Louie

Between 1859 and 1891 her four sons and four of her five daughters produced for Queen Victoria no fewer than forty grandchildren. Of these six died in early childhood, and a further four died comparatively young. Of the surviving thirty, twenty-one were princesses and no fewer than six of these were christened Victoria. Princess Marie Louise (Louie), and her elder sister Princess Helena Victoria (Thora), were the daughters of Queen Victoria’s slightly difficult third daughter and fifth child Princess Helena and her husband Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenberg, and were born in 1872 and 1870 respectively. This places them right in the middle of the sequence of granddaughters, in the tenth and eleventh spots. Their female first cousins fall into four principle categories: German and Russian princesses by birth or marriage who found themselves cut off from their British cousins after the outbreak of World War I and whose official rank evaporated when the Kaiser abdicated in 1918; British and German princesses who went on to become crown princesses or queens consort and empresses of other European countries—namely of Greece, Norway, Rumania, Spain, Sweden, and Russia; British princesses who remained British, but whose public role gradually diminished in prominence and importance following the accession of King Edward VII, and the following three generations: King George V (1910), King George VI (1936), and the present Queen Elizabeth (1952); and, finally, those few who, through marriage, spent long periods in vice-regal service abroad, invariably in Canada and South Africa.

Louie is interesting because although she evolved through several of the lesser of these categories, she did not fit comfortably or permanently into any of them. Her early marriage to Prince Aribert of Anhalt was the bright idea of Cousin Willie—but was perhaps more accurately an outstanding example of the Kaiser’s astounding lack of judgment. The marriage was dissolved in 1900, almost certainly because the prince was caught in flagrante with a young male servant. Thenceforth Louie’s status was somewhat problematic. She regarded her marriage vows as permanently binding, and never considered remarriage. She returned to the household of her parents, and, in 1917, when, bowing to immense public pressure, King George V converted those German titles held by members of the extended royal family to English ones, Louie became known, somewhat ambiguously, as Her Highness Princess Marie Louise. In the 1920s and 1930s Louie spent long periods traveling abroad, inviting herself to stay for several high-maintenance months at a time in Government Houses all over the Empire, or else in the palaces of her crowned cousins. In between, Louie interested herself in various charities, girls’ clubs, nursing homes, and other worthy causes, mostly those established and sustained for decades by her mother Princess Helena. Louie lived comfortably with her sister Thora and a succession of long-suffering ladies-in-waiting for whom the arduousness of these honorary appointments was not necessarily rewarded by close proximity to court; indeed the rate of attrition appears to have been quite high. Nevertheless as an increasingly eccentric old lady, the families of George V and George VI kept an affectionate eye on Louie and Thora, and evidently enjoyed their company. Most importantly in the present context, not unlike her aunt Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, Louie gravitated towards artists and designers and musicians and writers. It was partly through her intervention that the young Cecil Beaton gained access to the royal circle, and for two solid years between 1921 and 1923 practically all of Louie’s time was spent organizing and mustering the increasingly granular contributions to Queen Mary’s Doll’s House.

Princess Marie Louise again

This rather beautiful drawing by Dame Laura Knight is coming up for sale late this month at Lawrences in Dorset, for next to no money. It shows Princess Marie Louise as a rather wistful old lady, having just completed her very engaging volume of memoirs, My Memories of Six Reigns. The lot contains two further drawings by Knight, showing the hands of the sitter and sheets of writing (“To all those whose friendship and affection have made my long life so full of interest and happiness―Marie Louise; I have told you that my religion and faith have been the anchor to which I have clung all through my life with its many joys and sorrows. There is no other anchor, and with that assurance I say ‘Farewell’―Marie Louise.” The drawings and manuscript were apparently acquired by the vendor’s mother from Princess Marie Louise’s last Lady-in-Waiting. According to the catalogue notes, the Princess died at her home off Berkeley Square on December 8, 1956, aged 84, only a matter of months after Dame Laura executed this portrait. The ones of her hands formed the frontispiece and endpapers of the Princess’s book, which was published earlier in the same year, so the group carries more than a hint of valedictory repose, or, as Lawrences rightly put it, “an unusual farewell to the nation” by one of Queen Victoria’s last surviving granddaughters.

