffected as possible — and seems exceedingly well brought up.’ The only physical blemish was a slight scar on her neck which might, the Crown Princess thought, have been the result of an attack of scrofula; but this, the Queen was subsequently assured, was not the cause of the mark which, in any case, could be concealed — as Princess Alexandra later did conceal it, thus setting a long-lasting fashion — by wearing a jewelled ‘dog-collar’.
The Queen was rather sceptical of her daughter’s lavish praise of the girl, since the Crown Princess was ‘perhaps a little inclined to be carried away’ when she liked someone. But the Crown Prince agreed with everything his wife said. So the Queen allowed herself to be convinced that Princess Alexandra must ‘be charming in every sense of the word’. She seemed all the more desirable because not only was the Russian court also interested in her as a bride for the Tsar Alexander’s heir, but so was the Queen of Holland on behalf of the Prince of Orange. Evidently she was a ‘pearl not to be lost’.
‘We dare not let her slip away,’ the Prince Consort wrote to his daughter. ‘If the match were more or less your work … it would open the way to friendly relations between you and the Danes which might later be a blessing and of use to Germany.’ At the same time the Prince Consort informed his son that, if Princess Alexandra appealed to him, the marriage would be considered more important than either the Schleswig-Holstein question or his parents’ disapproval of the Hesse-Cassel family. So eager for the match did the Prince Consort become, in fact, that when he heard that his brother, Ernest, Duke of Coburg, was raising objections to it on the grounds that it would not be in the best interests of Germany, he wrote him a furious letter: ‘What has that got to do with you? … Vicky has racked her brains to help us to find someone, but in vain … We have no choice.’ To his son, the Prince Consort wrote, ‘It would be a thousand pities if you were to lose her.’
So, in September, without marked enthusiasm, the Prince of Wales embarked for the Continent with General Bruce to see the girl whom his sister, having contrived a meeting with her at Strelitz, now described as ‘the most fascinating creature in the world’. It was given out that the purpose of his visit was to continue his military studies by accompanying his brother-in-law, the Crown Prince, to the autumn manoeuvres of the Prussian army. But the German newspapers hinted that there might be other reasons for the Prince’s journey, particularly as, in the same week, Princess Alexandra left Copenhagen for her grandfather’s castle at Rumpenheim which was not far from the area selected for the forthcoming army manoeuvres. The Prince carried with him detailed instructions from his father as to how he must behave if his Uncle Ernest endeavoured to interfere with the proposed arrangements. He was warned:
Your Uncle Ernest … is going to the Rhine, and will try his hand at this work. Your best defence will be … not to enter upon the subject, should he broach it. Saying nothing is not difficult … Should you be told that it is known that you will meet Princess A., your answer should be that you will be very glad to have an opportunity of seeing a young lady of whom you have heard so much good.
‘I am afraid that I shall have many difficulties,’ the Prince rather mournfully acknowledged. ‘But I feel sure that the best plan is not to be too precipitate. The newspapers I see have taken it up, and say that, if I marry a Danish princess, there will be immediate rupture between the British and Prussian courts.’ Anyway, he would keep his father’s letter in his pocket; and if there was trouble with Duke Ernest or anyone else he would talk to no one but General Bruce or the Crown Prince Frederick. Duke Ernest’s threats to prevent it having come to nothing, the meeting between the Prince and Alexandra took place at Speyer on 24 September. The place chosen for the meeting was the cathedral, and here Princess Alexandra with her parents and the Crown Princess all assembled during the morning of that day. The Prince and Bruce were travelling incognito but they were immediately recognized by the Bishop, who insisted upon conducting them around the cathedral, so that it was some time before the necessary introductions could take place. Having effected them before the altar, the Crown Princess took the Bishop away, ostensibly to look at the cathedral frescoes ‘but in reality’, as she reported to her parents, ‘to watch the course’ of her brother’s conversation with Princess Alexandra.
The Crown Princess ‘felt very nervous the whole time’, she admitted; and her nervousness increased when she saw that her brother had evidently begun the conversation rather awkwardly.
At first, I think, he was disappointed about her beauty and did not think her as pretty as he expected, but as … her beauty consists more in the sweetness of expression, grace of manner and extreme refinement of appearance, she grows upon one the more one sees her; and in a quarter of an hour he thought her lovely … He said that he had never seen a young lady who pleased him so much … [though] her nose was too long and her forehead too low. She talked to him at first, in her simple and unaffected way [speaking English fluently, though with a strong Danish accent]. She was not shy. I never saw a girl of sixteen so forward for her age; her manners are more like twenty-four … I see that [she] has made an impression on [him] though in his own funny and undemonstrative way.