Queen Louise & King Christian IX

[kmerov]

In 1891 Max of Baden visited Fredensborg Palace. Queen Louise was thrilled and wrote to Thyra. " Max is my flame, he's as lovely as Emperor Nicholas, and a delightful young person, but Toria dosn't want to get married, and the three others are children, of which only Xenia is pretty, (little) Minny the wisest but still very plump, and (little) Louise far from adoring anyone. So it was only I who lost my eyes and a piece of my hart."

[Eric_Lowe]

Louise wasn't the only one who pined for Max of Baden. He was popular in the marriage sweeps stakes, and Miechen was very distressed with he broke up with her daughter Elena. Joyfully for Louise, he did selected Marie Louise, a daughter of Thyra for his wife.

[Svetabel]

In 1891 Max of Baden visited Fredensborg Palace. Queen Louise was thrilled and wrote to Thyra. " Max is my flame, he's as lovely as Emperor Nicholas, and a delightful young person, but Toria dosn't want to get married, and the three others are children, of which only Xenia is pretty, (little) Minny the wisest but still very plump, and (little) Louise far from adoring anyone. So it was only I who lost my eyes and a piece of my hart."

Prince Max was really a handsome guy : ).It always amazes me how his sister Marie was very plain and Max such a heart-breaker with his features and manners.

[Svetabel]

Queen Louise and her daughter Thyra, 1879 year.

[grandduchessella]

Louise wasn't the only one who pined for Max of Baden. He was popular in the marriage sweeps stakes, and Miechen was very distressed with he broke up with her daughter Elena. Joyfully for Louise, he did selected Marie Louise, a daughter of Thyra for his wife.

Wasn't very joyful for her since she'd already died by the time they married. I'm sure she would've been happy though. And of course, Margaret of Prussia pined for him dreadfully before marrying one of his best friends. Interesting that in Louise's view, Toria didn't want to get married. She wasn't very old at that point--and only her sister Louise, out of all the Wales children, had married.

[Eric_Lowe]

Yes. Even if we discount the story that Louise threatened to put her head in the stove/oven if permission not given, it shows that Louise was very keen to get married (perhaps to get away from "Motherdear"). Toria wasn't geared towards that direction until later in life and with an unsuitable candidate.

[kmerov]

Interesting that in Louise's view, Toria didn't want to get married. She wasn't very old at that point--and only her sister Louise, out of all the Wales children, had married.

Yes I wondered aswell. Max visited while Toria was there, but the published letter dosn't mention if Queen Louise actually said anything to Toria regarding Max and got a "I'm not going to marry" response, or if shey went by previous conversations or just intuition.

And thanks for the picture, Svetabel.

[Eric_Lowe]

It would be easier to know if we have letters of Toria in that period. I wonder how often she wrote to "Amama" ?

[Naslednik Norvezhskiy]

Earlier I've been fascinated by the fact that Christian IX might have delayed appointing a liberal cabinet untill his wife passed away, because he had come to the throne by her right and she was arch-conservative. Recently I also learned this:

I have read that she [Princess Marie] had an influence in making Christian IX appoint the first liberal goverment in Denmark in 1901. Prior to that the old king would only appoint conservative cabinets, eventhough they at one time only had 8 seats out of 114 in the parlament.
A french magazine called him; Inventeur de l`art de gouverner avec la minorité.

Christian IX's and Prime Minister Estrup's argument for their course was apparantly not just Montesquieu's division of powers, but also that the Constitution of 1866 gave no pre-eminence to the lower chamber, the Popular Assembly (Folketinget), but made the upper chamber, the Conservative bastion the Territorial Assembly (Landstinget, with a rather limited suffrage and several government appointed members) its equal. As long as the Conservatives had a majority in Landstinget, they ruled with a majority, one could argue. The illussion broke in 1899 when 8 Landsting Members of the Conservative Party, among them Denmark's largest landowner Count Mogens Krag-Juel-Vind-Frijs and former Prime Minister Baron Tage Reedtz-Thott, in an effort to unite the bourgeois side against the Socialists, bolted and formed the Free Conservative Party, which supported the Liberals and made the ensuing change to a parliamentary system with lower chamber supremacy in 1901 possible.

I return to this topic over and over again, because I never get over the fact that Denmark, which seems to have rivalled Britain as the incarnation of political stableness in Christian IX's time (and still does, of course), actually was governed by provisionary laws (Folketinget did not consent to many law bills and both chambers' consent was necessary) for much of that period! Perhaps that was indeed why the royals thought Denmark so stable...

It was also interesting to read in the very radical Danish Professor Georg Brandes' reports from Berlin from this period, that the Prussian nobility still was going strong, producing great leaders like Bismarck and holding many powerful positions in society, while the Danish nobility "since long had ceased to be a true aristocracy". Count Krag-Juel-Vind-Frijs and Baron Reedtz-Thott were perhaps the exceptions?

[Eric_Lowe]

Thanks for the comparisons between Berlin and Copehagen. We do not hear too much about the political situation in Denmark, but Christian IX was a constitutional monarch unlike the Kaisers in Berlin. I think both Louise & Marie were very persuative women and that was the reason they have the ear of the old king.

[Naslednik Norvezhskiy]

We do not hear too much about the political situation in Denmark, but Christian IX was a constitutional monarch unlike the Kaisers in Berlin.

Yes, this is the general belief.

But how was Christian IX so much more constitutional than Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II? That is, if we speak about the period 1866-1901 - the era of the North German Confederacy / German Empire and the great political standstill in defeated Denmark. Of course, before that Wilhelm I had actually crushed a democractic revolution (1848) and for the last 5 years of his reign Christian IX was a true constitutional monarch with parliamentary government.

But before that he simply put aside the intentions of the constitution he had signed himself: Not really by refusing to appoint a cabinet with a parliamentary majority, that demand was still not inherent in the constitution. But by not dismissing a cabinet that simply started to issue permanent provisional ordinance when they couldn't find a majority in both chambers of parliament to pass new laws.

It is as if Queen Victoria appointed a cabinet with a majority in the House of Lords, simply ignored the House of Commons and the constitutional demand for their assent to laws and issued orders-in-council instead of laws!
The Prussian and German systems were deeply flawed from a democractic point of view, but didn't Bismarck and his imperial masters always play by those reactionary rules? They never just ignored the Reichstag.

(They couldn't because unlike Denmark (and Prussia), the German Empire didn't have a second or upper chamber with a direct mandate from what reactionaries might say represented the most important sections of the population. The Bundesrat or Federal Council was just an organ of the state governments. As the legal sovereign of the Empire, it had great potential, but I think Prussia avoided making it too politically charged, as that would highlight German disunity instead of unity.)

[Eric_Lowe]

Thanks for the comparison. There is not a lot of books on the political structure of Denmark, and those on Germany was as dry as anything one does.

[kmerov]

Yes, Christian IX used his granted rights in the constitution to rule only with the conservatives, allowing Prime Minister Estrup to serve from 1875-1894. I don't think that it was Queen Louis's influence that prevented him from appointing a liberal cabinet. Eventhough she was more conservative than him, Christian was a core conservative himself, but in the end it was impossible to ignore the Liberal majority.

[kmerov]

[Eric_Lowe]

Alexandra's features actually looked more like her father, while Dagmar & Thyra resembled Queen Louise.