True Blue

We Australians have held onto the concept of “true blue” with such tenacity that it is now commonly applied to the national identity, or, more accurately, those who are, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “faithful, staunch and unwavering (in one’s faith, principles, etc.): sterling, genuine, real.”

However, “true blue” is a survival of our British heritage, and an ancient one. In its current sense the phrase probably descends from seventeenth-century Scottish Presbyterians, “the Covenanters having adopted blue as their color in contradistinction to the royal red.” It seems that Covenanters wore blue scarves, and bunches of blue ribbons fastened to their bonnets, no doubt fortified retrospectively by gloomy divines, citing the precept of Mosaic law (Numbers 25: 38). Of one such person it was written in 1663 that “For his Religion it was fit To match his Learning and his Wit; ’Twas Presbyterian true Blew.” Certainly this is the sense in which Jonathan Swift applied the same phrase to the Whig opponents of Queen Anne’s first Tory ministry.

However, there are indications that some notional link between “blue” and “true” has existed at least since Chaucer, because in the “Squiere’s Tale” we read “And by hire bedde’s hed she made a mew, / And covered it with velouettes blew, / In signe of trouthe that is in woman sene,” and again in Court of Love, “Lo yonder folke (quod she) that knele in blew, / They were the colour ay and ever shal, / In signe they were and ever wil be true, / Withoutin change.” There is a slightly wobbly tradition, as persistent as it is misguided, that regards blue as the fastest dye, and this seems to have stemmed from the apparent immutability of the colors of the sky, and of the ocean.

Through the eighteenth century, as British two-party politics gradually solidified, the distinction “true blue” began to be claimed by both sides for its staunchest adherents. The True Blue Club was founded at Gloucester in 1790, to celebrate in perpetuity (with an annual dinner) an election victory won in the previous year by the narrowest possible majority of one vote. The Tory John Pitt was the “True Blue” candidate. Meanwhile, “buff-and-blue” or “blue-and-buff” were equally distinctive signature colors embraced by Charles James Fox and the Whigs.

You always know you have uncovered a deep vein of linguistic continuity when a vast array of cheerfully conflicting etymologies opens up among nineteenth-century antiquarians. That the question arose again and again in the pages of Notes and Queries without satisfactory resolution points to the happy coexistence of many sources, and not one only. Yet the variety is fascinating, and trickles all the way down to that nutty but lovable minor royal Princess Marie Louise, who thought “true blue” originated when the color of the ribbon of the Order of the Garter was altered from light to dark or royal blue at the time of the Hanoverian succession. According to Her Highness,

This change was considered advisable, as well as necessary, to show that if the exiled Stuarts conferred the Garter with the light-blue ribbon it was not the genuine order. Only dark-blue was judged correct, and from this came the expression, “true blue.”

The shrewdness of the later Stuarts is amply documented, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that, as a measure to guard against the creation of bogus knights companion of the Order of the Garter, a not particularly subtle change to the color of the ribbon from which they might suspend their Great and Lesser Georges is not by any means reliable, so one must assume therefore that the Hanoverians were comparatively slow on the uptake. On the other hand, Princess Marie Louise may have latched onto something, because we find in John Dryden’s “The Flower and the Leaf; or, The Lady in the Arbour, A Vision” the following couplet referring explicitly to Knights of the Garter: “…Unchang’d by fortune, to their sovereign true, / For which their manly legs are bound with blue…” (lines 550–551, Works, Vol. 11, p. 392). Sweet, really.

Curiously, on three separate occasions, first G. J. De Wilde (1853), then W. Brailsford of Kensington (1887) and J. Ardagh of Dublin (1915), successively alerted readers of Notes and Queries to the existence of “a substantially built brick tomb, with table top of stone, in the well-preserved churchyard of Little Brickhill, in Buckinghamshire. On the side facing the chief entrance to the church are the following two inscriptions: ‘Here lyeth the body / of True Blue / Who departed this life / January ye 17th 1724-5, / ageed 57.’ and ‘Also ye body / of Eleanor ye wife / of True Blue / who departed this life / January ye 27 1722-3 / ageed 50’” (Brailsford). However, no further explanation of the identity of these intriguing persons emerged from a careful examination of the register of burials in the church vestry (a document which commenced, incidentally, in 1559).

Some thirty years after the death of Mr. and Mrs. True Blue, “a certain poor woman from Marston, Oxford, was unexpectedly delivered of a child, ‘which was sent by the sureties on the same day to the Foundling Hospital, under the mark of True Blew (sic)’” (Notes and Queries, 7th. series, Vol. 3, June 18, 1887, p. 503).

According to R. W. Hackwood, meanwhile, writing in September 1858, “Mr. B. Webster, in his address to the audience on the closing night of the old Adelphi Theatre [the previous June 2], in giving a sketch of the history of the theatre, spoke as follows:—‘How it became a theatre is equally singular. It was consequent upon True Blue in the year 1802, through a dye of that name having been invented by a Mr. Scott, or True Blue Scott as he was familiarly called, which gave such a delicious tint to the peculiarly delicious habiliments of the fair sex that a rapid fortune was the consequence.’” Evidently through the eighteenth century there was a trend toward employing the term true blue as a bona fide name for male persons.

Still more correspondents insisted (1) that “true blue” had always been the Tory color in Suffolk, and that an old lady who used to say “Whenever I die, I shall die ‘Church and King,’ ‘King and Church,’ wonderful!” and was duly buried in a coffin lined with “true blue”; (2) that “true blue” was the Whig color in Lincolnshire in the days of agitation preceding the passage of the first Reform Bill (1832), “and continued so long afterwards”; and (3) that “true blue” was even mentioned by Thomas Cranmer “(vol. ii, p. 394).”

Intriguingly, according to the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser on Friday, October 12, 1827, p. 4 (citing Brady’s Varieties of Literature and thence Ray’s Proverbs, 1737), “Coventry had formerly the reputation for dyeing blues; insomuch that true blue came to be a proverb, to signify one who was always the same, and like himself.” 

And in his early, weird political satire, The Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1827), the future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli referred to England as “Vraibleusia.”

All of which suggests that if we Australians continue to lay particular claim to the expression “true blue,” and the qualities attaching to it—as, for example, in Peter Goldsworthy’s recent anthology True Blue? On Being Australian (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2008)—we had better be prepared to tolerate a little condescension, not to say snickering, in the lobby of the House of Commons, at the Athenaeum, and Lord’s Cricket Ground.

Oui, comme mon mari disait à Louis XIV

In the mid-1970s a friend of mine was taken to visit the widowed English grandmother of a university friend of his somewhere in Shropshire, and was warned beforehand that the old lady’s preferred conversational gambit upon sitting down to lunch was to turn to her next door neighbor and commence with something like: “As the Dalai Lama said to me…” Sure enough, this was what actually happened, and my friend got the giggles.

Presumably by disclosing in this manner an easy acquaintanceship with persons famous, exotic, or deeply unexpected, this stratagem may achieve an immediate effect of heightened drama—and enable you to conduct the rest of your conversation entirely unimpeded.

Lately I have been accumulating a charming array of other examples of this ingenious practise, the vast majority of which were used by ladies either rich in experience, or very old indeed.

In her memoirs, for example, Princess Marie Louise recalled being told by a French diplomat, M. de Fleuriau, that as a young man he had been granted an audience with the Empress Eugénie (who died in 1920, aged 94, and was buried at Farnborough in England). This took place in the late 1850s at the Tuileries. During the audience the Empress told him that her previous caller, a very elderly lady, had tossed into the conversation as casually as possible a remark that began «Oui, comme mon mari disait à Louis XIV… » (“Yes, as my husband used to say to Louis XIV...”)

According to M. de Fleuriau, this was the dowager duchesse de Richelieu, who as a very young girl in 1780 married Louis-François-Armand du Plessis, second duc de Richelieu (1696–1788), marshal of France, and a great-nephew of the eponymous cardinal. By then the duc was eighty-four years old and she was his third wife. Somewhat taken aback by this astonishing span of years, the Empress expressed much interest and some surprise, and it duly emerged that in about 1704 or 1705, aged eight or nine, the duc had served as a page to the Sun King at Versailles. Louis XIV died in 1715. 

In this case, if we accept the facts, the combined lifespan of husband and wife was at least 165 years, possibly much more. Certainly this outstrips by a considerable margin the celebrated case of General W. A. Johnson (born 1777) and the youngest of his nine children, Mrs. Margaret Martin-Atkins (who died in November 1944, aged 94)—yielding a double lifespan of 167 years, for which see Notes and Queries, June 5, 1943, p. 343, and February 10, 1945, pp. 56–57. 

The only snag is that (a) Princess Marie Louise and/or M. de Fleuriau were badly mistaken; or (b) the Empress Eugénie was in a frightful muddle; or (c) much given to exaggeration; (d) fibs, or else (e) a combination of two or more of these, because Jeanne Cathérine Josèphe de Lavaulx, a daughter of the comte and comtesse Gabriel de Lavaulx (a nobleman of Lorraine) was born in 1741. She married, first, on March 6, 1764, the chevalier Edmond de Rothe, a gentilhomme of Irish descent, who died at Mauritius in 1772, by which time she had produced four children. 

Some years later, as a result of an accident on the Pont-Neuf in which her carriage overturned, Mme. de Rothe, by now a widow of thirty-nine, met the elderly but spry duc de Richelieu, or, rather, he met her, and soon afterwards proposed marriage. Their wedding took place on February 13, 1780. The reason why the Empress Eugénie cannot have heard the remark «Oui, comme mon mari disait à Louis XIV… » at the Tuileries or anywhere else, at least not from this particular pair of lips, is because this duchesse de Richelieu died in 1815, aged seventy-four, more than ten years before the Empress was born. Or perhaps it was a subsequent duchesse de Richelieu who was clearly endowed with a fertile imagination. I shall certainly check.

The Empire Christmas Pudding

Princess Marie Louise was probably not aware that by so enthusiastically recommending the exciting concept of an “Empire” pudding at the Food and Cookery Fair at Olympia in November 1926, she was getting herself mixed up in a sticky political issue. The Fair was in any case a grand event, tied from the outset to imperial trade—in tough competition with California, Florida, Mexico, and Central and South America. According to a carefully worded advertorial placed in the Australian press, the fair also addressed (inter alia) “the Decline of Cookery”:

Master chefs from all parts of the world exhibited the products of their art at the cookery exhibition—the greatest ever held—opened at New Hall, Olympia, Kensington, W., last month. There were dishes by soldiers, sailors, artisans, hospital workers, domestic cooks, and Boy Scouts. An exact replica of the Prince of Wales’ dinner to V.C.’s in the House of Lords last November was one of the chief exhibits. Mr. R. C. Vaughan, caterer to the House of Lords, who arranged the original dinner, and Maître A. C. Juriens, who cooked it, made the preparations. Mr. Vaughan, interviewed by a “Daily Mail” reporter, said:—“Cookery has never reached a higher stage of artistry before—that is, professional cookery. The cooking of our housewives and young women, however, is of a very different order. There is hardly a girl to-day who knows how to fry a chop. They are too busy drinking cocktails, driving motor-cars, and playing golf to learn how to cook. So many young people live in service flats, dining in restaurants, that cookery in the home is a thing of the past. (Argus, March 8, 1930, p. 11 S[upplement].)

The aggressive marketing efforts of Australia House in respect of the dried fruit growers of the Riverina were occasionally at odds with the larger concerns of the Empire Marketing Board, however they converged on this occasion at Olympia, when the idea of an imperial pudding seemed to make good sense. At short notice the Board engaged the advertising firm of F. H. Benson, Ltd., to place the following advertisement for a fairly impressionistic “Empire” pudding in time for Christmas:

Take 1 breakfastcup full of each of the following eight ingredients: Canadian flour, Australian or South African raisins, Australian sultanas, Australian currants, chopped mixed peel, English or Scottish beef suet, breadcrumbs. Also 1 English cooking apple, 4 to 6 eggs (Home laid), 1 teaspoonful pudding spice (Indian), 1 wineglass Jamaica rum, sufficient milk to mix, grated rind and juice of one lemon. One English 3d bit for luck! Mix well. Place in greased basin. Cover with greaseproof paper: tie on cloth and steam or boil 6 to 8 hours. Here you have a quite simple recipe. It will make as delicious a plum pudding as you have ever tasted. And you will enjoy it all the more if you remember that by using Empire fruit to make it you will give a helping hand to the thousands of British Overseas—most of them ex-Service men and their families—by whom that fruit is grown. Buy Empire Goods. Ask—is it British?

The problem was that the produce of New Zealand, and that of numerous crown colonies were missing from the recipe, and feelings were duly hurt. Therefore early in 1927 it became necessary for drastic remedial action, extending to the highest echelons of the government. This and various other aspects of the story have been taken up recently by Kaori O’Connor in her long article “The King’s Christmas Pudding: Globalization, Recipes, and the Commodities of Empire” (Journal of Global History, Vol. 4, 2009, pp. 127–155). 

Retrieving the matter from Bensons, and securing the co-operation of Buckingham Palace, towards the end of the summer the Empire Marketing Board was in the happy position of being able to issue the following, carefully revised edict:

The King’s Chef, Mr. [André] Cédard, with Their Majesties’ gracious consent, has supplied to the Empire Marketing Board the following recipe for An Empire Christmas Pudding:

5 lbs. of currants—AUSTRALIA; 5 lbs. of sultanas—AUSTRALIA; 5 lbs. of stoned raisins—SOUTH AFRICA; 1½ lbs. of minced apple—CANADA; 5 lbs. of bread crumbs—UNITED KINGDOM; 5 lbs. of beef suet—NEW ZEALAND; 2 lbs. of cut candied peel—SOUTH AFRICA; 2½ lbs. of flour—UNITED KINGDOM; 2½ lbs. of demarara sugar—WEST INDIES; 20 eggs—IRISH FREE STATE; 2 ozs. ground cinnamon—CEYLON; 1½ ozs. ground cloves—ZANZIBAR; 1½ ozs. ground nutmegs—STRAITS SETTLEMENTS; 1 teaspoonful pudding spice—INDIA; 1 gill brandy—CYPRUS; 2 gills rum—JAMAICA; 2 quarts old beer—ENGLAND.

No doubt Princess Marie Louise was among the forty or so guests who tucked in at Sandringham on December 25, but naturally the vast size of the royal pudding so configured in due course caused a headache for the Board, to whom tens of thousands of patriotic students of domestic economy applied for a more manageable, and incidentally less costly version of M. Cédard’s flamboyant recipe—which, after all, required a basin the size of a bathtub; semi-industrial equipment for mixing, a pudding cloth almost as big as a sail, and upwards of twenty-four hours of volcanic cooking. Meanwhile questions of taste (Cypriot brandy?) and sensitivities arising from disproportionate representation, such as for example only a teaspoonful of allspice sought from the Indian Empire, were thankfully offset by sectarian considerations and the tropical climate: Christmas puddings were at this date not high on the agenda of Gandhi, Nehru, or Congress.

In any event, the Australian recipe that appealed so much to Princess Marie Louise at Olympia in November 1926 remains fugitive, but I am—as always—optimistic.

Princess Marie Louise

Australian Dried Fruits.

Princess Marie Louise’s Praise. LONDON, Nov. 12.

“What wonderful fruit. How splendid if everybody made Christmas puddings this year of Empire ingredients,” said Princess Marie Louise, on viewing the Australian dried fruits exhibit at the Food Exhibition at Olympia. Princess Marie Louise, cousin of the King, who opened the exhibition, wrote her autograph on an Empire Christmas pudding recipe compiled by Australian food experts.

—Argus (Melbourne), Monday, November 15, 1926, p. 11.

H.H. Princess Marie Louise was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, the fourth child and younger daughter of Princess Helena—“Lenchen,” as she was known, the Queen’s slightly difficult third daughter—and of Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg. In old age Princess Marie Louise wrote an engaging but slightly wacky book entitled My Memories of Six Reigns (1956). It is well worth reading, as much for its frankness and sprightly charm, as for the table-rapping element. The princess was most unfortunate in having married (1891) Prince Aribert of Anhalt, the unsatisfactory third son of the reigning duke—a match engineered with unerring lack of judgment by Marie Louise’s first cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II. The marriage was annulled late in 1900 after the prince was caught in flagrante delicto with an attractive young male servant.

In view of the ensuing scandal, Princess Marie Louise discreetly toured Canada and the United States.

Thenceforth she lived as a minor but active member of the extended British royal family based in London, and, with her Aunt, Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, was instrumental in introducing the young photographer Cecil Beaton into the Court circle.

Here she is, wearing the spectacular “Indian” tiara by Cartier, perhaps also reflecting upon the superior quality of Australian dried fruits. This charming informal portrait photograph was taken near the end of her life by Cecil Beaton.

I have not yet located the Empire Christmas pudding recipe to which the Argus correspondent refers here, nor indeed those “Australian food experts” but I am working on it.